"This is that 'once in a lifetime,'
this is the thrill divine."
— Dorcas Cochran, "Again"
Background—
Today's previous post as well as Loretta's Rainbow,
the "hole in the record" theme in The Third Wor*d War,
"Is Nothing Sacred?," and James Joyce's Birthday, 2009.
See also "the name of the story" in this journal.
Operation Playmate:
On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died.
From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry:
Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues
“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens
to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips
yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer,
of rounder replies?”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
“Hurrahing in Harvest”
|
|
|
“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”
From my March 31, 2003, entry:
“During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their ‘Operation Playmate’ project….
Now, in light of the war in Iraq, ‘Operation Playmate’ has returned.”
Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003:
Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie “Mattress Dancing” Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction.
Etymology: Latin Terpsichor
,
from Greek Terpsikhor
from feminine of terpsikhoros,
dance-loving : terpein, to delight
+ khoros, dance.
See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City.
All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:
“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”
It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today’s date in another guise. To paraphrase an Eliot line,
“Hurry up please, it’s 5/13.”
The Tony Nominations
Dannie Abse quoting Robert Penn Warren:
“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”
Dannie Abse
Abse deserves a Tony Smith award¹ for his play Pythagoras.
Frank Rich on Bush’s Top Gun speech:
“Only hours before President Bush’s prime-time speech came news of what Variety headlined on Page 1 as ‘Regime Change’ in Hollywood — the departure of the [West Wing] creator, the writer Aaron Sorkin.”
George W. Bush
President Bush deserves a Tony Smith award² for his performance aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.
Madeleine L’Engle on the religion of Cubism:
“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”
Madeleine L’Engle
L’Engle, former librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, deserves a Tony Smith award³ for insisting on the existence of the tesseract, or 4-dimensional cube, as an object of conceptual art.
L’Engle is perhaps the best defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, as opposed to the “diamond” theory of truth. (See my earlier May 12 entry, “Death and Truth,” which deals with the bishop of L’Engle’s cathedral.)
¹ See Tony Smith on mathematics.
² See Tony Smith on foreign policy.
³ See Tony Smith on conceptual art.
Powered by WordPress
