x Posted 12/30/2008 at 2:02 PM |
The Gift
Today's online Times on "Dale Wasserman... the playwright responsible for two Broadway hits of the 1960s, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest' and 'Man of La Mancha,' died on Sunday [December 21, 2008] at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., near Phoenix.... Mr. Wasserman wrote more than 75 scripts for television, the stage and the movies, including screenplays for 'The Vikings' (1958), a seafaring epic with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, and 'A Walk With Love and Death' (1969), a John Huston film set in 14th-century Europe.... Mr. Graham's widow, Anjelica Huston -- "Well..." Posted 12/29/2008 at 12:21 PM |
Her Scalloped Shore -- A meditation for Becket's Day on James Joyce, Santiago de Compostela, and the death of Pope John Paul II Posted 12/29/2008 at 2:45 AM |
keen Posted 12/27/2008 at 9:00 PM |
Narrative "Wayne C. Booth's lifelong study of the art of rhetoric illuminated the means by which authors seduce, cajole and lie to their readers in the service of narrative." -- New York Times, Oct. 11, 2005 Roberta Smith in a New York Times Christmas Day review of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art: "He ends the show with Ed Ruscha's painting 'The End.' But if you consult the brochure, you'll see that it also lists one final object up above, near the ceiling. This is the green LED exit sign that directs you out of the gallery. The sign, designed by Mark Wamble, Dawn Finley and Ben Thorne of Interloop Architecture, is, like everything else here, in the Modern's collection. Here, of course, it is also just doing its job." Other Christmas Day endings -- Those of W.C. Fields-- see Cafe Society (April 14, 2007)-- and, this year, of Eartha Kitt: From April 12 last year: This Way to the Egress Posted 12/26/2008 at 4:07 PM |
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"There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling.... ...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...." -- Robert Graves, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice" Posted 12/23/2008 at 12:00 PM |
Kindred Spirit On the late film director Robert Mulligan, who died early Saturday [Dec. 20, 2008] at 83: Mulligan received a best director Oscar nomination in 1963 for "[To Kill a] Mockingbird"....Thanks to desconvencida for a trailer of "The Man in the Moon" (1991), Reese Witherspoon's first film and Mulligan's last. Mulligan also directed Natalie Wood in a personal favorite of mine, "Love with the Proper Stranger." Posted 12/23/2008 at 12:20 AM |
The Folding Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5 -- Ghost: "I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porpentine: But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!" This recalls the title of a piece in this week's New Yorker: "The Book of Lists: Susan Sontag’s early journals" (See Log24 on Thursday, Dec. 18.) In the rather grim holiday spirit of that piece, here are some journal notes for Sontag, whom we may imagine as the ghost of Hanukkah past. There are at least two ways of folding a list (or tale) to fit a rectangular frame. The normal way, used in typesetting English prose and poetry, starts at the top, runs from left to right, jumps down a line, then again runs left to right, and so on until the passage is done or the bottom right corner of the frame is reached. The boustrophedonic way again goes from top to bottom, with the first line running from left to right, the next from right to left, the next from left to right, and so on, with the lines' directions alternating. The word "boustrophedon" is from the Greek words describing the turning, at the end of each row, of an ox plowing (or "harrowing") a field. The Tale of the Eternal Blazon by Washington Irving "Blazon meant originally a shield, and then the heraldic bearings on a shield. Later it was applied to the art of describing or depicting heraldic bearings in the proper manner; and finally the term came to signify ostentatious display and also description or record by words or other means. In Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 5, the Ghost, while talking with Prince Hamlet, says: 'But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood.' Eternal blazon signifies revelation or description of things pertaining to eternity." -- Irving's Sketch Book, p. 461 By Washington Irving and Mary Elizabeth Litchfield, Ginn & Company, 1901 Related material: Folding (and harrowing up) some eternal blazons -- These are the foldings described above. They are two of the 322,560 natural ways to fit the list (or tale) "1, 2, 3, ... 15, 16" into a 4x4 frame. For further details, see The Diamond 16 Puzzle. Moral of the tale: Cynthia Zarin in The New Yorker, issue dated April 12, 2004-- "Time, for L'Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated, 'When you bring a sheet off the line, you can't handle it until it's folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can't exist until it's folded-- or it's a story without a book.'" Posted 12/22/2008 at 9:00 PM |
Fides et Ratio Part I: Ratio Continued from...
Part II: Fides For more information, click on the cocktail. Posted 12/22/2008 at 11:07 AM |
Le PLI An excerpt from Simon Blackburn's 1999 review of Eco's Kant and the Platypus:
An excerpt from Barry Mazur's "Visions, Dreams, and Mathematics" (apparently a talk presented at Delphi), dated Aug. 1, 2008, but posted on Dec. 19: "The word explicit is from the Latin explicitus related to the verb explicare meaning to 'unfold, unravel, explain, explicate' (plicare means 'to fold'; think of the English noun 'ply')."Related material: Mark Taylor's Derridean use of "le pli" (The Picture in Question, pp. 58-60, esp. note 13, p. 60). See also the discussion of Taylor in this journal posted on Dec. 19. Posted 12/21/2008 at 4:23 PM |
Interpretive Grids The 15 grids in the picture at right above may be regarded as interpreting the structure of the space at left above. This pair of pictures was suggested by yesterday's entry at Ars Mathematica containing the phrase "a dramatic extension of the notion of points." For other uses of the phrase "interpretive grid," see today's previous entry. Posted 12/21/2008 at 1:06 PM |
A Sontag Sermon I: "Against Interpretation," by Susan Sontag II: An interpretation of Sontag that introduces the concept of the interpretive grid III: An Interpretive Grid Related commentary: Texas Law Review and Michigan Law Review. Posted 12/21/2008 at 11:00 AM |
Cheap* Epiphanies for the Church of the Forbidden Planet Mid-day lotteries Dec. 19: * NY 198 PA 918 From 9/18:Evening lotteries Dec. 19: * NY 198 PA 414 From 4/14: Posted 12/20/2008 at 11:11 AM |
Inside the White Cube Part I: The White Cube Part II: Inside Part III: Outside Click to enlarge. Mark Tansey, The Key (1984) For remarks on religion related to the above, see Log24 on the Garden of Eden and also Mark C. Taylor, "What Derrida Really Meant" (New York Times, Oct. 14, 2004). For some background on Taylor, see Wikipedia. Taylor, Chairman of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, has a 1973 doctorate in religion from Harvard University. His opinion of Derrida indicates that his sympathies lie more with the serpent than with the angel in the Tansey picture above. For some remarks by Taylor on the art of Tansey relevant to the structure of the white cube (Part I above), see Taylor's The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (U. of Chicago Press, 1999):
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Polar Opposites Susan Sontag in this week's New Yorker: "The mind is a whore." Embedded in the Sontag article is the following: Act One South Pole: Shi Ho Act Two North Pole: Kun "If baby I'm the bottom, you're the top." -- Cole Porter Happy birthday, Steven Spielberg. Posted 12/18/2008 at 1:00 PM |
The Dance (continued) "... physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali...." Gary Zukav, Harvard '64 Posted 12/17/2008 at 12:00 AM |
The Square Wheel (continued) From The n-Category Cafe today: David Corfield at 2:33 PM UTC quoting a chapter from a projected second volume of a biography: "Grothendieck’s spontaneous reaction to whatever appeared to be causing a difficulty... was to adopt and embrace the very phenomenon that was problematic, weaving it in as an integral feature of the structure he was studying, and thus transforming it from a difficulty into a clarifying feature of the situation." John Baez at 7:14 PM UTC on research: "I just don’t want to reinvent a wheel, or waste my time inventing a square one." For the adoption and embracing of such a problematic phenomenon, see The Square Wheel (this journal, Sept. 14, 2004). For a connection of the square wheel with yesterday's entry for Julie Taymor's birthday, see a note from 2002: Wolfram's Theory of Everything and the Gameplayers of Zan. Related pictures-- From Wolfram: A Square From me: A Wheel Posted 12/16/2008 at 8:00 PM |
Happy Birthday, Julie Taymor "Julie Taymor... will be directing Helen Mirren in a big-screen adaptation of The Tempest. Dame Helen, in a gender-switch from the original, will be playing Prospera, the usurped Duchess possessed of a vast library and magical powers." -- John Murphy at Bardolatry.com on November 21, 2008 A vast library... On searching for Garden of Eden patterns (GEP's): "The grid is a staircase to the Universal...." -- Rosalind Krauss, quoted here on Weyl's birthday, 2004 "I find the whole topic of GEPs a deeply interesting one, from many viewpoints: mathematical, philosophical, physical.... ... the obvious problem is, that the required computational time is growing rapidly with the size of the grid, and even for a small grid, like 4x4 (=16 cells) there are 216=65536 possible patterns...." -- cateye at RichardDawkins.net ... and magical powers The date of cateye's post was Sunday, October 21, 2007. For related material see Log24 on Sunday, October 21, 2007. Posted 12/15/2008 at 3:09 PM |
Epigraphs 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.'"Epigraph for Part One: "Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane." Epigraph for Part Two: "Beware lest you believe that you can comprehend the Incomprehensible...." Posted 12/14/2008 at 4:00 PM |
Ideas and Steps "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas-- only I don't exactly know what they are!.... Let's have a look at the garden first!" -- A passage from Through the Looking-Glass "... it's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things." -- Anne McCaffrey On the seven steps of Charles Williams: "If we assume Williams was responding to a psychological need to express himself, then we may also assume that Williams wrote these seven steps in compliance with Jung's theory that an author, who believes strongly enough in some set of ideas, has to write about them." -- Dennis L. Weeks (a former student of Walter J. Ong, S. J.) in Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of Coinherence and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams (New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 1991), page 9 On the twelve steps of Christmas: So set 'em up, Joe... Posted 12/14/2008 at 11:00 AM |
Symmetry and Reflections A figure from Nobel Prize day, December 10, and from Eugene Wigner's birthday, November 17: Also on December 10: the death of Constantine-- (Click for details.) Related material: Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life, Photos by Tina Modotti, Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday, as well as Art Wars, June 1-15, 2007: "Ay que bonito es volar A las dos de la mañana...." -- "La Bruja" Posted 12/14/2008 at 2:00 AM |
The Shining of Dec. 13 continued from Dec. 13, 2003 "There is a place for a hint somewhere of a big agent to complete the picture." -- Notes for an unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald Internet Movie Database Filmography: William Grady The Good Earth (1937) casting: Chinese extras (uncredited) A Place for a Hint: (From the book Tangram) See also yesterday's entries as well as... Serpent's Eyes Shine, Alice's Tea Party, Janet's Tea Party, Hollywood Memory, and Hope of Heaven. "... it's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things." -- Anne McCaffrey Posted 12/13/2008 at 1:06 PM |
In memory of Van Johnson: "The Voiceless Sinatra."In memory of Cardinal Avery Dulles: "The God Factor." Posted 12/12/2008 at 6:34 PM |
On the Symmetric Group S8 Wikipedia on Rubik's 2×2×2 "Pocket Cube"-- Some pages related to this claim-- Simple Groups at Play Analyzing Rubik's Cube with GAP Online JavaScript Pocket Cube. The claim is of course trivially true for the unconnected subcubes of Froebel's Third Gift: © 2005 The Institute for Figuring Photo by Norman Brosterman fom the Inventing Kindergarten exhibit at The Institute for Figuring (co-founded by Margaret Wertheim) See also: MoMA Goes to Kindergarten, Tea Privileges, and "Ad Reinhardt and Tony Smith: A Dialogue," an exhibition opening today at Pace Wildenstein. For a different sort of dialogue, click on the artists' names above. For a different approach to S8, see Symmetries. "With humor, my dear Zilkov. Posted 12/12/2008 at 3:09 PM |
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas-- only I don't exactly know what they are!.... Let's have a look at the garden first!" -- A passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. The "garden" part-- but not the "ideas" part-- was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, "The Time before First." "'For you... he... we aren't meaning...' She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once.... Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. 'O!' she cried, 'O! I can't keep up! it keeps dividing! There's too many things to think of!'" -- A passage from Charles Williams's The Place of the Lion, Chapter 12. "He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out of nothing and followed each other-- what was to will? Will was determination to choose-- what was choice? How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not... So swiftly the questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on an unceasing and serpentine journey." -- A passage from The Place of the Lion, Chapter 10. "Do you like apples?" -- Good Will Hunting Posted 12/12/2008 at 12:24 PM |
Sign ho anax, hou to manteion esti to en Delphois, oute legei oute kruptei, alla sêmainei -- Heraclitus, DK 22 B 93, Kahn XXXIII: "The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign." A sign, perhaps of the sort given by Apollo's oracle: Click on the sign for further details. Related material: This week's New Yorker... ... as well as today's previous entry -- "Symbol," discussing Apollo and a web page by Nick Wedd -- and Wedd's home page, which states that "I have now found a source of Polish sandals." Posted 12/10/2008 at 9:00 PM |
Symbol "If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist." -- Margaret Atwood, quoted here on November 17, 2008 A symbol of Apollo Related material: A web page by Nick Wedd at Oxford with a neater version of pictures I drew on March 26, 1985 (Recall that Apollo is the god of, among other things, reason.) Posted 12/10/2008 at 3:26 PM |
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The Simplest Terms "Broken down in the simplest terms, the story centres around two warring factions, the 'Fathers' and the 'Friends.'" -- Summary of "Wild Palms" Today's birthdays: Kirk Douglas, Buck Henry, John Malkovich. In a nutshell: The Soul's Code and today's previous entry. Posted 12/9/2008 at 7:00 PM |
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Last night on TNT: The Librarian Part 3: Curse of the Judas Chalice, in which The Librarian encounters the mysterious Professor Lazlo Related material: An Arthur Waite quotation from the Feast of St. Nicholas: "It is like the lapis exilis of the German Graal legend" as well as yesterday's entry relating Margaret Wertheim's "Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet" to a different sort of space-- that of the I Ching-- and to Professor Laszlo Lovasz's "cube space" "Click on the Yellow Book." Happy birthday, David Carradine. Posted 12/8/2008 at 10:12 AM |
Premiere on TNT tonight: The Librarian 3: Curse of the Judas Chalice Posted 12/7/2008 at 7:07 PM |
Space and the Soul On a book by Margaret Wertheim: "She traces the history of space beginning with the cosmology of Dante. Her journey continues through the historical foundations of celestial space, relativistic space, hyperspace, and, finally, cyberspace." --Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago, in Library Journal, 1999 (quoted at Amazon.com) There are also other sorts of space. © 2005 The Institute for Figuring Photo by Norman Brosterman fom the Inventing Kindergarten exhibit at The Institute for Figuring (co-founded by Margaret Wertheim) This photo may serve as an introduction to a different sort of space. See The Eightfold Cube. For the religious meaning of this small space, see Richard Wilhelm on the eight I Ching trigrams. For a related larger space, see the entry and links of St. Augustine's Day, 2006. Posted 12/7/2008 at 11:00 AM |
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Another Opening, Another Show "While feasts of Saint Nicholas are not observed nationally, cities with strong German influences like Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis celebrate St. Nick's Day on a scale similar to the German custom." --Wikipedia A footprint from Germany:
The link in the above footprint leads to an entry of July 5, 2006. The access method:
For more pictures and discussion of the object fetched by Python, see Anti-Christmas 2007. For a larger and more sophisticated relative of that object, see Solomon's Cube and the related three presents from the German link's target:
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Shining Forth
et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt Mihai Spariosu on Heidegger: ... the mirroring ... is to be conceived of as a shining forth, a play of mirror flashes, as it were.... The four "mirrors" emerge into presence as light at the same time that they converge.... The above image: Axes of Reflection and Annunciation, the latter being a detail of a fresco by Giotto on the cover of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. Happy Feast of St. Nicholas. Posted 12/6/2008 at 12:09 AM |
Continued from Monday: A Version of Heaven's Gate in memory of Alexy II, the Russian Orthodox patriarch who died today in Moscow: The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: From Geoffrey Broadbent, "Why a Black Square?" in Malevich (London, Art and Design/ Academy Group, 1989, p. 49): "Malevich's Black Square seems to be nothing more, nor less, than his 'Non-Objective' representation of Bragdon's (human-being-as) Cube passing through the 'Plane of Reality.'!" Posted 12/5/2008 at 4:30 PM |
Mirror-Play of the Fourfold For an excellent commentary on this concept of Heidegger, View selected pages from the book Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse (Mihai I. Spariosu, Cornell U. Press, 1989) Related material: the logo for a web page-- -- and Theme and Variations. Posted 12/5/2008 at 1:06 PM |
The Dormouse of Perception This evening I noticed in the New York Times the obituary of Oliver Selfridge, an early writer on artificial intelligence and machine perception. Selfridge apparently died yesterday. The author of the obituary is John Markoff, who wrote a book on the early development of the personal computer in the San Francisco area-- What the Dormouse Said. The title quotes Grace Slick. For the dormouse himself, see the previous entry. Posted 12/4/2008 at 10:31 PM |
From the author of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: "Like so many other heroes who have seen the light of a higher order...." For further backstory, click on the mouse. Posted 12/4/2008 at 12:00 PM |
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Smiley
Meanwhile, at National Geographic: Jupiter, Venus, Moon Make "Frown" A Midrash for Maureen: Related material on Pasadena: Happy birthday, R. P. Dilworth. Related material on India: The Shining of May 29 (2002) and A Well-Known Theorem (2005). "Sometimes a line of mathematical research extending through decades can be thought of as one long conversation in which many mathematicians take part. This is fortunately true at present...." -- Barry Mazur in 2000 as quoted today at the University of St. Andrews Posted 12/2/2008 at 11:09 AM |
A Version of Heaven's Gate in memory of G. H. Hardy, who died on this date in 1947 C. P. Snow on Hardy: "He was living in some of the best intellectual company in the world-- G.E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Trevelyan, the high Trinity society which was shortly to find its artistic complement in Bloomsbury." For a rather different artistic complement, see the previous entry. Posted 12/1/2008 at 8:48 PM |
From Braque's birthday, 2006: "The senses deform, the mind forms. Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives." -- Georges Braque, Reflections on Painting, 1917 Those who wish to follow Braque's advice may try the following exercise from a book first published in 1937: Hint: See the following construction of a tesseract: From a page by Bryan Clair For a different view of the square and cube see yesterday's entry Abstraction and Faith. Posted 12/1/2008 at 12:00 PM |