The entertainment continues. A rabbi's obituary in today's New York Times (see previous entry) served as ad-bait for "Joshua," a Fox Searchlight film opening July 6. A search for a less sacrilegious memorial to the rabbi yields the following: The "Project MUSE" link above works only at subscribing libraries. It seems that here, too, the rabbi is being used as bait. For a perhaps preferable reference to bait, in the context of St. Peter as a "fisher of men," see the Christian "mandorla" or "vesica piscis," a figure hidden within the geometry of Rome's St. Peter's Square-- which, despite its name, is an oval: For the geometric construction of the Roman oval, see "ovato tondo" in Rudolf Arnheim's The Power of the Center. For a less theoretical account of the religious significance of the mandorla, see the 2001 film The Center of the World. Posted 6/30/2007 at 10:04 PM |
An Evening Star for Rabbi Abraham Klausner, a "father figure" according to The New York Times. The Times says Klausner died at 92 on Thursday, June 28, 2007: (Click to enlarge.) Klausner was a rabbi in Yonkers until his retirement in 1989. The evening number in the New York Lottery on the reported date of Klausner's death was 514. As in the previous entry, this number may be interpreted as the date 5/14. A Log24 entry with that date:
In the details: the title character as follows:
The "Biblical namesake" is the Joshua of the Old Testament-- source of the deeply flawed "tumbling down" analogy. In the New Testament, there is of course also a rather famous Joshua. "And the serpent's eyes shine as he wraps around the vine...." -- The Garden of Allah Posted 6/30/2007 at 1:00 PM |
x Posted 6/30/2007 at 12:59 PM |
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Posted 6/30/2007 at 12:37 PM |
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Posted 6/30/2007 at 12:37 PM |
A Cornell professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens: "Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees... the description that makes it divinity, still speech... not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'...." -- Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:
Modernism and the Test of Production, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 242 "God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the artifact pictured on the cover of Mao's book: I have more confidence that God is to be found in the Ping Pong balls of the New York Lottery. These objects may be regarded as supplying a parlance that is, if not paradisal, at least intelligible-- if only in the context of my own personal experience: Journal entry dated 5/14: Posted 6/28/2007 at 9:00 PM |
Christianus
Cornelius Uhlenbeck Oct. 18, 1866 - Aug. 12, 1951 "... born at Voorburg near The Hague in Holland, and
studied philology at the University of Leiden.... Though he would
actually have preferred to graduate in Basque, Uhlenbeck in 1888, when
only 22 years old, took his doctor's degree in Dutch. It must be
here noted that for this degree the requirements in comparative
philology were very considerable...." --International Journal of American Linguistics, Jan. 1953 From Uhlenbeck's A Manual of Sanskrit Phonetics (1898): "The Indogermanic family of languages. The great family of languages, in which Sanskrit belongs, is called the Indogermanic, Indoceltic or Aryan.... The word Indogermanic dates from a time, when it was not yet proved, that the Celtic dialects also make part of our family of languages, and indicates by the combined name of the utmost branches, Indian and Germanic, the whole territory of speech, to which they belong. Now that it is certain, that Celtic also is a member of our family, it would be accurate to replace the word Indogermanic by Indoceltic, because not Germanic, but Celtic is the utmost branch in the Occident. The name Indogermanic however is generally adopted and it would be impossible to supplant it by another. By the word Aryan is generally understood a certain subdivision of the Indogermanic family, viz. the Indo-Iranian, and therefore it would seem unsuitable to use this name also for the whole Indogermanic family." An unsuitable Santa:
A Santa understudy: Transcript of "Miracle on 34th Street"-- KRIS: Bye. Merry Christmas!Related material: Pope Approves Wider Use of Latin Mass, (Click on image for details), and Seminar für Klassische Philologie der Universität Basel-- Sprachwissenschaft Indogermanistische Bibliothek. Posted 6/28/2007 at 12:06 PM |
A Long and Strange Day Time and chance yesterday: Pennsylvania Lottery June 26, 2007-- Mid-day 040 Evening 810 040:
A discussion of the work of Ralph Ellison: "... why do you think he did not finish these novels? He wrote on them for many, many years-- 40 years, I think." "Yes, he worked for 40 years." See Ellison's novel Juneteenth (New York Times review, 1999) 810: August 10 (8/10), 2004 -- "But all things then were oracle and secret. I say the wood within is the dark wood...." John Baez, Diary, entry of June 22, 2007:"On Tuesday the 19th.... I hiked down the completely dark but perfectly familiar gravel road with my suitcase in hand, listening to the forest creatures. But then, I couldn't find my parents' driveway! It was embarrassing: I could see their house perfectly well, off in the distance, but it was so darn dark I couldn't spot the driveway. It felt like a dream: after a long flight with many delays, one winds up walking to ones parents house, lost in a spooky forest.... ... I sort of enjoy this kind of thing, as long as there's no real danger. It's also sort of scary. The well-lit grid of civilization slowly falls away, and you're out there alone in the night... Anyway: I considered hiking straight through the woods to my parents' house, but I decided things were already interesting enough, so instead I called my mom and ask her to drive down the driveway a bit, just so I could see where it was. And so she did, and then it was obvious.
So, I got home shortly before midnight. A long and strange day.
My dad was already in bed, but I said hi to him anyway." Related material: Posted 6/27/2007 at 3:33 PM |
x Posted 6/25/2007 at 9:00 PM |
Object Lesson "... the best definition I have for Satan is that it is a real spirit of unreality." M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie
Today is June 25, anniversary of the birth in 1908 of Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine died on Christmas Day, 2000. Today, Quine's birthday, is, as has been noted by Quine's son, the point of the calendar opposite Christmas-- i.e., "Anti-Christmas." If the Anti-Christ is, as M. Scott Peck claims, a spirit of unreality, it seems fitting today to invoke Quine, a student of reality, and to borrow the title of Quine's Word and Object... Word: An excerpt from "Credences of Summer" by Wallace Stevens:
Object: From Friedrich Froebel, who invented kindergarten: From Christmas 2005: Click on the images for further details. For a larger and more sophisticaled relative of this object, see yesterday's entry At Midsummer Noon. The object is real, not as a particular physical object, but in the way that a mathematical object is real -- as a pure Platonic form. "It's all in Plato...." -- C. S. Lewis Posted 6/25/2007 at 3:00 PM |
Raiders of the Lost Stone (Continued from June 23) Charles Williams: "In Many Dimensions (1931) Williams sets before his reader the mysterious Stone of King Solomon, an image he probably drew from a brief description in Waite's The Holy Kabbalah (1929) of a supernatural cubic stone on which was inscribed 'the Divine Name.'" Related material: Solomon's Cube, Geometry of the 4x4x4 Cube, The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model Posted 6/24/2007 at 12:00 PM |
Midsummer Night in the Garden of Good and Evil "I Put a Spell on You" -- Nina Simone, title of autobiograpy "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 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974: "But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought... occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like... because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences." "I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason." "Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn’t make 'sense.' But what's really wrong is not the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots." Related material: D-Day Morning, Figures of Speech, Ursprache Revisited. See also the midnight entry of June 23-24, 2006: "Let the midnight special Posted 6/24/2007 at 12:07 AM |
Raiders of the Lost Stone continued from March 10, 2006 The Roman Imperial Eagle and, according to C. B. DeMille in 1932 -- The above photo is courtesy of the Cecil B. DeMille Collection at DVD Beaver. HARVARD CRIMSON/ ALEX R. LEVIN Sharon Stone lectures at Harvard's Memorial Church on March 14, 2005... "Ready when you are, C. B." Related material -- Log24, Oct. 26, 2002 -- Midnight in the Garden, starring Nina Simone Posted 6/23/2007 at 6:00 PM |
Faust in Copenhagen:
A Struggle for the Soul of Physics By Gino Segrè Illustrated. 310 pp. Viking. $25.95. "As though their knowledge of the quantum secrets came with the power of prophecy, some three dozen of Europe's best physicists ended their 1932 meeting in Copenhagen with a parody of Goethe’s 'Faust.'.... It was only in retrospect that the silliness became profound. The players were becoming possessors of 'a truth with implicit powers of good and evil,' Gino Segrè writes in 'Faust in Copenhagen,' his inventive new book about the era. And 'the devil... was in the details.'" --George Johnson Related material: This week's entries on Pauli and Faust, the entries of June 3 through June 6, and the five entries ending on April 7, 2005, with "In the Details" Posted 6/23/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Encounter at Harvard-- Related material: (Click to enlarge) Dean Gross also appears in The Crimson Passion: A Drama at Mardi Gras Posted 6/22/2007 at 2:22 PM |
Taking Christ to Studio 60 continues... From NBC: K&R PART III 06.21.07 10/9c TV-14 "The long day's journey into night descends deeper into the past." Posted 6/21/2007 at 9:57 PM |
"Ich
aber, hier auf dem objektiven Wege, bin jetzt bemüht, das Positive der
Sache nachzuweisen, daß nämlich das Ding an sich von der Zeit und Dem,
was nur durch sie möglich ist, dem Entstehen und Vergehen, unberührt
bleibt, und daß die Erscheinungen in der Zeit sogar jenes rastlos
flüchtige, dem Nichts zunächst stehende Dasein nicht haben könnten,
wenn nicht in ihnen ein Kern aus der Ewigkeit*
wäre. Die Ewigkeit ist freilich ein Begriff, dem keine Anschauung zum
Grunde liegt: er ist auch deshalb bloß negativen Inhalts, besagt
nämlich ein zeitloses Dasein. Die Zeit ist demnach ein bloßes Bild der
Ewigkeit, ho chronos eikôn tou aiônos,**
wie es Plotinus*** hat: und ebenso ist unser zeitliches Dasein das bloße
Bild unsers Wesens an sich. Dieses muß in der Ewigkeit liegen, eben
weil die Zeit nur die Form unsers Erkennens ist: vermöge dieser allein
aber erkennen wir unser und aller Dinge Wesen als vergänglich, endlich
und der Vernichtung anheimgefallen." * "a kernel of eternity" Related material: J. N. Darby, Carl Gustav Jung, Aion, Posted 6/21/2007 at 4:30 PM |
"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality." --Allan Kozinn on Mstislav Rostropovich in The New York Times, quoted in Log24 on April 29, 2007 "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, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005 "... 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, "The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups" (pdf) "... donc Dieu existe, réponse!" "Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: 'Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'" (Faust, Part Two, as quoted by Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections) "Pauli as Mephistopheles in a 1932 parody of Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen. The drawing is one of many by George Gamow illustrating the script." -- Physics Today "Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was
looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange
correspondences between them. 'To meet someone' was his enigmatic answer. 'To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso.'" -- The Club Dumas, basis for the Roman Polanski film "The Ninth Gate" (See 12/24/05.) "Pauli linked this symbolism
with the concept of automorphism." -- The Innermost Kernel (previous entry) And from "Symmetry in Mathematics and Mathematics of Symmetry" (pdf), by Peter J. Cameron, a paper presented at the International Symmetry Conference, Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007, we have The Epigraph-- (Here "whatever" should of course be "whenever.") Also from the Cameron paper:
Some Log24 entries related to the above politically (women in mathematics)-- Global and Local: One Small Step and mathematically-- Structural Logic continued: Structure and Logic (4/30/07): This entry cites Alice Devillers of Brussels-- "The aim of this thesis is to classify certain structures which are, from a certain point of view, as homogeneous as possible, that is which have as many symmetries as possible." "There is such a thing as a tesseract." -- Madeleine L'Engle Posted 6/21/2007 at 12:07 PM |
Kernel
Mathematical Reviews citation: MR2163497 (2006g:81002) 81-03 (81P05) Gieser, Suzanne The innermost kernel. Depth psychology and quantum physics. Wolfgang Pauli's dialogue with C. G. Jung. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005. xiv+378 pp. ISBN: 3-540-20856-9 A quote from MR at Amazon.com: "This revised translation of a Swedish Ph. D. thesis in philosophy offers far more than a discussion of Wolfgang Pauli's encounters with the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung.... Here the book explains very well how Pauli attempted to extend his understanding beyond superficial esotericism and spiritism.... To understand Pauli one needs books like this one, which... seems to open a path to a fuller understanding of Pauli, who was seeking to solve a quest even deeper than quantum physics." (Arne Schirrmacher, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2006g) An excerpt:
I do not yet know what Gieser means by "the innermost
kernel." The following is my version of a "kernel" of sorts-- a diagram
well-known to students of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and art theorist Rosalind Krauss:
The four group is also known as the Vierergruppe or Klein group. It appears, notably, as the translation subgroup of A, the group of 24 automorphisms of the affine plane over the 2-element field, and therefore as the kernel of the homomorphism taking A to the group of 6 automorphisms of the projective line over the 2-element field. (See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.) Related material:
The "chessboard" of Nov. 7, 2006 -- I Ching chessboard None of this material really has much to do with
the history of physics, except for its relation to the life and thought of physicist
Wolfgang Pauli-- the "Mephistopheles" of the new book Faust in Copenhagen. (See previous entry.)
"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is: 'Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'" (Faust, Part Two, as quoted by Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections) Posted 6/20/2007 at 1:06 AM |
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall -- Marlowe I have just read, in the New York Times Book Review that arrived in yesterday's mail, a review of Segre's Faust in Copenhagen. The review, on news stands next Sunday, was titled by the Times "Meta Physicists." On Faust-- today's noon entry and yesterday's "Nightmare Lessons." On "Meta Physicists"-- an entry of June 6, on Cullinane College, has a section titled "Meta Physics." On Copenhagen-- an entry of Bloomsday Eve, 2004 on a native of that city. Another Dane:
"Words, words, words." -- Hamlet Another metaphysics: "317 is a prime, A Mathematician's Apology Posted 6/19/2007 at 3:17 PM |
Posted 6/19/2007 at 1:00 PM |
Let Noon Be Fair -- Title of a novel by Willard Motley A review of Helene Cixous's Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing:
"Cixous explores three distinct 'schools' that produce what she
envisions as great writing-- the Schools of the Dead, of Dreams, and of
Roots. Cixous invests much weight in the purposefully ambiguous nature
of the word 'school'; she seems to refer to a motivation, conscious or
unconscious, that directs, influences, and shapes writing; at other
times she seems to want to speak of actual places from whence we get
instruction (again, consciously or unconsciously)."
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I: From The Shining, Chapter 18: "In 1961 four writers, two of them Pulitzer Prize winners, had leased the Overlook and reopened it as a writers' school. That had lasted one year.... Every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go.... (In the room the women come and go)" --Quoted in Shining Forth Photo: jewishbookweek.com Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous Time of this entry: Noon. Posted 6/19/2007 at 12:00 PM |
Let No Man Write My Epitaph -- Title of a novel by Willard Motley "Recall the passage in the Odyssey when he [Ulysses] encounters the Cyclops
Polyphemos. Trying to disguise himself, to hide himself, Ulysses calls
himself Outis-- nobody, no man, personne. Here, in a strategy of simple
erasure, the Subject masks his singularity behind no one, das Man (here
in a sense that does not depend on the Heidggerian distinction between
the authentic Dasein and the inauthentic das Man). In French, Outis is
translated as personne, meaning no one, no particular subject."
-- Jacques Derrida, "Summary of Impromptu Remarks," pp. 39-45 in Anyone, ed. by Cynthia Davidson (New York: Rizzoli International, 1991) "In A GOOD YEAR, more than one reference is made to the secret of comedy. It's all in the timing, two characters explain." --Review at epinions.com Posted 6/19/2007 at 11:49 AM |
Filed at 6:13 a.m. ET Norman Hackerman "AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Norman Hackerman, a chemist ... died Saturday [June 16] .... He was 95. ... He taught chemistry ... before joining the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon during World War II." The date of Hackerman's death is celebrated in Ireland as Bloomsday-- the day on which, in 1904, the events of James Joyce's novel Ulysses came to pass. Scene from Photo by Richard Termine "Behind the Lid" is an avant-garde production featuring scenes from the author's life presented in the form of dreams.
Those who like such scenes may consult past Log24 entries. They will find, for instance, the following, commemorating a death which, like Hackerman's, occurred on a Bloomsday: Click on the picture for details. "History, Stephen said, -- Ulysses Posted 6/18/2007 at 1:00 PM |
Yesterday, Father's Day, was also the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Bunker Hill Community College was the site yesterday of the New England Fine Arts Fair. A 2006 collage from Log24: Sources: Log24 on 12/31/02 and 10/30/05, and wainscoting from "Mystic River." Meanwhile in Cambridge we have, at Harvard's math department, Noam Elkies's "Slummerville"--
"By all means accept the invitation to hell, should it come. It will not take you far-- from Cambridge to hell is only a step; or at most a hop, skip, and jump. But now you are evading-- you are dodging the issue.... after all, Cambridge is hell enough." -- Great Circle, a 1933 novel by Conrad Aiken (father of Joan Aiken, who wrote The Shadow Guests) Posted 6/18/2007 at 2:00 AM |
A selection from the Stephen King Hymnal "... it's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things." -- Anne McCaffrey, Radcliffe '47, To Ride Pegasus See also Part I and Part II. Posted 6/17/2007 at 7:00 PM |
No Place Like Home: A Father's Day Special for Stephen King "... the poet's search for the same exterior made / Interior" -- Wallace Stevens "Imago. Imago. Imago." -- Wallace Stevens (See previous entry.) Stevens's phrase was the epigraph to The Imago Sequence, a novella published in May 2005. From a review (containing a spoiler) of the novella: "The Imago Sequence
are three notable photographs taken by an otherwise unnotable
photographer. They are photographs taken underground, location a well
kept secret, and show either a bizarre rock formation carved out over
millenia, or perhaps the imprint of a fossiled hominid in an anguished
pose.
The photographs can have an impact on the viewer, and have had a history of having a major impact on the owners. One has changed hands, and the new owner shows off his new prized objet d'art, and sets one of his employees the tasks [sic] of identifying the location of the third in the sequence...." Greensburg, Kansas prior to May 4, 2007: This may be taken as a reference to today's previous entry. That entry, like the novella The Imago Sequence, contains a sequence of three photographs. The sequence was made a month or so after the novella was published, but I was unaware until this afternoon that the novella existed. Besides "Imago Imago Imago," two other phrases come to mind... The real estate motto "Location, Location, Location" and Stevens again-- "Adam in Eden was the father of Descartes." Happy Father's Day. Posted 6/17/2007 at 3:00 PM |
Posted 6/17/2007 at 2:02 PM |
Obituaries in the News
Filed at 7:10 a.m. ET Samuel Isaac Weissman ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Samuel Isaac Weissman, a professor and chemist who helped develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, has died. He was 94. Weissman died Tuesday [June 12].... From Log24 Sky Fish
Illustration from Photo by Richard Termine Scene from "Behind the Lid"
(See the Log24 entries from From Ben Brantley's "Her life, her voice says, Related material: "They did it from Professor Eucalyptus said,
"The search/ For reality is as momentous as/ The search for God." It is the philosopher's search/ For an interior made exterior/ And the poet's search for the same exterior made/ Interior.... Posted 6/16/2007 at 12:00 PM |
Happy Bloomsday to Margaret Soltan at "When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked." -- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Posted 6/16/2007 at 12:00 AM |
Geometry and Death (continued from Dec. 11, 2006): J. G. Ballard on "the architecture of death": "... a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death." -- The Guardian, March 20, 2006 From the previous entry, which provided a lesson in geometry related, if only by synchronicity, to the death of Jewish art theorist Rudolf Arnheim: "We are going to keep doing this until we get it right." Here is a lesson related, again by synchronicity, to the death of a Christian art scholar of "uncommon erudition, wit, and grace"-- Robert R. Wark of the Huntington Library. Wark died on June 8, a date I think of as the feast day of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest-poet of the nineteenth century. From a Log24 entry on the date of Wark's death-- Samuel Pepys on a musical performance (Diary, Feb. 27, 1668): The above three quotations were intended to supply some background for a link
to an entry on Taymor, on what Taymor has called "skewed mirrors," and
on a related mathematical concept named, using a term Hopkins coined,
"inscapes." They might form part of an introductory class in mathematics and art given, like the class of the previous entry, in Purgatory. Wark, who is now, one imagines, in Paradise, needs no such class. He nevertheless might enjoy listening in. A guest teacher in
Posted 6/15/2007 at 10:31 PM |
A Study in
Art Education Rudolf Arnheim, a student of Gestalt psychology (which, an obituary notes, emphasizes "the perception of forms as organized wholes") was the first Professor of the Psychology of Art at Harvard. He died at 102 on Saturday, June 9, 2007. The conclusion of yesterday's New York Times obituary of Arnheim: "... in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, Celia McGee called Professor Arnheim 'the best kind of romantic,' adding, 'His wisdom, his patient explanations and lyrical enthusiasm are those of a teacher.'" A related quotation: "And you are teaching them a thing or two about yourself. They are learning that you are the living embodiment of two timeless characterizations of a teacher: 'I say what I mean, and I mean what I say' and 'We are going to keep doing this until we get it right.'" -- Tools for Teaching Here, yet again, is an illustration that has often appeared in Log24-- notably, on the date of Arnheim's death: Related quotations:
"We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game." -- Robert Hughes, speech of June 2, 2004 "Whether the 3x3 square grid is fast art or slow art, truly or falsely iconic, perhaps depends upon the eye of the beholder." -- Log24, June 5, 2004 If the beholder is Rudolf Arnheim, whom we may now suppose to be viewing the above figure in the afterlife, the 3x3 square is apparently slow art. Consider the following review of his 1982 book The Power of the Center: "Arnheim deals with the significance of two kinds of visual organization, the concentric arrangement (as exemplified in a bull's-eye target) and the grid (as exemplified in a Cartesian coordinate system).... It is proposed that the two structures of grid and target are the symbolic vehicles par excellence for two metaphysical/psychological stances. The concentric configuration is the visual/structural equivalent of an egocentric view of the world. The self is the center, and all distances exist in relation to the focal spectator. The concentric arrangement is a hermetic, impregnable pattern suited to conveying the idea of unity and other-worldly completeness. By contrast, the grid structure has no clear center, and suggests an infinite, featureless extension.... Taking these two ideal types of structural scaffold and their symbolic potential (cosmic, egocentric vs. terrestrial, uncentered) as given, Arnheim reveals how their underlying presence organizes works of art." -- Review of Rudolf Arnheim's The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1982). Review by David A. Pariser, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1983), pp. 210-213 Arnheim himself says in this book (pp. viii-ix) that
"With all its virtues, the framework of verticals and horizontals has
one grave defect. It has no center, and therefore it has no way
of defining any particular location. Taken by itself, it is an
endless expanse in which no one place can be distinguished from the
next. This renders it incomplete for any mathematical,
scientific, and artistic purpose. For his geometrical analysis,
Descartes had to impose a center, the point where a pair of coordinates
[sic] crossed. In doing so he borrowed from the other spatial system, the centric and cosmic one." Students of art theory should, having read the above passages, discuss in what way the 3x3 square embodies both "ideal types of structural scaffold and their symbolic potential."
We may imagine such a discussion in an afterlife art class-- in, perhaps, Purgatory rather than Heaven-- that now includes Arnheim as well as Ernst Gombrich and Kirk Varnedoe. Such a class would be one prerequisite for a more advanced course-- Finite geometry of the square and cube. Posted 6/15/2007 at 1:00 PM |
A Time for Remembering June 9, the birthday of Aaron Sorkin, a writer mentioned in recent Log24 entries, was also the birthday of writer Patricia Cornwell. An illustration from that date: Cornwell's first book was a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, A Time for Remembering. "Seven is heaven, Eight is a gate, Nine is a vine." Posted 6/14/2007 at 9:00 PM |
"Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General and President of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes was [sic] exposed late in his career, died today at his home in Vienna. He was 88." --The New York Times this afternoon Related material: From a story by Leonard Michaels linked to on Aaron Sorkin's birthday, June 9: "Induction and analogy, in which he was highly gifted, were critical to mathematical intelligence.
It has been said that the unexamined life isn't worth living. Nachman wasn't against examining his life, but then what was a life? .... ... As for 'a life,' it was what you
read about in newspaper obituaries. He didn't need one. He would return
to California and think only about mathematics."
2. A quotation from an anonymous Internet user signed "George Polya"-- "Steven Cullinane is a Liar." 3. L'Affaire Dharwadker continues (May 31, 2007) 4. Geometry for Jews "One two three four, who are we for?" Posted 6/14/2007 at 4:00 PM |
x Posted 6/14/2007 at 3:57 PM |
TrifectaArts & Letters Daily (14 Jun 2007): Every time an economic impact study comes out, you know the pigs are at the pastry cart. "Save your city by giving money to the arts!" Yeah, sure... more
Democracy can flourish in India only if every citizen resists the will to dominate and accepts the reality and equality of others... more The American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady
who lives in the past, falls for pseudo-intellectual garbage, and runs
from real conflict or responsibility... more Posted 6/14/2007 at 10:35 AM |
Unscholarly Notes The time of the previous entry, 1:06:18, suggests both the date of Epiphany, 1:06, and Hexagram 18 of the I Ching: Ku, Work on what has been spoiled (Decay).
Epiphany: A link in the Log24 entries for Epiphany 2007 leads to Damnation Morning, which in turn leads to Why Me?, a discussion of the mythology of Spiders vs. Snakes devised by Fritz Leiber. Spiders represent the conscious mind, snakes the unconscious. On Hexagram 18: "The Chinese character ku represents a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding. This means decay." --Wilhelm's commentary This brings us back to the previous entry with its mention of the date of Rudolf Arnheim's death: Saturday, June 9. In Log24 on that date there was a link, in honor of Aaron Sorkin's birthday, to a short story by Leonard Michaels. That link was suggested, in part, by a review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review (available online earlier, on Friday). Here is a quote from that review related to the Hexagram 18 worm bowl: "... what grabbed attention for his early collections was Michaels's gruesome, swaggering depiction of the sexual rampage that was the swinging '60s in New York-- 'the worm bucket,' as Michaels described an orgy." Related material for meditation on this, the anniversary (according to Encyclopaedia Britannica) of the birth of author Jerzy Kosinski-- his novel The Hermit of 69th Street. Kosinski was not unfamiliar with Michaels's worm bucket. For related information, see Hermit (or at least a review). In Leiber's stories the symbol of the Snakes is similar to the famed Yin-Yang symbol, also known as the T'ai-chi tu. For an analysis of this symbol by Arnheim, see the previous entry. See also "Sunday in the Park with Death" (Log24, Oct. 26, 2003): Posted 6/14/2007 at 2:00 AM |
Scholarly Notes In memory of Rudolf Arnheim, who died on Saturday, June 9 "Originally trained in Gestalt psychology,
with its emphasis on the perception of forms as organized wholes, he was one of
the first investigators to apply its principles to the study of art of all
kinds." --Today's New York Times From the Wikipedia article on Gestalt psychology prior to its modification on May 31, 2007:
The second paragraph of the above passage refers to my own work. Some Gestalt-related work of Arnheim:
-- From p. 242 of "Perceptual Analysis of a Symbol of Interaction," pp. 222-244 in Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays, Univ. of Calif. Press, 1966 Time of this entry: 1:06:18 AM ET. Posted 6/14/2007 at 1:06 AM |
A Flaming Cross
for Spain Click for details. Related flaming crosses: Nov. 19, 2004 and Nov. 21, 2004. (This entry was actually made just before noon on June 14. Its time, 6:29, was reserved earlier in honor of the date 6/29.) Posted 6/13/2007 at 6:29 PM |
Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times on "Sopranos" creator David Chase: "Mr. Chase, an apocalyptic tease, gave us a gimmicky and unsatisfying film-school-style blackout for an end to his mob saga, a stunt one notch above 'It was all a dream.'" Posted 6/13/2007 at 12:00 PM |
On Framing Science "... Packaging is unavoidable. Facts rarely, if ever, speak for themselves." -- Matthew C. Nisbet, American University Assistant Professor of "Communication," on June 6, 2007, in Framing Science Frame this. Related material: previous Log24 entries of June 10-12 Posted 6/12/2007 at 11:07 PM |
Sky Fish
Illustration from From an obituary in today's New York Times: "Lee Nagrin, a noted Off Broadway performance artist... died Thursday in Manhattan. She was 78.... She formed her own company, the Sky Fish Ensemble, in 1979 and presented performance-art pieces that tended to unspool like fairy tales, filled with mysterious, archetypal imagery. Her own presence was mysterious, too, both on and off the stage, often conjuring up the sense of a keen-eyed, all-seeing, benign witch. She created some of those images midperformance, as when she traced a landscape along brown paper that ringed the stage space of Silver Whale Gallery, where much of her work was performed. For her last piece,
'Behind the Lid,' she collaborated with the puppeteer Basil Twist on a
story in which a woman looks back on her life through a dream.
Performances are this month at the Silver Whale." LEE NAGRIN AND BASIL
TWIST’S on June 7, the date of Nagrin's death: "... Packaging is unavoidable. Facts rarely, if ever, speak for themselves." -- Matthew C. Nisbet, Assistant Professor of "Communication," June 6, 2007 From the New York Lottery on June 7, the date of Nagrin's death: Mid-day: 603 Evening: 805 Another opening of another show. Posted 6/12/2007 at 2:00 PM |
Continued from June 7-- Second Billing, Part III: Philosophy of Communication Pictures are more accessible than words. See Logos (May 17) and Torbellino (June 10), as well as the entries for June 8, the date of Rorty's death. Posted 6/11/2007 at 12:00 AM |
Torbellino
Iago states that he is not who he is. --Mark F. Frisch La historia agrega que, antes o después de morir, se supo frente a Dios y le dijo: «Yo, que tantos hombres he sido en vano, quiero ser uno y yo». La voz de Dios le contestó desde un torbellino: «Yo tampoco soy; yo soñé el mundo como tú soñaste tu obra, mi Shakespeare, y entre las formas de mi sueño estabas tú, que como yo eres muchos y nadie». --Jorge Luis Borges Posted 6/10/2007 at 12:00 PM |
Like a Melody
An excerpt from The Miracle of the Bells quoted in A Mass for Lucero-- "'A pretty girl-- is like a melody---- !' But that was always Bill Dunnigan's Song of Victory.... Thus thought the... press agent for 'The Garden of the Soul.'" "Ay que bonito es volar A las dos de la mañana...." -- "La Bruja" For a rendition by Salma Hayek, click on the picture below. Related material: Log24 entries for May 18, 2007. Posted 6/10/2007 at 2:00 AM |
Posted 6/9/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Samuel Pepys on a musical performance (Diary, Feb. 27, 1668): "When the Angel comes down" "When the Angel Comes Down, and the Soul Departs," a webpage on dance in Bali: "Dance is also a devotion to the Supreme Being." "I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain...." "No se puede vivir sin amar." Log24 on St. Peter's Day, 2004: "And so to bed." Posted 6/8/2007 at 4:00 PM |
The Source
Posted 6/8/2007 at 2:00 PM |
Framing truth On "framing" and "spin" in journalism: "... Packaging is unavoidable. Facts rarely, if ever, speak for themselves." -- Matthew C. Nisbet, Assistant Professor of "Communication," June 6, 2007 If they could, they might say "We was framed!" Facts cannot, of course, speak for themselves to those who do not understand their language. Example: A picture that appeared in Log24 on June 7, 2005: Click for details. Attempt to frame the picture: Analogies "A functor is an analogy." -- Anonymous The best mathematicians "see analogies between analogies." -- Banach, according to Ulam For further details, click on the link "Analogies" above. See also the analogies in the previous entry. Posted 6/7/2007 at 4:15 PM |
Masters of Chaos From the May 6, 2007, New York Times, Charles McGrath on Philip K. Dick: His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. "If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double," an editor once remarked, "it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.'" Click to enlarge. As for "the thing with three souls"-- Part I: "Educate, Empower, Entertain" -- Motto of Yolanda King Part II: Three universities (but not those of Martin Myerson)-- Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge Posted 6/7/2007 at 11:30 AM |
It is now 3:07 AM
June 7 in New Zealand. Today at Cullinane College: Examination Day (For the college curriculum, see the New Zealand Qualifications Authority.) If Cullinane College were Hogwarts--
Last-minute exam info: The Lapis Philosophorum
And from Bester's The Deceivers: Meta Physics "'... Think of a match. You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It's the chess legend for real.' Related material: Geometry of the I Ching Posted 6/6/2007 at 11:07 AM |
God, the Devil, and a Bridge "... just as God defeats the devil: this bridge exists ..." -- Andre Weil The "Mathematical" Bridge at Queens' College, Cambridge: Some related material might well be titled, as in the previous entry's parody of a new book, For details, see Connecting Ideas and Blitzes at Wikipedia. (The reference in the parody book cover above is to Charles Matthews, Wikipedia administrator and former Fellow of Queens' College.) Posted 6/5/2007 at 6:01 PM |
Devil in the Details This morning was the Princeton commencement. Meanwhile... (Altered) photo at right courtesy of Kenneth L. From the May 18 Harvard Crimson: "Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that 'the devil is in the details'...." For the details, see Al Gore and the Absence of Truth (May 30, 2007). Posted 6/5/2007 at 2:00 PM |
Princeton: A Whirligig Tour Symbol from a website on "Presbyterian Creedal Standards" The above symbol appeared here on 11/8/02. Related material: 1. The remarks of Bradley Whitford at Princeton's Class Day yesterday: 2. An illustration from Log 24 on 11/10/06:
3. The Whirligig of Time (1/5/03): 4. Natalie Angier, priestess of Scientism (5/26/07), and her new book The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (available as a special from Amazon.com):
Posted 6/5/2007 at 11:08 AM |
Dialogue Albert Einstein-- "God does not play dice with the universe." Reply by the New Jersey Lottery on Sunday, June 3, 2007-- Mid-day 220, evening 939. Related material Review of a 2004 production of a 1972 Tom Stoppard play, "Jumpers"-- Posted 6/3/2007 at 9:29 PM |
Haunting Time "Macquarrie remains one of the most important commentators [on] ... Heidegger's work. His co-translation of Being and Time into English is considered the canonical version." -- Wikipedia The Rev. Macquarrie died on May 28. The Log24 entry for that date contains the following illustration: The part of the illustration relevant to the death of Macquarrie is the color. From my reply to a comment on the May 28 entry: "I checked out [Terence] McKenna and found this site
on the aging druggie. I didn't like the hippie scene in the sixties and
I don't like it now. Booze was always my drug of choice. Still,
checking further, I found that McKenna's afterword to Dick's In Pursuit of Valis was well written." From McKenna's afterword: "Schizophrenia
is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia
is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity
of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of
radical understanding that haunts time. It haunts time in the same way
that Alfred North Whitehead said that the color dove grey 'haunts time
like a ghost.'" I can find no source for any remarks of Whitehead on the color "dove grey" (or "gray") but Whitehead did say that "A
colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes
and it goes. But where it comes it is the same colour. It
neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted."
--Science and the Modern World, 1925 The poetic remark of McKenna on the color "dove grey" may be taken, in a schizophrenic (or, similarly, a Christian) way, as a reference to the Holy Spirit. My own remarks on the hippie scene seem appropriate as a response to media celebration of today's 40th anniversary of the beginning of the 1967 "summer of love." Posted 6/3/2007 at 10:31 AM |
"I don't think the 'diamond theorem' is anything serious, so I started with blitzing that." -- Charles Matthews at Wikipedia, Oct. 2, 2006 "The 'seriousness' of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is 'significant' if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas." -- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology Posted 6/2/2007 at 8:00 AM |