"Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead."
"When the men on the chessboard
get up and tell you where to go . . ."
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Surrealistic Pillow Talk
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Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Staging the Self
| SPOILER ALERT
This post links to a column that |
The title is from a column by Stanley Fish
on The Hunger Games books in today's
online New York Times . The column
was posted at 9 PM EDT on May 7th, but I
did not see it until this morning.
Fish says—
"In the end… [spoiler details omitted]…
children… 'don’t know they play
on a graveyard'…."
For some literary background, see last night's post
on the May 7th, 2012, NY Times obituaries as well
as the May 7th, 2006, Log24 post featuring 24 squares
arranged in a rectangular frame.
See also Frame Tales and, more generally,
The King and the Corpse.
"Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." — Yul Brynner
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Thursday, May 3, 2012
Child’s Play
"… a long seat, or a seat with a back,
or a throne for the Queen;
or again, a cross, a doorway, etc."
"… etc., etc." — Yul Brynner
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Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Tuesday October 10, 2006
Mate
 Orson Welles Welles died on |
“The crème de la crème
of the chess world in a show with everything
but Yul Brynner” |
New York Lottery,
mid-day on Yom Kippur,
October 2, 2006:
256.
Pennsylvania Lottery,
mid-day on the same day:
723.
For more on 256,
see Symmetries
and 7/23.
“It is a very difficult
philosophical question,
the question of
what ‘random’ is.”
— Herbert Robbins, co-author
of What is Mathematics?
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Friday, July 7, 2006
Friday July 7, 2006
Born (some say)
on this date:
Yul Brynner
on this date:
Yul Brynner
Mate in 6
(White moves.)
(White: Ke8, Nd7, Be5,
b5, e4, f2. Black: Ke6.)
— Sevitov, 1938
(For solution, click here.)
“… There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight….
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.”— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, begun in the summer of 1938
“In this way we are offered a formidable lesson for every Christian community.”
— Pope Benedict XVI on Pentecost, June 4, 2006, St. Peter’s Square.
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Saturday, October 15, 2005
Saturday October 15, 2005
Canon
A brief note to place Edward Bennett Marks, who died either on Saturday, October 8, 2005 (Washington Post), or on Monday, October 10, 2005 (New York Times), in my personal canon of saints. Today’s New York Times says that Marks spent his career “aiding refugees as an executive of American and international agencies, both official and volunteer.” This alone was commendable, but not miraculous. The miraculous is contained in three words from the Log24 entry of October 10, the date of death of Orson Welles, of Yul Brynner, and perhaps of Marks: “All come home.”
For a rather different perspective on St. Yul Brynner, see “Shall We Dance?”– a profile by Calvin Tomkins in this week’s New Yorker (issue dated 2005 10/17, posted 10/10) of an artist raised in Bangkok. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the chess enthusiast Marcel Duchamp plays a prominent role in this piece.
Some other remarks on chess and art:
| From Introduction to Aesthetics (Log24, October 10, 2004) — G. H. Hardy on chess problems: “It is essential… (unless the problem is too simple to be really amusing) that the key-move should be followed by a good many variations, each requiring its own individual answer.”
According to the New York Times, Marks died on Oct. 10 (see related entry). According to the Washington Post, Marks died on Oct. 8 (see related entry). |
For some remarks on art by St. Edward, see UN Chronicle, Issue 4, 1998.
Monday, October 10, 2005
Monday October 10, 2005
Starflight
“The crème de la crème
of the chess world in a
of the chess world in a
show with everything
but Yul Brynner”
Mate in 2,
V. Nabokov, 1919,
“Starflight” theme
but Yul Brynner”
Mate in 2,
V. Nabokov, 1919,
“Starflight” theme
Today is the feast of St. Yul Brynner,
who died on this date in 1985.
“Head bent down over the guitar,
he barely seemed to hum;
ended “all come home”;
….
Yule– Yul log for the
Christmas-fire tale-spinner–
of fairy tales that can come true.
Yul Brynner.”
— Marianne Moore,
“Rescue with Yul Brynner”
Related material:
Starflight, a year ago today
Pleiades, by Ivan Bunin, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, whose birthday is today
Natasha’s Dance (Log24, Jan. 8, 2004)
Star! by John Gregory Dunne (NY Review of Books, Jan. 15, 2004)
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