x Posted 7/31/2007 at 9:11 PM |
x Posted 7/31/2007 at 9:05 PM |
x Posted 7/31/2007 at 4:23 PM |
Joke The Guardian, July 26, "... inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. 'Just two,' says Jay. 'The boy is bringing his own.' Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form." "When may we expect to have
July 11, 2003 7-11 Evening
Number: 000. Posted 7/31/2007 at 7:11 AM |
Italian Director Antonioni Dies at 94 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: July 31, 2007 Filed with The New York Times at 5:14 a.m. ET "ROME (AP) -- Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, best known for his movies 'Blow-Up' and 'L'Avventura,' has died, officials and news reports said Tuesday. He was 94. The ANSA news agency said that Antonioni died at his home on Monday evening. 'With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,' Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said in a statement. In
1995, Hollywood honored Antonioni's career work-- 25 films and several
screenplays-- with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement." Related material:
Posted 7/31/2007 at 6:00 AM |
x Posted 7/31/2007 at 5:55 AM |
The Deathly Hallows Symbol
According to Wikipedia, the "Deathly Hallows" of the final Harry Potter novel are "three fictional magical objects that appear in the book." The vertical line, circle, and triangle in the symbol pictured above are said to refer to these three magical objects. One fan relates the "Deathly Hallows" symbol above, taken from the spine of a British children's edition of the book, to a symbol for "the divine (or sacred, or secret) fire" of alchemy. She relates this fire in turn to "serpent power" and the number seven: Kristin Devoe at a Potter fan site: "We know that seven is a powerful number in the novels. Tom Riddle calls it 'the most powerfully magic number.' The ability to balance the seven chakras within oneself allows the person to harness the secret fire. This secret fire in alchemy is the same as the kundalini or coiled snake in yogic philosophy. It is also known as 'serpent power' or the 'dragon' depending on the tradition. The kundalini is polar in nature and this energy, this internal fire, is very powerful for those who are able to harness it and it purifies the aspirant allowing them the knowledge of the universe. This secret fire is the Serpent Power which transmutes the base metals into the Perfect Gold of the Sun. It is interesting that the symbol of the caduceus in alchemy is thought to have been taken from the symbol of the kundalini. Perched on the top of the caduceus, or the staff of Hermes, the messenger of the gods and revealer of alchemy, is the golden snitch itself! Many fans have compared this to the scene in The Order of the Phoenix where Harry tells Dumbledore about the attack on Mr. Weasley and says, 'I was the snake, I saw it from the snake's point of view.' The chapter continues with Dumbledore consulting 'one of the fragile silver instruments whose function Harry had never known,' tapping it with his wand: Could these coiling serpents of smoke be foreshadowing events to come in Deathly Hallows where Harry learns to 'awaken the serpent' within himself? Could the snake's splitting in two symbolize the dual nature of the kundalini?" Related material The previous entry-- and the following famous illustration of the double-helix structure of DNA: This is taken from a figure accompanying an obituary, in today's New York Times, of the artist who drew the figure. The double helix is not a structure from magic; it may, however, as the Rowling quote above shows, have certain occult uses, better suited to Don Henley's Garden of Allah than to the Garden of Apollo. Similarly, the three objects above (Log24 on April 9) are from pure mathematics-- the realm of Apollo, not of those in Henley's song. The similarity of the top object of the three -- the "Fano plane" -- to the "Deathly Hallows" symbol is probably entirely coincidental. Posted 7/30/2007 at 7:00 PM |
Garden Party
"And the serpent's eyes shine As he wraps around the vine..." "But not, perhaps, Related material: "When, on the last day of February 1953 Francis told her excitedly of the double helix discovery, she took no notice: 'He was always saying that kind of thing.' But when nine years later she heard the news of the Nobel Prize while out shopping, she immediately rushed to the fishmonger for ice to fill the bath and cool the champagne: a party was inevitable." -- Matt Ridley on Odile Crick (The Independent, July 20, 2007), who drew what "may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology," according to Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla quoted by Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post, July 21, 2007 See also "Game Boy" Posted 7/30/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Behind Every Great Man...
"Her graceful drawing of the double-helix structure of DNA with intertwined helical loops has become a symbol of the achievements of science and its aspirations to understand the secrets of life. The image represents the base pairs of nucleic acids, twisted around a center line to show the axis of the helix. Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, where Francis Crick later worked, said: 'Mrs. Crick's drawing was an abstract representation of DNA, but it was accurate with regard to its shape and size of its spacing. 'The models you see now have all the atoms in them,' Sejnowski said. 'The one in Nature was the backbone and gave the bare outline. It may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology.'" The Washington Post, July 21, 2007 Posted 7/30/2007 at 8:00 AM |
Posted 7/30/2007 at 7:00 AM |
The Ninefold Square
"This translation plane is defined by Priv.-Doz. Dr. H. Klein, Arbeitsgruppe Geometrie, Mathematical Seminar of Christian-Albrechts University (See Log24, The Nine and Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah.)
Posted 7/29/2007 at 9:00 AM |
A Fulfilled Recognition
This morning's previous entry featured contemptibly mediocre Jewish
fiction. In contrast, here is a passage from first-rate Jewish
fiction-- the little boy and little girl of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime:"Their desire for each other's company was unflagging. This was noted with amusement by the adults. They were inseparable until bedtime but uncomplaining when it was announced. They ran off to their separate rooms with not a glance backward. Their sleep was absolute. They sought each other in the morning. He did not think of her as beautiful. She did not think of him as comely. They were extremely sensitive to each other, silhouetted in a diffuse excitement, like electricity or a nimbus of light, but their touching was casual and matter-of-fact. What bound them to each other was a fulfilled recognition which they lived and thought within so that their apprehension of each other could not be so distinct and separated as to include admiration for the other's fairness. Yet they were beautiful, he in his stately blond thoughtfulness, she a smaller, darker, more lithe being, with flash in her dark eyes and an almost military bearing. When they ran their hair lay back from their broad foreheads. Her feet were small, her brown hands were small. She left imprints in the sand of a street runner, a climber of dark stairs; her track was a flight from the terrors of alleys and the terrible crash of ashcans. She had relieved herself in wooden outhouses behind the tenements. The tails of rodents had curled about her ankles. She knew how to sew with a machine and had observed dogs mating, whores taking on customers in hallways, drunks peeing through the wooden spokes of pushcart wheels. He had never gone without a meal. He had never been cold at night. He ran with his mind. He ran toward something. He was unencumbered by fear and did not know there were beings in the world less curious about it than he. He saw through things and noted the colors people produced and was never surprised by a coincidence. A blue and green planet rolled through his eyes." Posted 7/29/2007 at 8:00 AM |
Posted 7/29/2007 at 7:59 AM |
x Posted 7/29/2007 at 6:24 AM |
x Posted 7/28/2007 at 9:29 PM |
x Posted 7/28/2007 at 9:28 PM |
The Third Cross
"... he triumphed again with The Goldberg Variations. Mr Jay, assisted by Goldberg, a concentration camp survivor, is rehearsing a montage of biblical scenes in Jerusalem. It is inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. 'Just two,' says Jay. 'The boy is bringing his own.' Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form." Posted 7/28/2007 at 6:15 AM |
x Posted 7/26/2007 at 12:00 PM |
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Posted 7/26/2007 at 4:00 AM |
The Comedy of
George Tabori
From AP "Obituaries in the News"--
Filed with The New York Times at 11:16 p.m. ET July 24, 2007-- George Tabori "BERLIN (AP) -- Hungarian-born playwright and director George Tabori, a legend in Germany's postwar theater world whose avant-garde works confronted anti-Semitism, died Monday [July 23, 2007]. He was 93. Tabori, who as recently as three years ago dreamed of returning to stage to play the title role in Shakespeare's 'King Lear,' died in his apartment near the theater, the Berliner Ensemble said Tuesday, noting that friends and family had accompanied him through his final days. No cause of death was given. Born into a Jewish family in Budapest on May 24, 1914, Tabori fled in 1936 to London, where he started working for the British Broadcasting Corp., and became a British citizen. His father, and other members of his family, were killed at Auschwitz. Tabori moved to Hollywood in the 1950s, where he worked as a scriptwriter, most notably co-writing the script for Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 film, 'I Confess.' He moved to Germany in the 1970s and launched a theater career that spanned from acting to directing to writing. He used sharp wit and humor in his plays to examine the relationship between Germany and the Jews, as well as attack anti-Semitism. Among his best-known works are 'Mein Kampf,' set in the Viennese
hostel where Adolf Hitler lived from 1910-1913, and the 'Goldberg
Variations,' both dark farces that poke fun at the Nazis." From Year of Jewish Culture: "The year 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish Museum in Prague." From the related page Programme (October-December): "Divadlo v Dlouhé
Posted 7/25/2007 at 9:00 AM |
The Church of St. Frank
See yesterday's entries for some relevant quotations from Wallace Stevens. Further quotations for what Marjorie Garber, replying to a book review by Frank Kermode, has called "the Church of St. Frank"-- Frank Kermode on Harold Bloom: "He has... a great, almost selfish passion for poetry, and he interprets difficult texts as if there were no more important activity in the world, which may be right." Page 348 of Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, by Harold Bloom (1977, Cornell U. Press): "The fiction of the leaves is now Stevens'
fiction.... Spring, summer, and autumn adorn the rock of reality even
as a woman is adorned, the principle being the Platonic one of copying
the sun as source of all images....
... They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock.... They bear their fruit so that the year is known.... If they are more than leaves, then they are no
longer language, and the leaves have ceased to be tropes or poems and
have become magic or mysticism, a Will-to-Power over nature rather than
over the anteriority of poetic imagery."
For more on magic, mysticism, and the Platonic "source of all images," see Scott McLaren on "Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in the Novels of Charles Williams." McLaren quotes Evelyn Underhill on magic vs. mysticism: The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give [...] In mysticism the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the sense-world in order that the self may be joined by love to the one eternal and ultimate Object of love [...] In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness [...] (Underhill 84; see also 178ff.)
For more on what Bloom calls the "Will-to-Power over nature," see Faust in Copenhagen and the recent (20th- and 21st-century) history of Harvard University. These matters are also discussed in "Log24 - Juneteenth through Midsummer Night." Posted 7/24/2007 at 7:11 AM |
Daniel Radcliffe is 18 today. Greetings. "The
greatest sorcerer (writes Novalis memorably) would be the one who
bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias for
autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of us?" --Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise" "El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis) sería el que se hechizara hasta el punto de tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas. ¿No sería este nuestro caso?" --Jorge Luis Borges, "Los Avatares de la Tortuga"
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves. We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure Of the ground, a cure And if we ate the incipient colorings Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground. -- Wallace Stevens, "The Rock" See also the recent venture of Douglas Hofstadter into trinitarian theology, as well as Hofstadter on his magnum opus: "... I realized that to me, Gödel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to reconstruct the central object, and came up with this book." Hofstadter's cover Here are three patterns, "shadows" of a sort, derived from a different "central object": Posted 7/23/2007 at 8:00 AM |
Today's Birthday: Daniel Radcliffe ("Harry Potter") Theme (Plato, Meno) "A diamond jubilance Posted 7/23/2007 at 7:59 AM |
8 am Posted 7/22/2007 at 8:00 AM |
x Posted 7/22/2007 at 7:59 AM |
x Posted 7/21/2007 at 8:00 PM |
Death of a Nominalist "All our words from loose using have lost their edge." --Ernest Hemingway (The Hemingway quotation is from the AP's "Today in History" on July 21, 2007; for the context, see Death in the Afternoon.) Today seems as good a day as any for noting the death of an author previously discussed in Log24 on January 29, 2007, and January 31, 2007. Joseph Goguen died on July 3, 2006. (I learned of his death only after the entries of January 2007 were written. They still hold.) Goguen's death may be viewed in the context of the ongoing war between the realism of Plato and the nominalism of the sophists. (See, for instance, Log24 on August 10-15, 2004, and on July 3-5, 2007.) Joseph A. Goguen, "Ontology, Society, and Ontotheology" (pdf): "Before introducing algebraic semiotics and structural blending, it is good to be clear about their philosophical orientation. The reason for taking special care with this is that, in Western culture, mathematical formalisms are often given a status beyond what they deserve. For example, Euclid wrote, 'The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.' Similarly, the 'situations' in the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry, which resemble conceptual spaces (but are more sophisticated-- perhaps too sophisticated), are considered to be actually existing, real entities [23], even though they may include what are normally considered judgements.5 The classical semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce [24] also tends towards a Platonist view of signs. The viewpoint of this paper is that all formalisms are constructed in the course of some task, such as scientific study or engineering design, for the heuristic purpose of facilitating consideration of certain issues in that task. Under this view, all theories are situated social entities, mathematical theories no less than others; of course, this does not mean that they are not useful." From Log24 on the date of Goguen's death: Requiem for a clown: This same Mailer aphorism was quoted, along with an excerpt from the Goguen passage above, in Log24 this year on the date of Norman Mailer's birth. Also quoted on that date:
Whether the above excerpt-- from Hans Christian Oersted's The Soul in Nature (1852)-- is superior to the similar remark of Goguen, the reader may decide. Posted 7/21/2007 at 9:45 AM |
x Posted 7/20/2007 at 11:30 PM |
x Posted 7/20/2007 at 12:00 AM |
Volta da Morte: TV listing from Brazil
Related material: If Cullinane College Friday the 13th and Posted 7/19/2007 at 10:31 AM |
4:09 Posted 7/19/2007 at 4:09 AM |
Death Flight Lord Voldemort (in French vol de mort meaning "flight of death" or "steals of/in death," in Portuguese volta da morte meaning "return from death") made his debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. -- Wikipedia folk etymology; corrected, but may still contain errors. Related material: Yesterday's entries and the remarks from Porto Alegre, Brazil, quoted here on January 25, 2005. Posted 7/19/2007 at 2:00 AM |
Death Flight Lord Voldemort (vol de mort meaning "flying in death," or "steals of/in death", or, more likely, 'death flight' in French. volta de morte in portuguese means return from the dead) made his debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. -- Wikipedia Posted 7/19/2007 at 1:44 AM |
Elsewhere: Log24, Sept. 28, 2006:
Click on picture for a midi. "...consonant intervals Related material on universals July 23, 2007, page 42: "While out-of-body experiences have the character of a perceptual illusion (albeit a complex and singular one), near-death experiences have all the hallmarks of mystical experience, as William James defines it...." -- Oliver Sacks, "A Bolt from the Blue" The New Yorker, issue dated July 23, 2007, page 70: Posted 7/18/2007 at 6:28 PM |
Burning Bright Yesterday in the Keystone State: This suggests-- via a search on "853-856" + "universals"-- that we consult pages 853-856 in The Library of America's William James: Writings 1902-1910.
Beginning on page 853 in this book, and ending on page 856, is an excerpt from a James address that the editor has titled...
The Tigers in India "There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically. Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge, and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers? .... Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought.... At the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here.... ... The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers.... ... In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there. In short, the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume's language, as any two things can be, and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields. I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies.... Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes.... What now do we mean by 'knowing' such a sort of object as this? For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us to his lair? ... the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience. The paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different directions.1"
The same volume also contains
James's The Varieties of Religious Experience. "The Tigers in India" is only a part of a 20-page James address originally titled "The Knowing of Things Together" (my emphasis). Posted 7/18/2007 at 7:03 AM |
x Posted 7/18/2007 at 12:02 AM |
Habeas Corpus The Hex Witch of Seldom, by Nancy Springer: Log24 on 9/11, 2003: Here is a rhetorical exercise Discuss Bobbi's "little squares" Posted 7/17/2007 at 7:00 AM |
Confirmation
"They took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum and they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em" -- Joni Mitchell From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia: "In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where 'someone long forgotten had hung a rope.' They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic...." From Bridge to Terabithia: "I know"-- she was getting excited-- "it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope." Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. "Come on," she said.
Posted 7/16/2007 at 8:06 AM |
$660-million settlement in priest abuses "The Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed Saturday to a $660-million settlement with 508 people who have accused priests of sexual abuse, by far the biggest payout in the child molestation scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church nationwide.... The agreement will end all of the pending abuse litigation against the most populous archdiocese in the U.S.... Although the settlement will effectively end a chapter in the sad saga of clerical abuse that has spanned decades, the resolution will come at a huge cost to the church. More than $114 million has been promised in previous settlements, bringing the total liability for clergy misconduct in the Los Angeles Archdiocese to more than $774 million. The figure dwarfs the next largest settlements in the U.S., including those reached in Boston, at $157 million, and in Portland, Ore., at $129 million." -- Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007 Posted 7/15/2007 at 6:20 AM |
A Note from the
Catholic University of America The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains tributes to the admirable personal qualities and mathematical work of the late Harvard professor George Mackey. For my own tributes, see Log24 on March 17, 2006, April 29, 2006, and March 10, 2007. For an entry critical of Mackey's reductionism-- a philosophical, not mathematical, error-- see Log24 on May 23, 2007 ("Devil in the Details"). Here is another attack on reductionism, from a discussion of the work of another first-rate mathematician, the late Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT: "Another theme developed by Rota is that of 'Fundierung.' He shows that throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain pieces of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain pieces of wood or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an act of generosity is founded upon something's being handed over. In perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon it; what we see is far more than meets the eye. Rota gives striking examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity. His point is strongly antireductionist. Reductionism is the inclination to see as 'real' only the foundation, the substrate of things (the piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon, and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true existence of that which is founded. Rota's arguments against reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, of intelligence, of emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even as we deny it in our theories." -- Robert Sokolowski, foreword to Rota's Indiscrete Thoughts
The tributes to Mackey are contained in the first of two feature articles in the August 2007 AMS Notices.
The second feature article is a review of a new book by Douglas
Hofstadter. For some remarks related to that article, see
Thursday's Log24 entry "Not Mathematics but Theology." Posted 7/14/2007 at 4:07 AM |
Today's birthday:
Harrison Ford is 65.
"It was Plato who best expressed-- who veritably
embodied-- the tension between the narrative arts and mathematics....
Plato clearly loved them both, both mathematics and poetry. But he
approved of mathematics, and heartily, if conflictedly, disapproved of
poetry. Engraved above the entrance to his Academy, the first European
university, was the admonition: Oudeis ageometretos eiseto. Let none
ignorant of geometry enter. This is an expression of high approval
indeed, and the symbolism could not have been more perfect, since
mathematics was, for Plato, the very gateway for all future knowledge.
Mathematics ushers one into the realm of abstraction and universality,
grasped only through pure reason. Mathematics is the threshold we cross
to pass into the ideal, the truly real."
Posted 7/13/2007 at 7:00 AM |
On Interpenetration, or Coinherence, of Souls The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop. (2007, Basic Books, New York. $26.95, 412 pages.) A better review, in the Los Angeles Times of March 18, 2007, notes an important phrase in the book, "interpenetration of souls," that the AMS Notices review ignores. Here is an Amazon.com search on "interpenetration" in the Hofstadter book:
The American Mathematical Society editors and reviewer seem to share Hofstadter's ignorance of Christian doctrine; they might otherwise have remembered a rather famous remark: "This is not mathematics, it is theology." For more on the theology of interpenetration, see Log24 on "Perichoresis, or Coinherence" (Jan. 22, 2004). For a more mathematical approach to this topic, see Spirituality Today, Spring 1991: "... the most helpful image is perhaps the ellipse often used to surround divine figures in ancient art, a geometrical figure resulting from the overlapping, greater or lesser, of two independent circles, an interpenetration or coinherence which will, in some sense, reunify divided humanity, thus restoring to some imperfect degree the original image of God." See also the trinitarian doctrine implicit in related Log24 entries of July 1, 2007, which include the following illustration of the geometrical figure described, in a somewhat confused manner, above: "Values are rooted in narrative." -- Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, Atlantic Monthly, November 1995 Related material: Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of Co-Inherence and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams, by Dennis L. Weeks Posted 7/12/2007 at 7:00 PM |
"Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe, a lid that kept everything underneath it where it belonged." — Carrie Fisher, 5/11: "Going Up." -- "Love at the Five and Dime," by Nanci Griffith 234: "One two three four, who are we for?" Posted 7/12/2007 at 1:00 PM |
x Posted 7/12/2007 at 2:45 AM |
x Posted 7/12/2007 at 2:02 AM |
... And One More for the Road In memory of Doug Marlette, cartoonist and author of Magic Time. Marlette died in a highway accident yesterday at about 10 AM CT. He was "on his way to Oxford [Mississippi]... to help a troupe of high school students put on a play based on his nationally syndicated comic strip, Kudzu." -- Chris Joyner, Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi Log24 yesterday, 7:59 AM ET: Mary Karr, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer"-- "There is a body on the cross in my church." Kudzu, by Doug Marlette "I started kneeling to pray morning and night-- spitefully at first, in a
bitter pout. The truth is, I still fancied the idea that glugging down
Jack Daniels would stay my turmoil, but doing so had resulted in my car
hurtling into stuff." --Mary Karr
Posted 7/11/2007 at 2:45 AM |
Fewer frames for Mary Karr Mary Karr was "an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a
consuming inner life others didn't seem to bear the burden of. I just
seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."
Posted 7/10/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Posted 7/10/2007 at 8:00 AM |
Pulp Fiction "There is a body on the cross in my church. (Which made me think
at first that the people worshipped the suffering, till my teenage son
told me one day at Mass: 'What else would get everybody's attention but
something really grisly? It's like Pulp Fiction.' In other words, we wouldn't have it any other way.)" --Mary Karr
Corpus Hypercubus, "Does the word 'tesseract' Posted 7/10/2007 at 7:59 AM |
Perfect your wand work -- Web page for the "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" Xbox 360 game Sounds to me more like Harry Reems. Posted 7/10/2007 at 12:01 AM |
Harry Potter and
the Xbox 360 Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix for Xbox 360 "is based on the fifth book and is timed to coincide with the release of the movie of the same name.... The game consists of Harry walking around and talking to characters and performing spells and tasks in order to advance the plot. I jokingly considered calling this review 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Random Tasks Needed to Advance the Plot.'" --July 9 review at Digital Joystick Today's lottery numbers in the Keystone State: Mid-day 220 Evening 034 Related material: 2/20 and Hexagram 34 in the box-style I Ching: The Power of the Great Let us hope that Harry fans remember the meaning of Hexagram 34 (according to Richard Wilhelm)--
"Perseverance furthers" and "That is truly great power which does not
degenerate into mere force but remains inwardly united with the
fundamental principles of right and of justice. When we understand this
point-- namely, that greatness and justice must be indissolubly
united-- we understand the true meaning of all that happens in heaven
and on earth."
Related material:
"If Cullinane College were Hogwarts" (continued) and the four entries that preceded it on July 5-6, 2007 Posted 7/9/2007 at 11:59 PM |
x Posted 7/9/2007 at 11:59 PM |
Posted 7/9/2007 at 2:35 AM |
x Posted 7/7/2007 at 11:12 PM |
"Dead time lasts for one hour-- from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin' good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin' evil...." --Voodoo Justice Lois Wyse (previous entry) died "shortly after midnight" on the morning of Friday, July 6, 2007. Related material: Death on the Feast of Saint Nicholas Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) in 1788 Posted 7/7/2007 at 2:22 PM |
Seven is Heaven John Lahr, review of a production of Tom Stoppard's "Jumpers"-- The play is about a philosophy professor, George, and his wife, Dotty, who "exudes a sumptuous sexuality.... She has a pert round head, high cheekbones, and a deep voice, which, like her acting, is full of playfulness and longing. George is lost in thought; Dotty is just lost. 'Heaven, how can I believe in Heaven?' she sings at the finale. 'Just a lying rhyme for seven!' She is promise and heartbreak in one." "With a name like Frigo..." Related material: Eight is a Gate Posted 7/7/2007 at 1:48 AM |
Nymphet Witches A New York Times review of the new Geoffrey Wright film of "Macbeth"-- "... dreamscape of nymphet witches.... In this telling, the three witches are first glimpsed in the opening scene vandalizing tombstones" For a rather different dreamscape of nymphets and tombstones, see the five previous entries. As the Times notes, "'Macbeth' has been made as a gangster picture before." A truly surreal production, perhaps to be made in the next world, might star the young (again) George Melly as Macbeth, introduced by the following tombstone:
For further details, click on Melly's picture. "A tale told by an idiot... signifying nothing...." Posted 7/7/2007 at 12:00 AM |
Another Mearingstone (see last 3 entries)-- 11:07:02 PM: Sex and Art in a Chinese Poem See also the entries of St. Stephen's Day (Boxing Day), 2006. Posted 7/6/2007 at 11:07 PM |
Mearingstone, or: "Last to the Lost," continued from July 1, 2007 Finnegans Wake 293:
"with Mearingstone in Fore ground.... we're last to the lost, Loulou!" Midnight, July 1-2, 2007 Click on image for details. Posted 7/6/2007 at 8:00 PM |
Log24, June 6: "If Cullinane College were Hogwarts...." Click to enlarge. El Cazador de la Bruja A word to the wise: desconvencida. Related material: Julio Cortazar and Ay que bonito es volar.... Posted 7/6/2007 at 7:47 PM |
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil continued from Midsummer Night... "The
voodoo priestess looked across the table at her wealthy client, a man
on trial for murder: 'Now, you know how dead time works. Dead time
lasts for one hour-- from half an hour before midnight to half an hour
after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin' good. The
half-hour after midnight is for doin' evil....'"
-- Glenna Whitley, "Voodoo Justice," The New York Times, March 20, 1994 In Other Game News: "In June, bloggers speculated that the Xbox 360 return problem was
getting so severe that the company was running out of 'coffins,' or
special return-shipping boxes Microsoft provides to gamers with dead
consoles. 'We'll make sure we have plenty of boxes to go back and
forth,' Bach said in an interview."
The picture of
"Coxeter Exhuming Geometry" suggests the following illustration, based in part on Plato's poem to Aster: Related material: Thursday's last entry and Sex and Art in a Chinese Poem The proportions of the above rectangle may suggest to some a coffin; they are meant to suggest a monolith. Posted 7/6/2007 at 12:26 AM |
Posted 7/6/2007 at 12:18 AM |
George Melly died yesterday in London at 80. Jazz singer, raconteur, imitator of Bessie Smith, he apparently named his daughter Pandora.
Posted 7/6/2007 at 12:06 AM |
In defense of Plato's realism (vs. sophists' nominalism-- see recent entries.) Plato cited geometry, notably in the Meno, in defense of his realism. Consideration of the Meno's diamond figure leads to the following: Click on image for details. As noted in an entry, Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star, linked to at the end of today's previous entry, the "universals" of Platonic realism are exemplified by the hexagrams of the I Ching, which in turn are based on the seven trigrams above and on the eighth trigram, of all yin lines, not shown above: K'un The Receptive Posted 7/5/2007 at 7:11 PM |
Their Name is Legion
"Although it may not at first be obvious, the substitution for real religions of a religion drained of particulars is of a piece with the desire to exorcise postmodernism." -- Stanley Fish, July 2002
Related material: Simon Blackburn on Plato and sophists, realism and nominalism (previous entry) and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star Posted 7/5/2007 at 12:48 PM |
x Posted 7/4/2007 at 9:00 PM |
The Ignorance
of Stanley Fish (continued from June 18, 2002) The "ignorance" referred to is Fish's ignorance of the philosophical background of the words "particular" and "universal." "Postmodern Warfare:
The Ignorance of Our Warrior Intellectuals," by Stanley Fish, Harper's Magazine, July 2002, contains the following passages: "The deepest strain in a religion is the particular and particularistic
doctrine it asserts at its heart, in the company of such pronouncements
as 'Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.' Take the deepest strain
of religion away... and what remains are the
surface pieties-- abstractions without substantive bite-- to which
everyone will assent because they are empty, insipid, and safe.
It is this same preference for the vacuously general over the
disturbingly particular that informs the attacks on college and
university professors who spoke out in ways that led them to be branded
as outcasts by those who were patrolling and monitoring the narrow
boundaries of acceptable speech. Here one must be careful, for there
are fools and knaves on all sides."
"Although it may not at first be obvious, the substitution for real religions of a religion drained of particulars is of a piece with the desire to exorcise postmodernism." "What must be protected, then, is the general, the possibility of making pronouncements from a perspective at once detached from and superior to the sectarian perspectives of particular national interests, ethnic concerns, and religious obligations; and the threat to the general is posed by postmodernism and strong religiosity alike, postmodernism because its critique of master narratives deprives us of a mechanism for determining which of two or more fiercely held beliefs is true (which is not to deny the category of true belief, just the possibility of identifying it uncontroversially), strong religiosity because it insists on its own norms and refuses correction from the outside. The antidote to both is the separation of the private from the public, the establishing of a public sphere to which all could have recourse and to the judgments of which all, who are not criminal or insane, would assent. The point of the public sphere is obvious: it is supposed to be the location of those standards and measures that belong to no one but apply to everyone. It is to be the location of the universal. The problem is not that there is no universal--the universal, the absolutely true, exists, and I know what it is. The problem is that you know, too, and that we know different things, which puts us right back where we were a few sentences ago, armed with universal judgments that are irreconcilable, all dressed up and nowhere to go for an authoritative adjudication. What to do? Well, you do the only thing you can do, the only honest thing: you assert that your universal is the true one, even though your adversaries clearly do not accept it, and you do not attribute their recalcitrance to insanity or mere criminality--the desired public categories of condemnation--but to the fact, regrettable as it may be, that they are in the grip of a set of beliefs that is false. And there you have to leave it, because the next step, the step of proving the falseness of their beliefs to everyone, including those in their grip, is not a step available to us as finite situated human beings. We have to live with the knowledge of two things: that we are absolutely right and that there is no generally accepted measure by which our rightness can be independently validated. That's just the way it is, and we should just get on with it, acting in accordance with our true beliefs (what else could we do?) without expecting that some God will descend, like the duck in the old Groucho Marx TV show, and tell us that we have uttered the true and secret word." of the Pennsylvania Lottery: 105 --
Log24 on 1/05: "'From your lips to God's ears,' goes the old Yiddish wish. The writer, by contrast, tries to read God's lips and pass along the words...." -- Richard Powers 268 -- This is a page number that appears, notably, in my June 2002 journal entry on Fish, and again in an entry, "The Transcendent Signified," dated July 26, 2003, that argues against Fish's school, postmodernism, and in favor of what the pomos call "logocentrism." Page 268 of Simon Blackburn's Think (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999): "It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the
streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at
issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world
truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to
ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most
profound problem of philosophy. It structures Plato's (realist)
reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called
'postmodernism' is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the
doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of
nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to
reason and truth."
Fish may, if he wishes,
regard the particular page number 268 as delivered-- five years late, but such is philosophy-- by Groucho's winged messenger in response to Fish's utterance of the "true and secret word"-- namely, "universal." When not arguing politics, Fish, though from a Jewish background, is said to be a Milton scholar. Let us therefore hope he is by now, or comes to be, aware of the Christian approach to universals-- an approach true to the philosophical background sketched in 1999 by Blackburn and made particular in a 1931 novel by Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion. Posted 7/3/2007 at 9:29 PM |
A figure like Ecclesiast/
Rugged and luminous, chants in the dark/ A text that is an answer, although obscure. -- Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
From 8/02 in 2005:
Result:
For a text on today's mid-day number, see Theme and Variations. Posted 7/2/2007 at 8:28 PM |
From a Log24 entry of March 20, 2005, as rendered today by a Xanga server and my Mozilla browser: The above screenshot is only an image of the links; here are the links themselves: A Postmodern Twinkle A Postmodern Diamond The question mark in the diamond is the browser's rendition of the server's baffled response to a character it cannot recognize-- in this case, the HTML code for a blank space: " " Related material: The God-Shaped Hole Posted 7/2/2007 at 12:03 PM |
Object Lesson
continued...
For a religious interpretation of 265, see Sept. 30, 2004. For a religious interpretation of 153, see Fish Story. A quotation from the Eater of Souls:
"That's how it is, Easy," my Coach went on, his voice more in sorrow
than in anger. "Yardage is all very well but you don't make a nickel
unless you cross that old goal line with the egg tucked underneath your
arm." He pointed at the football on his desk. "There it is. I had it
gilded and lettered clear back at the beginning of the season, you
looked so good and I had so much confidence in you-- it was meant to be
yours at the end of the season, at a victory banquet."
Posted 7/1/2007 at 10:31 PM |
Mozart by the Numbers 2/21 A Superficial Beauty: Structural Certainty:
-- Finnegans Wake, Book II, 1/27 "Mozart is a menace to
musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his
own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and
structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in
the 21st century. Let him rest." --Norman Lebrecht
Posted 7/1/2007 at 1:27 PM |
At the still point, there the dance is. -- T. S. Eliot Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings, his book on the Christian writers J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, says that "Eliot by his own admission took the 'still point of the turning world' in Burnt Norton from the Fool in Williams's The Greater Trumps." Today's Birthdays: .... Actress-dancer Leslie Caron is 76.... Movie director Sydney Pollack is 73.... Dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp is 66. --AP, "Today in History," July 1, 2007 The Diamond in the Mandorla Posted 7/1/2007 at 2:06 AM |