Log24

Thursday, March 12, 2015

For Stephen King

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:12 pm

Doctor Steam

"Everybody's doin'
a brand new dance now…"

     "A corpse will be
transported by express!"
Under the Volcano

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

24-Part Invention

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 am

IMAGE- The 24-drawer filing cabinet of Lucia St. Clair Robson

“Next to the bookcase stands a wooden cabinet with 24 drawers that looks like something you might have seen in a library decades ago, or perhaps in an old apothecary. The drawers are marked with the names of her novels or characters in the novels and crammed with indexed notes.

She pulls open a drawer marked ‘Lozen,’ the name of a main female character in another historical western novel, ‘The Ghost Warrior,’ and reads a few of the index tabs: ‘social relationships, puberty, death, quotes….'”

— From an article on Lucia St. Clair Robson in The Baltimore Sun  by Arthur Hirsch, dated 1:31 p.m. EDT April 30, 2011*

From this  journal later that same day

IMAGE- Sabato on his own tombstone in 'Angel of Darkness'

Robson’s most recent novel is Last Train from Cuernavaca .

A corpse will be transported by express!

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

* Update of 5:48 AM EDT May 3—
The same article was also published with a different  dateline— April 28.
Enthusiasts of synchronicity may lament the confusion, or they may
turn to April 28 in this journal for a different  24-part invention.
See also Art Wars, April 7, 2003 and White Horse .

Monday, August 30, 2010

Strike Up the Band

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:33 am

(A sequel to Rally Round the Flag and Gotta Know the Territory)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100830-NYTobitsSm.jpg

Click here for a bigger picture.

See also, in this journal, "a corpse will be transported by express."

Band pioneer William P. Foster died on Saturday, the Feast of St. Augustine.

Related material—

"Mexico, the place you thought you knew"— an ad in this morning's NY Times  obituaries—

and the following literary passage—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100830-Motley.jpg

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Corpse Express

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:02 am

See Malcolm Lowry's "A corpse will be transported by express!" in this journal.

From June 23

"When Plato regards geometry as the prerequisite to
philosophical knowledge, it is because geometry alone
renders accessible the realm of things eternal;
tou gar aei ontos he geometrike gnosis estin."

— Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
   Volume V, Number 1, September, 1944.

Maybe.

June 23, Midsummer Eve, was the date of death for Colonel Michael Cobb.

Cobb, who died aged 93, was "a regular Army officer who in retirement produced
the definitive historical atlas of the railways of Great Britain." — Telegraph.co.uk, July 19

As for geometry, railways, and things eternal, see parallel lines converging
in Tequila Mockingbird and Bedlam Songs.

Station of the Rock Island Line

The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot 
in Rock Island, Illinois

See also Wallace Stevens on "the giant of nothingness"
in "A Primitive Like an Orb" and in Midsummer Eve's Dream

At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave
And prodigious person, patron of origins.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Wednesday May 28, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Tequila
Mockingbird

(November 5, 2002):

CelebritySexNews.com
on Kylie Minogue:

“Turns out she’s a party girl
who loves Tequila:
‘Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.'”

From a web page on
Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel
Under the Volcano

The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that  “A corpse will be transported by express!” (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).

Kylie Minogue
Kylie

Film 'Under the Volcano'
Finney

 
Well if you want to ride
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
— Lonnie Donegan (d. Nov. 3) 
and others
 
Station of the Rock Island Line
 
The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot 
in Rock Island, Illinois


Related material:

Twenty-First Century Fox
(10/6/02)

Back to You, Kylie
(11/5/02)

Time, Eternity, and Grace
(11/22/02)

That Old Devil Moon
(1/1/03) and
The Shanghai Gesture
(1/3/03)

Whirligig
(1/5/03)

Harrowing
(4/19/03)

Temptation
(4/22/03)

Temptation
(4/9/04)

Tribute
,
Train of Thought,
Drunk Bird, and
From Here to Eternity
(8/17/04-8/18/04)

Heaven and Earth
(9/2/04)

Habeas Corpus

(11/24/04)

X, continued
(12/4/04)

Birth and Death
(5/28/05)

Time Travel
(5/28/06)

Timeagain and
Two-Bar Hook
(8/9/06)

Echoes
(8/11/06)

Phantasmagoria
and Tequila!
(9/23/06)

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Saturday September 23, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

“A corpse will be
transported by express!”

Under the Volcano,
by Malcolm Lowry (1947)


Dietrich


Minogue

“It has a ghastly familiarity,
like a half-forgotten dream.”

 — Poppy (Gene Tierney) in
The Shanghai Gesture.”

Temptation


Locomotive

The Star
of Venus


Locomotion

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.”

From Patrick Vert,
The Narrative of Acceleration:

“There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage…

… a unique study on phantasmagoria and the history of imagination. The word originates [in] light-projection, the so-called ghost-shows of the early 19th century….

… thought becomes a phantasmagorical process, a spectral, representative location for the personal imagination that had been marginalized by scientific rationalism….

This phantasmagoria became more mediated over time…. Perception became increasingly visually oriented…. As this occurred, a narrative formed to encapsulate the phenomenology of it all….”

For such a narrative, see
the Log24.net entries of

From a Christian fairy tale:

Aslan’s last words come at the end of The Last Battle: ‘There was a real railway accident […] Your father and mother and all of you are–as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands–dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’….

Aslan is given the last word in these quiet but emphatic lines. He is the ultimate arbiter of reality: “‘There was a real railway accident.'” Plato, in addition to the Christian tradition, lies behind the closing chapters of The Last Battle. The references here to the Shadowlands and to the dream refer back to an earlier explanation by Digory, now the Lord Digory:

“[…] that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. [….] Of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. […] It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!”

Joy Alexander, Aslan’s Speech

“I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)”

Whether any of the above will be of use in comforting the families of those killed in yesterday morning’s train wreck in Germany is not clear.  Pope Benedict XVI, like C. S. Lewis, seems to think Greek philosophy may be of some use to those dealing with train wrecks:

“Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the logos.‘ This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, syn logo, with logos. Logos means both reason and word– a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.”

Remarks of the Pope at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006

Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Wednesday April 6, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am
Final Arrangements, continued:
Confession
“A corpse will be transported by express!”
Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947)

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050406-Confession.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Then he began to narrate in his original style…. After this came disclosure, confession.  Then he accused, fulminated, stammered, blazed, cried out.  He crossed the universe like light….

He had no old friends, only ex-friends.  He could become terrible, going into reverse without warning.  When this happened, it was like being caught in a tunnel by the Express.  You could only cling to the walls, or lie between the rails, praying.”

— Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift,

page 162

See also

Sunday, December 12, 2004  7:59 PM

Monday, April 4, 2005  4:04 AM

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Wednesday November 24, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

Habeas Corpus

From St. Nicholas Versus the Volcano:

“The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture, this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that  ‘A corpse will be transported by express!’ (Lowry, Under the Volcano).”

In honor of a particular corpse, from last Friday, November 19, here is part of a Log24 entry from that day:

“The meaning of the poem is ‘the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it.’ “
— Allen Tate

A corpse will be transported by express!

The corpse in question is that of a children’s book illustrator.  The following screenshot from today’s online New York Times illustrates both extension and, in light of the Lowry quotation above, intension.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041124-Express.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Wednesday August 18, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 am

Drunk Bird


T. Charles Erickson
Shizuo Kakutani
in the 1980’s

Kakutani died yesterday.

“A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever.”

— Shizuo Kakutani, quoted by J. Chang in Stochastic Processes (ps), p. 1-19.  Chang says the quote is from an R. Durrett book on probability.

Meaning:

A random walk in d dimensions is recurrent if d = 1 or d = 2, but transient if d is greater than or equal to 3.


From a web page on Kylie Minogue:

Turns out she’s a party girl
who loves Tequila:
“Time disappears with Tequila.  
  It goes elastic, then vanishes.”



Kylie sings
“Locomotion”

From a web page on Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel Under the Volcano

The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that  “A corpse will be transported by express!” (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).

For further literary details in memory of Shizuo Kakutani, Yale mathematician and father of book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, see

Santa Versus the Volcano.

Of course, Kakutani himself would probably prefer the anti-Santa, Michael Shermer.  For a refutation of Santa by this high priest of Scientism, see

Miracle on Probability Street

(Scientific American, July 26, 2004). 

Friday, January 3, 2003

Friday January 3, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:59 pm

The Shanghai Gesture:
An Exercise in Synchronicity

“A corpse will be transported by express!”

Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947)


Dietrich


Minogue

For Dietrich, see the reference below;
For Minogue, see my entry
“That Old Devil Moon”
of January 1st, 2003.

From the Turner Classic Movies website:

PLAYING ON TCM:
Jan 03, 2003, 08:00 PM

Shanghai Express  (1932)
CAST: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong. DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg.

A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey. [Set in 1931] BW-82m

From The New Yorker magazine,
received in the mail this afternoon:

Shanghai Moon

“…a new play… set in Shanghai in 1931…. Previews begin Jan. 3.”

Given the above, a believer in synchronicity
under the volcano 
will naturally search for a suitable corpse…
and voilà:

The Toronto Star

Friday, Jan. 3, 2003. 05:50 PM

Syndicated astrologist
Sydney Omarr, 76, dies

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sydney Omarr, the astrologer to the stars who came to write horoscopes that appear in more than 200 North American newspapers, has died. He was 76.

Omarr, who was blinded and paralysed from the neck down by multiple sclerosis, died Thursday [Jan. 2, 2003] in hospital in Santa Monica of complications from a heart attack, the Los Angeles Times reported. His ex-wife, assistants and several close friends were by his side.

Born Sidney Kimmelman in Philadelphia, Omarr decided to change his name at age 15 after watching a movie called The Shanghai Gesture, starring Victor Mature as a character named Omar. He changed the spelling of his first name and adopted Omar as his last name, but added a second “r,” in accordance with certain numerological formulas.

“It has a ghastly familiarity,
like a half-forgotten dream.”
 — Poppy (Gene Tierney) in
The Shanghai Gesture.”

“It’s a gesture, dear, not a recipe.”
 — Peggy (Vanessa Redgrave) in
Prick Up Your Ears

 

Tuesday, November 5, 2002

Tuesday November 5, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 am

Kylie on Tequila

From a web page on Kylie Minogue:

Turns out she’s a party girl who loves Tequila:
“Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.”

From a web page on Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel
Under the Volcano

The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that  “A corpse will be transported by express!” (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).


Kylie


Finney

 
Well if you want to ride
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
Lonnie Donegan (d. Nov. 3)
and others
 
 
The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot 
in Rock Island, Illinois
 
 
See also the preceding entry.

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