"Jean-Marc Vallée has died suddenly at age 58." 

See as well a post from Joan Didion's Dec. 5th birthday.

"You look in her eyes, the music begins to play" 
— Eagles, "New Kid in Town"

Flashback:

Detail of Instagram story last night by marrific:

Quoted here on today's date — Joan Didion's birthday — 

15 years ago:

Joan Didion, The White Album :

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable
of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we
are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon
disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have
learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which
is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about
a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the
stories I had ever told myself, a common condition
but one I found troubling.”

“We tell ourselves stories 
  in order to live.” — Joan Didion

See as well Match Tip and Multispeech.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion

Yes, we do.

" 'Desertion' is the perfect story to make my case
that 1940s science fiction was often about the next
evolutionary step for our species." — James Wallace Harris, 9/18/21

From https://classicsofsciencefiction.com on Sept. 18, 2021 —

In “Paradise,” the mutants are that superior species,
ones who are waiting for normal humans to get their
act together. Mutants arrange for Tyler Webster 
to get a kaleidoscope that will trick his brain into
opening its higher functionality. The kaleidoscope
is like the toys from the future in “Mimsy Were the
Borogoves” that trigger evolution in normal human
children. 

See as well Mimsy and Kaleidoscope in this  journal.

"We tell ourselves stories . . . ." — Joan Didion

New York Times Wire, 6:40 PM ET Thursday, March 8, 2018 

3h ago
GRAY MATTER
How Lies Spread Online

They diffuse farther, faster and more broadly than the truth does.

4h ago
It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider.
And Humans Are to Blame.

False claims posted on Twitter were 70 percent more likely
to be shared than the truth, researchers at M.I.T. found.
And people appear to prefer false news.

A quote that appeared here on April 14, 2013 —

"I know what 'nothing' means." — Joan Didion

Dirac on the 4×4 matrices of an underlying nothingness —

"Corresponding to the four rows and columns,
the wave function ψ  must contain a variable
that takes on four values, in order that the matrices
shall be capable of being multiplied into it." 

— P. A. M. Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics,
     Fourth Edition, Oxford University Press, 1958,
     page 257

From "Pitch Perfect 2," Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Junk-Hardon —

"I know what nothing means." — Joan Didion

See

“ [An] ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world
where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness …
Think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion …
Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet …
Magnetic … a breakout novel. " — Kirkus (starred)

Saw

Seen

See a post of Nov. 17, 2011 — Void.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
— Joan Didion, The White Album

See also John Gregory Dunne.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The princess is caged in the consulate.
The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.
The naked woman on the ledge outside the window
on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or
the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be
‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes
some difference whether the naked woman is about to
commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest
or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the
human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible
in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral
lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select
the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely,
especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line
upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned
to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual
experience.”

― Joan Didion

This evening’s New York Lottery:  659 and 7326.

“… which is our actual experience” — Joan Didion

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

" 'So this is heaven!' A line that strikes dread into
a theater reviewer's heart." 

— Dan Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times

“The most terrifying verse I know:
merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.”

—Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted

"Audiences never had any difficulty with his work,
which was instantly recognisable as the stuff of dreams…."

— Apology for the life of a British playwright
     who died on July 3, 2013.

"I saw 'More Light' twice, for my sins, and wasn't surprised
that half of the second audience left at intermission."

— Dan Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times  (continued)

Some light from this journal on the day of the above
playwright's death, the day before, and the day after—

For a more plausible heaven, see the posts of July first 
and an LA Times  obituary for a man who died on that  date.

New York Lottery today—

Without imagination, these digits are a meaningless jumble.

With  imagination…

608 might refer to June 8, the Saint's Day  of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
        (See the date July 29, 2002, that appeared in an earlier post today
         as the publication date of Geometrical Landscapes . In this
         journal, a post on that date, "At Random," referred to Hopkins.)

8516 might refer to 8/5/1916. A check of a hometown newspaper
         on that date yields…
         "St. Joseph's Garden Party and Bazaar 22, 23, 24.
          Pictures. Everybody Welcome. Admission to Garden Ten Cents"

And in the evening…

937 might refer to a post on the nihilistic philosophy of Joan Didion, and

7609 might refer to an occurrence of these digits in a link 
          to "7/11" in a post from the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola last year.

For a more cynical view of lottery hermeneutics, see
"High on RAM (overload)," by Jo Lyxe.

Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks.

From an obituary in this evening's online Wall Street Journal—

"Ms. Dunn spent her childhood in Las Vegas, where her father was a casino entertainment director and her mother was a retired showgirl. She earned a journalism degree from University of California at Berkeley….

She eventually advanced to become chief executive of Barclays Global Investors. As head of the large institutional money manager, she succeeded in the orderly world of index funds, which aim to control risk and take the guesswork out of investing."

As does Las Vegas.

Happy birthday to Joan Didion.

(Continued from Tuesday's "A Story")

Tuesday's story, a collection of four random posts, was
suggested by Tuesday's NY lottery numbers.

That story leads, by association, to Frame Tale in
a post of 2:02 AM on Sunday, May 23, 2010. For related
material, see Death Story, a post of 9:40 PM that same Sunday.

Wednesday's numbers—

—suggest a counter-story…

Escape to Pine Mountain

A website on films about Latter-Day Saints (i.e., Mormons) asks

Was "Escape to Witch Mountain"
based on Zenna Henderson's "People" stories?

The lottery numbers above suggest the names of three women—
none, as far as I know, with any Mormon background—
who might rightly be called, without capital letters,
"latter-day saints"…

1. Madeleine L'Engle (see 529 as the date 5/29),
2. June Christy (a singer first recorded on 5/4/45), and
3. Mary Rockwell Hook, architect of Pine Mountain
   Settlement School, who died on 9/8/78.

These three lives, taken together, may serve as
an antidote to the Death Story mentioned above.

"We tell ourselves stories…" — Joan Didion
"Therefore choose life." —God

"We tell ourselves stories…." * — Joan Didion

President Lindberg**

in "The Fifth Element"

Priest Vito Cornelius: I… have… a different theory to offer you, sir.

President Lindberg: You have twenty seconds.

See "Finale."

* See also Friday morning's post.

** Today's New York Times—
   "A version of this op-ed appeared in print
   on July 23, 2011, on page A19 of the New York
   edition with the headline: The Great Evil." —

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs.
Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of
mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in
concepts that unify our thinking and bring together
diverse problems from different parts of the
landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see
only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in
the details of particular objects, and they solve
problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but
many of my best friends are birds. The main theme
of my talk tonight is this. Mathematics needs both
birds and frogs. Mathematics is rich and beautiful
because birds give it broad visions and frogs give it
intricate details. Mathematics is both great art and
important science, because it combines generality
of concepts with depth of structures. It is stupid to
claim that birds are better than frogs because they
see farther, or that frogs are better than birds
because they see deeper. The world of mathematics
is both broad and deep, and we need birds and
frogs working together to explore it.

This talk is called the Einstein lecture…."

— Freeman Dyson, Notices of the American
Mathematical Society , February 2009

The Didion reading was suggested by the "6212" in yesterday evening's New York Lottery.

"A certain vertiginous occlusion of the imagined and the real" —The White Album

ver·tig·i·nous

adjective 1. whirling; spinning; rotary: vertiginous currents of air .

oc·clu·sion

noun 2. the front formed by a cold front overtaking a warm front and lifting the warm air above the earth's surface

   Excerpt from Joan Didion's The White Album  (click to enlarge)—

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest…." —Joan Didion

"Then came From Here to Eternity ." —Art Wars

"Someday I'll wish upon a star…." —The Definitive Collection

Yesterday's New York Lottery— Midday 346, Evening 104.

Interpretations:

346 as a page number. See The Storyteller in Chance  (March 22, 2009), with its "spinning wheel" link to a passage by Joan Didion.

104 as a date. See 1/04/11— Didion on "a certain vertiginous occlusion of the imagined and the real" in the post The White Itself.

The White Album – Google Books Result

Joan Didion – 1990 – Fiction – 222 pages
… a slippage, a certain vertiginous occlusion  of the imagined and the real, and this slippage was particularly acute the last time I arrived in Honolulu,…
books.google.com/books?isbn=0374522219…

American Spectator – Ben Stein's Diary: Watch …

A vertiginous occlusion  opened at my feet… …He had so much time to spend with me it was hard to believe… …The food was ghastly, simply horrible,…
search.opinionarchives.com/Summary/…/V30I10P52-1.htm – Cached

The Development of Logic  —

A Universal Etymological English Dictionary —

Joan Didion —

The above readings are related* to All Things Shining , a work of pop philosophy published today.

For a review of the new book, click on the image below.

* Didion's remarks on James Jones are related to the title  of the new book.
  Jones wrote a novel, The Thin Red Line , on which a film is based that
  contains the phrase "all things shining." The phrase is not in the novel.
  The authors of All Things Shining  credit neither novel nor film.

Today's NY Times obituaries —

Warnecke died April 17, last Saturday.
From an entry linked to on that date —

Screenwriter Joan Didion —

Happy Shakespeare's birthday.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album,
quoted here on her birthday–
December 5th, 2006

Also on that date, a question
from answerbag.com:

“Do dyslexic devil worshippers
sell their souls to Santa?”

The Great Answer:

Click image to enlarge.

Everything and Nothing

"I know what 'nothing' means…."

— Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990 paperback, page 214

"In 1935, near the end of a long affectionate letter to his son George in America, James Joyce wrote: 'Here I conclude. My eyes are tired. For over half a century they have gazed into nullity, where they have found a lovely nothing.'"

— Lionel Trilling, "James Joyce in His Letters," Commentary, 45, no. 2 (Feb. 1968), abstract

"The quotation is from The Letters of James Joyce, Volume III, ed. Richard Ellman (New York, 1966), p. 359. The original Italian reads 'Adesso termino. Ho gli occhi stanchi. Da più di mezzo secolo scrutano nel nulla dove hanno trovato un bellissimo niente.'"

— Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics, by William M. Chace, Stanford U. Press, 1980, page 198, Note 4 to Chapter 9

"Space: what you damn well have to see."

— James Joyce, Ulysses

"What happens to the concepts of space and direction if all the matter in the universe is removed save a small finite number of particles?"

— "On the Origins of Twistor Theory," by Roger Penrose

"… we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything…"

— Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon (See previous entry.)

"A strange thing then happened."

— L. Frank Baum

Today in History
(via The Associated Press)

Joan Didion, The White Album:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

An Alternate History

(based on entries of
the past three days):

“A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:

England, 932 A.D. —
A kingdom divided….”

— Introduction to “Spamalot”

Backstory
for the previous entry,
“Once Upon a Time“

• Ernest Hemingway,
  “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
• Ernest Hemingway,
  “The Killers”
• Joan Didion,
  Play It As It Lays
• The Devil’s Bible

Related material:

White Christmas

Starring W. V. Quine as
the Ghost of Christmas Past

“Birthday, death-day —
   what day is not both?”
   — John Updike

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

— Joan Didion, The White Album

0! = 1

— Quine’s Shema

Kierkegaard on death:

“I have thought too much about death not to know that he cannot speak earnestly about death who does not know how to employ (for awakening, please note) the subtlety and all the profound waggery which lies in death.  Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is.  To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.”

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

For more on “the thought of the eternal,”  see the discussion of the number 373 in Directions Out and Outside the World, both of 4/26/04.

“… as an inscription over the graveyard gate one could place ‘No compulsion here’ or ‘With us there is no compulsion.’ “

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

“In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were in Peterson Field in Colorado Springs.  A hot wind blew through that summer…. There was not much to do…. There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar.  The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice.  Heard him tell a girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’  As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.  Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

… When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.  And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free. could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

— Joan Didion,
   “John Wayne: A Love Song,” 1965

“He is home now. He is free.”

— Ron Reagan, Friday, June 11, 2004

“Beware, therefore, of the dead!  Beware of his kindness; beware of his definiteness, beware of his strength; beware of his pride!  But if you love him, then remember him lovingly, and learn from him, precisely as one who is dead, learn the kindness in thought, the definiteness in expression, the strength in unchangeableness, the pride in life which you would not be able to learn as well from any human being, even the most highly gifted.”

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 328

Inaugural Poem for California:

Archaischer Torso Apollos

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

Illustration:

See also

Philip K. Dick Meets Joan Didion,

Aes Triplex,

From the Empty Center,

The Empty Center, and

Translation of Rilke by Stephen Mitchell:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

 See also “For the Green Lady of Perelandra,
from the City of Angels,” my entry of December 21, 2002.

For the Green Lady
of Perelandra,
from the City of Angels

“The oral history of Los Angeles
is written in piano bars.” 
— Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Tonight’s midnight music in the garden of good and evil is a shamelessly romantic classic from a site titled simply Piano Bar.

De Rêve En Rêverie
(Lyrics by Eddy Marnay)

Tu es le pianiste
Et moi je suis ton encore.
Un feu de joie pour deux
Tombe sur nous d’un ciel amoureux.
Toi, toi qui m’as tout appris
Moi, dans l’ombre de ta vie
Je vis,
Je vis de rêve
En rêverie. 

 Washington Square Press paperback, 1981, page 222 

Last-Minute Shopping

In celebration of today’s nationwide opening of Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” —

See also my Sermon for St. Patrick’s Day. 

This contains the following metaphysical observation from Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale:

“Nothing is random.”

For those who, like the protagonist of Joan Didion’s

Play It As It Lays,

feel that they “know what nothing means,” I recommend the following readings:

From Peter Goldman’s essay

Christian Mystery and Responsibility:
Gnosticism in Derrida’s The Gift of Death —

The gift made to me by God as he holds me in his gaze and in his hand while remaining inaccessible to me, the terribly dissymmetrical gift of the mysterium tremendum only allows me to respond and only rouses me to the responsibility it gives me by making a gift of death, giving the secret of death, a new experience of death. (33)”

The above-mentioned sermon is a meditation on randomness and page numbers, focusing on page 265 in particular.

On page 265 of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce,  we find the following remark:

“Googlaa pluplu.” 

Following Joyce’s instructions, and entering “pluplu” in the Google search engine, we find the following:

“Datura is a delusional drug rather than a hallucinatory one. You don’t see patterns, trails, or any cool visual effects; you just actually believe in things that aren’t there….  I remember holding a glass for a while–but when I raised it to my mouth to take a drink, my fingers closed around nothingness because there was no glass there….

Using datura is the closest I’ve ever come to death…. Of all the drugs I’ve taken, this is the one that I’d be too scared to ever take again.”

— PluPlu, August 4, 2000

 
For those who don’t need AA, perhaps the offer of Ed Harris in the classic study of gangs of New York, “State of Grace,” is an offer of somewhat safer holiday cheer that should not be refused.

Play It

From a Kol Nidre sermon:

“…in every generation 36 righteous
greet the Shechinah,
   the Divine Presence…” 

A scene at the Sands in Las Vegas,
from Play It As It Lays,
by Joan Didion:

“What do you think,”
Maria could hear
one of the men saying….

“Thirty-six,” the girl said. 
“But a good thirty-six.”

For the rest of the time
Maria was in Las Vegas
she wore dark glasses.
She did not decide to
stay in Vegas: she only
failed to leave.

Today’s site music, in honor of
Sinatra’s birthday, is “Angel Eyes.”

Key

Today is Joan Didion’s birthday.  It is also the date that the first Phi Beta Kappa chapter was formed, at the College of William and Mary.

A reading for today, from a web page called Respect:

“In her book Slouching Toward Bethlehem Didion writes about being a student in college. She says she expected to be voted into Phi Beta Kappa but discovered she didn’t have the grades for it. She says: ‘I had somehow thought myself [as being] exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others.’ But, Didion continues:

Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man. I lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix in hand.

What Joan Didion discovered in the wake of this incident was that self-respect, although it was of importance, had to come from something inside her, rather than from the approval of others. She says she learned that self-respect has to do with ‘a separate peace, a private reconciliation,’ and at the heart of it is a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life, whatever its rewards or lack of them. Didion says:

… people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things…. People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.

— Comments by David Sammons

For more of Didion’s essay, click here.