Log24

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Tuesday July 31, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:11 am

Joke

From July 28:

The Guardian, July 26,
on a work by the
late playwright
 George Tabori:

“… inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. ‘Just two,’ says Jay. ‘The boy is bringing his own.’ Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form.”

“When may we expect to have
something from you on the
  esthetic question? he asked.”

A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man

             From The Gag

Seven – Eleven Dice 

Throw a seven or eleven every time. Set consists of a pair of regular dice and another set that can’t miss. A product of the S. S. Adams Company. Make your friends and family laugh with this great prank!

 July 11, 2003
New York State Lottery

7-11 Evening Number: 000.

Tuesday July 31, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 am

Italian Director Antonioni
Dies at 94

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 31, 2007

Filed with The New York Times at 5:14 a.m. ET

“ROME (AP) — Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, best known for his movies ‘Blow-Up’ and ‘L’Avventura,’ has died, officials and news reports said Tuesday. He was 94.

The ANSA news agency said that Antonioni died at his home on Monday evening.

‘With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,’ Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said in a statement.

In 1995, Hollywood honored Antonioni’s career work– 25 films and several screenplays– with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement.”

Related material:

  1. “Zabriskie Point” (1970), a film by Antonioni.

    “The name refers to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, the location of the film’s famous desert love scene, in which members of the Open Theatre simulate an orgy.” —Wikipedia

  2. Play It As It Lays (1970), a novel by Joan Didion

       Play It As It Lays

    Play It As It Lays, page 204

  3. Log24: The Word in the Desert

Tuesday July 31, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:55 am

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Monday, July 30, 2007

Monday July 30, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:00 pm
The Deathly Hallows Symbol

'Deathly Hallows symbol, related to the 'Snakes on a Plane' cartoon.

Some fear that the Harry Potter books introduce children to the occult; they are not entirely mistaken.

According to Wikipedia, the “Deathly Hallows” of the final Harry Potter novel are “three fictional magical objects that appear in the book.”

The vertical line, circle, and triangle in the symbol pictured above are said to refer to these three magical objects.

One fan relates the “Deathly Hallows” symbol above, taken from the spine of a British children’s edition of the book, to a symbol for “the divine (or sacred, or secret) fire” of alchemy. She relates this fire in turn to “serpent power” and the number seven:

Kristin Devoe at a Potter fan site:

“We know that seven is a powerful number in the novels. Tom Riddle calls it ‘the most powerfully magic number.‘ The ability to balance the seven chakras within oneself allows the person to harness the secret fire. This secret fire in alchemy is the same as the kundalini or coiled snake in yogic philosophy. It is also known as ‘serpent power’ or the ‘dragon’ depending on the tradition. The kundalini is polar in nature and this energy, this internal fire, is very powerful for those who are able to harness it and it purifies the aspirant allowing them the knowledge of the universe. This secret fire is the Serpent Power which transmutes the base metals into the Perfect Gold of the Sun.

It is interesting that the symbol of the caduceus in alchemy is thought to have been taken from the symbol of the kundalini. Perched on the top of the caduceus, or the staff of Hermes, the messenger of the gods and revealer of alchemy, is the golden snitch itself! Many fans have compared this to the scene in The Order of the Phoenix where Harry tells Dumbledore about the attack on Mr. Weasley and says, ‘I was the snake, I saw it from the snake’s point of view.

The chapter continues with Dumbledore consulting ‘one of the fragile silver instruments whose function Harry had never known,’ tapping it with his wand:

The instrument tinkled into life at once with rhythmic clinking noises. Tiny puffs of pale green smoke issued from the minuscule silver tube at the top. Dumbledore watched the smoke closely, his brow furrowed, and after a few seconds, the tiny puffs became a steady stream of smoke that thickened and coiled into he air… A serpent’s head grew out of the end of it, opening its mouth wide. Harry wondered whether the instrument was confirming his story; He looked eagerly at Dumbledore for a sign that he was right, but Dumbledore did not look up.

“Naturally, Naturally,” muttered Dumbledore apparently to himself, still observing the stream of smoke without the slightest sign of surprise. “But in essence divided?”

Harry could make neither head not tail of this question. The smoke serpent, however split instantly into two snakes, both coiling and undulating in the dark air. With a look of grim satisfaction Dumbledore gave the instrument another gentle tap with his wand; The clinking noise slowed and died, and the smoke serpents grew faint, became a formless haze, and vanished.

Could these coiling serpents of smoke be foreshadowing events to come in Deathly Hallows where Harry learns to ‘awaken the serpent’ within himself? Could the snake’s splitting in two symbolize the dual nature of the kundalini?”

Related material

The previous entry

“And the serpent’s eyes shine    
As he wraps around the vine
In The Garden of Allah” —

and the following
famous illustration of
the double-helix
structure of DNA:

 Odile Crick, drawing of DNA structure in the journal Nature, 1953
This is taken from
a figure accompanying
an obituary, in today’s
New York Times, of the
artist who drew the figure
.

The double helix
is not a structure
from magic; it may,
however, as the Rowling
quote above shows, have
certain occult uses,
better suited to
Don Henley’s
Garden of Allah
than to the
  Garden of Apollo.

Seven is Heaven...

Similarly, the three objects
above (Log24 on April 9)
are from pure mathematics–
the realm of Apollo, not
of those in Henley’s song.

The similarity of the
top object of the three —
the “Fano plane” — to
the “Deathly Hallows”
symbol is probably
entirely coincidental.

Monday July 30, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am
Garden Party
 
"And the serpent's eyes shine    
As he wraps around the vine…"

In The Garden of Allah

"But not, perhaps,
in the Garden of Apollo":

The Garden of Apollo: The 3x3 Grid

— "Garden Party" —
Log24, April 9, 2007

Related material:

"When, on the last day of February 1953 Francis told her excitedly of the double helix discovery, she took no notice: 'He was always saying that kind of thing.' But when nine years later she heard the news of the Nobel Prize while out shopping, she immediately rushed to the fishmonger for ice to fill the bath and cool the champagne: a party was inevitable."

— Matt Ridley on Odile Crick (The Independent, July 20, 2007), who drew what "may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology," according to Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla quoted by Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post, July 21, 2007

See also "Game Boy"
(Log24 on the Feast
of the Transfiguration–
August 6, 2006):

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

Monday July 30, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
 Behind Every
Great Man…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070730-OdileCrick.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Odile Crick with her husband, Francis H.C. Crick, in Cambridge, England. Mrs. Crick, an artist, illustrated the work of her husband, whose team received a Nobel Prize for its DNA research.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Of The Salk Institute For Biological Studies

Washington Post, July 21, 2007

“Her graceful drawing of the double-helix structure of DNA with intertwined helical loops has become a symbol of the achievements of science and its aspirations to understand the secrets of life. The image represents the base pairs of nucleic acids, twisted around a center line to show the axis of the helix. Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, where Francis Crick later worked, said: ‘Mrs. Crick’s drawing was an abstract representation of DNA, but it was accurate with regard to its shape and size of its spacing.

‘The models you see now have all the atoms in them,’ Sejnowski said. ‘The one in Nature was the backbone and gave the bare outline. It may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology.'”

— Adam Bernstein in
The Washington Post, July 21, 2007

Monday July 30, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am
Structure

Illustration from
Log24, April 7, 2003:

April is Math Awareness Month.
This year’s theme is “mathematics and art.”

Mathematics and Art

Illustration from
this morning’s
New York Times:

NYT obituaries for Ingmar Bergman, Odile Crick, on July 30, 2007

Illustration from
the journal Nature, 1953:

Odile Crick, illustration of DNA structure, 1953

Monday July 30, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 am
Ingmar Bergman Dies; NYT front page

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Sunday July 29, 2007

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

“This translation plane is defined by
a spreadset in a 2-dimensional
vector space over the field GF(3),
consisting of the following matrices.”


 

Priv.-Doz. Dr. H. Klein,
Arbeitsgruppe Geometrie,
Mathematical Seminar of
Christian-Albrechts University

(See Log24, The Nine
and Translation Plane
for Rosh Hashanah
.)

Sunday July 29, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
A Fulfilled Recognition

This morning’s previous entry featured contemptibly mediocre Jewish fiction.  In contrast, here is a passage from first-rate Jewish fiction– the little boy and little girl of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime:

“Their desire for each other’s company was unflagging.  This was noted with amusement by the adults.  They were inseparable until bedtime but uncomplaining when it was announced.  They ran off to their separate rooms with not a glance backward.  Their sleep was absolute.  They sought each other in the morning.  He did not think of her as beautiful.  She did not think of him as comely.  They were extremely sensitive to each other, silhouetted in a diffuse excitement, like electricity or a nimbus of light, but their touching was casual and matter-of-fact.  What bound them to each other was a fulfilled recognition which they lived and thought within so that their apprehension of each other could not be so distinct and separated as to include admiration for the other’s fairness.  Yet they were beautiful, he in his stately blond thoughtfulness, she a smaller, darker, more lithe being, with flash in her dark eyes and an almost military bearing.  When they ran their hair lay back from their broad foreheads.  Her feet were small, her brown hands were small.  She left imprints in the sand of a street runner, a climber of dark stairs; her track was a flight from the terrors of alleys and the terrible crash of ashcans.  She had relieved herself in wooden outhouses behind the tenements.  The tails of rodents had curled about her ankles.  She knew how to sew with a machine and had observed dogs mating, whores taking on customers in hallways, drunks peeing through the wooden spokes of pushcart wheels.  He had never gone without a meal.  He had never been cold at night.  He ran with his mind.  He ran toward something.  He was unencumbered by fear and did not know there were beings in the world less curious about it than he.  He saw through things and noted the colors people produced and was never surprised by a coincidence.  A blue and green planet rolled through his eyes.”

Sunday July 29, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am
Nordic Truth: Jewish Fiction:
Snowball In Hell
From The New York Times in 2005:

Portrait of conductor
Arild Remmereit:


Arild Remmereit

April 24, 2005
Have Baton,
Will Travel

by James R. Oestreich

 
PITTSBURGH

“HE’S the hottest conductor you’ve never heard of….

In music, as in most other pursuits, one person’s misfortune can be another’s opportunity. Many a podium career has been built on successful substitutions…. typically, the process is cumulative and measured.

In Mr. Remmereit’s case, it seems a sort of spontaneous combustion…. he seems destined for big things, and soon.

Regarding his sudden change in stature, he spoke as if from afar. ‘The snowball has reached such a size that it has started to roll,’ he said matter-of-factly….

‘It’s terrifying when it happens,’ he said, ‘but I can’t tell you how naively happy I am when it goes well. These are such major steps that I wasn’t even hoping for a few weeks ago.’

ARILD REMMEREIT (pronounced AHR-eeld REMM-uh-right, with the r’s heavily rolled) was born in a village in Norway, between Bergen and Trondheim, and has lived in Vienna since 1987. Slim and fresh-faced at 43, he has had a busy but low-level career in Europe….

So here he was, on April 15, conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony… in a vintage… Germanic program…. Wagner’s ‘Siegfried Idyll,’ Schumann’s Fourth Symphony and Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto….”

Review:

Württemberg Philharmonic February 2004
Nielsen, Sibelius, Grieg.

Reutlinger Nachrichten.
“Distant closeness, close distance.

Arild Remmereit as a guest conductor: ‘As when the sun rises in the North.’ The Philharmonics and their brilliant guest conductor fetched the mind-blowing, tempting and exciting Scandinavia.

It was like a lucky strike to see the Norwegian conductor on stage with the Philharmonic. When he conducts the Dane Nielsen, the Finn Sibelius and the Norwegian Grieg, one can really feel that this man has the locally marked music floating in his blood.”

From The New York Times today:
 

Discussion of
a new novel:
Variations on the Beast

Variations on
the Beast
,
by psychoanalyst
Henry Grinberg

An interview with Henry Grinberg conducted by James R. Oestreich:

“For those who find inspiration and edification in great art, it is always painful to be reminded that artists are not necessarily admirable as people and that art is powerless in the face of great evil. That truth was baldly evident in Nazi Germany and in the way the regime used and abused music and musicians, to say nothing of the way it used and abused human beings of all kinds.

[A new novel touches on] these issues…. In Variations on the Beast (Dragon Press), Henry Grinberg, a psychoanalyst, posits Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder, a powerful maestro, as a fictional rival of Wilhelm Furtwängler (whose qualms about working under the regime he does not share) and Herbert von Karajan (whose vaulting ambition he does).”

GRINBERG:

“And it soon occurred to me… that, my God, a lot of the famous, the notable, the moving, the magnificent composers in the 18th and 19th centuries and earlier were Germans. And I tried to understand, how did such a nation turn out to be so bestial and cruel, so indifferent to the suffering of others? And I have no explanation for it.

As a practicing psychoanalyst, I can see individual expressions of rage and their causes and their so-called justifications. But for a whole nation to be consumed, to be seduced by an overwhelming idea– well, there are rationalizations, I guess, but not explanations. There’s no forgiveness for this. And I tried to put together a story of a person who was a participant and a causer of these kinds of things….

So I sort of poured my feelings of contempt and rage into the character I was devising. And I have to admit, after having been psychoanalyzed myself in preparation for the training, that something of Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder exists in me. I shudder to think that this may be so, but I have to accept the possibility. Murderous thoughts may have occurred to me, but, thank God, I’ve never killed anyone.”

Sunday July 29, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:24 am

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Saturday, July 28, 2007

Saturday July 28, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

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Saturday July 28, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:28 pm

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Saturday July 28, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:15 am
The Third Cross


The Guardian, July 26,
on the late playwright
 George Tabori:

“… he triumphed again with The Goldberg Variations. Mr Jay, assisted by Goldberg, a concentration camp survivor, is rehearsing a montage of biblical scenes in Jerusalem. It is inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. ‘Just two,’ says Jay. ‘The boy is bringing his own.’ Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form.”

Related material:

Log24 on
the date of
Tabori’s death
:

Harry Potter and Plato's Diamond
 
Click on image
for variations
 on the theme.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Thursday July 26, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

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Thursday July 26, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 am
The Varieties
of Religious Experience

PA Lottery July 25, 2007: Mid-day 057, Evening 225

In memory of
author George Tabori
(see previous entry):

57:

“The author takes the place of the omniscient narrator. He heightens the tension by using striking dialogue. To decrease the tension he uses some light forms of comedy, like the commands for the Dobermans of the little boy: ‘Ketchup’ for retreating, ‘Pickles’ for attacking, and ‘Mustard’ for killing.”

Menno Mertens  
on Ira Levin’s
The Boys from Brazil
225:
 
George Tabori
Log24 on 2/25, 2007:

“I caught the sudden look
of some dead master….”

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Wednesday July 25, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
The Comedy of
George Tabori

George Tabori

From AP “Obituaries in the News”–
Filed with The New York Times
at 11:16 p.m. ET July 24, 2007–

George Tabori

“BERLIN (AP) — Hungarian-born playwright and director George Tabori, a legend in Germany’s postwar theater world whose avant-garde works confronted anti-Semitism, died Monday [July 23, 2007]. He was 93.

Tabori, who as recently as three years ago dreamed of returning to stage to play the title role in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear,’ died in his apartment near the theater, the Berliner Ensemble said Tuesday, noting that friends and family had accompanied him through his final days. No cause of death was given.

Born into a Jewish family in Budapest on May 24, 1914, Tabori fled in 1936 to London, where he started working for the British Broadcasting Corp., and became a British citizen. His father, and other members of his family, were killed at Auschwitz.

Tabori moved to Hollywood in the 1950s, where he worked as a scriptwriter, most notably co-writing the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film, ‘I Confess.’

He moved to Germany in the 1970s and launched a theater career that spanned from acting to directing to writing. He used sharp wit and humor in his plays to examine the relationship between Germany and the Jews, as well as attack anti-Semitism.

Among his best-known works are ‘Mein Kampf,’ set in the Viennese hostel where Adolf Hitler lived from 1910-1913, and the ‘Goldberg Variations,’ both dark farces that poke fun at the Nazis.”

From Year of Jewish Culture:

“The year 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish Museum in Prague.”

From the related page Programme (October-December):

Divadlo v Dlouhé
George Tabori: GOLDBERGOVSKÉ VARIACE / THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, 19 October, 7 p.m. A comedy on creation and martyrdom.”

Variations on
Birth and Death

From Log24 on the date of
the Prague production of the
Tabori “Goldberg Variations,”
an illustration in honor of
Sir Thomas Browne, who
was born, and died,
on that date:

Laves tiling

The above is from
Variable Resolution 4–k Meshes:
Concepts and Applications
(pdf),
by Luiz Velho and Jonas Gomes.

See also Symmetry Framed
and The Garden of Cyrus.

Variations on
the Afterlife

 From Log24
on the date of
Tabori’s death:

Theme

(Plato, Meno)

Plato's Diamond colored

and Variations:

Diamond Theory cover, 1976

Click on “variations” above
for some material on
the “Goldberg Variations”
of Johann Sebastian Bach.

 

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Tuesday July 24, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:11 am
The Church of St. Frank

See yesterday’s entries for
some relevant quotations
from Wallace Stevens.

Further quotations for what
Marjorie Garber, replying to
a book review by
Frank Kermode, has called
the Church of St. Frank“–

Frank Kermode on

Harold Bloom:

“He has… a great, almost
selfish passion for poetry,
and he interprets difficult
texts as if there were no
more important activity
in the world, which may
be right.”

Page 348 of Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate
,
by Harold Bloom
(1977, Cornell U. Press):

“The fiction of the leaves is now Stevens’ fiction…. Spring, summer, and autumn adorn the rock of reality even as a woman is adorned, the principle being the Platonic one of copying the sun as source of all images….

… They are more than leaves
              that cover the barren rock….

They bear their fruit    
             so that the year is known….

If they are more than leaves, then they are no longer language, and the leaves have ceased to be tropes or poems and have become magic or mysticism, a Will-to-Power over nature rather than over the anteriority of poetic imagery.”

For more on magic, mysticism, and the Platonic “source of all images,” see Scott McLaren on “Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in the Novels of Charles Williams.” McLaren quotes Evelyn Underhill on magic vs. mysticism:

The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give […] In mysticism the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the sense-world in order that the self may be joined by love to the one eternal and ultimate Object of love […] In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness […] (Underhill 84; see also 178ff.)

— Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1911.

For more on what Bloom calls the “Will-to-Power over nature,” see Faust in Copenhagen and the recent (20th- and 21st-century) history of Harvard University. These matters are also discussed in “Log24 – Juneteenth through Midsummer Night.”

For more on what Underhill calls “the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness,” see the review, in the August 2007 Notices of the American Mathematical Society, of a book by Douglas Hofstadter– a writer on the nature of consciousness— by magician Martin Gardner.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Monday July 23, 2007

Daniel Radcliffe
is 18 today.
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter

Greetings.

“The greatest sorcerer (writes Novalis memorably)
would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of
taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions.
Would not this be true of us?”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise”

El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis)
sería el que se hechizara hasta el punto de
tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas.
¿No sería este nuestro caso?”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Los Avatares de la Tortuga

Autonomous Apparition

At Midsummer Noon:

“In Many Dimensions (1931)
Williams sets before his reader the
mysterious Stone of King Solomon,
an image he probably drew from
a brief description in Waite’s
The Holy Kabbalah (1929) of
a supernatural cubic stone
on which was inscribed
‘the Divine Name.’”
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070624-Waite.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Related material:
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure 

Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.

– Wallace Stevens, “The Rock”

See also
as well as
Hofstadter on
his magnum opus:
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
Goedel Escher Bach coverHofstadter’s cover.

Here are three patterns,
“shadows” of a sort,
derived from a different
“central object”:
Faces of Solomon's Cube, related to Escher's 'Verbum'

Click on image for details.

Monday July 23, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am
 
Today’s Birthday:
Daniel Radcliffe
(“Harry Potter”)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone DVD

Theme

(Plato, Meno)

Plato's Diamond colored

and Variations:

Diamond Theory cover, 1976
Click on picture for details.

“A diamond jubilance
beyond the fire,
That gives its power
to the wild-ringed eye”

— Wallace Stevens,
“The Owl in the Sarcophagus”

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Sunday July 22, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am

8 am

Sunday July 22, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am

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Saturday, July 21, 2007

Saturday July 21, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

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Saturday July 21, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:45 am

Death of a Nominalist

“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.” –Ernest Hemingway

(The Hemingway quotation is from the AP’s “Today in History” on July 21, 2007; for the context, see Death in the Afternoon.)

Today seems as good a day as any for noting the death of an author previously discussed in Log24 on January 29, 2007, and January 31, 2007.

Joseph Goguen
died on July 3, 2006. (I learned of his death only after the entries of January 2007 were written. They still hold.)

Goguen’s death may be viewed in the context of the ongoing war between the realism of Plato and the nominalism of the sophists. (See, for instance, Log24 on August 10-15, 2004, and on July 3-5, 2007.)

Joseph A. Goguen, “Ontology, Society, and Ontotheology” (pdf):

“Before introducing algebraic semiotics and structural blending, it is good to be clear about their philosophical orientation. The reason for taking special care with this is that, in Western culture, mathematical formalisms are often given a status beyond what they deserve. For example, Euclid wrote, ‘The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.’ Similarly, the ‘situations’ in the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry, which resemble conceptual spaces (but are more sophisticated– perhaps too sophisticated), are considered to be actually existing, real entities [23], even though they may include what are normally considered judgements.5 The classical semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce [24] also tends towards a Platonist view of signs. The viewpoint of this paper is that all formalisms are constructed in the course of some task, such as scientific study or engineering design, for the heuristic purpose of facilitating consideration of certain issues in that task. Under this view, all theories are situated social entities, mathematical theories no less than others; of course, this does not mean that they are not useful.”

5 The “types” of situation theory are even further removed from concrete reality.

[23] Jon Barwise and John Perry. Situations and Attitudes. MIT (Bradford), 1983.
[24] Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Harvard, 1965. In 6 volumes; see especially Volume 2: Elements of Logic.

From Log24 on the date of Goguen’s death:

Requiem for a clown:

“At times, bullshit can only be
countered with superior bullshit.”

Norman Mailer

This same Mailer aphorism was quoted, along with an excerpt from the Goguen passage above, in Log24 this year on the date of Norman Mailer’s birth.  Also quoted on that date:

Sophia. Then these thoughts of Nature are also thoughts of God.

Alfred. Undoubtedly so, but however valuable the expression may be, I would rather that we should not make use of it till we are convinced that our investigation leads to a view of Nature, which is also the contemplation of God. We shall then feel justified by a different and more perfect knowledge to call the thoughts of Nature those of God….

Whether the above excerpt– from Hans Christian Oersted‘s The Soul in Nature (1852)– is superior to the similar remark of Goguen, the reader may decide.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Friday July 20, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 pm

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Friday July 20, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

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Thursday, July 19, 2007

Thursday July 19, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am

Volta da Morte:
Friday the 13th

TV listing from Brazil
for Friday, Jan. 13th, 2006:

Veja quais são os melhores filmes
DESTA SEMANA na TV!

Sexta, 13 de Janeiro

Abracadabra
(SBT, 22h30
Hocus Pocus, de Kenny Ortega. Com Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker e Kathy Najimy. EUA, 1993, cor, 102 min. Terror – Dois jovens irmãos, na noite de Halloween, entram na velha casa das bruxas, e sem saber, trazem duas bruxas de volta da morte. Decididas a se tornarem imortais, elas precisarão, para isso, roubar vidas de crianças.

— http://www.jornalonorte.com.br/
especial/tvearte/noticias/?10096

Related material:

If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts
,

Friday the 13th
of January, 2006
,

and

Catholic Schools Sermon

Thursday July 19, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:09 am

4:09

Thursday July 19, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am

Death Flight

Lord Voldemort (in French vol de mort meaning “flight of death” or “steals of/in death,” in Portuguese volta da morte meaning “return from death”) made his debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Wikipedia folk etymology; corrected, but may still contain errors.

Related material: Yesterday’s entries and the remarks from Porto Alegre, Brazil, quoted here on January 25, 2005.

Thursday July 19, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:44 am

Death Flight

Lord Voldemort (vol de mort meaning “flying in death,” or “steals of/in death”, or, more likely, ‘death flight’ in French. volta de morte in portuguese means return from the dead) made his debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
— Wikipedia

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Wednesday July 18, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:28 pm
Reminder

Reuters News Agency,
Wed., July 18, 2007,
3:48 PM EDT

By Mauricio Savarese

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – The flames from Brazil’s worst plane crash were contained around dawn on Wednesday, but the smell of smoke and death wafted over travelers at Sao Paulo’s airport as a reminder of disaster….

The airport resumed flights on an alternate runway.

Despite the deterioration of Brazil’s air safety record over the past year, Guilherme Braghetto, 72, showed little concern for his son, whom he brought to the airport for a flight to Goiania.

‘I feel for those who lost loved ones, but I don’t think lightning so strong will hit twice,’ he said.

On September 29, 2006, a Boeing 737 operated by Brazilian carrier Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes crashed after clipping wings with a Legacy business jet over the Amazon rainforest, killing 154 people.

Elsewhere:

Log24, Sept. 28, 2006
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/music/images/Keys-Piano.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on picture for a midi.

“…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….”

The New Yorker, issue dated
July 23, 2007, page 42:

“While out-of-body experiences
have the character of
a perceptual illusion
(albeit a complex and
singular one), near-death
experiences have all the
hallmarks of mystical
experience, as William
James defines it….”

— Oliver Sacks,
A Bolt from the Blue

The New Yorker, issue dated
July 23, 2007, page 70:

IMAGE- Barsotti cartoon, 'You're a good listener'

Wednesday July 18, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:03 am
Burning Bright

“What is real?”
Pope Benedict XVI
in Brazil on May 13

Yesterday in
the Keystone State:

PA Lottery July 17, 2007: Mid-day 853, Evening 856

This suggests– via a search on “853-856” + “universals”– that we consult pages 853-856 in The Library of America’s William James: Writings 1902-1910.

Beginning on page 853 in this book, and ending on page 856, is an excerpt from a James address that the editor has titled…

The Tigers in India

“There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively.  Altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge, and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here.  Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers? ….

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought…. At the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here….

… The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers….

… In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there.  In short, the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume’s language, as any two things can be, and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields.

I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies….

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes…. What now do we mean by ‘knowing’ such a sort of object as this?  For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us to his lair?

… the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience. The paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different directions.1

James, Writings 1902-1910, page 856

The same volume also contains
James’s The Varieties of
Religious Experience.

“The Tigers in India” is
only a part of a 20-page
James address originally titled
The Knowing of Things Together
(my emphasis).

Wednesday July 18, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:02 am

x

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Tuesday July 17, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 am
Habeas Corpus
 
The Hex Witch of Seldom,
by Nancy Springer:

Hex Witch of Seldom - Excerpt on squares of breadT

Log24 on 9/11, 2003
:

Here is a rhetorical exercise
for Jesuits that James Joyce
might appreciate:

Discuss Bobbi’s “little squares”
of bread as the Body of Christ.
Formulate, using Santayana’s
criteria, a definition of beauty
that includes this sacrament.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Monday July 16, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:06 am
Confirmation

“They took all the trees,
put ’em in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see ’em”

Joni Mitchell

From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia:

“In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where ‘someone long forgotten had hung a rope.’ They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic….”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070716-MagicTime.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette

From Bridge to Terabithia:

“I know”– she was getting excited– “it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said.

LOS ANGELES – Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the nation’s largest, apologized yesterday for what he called a “terrible sin and crime” as the church confirmed it would pay a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.

Log24 7/11,
“Magic Time”

Mary Karr,
Facing Altars:
  Poetry and Prayer“–

“There is a body
on the cross  
 in my church.”

“Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know
what you’ve got
till it’s gone”

Joni Mitchell

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Sunday July 15, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:20 am
$660-million settlement
in priest abuses

“The Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed Saturday to a $660-million settlement with 508 people who have accused priests of sexual abuse, by far the biggest payout in the child molestation scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church nationwide….

The agreement will end all of the pending abuse litigation against the most populous archdiocese in the U.S….

Although the settlement will effectively end a chapter in the sad saga of clerical abuse that has spanned decades, the resolution will come at a huge cost to the church. More than $114 million has been promised in previous settlements, bringing the total liability for clergy misconduct in the Los Angeles Archdiocese to more than $774 million. The figure dwarfs the next largest settlements in the U.S., including those reached in Boston, at $157 million, and in Portland, Ore., at $129 million.”

Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Saturday July 14, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:07 am
A Note from the
Catholic University
of America


The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains tributes to the admirable personal qualities and mathematical work of the late Harvard professor George Mackey.  For my own tributes, see Log24 on March 17, 2006April 29, 2006, and March 10, 2007.  For an entry critical of Mackey’s reductionism– a philosophical, not mathematical, error– see Log24 on May 23, 2007 (“Devil in the Details”).

Here is another attack on reductionism, from a discussion of the work of another first-rate mathematician, the late Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT:

“Another theme developed by Rota is that of ‘Fundierung.’ He shows that throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain pieces of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain pieces of wood or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an act of generosity is founded upon something’s being handed over. In perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon it; what we see is far more than meets the eye. Rota gives striking examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity. His point is strongly antireductionist. Reductionism is the inclination to see as ‘real’ only the foundation, the substrate of things (the piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon, and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true existence of that which is founded. Rota’s arguments against reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, of intelligence, of emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even as we deny it in our theories.”

Robert Sokolowski, foreword to Rota’s Indiscrete Thoughts

Father Robert Sokolowski

Father Robert Sokolowski

Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski.

Thomas Aquinas College newsletter

The tributes to Mackey are contained in the first of two feature articles in the August 2007 AMS Notices.  The second feature article is a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter.  For some remarks related to that article, see Thursday’s Log24 entry “Not Mathematics but Theology.”

Friday, July 13, 2007

Friday July 13, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:00 am
Today’s birthday:
Harrison Ford is 65.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070713-Ford2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Three times the concentred
     self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self,
     having possessed
The object, grips it
     in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive,
     once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation,
     once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture,
     this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent,
     fully found.”

— “Credences of Summer,” VII,
    by Wallace Stevens, from
    Transport to Summer (1947)

“It was Plato who best expressed– who veritably embodied– the tension between the narrative arts and mathematics….


Plato clearly loved them both, both mathematics and poetry.  But he approved of mathematics, and heartily, if conflictedly, disapproved of poetry.  Engraved above the entrance to his Academy, the first European university, was the admonition: Oudeis ageometretos eiseto.  Let none ignorant of geometry enter.  This is an expression of high approval indeed, and the symbolism could not have been more perfect, since mathematics was, for Plato, the very gateway for all future knowledge.  Mathematics ushers one into the realm of abstraction and universality, grasped only through pure reason.  Mathematics is the threshold we cross to pass into the ideal, the truly real.”

   — Rebecca Goldstein, Mathematics and the Character of Tragedy

Related material:

Previous entry,
entries of July 1, 2007,
and A Little Story
(9/30/06)

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Thursday July 12, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:00 pm
On Interpenetration,
or Coinherence, of Souls

The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop. (2007, Basic Books, New York. $26.95, 412 pages.)

A better review, in the Los Angeles Times of March 18, 2007, notes an important phrase in the book, "interpenetration of souls," that the AMS Notices review ignores.

Here is an Amazon.com search on "interpenetration" in the Hofstadter book:

1. on Page 217:
"… described does not create a profound blurring of two people's identities. Tennis and driving do not give rise to deep interpenetrations of souls. …"
2. on Page 237:
"… What seems crucial here is the depth of interpenetration of souls the sense of shared goals, which leads to shared identity. Thus, for instance, Carol always had a deep, …"
3. on Page 270:
"… including the most private feelings and the most confidential confessions, then the interpenetration of our worlds becomes so great that our worldviews start to fuse. Just as I could jump to California when …"
4. on Page 274:
"… we choose to downplay or totally ignore the implications of the everyday manifestations of the interpenetration of souls. Consider how profoundly wrapped up you can become in a close friend's successes and failures, in their very …"
5. on Page 276:
"… Interpenetration of National Souls Earlier in this chapter, I briefly offered the image of a self as analogous to a country …"
6. from Index:
"… birthday party for, 350 "bachelor", elusiveness of concept, 178 bad-breath analogy, 150 bandwidth of communication as determinant of degree of interpenetration, 212 213, 220, …"
7. from Index:
"… phrases denying interpenetration of souls, 270 271; physical phenomena that lack consciousness, 281 282; physical structures lacking hereness, 283; potential personal attributes, 183; …"

The American Mathematical Society editors and reviewer seem to share Hofstadter's ignorance of Christian doctrine; they might otherwise have remembered a rather famous remark: "This is not mathematics, it is theology."
 
For more on the theology of interpenetration, see Log24 on "Perichoresis, or Coinherence" (Jan. 22, 2004).

For a more mathematical approach to this topic, see Spirituality Today, Spring 1991:

"… the most helpful image is perhaps the ellipse often used to surround divine figures in ancient art, a geometrical figure resulting from the overlapping, greater or lesser, of two independent circles, an interpenetration or coinherence which will, in some sense, reunify divided humanity, thus restoring to some imperfect degree the original image of God."

See also the trinitarian doctrine implicit in related Log24 entries of July 1, 2007, which include the following illustration of the geometrical figure described, in a somewhat confused manner, above:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070701-Ratio.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Values are rooted
in narrative."

Harvey Cox,    
Hollis Professor
of Divinity
at Harvard,
Atlantic Monthly,
  November 1995  

Related material:

Steps Toward Salvation:
An Examination of
Co-Inherence and
Substitution in
the Seven Novels
of Charles Williams
,
by Dennis L. Weeks

Thursday July 12, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm
Heaven was
kind of a hat

on the universe,
a lid that kept
everything underneath it
where it belonged.”

 — Carrie Fisher,
Postcards from the Edge

Texas Lottery logo: cowboy hat in air

Texas Lottery on 7/11, 2007: Mid-day 511, Evening 234

5/11:

“Going Up.”

— “Love at the  
 Five and Dime
,”
by
Nanci Griffith

234:

“One two three four,
who are we for?”

Thursday July 12, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am

x

Thursday July 12, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am

x

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Wednesday July 11, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:45 am
… And One More  
 for the Road

In memory of Doug Marlette,
cartoonist and author
of Magic Time.

Marlette died in a highway
accident yesterday at about
10 AM CT.  He was
"on his way to Oxford
[Mississippi]… to help a
troupe of high school students
put on a play based on
his nationally syndicated
comic strip, Kudzu."

Chris Joyner,
Clarion-Ledger,
Jackson, Mississippi


  Log24 yesterday,
7:59 AM ET:

Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
    Poetry and Prayer"–

"There is a body
on the cross  
 in my church."

Church, by Doug Marlette

Kudzu, by Doug Marlette

"I started kneeling to pray morning and night– spitefully at first, in a bitter pout. The truth is, I still fancied the idea that glugging down Jack Daniels would stay my turmoil, but doing so had resulted in my car hurtling into stuff." Mary Karr

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Tuesday July 10, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
Fewer frames
for Mary Karr

3x3 grid

Mary Karr was “an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids.”

Tuesday July 10, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
24 frames
in search of
a picture

(5/24/06)

Related material:

Canonization.

Tuesday July 10, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am
Pulp Fiction

“There is a body on the cross in my church. (Which made me think at first that the people worshipped the suffering, till my teenage son told me one day at Mass: ‘What else would get everybody’s attention but something really grisly? It’s like Pulp Fiction.’ In other words, we wouldn’t have it any other way.)” —Mary Karr

Corpus Hypercubus,
by Dali.

Pulp fiction:

“Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?”
— Robert A. Heinlein

Tuesday July 10, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:01 am
Perfect your
wand work

 
— Web page for the
“Harry Potter and the
Order of the Phoenix”
Xbox 360 game

Sounds to me
more like Harry Reems.

Monday, July 9, 2007

Monday July 9, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:59 pm

x

Monday July 9, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:59 pm
Harry Potter and
the Xbox 360

Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix for Xbox 360 “is based on the fifth book and is timed to coincide with the release of the movie of the same name…. The game consists of Harry walking around and talking to characters and performing spells and tasks in order to advance the plot. I jokingly considered calling this review ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Random Tasks Needed to Advance the Plot.'” —July 9 review at Digital Joystick

Today’s lottery numbers
in the Keystone State:

Mid-day 220
Evening 034

Related material:
2/20 and
Hexagram 34 in the
box-style I Ching:

  The image �http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Box34.gif� cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
The Power
of the Great

Let us hope that Harry fans remember the meaning of Hexagram 34 (according to Richard Wilhelm)– “Perseverance furthers” and “That is truly great power which does not degenerate into mere force but remains inwardly united with the fundamental principles of right and of justice. When we understand this point– namely, that greatness and justice must be indissolubly united– we understand the true meaning of all that happens in heaven and on earth.”

Related material:

If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts

(continued) and
the four entries
that preceded it
on July 5-6, 2007

Monday July 9, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:35 am
Mystic River Song
continued from June 18:

From the Harvard
Math Department:

Noam Elkies of Harvard Math Department

From the late
jazz violinist
Johnny Frigo:

Johnny Frigo Summertime
(mp3)


From a film version
of Somerville…

A Stone for
Johnny Frigo

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070708-Mystic-stone.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Mystic River, 2003

Related material:

Human Conflict
Number Five
 
(Album title,
 10,000 Maniacs)

10,000 Maniacs, Human Conflict Number Five


This album contains
"Planned Obsolescence":

any modern man can see
that religion is
obsolete

piety
obsolete
ritual
obsolete
martyrdom
obsolete
prophetic vision
obsolete
mysticism
obsolete
commitment
obsolete
sacrament
obsolete
revelation
obsolete

Noam Elkies:

Folk are humpin'
And the chillun is high.
Oh yo' daddy's rich,
'Cos yo' ma is good lookin'

Conrad Aiken:

"By all means accept the invitation to hell, should it come. It will not take you far– from Cambridge to hell is only a step; or at most a hop, skip, and jump. But now you are evading– you are dodging the issue…. after all, Cambridge is hell enough."

Great Circle, a 1933 novel by Conrad Aiken (father of Joan Aiken, who wrote The Shadow Guests)

Saturday, July 7, 2007

Saturday July 7, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:12 pm

x

Saturday July 7, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:22 pm
Requiem for
an Ad Exec

“Dead time lasts for one hour– from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin’ good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin’ evil….”  —Voodoo Justice

Lois Wyse (previous entry) died “shortly after midnight” on the morning of Friday, July 6, 2007.

See Friday’s
Log24 entries of

12:06 AM,
12:18 AM,
and
12:26 AM.


Related material:

Death on the Feast
of Saint Nicholas

Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, by Goya

Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed
of an Impenitent
, by Francisco Goya
(1746-1828) in 1788

Saturday July 7, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:48 am
Seven is Heaven


John Lahr, review
of a production of Tom Stoppard’s “Jumpers”–

The play is about a philosophy professor, George, and his wife, Dotty, who “exudes a sumptuous sexuality…. She has a pert round head, high cheekbones, and a deep voice, which, like her acting, is full of playfulness and longing. George is lost in thought; Dotty is just lost. ‘Heaven, how can I believe in Heaven?’ she sings at the finale. ‘Just a lying rhyme for seven!’ She is promise and heartbreak in one.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070707-Obits.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“With a name like Frigo…”

Related material:

Eight is a Gate

Saturday July 7, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am
Nymphet Witches

A New York Times review  
of the new Geoffrey Wright
 film of “Macbeth”–

  “… dreamscape of nymphet witches….
In this telling, the three witches
are first glimpsed in the
opening scene vandalizing
tombstones”

For a rather different dreamscape
of nymphets and tombstones, see
the five previous entries.

As the Times notes,
“‘Macbeth’ has been made as
 a gangster picture before.”
A truly surreal production,
perhaps to be made in
the next world, might star the
young (again) George Melly

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070706-MellyCover.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

as Macbeth,
introduced by
the following
tombstone:

GEORGE MELLY
1926 – 2007

WHAT AFTERLIFE
HE NOW ENJOYS
GOD ONLY KNOWS

For further details,
click on Melly’s picture.

“A tale told by an idiot…
signifying nothing….”

Friday, July 6, 2007

Friday July 6, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:07 pm
Another Mearingstone
(see last 3 entries)–

11:07:02 PM:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050310-hex.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sex and Art
in a
Chinese Poem

See also the entries
of St. Stephen’s Day
(Boxing Day), 2006
.

Friday July 6, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Mearingstone, or:
 
“Last to the Lost,”
continued from
July 1, 2007


Finnegans Wake 293:

Vieus Von DVbLIn, ’twas one of dozedeams
a darkies ding in dewood) the Turnpike under
the Great Ulm (with Mearingstone in Fore
ground). 1 Given now ann linch you take enn
all. Allow me! And, heaving alljawbreakical
expressions out of old Sare Isaac’s 2 universal
of specious aristmystic unsaid, A is for Anna
like L is for liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you’re
apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise.
Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh
leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we’re last to
the lost, Loulou! Tis perfect. Now (lens

“with Mearingstone in Fore ground….
we’re last to the lost, Loulou!”

Desconvencida at Blogspot -- Monolito -- Midnight July 1-2, 2007

Midnight, July 1-2, 2007
Click on image for details.

Friday July 6, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:47 pm
Log24, June 6:

“If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts….”

Click to enlarge.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070706-CazadorSm.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

El Cazador de la Bruja

A word to the wise:

desconvencida.

Related material:

Julio Cortazar

and

Ay que bonito es volar….

Friday July 6, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:26 am
Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil

continued from
Midsummer Night

“The voodoo priestess looked across the table at her wealthy client, a man on trial for murder: ‘Now, you know how dead time works. Dead time lasts for one hour– from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin’ good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin’ evil….'”


— Glenna Whitley, “Voodoo Justice,”
The New York Times, March 20, 1994


The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061019-Coxeter.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

In Other Game News:

“In June, bloggers speculated that the Xbox 360 return problem was getting so severe that the company was running out of ‘coffins,’ or special return-shipping boxes Microsoft provides to gamers with dead consoles. ‘We’ll make sure we have plenty of boxes to go back and forth,’ Bach said in an interview.”

The picture of
“Coxeter Exhuming Geometry”
suggests the following
illustration, based
in part on
 Plato’s poem to Aster:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061019-Tombstones.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

Thursday’s last entry

and

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050310-hex.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sex and Art
in a
Chinese Poem

The proportions of
the above rectangle
may suggest to some
a coffin; they are
meant to suggest
a monolith.

Friday July 6, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:18 am
Review:

Black square 256x256

Friday July 6, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:06 am
George Melly
  died yesterday
in London at 80.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070706-Melly.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Jazz singer, raconteur,
imitator of Bessie Smith,
he apparently named

his daughter Pandora.

GEORGE MELLY
1926 – 2007

WHAT AFTERLIFE
HE NOW ENJOYS
GOD ONLY KNOWS

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Thursday July 5, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:11 pm

In Defense of
Plato’s Realism

(vs. sophists’ nominalism–
see recent entries.)

Plato cited geometry,
notably in the Meno,
in defense of his realism.
Consideration of the
Meno’s diamond figure
leads to the following:

The Eightfold Cube and its Inner Structure

Click on image for details.

As noted in an entry,
Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star,

linked to
at the end of today’s
previous entry,
the “universals”
of Platonic realism
are exemplified by
the hexagrams of
the I Ching,
which in turn are
based on the seven
trigrams above and
on the eighth trigram,
of all yin lines,
not shown above:

Trigram of K'un, the Receptive

K’un
The Receptive

_____________________________________________

Update of Nov. 30, 2013:

From  a little-known website in Kuala Lumpur:
(Click to enlarge.)

The remarks on Platonic realism are from Wikipedia.
The eightfold cube is apparently from this post.

Thursday July 5, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:48 pm
Their Name is Legion

“Although it may not at first be obvious,
the substitution for real religions
 of a religion drained of particulars
is of a piece with the desire to
exorcise postmodernism.”

Stanley Fish, July 2002

The previous entry linked to an entry of June 2002 that attacked the nominalism of Stanley Fish.  Here is another such attack:

From “Stanley Fish: The Critic as Sophist,” by R.V. Young, in Modern Age, June 22, 2003:

In one of the definitive works of conservatism in the twentieth century, Richard Weaver designates the rise of nominalism as a critical turn in the emergence of the intellectual and cultural disintegration associated with liberalism, which it is the business of a reviving conservatism to contest: “The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.” It is nominalism that provides the intellectual foundation– if a paradox may be hazarded– for the attack by Fish and numerous others (their name is Legion) on the very idea of intellectual foundations:  

It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our  convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a  source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. (4)

(4). Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago and London, 1948), 3.

R.V. YOUNG is Professor of English at North Carolina State University and author of At War With the Word and Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (2000).


Related material:

Simon Blackburn on
Plato and sophists,
realism and nominalism
(previous entry)

and

Plato, Pegasus, and

the Evening Star

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Wednesday July 4, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

x

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Tuesday July 3, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm
The Ignorance
of Stanley Fish

(continued from
June 18, 2002)

The “ignorance” referred to
is Fish’s ignorance of the
philosophical background
of the words
“particular” and “universal.”

Postmodern Warfare:
The Ignorance of Our
Warrior Intellectuals,”
by Stanley Fish,
Harper’s Magazine,
July 2002, contains
the following passages:

“The deepest strain in a religion is the particular and particularistic doctrine it asserts at its heart, in the company of such pronouncements as ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’ Take the deepest strain of religion away… and what remains are the surface pieties– abstractions without substantive bite– to which everyone will assent because they are empty, insipid, and safe. It is this same preference for the vacuously general over the disturbingly particular that informs the attacks on college and university professors who spoke out in ways that led them to be branded as outcasts by those who were patrolling and monitoring the narrow boundaries of acceptable speech. Here one must be careful, for there are fools and knaves on all sides.”

“Although it may not at first be obvious, the substitution for real religions of a religion drained of particulars is of a piece with the desire to exorcise postmodernism.”

“What must be protected, then, is the general, the possibility of making pronouncements from a perspective at once detached from and superior to the sectarian perspectives of particular national interests, ethnic concerns, and religious obligations; and the threat to the general is posed by postmodernism and strong religiosity alike, postmodernism because its critique of master narratives deprives us of a mechanism for determining which of two or more fiercely held beliefs is true (which is not to deny the category of true belief, just the possibility of identifying it uncontroversially), strong religiosity because it insists on its own norms and refuses correction from the outside. The antidote to both is the separation of the private from the public, the establishing of a public sphere to which all could have recourse and to the judgments of which all, who are not criminal or insane, would assent. The point of the public sphere is obvious: it is supposed to be the location of those standards and measures that belong to no one but apply to everyone. It is to be the location of the universal. The problem is not that there is no universal–the universal, the absolutely true, exists, and I know what it is. The problem is that you know, too, and that we know different things, which puts us right back where we were a few sentences ago, armed with universal judgments that are irreconcilable, all dressed up and nowhere to go for an authoritative adjudication.

What to do? Well, you do the only thing you can do, the only honest thing: you assert that your universal is the true one, even though your adversaries clearly do not accept it, and you do not attribute their recalcitrance to insanity or mere criminality–the desired public categories of condemnation–but to the fact, regrettable as it may be, that they are in the grip of a set of beliefs that is false. And there you have to leave it, because the next step, the step of proving the falseness of their beliefs to everyone, including those in their grip, is not a step available to us as finite situated human beings. We have to live with the knowledge of two things: that we are absolutely right and that there is no generally accepted measure by which our rightness can be independently validated. That’s just the way it is, and we should just get on with it, acting in accordance with our true beliefs (what else could we do?) without expecting that some God will descend, like the duck in the old Groucho Marx TV show, and tell us that we have uttered the true and secret word.”

From the public spheres
of the Pennsylvania Lottery:

PA Lottery logo

PA Lottery July 3, 2007: Mid-day 105, Evening 268

105 —

Log24 on 1/05:

“‘From your lips
to God’s ears,’
 goes the old
Yiddish wish.

 The writer, by contrast,
tries to read God’s lips
and pass along
the words….”

— Richard Powers   

268 —

This is a page number
that appears, notably,
in my June 2002
journal entry on Fish
,
and again in an entry,
The Transcendent Signified,”
dated July 26, 2003,
that argues against
Fish’s school, postmodernism,
 and in favor of what the pomos
call “logocentrism.”

Page 268
 
of Simon Blackburn’s Think
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1999):

“It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound problem of philosophy. It structures Plato’s (realist) reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called ‘postmodernism’ is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to reason and truth.”

Fish may, if he wishes,
regard the particular
page number 268 as
delivered– five years late,
but such is philosophy–
by Groucho’s
winged messenger
in response to
Fish’s utterance of the
  “true and secret word”–
namely, “universal.”

When not arguing politics,
Fish, though from
a Jewish background, is
 said to be a Milton scholar.
Let us therefore hope he
is by now, or comes to be,
aware of the Christian
approach to universals–
an approach true to the
philosophical background
sketched in 1999 by
Blackburn and made
particular in a 1931 novel
 by Charles Williams,
The Place of the Lion.

Monday, July 2, 2007

Monday July 2, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:28 pm

A figure like Ecclesiast/
Rugged and luminous,
 chants in the dark/
A text that is an answer,
although obscure.

— Wallace Stevens,
"An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven"

A Text

Time and Chance
today in the
Keystone State:

PA Lottery July 2, 2007: Mid-day 004, Evening 802


From 8/02
in 2005:

50 Years Ago
on this date, poet
Wallace Stevens died.

Memorial: at the
Wallace Stevens
Concordance,
enter center.


Result:

The Man with the Blue Guitar
line 150 (xiii.6): The heraldic center of the world

Human Arrangement
line 13: The center of transformations that

This Solitude of Cataracts
line 18: Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.

A Primitive Like an Orb
line 1 (i.1): The essential poem at the center of things,
line 87 (xi.7): At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave

Reply to Papini
line 33 (ii.15): And final. This is the center. The poet is

Study of Images II
line 7: As if the center of images had its

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
line 291 (xvii.3): It fails. The strength at the center is serious.
line 371 (xxi.11): At the center, the object of the will, this place,

Things of August
line 154 (ix.18): At the center of the unintelligible,

The Hermitage at the Center
Title: The Hermitage at the Center

Owl's Clover, The Old Woman and the Statue (OP)
line 13 (ii.9): At the center of the mass, the haunches low,

The Sail of Ulysses (OP)
line 50 (iv.6): The center of the self, the self

Someone Puts a Pineapple Together (NA)
line 6 (i.6): The angel at the center of this rind,

Of Ideal Time and Choice (NA)
line 29: At last, the center of resemblance, found
line 32: Stand at the center of ideal time,


For a text on today's
mid-day number, see

  Theme and Variations.

Monday July 2, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:03 pm
Question mark in diamond

From a Log24 entry
of March 20, 2005,
as rendered today
by a Xanga server
and my Mozilla browser:

Postmodern Diamond

The above screenshot is only
an image of the links;
here are the links themselves:

A Postmodern Twinkle

A Postmodern Diamond

 
The question mark in the
diamond is the browser’s
rendition of the server’s
baffled response to
a character it cannot
recognize– in this case,
 the HTML code for
a blank space:
“ ”

Related material:
The God-Shaped Hole

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Sunday July 1, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Object Lesson
continued…

"Three times the concentred
     self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self,
     having possessed
The object, grips it
     in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive,
     once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation,
     once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture,
     this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent,
     fully found."

— "Credences of Summer," VII,
    by Wallace Stevens, from
    Transport to Summer (1947)

 

Mathematics of the football mandorla (vesica piscis)

For a religious
interpretation
of 265, see
Sept. 30, 2004.

For a religious
interpretation
of 153, see
Fish Story.
 
A quotation from
the Eater of Souls:

"That's how it is, Easy," my Coach went on, his voice more in sorrow than in anger. "Yardage is all very well but you don't make a nickel unless you cross that old goal line with the egg tucked underneath your arm." He pointed at the football on his desk. "There it is. I had it gilded and lettered clear back at the beginning of the season, you looked so good and I had so much confidence in you– it was meant to be yours at the end of the season, at a victory banquet."

Glory Road,
by Robert A. Heinlein
 

Sunday July 1, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:27 pm
Mozart
by the Numbers

PA Lottery June 30, 2007: Mid-day 221, Evening 127

2/21


A Superficial Beauty:

Structural Certainty:

murphy plant, murphy grow, a maryamyria- 10
meliamurphies, in the lazily eye of his lapis, 11

12
Geometry lesson 13

14
Uteralterance or Vieus Von DVbLIn, ’twas one of dozedeams 15
the Interplay of a darkies ding in dewood) the Turnpike under 16
Bones in the the Great Ulm (with Mearingstone in Fore 17
Womb. ground). 1 Given now ann linch you take enn 18
all. Allow me! And, heaving alljawbreakical 19
expressions out of old Sare Isaac’s 2 universal 20
The Vortex. of specious aristmystic unsaid, A is for Anna 21
Spring of Sprung like L is for liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you’re 22
Verse. The Ver- apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise. 23
tex. Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh 24
leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we’re last to 25
the lost, Loulou! Tis perfect. Now (lens 26

Finnegans Wake, Book II,
    Episode 2, page 293


1/27

“Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest.” —Norman Lebrecht

Sunday July 1, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:06 am
At the still point,
there the dance is.
— T. S. Eliot

Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings, his book on the Christian writers J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, says that

“Eliot by his own admission took the ‘still point of the turning world’ in Burnt Norton from the Fool in Williams’s The Greater Trumps.”

The Inklings, Ballantine Books, 1981, p. 106

Today’s Birthdays: …. Actress-dancer Leslie Caron is 76…. Movie director Sydney Pollack is 73….  Dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp is 66. –AP, “Today in History,” July 1, 2007

The Diamond within the Mandorla

The Diamond
in the Mandorla

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