Log24

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Thursday August 31, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:09 pm
Wag the Dogma
(continued from 2001)
Ingrid Thulin and
Glenn Ford in
“The 4 Horsemen
of the Apocalypse”:

The 4 Horsemen, Ingrid Thulin, Glenn Ford

A sneering review from TIME Magazine, March 23, 1962:

“Hero Ford, a playboy from Argentina, falls pampassionately in love with Heroine Thulin, a Parisienne married to a patriotic editor. When the editor joins the Resistance, the hero realizes his duty and secretly does the same. Unaware of his decision, the heroine decides that he is merely a lightweight, and goes back to her husband. At the fade, while the violins soar among the bomb bursts, the poor misunderstood playboy dies heroically in an attempt to weaken the Wehrmacht’s defenses in Normandy.

The tale is trite, the script clumsy, and the camera work grossly faked. Though the lovers wander all over Paris, the Cathedral of Notre Dame turns up in the background practically everywhere they go, almost as if it were following them around like a little dog.”

TIME Magazine is still wearing the Ivy League sneer it displayed so impressively in 1962.

A less dismissive summary from Answers.com:

“The World War I setting of the original Blasco-Ibanez novel has been updated to World War II, but the basic plot remains the same. A well-to-do Argentinian family, rent asunder by the death of patriarch Lee J. Cobb, scatters to different European countries in the late 1930s. Before expiring, Cobb had warned his nephew Carl Boehm that the latter’s allegiance to the Nazis would bring down the wrath of the titular Four Horsemen: War, Conquest, Famine and Death. Ford, Cobb’s grandson, has promised to honor his grandfather’s memory by thwarting the plans of Boehm. At the cost of his own life, Ford leads allied bombers to Boehm’s Normandy headquarters.”

In memory of Glenn Ford, a talented character actor who died at 90 yesterday, the opening paragraphs of an obituary in The Scotsman:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060831-ScotsmanLogo3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Screen icon Glenn Ford
dies at 90

RHIANNON EDWARD

GLENN Ford, one of the most enduring stars of the silver screen, has died at the age of 90.

Ford, who appeared in more than 200 films in a career spanning five decades, died at his home in Beverly Hills.

The actor’s health had been in decline for a number of years after he suffered a series of strokes.

Although he never achieved the superstardom he craved, Ford was widely acclaimed as one of the best character actors in the business.

The business of narrative:

From a narrative suggested by the name of The Scotsman‘s reporter and related, if only by association with Normandy, to Ford’s “Four Horsemen” film:

“The Vandaleurs are a family of Norman nobles with a heritable version of the mages’ Gift. They have been using magic covertly for what appears to have been a very long time…. Another branch of the family is known to hold a fief in Normandy, but it is not yet known if they are covert magicians as well.”

The Vandaleur narrative may be of interest to fans of The Da Vinci Code. (Ford is said to have been a Freemason, a charter member of Riviera Lodge No. 780, Pacific Palisades, California.)

For Catholics and others who prefer more traditional narratives:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060831-4Horsemen.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 Illuminated parchment,
1047 A.D.,
The Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse

Related material:

Yesterday’s entries, and
an entry from April 7. 2003,
that they link to:

Mathematics and The Seventh Seal

Thursday August 31, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Party Phone

for Van Morrison
on his birthday

A few words for M.C.C.:

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

From March 24, 2006:

Life of the Party

From Stephen King's Dreamcatcher:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060324-Dreamcatcher.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From Alfred Bester's
The Demolished Man:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060324-Party.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

"… it's going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment
of the Talented in
  the scheme of things."

— Anne McCaffrey, 
Radcliffe '47,
To Ride Pegasus

"It's not the twilight zone no,
it's not the twilight zone
Yes it's just a party phone,
pure
honeycomb,
honeycomb,
honeycomb"

— Van Morrison, "Twilight Zone,"
in The Philosopher's Stone

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/PhilosophersStoneAlbum.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Wednesday August 30, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Seven

“Research & Ideas” memo from Harvard Business School dated April 17, 2006:

“The word experience comes from the Latin words ex pericolo, which mean ‘from danger.'”

— Etymology by Professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard University.  Badaracco gives no evidence for his dubious claim.

Related (if only temporally):
Easter Monday, April 17, 2006.

experience

1377, from O.Fr. experience, from L. experientia “knowledge gained by repeated trials,” from experientem (nom. experiens), prp. of experiri “to try, test,” from ex- “out of” + peritus “experienced, tested.” The v. (1533) first meant “to test, try;” sense of “feel, undergo” first recorded 1588.

      — Online Etymology Dictionary

The title of this entry refers to the time it was posted. Related references to seven: April 7, 2003, and today’s previous entry.

See also an entry from 2/29, 2004
(Leap Day and Oscar Night):

Vita Brevis

“In many ways, the arts are the highest achievements of man.”

— Harvard President
   Lawrence H. Summers,
   Feb. 26, 2004 

”We intensively train children in the Arts and ritual because deep down we know that these are the only things that really MATTER. This is what we must share first with the young, in case they DIE.”

— Lucy Ellmann, Dot in the Universe, quoted in today’s [2/29/04] New York Times

Harvard persons from parts of the university that are more scholarly than the Business School may sneer at the above-quoted Online Etymology Dictionary.  They can consult the following:

On “experience”

From J.L. Austin, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play:

“Scholars, such as Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymolgisches Worterbuch, 1959), trace ‘experience’ right back to hypothetical Indo-European base or root *per-, ‘to attempt, venture, risk,’ whence the Greek peira,”experience,” the source of our word ’empirical.’ It is also the verbal root which derives the Germanic *feraz, giving rise to Old English faer, “danger, sudden calamity,” whence Modern English ‘fear.’ Already, we see the ‘cognitive’ directions taken by * per-, through the Greek route, and affective ones, through the Germanic — which would have interested Dilthey, one may be sure! But more directly ‘experience’ derives, via Middle English and Old French, from the Latin experientia, denoting ‘trial, proof, experiment,’ itself generated from experiens, the present participle of experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from from ex-, ‘out’ + base per as in peritus, ‘experienced,’ ‘having learned by trying.’ The suffixed extended form of *per is peri-tlo-, whence the Latin periclum, periculum, “trial, danger, peril. Once more, we find experience linked with risk, straining towards ‘drama,’ crisis, rather than bland cognitive learning!”

“… Finally, ‘experiment,’ like ‘experience,’ is derived from Latin experiri “to try or test.” If we put these various senses together we have a ‘laminated’ semantic system focused on ‘experience,’ which portrays it as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, an exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we ‘fare’ ‘fearfully’ through ‘perils,’ taking ‘experimental’ steps. …” (17-18)

The above is taken from an anonymous weblog entry.  The author of the entry identified the source as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.  The author of the entry falsely stated that the author of this book was J. L. Austin.  In fact, the book was written by Victor Turner, apparently the same philosophical sociologist whom we encountered in the previous entry and in the Log24 entry for the recent feast of St. Max Black.  Turner may have been quoting Austin; pages from the book are not available online.  Another author, however, says the quotation is by Turner himself.  See Rena Fraden’s Imagining Medea, pp. 218-219.

Today’s previous entry is a sort of “ritual passage” for a Nobel Prize winner. For a ritual passage more directly related to Professor Badaracco, see the Brookline TAB obituary of his 23-year-old daughter, who died on Monday, August 21, 2006.  According to today’s online Harvard Crimson, “she was walking along Hammond Street in Newton [Mass.] when an 84-year-old driver jumped the curb and struck her.”

From her Brookline TAB obituary of Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006:

“Funeral services will be held Friday [Aug. 25, 2006] at 10 a.m. at St. Mary’s of the Assumption Church, at 67 Harvard St.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Centro Romero Community Center in Chicago: 6216 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60660.”

Wednesday August 30, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:07 am
The Seventh Symbol:

A Multicultural Farewell

to a winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature,
the Egyptian author of
The Seventh Heaven:
Supernatural Stories
 —

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The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060830-SeventhSymbol.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Jackson has identified
the seventh symbol."
Stargate

Other versions of
the seventh symbol —

Chinese version:

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pictorial version:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060830-Box.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

algebraic version:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060830-Algebra.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra' …."

— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Tuesday August 29, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:21 pm

For the Feast of St. Ingrid:
 

The Hand of Grace

"Only the hand of grace
  can end the race"

Mary Gauthier

"Have you tried 22 tonight?"

— Rick in Casablanca

Today's lottery in Pennsylvania
(state of Grace):

Mid-day 229, evening 119.

Related material: 2/29, 1/19.

"… God to a nation
         dealt that day's dear chance.
 To man, that needs would worship
         block or barren stone…."

— "To what serves Mortal Beauty?,"
     by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J.

"Cash it in, and don't come back."

Rick in Casablanca

Tuesday August 29, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:09 pm
Today’s
Hollywood Birthday

William Friedkin,
director of
The Guardian,
The Birthday Party,
and The Exorcist.

Related material:

Yesterday’s entry on St. Augustine
and the life of
Robert J. O’Connell, S.J.,
author of
Plato on the Human Paradox,
Fordham U. Press, 1997,
online at questia.com.

See also today’s entry at noon.

Tuesday August 29, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Under God
(continued from
August 11)

Today’s Washington birthday:
Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona).
 

“… maybe it was McCain’s role as ‘movie-teller’ that he cherishes most– the man who used to narrate the plots of films to his fellow PoWs in the compound. ‘I must have told a hundred movies,’ says McCain. ‘Of course I don’t know a hundred movies– I made them up.'”

The Guardian

Memorable Quotes 

Lieutenant Daniel Taylor:
Where the Hell is
this God of yours?
 
Forrest Gump:
[narrating]
It’s funny Lieutenant Dan
said that, ’cause right then,
God showed up.

One year ago today:

Part I

The Gulf Coast,
Aug. 29, 2005
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060829-Katrina.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Part II

The same day:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060829-McCain.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

President George W. Bush joins Arizona Senator John McCain in a small celebration of McCain’s 69th birthday Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, after the President’s arrival at Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix. The President later spoke about Medicare to 400 guests at the Pueblo El Mirage RV Resort and Country Club in nearby El Mirage. White House photo by Paul Morse

Monday, August 28, 2006

Monday August 28, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am
Today's Sinner:

Augustine of Hippo, who is said to
have died on this date in 430 A.D.

"He is, after all, not merely taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Augustine

Here is a rather different attempt
to combine the eternal with the temporal:

 

The Eternal

Symbol of necessity,
immutability, and
atemporal eternity:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060828-Cube.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For details, see
finite geometry of
the square and cube
.

The Temporal

Symbol of the
God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060828-Cloud.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For details, see
Under God
(Aug. 11, 2006)

The eternal
combined with
the temporal:

 

Singer 63-cycle in the Galois field GF(64) used to order the I Ching hexagrams

Related material:

Hitler's Still Point and
the previous entry.
 

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Sunday August 27, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm
Today’s Saint:

Philosopher Max Black,
who died on this date
in 1988

“… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how ‘perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra’ ….”

— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Saturday August 26, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Philosopher's Rock
 
(continued from  

previous entry)

"Alcatraz, Spanish for pelican, was named Isla de los Alcatraces after the birds that were the island's only inhabitants." —Bay City Guide

Related material

Thomas Kuhn's "Pelican Brief":

"… the Philosopher’s Stone was a psychic rather than a physical product.  It symbolized one’s Self…."

Philosopher's Pelican:

"The formula presents a symbol of the self…."

Jung and the Imago Dei:

"… Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self…."

…the movement of
a self in the rock…

Stevens, The Rock, and Piranesi's Prisons

Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate
,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977

Friday, August 25, 2006

Friday August 25, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 am

Today's birthday:
Sean Connery

"Poetry is an illumination of a surface,
  the movement of a self in the rock."
— Wallace Stevens, introduction to
    The Necessary Angel, 1951

Welcome.

Time in the Rock, by Conrad Aiken

First edition, 1936

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Thursday August 24, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 am
Beginnings
(continued from
August 22)

A classic of mathematical history in this week’s New Yorker begins,

“On the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau.”

The story, by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber, is now online.

Related material

Log24 on June 20th
(morning in New York,
 evening in Beijing)–

Beijing String begins,

“Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?
Let us go and make our visit.”
T. S. Eliot

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Wednesday August 23, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am
Same Time
Last Year
:

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“‘Once upon a time’ used to be a gateway to a land that was inviting precisely because it was timeless, like the stories it introduced and their ageless lessons about the human condition.”

— Dorothea Israel Wolfson, Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2006

“It’s quarter to three…” –Sinatra

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Tuesday August 22, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

Introductions

In talks at Valencia, Spain, in May through August of 2004, Alexander Borisenko, of Kharkov National University in the Ukraine, provided a detailed introduction to the topic of today’s opening lecture at ICM 2006 in Madrid:

An Introduction to Hamilton and Perelman’s Work on the Conjectures of Poincare and Thurston (pdf, 155 pages).

For a less detailed introduction, see an ICM 2006 press release (pdf, 3 pages) on Fields Medal winner Grigory Perelman.

Related material: The previous entry, “Beginnings,” and an introduction to the second-simplest two-dimensional geometry (Balanchine’s Birthday, 2003).

“How much story do you want?”
George Balanchine

Tuesday August 22, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 am

Beginnings

“Nothing ever begins.

There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.”

— Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“No mathematical subject lies closer to intuition than the geometry of two and three dimensions.”

Robert E. Greene, beginning an April 1998 review of Three-Dimensional Geometry and Topology, by William P. Thurston

Thurston’s book provides some background for today’s opening lecture by Richard Hamilton, “The Poincare Conjecture,” at the beginning of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

Hamilton is likely to discuss the Poincare conjecture in the wider context of Perelman‘s recent work on Thurston’s geometrization conjecture.

In “The Eight Model Geometries,” section 3.8 of his book, Thurston provides yet another beginning–

“What is a geometry?”

Monday, August 21, 2006

Monday August 21, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

Mathematics and Narrative

(Geometrization and Perelman)

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Saturday August 19, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:28 pm
Metaphysical
Wonderlands

"With no means to verify its truth, superstring theory, in the words of Burton Richter, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, may turn out to be 'a kind of metaphysical wonderland.' Yet it is being pursued as vigorously as ever, its critics complain, treated as the only game in town."

— "The Inelegant Universe," by George Johnson, in the Sept. 2006 Scientific American

Some may prefer metaphysics of a different sort:

"To enter Cervantes’s world, we cross a threshold that is Shakespearean and quixotic into a metaphysical wonderland where time expands to become space and vast vaulted distances bend back on themselves, where the threads of fiction and the strands of history shuttle back and forth in the great loom of the artist’s imagination."

As wonderlands go, I personally prefer Clive Barker's Weaveworld.
 

Saturday August 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:14 pm
For Jill St. John
On Her Birthday:
 
Cleavage Term
Revisited
 
 

“… a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it.”


“During his distinguished 17-year tenure as director of the theatre program at Fordham University, Sacharow was recalled by faculty colleagues as ‘exceedingly collegial, understanding, sympathetic and very, very funny.'”

— Obituary of Lawrence J. Sacharow at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution

See also Log24 on August 14,
the date of Sacharow’s death,
and on April 10, 2004:

“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”

Under the Volcano  

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Thursday August 17, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:20 pm

Special Topics

From a review by Liesl Schillinger in the Aug. 13 New York Times of a new novel by Marisha Pessl:

“… Special Topics in Calamity Physics tells the story of a wise newcomer who joins a circle of students who orbit a charismatic teacher with a tragic secret. The newcomer, a motherless waif named Blue van Meer, spent most of her life driving between college towns with her genius poli-sci professor father, Gareth….  Gareth is fond of making oracular statements, which his daughter laps up as if they were Churchill’s: ‘Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,’ he tells her. And, he cautions, ‘never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story.’

…. Heeding Gareth van Meer’s dictum that the most page-turning read known to man is the collegiate curriculum, with its ‘celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam,’ Pessl structures Blue’s mystery like a kind of Great Books class…. A professor is all-powerful, Gareth liked to tell his daughter, he puts ‘a veritable frame around life,’ and ‘organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order– simply divine.’ Blue’s syllabus also includes a murder or two. Her book’s last pages are a final exam. You will be relieved to learn it is mostly multiple choice, and there is no time limit.”

Multiple choice:
The examination below, taken from a page by a scholar at a Jesuit university, is on the Borges story “The Garden of Forking Paths”– a classic of multiple choice.

No time limit:
See the first question.

Examination on
The Garden of Forking Paths

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060817-Tree.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“What is the meaning of the idea expressed by Yu Tsun that ‘everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen’? What is the significance of the emphasis on the present moment, the here and now? Is this related to the carpe diem (‘seize the day’) idea? How? How is the present effectively connected to the past and the future? How is the present associated simultaneously to choices, actions, and consequences? How is the present moment relevant to the idea of the ‘forking paths’? What is the symbolic meaning of forking paths when understood as a crossroads? What is a person confronted with when standing at a crossroads? What are the implications of a choice of road? May this be connected to the myth of Oedipus and its concerns with human choices and supposed predestination? What is suggested by the idea that ‘in all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pen, he chooses– simultaneously– all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork’? What does it mean to make all choices at once? What view of life do such beliefs embody?”

Related material on physics:

Multiverse

Peter Woit on the physics
story in this week’s TIME

Physics and Narrative

Related material on mathematics:

Mathematics and Narrative

 

Monday, August 14, 2006

Monday August 14, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:30 pm
Under God
continued from Friday

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060814-Who.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Above left: Lieutenant Dan
from “Forrest Gump”

Above right: This week’s TIME
asks, “Who needs Harvard?”

Well, maybe Lieutenant Dan.

Perhaps he should heed
the words of of Harvard student
April H. N. Yee in Friday’s Crimson:

Shrimping is a
notoriously dangerous job.


Related material:
the previous entry.

Monday August 14, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:17 am
Cleavage Term

“… a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes.”

For such building blocks, see

A Trinity for Rebecca

(4/25/06)

and yesterday’s lottery
in Pennsylvania:
mid-day 713, evening 526.
These numbers prompt the
following meditation
on the square and the hip:

In memory of
Kermit Hall,
college president,
who died Sunday,
August 13, 2006:

Square
7/13:
Carpe Diem

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060814-WenzhouHall.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
President Hall
(SUNY Albany)
meets with
Wenzhou University*
delegation, 4/25/06.

In memory of
Duke Jordan,
jazz pianist,
who died Tuesday,
August 8, 2006:

Hip
5/26:
A Living Church

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060814-52ndSt.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Jazz clubs
on 52nd Street
on a summer night
in 1948, pictured in
Log24 on 4/25/06.

  Square and hip may each have a place
in heaven; for a less pleasant destination,
see the previous entry.
__________________________________

* Update of 3 PM 8/14/06:

See Forrest Gump on God
in an Aug. 11 entry and
the related paper

Renegotiating Chinese Identity:
Between Local Group
and National Ideology,

by Kristen Parris:

Center and Locality in China

The Roots of Group Identity in Wenzhou

Wenzhou as a Negative Identity

The Wenzhou Model as a Positive Identity

The New Wenzhou Narrative

Wenzhou Identity and Emergent Class Interests

Conclusion: Local Group Identity and National Transformation.

The paper is found in
The Power of Identity:
Politics in a New Key
,
by Kenneth Hoover et al.,
Chatham House, 1997.

Related material
may be found
by a search on
“the Wenzhou model.”

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Sunday August 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:20 pm
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060813-Frankfurter2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

David
Frankfurter,
author of
Evil Incarnate
(Princeton
Univ. Press)

Via dell’Inferno

“Most modern men
 do not believe in hell
 because they have
 not been there.”
— Review of
   Malcolm Lowry’s
   Under the Volcano

The Death of Satan:
How Americans Have
Lost the Sense of Evil

— Title of book by
    Andrew Delbanco

Song based on
Delbanco’s book:

The serpent’s eyes shine
 as he wraps
   around the vine
 in the Garden of Allah.”
— Don Henley

Sunday August 13, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 pm
Happy Six

(continued from
New Year's Day, 2006)

See David P. Roberts (1998)
on Twin Sextic Algebras
for a discussion of
sextic twinning as an
analogue of duality
in vector spaces:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060813-Twinning.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

R.T. Curtis, 2001:

"A Fresh Approach
to the Exceptional Automorphism
and Covers of the Symmetric Groups"
in
The Arabian Journal
for Science and Engineering
.
 

Friday, August 11, 2006

Friday August 11, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 pm

Under God

Adapted from August 7:

 The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060811-Glyphs2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Saomai, the Vietnamese name
for the planet Venus, was the
eighth major storm to hit China
during an unusually violent
typhoon season.”

AP online tonight 

Memorable Quotes 

Lieutenant Daniel Taylor:
Where the Hell is
this God of yours?
 
Forrest Gump:
[narrating]
It’s funny Lieutenant Dan
said that, ’cause right then,
God showed up.

 Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
Thus the superior man:
If he sees good,
he imitates it;
If he has faults,
he rids himself of them.

Hexagram 42 

For further details,
see
recent entries
(August 7-11)
and also

Symmetry and Change
In the Dreamtime
.

Update of 1:06 AM ET
from KHYI:

Mercy Now 
Written by Mary Gauthier

My father could use a little mercy now
The fruits of his labor
Fall and rot slowly on the ground
His work is almost over
It won’t be long and he won’t be around
I love my father, and he could use some mercy now

My brother could use a little mercy now
He’s a stranger to freedom
He’s shackled to his fears and doubts
The pain that he lives in is
Almost more than living will allow
I love my brother, and he could use some mercy now

My church and my country could use a little mercy now
As they sink into a poisoned pit
That’s going to take forever to climb out
They carry the weight of the faithful
Who follow them down
I love my church and country, and they could use some mercy now

Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race
Towards another mushroom cloud
People in power, well
They’ll do anything to keep their crown
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now

Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now
Every single one of us could use some mercy now
Every single one of us could use some mercy now

Friday August 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Catechism

QNo more Mr. Nice Guy?
ASeven is heaven.

Friday August 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:16 pm

Echoes

 

Log24 on
Wednesday,
8/9/06
:

Absinthe makes the
heart grow fonder…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060811-Green.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Log24 8/9/06:

“Time disappears
with Tequila.
It goes elastic,
then vanishes.”

Kylie Minogue

on 8/9/06:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060811-Bottle.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Log24 on 8/8/06:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060811-Clown.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

New York Times
today, 8/11/06
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060811-Echoes.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Wikipedia on
Mel Gibson:

“The arrest was
supported by…
an open container…
75% full, labeled
Cazador [sic] tequila‘”

Related material:

“Not the sound
but the echo
of a sound.
Not the prophecy
from God
in its purest way,
but in a less
pure way.”

— Abraham Mezrich,
quoted in

Log24 June 6, 2003:

Beware of Jews
Telling Stories

See also…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060811-Jesus.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
For further details,
click on Jesus.

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Wednesday August 9, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

Night Listener
 
(See previous entry.)

Thanks to Natalie at
KHYI, 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas
(hard country music),
for just now playing
A Fine Line, by Radney Foster:

There’s a curve in the highway, just south of town
where a man has pulled over to figure life out
with only his concience and the lonesome sound
of diesels winding up grade
he’s got a wife and two kids, and they love him so
he’s got a woman down in georgia,
   and she’s startin’ to show
he’s damned if he leaves her,
   and he’s sure damned if he don’t
and he wonders how life got this way
cuase it’s a fine line in between right and wrong
yea he’s been crossing over that border
   way too long
he should’ve seen it coming at him
   right from the start
now there aint’ no escape from a broken heart
now the call of the highway is a powerful thing
like the pull of a lover, or a child in a swing
gave his heart to two women
   only one wears his ring
they’re both gonna have his babies now
so how do you confess,
   what words don’t explain
he never intended to cause this much pain
now he feels like a farmer
   who went praying for the rain
got more than he bargained from the clouds
[chorus]
he’ll turn his car around tonight,
   go home and try to face the truth
everyone involved’s getting hurt,
   now there aint nothing he can do
[chorus]

Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
Thus the superior man:
If he sees good,
he imitates it;
If he has faults,
he rids himself of them.

Hexagram 42

  (10:00:42 PM ET)

Update of 11:08 PM ET…

and, Natalie, for playing
Late Night Grande Hotel
just now, thanks big time.

Wednesday August 9, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:20 pm
Timeagain:
 
3:57 Revisited
 
Question

(NBC Nightly News
this evening)

Who is minding the
Internet liquor store?

Answer

The Green Fairy
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060809-Minogue.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Kylie Minogue
in “Moulin Rouge”

Online news today at 3:57 PM:

Robin Williams in Rehab

Williams’s most recent
film is “The Night Listener.”

Related material —

For Your Listening Pleasure

(Log24, 9/2/05 at 3:57 PM),

and today’s previous entry:

“Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.”

Kylie Minogue

Wednesday August 9, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm
Two-Bar Hook
 

Wikipedia on Mel Gibson:

"The arrest was supported by…
an open container… 75% full,
labeled 'Cazador [sic] tequila'
(a strong type of mezcal)."

Today's New York Times:

Refined Tequilas,
Meant to be Savored:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060809-Bottle.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
Photo by Lars Klove for
The New York Times

— Essay by Eric Asimov,
  "Spirits of the Times"

"Remember that we deal with
Herb Alpert–

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060809-Alpert.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
First album, 1962

cunning, baffling, and powerful."

(Adapted from Chapter 5
of Alcoholics Anonymous)

Related Material:

"Tequila,"
by The Champs
(1958)

The Spirituality of
Addiction and Recovery

Kylie on Tequila:

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

Yvonne returns to the Bella Vista
in Under the Volcano:

"… a glass partition
that divided the room
(from yet another bar,
she remembered now,
giving on a side street)"

David Sanborn
(a reply to Alpert's
Lonely Bull ):

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/Closer.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Just listen to how he attacks the two-bar hook of  'Tequila.' After planting it firmly in our brains, he finds new ending notes for each measure; then he drops half a bar by an octave; then he substitutes a new melodic detour for the first bar, retaining the second; then he inverts that approach. He keeps twisting the phrase into new melodic shapes, but he never obscures the original motif and he never loses the beat."

Review of Sanborn's album "Timeagain"
    by Geoffrey Himes in Jazz Times,
    June 2003

Update of 3:57 PM:
Robin Williams in Rehab

"It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357."

Symmetry and Change

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Tuesday August 8, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

The Crimson Passion
continues…

From The Harvard Crimson today:

Ned Lamont ’76 faces voters
today in Connecticut’s primary

“Lamont was a fourth generation legacy student whose great-grandfather– Thomas W. Lamont, class of 1892– was a partner at J.P. Morgan and the donor who gave Lamont Library its name.”

There was an article on
that center of learning
in The Harvard Crimson
on May 18, 2006:

Lamont Pick-up Lines

That article suggests a caption
for this excerpt from
The Crimson Passion,
Mardi Gras, 2004:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060808-Passion.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“What are you looking at, sugar tits?”

(Courtesy of Mel Gibson,
Malibu bon-vivant)

Tuesday August 8, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am
Clown

“I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard.”

Mel Gibson in
“Conspiracy Theory”

                                           Hence it was,
Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served
Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,
A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.   
 
The Comedian as the Letter C

Related material:

Mental Health Month, Day 27

Monday, August 7, 2006

Monday August 7, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

ART WARS continued

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060807-Poster2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Adapted from Rick McKee,
Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 2, 2006

Click on picture for details.

Script:

“David Stuart, a University of Texas master of Maya writing, stopped by and tried to be helpful….

‘There’s a playfulness to the script,’ Dr. Stuart said. ‘It was not a writing system that was necessarily there to be as clear as it could be. It was communicating language, but it was doing it as art.'”

My Maya Crash Course
in The New York Times
of May 16, 2006

“… apocalypto means to open up
and to show the truth….”

UCLA’s Anthropoetics

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Log24, May 16, 2006

Sunday, August 6, 2006

Sunday August 6, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm
Game Boy
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060806-Einsatz.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
Click on picture for details.
"Nine is a very
powerful Nordic number
."
— Katherine Neville

 

 
to put one's back
into something
bei etwas
Einsatz zeigen
to up the ante
den Einsatz erhöhen
to debrief den Einsatz
nachher besprechen
to be on duty
im Einsatz sein
mil.to be in action im Einsatz sein
to play for
high stakes
mit hohem
Einsatz spielen

 

Score:

"His music had of course come from Russian folk sources and from Rimsky-Korsakov and from other predecessors, in the way that all radical art has roots. But to be a true modernist, a cosmopolitan in the twentieth century, it was necessary to seem to disdain nationalism, to be perpetually, heroically novel– the more aloof, the better. 'Cold and transparent, like an "extra dry" champagne, which gives no sensation of sweetness, and does not enervate, like other varieties of that drink, but burns,' Stravinsky said about his own Octet, Piano Concerto, and Piano Sonata. The description might be applied to works by Picasso or Duchamp."

— Michael Kimmelman in
  The New York Review of Books,
issue dated Aug. 10, 2006

Perhaps.
But the description
certainly applies to
Bridget Moynahan:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060806-Recruit2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"… like an 'extra dry' champagne,
which gives no sensation of
sweetness, and does not enervate."

For more on the
"Ice 9" figure, see
Balanchine's Birthday.
 

Sunday August 6, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:14 pm
Zen and the Art
of Definition

"Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame." —Robert M. Pirsig

"How should we define goodness?"

— Title of an article (pdf) available online from Harvard.

This article (Journal of Theoretical Biology 231 (2004) 107–120), examines goodness in the light of evolutionary dynamics as it involves altruism and social reputation, and concludes that goodness as an evolved social trait has two characteristics: those with good reputations are helped, those with bad reputations are not helped.  This is expressed as follows. (English is apparently not the native language of the authors, from Kyushu University in Japan.)

"One [feature of goodness] is that a player interacting with good persons are assessed by what he does. Cooperation with good individuals should be good and defection against good ones should be bad. The second feature should we consider with much emphasis: a good player who refused to help a bad person must be labeled good. This enables players facing cheaters to refuse help without worrying about the influence of the action on their own good reputation."

In other words,

"… a person in good standing falls into bad if and only if he fails to cooperate with an opponent in good standing. Even if he refuses to help an individual in bad standing, he does not lose his good standing. This is because the refusal is interpreted as punishment against a selfish individual (for studies on punishment, see Brandt and Sigmund (2003), Fehr and Gachter (2000), Fehr and Rockenbach (2003), and Henrich and Boyd (2001))."

See also Harry Truman and Hiroshima, on this date in 1945.

Related material:

Hitler's Still Point:
A Hate Speech for Harvard

The 5 Log24 entries ending
with "Three in One" on
December 30, 2002

Satori at Pearl Harbor

Saturday, August 5, 2006

Saturday August 5, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

John Huston
was born
100 years ago
on this date.

Huston directed
the film versions of
The Night of the Iguana
and
Under the Volcano.

IMAGE- 'Right through hell there is a path.'

"IMAGE-

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060805-Evite.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Borges’ seminal short story
El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan
(The Garden of Forking Paths)
is an early example of
many worlds in fiction.”

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
— Voltaire

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060516-Kunitz2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Saturday August 5, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:20 am
ART WARS
continued

“Examples are the
stained-glass windows
of knowledge.”

— Vladimir Nabokov 

Today’s New York Times:

Jason Rhoades, 41, Maker of
Transgressive Installations,
Is Dead

For some background
on Rhoades’s Manhattan

gallerist, David Zwirner,
and his
UCLA art school teacher,
Paul McCarthy, see
yesterday morning’s
The Frankfurter School.

“UCLA is frequently described
as the power art school.”
attributed to  
The New York Times Magazine
 
For more remarks related
to UCLA, art, and food,
see the Log24 entry for
 

Friday, August 4, 2006

Friday August 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm
Quad
by
Samuel Beckett:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060804-Quad.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Click on the
figure for details.

“I am always about
in the Quad”
–God

(Rhyme attributed to
Monsignor Ronald
Arbuthnott Knox)

Related material:
the previous entry,
an article subtitled
Beckett’s Private Purgatories
in this week’s New Yorker,
Quine in Purgatory,
and Logos and Logic.

Friday August 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm
The Double Cross

The following symbol
has been associated
with the date
December 1:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060804-DWA2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on the symbol
for details.

That date is connected
to today’s date since
Dec. 1 is the feast
i.e., the deathday– of
a saint of mathematics:
G. H. Hardy, author of
the classic
A Mathematician’s Apology
(online, pdf, 52 pp. ),
while today is the birthday
of three less saintly
mathematical figures:
Sir William Rowan Hamilton,

For these birthdays, here is
a more cheerful version of
the above symbol:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/PeirceBox.bmp” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For the significance of
this version, see
Chinese Jar Revisited
(Log24, June 27, 2006),
a memorial to mathematician
Irving Kaplansky
(student of Mac Lane).

This version may be regarded
as a box containing the
cross of St. Andrew.
If we add a Greek cross
(equal-armed) to the box,
we obtain the “spider,”
or “double cross,” figure

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/PeirceSpider.bmp” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

of my favorite mythology:
Fritz Leiber’s Changewar.

Friday August 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:01 am

The Presbyterian Exorcist

In memory of

Charles W. Dunn, Harvard Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures Emeritus, who died July 24, 2006, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston at the age of 90.  Dunn was master of Quincy House from 1966 to 1981.

“‘He brought a taste of Scotland to the House, initiating an annual rite of exorcism in September to cleanse the place of evil spirits, during which a Scots bagpiper led a march of residents around the courtyard and Charles intoned an incantation while waving a large baton, banishing ghosts and other harbingers of ill will. His leadership was at its best during magnificent evenings in the Master’s lodging when he taught guests Scottish country dances. Students were fond of him, and he of them.’

Born in Arbuthnott, Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Dunn began his schooling in Aberdeen and Edinburgh….”

Harvard University Gazette online, Aug. 2, 2006

Related material:

In Memory of Wallace Stevens,
Presbyterian Saint

(also from Aug. 2, 2006),
and Deaconess.

Friday August 4, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 am

ART WARS
continued from
previous entry

In memory of
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf:

"Who is the fairest of them all?"

This question might
well be posed by…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050501-Krauss.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Rosalind Krauss,
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory
at Columbia University
(Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969).

"The grid is a staircase to the Universal….
We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who,
despite his repeated insistence that
'Art is art,'
ended up by painting a series of…
nine-square grids in which the motif
that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051202-Cross.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Adapted from
Ad Reinhardt

There is no painter in the West
who can be unaware of
the symbolic power
of the cruciform shape and the
Pandora's box of spiritual reference
that is opened once one uses it."

— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids"

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight

Related material:

Balanchine's Birthday,

Apollo and Christ.
 

Friday August 4, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:12 am

ART WARS
Continued from
Nov. 25, 2005

The Frankfurter School

From today’s New York Times:

A review of a current Manhattan art exhibition

“It begins with a juxtaposition of early body-oriented videos by Mr. Nauman and Paul McCarthy, who, quickly following Mr. Nauman’s lead, was in his studio in Los Angeles videotaping home-alone performance pieces by 1970. The contrast is pure Apollo-versus-Dionysus.”

More on Paul McCarthy from artandculture.com:

“If you walk into a room and find everything you held dear in childhood degraded, chances are it’s a Paul McCarthy installation. McCarthy is known for shocking, sexually charged pieces that feature benign cartoon and pop-culture characters — Olive Oyl and Santa Claus, among others — in a bacchanalia of blood and feces.

The 1974 video ‘Hot Dog’ shoots to the heart of the adolescent ‘gross-out’ as McCarthy tapes his penis into a hot dog bun, then packs his pie hole full of franks and wraps himself in gauze. Another piece from the 70s called ‘Sailor’s Meat’ finds the artist dressed as a blonde hooker smeared with blood and ‘knowing’ a pile of raw meat….

Critics often compare his work with that of the Viennese Actionists whose performances were also characterized by gore, raw sexuality, and abused food.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041215-Frankfort.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:
The Wiener Kreis in
yesterday’s 1:06 PM entry
and the five entries
ending the afternoon of
Nov. 25, 2005.

For an approach to art
more in the spirit of Apollo
than of Dionysus, see
Geometry for Jews.

Thursday, August 3, 2006

Thursday August 3, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Let Noon Be Fair

Comment at Peter Woit’s weblog today:

“Would this be a good time to bring up the social habits of ancient Greek mathematicial philosophers?”

Answer to this rhetorical question:

De veras! It’s so romantic!”

Let Noon Be Fair, by Willard Motley

Related material:

  1. The closing entries for Log24
    in 2002 (Dec. 28-31),
  2. Log24, May 18-19, 2006, and
  3. last night’s performance of
    Mozart’s K. 265 (“Twinkle, Twinkle”)
    on Live from Lincoln Center.

Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Wednesday August 2, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:23 pm

In memory of Wallace Stevens,
Presbyterian saint,
whose feast is today


Agon of the Critics:
Christian vs. Jew


The following are extracts from recent reviews of On Late Style, a book by Edward Said.

John Updike on Adorno and Said:

“‘The Tempest,’ like Beethoven’s late compositions, refuses, in Adorno’s phrase, to ‘reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled.’ Said wrote, ‘What I find valuable in Adorno is this notion of tension, of highlighting and dramatizing what I call irreconcilabilities.'”

Edward Rothstein on late style:

“Late style, Said suggests, expresses a sense of being out of place and time: it is a rejection of what is being offered. But listen to Beethoven or Strauss or Gould: the music is more like a discovery of place. That place is different from where one started; it may not even be what was once expected or desired. But it is there, in resignation and fulfillment, that late works take their stand, where even exile meets its end.”

The Jew wins.

Wednesday August 2, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 pm

The Crimson Passion
continues.

The Harvard Jesus:

Crimson/Nancy K. Dutton
Monday, Feb. 23, 2004

"If Jesus does come back, he will likely be wearing a tie-dyed shirt, smoking a joint, flashing the peace sign and rocking rose-tinted glasses….

Gibson never wants people to forget that we are ultimately responsible for his Lord's crucifixion.  And by 'people' I mean 'the Jews.'"

Harvard Crimson,
Monday, Feb. 23, 2004,
opinion column
by Erol N. Gulay

And now…

From the Harvard Crimson
on the 2006 feast of
St. Ignatius Loyola:

WEB UPDATE

Billionaire Harvard Donor
Arrested For Soliciting Prostitutes

Epstein donated $30 million to Harvard in 2003; Law professor Alan Dershowitz has been hired to defend Epstein.


Monday, July 31, 2006 7:46 PM
 
Billionaire money manager Jeffrey Epstein, who donated $30 million to Harvard in 2003, has been charged with soliciting sex from prostitutes in his Palm Beach, Florida mansion– and has hired Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz to serve in his defense.

Related illustrations
from Dec. 15, 2004:

Judeo-Christian Heritage:
The Wiener Kreis

The meditation below was suggested by this passage:

"… the belief that any sensible discourse had to be formulated within the rules of the scientific language, avoiding the non sense of the ordinary language. This belief, initially expressed by Wittgenstein as aphorisms, was later formalized by the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] as a 'logical construction of the world'…."

"Deeply Vulgar"

— Epithet applied in 2003 to
Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

"Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge."
— Vladimir Nabokov

 

In today's Crimson:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041215-Crimson.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

Only moderately vulgar, with its sniggering pop-culture reference. But it  should be
Frankfurter
Professor of Law.
 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041215-Frankfort.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

Today's birthday:
Peter O'Toole.

Wednesday August 2, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am
Final Arrangements,
continued

Ontology Alignment is
the process of determining
correspondences between concepts.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060802-Deaths.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Online New York Times today

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050326-Garden.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“With a little effort,
anything can be shown to
connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely
cross-referenced.”

— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

“Frere Jacques, Cuernavaca,
ach du lieber August.”

— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938

And now I was beginning to surmise:
Here was the library of Paradise.

Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi 

(For Hesse in another context,
see the Log24 entries of
  Nov. 4-6, 2003.)

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Tuesday August 1, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm
Highway 1
Revisited

Log24 illustration for 'Highway 1 Revisited'

John Constantine,
cartoon character, and
Donald E. Knuth,
Lutheran mathematician

“I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060801-Gibson.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Mel Gibson,
7/28/06,
photo by
Los Angeles County
Sheriff’s Department

This meditation is prompted by memories of suicidal alcoholics Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway, as well as by the title of Mel Gibson’s latest project, “Apocalypto.”

A search on Gibson’s film title leads to this quotation:

“And what does apocalypse mean? It means revelation: apocalypto means to open up and to show the truth. But it also means absolute violence, so the apocalypse is a violent revelation and a revelation of violence and immediately you see the relevance of this.”

Interview with Rene Girard in the June 1996 issue of UCLA’s Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology

It is by no means clear that “apocalypse” means “violence,” let alone “absolute violence,” except in the Christian tradition.

For apocalyptic Christian violence, see “Apocalypse and Violence: The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation” (pdf), by Christopher Rowland of Oxford University.

As for “the relevance of this,” see the definition of “generative anthropology” (GA) at

anthropoetics.ucla.edu/purpose.htm:

“The originary hypothesis of GA is that human language begins as an aborted gesture of appropriation representing–and thereby renouncing as sacred– an object of potential mimetic rivalry. The strength of our mimetic intelligence makes us the only creatures for whom intraspecific violence is a greater threat to survival than the external forces of nature. Human language defers potential conflict by permitting each to possess the sign of the unpossessable object of desire– the deferral of violence through representation.”

Compare with the remarks of Jung on Transformation Symbolism in the Mass:

Antecedents and parallels are found for the ritual of the Christian religious Mass in Aztec, Mithraic and pagan religious practices. “The Aztecs make a dough figure of the god Huitzilopochtli, which is then symbolically killed, divided and consumed….”

Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1969. (pp. 222-225)

Mel Gibson’s interest in religion and violence is well known.  His film “Apocalypto,” scheduled for release on Dec. 8, 2006, deals with human sacrifice among the Maya, rather than the Aztecs or Jews.  (Cf. Abraham and “Highway 61 Revisited.”)

It seems unlikely that Mel will learn more about these issues in his recovery program. Too bad.

Tuesday August 1, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

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