Log24

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Saturday September 30, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am
Quarter to Three
continued:

 
A Little Story

 
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So make it one for my baby (8/19) 
And one more for the road  (7/13).

8/19:

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7/13:

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Friday, September 29, 2006

Friday September 29, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
Values
for the High Holy Days


(Rosh Hashanah began at sundown September 22; Yom Kippur begins at sundown October 1.  —holidays.net)

Mark Finkelstein today:
 

"Today comes more evidence of the left's painful struggle to deal with its diminished standing and repeated rejection at the polls. In the subscription-required Why Voters Like Values, [New York] Times columnist Judith Warner claims that "the Christian right's ability to stir voter passions is based not on values, but on psychology." Warner describes having bravely gone inside the belly of the conservative beast, recently attending a Values Voters Summit in DC, and declaring it "imbued with so much intolerance and hate." This is presumably in contrast with liberal love-ins, where Bush & Co. are regularly depicted as liars, murderers, Hitlers, etc.

She later describes a schadenfreude-provoking scene of the day after Kerry's 2004 defeat, picking through the rubble with Harvard psychology professor emeritus, Jerome Kagan, who tried to console Warner and presumably himself. As she describes it:

"Our conversation drifted to the Republicans' 'values' [note scare quotes] agenda, and Kagan's belief that values sell because they're an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.

"'Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,' he said. 'You've got to believe that the track you've taken is the right track. You get depressed if you're not certain as to what it is you're supposed to be doing or what's right and wrong in the world."

"People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise– to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray– is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it's also, psychically, a recipe for disaster."

Got it? Liberalism is "more honest, rational and decent" than conservativism, but that's just not what the benighted public wants. They're looking for political Prozac, a Manichean worldview they can cling to, and that's what conservatism cunningly offers.

Less controversial values are provided by yesterday evening's Pennsylvania lottery— namely, the values 4, 5, and 6.

For a discussion of these values under the guise of musical intervals, see Professor Kagan again, in a paper (pdf) he wrote with Marcel R. Zentner, "Infants' Perception of Consonance and Dissonance in Music" (Infant Behavior & Development, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1998):

Adults judge as most consonant either the octave (difference of 12 semitones) [or the unison, difference of 0 semitones], the fifth (7 semitones), or the major third (4 semitones).

Illustration (see also yesterday evening):

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Notes and frequency ratios

The paper discusses consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
"perceptual universals."

Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:

Shining Forth and
Midsummer Eve's Dream.

The material in Shining Forth
is also related, tangentially, to the
following presentation of the
Warner "values" essay
in today's online New York Times:

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The above three Times items,
taken together, suggest that
those in search of "values"
should consult Betty Suarez:

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Click on picture for further details.

Friday September 29, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 am

Immovable Feast

Today is the feast of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels
.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Thursday September 28, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:28 pm
Grace Notes

Today’s evening lottery number in the state of Grace was 546… or, digit by digit, 5 – 4 – 6.  Acoustic interpretation by frequency ratios: E, C, G.

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Click on picture for a midi.

See also this afternoon’s entry.

Selah.”

— Hunter S. Thompson  

Thursday September 28, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:27 pm

Grace

Background on today’s noon entry:

  1. “Macau’s economy is based largely on tourism, namely gambling.” —Wikipedia
  2. The mid-day lottery today in the state of Grace: 313.

Background on today’s morning entry:

  1. Log24 on 3/13, 2006:

    Note the… description
    of Christmas Eve 1900,
    and the remark that
    Ici, le jour, c’est comme
    dans une église
    .”

  2. Une église:
    The American Cathedral in Paris
    .

Thursday September 28, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Today’s birthday:
Mira Sorvino

In her honor, a “page visited” link from
Xanga Footprints for Log24 this morning–


Visitor Page Visited
Macau /home.aspx?user=m759…
Referrer Time
search.yahoo.com…
9/28/2006 11:34 AM


— and a memento of
the 1952 film “Macao”

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Memorable Quotes:

Halloran: You don’t want that junk.
          Diamonds would only
   cheapen you.    
Margie:    Yeah. But what a way    
    to be cheapened.

Thursday September 28, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:15 am
A Table

From the diary
of John Baez:

September 22, 2006

… Meanwhile, the mystics beckon:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. – Rumi

September 23, 2006

I’m going up to San Rafael (near the Bay in Northern California) to visit my college pal Bruce Smith and his family. I’ll be back on Wednesday the 27th, just in time to start teaching the next day.

A check on the Rumi quote yields
this, on a culinary organization:

“Out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.”

This is the starting place of good spirit for relationship healing and building prescribed centuries ago in the Middle East by Muslim Sufi teacher and mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273).

Even earlier, the Psalmists knew such a meeting place of adversaries was needed, sacred and blessed:

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies….” (23rd Psalm)

A Field and a Table:

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From “Communications Toolbox”
at MathWorks.com

For more on this field
in a different context, see
Generating the Octad Generator
and
“Putting Descartes Before Dehors”
in my own diary for December 2003.

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Descartes



Après l’Office à l’Église
de la Sainte-Trinité, Noël 1890

(After the Service at Holy Trinity Church,
Christmas 1890), Jean Béraud

Let us pray to the Holy Trinity that
San Rafael guides the teaching of John Baez
this year.  For related material on theology
and the presence of enemies, see Log24 on
  the (former) Feast of San Rafael, 2003.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Tuesday September 26, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am
Symbology 101

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See Balance and
A Form.

Tuesday September 26, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:48 am
Today’s Birthdays:
T. S. Eliot and Linda Hamilton

From Eliot’s
Ash Wednesday“–

“Prophesy to the wind,
    to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.
    And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper,
    saying….”         

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From The Man in the High Castle:

“Juliana said, ‘Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?’

‘You have a disconcertingly superstitious way of phrasing your question,’ Hawthorne said. But he had squatted down to witness the coin throwing. ‘Go ahead,’ he said; he handed her three Chinese brass coins with holes in the center. ‘I generally use these.’

She began throwing the coins; she felt calm and very much herself. Hawthorne wrote down her lines for her. When she had thrown the coins six times, he gazed down and said:

‘Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty in the center.’

‘Do you know what hexagram that is?’ she said. ‘Without using the chart?’

‘Yes,’ Hawthorne said.

‘It’s Chung Fu,’ Juliana said. ‘Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.'”

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Our Lady of
Judgment Day

“One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.”

Emerson, Ch. VII, “Works and Days,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VII, Society and Solitude (1870)

Monday, September 25, 2006

Monday September 25, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am
Medal

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Adapted from Pierre Le-Tan
in The New Yorker of 8/28/06

Bi-Ethnically Correct

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Saturday September 23, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:24 pm

Tequila!

for Kylie

"Time disappears
with tequila.
It goes elastic,
then vanishes."

Kylie Minogue

From today's AP
"Obituaries in the News"–

Danny Flores

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Danny Flores, who played the saxophone and shouted the word ''tequila!'' in the 1950s hit song ''Tequila!'', died Tuesday [Sept. 19, 2006]. He was 77.

Flores, who lived in Westminster, died at Huntington Beach Hospital, said hospital spokeswoman Kathleen Curran. He died of complications from pneumonia, the Long Beach Press-Telegram reported.

The man sometimes called the ''godfather of Latin rock'' was born in Santa Paula but grew up in Long Beach. By age 5, he was playing guitar in church and at 14 he was a member of a trio that performed Mexican music.

In 1957, Flores was in a group that recorded some work with rockabilly singer Dave Burgess. One of the songs was based on a nameless riff Flores had written. He played the ''dirty'' saxophone part and repeatedly growled the single-word lyric: ''Tequila!''

''Tequila!'' went to No. 1 on the Billboard chart and won a Grammy in 1959 for best rhythm and blues performance. Flores continued to play it for the next 40 years.

Related material:

Today's previous entry,

"Echoes (Aug. 11)" —

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— and
Two-Bar Hook

(Log24, Aug. 9)

Saturday September 23, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

“A corpse will be
transported by express!”

Under the Volcano,
by Malcolm Lowry (1947)


Dietrich


Minogue

“It has a ghastly familiarity,
like a half-forgotten dream.”

 — Poppy (Gene Tierney) in
The Shanghai Gesture.”

Temptation


Locomotive

The Star
of Venus


Locomotion

Joan Didion, The White Album:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas‘ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

From Patrick Vert,
The Narrative of Acceleration:

“There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage…

… a unique study on phantasmagoria and the history of imagination. The word originates [in] light-projection, the so-called ghost-shows of the early 19th century….

… thought becomes a phantasmagorical process, a spectral, representative location for the personal imagination that had been marginalized by scientific rationalism….

This phantasmagoria became more mediated over time…. Perception became increasingly visually oriented…. As this occurred, a narrative formed to encapsulate the phenomenology of it all….”

For such a narrative, see
the Log24.net entries of

From a Christian fairy tale:

Aslan’s last words come at the end of The Last Battle: ‘There was a real railway accident […] Your father and mother and all of you are–as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands–dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’….

Aslan is given the last word in these quiet but emphatic lines. He is the ultimate arbiter of reality: “‘There was a real railway accident.'” Plato, in addition to the Christian tradition, lies behind the closing chapters of The Last Battle. The references here to the Shadowlands and to the dream refer back to an earlier explanation by Digory, now the Lord Digory:

“[…] that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. [….] Of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. […] It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!”

Joy Alexander, Aslan’s Speech

“I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)”

Whether any of the above will be of use in comforting the families of those killed in yesterday morning’s train wreck in Germany is not clear.  Pope Benedict XVI, like C. S. Lewis, seems to think Greek philosophy may be of some use to those dealing with train wrecks:

“Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the logos.‘ This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, syn logo, with logos. Logos means both reason and word– a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.”

Remarks of the Pope at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006

Friday, September 22, 2006

Friday September 22, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:00 am
Shining Forth continued:

The Grace of Accuracy

In this morning's New York Times:

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The Times describes yesterday's
memorial to Cy Feuer,
producer, notably, of the 1972
film version of "Cabaret"–

"Joel Grey sang 'Willkommen….'"

Related material:

a Log24 entry
from October 29, 2002–

 

Our Judeo-Christian Heritage:

Two Sides of the Same Coin

 

On this date in 1897,
Joseph
Goebbels was born.
Related reading:

The Calvin College
Propaganda Archive
and

Prince Ombra.

Cabaret

Joseph Goebbels

  — and Echoes
(August 11, 2006).

The New York Times on Sven Nykvist,
a cinematographer who died on Wednesday:

"In his films, especially those with Mr. Bergman, light assumed a metaphysical dimension that went beyond mood. It distilled and deepened the feelings of torment and spiritual separation that afflicted Bergman characters." –Stephen Holden


"Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination…."

— "Epilogue," by Robert Lowell,
in Day by Day, 1977

For further remarks on light,
see Shining Forth as well as
Tombstone (from May 17,
the date of Feuer's death).

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Thursday September 21, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
Religious
Symbolism

continued from
Oct. 14, 2004

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See also the previous entry.

A related symbol, in memory of
two-time Academy Award winning
cinematographer Sven Nykvist,
who died yesterday:

(See Why Me?, Show Business,
and the cover of the DVD of
an Ingmar Bergman trilogy
photographed by Nykvist.)

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Wednesday September 20, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 am

Public Space

"… the Danish cartoons crisis last March showed 'two world views colliding in public space with no common point of reference.'"

George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, quoted in today's London Times.

Related material:

Geometry and Christianity
   (Google search yielding
    "about 1,540,000" results)

Geometry and Islam
   (Google search yielding
    "about 1,580,000" results)

MySpace.com/affine

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A Public Space

 

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— Motto of 
Plato's Academy

Background from
Log24 on Feb. 15, 2006:

Hellmut Wilhelm on the Tao
 
If we replace the Chinese word "I" (change, transformation) with the word "permutation," the relevance of Western mathematics (which some might call "the Logos") to the I Ching ("Changes Classic") beomes apparent.

For the relevance of Plato to
Islam, see David Wade's
Pattern in Islamic Art
and a Google search on
Plato and Islam
("about 1,680,000" results).

"We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each had a private intelligence of his own."

Heraclitus of Ephesus, about 500 B.C.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Tuesday September 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

For a Dark Lady,
Soledad O’Brien,
Who Turns 40 Today:

Jerezana, by Paco de Lucia
(Requires RealPlayer and broadband)

From a 1967 album.

For a more recent look at de Lucia,
see his Cositas Buenas video
(wmv format) at flamenco-world.com.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Monday September 18, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm
Movie Date
continued…

Taking Christ to the Movies,
by Anna Megill, Princeton ’06

Related material:

Prepare for the Weirdness.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
(see entry of Sept. 17,
At Midnight),

The Presbyterian Exorcist,

and
NBC’s “Crazy Christians” Show
(or, “Taking Christ to Studio 60“)
10 PM ET tonight on NBC.

Monday September 18, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:14 am
Apology

 

Excerpts from
Log 24, January 18, 2004:

 
A Living Church

"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy in the foreword to A Mathematician's Apology:

"… he had another favourite entertainment…."

… If, as Chesterton might surmise, he… met Plato and Shakespeare in Heaven, the former might discuss with him the eternal Platonic form of the number 17*, while the latter might offer….

* Footnote of 9/18/06: For the Platonic form of 17, see Feast of the Triumph of the Cross (9/14/06) and Medal (9/15/06).

A Living Church,
continued…

Apology:
An Exercise in Rhetoric

Related material:


MOVIE RELEASED
ON 6-6-6 —


"Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick stars in a scene from the R-rated movie 'The Omen.' An official of the Australian bishops conference took on the superstition surrounding the movie's release date of June 6, 2006, noting that 'I take evil far too seriously to think "The Omen" is telling me anything realistic or important.'" (CNS/20th Century Fox)

and

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Sunday, September 17, 2006

Sunday September 17, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

At Midnight

“At midnight
   on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds,
   nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames
   begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot
   singe a sleeve.”

— From Byzantium, by
    William Butler Yeats

“The only hope, or else despair
    Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre–
    To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

— From Four Quartets, by
    Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in…”

Prepare for the Weirdness, by Hunter S. Thompson, quoted in a sermon for Pentecost Sunday, 2005

“If you passed, you got to live, and if you failed you were burned alive on a pyre that’s now the Transgender Studies Building.”

Baccalaureate address at the interfaith worship service, Princeton University, on Pentecost Sunday, June 4, 2006

Review:

“At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement….”

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Saturday September 16, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm

The Pope in
Plato's Cave

Those who find the Pope's recent remarks (see the previous entry) on a Byzantine emperor lacking in literary depth may consult the writings of William Butler Yeats on Byzantium quoted in Log24 entries of February 14-16, 2003.  Those entries also refer to a modern version of Plato's cave– the movie theater– and the film "The Recruit." See also a more recent Log24 discussion of that film:

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This supplies a different illustration
of the previous entry's conclusion:

"Nine is a very powerful
Nordic number."

Saturday September 16, 2006

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

Pandora's Box

Part I:
The Pandora Cross

"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"


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(See Log24, Sept. 13)

Part II:
The Opening

Remarks by the Pope on Sept. 12,
as reported by the Vatican:

Faith, Reason, and the University:
Memories and Reflections

For the result of
the Pope's remarks, see
a transcript of
 yesterday's Google News
and the following
from BBC today:

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Click to enlarge the screenshot.

Part III:
Hope

The New Yorker (issue of June 5, 2006) on the late Oriana Fallaci:

"In September [2005], she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger."

For further details, see yesterday's Log24.


Part IV:
The Sibyl's Song

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— From The Magic Circle,
 a spiritual narrative
 by Katherine Neville

For more on "the long-mute voice
of the past," on "darkness beneath
the volcano," and on uncorking,
see Glory Season and Harrowing.

Related material from
Log24 on Dec. 2, 2005:

Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:

"… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was 'the God' and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as 'the truly divine' is absolutely no longer sufficient."

A symbol of Apollo:

IMAGE- The ninefold square

and a related
Christian symbol,

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the Greek Cross
(adapted from
Ad Reinhardt).

Moral of the Pandora Cross:

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville in The Magic Circle…

quoted in The Nine, a Log24 entry
for Hermann Weyl's birthday,
November 9, 2004.
 

Friday, September 15, 2006

Friday September 15, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:11 am
Medal

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In memory of
journalist Oriana Fallaci,
who died last night:

"In September [2005], she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger. (The meeting was something of a scandal in Italy, since Fallaci has always said that she is an atheist; more recently, she has called herself a 'Christian atheist,' out of respect for Italy's Catholic tradition.) Last December, the Italian government presented her with a gold medal for 'cultural achievement.'"
 

The New Yorker, issue of June 5, 2006

 

Fallaci's book The Force of Reason
was published in March.

For more on the "medal"
pictured above,
see Log24 entries of
September 13 and 14
and of  D-Day 2006.

Update of 4 PM Sept. 15–

Click for further details:
"She has hopes
for Joseph Ratzinger….
"
 

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Thursday September 14, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:11 pm
Today is the Feast of the
Triumph of the Cross

Primitive roots modulo 17
(Based on Weyl's Symmetry)

and the birthday of
an expert on primitive roots,
the late I. M. Vinogradov.

Elements of Number Theory, by Vinogradov

Happy birthday.

Click on pictures
for further details.
 

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Wednesday September 13, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:28 pm

ART WARS continued:

The Krauss Cross

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Rosalind Krauss in "Grids":

"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit.  From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.

Or, to take a more up-to-date example, we could think about Ad Reinhardt who, despite his repeated insistence that 'Art is art,' ended up by painting a series of black nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross.  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."

Rebecca Goldstein on
Mathematics and Narrative
:

"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."

Jacques Maritain,
October 1941
:

"The passion of Israel
today is taking on
more and more distinctly
the form of the Cross."

E. L. Doctorow,
City of God:

"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd."

Wednesday September 13, 2006

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

Octobers for Fest

In memory of Joachim Fest, a noted biographer of Hitler who died on 9/11 at age 79–

A link from 5/27, 2005 (a date mentioned in Monday's Log24 9/11 entry):

"the four corners of the horizon."

A search on this inelegant phrase from Sartre's Being and Nothingness leads, surprisingly, to remarks by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain said to have been published in the month of October in the fateful year 1941.

According to Telegraph.co.uk today, Fest was "the most celebrated historian and the most distinguished journalist of the post-war generation in Germany."

The Telegraph says he 

"aroused the envy of professorial rivals, none of whom could match the incisive elegance of his writing. Equally important was his flair for controversy. He was determined to prevent the wrong lessons being drawn from the past by the Left-wing establishment that had dominated German intellectual life since the 1960s.

Conservative in politics and Catholic by upbringing, Fest stood out among his contemporaries for his rejection of the influence of the Marxist sociologists of the Frankfurt school on the historiography of the Third Reich. Fest saw the Nazi phenomenon not as a product of capitalism, but as a moral catastrophe, made possible by the abdication of responsibility on the part of educated Germans."

For a view of Christian politics closer to that of the Frankfurt school, see a review by Charles Isherwood in the 9/11 New York Times of a play, "The Man Himself."

Related material:

A Log24 entry
from October 29, 2002:

 

Our Judeo-Christian Heritage:

Two Sides of the Same Coin

 

On this date in 1897,
Joseph
Goebbels was born.
Related reading:

The Calvin College
Propaganda Archive
and

Prince Ombra.

Cabaret

Joseph Goebbels

 and Echoes
(August 11, 2006).
 

Monday, September 11, 2006

Monday September 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

A Sermon for Sartre

A sequel to
Les Mots:
Les Nombres

 “Words and numbers
are of equal value,
for, in the
cloak of knowledge,
one is warp
and the other woof.”
— The princesses
Rhyme and Reason
in The Phantom Tollbooth,
by Norton Juster, 1961

Lotteries
9/11/06

Midday

Evening
NY 394 628
PA 527 916

“Time and chance
happeneth to them all.”

— Ecclesiastes 9:11

Hermeneutics:

The numbers may be regarded
as coordinates in a map
of one spatial dimension
(a road dimension:
394 – Chautauqua, NY)
and of three
temporal dimensions
(birthday dimension 6/28,
Sartre dimension 5/27,
religious dimension 9/16).

This interpretation is of course
rather arbitrary, but so are most
interpretations.

Related material:
Sontag and Sartre this morning
and Sontag on Sunday.

Update of 1:29 AM 9/12:

 The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060912-Doonesbury2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
“HASS-D”– Click here.

Monday September 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 am

Sontag’s Sermon
continued from yesterday

Conclusion:

“My image of myself since age 3 or 4– the genius-schmuck. I allow one to pay off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one or the other….

Sartre (cf. ‘Les Mots’) the only other person I know of who had this ‘certainty’ of genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood of a famous man.)

A kind of suicide– with the ‘work’ of genius you know you’ll do when adult your tombstone. The most glorious tombstone possible.

Sartre was very ugly– and knew it. So he didn’t have to develop ‘the schmuck’ to pay off the others for being ‘the genius.’ Nature had taken care of the problem for him. He didn’t have to invent a cause of failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself ‘stupid’ in personal relations. (For ‘stupid,’ also read ‘blind.’)”

Susan Sontag in The New York Times Magazine yesterday

Meanwhile, back at MIT:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060911-Doonesbury.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Doonesbury 9/11

Related material

from MIT’s School of
Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences
(SHASS),

and Log24 on
Sunday morning
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060911-SHASS3.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The Moralist:

“‘For the modern post-religious man,’ Susan Sontag wrote in a 1961 essay, ‘the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.'”

— “The Moralist,” by Scott McLemee, The Boston Globe, July 16, 2006

The Moral:

The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were ‘I love you.’  Over and over again, the message was the same, ‘I love you.’ …. Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock:  we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death.”

The Rev. Kenneth E. Kovacs

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Sunday September 10, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

ART WARS
continued:

Sontag’s Sermon

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060910-Doonesbury4.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sources:
This morning’s Log24 entry,
today’s New York Times Magazine,
and today’s Doonesbury.

Related material:

My Life among the Deathworks:
Illustrations of the
Aesthetics of Authority
,
by Philip Rieff,
Sontag’s ex-husband.

See also Nicole Kidman in
the 2004 remake of
The Stepford Wives.

Sunday September 10, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:00 am

And the
"
Meet Max Black"
Award goes to…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060910-Obits.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"For the Aeron and other designs,
Mr. Stumpf won this year’s
National Design Award
in Product Design
,
which is to be presented
posthumously on Oct. 18
by the Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum
in Manhattan."

— Today's New York Times

Stumpf died on August 30,
the date of the Log24 entry
"The Seventh Symbol."

Related material:

From
Geometry of the I Ching,
a chessboard:

I Ching chessboard (original 1989 arrangement)

From the
 National Design Museum:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060910-DesignAwards.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 From Log24 on the
date of Stumpf's death,

The Seventh Symbol:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060910-Box121.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Pictorial version of
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

See also
Fearful Symmetry
and
Symmetry Framed.

Sunday September 10, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:57 am

x

Saturday, September 9, 2006

Saturday September 9, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:07 pm
For Frank Morley‘s Birthday:

The Board

On chess and fiction:

“As Boileau-Narcejac* admirably said: ‘The creator invents the chessboard, the serial writer invents the moves.'” —Moez Lahmedi 

Quoted by Marc Lits in Pour lire le roman policier, Bruxelles-Paris, De Boeck-Duculot, 1989, p. 7. 

The Moves

 “Problems are the poetry of chess.
 They demand from the composer
 the same virtues that characterize
 all worthwhile art:
 originality, invention,
 harmony, conciseness,
 complexity, and
 splendid insincerity.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Friday, September 8, 2006

Friday September 8, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:20 am
Today’s Birthday:
Richard I of England
(Coeur de Lion)

In his honor, a small correction will be made this morning to the Wikipedia article on Harvard University.  The date of the founding of Harvard will be changed from today, September 8, to the apparently more correct date October 28 (1636).

“… the Massachusetts
Great and General Court…
on Oct. 28, 1636, set aside
400 pounds for that
     ‘schoale or colledge….'”

TIME, Sept. 28, 1936

“Only through time
   time is conquered.”
T. S. Eliot

Update of 7:14 PM Sept. 8:

Democracy has prevailed, and my correction has now been made politically correct.

Here is my comment at Wikipedia:

I see that Daniel P. B. Smith has changed the article in accordance with his earlier suggestion. This is at least an improvement. Enemies of Harvard’s political correctness may be amused by the fact that in the summary box, the college motto Veritas (Truth) is followed immediately by a Harvard lie.

Thursday, September 7, 2006

Thursday September 7, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm
Today’s Birthday:
Elizabeth I of England

“What, nephew,” said the king,
“is the wind in that door?”
SIR THOMAS MALORY
Le Morte d’Arthur

— Epigraph to
A Wind in the Door,
by Madeleine L’Engle

Vaine the ambition of Kings,
Who seeke by trophies and dead things,
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

— John Webster,
The Devil’s Law Case

From Eliot’s
The Waste Land,

Part II, “A Game of Chess”:

I think we are in rats’ alley  115
Where the dead men
      lost their bones
 116
 

 
 “What is that noise?”  117
          The wind under the door.  118 
“What is that noise now? 
      What is the wind doing?”
 119 
          Nothing again nothing.  120

Eliot’s note:
118. Cf. Webster: “Is the wind
in that door still?”

The line cited in Eliot’s note
is from John Webster’s
The Devil’s Law Case,
3.2.162.

Thursday September 7, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:04 am
A Game of Chess

for Isak Dinesen,
who died in 1962
on this date

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060907-SeventhSeal.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 Meanwhile…

 

Click on pictures for details.

Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Wednesday September 6, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 5:26 pm
Hamlet's Transformation

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell   
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams."
Hamlet

Background:

  1. Monday's "In a Nutshell,"
  2. Tuesday's "The King of Infinite Space," and
  3. this morning's "Bad Dreams."

Hamlet, 2.2:

"… Something have you heard
Of Hamlet's transformation; so call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was…."

The transformation:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/DTinscapes4-Trans.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

         Click on picture for details.

Related material:

Figures of Speech (June 7, 2006) and
Ursprache Revisited (June 9, 2006).

 

Wednesday September 6, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 am
Bad Dreams

Happy birthday, Robert M. Pirsig.

Readings for the hour of the wolf:

  1. The Shining of May 29 (2002) and
  2. For John F. Kennedy’s Birthday (2006).

Yesterday was Arthur Koestler’s birthday.

 “By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us.”

— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118

Tuesday, September 5, 2006

Tuesday September 5, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:00 am
The King of
Infinite Space
 
was published today.

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

Click on picture for details.

Monday, September 4, 2006

Monday September 4, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:20 pm
In a Nutshell:
 
The Seed

"The symmetric group S6 of permutations of 6 objects is the only symmetric group with an outer automorphism….

This outer automorphism can be regarded as the seed from which grow about half of the sporadic simple groups…."

Noam Elkies, February 2006

This "seed" may be pictured as

The outer automorphism of a six-set in action

group actions on a linear complex

within what Burkard Polster has called "the smallest perfect universe"– PG(3,2), the projective 3-space over the 2-element field.

Related material: yesterday's entry for Sylvester's birthday.

Monday September 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Happy Six

continued from
6/6/6

Click on picture
for details.

See also Saturday’s entry
and Sunday’s Pennsylvania
mid-day lottery:
666.

Related material:

Bright Star

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050312-Spider.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(Monday, March 28, 2005),
the Log24 entries
for the following Friday
(April 1, 2005), and
the Pennsylvania lottery
evening number for that
Friday, April Fools’ Day:
666.

Today’s birthday:
the late Joan Aiken,
author of
The Shadow Guests.
(See Devil’s Night, 2005.)

Sunday, September 3, 2006

Sunday September 3, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm
Sylvester's Birthday

The following figure from a June 11, 1986, note illustrates Sylvester's "duads" and  "synthemes" using the concept of an "inscape"  (part B of the figure).  As R. T. Curtis and Noam Elkies have explained, the duads and synthemes lead to constructions of many of the sporadic simple groups.

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

Saturday, September 2, 2006

Saturday September 2, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:31 am
Today's birthdays:

Salma Hayek
("
Frida")

Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor

"Shinin' like a diamond
 she had tombstones
in her eyes.
"

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060902-StarAndDiamond2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(For the above figures,
see Log24, 5/17/06,
"Tombstone," and
Log24, 9/13/03,
"For the Man in Black.")

and Keanu Reeves
("
Constantine")

 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050218-Highwater.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(For the above figure,
see Log24, 2/18/05,
"In Hoc Signo.")

Related material:

From Notre-Dame de Paris:

"Un cofre de gran riqueza        
Hallaron dentro un pilar,       
Dentro del, nuevas banderas 
Con figuras de espantar."      

"A coffer of great richness   
     In a pillar's heart they found,
Within it lay new banners,
With figures to astound."  

For some further details, see
the brief Log24 narrative
"Indiana Jones and
the Hidden Coffer
" as well as
Symmetry Framed and
the design of the doors
to Rick's Cafe Americain:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060902-Ricks.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Friday, September 1, 2006

Friday September 1, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am
Dirty Business

Some friends of mine
are in this band
.”
— David Auburn, Proof 

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

And if the band you’re in
starts playing different tunes
I’ll see you on
the dark side of the moon.”

Quoted in Log24 on the
July 20, 2005, anniversary
of the 1969 Apollo 11
“one small step” moon landing

Last night’s entry on Glenn Ford, freemasonry, and the business of narrative leads to the following meditation.

This morning’s New York Times obituary of the Apollo 11 launch director brings back memories of Dean Martin’s classic refrain “when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie….”  This in turn is a reminder of one of the great subtitles– Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (by Nick Tosches, published by Secker & Warburg on November 9, 1992).  I respect the launch director, Rocco A. Petrone, who later headed the successful recovery of Apollo 13 (and also headed the entire Apollo program), but I also greatly respect Nick Tosches as a guide to the dark side of humanity.  Secular humanism and the religion of scientism are all very well as cheerleaders for physics, but Tosches and the Roman Catholic Church have a much better understanding of human nature and original sin.

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