See also the previous post.
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Making Gatsby Great Again
Comments Off on Making Gatsby Great Again
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Friday, May 12, 2023
Famous Chatbot School
Summary of a TV episode from yesterday that seems like
it was written by a hallucinating chatbot —
In other chatbot news . . .
As for 2001 . . . See "Notes from a (Paper) Journal 1993-2001."
Comments Off on Famous Chatbot School
Sunday, January 23, 2022
Apperception for Newton
"So we beat on, boats against the current…"
— The Great Gatsby
Thandie Newton in "Reminiscence" (2021) —
The above Screen Rant article is from August 20, 2021.
From that same date —
Comments Off on Apperception for Newton
Sunday, June 13, 2021
Verba Volant, Scripta Manent
For Kristen Breitweiser
"Daisy, when she comes to tea at Nick's house,
refers to the flowers brought by Gatsby as being
appropriate for a funeral and asks 'Where's the corpse?'
Gatsby enters immediately thereafter. This foreshadows
what will happen to Gatsby. The dialogue is not in the novel…."
— Discussion of the 2000 TV movie version in
Learning Guide to The Great Gatsby
Correction to the midrash:
Sorvino actually says, when there is a knock at the door,
"That must be the corpse."
Comments Off on Verba Volant, Scripta Manent
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Jersey Hymn
An upload from Good Friday, 2019 —
"Daisy, when she comes to tea at Nick's house,
refers to the flowers brought by Gatsby as being
appropriate for a funeral and asks 'Where's the corpse?'
Gatsby enters immediately thereafter. This foreshadows
what will happen to Gatsby. The dialogue is not in the novel…."
— Discussion of the 2000 TV movie version in
Learning Guide to The Great Gatsby
Correction to the midrash:
Sorvino actually says, when there is a knock at the door,
"That must be the corpse."
Comments Off on Jersey Hymn
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
The Hot Rock
Comments Off on The Hot Rock
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
A Dark and Stormy May 29th
He had come a long way to this blue lawn,
and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
He did not know that it was already behind him,
somewhere back in that vast obscurity
beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
— Epigraph to Limitless: A Novel , by Alan Glynn
Glynn's novel was originally published in 2002 under the title
The Dark Fields .
Compare and contrast —
Stephen King's IT was first published by Viking in 1986.
See as well the May 29th date mentioned by King.
Comments Off on A Dark and Stormy May 29th
Saturday, May 21, 2016
New Base
Three reflections suggested by the previous post —
1. A Whit Stillman film mentions favorably Scrooge McDuck —
2. A "promoted tweet" at the Twitter of the previous post's author leads to …
3. The above phrase "New Base" suggests a related literary note —
Comments Off on New Base
Monday, November 3, 2014
Plan 9 Continues…
A link to “Nine Tailors” in this journal may serve as
a memorial to the late David M. Abshire, who
reportedly died at 88 on Halloween.
See also tonight’s previous post and a remark by
Mira Sorvino in her version of The Great Gatsby .
Comments Off on Plan 9 Continues…
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Smart Art
Comments Off on Smart Art
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Jersey Girl
“Oh, pretty baby…” — Frankie Valli at A Capitol Fourth last night.
Related material — Mira Sorvino in The Great Gatsby .
“Jersey girls are tough.” — Garfield.
Comments Off on Jersey Girl
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Red to Green continues
The New Yorker of March 17 on
a New York literary family—
“First they were Communists, then liberals
(he was questioned by the House Committee
on Un-American Activities);
always they were avid party-givers.”
“Gatsby believed in the green light… ”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Why did the Pole spend all night outside the whorehouse?
He was waiting for the red light to turn green.”
— Blanche Knott, Truly Tasteless Jokes
Mira Sorvino in a TV version of The Great Gatsby —
“Are you my one o’clock?” — Adapted from Mighty Aphrodite
See as well Green Hunt.
Comments Off on Red to Green continues
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Learning Guide
"The festival opened with The Great Gatsby ,
directed by Baz Luhrmann."
Midrash on an earlier film version (Mira Sorvino's, 2000):
"Daisy, when she comes to tea at Nick's house,
refers to the flowers brought by Gatsby as being
appropriate for a funeral and asks 'Where's the corpse?'
Gatsby enters immediately thereafter. This foreshadows
what will happen to Gatsby. The dialogue is not in the novel…."
— Learning Guide to The Great Gatsby
Correction to the midrash:
Sorvino actually says, when there is a knock at the door,
"That must be the corpse."
Update of Candlemas, 2014, in memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman—
Comments Off on Learning Guide
Monday, September 2, 2013
Analogy
From The New York Times Sunday Book Review of Sept. 1, 2013—
|
THE GAMAL Reviewed by Katharine Weber Ten years ago, when Mark Haddon’s “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” turned up on the best-seller list and won a number of literary awards, the novel’s autistic narrator beguiled readers with his unconventional point of view. Today, even as controversy surrounds the revised classification of autism in the latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the quirky yet remarkably perceptive points of view of autistic narrators have become increasingly familiar in every category of fiction, from young adult to science fiction to popular and literary fiction. Like Haddon’s Christopher Boone, the narrator of Ciaran Collins’s remarkable first novel, “The Gamal,” has been encouraged by a mental health professional to write his story for therapeutic purposes. Charlie McCarthy, 25, is known in the West Cork village of Ballyronan as “the gamal,” short for “gamalog,” a term for a fool or simpleton rarely heard beyond the Gaeltacht regions of Ireland. He is in fact a savant, a sensitive oddball whose cheeky, strange, defiant and witty monologue is as disturbing as it is dazzling. … |
The Gamal features a considerable variety of music. See details at a music weblog.
This, together with the narrator's encouragement "by a mental health professional
to write his story for therapeutic purposes" might interest Baz Luhrmann.
See Luhrmann's recent film "The Great Gatsby," with its portrait of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrator, and thus Fitzgerald himself, as a sensitive looney.
The Carraway-Daisy-Gatsby trio has a parallel in The Gamal . (Again, see
the music weblog's description.)
The Times reviewer's concluding remarks on truth, lies, and unreliable autistic
narrators may interest some mathematicians. From an Aug. 29 post—
A different gamalog , a website in Mexico, is not entirely unrelated to
issues of lies and truth—
Comments Off on Analogy
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Midnight Song
For a modeling visionary— "All the Time."
Related material: Coco Rocha and Gatsby .
Update of 12:31 AM July 21— See also "For Doin' Evil."
Comments Off on Midnight Song
Friday, April 12, 2013
An Education
For little Colva … The Mother Ship :
. . . .
For more light, see "Merton College" + Cameron
in this journal, as well as …
An Education
Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in Baz Luhrmann's
new version of The Great Gatsby :
We're going to Disney World! —
(For a more up-to-date version of little Colva,
see Primitive Groups and Maximal Subgroups.)
Comments Off on An Education
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Notable Transitions
This morning's New York Times gives a folklorist's
view of The Great Gatsby—
"Daisy Buchanan, he argued in a 1960 article,
is a Jazz Age incarnation of the beautiful,
seductive Fairy Queen of Celtic lore."
— Margalit Fox, obituary of Tristram P. Coffin,
who died at 89 on January 31st, 2012
See also…
Two screenshots in memory of fashion and fine-art photographer
Lillian Bassman, who died yesterday at 94—
Update of 10:10 AM EST Wed., Feb. 15, 2012…
In memory of Dory Previn, a song for "Hanna" and "Lord of the Rings" star Cate Blanchett.
Previn died yesterday, on Valentine's Day. Perhaps an inspiration for a lyric by Leonard Cohen?
Comments Off on Notable Transitions
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Old Sport
Comments Off on Old Sport
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Dark Fields
"He had come a long way to this blue lawn,
and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
He did not know that it was already behind him,
somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city,
where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."
— The Great Gatsby
See also St. Andrew's Day, 2011, in this journal.
Comments Off on Dark Fields
Thursday, May 6, 2010
The Great Clooney
"If you can bounce high, bounce for her too."
Happy birthday, George.
Comments Off on The Great Clooney
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Great Brown
Today's New York Times on a current theatrical presentation of The Great Gatsby—
"Throughout the show, the relationship between what is read and its context keeps shifting, with the real world finally giving way entirely to the fictive one."
"This fella's a regular Belasco."
David Brown, producer. Brown died on Monday.
From The Diamond as Big as the Monster in this journal on Dec. 21, 2005–
"At the still point, there the dance is.” –T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Eliot was quoted in the epigraph to the chapter on automorphism groups in Parallelisms of Complete Designs, by Peter J. Cameron, published when Cameron was at Merton College, Oxford.
“As Gatsby closed the door of ‘the Merton College Library’ I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald
Related material: Yesterday's posts and the jewel in Venn's lotus.
Comments Off on The Great Brown
Friday, November 21, 2008
Friday November 21, 2008
Gatsby Starts Over:
Cleaning Up the
St. Olaf Mess
Cleaning Up the
St. Olaf Mess
St. Olaf College,
Northfield, Minnesota —
From The MSCS Mess
(Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics,
and Computer Science)
November 14, 2008
Volume 37, Number 9—
Math Film Festival 2008
The MSCS Department is sponsoring the second of two film-discussion evenings this Wednesday, November 19. Come to RNS 390 at 7:00 PM to see watch [sic] two short [sic]— Whatchu Know 'bout Math and Just a Finite Simple Group of Order Two— and our feature film, Good Will Hunting. Will Hunting is a mathematical genius who's living a rough life in South Boston, while being employed at a prestigious college in Boston, he's [sic] discovered by a Fields Medal winning mathematics Professor [sic] who eventually tries to get Will to turn his life around but becomes haunted by his own professional inadequacies when compared with Will. Professor Garrett will explain the “impossible problem” and its solution after the film.
Background:
Log24 entries of Wednesday, November 19, the day "Good Will Hunting" was shown:
Damnation Morning revisited and
Mathematics and Narrative continued
From a story in the November 21
Chronicle of Higher Education
on a recent St. Olaf College
reading of Paradise Lost:
Chronicle of Higher Education
on a recent St. Olaf College
reading of Paradise Lost:
|
"Of man's first disobedience,
and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe…. A red apple made the rounds, |
________________________
"Do you like apples?"
— Good Will Hunting
Comments Off on Friday November 21, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Wednesday November 19, 2008
"Through the unknown,
remembered gate…."
(Epigraph to the introduction,
Parallelisms of Complete Designs
by Peter J. Cameron,
Merton College, Oxford)
"It's still the same old story…."
— Song lyric
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6:
"An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through."
There is a link to an article on St. Olaf College in Arts & Letters Daily today:
"John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too…" more»
The "more" link is to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
For related material on Paradise Lost and higher education, see Mathematics and Narrative.
Comments Off on Wednesday November 19, 2008
Friday, January 5, 2007
Friday January 5, 2007
Time and the River
Front page of The New York Times Book Review, issue dated January 7, 2007:
“Time passes, and what it passes through is people– though people believe that they are passing through time, and even, at certain euphoric moments, directing time. It’s a delusion, but it’s where memoirs come from, or at least the very best ones. They tell how destiny presses on desire and how desire pushes back, sometimes heroically, always poignantly, but never quite victoriously. Life is an upstream, not an uphill, battle, and it results in just one story: how, and alongside whom, one used his paddle.”
— Walter Kirn, “Stone’s Diaries”
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Comments Off on Friday January 5, 2007
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Wednesday July 5, 2006
Entertainment
from today’s
New York Times
from today’s
New York Times
From the obituary of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died at 52 on Monday, July 3, 2006, at her home in Santa Fe:
“If she rarely spoke of her private life, few artists have brought such emotional vulnerability to their work, whether it was her sultry portrayal of Myrtle Wilson, the mistress of wealthy Tom Buchanan in John Harbison’s ‘Great Gatsby,’ the role of her 1999 Metropolitan Opera debut, or her shattering performances several years ago in two Bach cantatas for solo voice and orchestra, staged by the director Peter Sellars, seen in Lincoln Center’s New Visions series, with the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, Craig Smith conducting.
In Cantata No. 82, ‘Ich Habe Genug’ (‘I Have Enough’), Ms. Hunt Lieberson, wearing a flimsy hospital gown and thick woolen socks, her face contorted with pain and yearning, portrayed a terminally ill patient who, no longer able to endure treatments, wants to let go and be comforted by Jesus. During one consoling aria, ‘Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen’ (‘Slumber now, weary eyes’), she yanked tubes from her arms and sang the spiraling melody with an uncanny blend of ennobling grace and unbearable sadness.”
Related Entertainment
from Nov. 6, 2003
Today’s birthday:
director Mike Nichols
Comments Off on Wednesday July 5, 2006
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Tuesday April 11, 2006
Dallas
|
Highballs
“If you can bounce high, Magazine purchased at
A Whiff of Camelot – New York Times, Song title from the “Gatsby’s Restaurant” From The Great Gatsby, “Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate, On JFK’s plane trips: Apparently there was some function… “Don’t forget the coffee!”
– Punchline from the film “Good Will Hunting.” |
Part II:
Today’s birthday:
Joel Grey
Grey in “Conundrum,”
the final episode of Dallas
Related material:
— and the 5 previous entries.
Comments Off on Tuesday April 11, 2006
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Wednesday December 21, 2005
For the feast of
St. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
The Diamond
as Big as
the Monster
as Big as
the Monster
From Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz:
“Now,” said John eagerly, “turn out your pocket and let’s see what jewels you brought along. If you made a good selection we three ought to live comfortably all the rest of our lives.”
Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and tossed two handfuls of glittering stones before him.
“Not so bad,” cried John, enthusiastically. “They aren’t very big, but– Hello!” His expression changed as he held one of them up to the declining sun. “Why, these aren’t diamonds! There’s something the matter!”
“By golly!” exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look. “What an idiot I am!”
“Why, these are rhinestones!” cried John.
From The Hawkline Monster, by Richard Brautigan:
“What are we going to do now?” Susan Hawkline said, surveying the lake that had once been their house.
Cameron counted the diamonds in his hand. There were thirty-five diamonds and they were all that was left of the Hawkline Monster.
“We’ll think of something,” Cameron said.
Related material:
“A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces.”
— When Novelists Become Cubists:
The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport,
by Andre Furlani
“T.S. Eliot’s experiments in ideogrammatic method are equally germane to Davenport, who shares with the poet an avant-garde aesthetic and a conservative temperament. Davenport’s text reverberates with echoes of Four Quartets.”
“At the still point,
there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,
quoted in the epigraph to
the chapter on automorphism groups
in Parallelisms of Complete Designs,
by Peter J. Cameron,
published when Cameron was at
Merton College, Oxford.
“As Gatsby closed the door of
‘the Merton College Library’
I could have sworn I heard
the owl-eyed man
break into ghostly laughter.”
Comments Off on Wednesday December 21, 2005
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Saturday October 29, 2005
Aquarius Jazz
Adapted from Matisse
“The Jazz Age spirit flared
in the Age of Aquarius.”
— Maureen Dowd, essay
for Devil’s Night, 2005:
What’s a Modern Girl to Do?
“I hope she’ll be a fool —
that’s the best thing a girl can be
in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan in Chapter I
of The Great Gatsby
“Thanks for the tip,
American Dream.”
— Spider-Girl, in
Vol. 1, No. 30, March 2001
(Excerpts from
Random Thoughts
for St. Patrick’s Eve)
Comments Off on Saturday October 29, 2005
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Tuesday March 1, 2005
3/16 Continued
The New Yorker, issue dated March 7, 2005, on Hunter S. Thompson:
“… his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from ‘The Great Gatsby,’ just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called ‘The Death of the American Dream,’ a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck.”
for St. Patrick’s Eve
by Steven H. Cullinane
on March 16, 2001
“I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan in Chapter I of The Great Gatsby
“Thanks for the tip, American Dream.”
— Spider-Girl, in Vol. 1, No. 30, March 2001
Comments Off on Tuesday March 1, 2005
Friday, May 16, 2003
Friday May 16, 2003
Highballs
“If you can bounce high,
bounce for her too….”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, epigraph to
The Great Gatsby
Magazine purchased at
newsstand May 14, 2003:
A Whiff of Camelot
as ‘West Wing’
Ends an Era
– New York Times,
May 14, 2003
Song title from the
June Carter Cash album “Press On“:
“Gatsby’s Restaurant”
From The Great Gatsby, Chapter Four:
“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”
said Mr. Wolfsheim, looking at the
Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling.
Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate,
in the news on May 15, 2003
On JFK’s plane trips:
“Whenever the President traveled,
members of the press staff traveled as well.
You always have a press secretary
and a couple of girls traveling….
Mimi, who obviously couldn’t perform
any function at all, made all the trips!”
Apparently there was some function….
“Don’t forget the coffee!”
– Punchline from the film
“Good Will Hunting.”
Comments Off on Friday May 16, 2003