Click image for a midrash.
Friday, June 23, 2017
A Kind of Cross* Continued
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A Kind of Cross
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
See also Heidegger + Rift in this journal.
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Thursday, June 21, 2012
A Kind of Cross*
In memory of art historian John Golding,
whose obituary appeared (finally) in
today’s online Telegraph—
“His most recent book, Paths to the Absolute (based on
his 1997 series of AW Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts
delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC),
addressed seven abstract artists — Mondrian, Kazimir
Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Barnett Newman, Rothko
and Clyfford Still — and argued that abstract art was
not simply decorative but ‘heavily imbued with meaning
[and] with content’. The book won the Mitchell Prize for
the History of Art in 2002.”
Commentary on Golding’s obituary suggested by
this evening’s 4-digit New York Lottery number,
1051—
Post 1051 in this journal, together with a post from
April 1, 2012 found in a search for the digits 1051
in Log24. That search may serve as a review.
* A phrase from Gravity’s Rainbow
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Sunday, June 2, 2024
In Memory of Michael Crichton, Author of Sphere:
Manifesting Summerisle
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
See as well this journal on the above mad-scientist date.
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Manifesting Summerisle
Manifesting Summerisle
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
McLuhan and the Time Machine
Page 1590 —
Log24:
Thomas Pynchon:
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
The Year 1591 —
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Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Big Dick Energy
For the title, see the Aug. 17 post Vampire Workday.
Scholium for Beckinsale —
“For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.” — Gravity’s Rainbow
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Wednesday, June 10, 2020
Space X File
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
"Sometimes I hit London."
— Saying ascribed to Wernher von Braun
Inscribed Carpenter's Square:
In Latin, NORMA
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Thursday, June 11, 2015
In Memoriam
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
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Thursday, April 17, 2014
Thursday with the Nashes
“For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.” — Gravity’s Rainbow
“I don’t write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters.
My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors , contained nine pieces,
five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me
with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer)
to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer.”
— Rebecca Goldstein, “Against Logic”
Midrashim for Rebecca:
The Diamond Theory vs. the Story Theory (of truth)
Story Theory and the Number of the Beast
The Palm Sunday post “Gray Space”
For those who prefer the diamond theory of truth,
a “precise mathematical” view of a Gray code —
For those who prefer the story theory of truth,
Thursday with the Nashes —
The actors who portrayed Mr. and Mrs. John Nash in
‘A Beautiful Mind’ now portray Mr. and Mrs. Noah…
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Saturday, March 29, 2014
Five Ninths
“For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.” — Gravity’s Rainbow
“I don’t write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters.
My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors , contained nine pieces,
five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me
with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer)
to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer.”
— Rebecca Goldstein, “Against Logic”
Related material: The cross of five ninths, from Epiphany 2006.
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Thursday, February 27, 2014
Secular Space
This morning's previous post, on sacred space,
linked to "Positively White Cube Revisited,"
an article by one Simon Sheikh.
Sheikh writes well, but he seems to be a disciple
of the damned Marxist lunatic Louis Althusser.
As Pynchon put it in Gravity's Rainbow ,
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
In this case, a video starring Sheikh on the exhibition "All That Fits"
suggests, by its filming date (May 27, 2011), a Maltese cross.
"The stuff that dreams are made of." — Bogart
(See also Oct. 25, 2012.)
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Sunday, December 8, 2013
Honors Night
Tonight was Honors Night at the Kennedy Center.
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross." — Pynchon
|
From "Colin Wilson: The Persistence of Meaning" "At a literary conference at SUNY New Paltz three years ago, among people who I thought would be positively disposed to Wilson, my mentioning of his name resulted in any number of arched eyebrows and suavely disparaging remarks. Now this might itself be, not an affirmation of justified oblivion, as one could easily assume, but rather a kind of indirect evidence for intrinsic merit. I stress the academic character of the event and the self-assured oiliness of the dismissal. In context, the reference seemed to carry a distinctly un-PC valence so that the reaction to it, as I picture it in retrospect, resembled that of a patrician vampire to garlic."
— Thomas F. Bertonneau on Thursday, |
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Sunday, September 8, 2013
Crosses for Sherlock
"Take a cube, and write the numbers 1,…,6 on its faces.
Now the pairs of numbers on opposite faces
form a syntheme. (Standard dice, for example, represent
the syntheme 12|34|56.) "
— Peter J. Cameron, weblog post of May 11, 2010
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
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Monday, August 26, 2013
Spectrum
From the weblog of Dr. David Justice today :
C.S. Lewis somewhere (in time, in retirement, I might recover
the passage) surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines, and notes
that that of Orpheus retains its power to spellbind, even in a
bare-bones form, whereas that of almost all worthy modern novels,
become as dust upon such summary.
We venture now upon that territory where words fail ….
Related material :
C. S. Lewis on Orpheus (click to enlarge) —
Lewis, according to Justice, "surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines."
A related image (see, too, today's previous post) —
C. S. Lewis on myth —
"The stories I am thinking of always have a very simple narrative shape—
a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip."
Conceptual Art
For concepts of prism, spectrum, and tulip combined, see Sicilian Reflections.
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
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Sunday, April 28, 2013
Red October’s Sermon
… For the Harvard Arts Weekend:
"Grids, You Say?" by Josefine Lyche, with
Lyche's quotation from Rosalind Krauss in October
(Vol. 9, Summer 1979) —
 |
See also last evening's Elevation of the Host, with Vampire Weekend.
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross." — Gravity's Rainbow
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Thursday, February 21, 2013
Galois Space
The previous post suggests two sayings:
"There is such a thing as a Galois space."
— Adapted from Madeleine L'Engle
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
Illustrations—
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Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Red October
"In the master's bedroom, they gathered for the feast…."
— Suggested by the current film Hotel Transylvania
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Related material— the Feast of Saint Patrick in 2009.
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Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Related material:
See a search for the author of
Venus on the Half-Shell .
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
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Saturday, January 8, 2011
True Grid (continued)
"Rosetta Stone" as a Metaphor
in Mathematical Narratives
For some backgound, see Mathematics and Narrative from 2005.
Yesterday's posts on mathematics and narrative discussed some properties
of the 3×3 grid (also known as the ninefold square ).
For some other properties, see (at the college-undergraduate, or MAA, level)–
Ezra Brown, 2001, "Magic Squares, Finite Planes, and Points of Inflection on Elliptic Curves."
His conclusion:
When you are done, you will be able to arrange the points into [a] 3×3 magic square,
which resembles the one in the book [5] I was reading on elliptic curves….
This result ties together threads from finite geometry, recreational mathematics,
combinatorics, calculus, algebra, and number theory. Quite a feat!
5. Viktor Prasolov and Yuri Solvyev, Elliptic Functions and Elliptic Integrals ,
American Mathematical Society, 1997.
Brown fails to give an important clue to the historical background of this topic —
the word Hessian . (See, however, this word in the book on elliptic functions that he cites.)
Investigation of this word yields a related essay at the graduate-student, or AMS, level–
Igor Dolgachev and Michela Artebani, 2009, "The Hesse Pencil of Plane Cubic Curves ."
From the Dolgachev-Artebani introduction–
In this paper we discuss some old and new results about the widely known Hesse
configuration of 9 points and 12 lines in the projective plane P2(k ): each point lies
on 4 lines and each line contains 3 points, giving an abstract configuration (123, 94).
PlanetMath.org on the Hesse configuration—
A picture of the Hesse configuration–
(See Visualizing GL(2,p), a note from 1985).
Related notes from this journal —
From last November —
|
From the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices—
Related material from this journal— Consolation Prize (August 19, 2010) |
From 2006 —
|
Sunday December 10, 2006
“Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry
– J. G. Ballard on Modernism
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance –
— Daniel J. Boorstin, |
Also from 2006 —
|
Sunday November 26, 2006
Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal*– or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason…."
For more on the field of reason, see
A reasonable set of "strange correspondences" Unreason is, of course, more popular. * The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel: "Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."
– Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy ,
"For every kind of vampire, |
And from last October —
|
Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .
"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage."
– "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,
* The Web version's title has a misprint— |
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Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Contra Harvard
Today is commencement day at Princeton.
Sunday's A Post for Galois was suggested, in part, by the fact that the founder and CEO of Amazon.com was that day's Princeton baccalaureate speaker. The Galois post linked to the Amazon reviews of one Christopher G. Robinson, a resident of Cambridge, Mass., whose Amazon book list titled "Step Right Up!" reflects a continuing libertine tradition at Harvard.
For Princeton's commencement day, it seems fitting to cite another Amazon document that reflects the more conservative values of that university.
I recommend the review Postmodern Pythagoras, by Matthew Milliner. Milliner is, in his own words, "an art history Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University."
See also Milliner's other reviews at Amazon.com.
"For every kind of libertine,
there is a kind of cross."
— Saying adapted from Pynchon
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Monday, March 15, 2010
The Craft, continued
Phoebe Halliwell of "Charmed"
Review of a new film — "She’s Out of My League has moments of humor and insight, but it’s bogged down by excessive vulgarity and cartoonishness."
Sometimes that's what it takes —
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
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Sunday, September 27, 2009
Sunday September 27, 2009
A Pleasantly
Discursive Treatment
Discursive Treatment
Unitarian Universalist Origins: Our Historic Faith—
"In sixteenth-century Transylvania, Unitarian congregations were established for the first time in history."
Gravity's Rainbow–
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
Unitarian minister Richard Trudeau—
"… I called the belief that
(1) Diamonds– informative, certain truths about the world– exist
the 'Diamond Theory' of truth. I said that for 2200 years the strongest evidence for the Diamond Theory was the widespread perception that
(2) The theorems of Euclidean geometry are diamonds….
As the news about non-Euclidean geometry spread– first among mathematicians, then among scientists and philosophers– the Diamond Theory began a long decline that continues today.
Factors outside mathematics have contributed to this decline. Euclidean geometry had never been the Diamond Theory's only ally. In the eighteenth century other fields had seemed to possess diamonds, too; when many of these turned out to be man-made, the Diamond Theory was undercut. And unlike earlier periods in history, when intellectual shocks came only occasionally, received truths have, since the eighteenth century, been found wanting at a dizzying rate, creating an impression that perhaps no knowledge is stable.
Other factors notwithstanding, non-Euclidean geometry remains, I think, for those who have heard of it, the single most powerful argument against the Diamond Theory*– first, because it overthrows what had always been the strongest argument in favor of the Diamond Theory, the objective truth of Euclidean geometry; and second, because it does so not by showing Euclidean geometry to be false, but by showing it to be merely uncertain." —The Non-Euclidean Revolution, p. 255
H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Trudeau's book—
"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question 'What is truth?'."
As noted here on Oct. 8, 2008 (A Yom Kippur Meditation), Coxeter was aware in 1987 of a more technical use of the phrase "diamond theory" that is closely related to…
A kind
of cross:
of cross:
* As recent Log24 entries have pointed out, diamond theory (in the original 1976 sense) is a type of non-Euclidean geometry, since finite geometry is not Euclidean geometry– and is, therefore, non-Euclidean, in the strictest sense (though not according to popular usage).
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Sunday, June 14, 2009
Sunday June 14, 2009
And the ruby slippers
go to… Thomas Pynchon!
go to… Thomas Pynchon!
“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
— Pynchon
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Saturday, April 25, 2009
Saturday April 25, 2009
April is Awareness Month
for both
Mathematics and Autism.
for both
Mathematics and Autism.
Welcome to the
Black Hole Café
"Our lifelong friendship made me not only an admirer of the depth, scholarship, and sheer energy of his mathematical work (and of his ceaseless activities as an editorial entrepreneur on behalf of mathematics) but one in awe of his status as the ultimate relaxed sophisticate."
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Psychoshop
by Alfred Bester
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"After Davis and Hersh,
it will be hard to uphold
the Glasperlenspiel
view of mathematics."
— Gian-Carlo Rota
it will be hard to uphold
the Glasperlenspiel
view of mathematics."
— Gian-Carlo Rota
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon
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Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Wednesday April 8, 2009
Where Entertainment
Is God
Is God
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon in
Gravity's Rainbow
"Since 1963, when Pynchon's first novel, V., came out, the writer– widely considered America's most important novelist since World War II– has become an almost mythical figure,
— Nancy Jo Sales in the November 11, 1996, issue of New York Magazine
A Cross Between
(Click on images for their
source in past entries.)
In a Nutshell:
|
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Wednesday March 18, 2009
From a place where
entertainment is God:
entertainment is God:
Click to enlarge.
From another place:
Click logo for a story.
“… a kind of cross.”
— Gravity’s Rainbow
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Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Tuesday March 17, 2009
Deep Structures
The Square of Oppositon
at Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
The Square of Opposition
in its original form
"The diagram above is from a ninth century manuscript of Apuleius' commentary on Aristotle's Perihermaneias, probably one of the oldest surviving pictures of the square."
— Edward Buckner at The Logic Museum
From the webpage "Semiotics for Beginners: Paradigmatic Analysis," by Daniel Chandler:
The Semiotic Square
"The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully (Greimas 1987,* xiv, 49). The semiotic square is intended to map the logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating key semantic features in a text. Fredric Jameson notes that 'the entire mechanism… is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition' (in Greimas 1987,* xiv). Whilst this suggests that the possibilities for signification in a semiotic system are richer than the either/or of binary logic, but that [sic] they are nevertheless subject to 'semiotic constraints' – 'deep structures' providing basic axes of signification."
* Greimas, Algirdas (1987): On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (trans. Paul J Perron & Frank H Collins). London: Frances Pinter
Another version of the semiotic square:
Krauss says that her figure "is, of course, a Klein Group."
Here is a more explicit figure representing the Klein group:
There is also the logical
diamond of opposition —
A semiotic (as opposed to logical)
diamond has been used to illustrate
remarks by Fredric Jameson,
a Marxist literary theorist:
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"Introduction to Algirdas Greimas, Module on the Semiotic Square," by Dino Felluga at Purdue University–
The semiotic square has proven to be an influential concept not only in narrative theory but in the ideological criticism of Fredric Jameson, who uses the square as "a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the closure of ideology itself" ("Foreword"* xv). (For more on Jameson, see the [Purdue University] Jameson module on ideology.) Greimas' schema is useful since it illustrates the full complexity of any given semantic term (seme). Greimas points out that any given seme entails its opposite or "contrary." "Life" (s1) for example is understood in relation to its contrary, "death" (s2). Rather than rest at this simple binary opposition (S), however, Greimas points out that the opposition, "life" and "death," suggests what Greimas terms a contradictory pair (-S), i.e., "not-life" (-s1) and "not-death" (-s2). We would therefore be left with the following semiotic square (Fig. 1): 
As Jameson explains in the Foreword to Greimas' On Meaning, "-s1 and -s2"—which in this example are taken up by "not-death" and "not-life"—"are the simple negatives of the two dominant terms, but include far more than either: thus 'nonwhite' includes more than 'black,' 'nonmale' more than 'female'" (xiv); in our example, not-life would include more than merely death and not-death more than life.
* Jameson, Fredric. "Foreword." On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. By Algirdas Greimas. Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976.
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"The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."
— The Gameplayers of Zan, by M.A. Foster
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity's Rainbow
Crosses used by semioticians
to baffle their opponents
are illustrated above.
Some other kinds of crosses,
and another kind of opponent:
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Monday, July 11, 2005
Logos
for St. Benedict's Day Click on either of the logos below for religious meditations– on the left, a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.
Both logos represent different embodiments of the "story theory" of truth, as opposed to the "diamond theory" of truth. Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion. I personally prefer the "diamond theory" of truth, represented by the logo below.
See also the previous entry Sunday, July 10, 2005
Mathematics
and Narrative Click on the title for a narrative about
Nikolaos K. Artemiadis,
"First of all, I'd like to
— Remark attributed to Plato
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Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Tuesday March 3, 2009
Straight
“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
there is a kind of cross.”
— Thomas Pynchon in
Gravity’s Rainbow
This entry is continued
from yesterday evening,
from midnight last night,
and from an entry of
February 20 (the date
four years ago of
Hunter Thompson’s death)–
“Emblematizing the Modern“–
|
Emblematizing the Modern
Note that in applications, the vertical axis of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes the timeless (money, temperature, etc.) while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time. T.S. Eliot:
|
“I played ‘Deathmaster’ straight….
The best villains are the ones who are
both protagonist and antagonist.”
— The late Robert Quarry
The best villains are the ones who are
both protagonist and antagonist.”
— The late Robert Quarry
“Selah.”
— The late Hunter Thompson
Yesterday afternoon’s online
New York Times:
Today’s online New York Times:
Footnote
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Tuesday March 3, 2009
Midnight
in the Garden
continues
in the Garden
continues
Click poster for details.
Click image for details.
Related material:
The three entries here on
the date of Quarry’s death:
A Kind of Cross, and
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Friday, February 20, 2009
Friday February 20, 2009
A Kind of Cross
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon in
Gravity's Rainbow
Related material:
A memorial service
held at 2 PM today at the
U.S. Space & Rocket Center
in Huntsville, Alabama, and
today's previous entry.
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