You May Already
Have Won.
Have Won.
Adapted from Google News
of about 9:30 AM EDT
Month: June 2009
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The Pleasures of the...
Online Etymology Dictionary - text
- 1369, "wording of anything written," from O.Fr. texte, O.N.Fr. tixte (12c.), from M.L. textus "the Scriptures, text, treatise," in L.L. "written account, content, characters used in a document," from L. textus "style or texture of a work," lit. "thing woven," from pp. stem of texere "to weave," from PIE base *tek- "make" (see texture).
"An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns-- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth." [Robert Bringhurst, "The Elements of Typographic Style"]
Text-book is from 1779.
"Discuss the geometry
underlying the above picture."
-- Log24, June 11, 2009"There is such a thing
as a tesseract." - text
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ART WARS continued:
AbstractionFrom Mitchell Stephens, author of a website mentioned here yesterday:
"This paper is designed to be a conversation....
The ideas are organized loosely around a single theme: the Roman leader Pompey's forced entry into the most sacred place of the Jewish temple. At issue are the origins and prevalence of doubt, even at the heart of religion....
The paper will be initially presented, with comments and additions, to the working group on 'Secularism, Religious Authority, and the Mediation of Knowledge' of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University on December 8, 2006."
From the paper itself:
"All Pompey's intrusion into the Holy of Holies will leave behind is one sentence in Tacitus; still, it is not hard to imagine it as a media show. As he enters this hidden room in the Temple of those weird, unGreek, Asian, tribal Jews, this cosmopolitan, sophisticated Roman is not just the insensitive anthropologist. He wants, to continue our imagining, to display the lack of contents of the Holy of Holies in a museum, to take them, like the treasures of Tutankhamen's tomb, on tour. This all-powerful Roman wields klieg lights; he brings the press. He exposes. His expedition is something of an exposé. The whole scene feels as if it might have been filmed: like Dorothy's peek behind the curtain at the diminutive Wizard of Oz. It feels as if it might have been televised: like Geraldo Rivera's opening of Al Capone's 'secret vault.' Pompey has in common with all journalists a desire to shove a microphone in God's face. He wants to rant about what he has learned on his blog.
In his desecration of the Holy of Holies, Pompey has with him, in other words, what Jacques Derrida, in his essay 'Faith and Knowledge,' calls the 'powers of abstraction': 'deracination, delocalization, disincarnation, formalization, universalizing schematization, objectification, telecommunication etc.'"
Related material:
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Musical Accompaniment:
Strange Bedfellows
The above excerpt from Google News was suggested- by David Lavery's June 19 weblog entry "Future Books,"
- by an example of this sort of book-- "The Holy of Holies: The Constituents of Emptiness,"
- by the June 19 NY Lottery midday number 354 (the name of an empty page in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, Library of America, 1997), and
- by the musical meaning of the numbers 3, 5, 4-- the frequency ratios of the notes G, E, C
and hence the numerical equivalent of the NBC chimes.
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Annals of Religion, continued:
"He wasn't there
again today"
And then there are
gemlike numbers
set free from words...Today's New York lottery:
These numbers also
name parts of a book
cited here Nov. 6, 2007:... The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark....-- Wallace Stevens in
Parts of a World, 1942 -
Annals of Religion:
Calvinist Epiphany
The above ad leads to...
... which in turn suggests
a picture linked to in yesterday's
Bloomsday for Carlin:
Related material:
Hilbert vs. Pascal
(Jan. 23, 2009) -
Fiction and History:
Back to the Real
Colum McCann on yesterday's history:"Fiction gives us access
to a very real history."The Associated Press thought for today:
"Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it."
-- John Hersey, American author (born on this date in 1914, died 1993).
From John Hersey's The Child Buyer (1960):
"I was wondering about that this morning... About forgetting. I've always had an idea that each memory was a kind of picture, an insubstantial picture. I've thought of it as suddenly coming into your mind when you need it, something you've seen, something you've heard, then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out, then maybe it comes back another time.... If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything, where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky? Back home around my bed, where my dreams stay?"
"We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns...."
-- Wallace Stevens
Postcard from eBayFrom Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I: Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall -- Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table... he reached to the floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read. There were really two sheets of uncommonly thin hotel notepaper....
I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night.... But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? ...And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.
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Bloomsday for Carlin:
"Actualmente Maju estudia Publicidad en la Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Lima, es modelo de la agencia Elite Model Management y viaja por varios paises realizando campañas de publicidad, y es imagen publicitaria exclusiva de varias empresas en su país."
Related material: "His and Hers: Something" (Log24 entry last year for the anniversary of the births of John Calvin and of Maria Julia Mantilla.)
“V. is whatever lights you to
the end of the street: she is
also the dark annihilation
waiting at the end of the street.” (Tony Tanner, page 36, "V. and V-2," in
Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. Edward Mendelson.
Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55).
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