On This Date: In 1936, Gone with the Wind was published. In 1971, Monica Potter was born. Sources: Amazon.com and Tall Tall Trees
Related material:
There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling, Whether as learned bard or gifted child; To it all lines or lesser gauds belong That startle with their shining Such common stories as they stray into. Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues, Or strange beasts that beset you, Of birds that croak at you the Triple will? Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns Below the Boreal Crown, Prison to all true kings that ever reigned? Water to water, ark again to ark, From woman back to woman: So each new victim treads unfalteringly The never altered circuit of his fate, Bringing twelve peers as witness Both to his starry rise and starry fall. Or is it of the Virgin's silver beauty, All fish below the thighs? She in her left hand bears a leafy quince; When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling, How may the King hold back? Royally then he barters life for love. Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched, Whose coils contain the ocean, Into whose chops with naked sword he springs, Then in black water, tangled by the reeds, Battles three days and nights, To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore? Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly, The owl hoots from the elder, Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup: Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward. The log groans and confesses: There is one story and one story only. Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling, Do not forget what flowers The great boar trampled down in ivy time. Her brow was creamy as the crested wave, Her sea-blue eyes were wild But nothing promised that is not performed. -- Robert Graves, To Juan at the Winter Solstice Posted 6/30/2005 at 2:56 AM |
Meditation for St. Peter's Day "Religious activists fool themselves if they believe public displays of the Ten Commandments reflect a more moral and less corrupt nation. One needs only to watch television to discern the level of our depravity." -- Cal Thomas, June 28, 2005 For further details, see Posted 6/29/2005 at 7:00 PM |
Reading for St. Peter's Day:
Posted 6/29/2005 at 12:00 PM |
Posted 6/29/2005 at 10:45 AM |
Summation "Res ipsa loquitur, baby." -- Maureen Dowd in "Quid Pro Quack"
March 21, 2004 Posted 6/27/2005 at 1:09 PM |
For of Such is the
Kingdom of Heaven From today's online New York Times,
with a slight embellishment: Posted 6/27/2005 at 3:26 AM |
Into the Dark O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant .... And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness.... -- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets "I’m well past eighty now and fairly certain I won’t see ninety but I’d like more of a choice than Hell or Paradise when I leave. Now that we know the Bible was created by a vote of Emperor Constantine’s clergy, wouldn’t we all be better off if other options were offered? Or is the fear of what happens after death the glue that holds Religion together? I hope not because I believe better of God. As a Deist, I have no fear or doubts of the way that life ends. I can bravely face the reality of ceasing to exist because the God of my heart comforts me by promising to provide a dark, starless night of nothingness when my visit is over." -- Paul Winchell (pdf) (See previous entry.) Paul Winchell was born at the winter solstice -- the longest night -- December 21, 1922. For another view of the longest night, see the five Log24 entries ending on the day after the longest night of 2003. Summary of those entries: After the Long Night
Posted 6/27/2005 at 12:00 AM |
Thanks for the Memory As I write, Susannah McCorkle is singing "Thanks for the Memory." Below are some photos from the website of Paul Winchell, ventriloquist, inventor, theologian. Winchell died in his sleep at 82 early on Friday, June 24, 2005. "God is a mathematical equation beyond our understanding." Related material: From Friday's entry -- Cross by Sol LeWitt (Fifteen Etchings, 1973): "No bridge reaches God, except one... God's Bridge: The Cross." -- Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, quoted in Friday's entry. This cross may, of course, also be interpreted as panes of a window -- see Lucy photo above -- or as a plus sign -- see "a mathematical equation beyond our understanding" in, for instance, Algebraic Geometry, by Robin Hartshorne. For a theological citation of Hartshorne's work, see Midsummer Eve's Dream (June 23, 1995). Posted 6/26/2005 at 7:26 PM |
Religious Symbolism at Midnight: Related material: Star Wars 6/13/05, Dark City 6/14/05, and De Arco, as well as the following from July 26, 2003:
Posted 6/25/2005 at 12:00 AM |
Geometry for Jews
continued: People have tried in many ways to bridge the gap between themselves and God.... No bridge reaches God, except one... God's Bridge: The Cross -- Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, according to messiahpage.com "... just as God defeats the devil: this bridge exists; it is the theory of the field of algebraic functions over a finite field of constants (that is to say, a finite number of elements: also said to be a Galois field, or earlier 'Galois imaginaries' because Galois first defined them and studied them....)" -- André Weil, 1940 letter to his sister, Simone Weil, alias Simone Galois (see previous entry) Related material: Billy Graham and the City: A Later Look at His Words -- New York Times, June 24, 2005 Geometry for Jews and other art notes Posted 6/24/2005 at 4:07 PM |
Mathematics and Metaphor The current (June/July) issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society has two feature articles. The first, on the vulgarizer Martin Gardner, was dealt with here in a June 19 entry, Darkness Visible. The second is related to a letter of André Weil (pdf) that is in turn related to mathematician Barry Mazur's attempt to rewrite mathematical history and to vulgarize other people's research by using metaphors drawn, it would seem, from the Weil letter. A Mathematical Lie conjectures that Mazur's revising of history was motivated by a desire to dramatize some arcane mathematics, the Taniyama conjecture, that deals with elliptic curves and modular forms, two areas of mathematics that have been known since the nineteenth century to be closely related. Mazur led author Simon Singh to believe that these two areas of mathematics were, before Taniyama's conjecture of 1955, completely unrelated -- "Modular forms and elliptic equations live in completely different regions of the mathematical cosmos, and nobody would ever have believed that there was the remotest link between the two subjects." -- Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma, 1998 paperback, p. 182 This is false. See Robert P. Langlands, review of Elliptic Curves, by Anthony W. Knapp, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, January 1994. It now appears that Mazur's claim was in part motivated by a desire to emulate the great mathematician André Weil's manner of speaking; Mazur parrots Weil's "bridge" and "Rosetta stone" metaphors -- From Peter Woit's weblog, Feb. 10, 2005: "The focus of Weil's letter is the analogy between number fields and the field of algebraic functions of a complex variable. He describes his ideas about studying this analogy using a third, intermediate subject, that of function fields over a finite field, which he thinks of as a 'bridge' or 'Rosetta stone.'" In "A 1940 Letter of André Weil on Analogy in Mathematics," (pdf), translated by Martin H. Krieger, Notices of the A.M.S., March 2005, Weil writes that "The purely algebraic theory of algebraic functions in any arbitrary field of constants is not rich enough so that one might draw useful lessons from it. The 'classical' theory (that is, Riemannian) of algebraic functions over the field of constants of the complex numbers is infinitely richer; but on the one hand it is too much so, and in the mass of facts some real analogies become lost; and above all, it is too far from the theory of numbers. One would be totally obstructed if there were not a bridge between the two. And just as God defeats the devil: this bridge exists; it is the theory of the field of algebraic functions over a finite field of constants.... On the other hand, between the function fields and the 'Riemannian' fields, the distance is not so large that a patient study would not teach us the art of passing from one to the other, and to profit in the study of the first from knowledge acquired about the second, and of the extremely powerful means offered to us, in the study of the latter, from the integral calculus and the theory of analytic functions. That is not to say that at best all will be easy; but one ends up by learning to see something there, although it is still somewhat confused. Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often. Be that as it may, my work consists in deciphering a trilingual text {[cf. the Rosetta Stone]}; of each of the three columns I have only disparate fragments; I have some ideas about each of the three languages: but I know as well there are great differences in meaning from one column to another, for which nothing has prepared me in advance. In the several years I have worked at it, I have found little pieces of the dictionary. Sometimes I worked on one column, sometimes under another." Here is another statement of the Rosetta-stone metaphor, from Weil's translator, Martin H. Krieger, in the A.M.S. Notices of November 2004, "Some of What Mathematicians Do" (pdf): "Weil refers to three columns, in analogy with the Rosetta Stone’s three languages and their arrangement, and the task is to 'learn to read Riemannian.' Given an ability to read one column, can you find its translation in the other columns? In the first column are Riemann’s transcendental results and, more generally, work in analysis and geometry. In the second column is algebra, say polynomials with coefficients in the complex numbers or in a finite field. And in the third column is arithmetic or number theory and combinatorial properties." For greater clarity, see Armand Borel (pdf) on Weil's Rosetta stone, where the three columns are referred to as Riemannian (transcendental), Italian ("algebraico-geometric," over finite fields), and arithmetic (i.e., number-theoretic). From Fermat's Enigma, by Simon Singh, Anchor paperback, Sept. 1998, pp. 190-191: Barry Mazur: "On the one hand you have the elliptic world, and on the other you have the modular world. Both these branches of mathematics had been studied intensively but separately.... Than along comes the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, which is the grand surmise that there's a bridge between these two completely different worlds. Mathematicians love to build bridges." Simon Singh: "The value of mathematical bridges is enormous. They enable communities of mathematicians who have been living on separate islands to exchange ideas and explore each other's creations.... The great potential of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was that it would connect two islands and allow them to speak to each other for the first time. Barry Mazur thinks of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture as a translating device similar to the Rosetta stone.... 'It's as if you know one language and this Rosetta stone is going to give you an intense understanding of the other language,' says Mazur. 'But the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture is a Rosetta stone with a certain magical power.'" If Mazur, who is scheduled to speak at a conference on Mathematics and Narrative this July, wants more material on stones with magical powers, he might consult The Blue Matrix and The Diamond Archetype. Posted 6/23/2005 at 3:00 PM |
Art History "I studied with Reinhardt and I found that a fantastic course. I think he was really very stimulating.... Art history was very personal through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt." -- Robert Morris, Smithsonian Archives of American Art Related material: "The Road to Simplicity
Followed by Merton’s Friends: Ad Reinhardt and Robert Lax" in The Merton
Annual 13
(2000) 245-256, by Paul J. Spaeth, library director at St. Bonaventure University
"Make Mass beautiful silence like big black picture speaking requiem. Tears in the shadows of hermit hatch requiems blue black tone. Sorrows for Ad in the oblation quiet peace request rest. Tomorrow is solemns in the hermit hatch for old lutheran reinhardt commie paintblack… Tomorrow is the eternal solemns and the barefoots and the ashes and the masses, oldstyle liturgy masses without the colonels… Just old black quiet requiems in hermit hatch with decent sorrows good by college chum." -- from J. S. Porter, "Farewell to a Monk," Posted 6/21/2005 at 4:24 PM |
ART WARS: Darkness Visible "No light, but rather darkness visible Serv'd only to discover sights of woe" -- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 63-64 A famed vulgarizer, Martin Gardner,
summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt (Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt, Dec. 24, 1913 - Aug. 30, 1967):
"Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just
one solid color. He had his black period
in which the canvas was totally black.
And then he had a blue period
in which he was painting the canvas blue.
He was exhibited in top shows in New York,
and his pictures wound up in museums.
I did a column in Scientific American
on minimal art, and I reproduced one of
Ed Rinehart's black paintings.
Of course,
it was just a solid square of pure black.
The publisher insisted on getting permission
from the gallery to reproduce it."
In memory of St. William Golding (Sept. 19, 1911 - June 19, 1993) Posted 6/19/2005 at 4:00 AM |
The Quality of Diamond,
continued From Log 24.net on Thursday, February 19, 2004: Five Easy
Pieces
Lorna Thayer, 85, the waitress in Five Easy Pieces, who was once someone's little princess, died on June 4, 2005. Lorna Thayer, 1954 The 2 PM June 4 Log24 entry has a link to The Quality of Diamond, where more of the Lorna Thayer story may be found. Posted 6/17/2005 at 4:01 PM |
"Joe Strauss to
Joe Six-Pack" (Editor's sneering headline for a David Brooks essay in today's New York Times) and Back Again "I was emptying some boxes in my basement the other day and I came across an essay somebody had clipped on Ernest Hemingway from the July 14, 1961, issue of Time magazine. The essay was outstanding. Over three pages of tightly packed prose, with just a few photos, the anonymous author performed the sort of high-toned but accessible literary analysis that would be much harder to find in a mass market magazine today.... The sad thing is that this type of essay was not unusual in that era.... The magazines would devote pages to the work of theologians like Abraham Joshua Heschel* or Reinhold Niebuhr. They devoted as much space to opera as to movies because an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one.... Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, middlebrow culture, which is really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America. There was still a sense that culture is good for your character, and that a respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been thought and said." -- David Brooks, The New York Times, June 16, 2005 The Time essay begins by quoting Hemingway himself: "All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true storyteller who would keep that from you."
Here is the top section of today's
New York Times obituaries. Here is the middlebrow part -- Esteemed Conductor Dies at 91 -- and here is a link that returns, as promised in this entry's headline, to "Joe Strauss" -- complete with polkas. * "Judaism is a religion of time, not space."
-- Wikipedia on Heschel. See the recent Log24 entries Star Wars continued, Dark City, and Cross-Referenced, and last year's Bloomsday at 100. Posted 6/16/2005 at 2:02 PM |
Cross-Referenced From today's New York Times, From the June 13-14
midnight Log24 entry: "With a little effort, anything can be -- Opening sentence of These images suggest
which yields the following.
From Dark City: A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review --
"There is
something mesmerizing about this important film. It flows in the same
vein as The Truman Show, The Game, and Pleasantville. Something
isn't real with the world around John Murdoch. Some group is trying to
control things and it isn't God." Amen. Related material: Posted 6/15/2005 at 1:44 AM |
I stood
out in the open cold -- Richard Eberhart, See also March 11. Posted 6/14/2005 at 12:00 PM |
ART WARS: Jennifer Connelly at In memory of Martin Buber, "With a little effort, anything can be -- Opening sentence of
Jennifer Connelly in "Dark City" (from journal note of June 19, 2002) --
And, one might add for Flag Day,
Posted 6/14/2005 at 12:00 AM |
STAR WARS
For John Nash on his birthday: Posted 6/13/2005 at 9:00 PM |
Cliffs of Moher My father's father, Go back to a parent before thought, rising out of the mist.... -- Wallace Stevens, "The Irish Cliffs of Moher"
See also Kahn's The Art and Thought of Heraclitus and the references to a "Delian diver" in Chitwood's Death by Philosophy. From "Although fragments examined earlier may enable Heraclitus’ reader
to believe that the stylistic devices arose directly from his dislike
of humanity, I think rather that Heraclitus deliberately perfected the
mysterious, gnomic style he praises in the following
fragment. 31. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor hides, but indicates. (fr. 93) Heraclitus not only admires the oracular style of delivery, but recommends it; this studied ambiguity is, I think, celebrated and alluded to in the Delian diver comment. For just as the prophecies of the Delian or Delphic god are at once obscure and darkly clear, so too are the workings of the Logos and Heraclitus’ remarks on it."
Posted 6/13/2005 at 2:00 PM |
Fathers' Day Meditation
Who is my father in this world, in this house, At the spirit's base? -- Wallace Stevens, "The Irish Cliffs of Moher" Il Miglior Fabbro:
Posted 6/12/2005 at 5:01 PM |
Bedlam Songs By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney... In the desert you can remember your name 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain. Posted 6/12/2005 at 2:29 PM |
From The New Yorker of June 6, 2005: Recommended geometry: Click on picture to enlarge. Related material: ART WARS Geometry for Jews Mathematics and Narrative. Posted 6/12/2005 at 12:00 AM |
Picture This In memory of film producer Fernando Ghia: "Among Ghia's solo credits as a producer is 'Lady Caroline Lamb,' a 1972 period drama
Ghia died on June 1, 2005
(the date of the Dutch "No" vote). In the spirit of Pale Fire, here is an excerpt from a Log24 entry of that date:
In researching this entry, I thought of
Wellington's statement in "Lady Caroline Lamb" -- Posted 6/11/2005 at 7:10 PM |
Evil Some academics may feel that a denunciation of an essay by one of their fellow academics as "evil" (see this morning's entry The Last Word) goes too far. Here is a followup to that entry. From the Riviera Presbyterian Church, a sermon quoting Madeleine L’Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time:
Amen. Posted 6/11/2005 at 2:25 PM |
Birthday Links Today's birthdays: Gene Wilder and Adrienne Barbeau. For Gene: A discussion of Frankenstein as The Modern Prometheus at Mathematics and Narrative. For Adrienne: Chinese Arithmetic. Posted 6/11/2005 at 12:48 PM |
The Last Word Beethoven Week on the BBC ended at midnight June 10. "With Beethoven, music did not grow up, it regressed to adolescence. He was a hooligan who could reduce Schiller’s Ode to Joy to madness, bloodlust, and megalomania." -- Arts and Letters Daily, lead-in to an opinion piece in The Guardian of Tuesday, June 7, 2005:
Speak for yourself, Dylan. "Evil did not have the last word." -- Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005 Evil may have had the last word in Tuesday's Guardian, but now that Beethoven Week has ended, it seems time for another word. For another view of Beethoven, in particular the late quartets, see the Log24 Beethoven's Birthday entry of December 16, 2002:
See also the previous entry. Posted 6/11/2005 at 3:11 AM |
A look at the job approval rating of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger since his election in Oct. 2003. What's YOUR opinion? ________________________ Update of 2:29 PM: Austrian Wins Kyoto Prize From today's New York Times: Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 75, was recognized for his ''exceptional creativity.'' Background: For a sample of Harnoncourt conducting Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," from the film "A Clockwork Orange," see The CMT Shop, Simply the Best Movie Themes. Peter Bates, Audiophile Audition: "Harnoncourt's sense of drama is intense." Posted 6/10/2005 at 5:01 AM |
Test Later in life, Boyer worked for Harvard University Press, where he edited science books, including Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988), by Hans Moravec. Boyer died at 61 on May 4, 2005. From Log24.net on Sept. 9, 2003,
January 9, 1989, is the date of The New Yorker's review of Hans Moravec's Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press). Brad Leithauser, reviewing Mind Children, says that if Moravec "is correct in supposing that human minds will be transferred into or otherwise fused with machines, it seems likely that traditional religious questions -- and traditional religions themselves -- will either melt away or suffer wholesale metamorphosis. Debates about Heaven or Hell -- to take but one example -- would hold little relevance for an immortal creature." Au contraire. Immortal creatures-- such as, according to Christianity, human beings-- are the only creatures for whom such debates hold relevance. For an example of such a debate, see The Contrasting Worldviews of by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi. For more on Nicholi, see my entry Posted 6/10/2005 at 3:57 AM |
From Andrew Cusack's weblog: April 21, 2005 'For Christ and Liberty' Though [it is] a purely Protestant institution (literally), I am rather fond of Patrick Henry College. Indeed, it takes some courage in this day and age to only admit students willing to sign a ten-point profession of Protestant Reformed faith. They also happen to have an old-fashioned ball featuring 'English country dancing, delicacies such as cream puffs and truffles and leisurely strolls about the scenic grounds of the historic Selma Plantation'. Anyhow, the college, whose motto is 'For Christ and Liberty', was visited [by] Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor to Touchstone magazine, who makes these comments: Today
I received a request to write a short article on Pope Benedict XVI from
a club called the De Tocqueville Society, in a small college in
Northern Virginia.
That such a request came was no surprise. Its provenance is, and cheeringly so. For this De Tocqueville Society is made up of a group of students at the new Patrick Henry College, founded by Mike Farris, the President of the Home School Legal Defense Association. More than ninety percent of the college’s students were homeschooled. If there’s a Roman Catholic in the bunch, I’ve yet to hear about it, and I’ve been to that campus twice to give lectures. [Note: Esolen does not seem to be aware that PHC requires its students to be Protestant.] More on that in a moment. I could spend all evening singing the praises of PHC (as the students fondly call it), but let me share one discovery I made that should gratify Touchstone readers. The first time I spoke there, two years ago, I was stunned to meet young men and women who—who were young men and women. I am not stretching the truth; go to Purcellville and see it for yourselves if you doubt it; I believe my wife took a couple of pictures, just to quiet the naysayers. The young men stand tall and look you in the eye—they don’t skulk, they don’t scowl and squirm uncomfortably in the back chairs as they listen to yet another analysis of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or one of the healthier poems of Sylvia Plath. They’re frank and generous and respectful, but they hold their own in an argument, and they are eager to engage you in those. They are comfortable in their skins; they wear their manhood easily. And the young ladies are beautiful. They don’t wither away in class, far from it; but they wear skirts, they are modest in their voices and their smiles, they clearly admire the young men and are esteemed in turn; they are like creatures from a faraway planet, one sweeter and saner than ours. Two years ago I spoke to them about medieval Catholic drama. They are evangelicals, half of them majors in Government, the rest, majors in Liberal Arts. They kept me and my wife in that room for nearly three hours after the talk was over. “Doctor Esolen, what you say about the habits of everyday life—to what extent is it like what Jean Pierre de Coussade calls ‘the sacrament of the present moment’?” “Doctor Esolen, do you see any connections between the bodiliness of this drama and the theology of Aleksandr Schmemann?” “Doctor Esolen, you have spoken a great deal about our recovery of a sense of beauty, but don’t you think that artists can also use the grotesque as a means of bringing people to the truth?” “You’ve suggested to us that Christians need to reclaim the Renaissance as our heritage, yet we are told that that was an age of the worship of man for his own sake. To what extent is the art of that period ours to reclaim?” And on and on, until nearly midnight. The questions were superior to any that I have ever heard from a gathering of professors—and alas, I’ve been to many of those. I mean not only superior in their enthusiasm and their insistence, but in their penetrating to the heart of the problem, their willingness to make connections apparently far afield but really quite apropos, and their sheer beauty—I can think of no better word for it. A few weeks ago I was in town for another talk, on the resurrection of the body. The Holy Father had passed away. At supper, ten or fifteen of the students packed our table, to ask questions before the talk. They were reverent and extraordinarily well informed; most especially they were interested in the Theology of the Body. The questions on that topic continued after the lecture, and I had the same experience I’d had before, but now without the surprise. And these are the young people who are devoting an entire issue of their journal to the thought of Cardinal Ratzinger, now the new head of the Roman Catholic Church. They are hungry to know about him; in the next week or two they will do what our slatternly tarts and knaves, I mean our journalists, have never done and will not trouble themselves to do, and that is to read what Benedict XVI has said, read it with due appreciation for their differences with him, and due deference to a holy and humble man called by Christ to be a light not only to Roman Catholics but to all the nations. These students don’t know it, but in their devotion to their new school (they are themselves the guards, the groundskeepers, the janitors; they ‘own’ the school in a way that is hard to explain to outsiders), they live the community life extolled by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum; in their steadfastness to the truth they are stalwart participators in the quest set out by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio; in their welcoming of me and, God bless them, of the good Benedict XVI, they live in the true spirit of Lumen Gentium, that greathearted document of the council so often invoked for the lame tolerance of every betrayal of the ancient faith. And for what it’s worth, they are readers of Touchstone Magazine. Be silent, Greeleys and Dowds of the world. These young people have you whipped, if for no other reason than that they believe in the One who is Truth, and who sets us free. How can I praise these my young brothers and sisters any more highly? God bless them and Patrick Henry College. And the rest of us, let’s keep an eye on them. We’ll be seeing quite a harvest from that seedbed! Many of the points Esolen commends are things I hope will be found in the colleges of my university when I get around to starting it. I particularly admire that Patrick Henry College's young men and women are just that, according to Esolen. This is all too often hard to achieve in modern American higher education, where students are quite often just elderly adolescents. (Though I suspect this has more to do with parents and family than education). The absurdist drinking age that the Federal government underhandedly coerced each state into passing hinders maturity as well. Indeed, when I start the first college or colleges of the university I'm planning, each will have a private college bar which will serve anyone over the age of 16 or so. (Probably at the barman or barmaid's discretion). Civil disobedience is the only solution. Though the graduates Patrick Henry College provides will be Protestant (at least at the time of their graduation), I have no doubt that they will act as leaven to raise up the social and political life of our United States. I'm not particularly fond that they proudly advertise their commendation as "One of America's Top Ten Conservative Colleges". I'm not of the view that colleges ought to be 'conservative' or 'liberal' per se. They ought to be seen more as communities of inquisitive, curious, intelligent people united in the quest for truth. Labels like 'conservative' and 'liberal' are far too narrow and allow the simple-minded to pidgeon-hole things which are too complex for such monikers. But anyhow, cheers for Patrick Henry College. Posted by Andrew Cusack at April 21, 2005 05:25 PM Posted 6/10/2005 at 1:25 AM |
Kernel of Eternity continued "At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction.... the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity." -- Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River From "The Relations between "The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety.... It was from the point of view of... [such a] subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less." As yesterday's entry "Kernel of Eternity"
indicated, the word "kernel" has a definite meaning in
mathematics. The Klein four group, beloved of structural anthropologists and art theorists, is a particularly apt example of a kernel. (See PlanetMath for details.) Diagrams of this group may have influenced Giovanni Sambin, professor of mathematical logic at the University of Padua; the following impressive-looking diagram is from Sambin's Sambin argues that this diagram reflects some of the basic structures of thought itself... making it perhaps one way to describe what Klee called the "mind or heart of creation." But this verges on what Stevens called the sacerdotal. It seems that a simple picture of the "kernel of eternity" as the four group, a picture without reference to logic or philosophy, and without distracting letters and labels, is required. The following is my attempt to supply such a picture: This is a picture of the four group as a permutation group on four points. Pairs of colored arrows indicate the three transformations other than the identity, which may be regarded either as invisible or as rendered by the four black points themselves. Update of 7:45 PM Thursday: Review of the above (see comments) by a typical Xanga reader: "Ur a FUCKIN' LOSER!!!!! LMFAO!!!!" For more merriment, see The Optical Unconscious and The Painted Word. A recent Xangan movie review: "Annakin's an idiot, but he's not an idiot because that's the way
the character works, he's an idiot because George Lucas was too lazy to
make him anything else. He has to descend to the Daaaahk Side, but the
dark side never really seems all that dark. He kills children, but
offscreen. We never get to see the transformation. One minute he cares
about the republic, the next he's killing his friends, and then for
some reason he's duelling with Obi Wan on a lava flow. Who cares? Not
me....
So a big ol' fuck you to George Lucas. Fuck you, George!" Both Xangans seem to be fluent in what Tom Wolfe has called the "fuck patois." A related suggestion from Google:
These remarks from Xangans and Google suggest the following photo gift, based on a 2003 journal entry: Posted 6/9/2005 at 7:45 PM |
The Power of Myth
"Myths have no life of their own. They wait for us to give them flesh." -- Albert Camus, Prometheus in the Underworld "Prometheus -- One of the Titans of Greek myth, famous as a benefactor of man" -- Log24 yesterday, 9:39 PM The New York Times on today's maiden speech of the new prime minister of France: "PARIS, June 8 -- ... In replying to his critics, Mr. De Villepin quoted from Albert Camus's description of Prometheus, saying, 'He is harder than his rock and more patient than his vulture.'" Posted 6/8/2005 at 6:26 PM |
Kernel of Eternity Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, "immortal diamond." "At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of
unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and
has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares
about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of
mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his
creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful
substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and
enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential
pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity." "... the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure
on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)" -- Peter J. Cameron, "... donc Dieu existe, réponse!" -- attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler Posted 6/8/2005 at 4:00 PM |
Quest
"Mike Nichols, who oversaw Monty Python's Spamalot, picked up the prize for directing a musical. A somewhat flustered Nichols told the audience he had forgotten
what he intended to say, but then went on to thank his company and
Eric Idle, 'from whom all blessings flow.'" One of my
Excerpt from the chapter "I started to cry. My search was over. 'Beam me up, Scotty.'"
Related material: In memory of Anne Bancroft and her work in 84 Charing Cross Road -- entries of Dec. 11-13, 2002, and entries of All Souls' Day, 2004, and of June 8, 2003. Posted 6/8/2005 at 11:11 AM |
939, or
Too Clever by Half On the new
Prime Minister of France: "In Praise of Those Who Stole the Fire, M. de Villepin's grandest literary effort to date.... will enhance his reputation within a small Paris set, but not in Washington, where he is already regarded as too clever by half." -- Philip Delves Broughton, "De Villepin bares soul as France's politician poet," The Telegraph, May 23, 2003 The Titan Prometheus was "'... chained to Mount Caucasus where an eagle preyed on his liver' (Bullfinch [sic] 939)." The study guide does not say whether 939 is a page number or paragraph number, nor does it name which edition of Bulfinch's Mythology is meant.
The rest of the story:
From the Web-Guide to Thomas Pynchon's V:
"Prometheus -- One of the Titans of Greek myth, famous as a benefactor of man. Zeus had him make men out of mud and water; however, pitying mankind, he stole fire from heaven and gave it to them. As punishment, Zeus chained him to Mount Caucasus where an eagle preyed on his liver all day, the liver being renewed at night. Hercules eventually released him and killed the eagle. Zeus sent Pandora to Earth with her box of evils to balance the gift of fire." Postscript for John Nash: Why 939 signifies "too clever by half" -- see 6:26 and 313. See also
Posted 6/7/2005 at 9:39 PM |
EU Treaty Not Dead
Posted 6/7/2005 at 6:26 PM |
"A SINGLE VERSE by Rimbaud,"
writes Dominique de Villepin, the new French Prime Minister, "shines like a powder trail on a day’s horizon. It sets it ablaze all at once, explodes all limits, draws the eyes to other heavens." -- Ben Macintyre, The London Times, June 4: When Rimbaud Meets Rambo "Room 101 was the place where your worst fears were realised in George Orwell's classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. [101 was also]
Professor Nash's office number in the movie 'A Beautiful Mind.'" -- Prime Curios
Classics Illustrated -- Click on picture for details. (For some mathematics that is actually from 1984, see Block Designs and the 2005 followup The Eightfold Cube.) Posted 6/7/2005 at 1:01 PM |
Rhetoric 101:
Poetry and Reason "La voix de la pensée est-elle plus qu'un rêve?" "Is the langage of thought any more than a dream?" -- Rimbaud Yes. Related material: When Rimbaud Meets Rambo Posted 6/6/2005 at 9:00 PM |
It was the best of times, |
One Bound "With one bound, -- Times of London, |
Related material:
"Derrida on Plato on writing
says 'In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false,
essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of
the terms must be simply EXTERNAL to the other, which means that one of
these oppositions (the opposition between inside and outside) must
already be accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition.' " -- Peter J. Leithart Skewed Mirrors, Sept. 14, 2003 "Evil did not have the last word." -- Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005
"There is never any ending to Paris." -- Ernest Hemingway Posted 6/6/2005 at 1:00 PM |
Mot Juste? From today's New York Times, on the effort of Paris to be chosen as the host of the 2012 Olympics: "'To have the games would bring a little fun, as you say, a breath of fresh air,' said Benoît Génuini, president of the French operation of Accenture, a global consulting company, on a balcony of the Louvre last week during an event to highlight the city's cultural attractions as an Olympic host. He remarked that the country was morose and that the city itself had become a sort of museum. 'The games would put Paris back in the saddle and lead it into the 21st century,' he said, 'get it out of its stupor.'" Attributed to Dominique de Villepin, the new Prime Minister of France: words about his book on poetry--
Posted 6/6/2005 at 3:35 AM |
Drama of the Diagonal The 4x4 Square: French Perspectives Earendil_Silmarils: Les Anamorphoses: "Pour construire un dessin en perspective, le peintre trace sur sa toile des repères: la ligne d'horizon (1), le point de fuite principal (2) où se rencontre les lignes de fuite (3) et le point de fuite des diagonales (4)." _______________________________ Serge Mehl, Perspective & Géométrie Projective: "... la géométrie projective était souvent synonyme de géométrie supérieure. Elle s'opposait à la géométrie euclidienne: élémentaire... La géométrie projective, certes supérieure car assez ardue, permet d'établir de façon élégante des résultats de la géométrie élémentaire." Similarly... Finite projective geometry (in particular, Galois geometry) is certainly superior to the elementary geometry of quilt-pattern symmetry and allows us to establish de façon élégante some results of that elementary geometry. Other Related Material... from algebra rather than geometry, and from a German rather than from the French: "This is the relativity problem:Weyl also says that the profound branch of mathematics known as Galois theory "... is nothing else but the relativity theory for the set Sigma, a set which, by its discrete and finite character, is conceptually so much simpler than the infinite set of points in space or space-time dealt with by ordinary relativity theory." -- Weyl, Symmetry, Princeton U. Press, 1952 Metaphor and Algebra... "Perhaps every science must -- attributed, in varying forms, to Max Black, Models and Metaphors, 1962 For metaphor and "Symmetry invariance
in a diamond ring," A.M.S. abstract 79T-A37, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, February 1979, pages A-193, 194 — the original version of the 4x4 case of the diamond theorem. More on Max Black... -- Paul Thompson, University College, Oxford, A New Slant...
That intuition, metaphor (i.e., analogy), and association may lead
us astray is well known. The examples of French perspective above
show what might happen if someone ignorant of finite geometry were to
associate the phrase "4x4 square" with the phrase "projective
geometry." The results are ridiculously inappropriate, but at
least the second example does, literally, illuminate "new slants"--
i.e., diagonals-- within the perspective drawing of the 4x4 square. Posted 6/4/2005 at 7:00 PM |
Drama of the Diagonal,
continued "I could name other writers who share this sense of a world larger than ourselves; their writing provides a field in which something like a sacramental imagination is clearly at play." -- Paul Mariani, God and the Imagination
"... the horizon is not the limit of meaning,
but that which extends meaning from what is directly given to the whole context in which it is given, including a sense of a world." XIt is a giant, always, that is evolved, XIHere, then, is an abstraction given head, XIIThat's it. The lover writes, the believer hears,
Related material (Click on pictures for details.) Logos Alogos Logos Alogos II: Horizon See also Subject and Predicates and The Quality of Diamond. Posted 6/4/2005 at 2:00 PM |
The Barest Vocabulary
at the Altar of Facts From Log24,(See also Log24, April 5, 2005.) Compare this diagram with that of Samuel Beckett in Quad (1981): Related quotation: Barry Mazur on a seminal paper of algebraist Saunders Mac Lane: The paper was rejected "because the editor thought that it was 'more devoid of content' than any other he had read. 'Saunders wrote back and said, "That’s the point,"' Mazur said. 'And in some ways that’s the genius of it. It’s the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary that incorporates the theory and nothing else.'" Other related material:
From Reuters: "Members
of the ballot commission manually count EU referendum votes in the
Duifkerk in Amsterdam June 1st, 2005. Dutch voters soundly rejected the
European Union constitution in a referendum on June 1..... Photo by... Ronald
Fleurbaaij"
"M. de Villepin positively worships Napoleon, and models himself after his hero. In a 600-page biography, Villepin wrote admiringly about the difference between great men like Napoleon and the 'common run' of men. It is worth reading every word carefully.
And in praise of French nationalism, de Villepin wrote, 'The Gaullist adventure renewed the élan of [Napoleon's] Consulate through the restoration of a strong executive and the authority of the State, the same scorn for political parties and for compromise, a common taste for action, and an obsession with the general interest and the grandeur of France.' Those words come straight from 1800. Napoleon’s 'genius,' his 'thirst for the absolute,' 'excess, exaltation, and a taste for risk,' 'a strong executive and the authority of the State,' 'his 'scorn for political parties and for compromise,' and 'an obsession with the grandeur of France' --- it is all classic national hero worship. But today that kind of thinking is used to promote a new vision of destiny, the European Union." -- James Lewis at The American Thinker,Jan. 4, 2005 Posted 6/2/2005 at 2:00 PM |
The Road to Brussels
"History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable." — Henry Kissinger, quoted in
Drama of the Diagonal, Part Deux "Les livres d’histoire et la vie racontent la même comédie...." — Alain Boublil "Along the road from Ohain to Braine-l'Alleud that hemmed in the plain of Mont-St-Jean and cut at right angles the road to Brussels, which the Emperor wished to take, he [Wellington] had placed 67,000 men and 184 cannons." Posted 6/1/2005 at 7:20 PM |
Posted 6/1/2005 at 3:57 AM |