A short story for the conclusion of Mental Health Month, 2008: 752, 753, 286. (Numbers courtesy of the Pennsylvania Lottery, evening of May 30- evening of May 31) Commentary on the meaning of this short story: Countdown Posted 5/31/2008 at 9:00 PM |
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Tequila Mockingbird (November 5, 2002):
Related material: Twenty-First Century Fox (10/6/02) Back to You, Kylie (11/5/02) Time, Eternity, and Grace (11/22/02) That Old Devil Moon (1/1/03) and The Shanghai Gesture (1/3/03) Whirligig (1/5/03) Harrowing (4/19/03) Temptation (4/22/03) Temptation (4/9/04) Tribute, Train of Thought, Drunk Bird, and From Here to Eternity (8/17/04-8/18/04) Heaven and Earth (9/2/04) Habeas Corpus (11/24/04) X, continued (12/4/04) Birth and Death (5/28/05) Time Travel (5/28/06) Timeagain and Two-Bar Hook (8/9/06) Echoes (8/11/06) Phantasmagoria and Tequila! (9/23/06) Posted 5/28/2008 at 12:00 PM |
From the Cartoon Graveyard The above is from The Paradise of Childhood, a work first published in 1869. For the late Thelma Keane, wife of "Family Circus" cartoonist Bil Keane of Paradise Valley, Arizona: "I need a photo-opportunity, I want a shot at redemption.* Don't want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard." -- Paul Simon * Mrs. Keane died May 23 (St. Sarah's Eve) according to The Washington Post. Related material: Log24 on May 23, Saints in Australia. Posted 5/27/2008 at 7:00 PM |
For Sydney Pollack (See last night's entry.) "Now, gentlemen, I give you our latest acquisition from the enemy." -- Paths of Glory Note the number, 701, on the colonel's collar. Adapted from Log24, February 19-22, 2008:
"'This is the last call for Jaunt-701,' the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York's Port Authority Terminal.... See 2/22/08, ....'What happened?' one of the scientists shouted.... 'It's eternity in there,' he said, and dropped dead...." -- Stephen King, "The Jaunt" Die Liebe nahm kein Ende mehr. Posted 5/27/2008 at 2:02 PM |
Great Directors "After his return to acting in 'Tootsie,' Pollack took
movie roles under directors Robert Altman in 'The Player'
(1992), Woody Allen in 'Husbands and Wives' (1992) and Stanley
Kubrick in 'Eyes Wide Shut' (1999). He said he chose roles in
part to study other great directors." Posted 5/26/2008 at 10:00 PM |
Crystal Vision Stevie Nicks is 60 today. On the author discussed here yesterday, Siri Hustvedt: "... she explores -- Janet Burroway,
-- Annals of Art Education: Geometry and Death * Related material: the life and work of Felix Christian Klein and Report to the Joint Mathematics Meetings Posted 5/26/2008 at 11:07 AM |
Today's Sermon continued from 9 AM -- Pennsylvania Lottery today: Mid-day 105, Evening 304 Related material: 1/05, 2003, 3/04, 2004 "Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself...." -- Siri Hustvedt, quoted here this morning "A poem should not mean But be" -- Archibald MacLeish, quoted here May 23 Posted 5/25/2008 at 10:30 PM |
Hall of Mirrors Epigraph to "Deploying the Glass Bead Game, Part II," by Robert de Marrais: “For a complete logical argument,” Arthur began with admirable solemnity, “we need two prim Misses –” “Of course!” she interrupted. “I remember that word now. And they produce -- ?” “A Delusion,” said Arthur. -- Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Prim Miss 1: Erin O'Connor's weblog "Critical Mass" on May 24: Roger Rosenblatt's Beet [Ecco hardcover, Jan. 29, 2008] is the latest addition to the noble sub-genre of campus fiction.... Curricular questions and the behavior of committees are at once dry as dust subjects and areas ripe for sarcastic send-up-- not least because, as dull as they are, they are really both quite vital to the credibility and viability of higher education. Here's an excerpt from the first meeting, in which committee members propose their personal plans for a new, improved curriculum:
Prim Miss 2: Siri Hustvedt speaks at Adelaide Writers' Week-- a story dated March 24, A Delusion: Exercise -- Identify in the following article the sentence that one might (by unfairly taking it out of context) argue is a delusion. (Hint: See Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry.) Why Borovik's Figure 4 Euclid, Peirce, L'Engle: No Royal Roads. For more on Prim Miss 2 and deploying the Glass Bead Game, see the previous entry. And now, perhaps, his brother Cornell Capa, who died Friday. † Related material: Log24 on March 24-- Death and the Apple Tree-- with an excerpt from George MacDonald, and an essay by David L. Neuhouser mentioning the influence of MacDonald on Lewis Carroll-- Lewis Carroll: Author, Mathematician, and Christian (pdf). Posted 5/25/2008 at 6:30 PM |
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Wechsler Cubes "Confusion is nothing new." -- Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper Part I: Magister Ludi Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)-- "For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist-- one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors." Part II: A Bulky Memorandum From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)-- What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)-- A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist: "Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large-- about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion-- to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised-- one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has -- End of page 168 --opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection-- and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube. The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself-- that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page." Part III: Wechsler Cubes (named not for Bill Wechsler, the fictional artist above, but for the non-fictional David Wechsler) --
Part IV: A Magic Gallery
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"Caught up in circles..." -- Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper Alethiometer from "The Golden Compass" The I Ching as Alethiometer Update: See also this morning's later entry, illustrating the next line of Cyndi Lauper's classic lyric "Time After Time" -- "... Confusion is nothing new." Posted 5/25/2008 at 8:28 AM |
Time After Time From the five entries ending on St. Bridget's Day, 2008: Dana R. Wright on James Edwin Loder, Jr.-- "At his memorial service his daughter Tami told the story of 'little Jimmy,' whose kindergarten teacher recognized a special quality of mind that set him apart. 'Every day we read a story, and after the story is over, Jimmy gets up and wants to tell us what the story means.'" believe in time." -- Nabokov, Speak, Memory From May 20: "Welcome to the Garden Club, Pilgrim." Related material: Primitive Roots and a video from Perth, Australia: "The drum beats out of time" -- Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper Posted 5/24/2008 at 8:48 AM |
Happy St. Sarah's Day "...something I once heard -- William F. House, Posted 5/23/2008 at 11:07 PM |
The Idea of Identity "Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday...." -- Bernard Holland Linked to on Monday, May 19: Conclusion of "Analyze That" -- "There's a place for us...." New York Timeson Friday, May 23: "A poem should not mean But be" -- Archibald MacLeish, quoted in a Friday comment on a Thursday night column by Rosanne Cash Thursday evening photo by Josh Haner for Friday's online New York Times: Brooklyn Bridge Turns 125 Posted 5/23/2008 at 11:28 AM |
841: Dublin founded by Danish [?] Vikings 9/04: In a Nutshell: The Seed (See also Hamlet's Transformation.) The moral of this story, it's simple but it's true: Hey, the stars might lie, but the numbers never do. -- Mary Chapin Carpenter Posted 5/22/2008 at 10:07 PM |
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The Undertaking: An Exercise in Conceptual Art Hexagram 54: THE JUDGMENT Undertakings bring misfortune. Nothing that would further. "Brian O'Doherty, an Irish-born artist, before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake of his alter ego* 'Patrick Ireland' on the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art." -- New York Times, May 22, 2008 THE IMAGE Thus the superior man understands the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end. Another version of the image: See 2/22/08 Related material: Michael Kimmelman in today's New York Times-- "An essay from the '70s by Mr. O'Doherty, 'Inside the White Cube,' became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown." Brian O'Doherty, "Inside the White Cube," 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art: "The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first.... An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art." See also Epiphany 2008: "Nothing that would further." -- Hexagram 54
".... in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead." -- The Greater Trumps,by Charles Williams, Ch. 14 * For a different, Jungian, alter ego, see Irish Fourplay (Jan. 31, 2003) and "Outside the Box," a New York Times review of O'Doherty's art (featuring a St. Bridget's Cross) by Bridget L. Goodbody dated April 25, 2007. See also Log24 on that date. Posted 5/22/2008 at 9:00 AM |
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The China Candidate In honor of the 100th birthday of actor James Stewart, Turner Classic Movies is now showing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In light of an ABC News story tonight, Report: U.S. Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators, the following film seems more relevant: Welcome to the Garden Club, Pilgrim Related material: The Dictatorship of Talent, by David Brooks in The New York Times of December 4, 2007: "When you talk to Americans, you find that they have all these weird
notions about Chinese communism. You try to tell them that China isn’t
a communist country anymore. It’s got a different system: meritocratic
paternalism. You joke: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of
the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the
Harvard Alumni Association with an army." and Harvard mathematician See also Sylvia Nasar's 2006 New Yorker article on Yau and the screenplay of The Manchurian Candidate: A long pause. Posted 5/20/2008 at 10:00 PM |
The Unembarrassed Peddler (For readers of the previous entry who would like to know more about purchasing the Brooklyn Bridge) From yesterday's New York Times, in an obituary of a teacher of reporters: "He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately compose dictated sentences, like this one: 'Outside a cemetery sat a harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady's ankle with unparalleled ecstasy.'" Spelling Your Way To Success Chapter I: "gnawing on a desiccated potato"
From elespectador.com: "... 'Supercholita' tiene sobre todo una clara vocación divulgadora de la cultura andina. No en vano Valdez recibió su primer premio por explicar mediante este personaje cómo se cocina el 'chuño,' una típica patata deshidratada muy consumida en el altiplano boliviano." Chapter II: "gazing on the symmetry of a lady's ankle" From "Sinatra: A Man and His Music, Part II" (reshown. prior to "It Happened in Brooklyn," by Turner Classic Movies on Sunday, May 11, 2008): "Luck, be a lady tonight." From wordinfo.info: astragalo-, astragal- (Greek: anklebone, talus ball of ankle joint; dice, die [the Greeks made these from ankle bones]) astragalomancy, astragyromancy
Divination
with dice, knuckle bones, stones, small pieces of wood, or ankle bones
which were marked with letters, symbols, or dots. Using dice for
divination is a form of astragalomancy. Chapter III: "unparalleled ecstasy" Bright Star -- ... Todo lo sé por el lucero puro -- Rubén Darío Posted 5/20/2008 at 1:06 PM |
Special to The Brooklyn Eagle-- The Cobbler, the Peddler, and the Cemetery Today's New York Times, in an obituary of a teacher of reporters: "He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately compose dictated sentences, like this one: 'Outside a cemetery sat a harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady's ankle with unparalleled ecstasy.'" Posted 5/19/2008 at 9:49 AM |
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"Well now what can I say at the end of the day?" -- Country song lyric
Und was für _______________________________ "How'd yuh know deh was such a place," I says, "if yuh neveh been deh befoeh?" "Oh," he says, "I got a map." "A map?" I says. "Sure," he says, "I got a map dat tells me about all dese places. I take it wit me every time I come out heah," he says. And Jesus! Wit dat, he pulls it out of his pocket, an' so help me, but he's got it-- he's tellin' duh troot-- a big map of duh whole f_____ place...." -- Thomas Wolfe of Asheville, North Carolina Posted 5/18/2008 at 8:48 PM |
From the Grave "From the grave, Albert Einstein "Coxeter exhuming Geometry," with the latter's tombstone inscribed "GEOMETRY 600 B.C. -- 1900 A.D. R.I.P." The above is from The Paradise of Childhood, a work first published in 1869. "I need a photo-opportunity, I want a shot at redemption. Don't want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard." -- Paul Simon Albert Einstein, 1879-1955: "It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which
was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of
the 'merely-personal,' from an existence which is dominated by wishes,
hopes and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge
world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands
before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to
our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world
beckoned like a liberation...." -- Autobiographical Notes, 1949 Related material: A commentary on Tom Wolfe's "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died"-- "The Neural Buddhists," by David Brooks, in the May 13 New York Times: "The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real." A New Yorker commentary on a new translation of the Psalms: "Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: 'So teach us to number our days.'" and a May 13 Log24 commentary on Thomas Wolfe's "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn"-- "... all good things -- trout as well as eternal salvation -- come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy." -- A River Runs Through It "Art isn't easy." -- Stephen Sondheim, quoted in Solomon's Cube. For further religious remarks, consult Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines. Posted 5/18/2008 at 2:02 PM |
A less controversial Einstein-related remark: "The relativity problem is one of central significance throughout geometry and algebra and has been recognized as such by the mathematicians at an early time."-- Hermann Weyl, "Relativity Theory as a Stimulus in Mathematical Research," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 93, No. 7, Theory of Relativity in Contemporary Science: Papers Read at the Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday of Professor Albert Einstein in Princeton, March 19, 1949 (Dec. 30, 1949), pp. 535-541 Posted 5/16/2008 at 11:22 PM |
Only the Dead Know Brooklyn (continued from April 2004) David Brooks in today's New York Times: "The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real." Sometimes in rather strange ways... An example-- Sunday morning's entry Annals of Poetry was linked, via the word "tesseract," to an entry of May 12, 2006, which in turn had a link to the Log24 entries of February 1-15, 2003. From those entries:
Last Sunday night (May 11), Turner Classic Movies showed a film featuring Jimmy Durante as a singing-master of Frank Sinatra: From earlier this month, an entry featuring Sinatra and a different singing-master -- not from Brooklyn but from Tidioute --
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In memory of poet May Swenson and sports novelist Rozanne Ruth "Zan" Knudson: Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times: "It's a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn's star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in 'Pat and Mike.' "Then she has a vision of herself,
"Does the word 'tesseract' Posted 5/11/2008 at 10:31 AM |
MoMA Goes to Kindergarten "... the startling thesis of Mr. Brosterman's new book, 'Inventing Kindergarten' (Harry N. Abrams, $39.95): that everything the giants of modern art and architecture knew about abstraction they learned in kindergarten, thanks to building blocks and other educational toys designed by Friedrich Froebel, a German educator, who coined the term 'kindergarten' in the 1830's." -- "Was Modernism Born in Toddler Toolboxes?" by Trip Gabriel, New York Times, April 10, 1997 RELATED MATERIAL Figure 1 -- Concept from 1819: (Footnotes 1 and 2) Figure 2 -- The Third Gift, 1837: Froebel's Third Gift Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten, worked as an assistant to the crystallographer Weiss mentioned in Fig. 1. (Footnote 3) Figure 3 -- The Third Gift, 1906: Figure 4 -- Solomon's Cube, 1981 and 1983: Figure 5 -- Design Cube, 2006: The above screenshot shows a moveable JavaScript display of a space of six dimensions (over the two-element field). (To see how the display works, try the Kaleidoscope Puzzle first.) For some mathematical background, see Footnotes: 1. Image said to be after Holden and Morrison, Crystals and Crystal Growing, 1982 2. Curtis Schuh, "The Library: Biobibliography of Mineralogy," article on Mohs 3. Bart Kahr, "Crystal Engineering in Kindergarten" (pdf), Crystal Growth & Design, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2004, 3-9 Posted 5/10/2008 at 8:00 AM |
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Cubist Language Game "Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday...." -- Bernard Holland
Related material for today's anniversay of the birth of philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset: Cubism as Multispeech and Halloween Meditations (illustrated below) "Modern art... will always have the masses against it." -- Ortega y Gasset, 1925 Posted 5/9/2008 at 10:31 AM |
Kernel of Eternity continued from April 29 Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe): In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A4 (and also the symmetric group S4) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S4 to S3. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.For radicals of another sort, see A Logocentric Meditation, A Mass for Lucero, and Steven Erlanger in The New York Times-- "France Still Divided Over Lessons of 1968 Unrest." The Klein Group as Kernel of a Map from S4 to S3: Click to enlarge. For those who prefer Galois's politics to his mathematics, there is MAY 68: STREET POSTERS FROM THE PARIS REBELLION at London's Southbank Centre (May 1 - June 1, 2008). Posted 5/9/2008 at 9:00 AM |
Synchronicity, Part Deux From "On the Holy Trinity," the entry in the 3:20 PM French footprint: "...while the scientist sees "Angel in the Details," the entry in the 3:59 PM French footprint: "I dwell in Possibility - A fairer House than Prose" -- Emily Dickinson These, along with this afternoon's earlier entry, suggest a review of a third Log24 item, Windmills, with an actress from France as...
"When life itself seems lunatic, -- For the source, see Posted 5/8/2008 at 4:48 PM |
Synchronicity Today is the feast of Saint Robert A. Heinlein. Time of the above: 1:00 PM. Update of 2:07 PM -- On the local Charlie Rose broadcast today at about 1:48 PM, Paola Antonelli, the organizer of an exhibit at MoMA, "Design and the Elastic Mind," talked about science fiction's influence (or non-influence) on the exhibit. She used the metaphor "the day after tomorrow." As I had just written a link relating design, science fiction, and May 10 (the date of the literal day after tomorrow-- click on "feast" above), I found her remarks of interest. Here is a related passage from a web page. Antonelli on scientists as designers who do not call themselves designers: "So they all try to reach out. They have that in common. Then what they have in common is this attempt to... propose something for the real future. I don't really like science fiction, but I like to think of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow." Amen. Posted 5/8/2008 at 1:00 PM |
Star Wars "JERUSALEM, May 7 (Reuters) - Fireworks and military fanfare launched Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations on Wednesday..." Related material from Tuesday: "... someone was down sixty, someone was up...." -- Play It As It Lays Posted 5/8/2008 at 12:00 PM |
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"It
seems to me that we are headed straight towards what C. L. Siegel called
'the theory of the empty set.'" Posted 5/7/2008 at 5:36 PM |
Forms of the Rock "point A / In a perspective -- Wallace Stevens, See also December 10, 2004January 11, 2006 April 30, 2006 August 25, 2006 August 26, 2006 February 6, 2007 July 23, 2007 July 24, 2007 September 30, 2007 April 14, 2008 Christmas Eve, 1981 Posted 5/7/2008 at 7:00 AM |
In the Dreamtime the Point Was Ten From Play It As It Lays,
For further details see yesterday's entries. "In her half sleep the point was ten...." -- Play It As It Lays The Random House signed first edition of Norman Mailer's The Time of Our Time (4 pounds, 1286 pages) was published ten years ago yesterday -- May 5, 1998: Fireworks starburst on the cover of The Time of Our Time Also from May 5, 1998: File Photo in Mailer's obituary -- (Photo by Bebeto Matthews with Mailer obituary in Toronto Globe and Mail) with excerpt from the obituary, by Richard Pyle (Associated Press Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007 at 8:20 AM EDT) Related material: Yesterday's entries and the time of this entry: 11:07:51 AM ET 51 THE JUDGMENTin light of...
Posted 5/6/2008 at 11:07 AM |
Time and the River "At the edge of the meadow flowed the river. Nick was glad to get to the river. He walked upstream through the meadow." Pennsylvania Lottery May 5, 2008: Related material: 2/16, 7/25 "In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today." Posted 5/5/2008 at 11:07 PM |
New York Lottery
May 5, 2008: The evening number, 411, may be interpreted as 4/11. From Log24 on that date: As for the mid-day number 098, a Google search (with the aid of, in retrospect, the above family tribute) on "98 'Norman Mailer'" yields
From an unattributed "editorial review" of The Time of Our Time at Amazon.com: "Surely this sense of himself as the republic's recording angel accounts for the structure of Mailer's anthology...." Related material: From Play It As It Lays,
The number 411 from this evening's New York Lottery may thus be regarded as naming the "exact point in space and time" sought in the above passage. For a related midrash on the meaning of the passage's page number, see the previous entry. For a more plausible recording angel, see Sinatra's birthday, December 12, 2002. Posted 5/5/2008 at 9:00 PM |
Lottery Sermon "And take upon's the mystery of things as if we were God's spies" -- King Lear From Log24 on Aug. 19, 2003 and on Ash Wednesday, 2004: a reviewer on An Instance of the Fingerpost:: "Perhaps we are meant to see the story as a cubist retelling of the crucifixion." From Log24 on Michaelmas 2007: Google searches suggested by Sunday's PA lottery numbers (mid-day 170, evening 144) and by the above figure of Kate Beckinsale pointing to an instance of the number 144 -- Click to enlarge: Related material: Beckinsale in another film (See At the Crossroads, Log24, Dec. 8, 2006): "For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross." -- Gravity's Rainbow There is such a thing as a tesseract. "It was only in retrospect that the silliness became profound." -- Review of Faust in Copenhagen From the conclusion of "I know what 'nothing' means, From Play It As It Lays,
"The page numbers are generally reliable." -- Michaelmas 2007 Posted 5/5/2008 at 11:07 AM |
The Old School
These
little town blues...
"... all good things -- trout as well as eternal salvation -- come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy." -- A River Runs Through It Posted 5/4/2008 at 10:12 AM |
"Teach us to number our days." -- Psalm 90, verse 12 The New Yorker,
issue dated Oct. 1, 2007 -- James Wood on Robert Alter's new translation of the Psalms: "At any time, God can cancel a life. 'So teach us to number our days,'
as the King James Version has it, 'that we may apply our hearts unto
wisdom.'.... The ancient Hebrew word for the shadowy underworld where the dead go, Sheol, was Christianized as 'Hell,' even though there is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible. Alter prefers the words 'victory' and 'rescue' as translations of yeshu'ah, and eschews the Christian version, which is the heavily loaded 'salvation.' And so on. Stripping his English of these artificial cleansers, Alter takes us back to the essence of the meaning. Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: 'So teach us to number our days.'" Today's numbers from the Pennsylvania Lottery: which, being interpreted, is 5/10 and 7/24. Selah. Posted 5/3/2008 at 11:07 PM |
A Balliol Star In memory of mathematician Graham Higman of Balliol College and Magdalen College, Oxford, Jan. 19, 1917 - April 8, 2008 From a biography of an earlier Balliol student, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): "In 1867 he won First-Class degrees in Classics and 'Greats' (a rare 'double-first') and was considered by Jowett to be the star of Balliol." Hopkins, a poet who coined the term "inscape," was a member of the Society of Jesus. From a publication of that society, The Invariant, Issue 15-- undated but (according to Issue 16, of 2005) from 1996 (pdf):
Another approach to the expression f(f(x)), by myself in 1982: For further details, see Inscapes. For more about Higman, see an interview in the September 2001 newsletter of the European Mathematical Society (pdf). "Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday...." -- Bernard Holland Posted 5/2/2008 at 12:00 PM |
Back from the Shadows
Today's Doonesbury (a flashback) -- "Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake." -- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast Posted 5/1/2008 at 12:00 PM |
x Posted 5/1/2008 at 2:00 AM |