Symmetry and Change, Part 1…

Early Evening,
Shining Star

7:31:01 PM ET

Hexagram 01
The Creative:

The Image

The movement of heaven
is full of power.

Click on picture
for details.

The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…

Iconography

For student
Anthony Fonseca,
Harvard ’04-’05:

Michael (Studio della Robbia, ca. 1475)

For teacher
Margaret Casey:

The Green and
Burning Tree, by
Chesca Potter

For the Voice of Gollum,
Peter Woodthorpe:

For further details, click on
any of the pictures above.

… y eres tú y soy yo 
y es un caminarte en círculo 
dar a tus hechos dimensión de arco 
y a solas con tu impulso decirte la palabra.

— Homero Aridjis

For Lucero:

dimensión de arco

(This last picture, taken by
Andrew from London,
was added at
11:30 AM ET Aug. 31, 2004.
For the excellent story that
accompanies the picture, see
“Early Evening, the Light
Beginning to Fade.”)

Olympic Arc

Thomas Becker, president of Chautauqua Institution, on Friday, Aug. 27, 2004:

“I’m really proud of this lecture platform this year.  We started with Phil Wilcox on the first day of the season and finished with Sandra Day O’Connor.  The arc of participation between them was really amazing.”

Phil Wilcox: See 

Israel and Palestine:
Let’s Separate Myth from Reality,
by Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., President,
Foundation for Middle East Peace,
Chautauquan Daily, June 28, 2004

Sandra Day O’Connor: See

The Majesty of the Law:
Reflections of a
Supreme Court Justice,
by Sandra Day O’Connor

The O’Connor link above is to a page at the Chautauqua Bookstore.

For Justice O’Connor:

Reflections on Themis
(Log24, Aug. 17, 2004) 

For Wilcox:

The Zen of Abraham
(Same entry, different title.)

I personally was at Chautauqua only one day this season — Friday, the 13th of August.  My stops of course included the Chautauqua Bookstore, where I purchased the following:

Human cultural activity is mostly what Walker Percy astutely called “symbol-mongering.”  Of the three books above, the central one offers the best symbols.

My own version of a
Chautauqua “Versus” symbol:

The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane

For further details, see the

entries of Aug. 15, 2004.

For an “arc” symbol, see

Loretta’s Rainbow.

A Matched Pair of Stories

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

The pitch that you
won’t see coming

With savvy consumers wary and weary of the old hard sell, advertising has shifted into covert mode.

From today’s New York Times:

Reverend Billy’s
Unholy War

Take that, Lucifer Media!

Angel of the
First Degree

June 24, 2002, at 8:22:21 PM:

Honey Blonde She’s as sweet as   tupelo honey She’s an angel   of the first degree. She’s as sweet as   tupelo honey Just like honey, baby,   from the bee. — Van Morrison, 1971

Elmer Bernstein, Film Composer, Dies at 82

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:22 a.m. ET
Thursday, Aug. 19, 2004

LOS ANGELES (AP)– Elmer Bernstein, the versatile, Oscar-winning composer who scored such movie classics as “The Ten Commandments,” “The Magnificent Seven,”‘ “To Kill a Mockingbird,”‘ “The Great Escape” and “True Grit,” died Wednesday. He was 82.

Bernstein died in his sleep at his Ojai home.

That, M.C.C., is what
Fritz Leiber means by

The Big Time.

A Cross Between

Grace

“The only way to describe her voice is a cross between Harriet Wheeler of The Sundays & Alanis Morissette.”

— Review of Jen Slocumb of Martha’s Trouble by Diane Matay

“Apostrophe Theory is a cross between.”

— Ian Lee, The Third Word War

Dyer, Part II:

From Here to Eternity

“Dying, at its best, might be something like this.  Everything was a memory, and everything was still happening in some extended present, and everything was still to come.”

— Geoff Dyer, quoted (in part of an entry, Dyer, for yesterday– the day mathematician Shizuo Kakutani died) by Ruth Franklin in

Journey Without Maps. 

A Koan for Kakutani–
on a random walk, a bird, death, time, and eternity–

In a comment on the previous entry, a Xangan asks,

“How many drunk men could migrate to Argentina without a map?”

My answer:  At least one.

Drunk Bird

T. Charles Erickson
Shizuo Kakutani
in the 1980’s

Kakutani died yesterday.

“A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever.”

— Shizuo Kakutani, quoted by J. Chang in Stochastic Processes (ps), p. 1-19.  Chang says the quote is from an R. Durrett book on probability.

Meaning:

A random walk in d dimensions is recurrent if d = 1 or d = 2, but transient if d is greater than or equal to 3.

From a web page on Kylie Minogue:

Turns out she’s a party girl
who loves Tequila:
“Time disappears with Tequila.  
  It goes elastic, then vanishes.”

Kylie sings
“Locomotion”

From a web page on Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel Under the Volcano: 

The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that  “A corpse will be transported by express!” (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).

For further literary details in memory of Shizuo Kakutani, Yale mathematician and father of book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, see

Santa Versus the Volcano.

Of course, Kakutani himself would probably prefer the anti-Santa, Michael Shermer.  For a refutation of Santa by this high priest of Scientism, see

Miracle on Probability Street

(Scientific American, July 26, 2004). 

Train of Thought

Kylie sings
“Locomotion”

“Oh, my Lolita. I have only words
to play with!” (Nabokov, Lolita)

“This is the best toy train set
a boy ever had!”
(Orson Welles, after first touring
RKO Studios, quoted in Halliwell)

“As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will ‘play with’ in crafting their narratives.”

— Donald F. Larsson

Tribute

“Un train peut encacher un autre.“

Modern Times:

ART WARS September 27, 2002 —

From the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, October 2002, p. 563:

“To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns.  Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications.  Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things.  These explorations led to…. [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story).”

— David W. Henderson, Cornell University

From an earlier Log24.net note: 

John Frankenheimer’s “The Train” —

Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?

Dyer

On an essay by Geoff Dyer:

“Dyer’s writing is searching and melancholic and sometimes profound. In the beautiful title essay, he has a fling with a girl named Kate on a beach in Thailand: for her it is a one-night stand, for him something more. ‘There is something about leaving a place on a small boat–something about the movement of the waves, the noise of the engine: it is like you are leaving your life behind and yet, since you are part of the life you have left behind, part of you is still there,’ he writes after they have said good-bye. ‘Dying, at its best, might be something like this. Everything was a memory, and everything was still happening in some extended present, and everything was still to come.'”

— Journey Without Maps, by Ruth Franklin, The New Republic Online, posted Friday the 13th of August, 2004

 “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals, but gives a sign.”
— Adolf H., The Left Hand of God, p. 50

Note the time in the Log24 illustration for Monday, August 16, 2004, and consult the entry for 12/05, 2003.

Classic to Romantic

“Ben Webster is probably best known for his eloquent ballad playing. On JAZZ ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT, we are treated to no less than 15 ballads, all of which are performed superbly. Webster is one of the great jazz romantics….”

The Line

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 6 (italics are mine):

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.”

The Sophist, by Plato:

STRANGER – We are far from having exhausted the more exact thinkers who treat of being and not-being. But let us be content to leave them, and proceed to view those who speak less precisely; and we shall find as the result of all, that the nature of being is quite as difficult to comprehend as that of not-being.

THEAETETUS – Then now we will go to the others.

STRANGER – There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence.

THEAETETUS – How is that?

STRANGER – Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body.

THEAETETUS – I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are.

STRANGER – And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.

THEAETETUS – True.

— Translated by Benjamin Jowett

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 18:

“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…

The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane

hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”

What Pirsig means by “quality” is close to what Yagoda means, in the previous entry, by “style.”

In memory of Julia Child,
born on this date:

Elements of Style

“Born Julia McWilliams in 1912, she was the product of the best American genetic engineering, bouncing out of an old-money, privileged Pasadena childhood like a kind of WASP merry prankster….”

— Dorothy Kalins in Newsweek, issue dated Aug. 23, 2004

When I read this, admiring the style of both Julia Child and Dorothy Kalins, I thought of a  blurb I’d seen yesterday in aldaily.com:

“If only academics had the wit and nerve to honor style… more»”

I didn’t click on the blurb then, but the spirit of Julia prompted me to click just now.  This is what I found, in an essay written while Child was still alive, as examples of style:

“Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a 20-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster playing a chorus of ‘All the Things You Are,’ of Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme fixing a duck à l’orange, or of Pieter Brueghel and Vincent van Gogh painting the same farmhouse.”

— Ben Yagoda in Chronicle of Higher Education, issue dated Aug. 13, 2004

The Day Justice Died

But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
    lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
    singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
    turning and turning back
   With the same terror,
                into the deep thicket
   Beside the highway,
                at home in the dark thicket.

I say the wood within is the dark wood….

— Donald Justice, “Sadness”

In memory of Justice,
Dante excerpts:

Canto I

Midway in the journey of our life
 I found myself in a dark wood,
 for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell what that
 wood was, wild, rugged, harsh;
 the very thought of it renews the fear!

Canto III

— Translation by Charles S. Singleton,
selection by Paul J. Viscuso

Justice moved my high maker…

From the day Justice died,
Friday, August 6, 2004,
The Feast of the Metamorphosis:

Hollywood Ending

“… they will meet at the top of
the Empire State Building at 5 PM…
‘It’s the closest thing to Heaven
we have in New York City!’ “

Shape Note

A variation on the theme of the previous entry, Quartet.

As in the previous entry, the illustration on the left is from a Log24 entry on the date of death of the person on the right.

Relevant quotations:

“It was rather like solving a crossword puzzle.”

— Derek Taunt, on breaking the Enigma Code

Four Quartets:

“… history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”

Cambridge News obituary:

“He [Dr. Taunt] and Angela [his wife] founded the Friends of Kettle’s Yard when the Arts Council cut its grant in 1984 and together organised countless fundraising activities for the museum and gallery.”

“How do we relate to the past? How are our memories affected by the cultural context that shapes our present? How many, and what kind of narratives compete in the representation of a historical moment? Rear View Mirror sets out to explore these questions and examine the devices we use to reconstruct events and people through different lenses….”

— On a future Kettle’s Yard exhibition

Time past and time future
What might have been
      and what has been
Point to one end,
      which is always present.

— Four Quartets

 “The diamonds will be shining,
no longer in the rough.”

See the Log24 remarks on Jesus College— Taunt’s college– in a web page for June Carter Cash, The Circle is Unbroken.

Playing God:

The Color of
Collateral

John Lahr (Log24 on 1/26 2003):

“The play’s narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role.”

“It’s not easy being green.”
— Jill O’Hara    

x

Epistle and Hymns

In the spirit of Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs, we conclude our Hiroshima Day service with a link to The Epistle of Jeremiah and a deadly trinity of singers:

Sermon for Hiroshima Day

In a comment, a Xangan recently made a pun on the name “Gennifer” (as in Flowers)… “geno-pher.”  I am still not sure what he meant, but I appreciate his prompting me to look up the etymology of gen words, one of which is…

genesis – O.E., from L. genesis, adopted as title of first book of Old Testament in Vulgate, from Gk. genesis “origin, creation, generation,” from gignesthai “to be born,” related to genos “race, birth, descent” (see genus). As such, it translated Heb. bereshith, lit. “in the beginning,” which was the first word of the text, taken in error as its title. Extended sense of “origin, creation” first recorded in Eng. 1604.

This ties in with the end of the previous entry, which recommended that the reader consult Log24 entries of Aug. 6, 2002.  Taking my own advice, I did so, and found that the current pope on Aug. 6, 1993, cited Genesis 1:26 —

And God said, Let us
make man in our image,
after our likeness….

Taking the chapter and verse numbers as also having deep religious significance, let us  consult the Log24 entries for 1/26 2003 and 1/26 2004.

In Our Image  

We find that 1/26 2003, and the entries on earlier days that lead up to it, deals with Paul Newman, Our Town, The Hustler, Super Bowl Sunday, and God.

After Our Likeness

We find that 1/26 2004 deals with God’s self-definition on Mount Sinai.  Lucifer also appears.  Karol Wojtyla would do well to click on the following link for an expert characterization of Lucifer:

hypocrite lecteur!
mon semblable, mon frère.

See, too, the Log24 entries
for August 6, 2002.

Summering Forth

Everything that ever summered forth starts
in identical springs, or four-note variations
on that repeated theme: four seasons,
four winds, four corners, four-chambered heart…

— Richard Powers, “The Perpetual Calendar,”
    from The Gold Bug Variations, 1991

Shell Beach

“It was a dark and stormy night….”

— Opening of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic novel by Madeleine L’Engle.

For those who seek religious significance in the name of Hurricane Alex:

“Alex Proyas directs this futuristic thriller about a man waking up to find he is wanted for brutal murders he doesn’t remember. Haunted by mysterious beings who stop time and alter reality, he seeks to unravel the riddle of his identity.”

— Description of the 1998 film Dark City

See also ART WARS of June 19, 2002.

Science and Fiction:

Attica to GATTACA

 “There is no gene for fate.”
— Vincent, a character in
   the 1997 film GATTACA

The film GATTACA was discussed in a Log24 entry for Saturday, July 31, 2004– the date of death of Frank Smith, also known as Big Black, a prominent figure in the events at Attica in 1971.  He died in Kinston, North Carolina, a town of about 24,000 about halfway between Raleigh and the Atlantic Ocean.

See today’s 6:01 AM entry for some details of Mr. Smith’s life.  In his memory, here are three links.

The first is to

Screening DNA:
Exploring the
Cinema-Genetics Interface,

by Stephen Nottingham

This online book, from which the above GATTACA quote was taken, discusses genetics in film more generally… Specifically, from Part 7 of Screening DNA:

In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace–

“Midi-chlorians are essentially genes for the force, which determine whether one will become either a Jedi or else a dark shadow of one. In particular, they evoke mitochondrian genes, as mitochondria once lived symbiotically in human cells. Mitochondria are a cell’s energy-producing ‘power plant,’ in which a positive mutation could lead to an individual having greater strength and stamina. Mitochondrial genes are also now known to control many critical stages in human development.“

The second link in memory of Mr. Smith, one he would probably prefer, is to another book, less academic in nature, that also deals with mitochondria:

The third link is to the aforementioned

Wind.

Southern Strategy, Da Capo

From July 31:

“Why are you based in North Carolina?”

— The Footprints of God

Death of Big Black

(Sequel to yesterday’s entry and to
the entries of Saturday, July 31,
feast day of St. Ignatius Loyola)

Politics and Truth

Bob Herbert, in today’s New York Times, on the central problem of democracy:

“It may well be that candidates can’t tell voters the truth and still win.”

Just figure that out, did you, Bob?

From USA Today
8/1/2004 1:20-1:30 PM

Bush 50%, Kerry 46%,

in a Friday-Saturday
USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup
poll of likely voters.

Before the Democratic convention, which ended Thursday night, Bush and Kerry were essentially tied.

From a July 12 Log24 entry:

“It was… a stunning result, the first time in the Gallup Poll since the 1972 Democratic convention that a candidate seemed to lose ground at his convention.”

— Susan Page, USA TODAY

Added at 10 PM ET Aug. 1:

The Susan Page story has been altered since 1:30 PM, and no longer calls the above “a stunning result.”  For the original story, see this Google Groups search.