Sunday, May 18, 2014
From Australian National University:
Biography
Mark Elvin retired from the University in 2006,
and, apart from an occasional semi-popular article
and review, and offering comments at a handful of
conferences each year, has moved away from his
previous research interests in Chinese history, and is
working on annotating his draft translation of a
crucial but relatively neglected European work
in Latin on plant science, R. J. Camerer’s
De sexu plantarum epistola
[Letter on the sexuality of plants] of 1694.
In other news:
* Background for the title: Rainbow Bridge in Maui and in this journal.
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See also this journal on January 21, 2014.
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From 1972:
From 2014:
“Since when did you start writing Chinese?” — Lucy trailer
See also the Saturday night 11:30 post.
Wolven’s Lucy midrash is from April 3. See also this journal on that date.
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Saturday, May 17, 2014
See the Field
“There have long been rumors of a mythical Ninth Element
that grants ultimate power to the Wizard who masters it.
The Order of Magick says there is no such thing. But….”
— Website of Magicka: The Ninth Element Novel
William Worthy in Beijing —
This journal on the date of Worthy’s death,
May 4, 2014, had a link to…
The Holy Field
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The title is a quote from Stephen Dedalus during
the Black Mass scene in Ulysses. (See May 12.)
Material related to the Ulysses scene:
Material related to pure reason (also from the above PS1 date):
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Friday, May 16, 2014
Or: Death Edit
Log24 on the reported date of Sturtevant’s death:
|
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See also a Log24 search for “Zeppelin.”
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From this journal last March:
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Thursday, May 15, 2014
The title is a line from a preview of the new
film “The Double,” starring Jesse Eisenberg:
Related lines from T. S. Eliot:
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
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On Edward Frenkel:
"Math is, for him, 'a narrative' of human endeavor
that shares much with art, music and religion.
For instance, he describes new mathematical insights
as 'revelations,' and the utterly unchanging truths of
mathematical ideas are 'nothing short of a miracle.'"
Uh-huh.
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“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Photo of full moon over Oslo last night by Josefine Lyche:
A scene from my film viewing last night:
Some background (click to enlarge):
Note:
The “I, Frankenstein” scene above should not be interpreted as
a carrying of Martin Gardner through a lyche gate. Gardner
is, rather, symbolized by the asterisk in the first image from
the above Google search.
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Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Continued from this morning and from earlier posts.
See also Abramson.
Related material: Ken Auletta, “Why Jill Abramson Was Fired.”
* Background for the title phrase: see Down + Up + Staircase.
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"It was our old friend Pythagoras who discovered
that the pentagram was full of mathematics."
— Narrator, "Donald in Mathmagic Land," Disney, 1959
… and it was Peter J. Cameron who discovered that
mathematics was full of pentagrams.
From Log24 on May 3: Gray Space —
Robert J. Stewart (left) and a pentagram photo posted May 2
by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche. See also Lyche in this journal.
From Log24 on May 13: An Artist's Memorial —
The death mentioned in the above May 13 post occurred on
May 12, the date of a scheduled Black Mass at Harvard.
Related material:
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See last night’s pentagram photo and a post from May 13, 2012.
That post links to a little-known video of a 1972 film.
A speech from the film was used by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche as a
voice-over in her 2011 golden-ratio video (with pentagrams) that she
exhibited along with a large, wall-filling copy of some of my own work.
The speech (see video below) is clearly nonsense.
The patterns* Lyche copied are not.
“Who are you, anyway?”
— Question at 00:41 of 15:00, Rainbow Bridge (Part 5 of 9)
at YouTube, addressed to Baron Bingen as “Mr. Rabbit”
* Patterns exhibited again later, apparently without the Lyche pentagram video.
It turns out, by the way, that Lyche created that video by superimposing
audio from the above “Rainbow Bridge” film onto a section of Disney’s 1959
“Donald in Mathmagic Land” (see 7:17 to 8:57 of the 27:33 Disney video).
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Tuesday, May 13, 2014
See the above weblog post honoring a Swiss artist‘s
“wit, his perception, his genius, his horizon,
his determination, his humour, his friendship,
and his immeasurable kindness.”
Not a bad sendoff. Contrast with events at Harvard
on the date of the artist’s death.
Related material: An album cover, and …
See also this journal in September 2008.
As far as Swiss art goes, I personally prefer the work of, say,
Karl Gerstner and Paul Talman.
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Click the above quote for some related material.
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The title is that of a short story in Dubliners , by James Joyce.
See in that story the phrase “Grey-green eyes.”
See also the tag #greygreengrids on an Oslo artist’s photo today.
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Monday, May 12, 2014
For those disappointed by the cancellation
of this evening’s Black Mass at Harvard,
here is a somewhat less exciting substitute.
See also Peter J. Cameron + Magic.
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Sunday, May 11, 2014
From a New York Times obituary by Bruce Weber tonight—
Charles Marowitz, Director and Playwright, Dies at 82
“There are two kinds of bafflement in the theater: the kind that fascinates as it perplexes, and the kind that just perplexes,” he wrote in The Times in 1969 in an essay about Mr. Shepard’s play “La Turista,” which had recently opened in London. “If a play doesn’t make quick sense, but enters into some kind of dialogue with our subconscious, we tend to admit it to that lounge where we entertain interesting-albeit-unfamiliar strangers.
“If it only baffles, there are several courses open to us: we can assume it is ‘above our heads’ or directed ‘to some other kind of person,’ or regretfully conclude that it confuses us because it is itself confused. However, the fear of being proved wrong is so great today that almost every new work which isn’t patently drivel gets the benefit of the doubt.”
Another play by Sam Shepard mentioned in the obituary suggests a review of…
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GOD is “Good Orderly Direction.” — AA saying.
See also yesterday’s noon post, with four orderly directions.
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Saturday, May 10, 2014
To Bel Kaufman, author of
Up the Down Staircase.
Click image for some backstory.
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Raven’s Progressive Matrices intelligence test—
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test—
Related art — (Click images for further details.)
Patterns suggesting those of the Raven test:
Patterns suggesting those of the Wechsler test:
The latter patterns were derived from the former.
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Friday, May 9, 2014
Para una Versión del I King
por Jorge Luis Borges
El porvenir es tan irrevocable
como el rígido ayer. No hay una cosa
que no sea una letra silenciosa
de la eterna escritura indescifrable
cuyo libro es el tiempo. Quien se aleja
de su casa ya ha vuelto. Nuestra vida
es la senda futura y recorrida.
Nada nos dice adiós. Nada nos deja.
No te rindas. La ergástula es oscura,
la firme trama es de incesante hierro,
pero en algún recodo de tu encierro
puede haber un descuido, una hendidura.
El camino es fatal como la flecha
pero en las grietas está Dios, que acecha.
— La Moneda de Hierro (1976)
For a translation, see a Dickinson College page.
See also Wrinkles in Time and Models of Everything.
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“The About page contains detailed descriptions of the project….”
— The Illustris project on constructing a model of the universe
For the mathematics of a simpler traditional Chinese model
of everything, see
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Thursday, May 8, 2014
Rivka Galchen, in a piece mentioned here in June 2010—
On Borges: Imagining the Unwritten Book
"Think of it this way: there is a vast unwritten book that the heart reacts to, that it races and skips in response to, that it believes in. But it’s the heart’s belief in that vast unwritten book that brought the book into existence; what appears to be exclusively a response (the heart responding to the book) is, in fact, also a conjuring (the heart inventing the book to which it so desperately wishes to respond)."
Related fictions
Galchen's "The Region of Unlikeness" (New Yorker , March 24, 2008)
Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life." A film adaptation is to star Amy Adams.
… and non-fiction
"There is such a thing as a 4-set." — January 31, 2012
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From a Log24 search for “Boxing Day“—
(Click image for some commentary.)
From The New York Times —
Correction: Jan. 16, 2006
“An obituary on Dec. 27 about John Diebold,
a businessman and engineer who helped shape
modern industrial development in America,
misstated a business venture of John Diebold Inc.,
an investment firm he founded in 1967. It did
not finance Diebold Election Systems, a maker of
polling machines that, despite its name, has no
connection to John Diebold.”
Related material:
Synchronicity and this journal on the date of the correction.
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Wednesday, May 7, 2014
For the title…
See Punch (Dec. 15, 2010) and Obituary (today):
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This post was suggested by last night’s posts on conceptual art
(in São Paulo) and on a quarter-to-three story.
From this journal on May 31, 2012:
Matrix Problem:
Click image for some related material.
Meanwhile…
A game released on the above date:
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… at quarter to three:
See also Stephen King and Steam in this journal.
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Yesterday’s online New York Times has the following quote:
“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
— Sol LeWitt
For instance, some conceptual art not by LeWitt:
Diamond Theory Roulette (Feb. 2, 2014).
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Tuesday, May 6, 2014
From The Ninth Element website:
Cover of a Norwegian author’s forthcoming novel:
For some Norwegian non-fiction, see an Oslo artist’s Instagram page.
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Monday, May 5, 2014
Click image below for the source.
“Together in heaven” — Phrase quoted in Norwegian, Piper Laurie, 1958
“As a little child” — Biblical phrase
“Cool.” — Phrase suggested by this morning’s weather:
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Wikipedia on Autodesk Maya:
“The product is named after the Sanskrit word
Maya (माया māyā), the Hindu concept of illusion.”
See also the poem in this year’s Easter Sunday post.
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Some might prefer the “human globe.” See St. Cecilia’s day last year.
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Sunday, May 4, 2014
Link to song and lyrics.
“There’s plenty of dives to be someone you’re not
Just say you’re looking for something you might have forgot”
— Rosanne Cash, 1981
See also Cantina in this journal.
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See also…
and … in this journal, the author of The Plumed Serpent.
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Scarlett Johansson stars in a new film, "Lucy," due to be
released on August 8, directed by Luc Besson, auteur of
The Fifth Element (1997). In other pop culture…
"There have long been rumors of a mythical Ninth Element
that grants ultimate power to the Wizard who masters it.
The Order of Magick says there is no such thing. But…."
— Website of Magicka: The Ninth Element Novel
See also, in this journal, Holy Field as well as Power of the Center.
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The Jerusalem Cross
The New York Times reports the May Day death
of a son of “a charismatic figure” in Israel:
The center image above is from “A Walk with Love and Death.”
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Saturday, May 3, 2014
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Or: Three Shades of Gray
(Continued from previous Gray Space posts.)
Click the above image for some related mathematics.
Those who prefer “magic” approaches to mathematics*
may consult the works of Robert J. Stewart and his
mentor William G. Gray.
Robert J. Stewart (left) and a pentagram photo posted yesterday evening
by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche. See also Lyche in this journal.
* See the April 2014 banners displayed at the websites
of the American Mathematical Society and of the
Mathematical Association of America, as well as
a mathematician’s remarks linked to here last evening.
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Friday, May 2, 2014
” ‘Harriet Burden has been really great to me,’
Rune says in an interview, ‘not only as a collector
of my work but as a true supporter. And I think of her
as a muse for the project … ‘ “
— In The Blazing World , the artist known as Rune
(See also Rune + Muse in this journal.)
Lily Collins in a Log24 post of Jan. 15, 2014— “Entertainment Theory“—
Related material from Trish Mayo—
The tulips are from today,
the gate is from April 27.
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See also, in this journal, Arcade Fire and Witch Ball.
This post was suggested by remarks today of mathematician
Peter J. Cameron, who seems to enjoy playing the role of
Lord Summerisle (from The Wicker Man , a 1973 horror classic).
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From today's 3 AM (ET) post "Quote":
“You’ve got to decide which side of the cross you’re on."
Perhaps both? See yesterday morning's Jerusalem Post —
"Although he was one of Israel’s best known
secular, leftwing bohemians, he achieved
some of his greatest success as an actor
playing as ultra-Orthodox and national-religious
characters."
See also a similar ambiguity in Damnation Morning.
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"You've got to decide which side of the cross you're on.
I need nailers, not hangers."
— Body of Lies
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Thursday, May 1, 2014
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Continued from Nov. 21, 2010:
“They always print… the lottery.”
The reader may interpret the lottery numbers
as he or she pleases.
Related material: Jersey City in Log24 posts
of April 25 and April 28, and today’s NY Times
image of another Jersey City landmark.
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Some background for a recent photo
by Josefine Lyche:
The Boys from Uruguay and Witch Ball.
The photo:
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Tuesday, April 29, 2014
“… it offers the comfort of a community of other players
all stuck in the same hellish quagmire.”
— Review of a video game that was in the news today.
A tweet from the game’s developer last Christmas:
From this journal, also on Christmas Day last year:
“She never looked up while her mind rotated the facts,
trying to see them from all sides, trying to piece them
together into theory. All she could think was that she
was flunking an IQ test.”
— Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty
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Monday, April 28, 2014
Suggested by a Saturday death in Jersey City:
Somewhere, over the gray space…
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(Orlin Wagner/Associated Press) – A vehicle tops a hill along
U.S. Route 56 as a severe thunderstorm moves through the area
near Baldwin City, Kansas, on Sunday, April 27, 2014.
See a related news story.
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Sunday, April 27, 2014
Galois and Abel vs. Rubik
(Continued)
"Abel was done to death by poverty, Galois by stupidity.
In all the history of science there is no completer example
of the triumph of crass stupidity…."
— Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics
Gray Space (Continued)
… For The Church of Plan 9.
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Saturday, April 26, 2014
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Friday, April 25, 2014
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For John Milton at the Cervecería XX —
Related material: Peter J. Cameron on Bertrand Russell
in A Midnight Exorcism.
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See also “Six Cuban Families Celebrate Kids’ Law Degrees.”
Feliz Cumpleaños to Al Pacino.
* “The Lighthouse,” in Spanish. See Under the Volcano .
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Quoted here on April 11 —
“…direct access to the godhead, which
in this case was Creativity.”
— Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House
From “Today in History: April 25, 2014,” by The Associated Press:
“Five years ago… University of Georgia professor
George Zinkhan, 57, shot and killed his wife
and two men outside a community theater in Athens
before taking his own life.”
Related material:
A Google Scholar search for Zinkhan’s 1993 paper,
“Creativity in Advertising,” Journal of Advertising 22,2: 1-3 —
Obiter Dicta:
“Dour wit” — Obituary of a Scots herald who died on Palm Sunday
“Remember me to Herald Square.” — Song lyric
“Welcome to Scotland.” — Kincade in Skyfall
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Thursday, April 24, 2014
“The more intellectual, less physical, the spell of contemplation
the more complex must be the object, the more close and elaborate
must be the comparison the mind has to keep making between
the whole and the parts, the parts and the whole.”
— The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins ,
edited by Humphry House, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1959), p. 126, as quoted by Philip A.
Ballinger in The Poem as Sacrament
Related material from All Saints’ Day in 2012:
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Wednesday, April 23, 2014
In memory of Peter Drummond-Murray, two readings:
The Beauty that Saves and The Trials of Device.
Drummond-Murray reportedly died at 84 on April 13,
Palm Sunday. The Telegraph describes him:
“A big, grim-faced man with a dour wit,
Drummond-Murray resembled some rugged
Jacobite from a novel by Sir Walter Scott.”
Or Sydney Greenstreet.
“The stuff that dreams are made of.” — The Maltese Falcon
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Tuesday, April 22, 2014
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Monday, April 21, 2014
Seattle Meets Kansas:
* For related material, see Gray Space.
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Sunday, April 20, 2014
(Continued from Palm Sunday)
From Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” —
Try to remember this: what you project
Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
With any passion, be it love or terror,
May take on whims and powers of its own.
Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection
Will serve you best, unless you overdo it,
Watching your step too narrowly, refusing
To specify a world, shrinking your purview
To a tight vision of your inching shoes—
Which may, as soon you come to think, be crossing
An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.
What you must manage is to bring to mind
A landscape not worth looking at, some bleak
Champaign at dead November’s end, its grass
As dry as lichen, and its lichens grey….
See also —
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Saturday, April 19, 2014
For the first word of the title, see The Harrowing of Hell.
For the second, see Pater and Hopkins.
This post was suggested by yesterday’s Symmetry and by…
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Friday, April 18, 2014
See also “Leave a space,” from Monday.
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“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high,
and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western
summit is called the Masai ‘Ngàje Ngài,’ the House of God.
Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcass
of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking
at that altitude.” — Ernest Hemingway, epigraph to a story
Some background —
Kristen Wiig and a mountain in the recent film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
and Wiig in a Log24 post of Sunday, March 6, 2011.
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Thursday, April 17, 2014
Todd Leopold at CNN today on a novel by
the late Gabriel García Márquez —
“…a tapestry of almost biblical proportions….”
See also Sermon (Sunday, March 6. 2011).
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“For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.” — Gravity’s Rainbow
“I don’t write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters.
My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors , contained nine pieces,
five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me
with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer)
to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer.”
— Rebecca Goldstein, “Against Logic”
Midrashim for Rebecca:
The Diamond Theory vs. the Story Theory (of truth)
Story Theory and the Number of the Beast
The Palm Sunday post “Gray Space”
For those who prefer the diamond theory of truth,
a “precise mathematical” view of a Gray code —
For those who prefer the story theory of truth,
Thursday with the Nashes —
The actors who portrayed Mr. and Mrs. John Nash in
‘A Beautiful Mind’ now portray Mr. and Mrs. Noah…
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Monday, April 14, 2014
“Leave a space.” — Tom Stoppard
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Sunday, April 13, 2014
Art Wars view —
image from a post at noon on Saturday, April 12:
Kansas City view:
Review of Seeing Gray , a book by pastor Adam Hamilton
of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection
in Leawood, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City—
“Adam Hamilton invites us to soulful gray space
between polarities, glorious gray space that is holy,
mysterious, complex, and true. Let us find within
our spirits the courage and humility to live and learn
in this faithful space, to see gray, to discern a more
excellent way.”
—Review by United Methodist Bishop Hope Morgan Ward
The above quotation was suggested by the following from today’s
online Kansas City Star :
“Two of the victims were 14-year-old Reat Griffin Underwood
and his grandfather, William Lewis Corporon, who attended the
United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood.
The Rev. Adam Hamilton, the church’s senior pastor, shared
the news with church members at the beginning of the evening
Palm Sunday service.”
Update of 10:48 PM — A related photo:
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Saturday, April 12, 2014
“What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric
masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect
at the heart of elite culture in America.”
— Ross Douthat in today’s online NY Times
More clarity:
Job interview…
What’s your greatest weakness?
Thanks to John Baez at Google+ for relaying this.
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(Continued from June 9, 2009)
“The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
A possible source of clarity:
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For the late Allen E. Puckett, Hughes Aircraft engineer and CEO,
who reportedly died at 94 on March 31 (the birthday of René Descartes) —
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Friday, April 11, 2014
Tom Cruise at the Vatican in MI3
Other descents of change:
Sacred Space and Cube Descending.
Context— Last night’s post Change Arises,
on Walter Gropius, Wolfe’s “Silver Prince.”
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Thursday, April 10, 2014
In memory of Lucia Eames, who reportedly died
on April 1, 2014:
“… Walter Gropius was her professor ….”
See also in this journal Gropius and the April 1 posts.
Related material: “As a little child.”
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The New York Times yesterday on Chloë Grace Moretz:
“The public may see her in a certain, put-together way, she said:
‘But when I go home, I’m like, “Let’s turn on ‘Little Mermaid’!”‘”
See also A Word from Our Sponsa and the following:
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(Continued)
From Between Two Worlds (Feb. 25, 2007) —
Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider (2007):
More recently, Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy (2010):
The New York Times as a guide for the perplexed:
“Go back to the flaming skull, Dad.”
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Wednesday, April 9, 2014
It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your childen are?
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Tuesday, April 8, 2014
A post from March 28, 2014 —
March 28 was reportedly the date of death for a public figure:
Edwin Kagin, Atheist Who Battled Religion
in Public Sphere, Dies at 73.
Related material — the link Complex Reflection from March 28,
and a post on “The Sunset Limited.”
The “Sunset” post was suggested by the contrast between Kagin’s
views and those in a book by his son Stephen, a minister.
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He “…believed the art to be real….”
— Lawyer for Mosaic Miami Church pastor
accused of trying to sell forged Damien Hirst art
A Miami mosaic from this journal last Dec. 21—
The indicated link is to…
See also St. Ursula’s Day, 2010, and Emil Artin’s dies natalis in 2003.
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Amy Adams in the recent film “Her” —
“You’re dating an OS? What is that like?”
eXPired
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From Log24 on Feb. 26, 2008 —
“Many dreams have been
brought to your doorstep.
They just lie there
and they die there.”
The Return of the Author,
by Eugen Simion:
On Sartre’s Les Mots –
“Writing helps him find his own place within this vast comedy. He does not take to writing seriously yet, but he is eager to write books in order to escape the comedy he has been compelled to take part in.”
|
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Monday, April 7, 2014
Comments Off on Hey, Kids…
Related material: A Harvard Crimson story on a student who died
this morning from injuries he received in a fall from a building
near the New England Aquarium in Boston. He reportedly fell around
midnight on the night of April 5-6, Saturday-Sunday.
Here are links to two posts from The Fish Tank blog in The
Harvard Ichthus — from 2013 March 9 and 2013 March 16—
that are apparently by this same student.
See also the link to a Harvard-related psychiatrists’ paper in
The View from Lone Pine, a Log24 post from Saturday evening.
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Sunday, April 6, 2014
(Continued)
“…in 1959… I stepped out alone, walked into the streets
of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world— the mountains,
the sky, the low scattered buildings— suddenly flame into life.
There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by
totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere.”
— Barbara Ehrenreich in today’s NY Times Sunday Review ,
“A Rationalist’s Mystical Moment”
A less credible account —
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Saturday, April 5, 2014
Comments Off on Peter Matthiessen, 1927-2014
Barbara Ehrenreich in today's online New York Times :
"…in 1959… I stepped out alone, walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world— the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings— suddenly flame into life.
There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with 'the All,' as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of."
Ehrenreich mentions a psychiatrists' paper, "The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered," that was published on September 1, 2012.
See also Log24 posts of September 1 and September 2, 2012.
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"May you be in heaven a full half-hour
before the devil knows you're dead ."
Related material:
Yesterday's posts of 12 PM and 8 PM,
and the life of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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Friday, April 4, 2014
(Continued)
From today’s news:
“His daughter, the poet Jorie Graham, confirmed the death.”
From an artist on Oct. 3, 2013:
“‘This is St. Francis country,’ she says of Umbria.”
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The Surreal Meets the Real
MOVIE REVIEW
“Place Vendôme” (1998)
Odilon Redon, L’Oeil
FILM REVIEW
For Deneuve, a Setting In Which She Sparkles
By DAVE KEHR
Published: August 18, 2000 in The New York Times
“Named after the Parisian square that is home
to the Ritz Hotel, several haute couture boutiques
and some of the world’s most expensive jewelry shops,
‘Place Vendôme’ provides a perfect setting for
Catherine Deneuve, herself one of the French cinema’s
most precious gems.”
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From a Huffington Post discussion of aesthetics by Colm Mulcahy
of Spelman College, Atlanta:
"The image below on the left… is… overly simplistic, and lacks reality:
It's all a matter of perspective: the problem here is that opposite sides
of the cube, which are parallel in real life, actually look parallel in the
left image! The image on the right is better…."
A related discussion: Eight is a Gate.
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Thursday, April 3, 2014
Last Sunday’s sermon from Princeton’s Nassau Presbyterian
Church is now online. It reveals the answer to the “One Thing”
riddle posted at the church site Sunday:
The online sermon has been retitled “One Thing I Do Know.”
A related search yields a relevant example of the original
Yoda-like word order:
From the online sermon —
“What comes into view is the bombarding cynicism,
the barrage of mistrust and questions, and the
flat out trial of the man born blind. The
interrogation coming not because of the miracle
that gave the man sight….”
Related material — “Then a miracle occurs.”
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Wednesday, April 2, 2014
For a different view of change arising, click on the tag above.
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Tuesday, April 1, 2014
(Continued)
A screenshot of the new page on the eightfold cube at Froebel Decade:
Click screenshot to enlarge.
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An obit from The Telegraph today:
Meanwhile, in The Chronicle of Higher Education …
The Chronicle quotes Mark Twain on “mental telegraphy.”
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Monday, March 31, 2014
Geometer H. S. M. Coxeter died on this date in 2003.
This evening’s daily number from the Keystone state: 822.
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On The Blazing World , a new novel —
“Hustvedt uses fragment-stories, frame narratives, and unreliable
narrators to talk about the ways in which brilliant women across
history have been silenced, forgotten, and appropriated by men.
This is a narrative suspicious of narratives, a story that
demonstrates how damaging stories can be.”
— Review by Amal El-Mohtar
The protagonist of Hustvedt’s novel is named Harriet Burden.
A midrash for Darren Aronofsky, director of The Fountain* and Noah—
Part I: The Burden of Proof —
Part II: The Story of Noam —
* See The Fountain in “The Story Theory of Truth,” Columbus Day, 2013
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“…what he was trying to get across was not that he was the Soldier of a Power that was fighting across all of time to change history, but simply that we men were creatures with imaginations and it was our highest duty to try to tell what it was really like to live in other times and places and bodies. Once he said to me, ‘The growth of consciousness is everything… the seed of awareness sending its roots across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways, spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake. The biggest wars are the wars of thought.'”
— Fritz Leiber, “The Oldest Soldier” (1960)
“And that’s the snake.” — Jill Clayburgh in “It’s My Turn” (1980)
Backstory — “For Daedalus,” May 26, 2009.
For a more up-to-date look at Burroway, see a
Chicago Tribune story of March 21, 2014.
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Sunday, March 30, 2014
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Click image for the backstory.
The sermon itself is not yet on line.
Perhaps the following will help.
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Two timely images for Oslo artist Josefine Lyche —
Backstory: Searches for “Blazing World” and for “Josefine + Lyche + Pink”
in this journal.
The image above is by a man, Brian Stauffer. Related material:
An image from today’s NY Times Sunday Book Review —
This image is by a non-man, Kelsey Dake.
The first image above, since it combines Lyche’s enthusiasm for the color
pink and (apparently) for fishnet stockings, seems to me the better picture,
despite its prurient nature.
(Updated through 10 AM ET)
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Saturday, March 29, 2014
Click the above for further details.
An elegy adapted from “Sequence,” by Theodore Roethke —
“She listened when light sang.”
Perhaps such a song was sung
on Shakespeare’s (and Nabokov’s) birthday, 2009.
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Friday evening’s post Musement dealt with Iris Murdoch’s
phrase “the clean crystalline work.”
For dirty bloody work see the life of Don Reitz, who
reportedly died at 84 on March 19.
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“For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.” — Gravity’s Rainbow
“I don’t write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters.
My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors , contained nine pieces,
five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me
with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer)
to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer.”
— Rebecca Goldstein, “Against Logic”
Related material: The cross of five ninths, from Epiphany 2006.
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Friday, March 28, 2014
(The title is from a work by Charles Sanders Peirce.)
For LYNX 760 —
For more beauty and strangeness, see Strange McEntire.
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"The Geometry of the I Ching introduces something called the Cullinane sequence
for the hexagrams, and uses a notation based on the four sides and two diagonals
in a square to indicate the yin and yang lines. The resulting rune-like symbols
are intriguing…."
— Andreas Schöter's I Ching home page
Actually, the geometry is a bit deeper than the rune-like symbols.
" 'Harriet Burden has been really great to me,'
Rune says in an interview, 'not only as a collector
of my work but as a true supporter. And I think of her
as a muse for the project … ' "
— In The Blazing World , the artist known as Rune
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"Constructed as a Nabokovian cat’s cradle, the novel
purports to be the work of a professor of aesthetics…."
— Fernanda Eberstadt in a book review now online
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The title is suggested by a new novel (see cover below),
and by an unwritten book by Nabokov —
.
Related material:
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For Josefine Lyche, by fellow artist Nuno Borges:
Related material:
Recent remarks by Lyche and
a recurring image from this journal.
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Thursday, March 27, 2014
The following is from a web page by
Andreas Schöter, developer of The Symbol Game.
Building the Narrative
The game can simply be played as a competitive board game,
simply trying to accumulate the most points. However,
to play this way is to miss the main purpose of the Symbol Game.
The author’s page on the game itself —
(This post was suggested by this afternoon’s post Diamond Space.)
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(Continued)
Definition: A diamond space — informal phrase denoting
a subspace of AG(6, 2), the six-dimensional affine space
over the two-element Galois field.
The reason for the name:
Click to enlarge.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2014
(Continued)
The front page of The New York Times Book Review
for next Sunday (March 30, 2014) is devoted to a
review of Siri Hustvedt’s new novel The Blazing World .
See two posts from St. Patrick’s day: Her and Narratives.
The review’s author is Fernanda Eberstadt.
The review is titled “Outsider Art.”
See also that phrase in this journal.
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Yakov G. Sinai today won the 2014 Abel Prize.
Earlier, he won the Wolf Prize.
Wolf Foundation press release quoted in the March 1997
Notices of the American Mathematical Society —
On Sinai —
“He is generally recognized as the world leader
in the mathematics of statistical physics.”
This afternoon’s New York Lottery: 813 and 1857.
Unrelated remarks: 813 and 1857.
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