The Hot Rock
See also A Little Story .
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Under the Volcano–
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Friday, June 12, 2026
“Make Him Express Himself” — Song Lyric
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Thursday, October 16, 2025
Story Space: “The Greek Letter”
For this year's winner of the Nobel prize for literature,
a Hungarian enthusiast of run-on sentences whose "bible"
is said to be the classic novel about Cuernavaca by
Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano . . .
As season three of "The Diplomat" unfolds, I visit my
memory garden to recall the time I sat with Judge Flick in his
chambers at my hometown courthouse to get a reference for
my application to Harvard and noticed on his desk a copy of
E. B. White's "little book" on prose style which, along with
a library book by Norbert Wiener, may have influenced my
mentioning to the judge the rather strange word "cybernetics,"
derived from the term for the steersman of the ship of Odysseus
who was lost at sea in Homer's epic tale.
"Wiener" of course is another term for a resident of Vienna.
And so, returning to much more recent memories — from
yesterday — of the long strange journey that has been my life . . .
Two references from a much less subjective and much more
objective tale that might amuse the late Hermann Weyl —
Related picture from a cartoon graveyard —
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Tuesday, September 9, 2025
California Logic: Every Gold Mine Has Its Shaft
Burton dialogue for Letterman —
"John, Tim … Tim, John."
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Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Para los Muertos
From Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star (11/11/99) :
|
"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard ; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor…. I have dwelt at length on the inconvenience of putting up with it. It is time to think about taking steps."
"The Consul could feel his glance at Hugh becoming a cold look of hatred. Keeping his eyes fixed gimlet-like upon him he saw him as he had appeared that morning, smiling, the razor edge keen in sunlight. But now he was advancing as if to decapitate him." |
See also Plato's Beard —
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Thursday, March 27, 2025
Obit for Pilot Fish*
The online New York Times today reports a March 14 death . . .
This journal on March 14 —
"Right through hell there is a path."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
* See Hemingway Pilot Fish
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Friday, March 14, 2025
Modernist Testament
This post is in opposition to the informative, but unfocused, survey
of academia by one Alma Steingart in her 2023 book Axiomatics.
The reported Axiomatics publication date — Jan. 17, 2023 — in this journal . . .
"Right through hell there is a path."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
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Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Niche Worlds: Motley and Perplexed
|
There is nothing more irritating to enthusiasts than when the mainstream tries to portray their niche world and gets it wrong. And The Brutalist gets an awful lot wrong. Just as Gladiator II recently vexed classicists with its inaccurate portrayal of the emperors and its anachronistic scenes of people reading the newspaper and drinking at cafes (neither of which, apparently, existed at the time), so too has director Brady Corbet riled the architecture world by playing fast and loose with his interpretation of brutalism, the Bauhaus, postwar immigration and the basic process of architecture itself.
— Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian, |
Chrysler Building Niche Worlds:
See also Alec Baldwin in "The Aviator" . . .
" 'There is a game of puzzles,' he resumed,
'which is played upon a map. One party playing
requires another to find a given word — the name
of town, river, state, or empire —
any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed
surface of the chart.' " — Edgar Allan Poe
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Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Skin in the Game: Real or Fake?
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Update of 1:28 PM ET on November 19, 2024 —
"The decadent legacy of Berlin between the World Wars,
and that of the American speak-easy era, have left their marks
on fashion, of course. At the Golden Globes on Sunday night,
Nicole Kidman incarnated the steamy eroticism of the Weimar
years in a clingy 20's-style gold-spangled dress by Tom Ford for
YSL Rive Gauche. Ms. Kidman's illusion top, with its suggestion
of nudity, set tongues wagging well into the next day."
— By Ruth La Ferla, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2004
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Monday, November 11, 2024
Echo Chamber: “The Room Outside of Time”*
"… as Gombrich well knew, Warburg also
constantly regrets the 'loss' of this 'thought-space' …"
Echo from the Pasaje Bella Vista in Cuernavaca —
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens
— Postcard from eBay
|
From 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. |
* "The room outside of time" is a recurring theme in "The Resort."
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Sunday, September 1, 2024
Annals of Secret Architecture: The Chrysler Thrusts
The Cinematic Imagination:
“Frida” Meets “Under the Volcano”
A scene from “Frida” and a scene from the Day of the Dead
festival, Cuernavaca, 30 October 2004.
For Diego Rivera (and Francis Ford Coppola) . . .
"Beyond his mathematics was the unknown. Were his final writings,
an avalanche of 70,000 pages in an often near-illegible hand,
the aimless scribblings of a madman? Or had the anchorite of Lasserre
made one last thrust into the secret architecture of the universe?"
— Phil Hoad in The Guardian , "Sat 31 Aug 2024 06.00 EDT"
Some impressive Chrysler Building thrusts . . .
Related cinematic entertainment . . .
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Monday, February 26, 2024
Once Upon a Time, Eureka
"Right through hell there is a path…" — Under the Volcano
Some Context:
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Sunday, October 8, 2023
Einführung
Metaphysics for the damned —
|
From the 1979 film "A Little Romance" —
Reading something you It's just a book. I used to read those too. What is it?
An Introduction to Metaphysics,
School has changed I'm just reading it for fun.
Fun?
Most people think anyone
I don't. But I have to admit
Heidegger.
Heidegger isn't all that hard.
Like, "Why is there something |
… And for the not so damned —
The Source —
https://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/
Heidegger-EinfuhrungMetaphysik.pdf
The actress playing the teen reading Heidegger in the 1979 film
"A Little Romance" was Diane Lane. The film was set in Venice.
Later in Venice . . .
Ben Affleck and Diane Lane at the 2006 Venice Film Festival
premiere of "Hollywoodland" :
An antidote to Hollywoodland . . .
The classic novel Under the Volcano :
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
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Friday, August 11, 2023
Garden Party
"Pardon me. J'adoube."
— The Consul as he fastens his fly in Malcolm Lowry's classic
novel, Under the Volcano , the Garden of Eden scene.
I, on the other hand, adobe.
Musical accompaniment . . .
"Sleight of hand and twist of fate . . . ." — "With or Without U"
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Monday, October 11, 2021
Silverview
The title is that of a novel by John le Carré — apparently his last —
reviewed this morning in the online New York Times by Joseph Finder:
" The great Graham Greene didn’t quite take his own
spy novels seriously, labeling them 'entertainments,'
but le Carré revamped the genre to fit his considerable
ambitions. 'Out of the secret world I once knew,' he wrote,
'I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds we inhabit.' "
The title suggests an image related to another novel …
Under the Volcano , by Malcolm Lowry (1947) —
The PLATA on the sign at right means "silver." The car in the foreground
is turning left onto Jardín Juárez, a street named for the plaza it adjoins
in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.
As for "to make a theater" . . .
My own modest efforts along those lines include a Log24 post
from le Carré's date of death:
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Tuesday, August 17, 2021
Class Dance
From Under the Volcano , Chapter II—
Hotel Bella Vista
Gran Baile Noviembre 1938
a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja.
Los Mejores Artistas del radio en accion.
No falte Vd.
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Wednesday, April 7, 2021
For Child Buyers
Recent posts on hotels and education suggest a review.
See “Child Buyer” in this journal.
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 eBay
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
|
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Saturday, March 2, 2019
Fashion Story
A death last Sunday —
Meanwhile . . .
Amy Adams attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party
at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on
Sunday, February 24, 2019, in Beverly Hills, California.
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Friday, November 16, 2018
On All Souls’ Day 2018
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Sunday, December 10, 2017
Interlacing, Interweaving
The above title should be sung to the following tune —
"Right through hell
there is a path…."
— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
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Friday, December 8, 2017
Mythos and Logos
Part I: Black Magician
"Schools of criticism create their own canons, elevating certain texts,
discarding others. Yet some works – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
is one of them – lend themselves readily to all critical approaches."
— Joan Givner, review of
A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century
by Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen, eds.
The Asals-Tiessen book (U. of Toronto Press, 2000) was cited today
by Margaret Soltan (in the link below) as the source of this quotation —
"When one thinks of the general sort of snacky
under-earnest writers whose works like wind-chimes
rattle in our heads now, it is easier to forgive Lowry
his pretentious seriousness, his old-fashioned ambitions,
his Proustian plans, [his efforts] to replace the reader’s
consciousness wholly with a black magician’s."
A possible source, Perle Epstein, for the view of Lowry as black magician —
Part II: Mythos and Logos
Part I above suggests a review of Adam Gopnik as black magician
(a figure from Mythos ) —
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Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
|
— and of an opposing figure from Logos ,
Paul B. Yale, in the references below:
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Friday, February 26, 2016
Overarching
"The study of social memory allows scholars to
understand how different memories form within
a collective group, thus exploring the societal
and ideological elements of disparate groups
that form the over-arching memory of Melkisedeq."
— The Melkisedeq Memoirs , by Cale Staley,
2015 master's thesis at the University of Iowa
Elements of groups that I prefer —
"Right through hell
there is a path…."
— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
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Tuesday, February 16, 2016
The Immortal Voice
From Malcolm Lowry's reply in 1947 to a hostile review
by Jacques Barzun of Lowry's novel Under the Volcano —
"The end, I suppose, is intended to crush one completely.
'Mr. Lowry has other moments, borrowed from
other styles in fashion, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe,
the thought-streamers, the surrealists. His novel can
be recommended only as an anthology held together
by earnestness.'
Whatever your larger motive–which I incidentally believe
to be extremely sound–do you not seem to have heard this
passage or something like it before? I certainly do. I seem
to recognize the voice, slightly disguised, that greeted Mr.
Wolfe himself, not to say Mr. Faulkner, Mr. Melville and Mr.
James–an immortal voice indeed that once addressed Keats
in the same terms that it informed Mr. Whitman that he knew
less about poetry than a hog about mathematics."
See as well the Log24 posts from the date of Barzun's death.
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Friday, February 12, 2016
The Game
"Right through hell
there is a path…."
— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
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Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Boulevard of Broken Punchlines
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Monday, December 21, 2015
Slouching Towards Christmas (continued)
Under the Volcano:
A Bottle, a Door, a Box
See also Glory Season (Nov. 12, 2005) and Unique Figure (April 12, 2011).
Update of 11:22 AM —
Today in History —
"On December 21, 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle
Theatre in Los Angeles."
Related material: The Red Book.
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Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Soul
Nonsense…
See Gary Zukav, Harvard ’64, in this journal.
and damned nonsense —
“Every institution has a soul.”
— Gerald Holton in Harvard Gazette today
Commentary —
“The Ferris wheel came into view again….”
— Malcom Lowry, Under the Volcano
See also Holton in a Jan. 1977 interview:
“If people have souls, and I think a few have, it shows….”
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Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Harvard Cinco de Mayo
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Thursday, March 12, 2015
For Stephen King
Doctor Steam
"Everybody's doin'
a brand new dance now…"
"A corpse will be
transported by express!"
— Under the Volcano
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Sunday, November 30, 2014
Back to the Real
Continued from June 17, 2009 —
"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…."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
See too a search for Snowflake in this journal.
This word may serve as Mark Strand's "Rosebud."
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