Log24

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Sunday December 31, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Tools of
Christ Church
(Continued from
St. Thomas Becket’s day)

The author of the thesis
“Conversations with the Dead”

described in this morning’s entry,

Aesthetics of Evil
vs. Christ Church
,

is Darren Joseph Danylyshen.

 
This may be the same
Darren Danylyshen who has
taught at St. Stephen’s SS
(a Catholic secondary school
in Bowmanville, Ontario).
 
Following a link in the
section of that school’s site
beneath the title
“St. Stephen’s Goes Hollywood,”
we find the following:
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061231-McLuhan.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
This ties in rather neatly with the
“Tools of Christ Church” entry
for last Friday–
St. Thomas Becket’s day–
and with the fact that
today would be the feast day
of Marshall McLuhan,
if McLuhan were a saint.
(McLuhan, a Catholic, died on
Dec. 31, 1980.)
 
Related material:
 
The Communion of Saints as
the Association of Ideas
 

Sunday December 31, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:15 pm
7/15, 2005:

From Darkness Visible:

“Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just one solid color.  He had his black period in which the canvas was totally black.  And then he had a blue period in which he was painting the canvas blue.”

— Martin Gardner interview in AMS Notices, June/July 2005

Sunday December 31, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:14 pm

7/14, 2004:


Time Magazine
,
issue dated July 19, 2004 —

“Second-Helping Summer:
Movie sequels are getting raves…”

Sunday December 31, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:13 pm

7/13, 2003:

The Word in the Desert


Sunday December 31, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 am
Aesthetics of Evil
vs. Christ Church

“… the closing number
for Spielberg’s tribute
and the gala itself…
[is] the finale to
the opera ‘Candide,’
  ‘Make Our Garden Grow.'”

Press release from CBS
on this year’s
Kennedy Center Honors

Wallace Stevens,
Esthétique du Mal, XI”
“We are not
At the centre of a diamond.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061231-DC.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The map shows the original
(pre-1846) diamond shape
of the District of Columbia.

For the relevance of the
closing number of “Candide”
to diamonds, see
the previous entry.

For the relevance of the
closing number of the
12/3/06 DC lottery, see
Theme and Variations.

For the relevance of the
earlier mid-day number,
see the conclusion of
Esthétique du Mal” —

“And out of what one sees
   and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could
   have thought to make
So many selves, so many
   sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air,
   was swarming
With the metaphysical changes
   that occur,
Merely in living
   as and where we live.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061203-DCday.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A search on the mid-day number
in the context of metaphysics
yields the following:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061231-Herm536.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

“In ‘Esthétique du Mal,’ one of his later poems, Wallace Stevens considers existence from a variety of critical and philosophical perspectives, among them various moral, aesthetic, political, theological, and philosophic ‘epistemes’ that condition how humanity perceives and experiences the world. These epistemological ‘modes’ dictate how we live and perceive the world about us, providing preconceptions that shroud understanding and obfuscate ontological explanation. What Stevens accomplishes in ‘Esthétique du Mal‘ is to create a dialogue with various historical and philosophical ‘schools,’ systematically confronting and rejecting their perspectives, and creating a movement toward Martin Heidegger’s ‘aletheia’ to uncover the ontological substructure that exists beneath the individual’s experience in the world. This movement of ‘uncovering’ and exposing the nature of what it means ‘to be in the world’ is a journey to an ontological substructure that allows Stevens to arrive at a dynamic, ontological proof: that existence is full of ‘reverberating’ possibilities, not solitary and ‘univocal’ statements.”

Conversations with the Dead:
The Ontological Substructure of
Wallace Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal

a 1999 Master’s thesis

For further remarks on
ontological substructure,
see A First Class Degree
(on a notable graduate of
Christ Church, Oxford).

Friday, December 29, 2006

Friday December 29, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:01 am
Tools
of Christ Church

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon

Cover of Thomas, by Shelley Mydans: Sword and its shadow, a cross

Click on picture for details.

Today is the feast
of St. Thomas Becket.

In his honor, a meditation
on tools and causation:

"Lewis Wolpert, an eminent developmental biologist at University College London, has just published Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a pleasant, though rambling, look at the biological basis of belief. While the book focuses on our ability to form causal beliefs about everyday matters (the wind moved the trees, for example), it spends considerable time on the origins of religious and moral beliefs. Wolpert defends the unusual idea that causal thinking is an adaptation required for tool-making. Religious beliefs can thus be seen as an odd extension of causal thinking about technology to more mysterious matters. Only a species that can reason causally could assert that 'this storm was sent by God because we sinned.' While Wolpert's attitude toward religion is tolerant, he's an atheist who seems to find religion more puzzling than absorbing."

Review by H. Allen Orr in
The New York Review of Books,
Vol. 54, No. 1, January 11, 2007    


"An odd extension"–

Wolpert's title is, of course,
from Lewis Carroll.

Related material:

"It's a poor sort of memory
that only works backwards."
Through the Looking-Glass

An event at the Kennedy Center
broadcast on
December 26, 2006
(St. Steven's Day):

"Conductor John Williams, a 2004 Honoree, says, 'Steven, sharing our 34-year collaboration has been a great privilege for me. It's been an inspiration to watch you dream your dreams, nurture them and make them grow. And, in the process, entertain and edify billions of people around the world. Tonight we'd like to salute you, musically, with a piece that expresses that spirit beautifully … It was written by Leonard Bernstein, a 1980 Kennedy Center Honoree who was, incidentally, the first composer to be performed in this hall.' Backed by The United States Army Chorus and The Choral Arts Society, soprano Harolyn Blackwell and tenor Gregory Turay sing the closing number for Spielberg's tribute and the gala itself. It's the finale to the opera 'Candide,' 'Make Our Garden Grow,' and Williams conducts."

CBS press release

See also the following,
from the conclusion to

"Mathematics and Narrative"

(Log24, Aug. 22, 2005):

Diamond on cover of Narrative Form, by Suzanne Keen

"At times, bullshit can
only be countered
   with superior bullshit."
Norman Mailer

Many Worlds and Possible Worlds in Literature and Art, in Wikipedia:

    "The concept of possible worlds dates back to at least Leibniz who in his Théodicée tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds.  Voltaire satirized this view in his picaresque novel Candide….
    Borges' seminal short story El jardín 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

"We symbolize
logical necessity
with the box (box.gif (75 bytes))
and logical possibility
with the diamond (diamond.gif (82 bytes))."

Keith Allen Korcz 

Diamond in a square

"The possibilia that exist,
and out of which
the Universe arose,
are located in
     a necessary being…."

Michael Sudduth,
Notes on
God, Chance, and Necessity
by Keith Ward,
 Regius Professor of Divinity,
  Christ Church College, Oxford
(the home of Lewis Carroll)

For further details,
click on the
Christ Church diamond.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Wednesday December 27, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:14 am
Least Popular
Christmas Present

Revisited

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Tuesday December 26, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
Imani

 James Brown in The Blues Brothers

Click on picture for sermon.

Tuesday December 26, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am

Today in History
by The Associated Press:

Today is Tuesday, Dec. 26, the 360th day of 2006. There are five days left in the year. The seven-day African-American holiday Kwanzaa begins today. This is Boxing Day.

Related material —

The Seventh Symbol:

Box symbol

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

Monday, December 25, 2006

Monday December 25, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
James Brown,
 
“the Godfather of Soul,”
died at about 1:45 AM EST
today, Christmas Day, 2006.

A picture from a set of
five Log24 entries ending,
at 2:56 AM on
Sept. 18, 2004, with an
entry on Brown titled
Soul at Harvard“–

Ibis Editions logo

“In one way or another, all of the work we publish navigates what essayist Guy Davenport called the ‘Geography of the Imagination.’ (‘The imagination has a history, as yet unwritten, and it has a geography, as yet only dimly seen.’)” —Ibis Editions

Related material:

1 Corinthians 13 and…

The Midnight Special

Guy Davenport's Midnight Special

Click on picture for further details.

Monday December 25, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:29 am

x

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Sunday December 24, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:15 am
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061224-Shoe2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Hexagram 30,

Click on picture
for further details.

Roz Chast's Math Cliff

Click on picture
for further details.

Sunday December 24, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 am
 The Edge of Eternity

(in memory of George Latshaw,
who died on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006)

Log24 on October 25, 2005:

Brightness Doubled

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051025-Sun3.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Seven is Heaven

“Love is the shadow
   that ripens the vine.
Set the controls for
   the heart of the Sun.

Witness the man who
   raves at the wall
Making the shape of his
   questions to Heaven.
Knowing the sun will fall
   in the evening,
Will he remember the
   lessons of giving?
Set the controls for
   the heart of the Sun.
Set the controls for
   the heart of the Sun.”

— Roger Waters, quoted in
    Allusions to Classical
    Chinese Poetry in Pink Floyd


The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061224-NYT-Latshaw.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on picture for details.

Related material:

Part I —
Wordsworth

Adapted from
Brenda Garrett’s

At Home in Landscape:
Mannheim’s Chiliastic Mentality
in ‘Tintern Abbey’

Garrett comments on Wordsworth’s approach to landscape, citing Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (page numbers below refer to the 1998 Routledge edition):

“… ‘the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward, bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it’ [p. 193]. This breaking through into ecstasy can only be brought about through ‘Kairos‘ or ‘fulfilled time'”….

See translators’ note, p. 198: “In Greek mythology Kairos is the God of Opportunity– the genius of the decisive moment.  The Christianized notion of this is given thus in Paul Tillich‘s The Religious Situation [1925, translation by H. Richard Niebuhr, New York, Holt, 1932, pp. 138-139]: ‘Kairos is fulfilled time, the moment of time which is invaded by eternity.  But Kairos is not perfection or completion in time.'”

Garrett quotes Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue … (12.208-210)

“And in book 14 Wordsworth…. symbolizes how man can find transcendent unity with the universe through the image of himself leading his group to the peak of Mt. Snowdon. Climbing at night in thick fog, he almost steps off a cliff, but at the last instant, he steps out of the mist, the moon appears, and his location on the brink is revealed. Walking in the darkness of reason, his imagination illumed the night, revealed the invisible world, and spared him his life.”

See also Charles Frazier on the edge of eternity:

“They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness…. Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back….”

Cold Mountain

Part II — 7/15

From Log24 on 7/15, 2005:

Christopher Fry’s obituary
in The New York Times

“His plays radiated
an optimistic faith in God
and humanity, evoking,
in his words, ‘a world
in which we are poised
on the edge of eternity,
a world which has
deeps and shadows
of mystery,
and God is anything but
a sleeping partner.'”

Accompanying illustration:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050703-Cold.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain


Saturday, December 23, 2006

Saturday December 23, 2006

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

Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:

“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”

Log24 on Monday,
Dec. 18, 2006:

“I did a column in
Scientific American
on minimal art, and
I reproduced one of
Ed Rinehart’s [sic]
black paintings.”

Martin Gardner (pdf)

“… the entire profession
has received a very public
and very bad black mark.”

Joan S. Birman (pdf)

Lottery on Friday,
Dec. 22, 2006:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061222-PAlottery.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

5/04
, 2005:

Analysis of the structure
of a 2x2x2 cube

The Eightfold Cube

via trinities of
projective points
in a Fano plane.

7/15, 2005:

“Art history was very personal
through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt.”

  — Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives
of American Art

Also on 7/15, 2005,
a quotation on Usenet:

“A set having three members is a
single thing wholly constituted by
its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine
of the Trinity as ‘three in one’
should be child’s play.”

— Max Black,
Caveats and Critiques:
Philosophical Essays in
Language, Logic, and Art

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Thursday December 21, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:02 am
Strings Attached

From a New York Times review on Monday, Dec. 18, 2006, of the play “Strings”–

The three main characters “spend much of the play discussing quantum mechanics, string theory and Schrödinger’s Cat experiment….

Ms. Buggé’s frequently clever script makes the audience feel smart by offering up fairly recognizable literary references (from, among other things, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’). But the play suffers from abrupt, sometimes motivation-free exits and entrances.”


As does life itself.

The Conjecture:

 Preludes to
Last Summer’s
String Theory
Conference

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?

Let us go and make our visit.

On Tuesday evening, the schedule says “Prof. Yau present his new research result,” which presumably will be about the proof of the Poincare conjecture.

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter
   with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe
   into a ball
To roll it toward some
   overwhelming question….

Yau rated the conjecture as one of  the major mathematical puzzles of the 20th Century.

Five years have passed;
    five summers, with the length
Of five long winters!

William Wordsworth

Five years ago
on this date:

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling….
 
— Robert Graves,
“To Juan at the Winter Solstice”

Exits and Entrances:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061221-Dullea.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Halmos exited on Yom Kippur.
He may or may not achieve
re-entry. For details, see
Log24 entries of Oct. 1-15:

Ticket Home

  

Related material:

The Unity of Mathematics,
  Heisenberg on Beauty, and
Theme and Variations.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Wednesday December 20, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:26 am
Spike

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon  

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061220-Spike.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Also on the card is Adrien Brody ('The Thin Red Line') as a poseur proto-punk who lives in his parents' converted garage and strips at an underground gay club. He takes heat from his former friends– the aforementioned neighborhood toughs– for affecting an English accent and wearing a mohawk…."

Rob Blackwelder review of Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam" (1999)

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061220-BrodySign.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"With its white community focus, Summer of Sam is something of a departure for Lee. But with its immaculate script, faultless acting and Lee's own cameo performance, it is a typical Spike Lee film. Plenty of rapid-fire, wise-cracking dialogue and hectic crowd scenes make it fraught with tension from beginning to end. Hectic, inventive, gritty, witty, edgy and provocative, no detail is too small to escape Lee's attention and no issue too large as the film's perceptive dissection of human nature moves effortlessly between humour and horror."

Andrea Henry review

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061222-BrodyDiner.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"At another end of the sexual confusion spectrum, there's Vinny's childhood friend, now turned spiky-haired punk rocker, Ritchie (Adrien Brody). Recently he's started dating Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), erstwhile neighborhood tramp. They are both redeemed by their relationship, which at least at first, involves no sex, technically. Where Vinny struggles with his culturally instilled madonna-whore complex, Ritchie's just back from a stint living in the Village, looking for an identity that's distinct from his Italian gotta-be-macho upbringing. Eventually, he gets a gig at CBGB's ('How do you spell that?' wonders Vinny), but in order to make ends meet (and pay for his new guitar), he's dancing and turning tricks at Male World, a decrepit gay club where he performs fellatio with a life-sized dummy on stage, and, you assume, with clients offscreen."

Cynthia Fuchs revew (title: "Sex and the City")
 

Oscar's War on Women: 

Susan G. Cole on the  
75th Annual Academy Awards,
presented March 23, 2003 —

"I watched Halle Berry wipe her mouth off after Adrien Brody, in the heat of his excitement, laid the lip-lock on her for five full excruciating seconds. She was stunned, and seemed to have no idea what had happened to her. I'll tell you what happened, Halle: it's called sexual assault."

Mephisto vs. the X-Men, Vol. 1, No. 3

The Kiss…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061220-Kiss.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Where's the Oscar
for the mouth-wipe?

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Tuesday December 19, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
Joseph Barbera
at the Apollo


The 3x3 Grid

Click on picture
for related symbolism.

“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect

I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
— Paul Simon

In memory of Joseph Barbera–
co-creator ot the Flintstones–
who died yesterday, a photo
from today’s Washington Post:

Joseph Barbera in Washington Post

Playing the role of
recording angel —

Halle Berry as
Rosetta Stone:

Halle Berry as Rosetta Stone

Related material:

Citizen Stone
and
Putting the X in Xmas.”

Tuesday December 19, 2006

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

Allan Stone,
art dealer and collector,
died at 74 on Friday,
Dec. 15, 2006.

From his obituary in
yesterday's
New York Times:

"Sometimes jokingly referred to as 'Citizen Stone' after Orson Welles's outsize film character, Mr. Stone was attracted to formal density and flamboyance. He was associated with the rise of the junk aesthetic and with realist painters whose canvases bristled with paint and details." –Roberta Smith

The Log24 entry for the date of Stone's death, titled "Putting the X in Xmas," suggests the following picture as a memorial:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061219-X.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Though not bristling
with paint, the picture
is, in a sense, realistic.

It should be noted of the
obituary by Roberta Smith
that

"This is the exact opposite
of what echthroi do in
their X-ing or un-naming."
Wikipedia on
A Wind in the Door

Tuesday December 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am

x

Monday, December 18, 2006

Monday December 18, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:20 am
Fade to Black:
Mathematics and Narrative
continued

Martin Gardner in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, June/July 2005 (pdf):

“I did a column in Scientific American on minimal art, and I reproduced one of Ed Rinehart’s [sic] black paintings.  Of course, it was just a solid square of pure black.”

Black square 256x256

Click on picture
for details.

The Notices of the American Mathematical Society, January 2007 (pdf):

“This was just one of the many moments in this sad tale when there were no whistle-blowers. As a result the entire profession has received a very public and very bad black mark.”

— Joan S. Birman
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Barnard College and
Columbia University

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Saturday December 16, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:48 pm
For Beethoven’s birthday:

Da Capo.

Saturday December 16, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:31 am
 
Cubism1 as Multispeech2
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061216-Cubism.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

— From Pedagogy, Praxis, Ulysses
 

A quotation omitted from the above excerpt:

In Ulysses, there is "… the same quality of simultaneity as in cubist collage. Thus, for example, Bloom surveys the tombstones at Paddy Dignam's funeral and, in the midst of platitudinous and humorous thoughts, remembers Molly 'wanting to do it at the window'…."

Related material from quotations at the poetry journal eratio:

"The guiding law of the great variations in painting is one of disturbing simplicity.  First things are painted; then, sensations; finally, ideas.  This means that in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then, on the subjective; finally, on the intrasubjective.  These three stages are three points on a straight line."

— Jose Ortega y Gasset ("On Point of View in the Arts," an essay on the development of cubism)

Related material on
tombstones and windows:

Geometry's Tombstones,
Galois's Window, and
Architecture of Eternity.

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

See also the following part
of the eratio quotations:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061216-Dilemma.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Quotations arranged by
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

1 Or hypercubism: See 10/31/06.

2 Or "Wake" speech: See 10/31/05.
 

Friday, December 15, 2006

Friday December 15, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am

 Putting the
X
in Xmas

“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato;
bless me, what do they
teach them at these schools?”

C. S. Lewis

Apparently they teach them nihilism, empty rhetoric, and despair, as reflected in Borges, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, according to the art review below from today’s New York Times.  Let us hope that the late Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday, Dec. 12, has moved beyond these now– singing “Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” rather than “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Ritz and Heaven

Black, White, and
Read All Over

by Randy Kennedy
in The New York Times
Friday, Dec. 15, 2006

“In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known short stories, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ a 20th-century French writer sets out to compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes’s 17th-century masterpiece simply because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it’s cracked up to be.

He manages two chapters word for word, a spontaneous duplicate that Borges’s narrator finds to be ‘infinitely richer’ than the original because it contains all manner of new meanings and inflections, wrenched as it is from its proper time and context….”

[An artist’s version of a newspaper is]….

“a drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to nature with a refraction or two in between.  In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas….”

The Work:

Pennsylvania Lottery
December 2006
Daily Number (Day):

Borges,
Menard’s Quixote, and
The Harvard Crimson
Mon., Dec. 11:
133
Baudrillard
(via a white Matrix)
Sun., Dec. 10:
569
Benjamin and
a black view of life in
“The Garden of Allah”
Sat., Dec. 9:
602

Click on numbers
for commentary.

Borges and Benjamin are
  referenced directly in the
  commentary. For Baudrillard,
  see Richard Hanley on
  Baudrillard and The Matrix:

“There is nothing new under the sun. With the death of the real, or rather with its (re)surrection, hyperreality both emerges and is already always reproducing itself.”  –Jean Baudrillard

Related material:

To Be,”

The Transcendent Signified,”

and…

Postmodern Religion


.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Thursday December 14, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:06 am

Hamlet’s Transformation,
continued from Sept. 6:

Geometry's Tombstones

Click on picture
for details.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Wednesday December 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am

 Best Wishes for a
C. S. Lewis
Christmas

 

 C.S. Lewis

Image of Lewis from
Into the Wardrobe

What on earth
  is a concrete
  universal?”

— Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance

For one approach to an answer, click on the picture at left.

Update of 4:23 PM:

The Lewis link above deals with the separation of Heaven from Hell.  The emphasis is on Heaven.  A mysterious visitor to this website, “United States,” seems to be seeking equal time for Hell.  And so…

Storyboard

Based on Xanga footprints of Dec. 13, 2006
from m759’s site-visitor “United States”
(possibly a robot; if so, a robot with strange tastes).

TIME OF     DATE OF             PAGE VISITED   
VISIT         PAGE VISITED 

1217 040520  Parable
1218 060606  The Omen
1220 051205  Don’t Know Much About History
1225 030822  Mr. Holland’s Week (And in Three Days…)
1233 030114  Remarks on Day 14 (What is Truth?)
1238 040818  Train of Thought (Oh, My Lolita)
1244 020929  Angel Night (Ellis Larkins)
1249 040715  Identity Crisis (Bourne and Treadstone)
1252 050322  Make a Differance (Lacan, Derrida, Reba)
1255 050221  Quarter to Three on Night of HST’s death
1256 040408  Triple Crown on Holy Thursday
1258 040714  Welcome to Mr. Motley’s Neighborhood
1258 030221  All About Lilith
0103 040808  Quartet (for Alexander Hammid)
0104 030106  Dead Poet in the City of Angels
0109 030914  Skewed Mirrors (Readings on Aesthetics)
0110 050126  A Theorem in Musical Form
0125 021007  Music for R. D. Laing
0138 020806  Butterflies & Popes (Transfiguration)
0140 060606  The Omen (again)
0156 030313  ART WARS: Perennial Tutti-Frutti
0202 030112  Ask Not (A Bee Gees Requiem)
0202 050527  Drama of the Diagonal, Part Deux
0202 060514  STAR WARS continued (Eclipse and Venus)
0207 030112  Ask Not (again… Victory of the Goddess)
0207 030221  All About Lilith (again… Roll credits.)

“How much story do you want?”
— George Balanchine
 

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Tuesday December 12, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:22 am
The State of Grace,
Author of
Hamlet

Today’s Harvard Crimson:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061212-Crimson.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The texts in question are said
to be manuscripts of
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,”
and “The Library of Babel.”

The latter deals (like
The Mountains of Pi“)
with literature that can
be seen as the result
of a random process–
such as the lottery in
another story by Borges.

A less sinister lottery
is that of Pennsylvania–
known to some as
 “the Keystone State.”
I prefer to think of it as
the State of Grace.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051016-Mont.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on picture for details.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061212-PAlottery.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The “NITE” number 108 leads us
naturally to 1/08:

 Sunday, January 08, 2006

For Stephen Hawking’s Birthday

Epigraphs to the classic novel Cosmic Banditos:

God does not play dice with the universe. –Albert Einstein

Not only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen. –Stephen Hawking

Today’s Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:

Mid-day 722 7/22, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene.
Evening 399 Page 399, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations of 1919.

 

This (and yesterday’s “DAY” number 133)
suggests we consult page 133 of
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
of 1919.  At the top of this
page we find…

“O day and night,
but this is wondrous strange!”

Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5

Another figure from 1/08,
St. Mary Magdalene, might,
adapting the words of Borges,
offer the following observation:

“Shakespeare’s text and the lottery’s
are verbally identical, but the second
is almost infinitely richer.
(More ambiguous, detractors will
  say, but ambiguity is richness.)”

Related material: 11/22.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Monday December 11, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am
Geometry and Death

J. G. Ballard on “the architecture of death“:

“… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”

The Guardian, March 20, 2006

Edward Hirsch on Lorca:

“For him, writing is a struggle both with geometry and death.”

— “The Duende,” American Poetry Review, July/August 1999

“Rosenblum writes with
absolute intellectual honesty,
and the effect is sheer liberation….
The disposition of the material is
a model of logic and clarity.”

Harper’s Magazine review
quoted on back cover of
Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,
by Robert Rosenblum
(Abrams paperback, 2001)

SINGER, ISAAC:
“Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?”
 — Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.
“Sets forth his own aims in writing for children
 and laments ‘slice of life’ and chaos in
children’s literature. Maintains that children
like good plots, logic, and clarity,
and that they have a concern for
‘so-called eternal questions.'”

An Annotated Listing of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson

“She returned the smile, then looked
across the room to her youngest brother,
Charles Wallace, and to their father,
who were deep in concentration, bent
over the model they were building
of a tesseract: the square squared,
and squared again: a construction
of the dimension of time.”

A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L’Engle

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061211-Swiftly2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For “the dimension of time,”
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.

For a more adult audience —

In memory of General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday in Santiago, Chile, a quotation from Federico Garcia Lorca‘s lecture on “the Duende” (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933):

“… Philip of Austria… longing to discover the Muse and the Angel in theology, found himself imprisoned by the Duende of cold ardors in that masterwork of the Escorial, where geometry abuts with a dream and the Duende wears the mask of the Muse for the eternal chastisement of the great king.”


Perhaps. Or perhaps Philip, “the lonely
hermit of the Escorial,” is less lonely now.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Sunday December 10, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm
The Librarian
on Nobel Prize Day

"Time and chance
happeneth to them all."
— Ecclesiastes  

PA Lottery Dec. 10, 2006: Mid-day 569, Evening 048

Timeline Index:

Pythagoras, born ca. 569 B.C.

The number 048
may be interpreted
as referring to…

A Miniature
Rosetta Stone
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/grid3x3med.bmp” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Function defined form,
expressed in a pure geometry
that the eye could easily grasp
in its entirety."

— J. G. Ballard on Modernism
(The Guardian, March 20, 2006)

"The greatest obstacle to discovery
is not ignorance —
it is the illusion of knowledge."

— Daniel J. Boorstin,
Librarian of Congress,
quoted in Beyond Geometry

Sunday December 10, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
On This Date

“… in 1896 Alfred Nobel,
the inventor of dynamite and
founder of the Nobel prizes,
died in San Remo, Italy,
at age 63.”

— “Today in History,”
by The Associated Press

… And the Nobel Prize
     for Bullshit goes to…

David Titcher,

author and co-producer of
The Librarian: Quest for the Spear.


First Runner-up

A Piece of Justice.

From a summary of the novel:

The story deals with “one Gideon Summerfield, deceased.” Summerfield, a former tutor at (the fictional) St. Agatha’s College, Cambridge University, “is about to become the recipient of the Waymark prize. This prize is awarded in Mathematics and has the same prestige as the Nobel….”

Sunday December 10, 2006

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

"Like all men of the Library,
I have traveled in my youth."
— Jorge Luis Borges,
The Library of Babel

"Papá me mandó un artículo
de J. G. Ballard en el que
se refiere a cómo el lugar
de la muerte es central en
nuestra cultura contemporánea
."

— Sonya Walger,
interview dated September 14
(Feast of the Triumph of the Cross),
Anno Domini 2006

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061210-Quest.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sonya Walger,
said to have been
born on D-Day,
the sixth of June,
in 1974

 

Walger's father is, like Borges,
from Argentina.
She "studied English Literature
at Christ Church College, Oxford,
where she received
    a First Class degree…. "

Wikipedia

"… un artículo de J. G. Ballard…."–

A Handful of Dust
, by J. G. Ballard

(The Guardian, March 20, 2006):

"… The Atlantic wall was only part of a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.

Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about….

… modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line…

Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom.  Architects were in the vanguard of the new movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety."

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/motto2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
John Outram, architect 

(Click on picture for details.)

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061210-Holl.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
The Left Hand of God, by Adolf Holl

Related material:

The Lottery of Babylon
and
the previous entry.
 

Sunday December 10, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 am
The Matrix:

Time and Chance
on the 90th Birthday
of Kirk Douglas,
star of
The Garden of Allah

The Lottery 12/9/06 Mid-day Evening
New York 036

See

The Quest
for the 36

331

See 3/31

“square crystal” and “the symbolism could not have been more perfect.”

Pennsylvania 602

See 6/02

Walter Benjamin
on
“Adamic language.”

111

See 1/11

“Related material:
Jung’s Imago and Solomon’s Cube.”

See also

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051209-Douglas1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Diamonds

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

Saturday, December 9, 2006

Saturday December 9, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 am
Death on the Feast
of Saint Nicholas

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061209-Deathbed.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Quotation from Log24 on
September 14, 2003–

Skewed Mirrors:

Readings on Aesthetics for the
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross:

“We’re not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We’re here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That’s what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you’re not painting an exact reproduction.”

Julie Taymor on “Frida” (AP, 10/22/02)

 

Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent [above], painted by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) in 1788, is one of the most astonishing works in an oeuvre replete with remarkable images. In the decade and a half since its inclusion in Robert Rosenblum‘s survey* of nineteenth-century art, this canvas has become widely known among scholars and their students. Rosenblum, following a line of interpretation that dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, uses this painting to support a symptomatic reading of Goya’s art, which he describes as ‘the most sharply accurate mirror of the collapse of the great religious and monarchic traditions of the West.'”

Andrew Schulz in The Art Bulletin, Dec. 1, 1998

* 19th-Century Art, by H. W. Janson and Robert Rosenblum, 1984

Rosenblum died at 79

on Wednesday,
the Feast of St. Nicholas.

For more on
St. Francis Borgia, see
In Lieu of Rosebud.

Friday, December 8, 2006

Friday December 8, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
An Instance
of the Fingerpost
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061208-Date.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
"CRUCIAL (from Lat. crux, a cross),
that which has the form of a cross…
 From Francis Bacon's expression
instantia crucis (taken, as he says, from
the finger-post or crux at cross-roads)"
 
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
the classic 11th edition (1911)
 
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
Gravity's Rainbow  
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060614-EvolutionBegins2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Kate Beckinsale, adapted from
poster for Underworld: Evolution
(DVD release date 6/6/6)

 
There is such a thing
as a tesseract.
A Wrinkle in Time  
 
Related material:
 
The tesseract on the cover of
The Gameplayers of Zan
(All Hallows' Eve, 2005), and
 
A Last Stitch in Time…or
A Map of the Map
of Kierkegaard's World:

"Appropriating the Button-molder's
words to Peer Gynt, he would say,
'We'll meet at the next crossroads…
and then we'll see–
I won't say more.'"

Thursday, December 7, 2006

Thursday December 7, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:30 am
From Here to Eternity

Time and Eternity

This morning’s New York Times:

Kenneth Taylor, 86,
a Key Pilot at Pearl Harbor,
Dies

In his honor,
“one brief shining moment”–
namely,

3:30:30,”

the time of this entry.

Hexagram 30
 
30

The Image

Image of Hexagram 30: Fire over Fire

That which is bright rises twice:
The image of Fire.

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Wednesday December 6, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:15 am
Mathematical Imagery

From the current
American Mathematical Society
“Mathematical Imagery” page:

AMS Mathematical Imagery

From today’s New York Times:

Rosie Lee Tompkins obituary

“Rosie Lee Tompkins, a renowned African-American quiltmaker whose use of dazzling color and vivid geometric forms made her work internationally acclaimed despite her vehement efforts to remain completely unknown, was found dead on Friday at her home in Richmond, Calif. She was 70.” —Margalit Fox, NY Times 12/6/06
Tompkins was found dead
on December 1, 2006.
 From Log24 on that date:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061201-DayWithout.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

That entry contained an excerpt from
Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word

“What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial….”

Related material:

Diamond Theory
 
and a politically correct
1995 feminist detective novel
about quilts,

A Piece of Justice.

From a summary of the novel:

The story deals with “one Gideon Summerfield, deceased.” Summerfield, a former tutor at (the fictional) St. Agatha’s College, Cambridge University, “is about to become the recipient of the Waymark prize. This prize is awarded in Mathematics and has the same prestige as the Nobel. Summerfield had a rather lackluster career at St. Agatha’s, with the exception of one remarkable result that he obtained. It is for this result that he is being awarded the prize, albeit posthumously.”  Someone is apparently trying to prevent a biography of Summerfield from being published.

The following page contains
a critical part of the solution
to the mystery:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/PieceOfJustice138.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Meanwhile, back in real life…

It is said that the late Ms. Tompkins
liked to work while listening to the
soundtrack of “Saturday Night Fever.”

“It’s just your jive talkin’
you’re telling me lies, yeah
Jive talkin’
you wear a disguise
Jive talkin’
so misunderstood, yeah
Jive talkin’
You really no good”

These lyrics may also serve
to summarize reviews
of Diamond Theory written
in the summer of 2005.

For further details, see
Mathematics and Narrative.

 

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Tuesday December 5, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:01 am

Today in History
(via The Associated Press)

On this date (Dec. 5):

In 1776, the first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

In 1791, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna, Austria, at age 35.

In 2006, author Joan Didion is 72.

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.”

An Alternate History

(based on entries of
the past three days):

“A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:

England, 932 A.D. —
A kingdom divided….”

Introduction to “Spamalot”

A Story That Works

  • “There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
  • there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles —
    • that minds should really touch, or
    • that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing)
    • that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy;
  • and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me.”

    Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder

Monday, December 4, 2006

Monday December 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 am
Descent of the God

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061204-Theo2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

All Hallows’ Eve,
2005:

Multispeech

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/Gameplayers12.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

as well as

C. S. Lewis,
That Hideous Strength,
Chapter 15,
“The Descent of the Gods,”

and
Charles Williams,
The Carol of Amen House“:

Beauty arose of old
And dreamed of a perfect thing,
Where none shall be angry or cold
Or armed with an evil sting;

Where the world shall be made anew,
For the gods shall breathe its air,
And Phoebus Apollo there-through
Shall move on a golden stair.

(For the musical score, see
The Masques of Amen House.)

See also
A Mass for Lucero.

Monday December 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am
180, 932 –
The Musical!

“You gotta be
true to your code.”
— Sinatra

NY Lottery, 2006:

Dec. 3 Mid-day – 180
Dec. 3 Evening – 932

Yesterday’s entry suggested that
the date, December 3, might be
appropriate for some sort of
Broadway production.

Yesterday evening’s NY lottery
number, 932, suggests*
(via Google) that a visit to
the castle Wildeck
is in order.

This castle is now the home
of the Buchdruck-Museum
honoring Johannes Gutenberg.

For an appropriate Broadway
production, see today’s
New York Times:

Gutenberg! The Musical!

Yesterday’s mid-day NY lottery
number, 180, suggests, in the
above context, the German term
Umkehrung.  A casual web search
on this term (+ “reversal,”
then, refining the search,
+ “Theocritus”) leads
to the following material,
which I personally find of
much greater interest than
the above Broadway production.

(Such web searches are made
possible by a technological
revolution comparable to that
of Gutenberg… Broadway may
perhaps look forward to…
Google! The Musical!“)

Google Search 12/4/06
Results 12 of about 14
for umkehrung theocritus. (0.07 seconds) 

JSTOR: Theocritus

I12: on ‘transference’ by Theocritus of refined motifs to uncouth peasants, is in reality a parody, a devastating ‘Umkehrung‘ of the real thing,

JSTOR: A Theophany
in Theocritus

A THEOPHANY IN THEOCRITUS IN a masterly study of the language and motifs of epithet I The completeness and precision of the Umkehrung (for this term cf.

*ZSCHOPAU, a town in the kingdom of Saxony, on the left bank of the Zschopau…. It contains… a castle (Wildeck), built by the Emperor Henry I in 932.” —From the classic 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911)

(The date 932 may or may not be accurate, but still serves nicely as what has been called elsewhere “an instance of the fingerpost.”)

Sunday, December 3, 2006

Sunday December 3, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:22 am

Washington hosts Hollywood elite for Kennedy Honors

By Joel Rothstein

Reuters
Sunday, December 3, 2006; 12:12 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – "Washington's elite mingled with artistic icons at the Kennedy Center Honors on Saturday….

The Kennedy Center Honors weekend was to conclude on Sunday with Bush hosting an afternoon reception at the White House followed by an evening performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The show will be broadcast on the CBS television network on December 26."

From "Today in History,"
by The Associated Press:

On this date (Dec. 3):

In 1925,
"Concerto in F,"
by George Gershwin,
had its world premiere
at New York's Carnegie Hall,
with Gershwin himself
at the piano.

In 1947,
the Tennessee Williams play
"A Streetcar Named Desire"
opened on Broadway.

In 1953,
the musical "Kismet"
opened on Broadway.

In 1960,
the musical "Camelot"
opened on Broadway.

Related material:

Yesterday's entries–

Monroe and the Kennedys
and

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061203-KennedysCenter.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Monroe and the Kennedys,
Part II
.

Click on the picture
for further details.
 

Saturday, December 2, 2006

Saturday December 2, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Brothers:
 
Divine Intervention
Puts the “X” in Sex

Steven Rosen in The Boston Globe, Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006:

“Emilio Estevez still doesn’t know why, but one day in 2000 he and his brother Charlie Sheen found themselves doing a photo shoot at this city’s long-closed but still infamous Ambassador Hotel. It was where Senator Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot the night he won California’s crucial Democratic presidential primary in 1968.

The site made little sense for the film they were promoting, ‘Rated X,’ a feature about the real-life San Francisco pornographers Jim and Artie Mitchell….  he [Estevez] and Sheen co-starred as the Mitchell brothers.

‘It wasn’t something I had requested,’ Estevez says today of the photo shoot’s location. ‘It was perhaps the photographer. I never got to the bottom of it, but there I was.’

To him, it was one in a series of ‘divine interventions’ that gave him the inspiration to write and direct the new film ‘Bobby,’ which opened Thursday [Nov. 23, Thanksgiving Day 2006].”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061202-Kennedys.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Brothers
Bobby Kennedy and
John F. Kennedy

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061202-RatedX.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Brothers
Charlie Sheen and
Emilio Estevez

“We keep coming back
and coming back to the real:
To the hotel instead of
the hymns….”

— Wallace Stevens
(See previous entry.)

For an account of the
Kennedy film in the
style of the
  “West Wing” liberals,
see Larry King tonight.

For some deeper political
background from a more
authentic voice of the left, see
The Myth of the Kennedys.

Saturday December 2, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:29 am

Venus at
St. Anne's
,
continued

In honor of
the film "Bobby,"
now playing.

("Venus at St. Anne's"
is the title of the final
chapter of
the C. S. Lewis classic
That Hideous Strength.)

Star and Diamond

Symbol of Venus
and
Symbol of Plato

Related symbols:

Marilyn Monroe

Representation of Plato's Academy

Click on pictures
for details related tp
the Feast of St. Anne
(July 26).

"The best theology today,
in its repudiation of a
rhetorical religious idealism,
finds itself in agreement
with a recurrent note
in contemporary poetry….

We keep coming back
and coming back/
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns/
That fall upon it
out of the wind.  We seek/
… Nothing beyond reality.
Within it/
Everything,
the spirit’s alchemicana….

(From 'An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven,'
in The Collected Poems
of Wallace Stevens….
)

… Not grim/
Reality, but reality grimly seen….

(Ibid.)"

— "The Church's
New Concern with the Arts
,"
by Amos N. Wilder,
Hollis Professor
of Divinity, Emeritus,
at Harvard Divinity School,
in Christianity and Crisis,
February 18, 1957.

 

 

 

"All the truth in the world
adds up to one big lie."

— Dylan, "Things Have Changed"
 

Friday, December 1, 2006

Friday December 1, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:07 am

Day Without Art

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

crucial – 1706, from Fr. crucial… from L. crux (gen. crucis) “cross.” The meaning “decisive, critical” is extended from a logical term, Instantias Crucis, adopted by Francis Bacon (1620); the notion is of cross fingerboard signposts* at forking roads, thus a requirement to choose.

“… given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial— the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

Hilton Kramer in The New York Times, April 28, 1974

“I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial….

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

For some related material from the next 30 years, 1976-2006, see Art Wars.

* “Note that in the original Latin, the term is not by any means ‘fingerpost’ but simply ‘cross’ (Latin Crux, crucis) – a root term giving deeper meaning to the ‘crucial’ decision as to which if any of the narratives are ‘true,’ and echoing the decisive ‘crucifixion’ revealed in the story.”

Wikipedia on An Instance of the Fingerpost.

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