Notes On "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," by
Wallace Stevens:
"This third section continues its play of opposing forces, introducing
in the second canto a 'blue woman,' arguably a goddess- or muse-figure,
who stan…
Library
These are the folios of April,All the library of spring
— Christopher Morley
The above quotation is dedicated to Quay A. McCune, M.D., whose copy of
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations I purchased for two dollars a…
X
Tonight on PBS:The Jesus Factor
From Good Friday:
3 PMGoodFriday
For an explanationof this icon, see
Art WarsandTo Be.
From Eternity:
"Red Hook! Jesus!"
From Holy Saturday:
"There…
Example
"...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the
concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of
a concept of seemingly great generality is in essence the same as a
small a…
Last Exit:A Meditation for Poetry Month
Click on the picture below for details.
Notes on the compiling of Only the Dead:
Today's obituary of the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn suggested I
look up Wolfe's sh…
The Whisper
Two interviews by Rebecca Murray —
Interview with Sofia Coppola, who won an Oscar for the screenplay of
Lost in Translation: Did you write that character with Bill Murray in
mind?I did. I was definitely p…
Outside the World
(A sequel to the previous entry)
Title: The Point Outside the World: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on
Nonsense, Paradox, and Religion
Author: M. Jamie Ferreira (Love's Gratef…
Directions Out
Part I: Indirections
"By indirections, find directions out."
-- Polonius in Hamlet: II, i
"Foremost among the structural similarities between Kierkegaard and
Wittgenstein... is the use of indirect co…
Philosophy
From today's New York Times:
"Philip Hamburger, a writer for The New Yorker for more than six
decades whose meticulously calibrated inflections — sober, droll and
everything in between — helped create and …
Small World
Added a note to 4x4 Geometry:
The 4x4 square model lets us visualize the projective space PG(3,2) as
well as the affine space AG(4,2). For tetrahedral and circular models
of PG(3,2), see the work of Burka…
Proof by Osmosis
by Kenneth Chang in theNew York Times of April 6, 2004
"A rigorous proof, a notion first set forth by Euclid around 300 B.C.,
is a progression of logic, starting from assumptions and arriving at a
conc…
Minimalism
"It's become our form of modern classicism."
-- Nancy Spector in the New York Times of April 23, 2004
Part I: Aesthetics
In honor of the current Guggenheim exhibition, "Singular Forms" — A
quotation fro…
Inscape
Picture said to be ofa Japanese Skylark,Hibari or Alauda
japonica.Photo: 05/2002, Nagano, Japan.
A false definition of "inscape":
Brad Leithauser, New York Review of Books, April 29, 2004:
"Not surp…
Hatched
Today is the birthday of Teiji Takagi.
"Kronecker's youthful dream had to wait for Takagi's development of
class field theory to be stated and proved properly."
-- The Honors Class:Hilbert's Problems and Their…
Rhetorical Question
Yesterday's Cartesian theatre continues....
Robert Osserman, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Stanford
University, is special-projects director at the Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute,…
Cartesian Theatre
From aldaily.com today:
"If my mind is a tiny theatre I watch in my brain, then there is a
tinier mind and theatre inside that mind to see it, and so on
forever... more»"
This leads to the dream (or …
Dream of Youth Revisited
For some material related to the entry Dream of Youth of last Dec. 8
(the feast day of St. Hermann Weyl), see the recently updated A
Mathematical Lie.
See, too, a "comedy of errors" from
7 rue…
Mistakes Were Made By Al Kamen, Washington
Post Friday, April 16, 2004
"... Bush, in his news conference Tuesday.... found a way to make not
one, not two, but three factual errors in a single 15-word sentence,
which m…
Today's Kerry Misery Index
70%: Karl Rove is smiling today.
"The Sharon-Bush partnership creates a ticklish tactical problem for
John Kerry. The Democrats (like the GOP) have traditionally regarded
Jewish settlements…
President Queeg,continued
Compare and contrast:
The President of the United States and Captain Queeg.
From last night's press conference:
"....you never admit a mistake. Is that a fair criticism.... ?" From
The C…
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
The previous entry dealt with politicians' lies and clergymen's damned
lies. This entry deals with statistics (often grouped with the former
two sins).
Group: Kerry's Misery IndexSele…
Easter Politics
At Fort Hood, Texas, a sermon for the President of the United States:
" 'Christianity is based on one historic event-- it happened Easter
morning.' Members of the congregation responded with cries of 'A…
Good Friday andDescartes's Easter Egg
"The use of z, y, x . . . to represent unknowns is due to René
Descartes, in his La géometrie (1637).... In a paper on
Cartesian
ovals, prepared before 1629, x alone occurs as unkno…
Couleurs
In memory ofRené Descartes(born March 31)andRené
Gruau(died March 31)
On the former:
"The predominant use of the letter xto represent an unknown valuecame
about in an interesting way."
On the latter:
"The…
Harrowing
"The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top,
silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him,
then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and
full of potholes, …
Lost in Translation?
In memory of
Murray L. Bob:
A lecture,
A picture,
A song.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
Bush Seeks to Shore UpSupport for Iraq
Fri Apr 9, 2004 03:49 PM ET By Jeremy Pelofsky CRAWFORD, Texas
(Reuters) - President Bush on Friday won renewed pledges of support for
U.S. effor…
3 PMGoodFriday For an explanationof this
icon, see Art Wars
and To Be.
Temptation
Kylie singsLocomotion.
In memory of Victor Argo,who died Tuesday, April 6, 2004.Today's New
York Timessays Mr. Argo was cast"somewhat against type"by Martin
Scorsese as
The Apostle Peter in"The Last Temptat…
Odd Massing
"An odd massing of consciousness takes place."
-- David Kalstone, On "Lost in Translation"
We Call This Friday Good
-- T. S. Eliot
Welcome to our imaginative and inspiring toy catalog! Today is Friday
9-April 2004.On this day in 19141st full color film shown"The World,
The Flesh & the Devil"(…
Triple Crown, Part II
(See previous entry.)
The winner is Mike Sullivan, far and away.
An essay, by Sullivan's son,from Harper's magazine, Oct. 2002 --
Horseman, Pass By:Glory, Grief, and the Race forthe Triple Cro…
Triple Crown
"The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with
science and religion is not to be underestimated.... Philosophical
ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism's bottom line…
As a Little Child
Today's birthdays:
Francis Ford Coppola andRussell Crowe.
From MindfulGroup.com:
Welcome to our imaginative and inspiring toy catalog!
Today is Wednesday 7-April 2004. On this day in 30 J…
ART WARS:Mother of Beauty
In memory of architect Pierre Koenig...
Mother of Beauty: A Note on Modernism.
"... Case Study House #22 ... was high drama — one in which the entire
city becomes part of the architect's comp…
Ideas and Art, Part III
The first idea was not our own. AdamIn Eden was the father of
Descartes...
-- Wallace Stevens, from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
"Quaedam ex his tanquam rerum imagines sunt, quibus solis p…
Ideas and Art, Part II
"We do not, of course, see ideas."
-- Roger Kimball, Minimalist Fantasies, 2003
"Idea (Lat. idea, forma, species; Gk. idea, eidos, from idein, to see;
Fr. idée; Ger. Bild; Begriff) Probably to…
Ideas and Art — Motto of Plato's Academy
From Minimalist Fantasies,by Roger Kimball, May 2003:
All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of
them, is the fact that you can see the …
Links for Palm Sunday
Google's "sunlit paradigm" and
my own "Lost in Translation."
ART WARS Update
Two New York Times reviews today are relevant to the themes of ART
WARS:
Minimal Art, by Michael Kimmelman
Hannah and Martin, by Margo Jefferson.
The themes of these reviews-- a minimalist dividing …
Loretta's Rainbow
AMC April 1, 2004:8:00 PM Coal Miner's Daughter 10:30 PM Love with the
Proper Stranger
From an interviewwith Iris Dement
(b. 5 January, 1961, Paragould, Arkansas)
Your songs are filled wit…
The Leonardo Code
Thirty-Three and Three
"Continue a search for thirty-three and three. Veiled forever is the
secret door." -- Katherine Neville, aka Cat Velis, in The Eight,
Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140
(Today is April 1.)
Poetry Month:
Stevens as a Riviera Presbyterian He never supposed That he might be
truth, himself, or part of it, That the things that he rejected might
be part And the irregular turquoise, p…