Log24

Monday, June 14, 2010

Whiteness

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:20 am

Continued from Sunday morning.

Image-- Album by Jimmy Dean-- '20 Great Story Songs'

Breakfast at Tiffany's  (Vintage reprint), page 73—

"Doc really loves me, you know. And I love him. He may have looked old and tacky to you. But you don't know the sweetness of him, the confidence he can give to birds and brats and fragile things like that. Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot. I've always remembered Doc in my prayers. Please stop smirking!" she demanded, stabbing out a cigarette. "I do  say my prayers."

… Page 74 …

She glanced at the clock. "He must be in the Blue Mountains by now."

The image 
“http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050703-Cold.jpg” cannot be displayed, 
because it contains errors.

Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Windmill vs. Diamond

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:44 pm

"… I miss the black-and-whiteness of the 20th century."

Vanity Fair  editor Graydon Carter  in The New York Times  today

A note for Carter —

Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Idea Idea

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

For the late philosopher Peter Goldie, who died on October 22nd—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111029-Goldie33.jpg

Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word — "And there, at last, it was!"—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111030-MarkHelprin_WintersTale.jpg

See also Whiteness and Horseness.

Monday, January 3, 2011

New Critical Art

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

From a scholar quoted in this morning's post

"Both Vico and Joyce, each in his own way, practice what Vico calls a nuov'arte critica , a 'new critical art'…"

From Hugh Grant's birthday, 2003 (found in a search for whiteness  in this morning's post) —

Tara Fitzgerald and Hugh Grant
in "Sirens" (1994)

PATRICK’S RUNE

At Tara, in this fateful hour,
I place all heaven with its power.
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness;
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

From A Swiftly Tilting Planet
by Madeleine L’Engle

The cover of yesterday's Sunday New York Times Book Review
features stylized letters by artist Leonardo Sonnoli that include black
circles and triangles —

IMAGE- NY Times Book Review cover art by Leonardo Sonnoli

The stylized Sonnoli letters spell out "WORDS ABOUT WORDS ABOUT WORDS."
This phrase is used to introduce essays on criticism by "six accomplished critics."

A less accomplished critic might note that in the picture above, Tara is modeling
a new fashion by Sonnoli — namely, the word OOV.  A search for this word yields…

"OOV in text processing stands for 'out-of-vocabulary,' i.e., a word
 that is not known in the computer's online dictionary."

It should be.

Addendum (from a link in the same search for whiteness ) in memory of a great beauty who died on Sunday —
      http://www.log24.com/log10/saved/100613-WhiteBySchwartz.gif

Shining

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am

For the authors of the new book All Things Shining

See the discussions of "concrete universals" in James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology  and in Donald Phillip Verene's Vico and Joyce

IMAGE- The imaginative universal in Vico and Joyce

The index to All Things Shining  contains no entries for Hillman (or his mentor Jung), Verene, Joyce, Vico, or the word "universal."

It does, however, contain four references to an example  of a universal —

whiteness, 161, 169-173, 175, 178

See also "whiteness" in this  journal.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Today’s Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 am

 

    Whiteness    


Sunday School

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

What on earth is a 'concrete universal'?"
Said to be an annotation (undated)
by Robert M. Pirsig of A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston, Society of Jesus.

From Aaron Urbanczyk's 2005 review of Christ and Apollo  by William Lynch, S.J., a book first published in 1960—

"Lynch's use of analogy vis-a-vis literature provides, in a sense, a philosophical basis to the theoretical paradox popularized by W. K. Wimsatt (1907-1975), which contends that literature is a sort of 'concrete universal.'"

The following figure has often been
offered in this journal as a symbol of Apollo

Image-- 3x3 array of white squares

Arguments that it is, rather, a symbol of Christ
may be left to the Society of Jesus.

One possible approach—
Urbanczyk's review says that
"Christianity offers the critic
   a privileged ontological window…."

"The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light."

Delmore Schwartz

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Thursday July 16, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

The White Itself

David Ellerman has written that

"The notion of a concrete universal occurred in Plato's Theory of Forms [Malcolm 1991]."

A check shows that Malcolm indeed discussed this notion ("the Form as an Ideal Individual"), but not under the name "concrete universal."

See Plato on the Self-Predication of Forms, by John Malcolm, Oxford U. Press, 1991.

From the publisher's summary:

"Malcolm…. shows that the middle dialogues do indeed take Forms to be both universals and paradigms…. He shows that Plato's concern to explain how the truths of mathematics can indeed be true played an important role in his postulation of the Form as an Ideal Individual."

Ellerman also cites another discussion of Plato published by Oxford:

Kneale and Kneale on Plato's theory of forms and 'the white itself'

For a literary context, see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., "The Structure of the Concrete Universal," Ch. 6 in Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.

Other uses of the phrase "concrete universal"– Hegelian and/or theological– seem rather distant from the concerns of Plato and Wimsatt, and are best left to debates between Marxists and Catholics. (My own sympathies are with the Catholics.)

Two views of "the white itself" —

 "So did God cause the big bang?
 Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
 I finally reach over to my bookshelf
 for The Devil's Bible.
 Turning to Genesis I read:
 'In the beginning
 there was nothing.
 And God said,
 'Let there be light!'
 And there was still nothing,
 but now you could see it.'"
 
 -- Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
    Slate's "High Concept" department 
 
   Fiat Lux, and After

"The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light."

-- Delmore Schwartz

Friday, January 13, 2006

Friday January 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Beyond the Fire

“Who Needs a White Cube These Days?”
Headline in today’s New York Times

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…
— Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins

 
                                          
“… Sleep realized
Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,
A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,

That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.”

— Wallace Stevens,
   “The Owl in the Sarcophagus”
III 13-16,
    from The Auroras of Autumn, 1950


Related material:
The five entries ending on Christmas, 2005.

Tuesday, September 9, 2003

Tuesday September 9, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:04 pm

Story Theory

The conflict between the Euclidean, or “diamond” theory of truth, and the Trudeau, or “story” theory of truth, continues.

On this, Hugh Grant’s birthday, let us recall last year’s log24 entry for this date. On Roger Ebert’s review of the Hugh Grant film “Sirens” about the artist Norman Lindsay:

Ebert gets Pan wrong in this film; he says, “the bearded Lindsay is a Pan of sorts.” No. The “Pan of sorts” is in fact the girl who romps joyfully with the local boys and who later, with great amusement, uses her divine x-ray vision to view Tara Fitzgerald naked in church.

This year’s offering for Grant’s birthday is an illustrated prayer by a great defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, Madeleine L’Engle:

Tara Fitzgerald

PATRICK’S RUNE

At Tara, in this fateful hour,
I place all heaven with its power.
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness;
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

From A Swiftly Tilting Planet
by Madeleine L’Engle


For an uncensored view, see my Harvard weblog.

Powered by WordPress