Stopped into a church
I passed along the way
Well, I got down on my knees
Got down on my knees
And I pretend to pray
I pretend to pray
The preacher locked the door
Preacher locked the door
He knows I’m gonna stay
Knows I’m gonna stay
California dreamin
California dreamin
On such a winter’s day
Related material:
Yesterday’s “Happy birthday” for the late Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas
Today’s New York Times story on this morning’s rededication of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
|
From Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, edited by Gary Garrels, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 376:
THE SQUARE AND THE CUBE The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. Being basic representations of two- and three-dimensional form, they lack the expressive force of other more interesting forms and shapes. They are standard and universally recognized, no initiation being required of the viewer; it is immediately evident that a square is a square and a cube a cube. Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed. Reprinted from Lucy R. Lippard et al., "Homage to the Square," Art in America 55, No. 4 (July-August 1967): 54. (LeWitt's contribution was originally untitled.) |
A vulgarized version
of LeWitt's remarks
appears on a webpage of
the National Gallery of Art.
|
Today's Sermon
"Closing the Circle on Abstract Art" On Kirk Varnedoe's National Gallery lectures in 2003 (Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003):
"Varnedoe's lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself."
|
For the relation of this sort of geometry to faith, see All Hallows' Eve, 2006.
Virginia Heffernan on the film version of A Wrinkle in Time:
"… the film is also sad, and soaring. It recalls the hippie days when a perverse, hubristic originality was a quality to be cultivated, not medicated. Told not from an aloof remove– through the eyes of a wise Yoda or Peter Jackson– the movie glitters irregularly, woven through with the sparkling fibers of a righteous child's tormented imagination. Steven Spielberg also attempted, with the same ambiguous but moving results, this messier brand of science fiction in 'A.I.'"
See also today's
previous entries.
Related material:
|
Happy birthday, C. S. Lewis.
A Story
for Madeleine
Part One: Frame Tale
Part Two: A Little Princess
Part Three: Happy Birthday
Recent abstracts of interest:
Kuwait Foundation Lectures —
Jan. 29, 2008: J. P. Wintenberger, “On the Proof of Serre’s Conjecture“
Oct. 28, 2008: Chandrashekhar Khare, “Modular Forms and Galois Representations“
Background:
The Last Theorem, a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl published Aug. 5, 2008
“Going Beyond Fermat’s Last Theorem,” a news article in The Hindu published April 25, 2005
Wikipedia: Serre Conjecture (Number Theory)
Henri Darmon, “Serre’s Conjectures“
Frame Tale
Click on image for details.
This morning’s entry quoted Ezra Pound:
“The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good.”
Dance critic Clive Barnes died Wednesday. Pound may have whispered his advice in St. Peter’s ear when Barnes stood before the Janitor Coeli at heaven’s gate. If so, another angel may have whispered in the other ear,
“Vide Forever Fonteyn.”
“The first credential
we should demand of a critic
is his ideograph of the good.”
— Ezra Pound,
How to Read
Music critic Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:
The Juilliard’s
Half-Century RipeningPhilosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday regardless of what might have changed in the interim. Medical science tells us that the body’s cells replace themselves wholesale within every seven years, yet we tell ourselves that we are what we were….
Schubert at the end of his life had already passed on to another level of spirit. Beethoven went back and forth between the temporal world and the world beyond right up to his dying day.
Exercise
Part I:
Apply Holland’s Monday-to-Friday “idea of identity” to the lives and deaths during the week of Monday, Nov. 10 (“Frame Tales“), through Friday, Nov. 14, of a musician and a maker of music documentaries– Mitch Mitchell (d. Nov. 12) and Baird Bryant (d. Nov. 13).
Part II:
Apply Holland’s “idea of identity” to last week (Monday, Nov. 17, through Friday, Nov. 21), combining it with Wigner’s remarks on invariance (discussed here on Monday) and with the “red dragon” (Log24, Nov. 15) concept of flight over “the Hump”– the Himalayas– and the 1991 documentary filmed by Bryant, “Heart of Tibet.”
Part III:
Discuss Parts I and II in the context of Eliot’s Four Quartets. (See Time Fold, The Field of Reason, and Balance.)
St. Olaf College,
Northfield, Minnesota —
From The MSCS Mess
(Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics,
and Computer Science)
November 14, 2008
Volume 37, Number 9—
Math Film Festival 2008
The MSCS Department is sponsoring the second of two film-discussion evenings this Wednesday, November 19. Come to RNS 390 at 7:00 PM to see watch [sic] two short [sic]— Whatchu Know 'bout Math and Just a Finite Simple Group of Order Two— and our feature film, Good Will Hunting. Will Hunting is a mathematical genius who's living a rough life in South Boston, while being employed at a prestigious college in Boston, he's [sic] discovered by a Fields Medal winning mathematics Professor [sic] who eventually tries to get Will to turn his life around but becomes haunted by his own professional inadequacies when compared with Will. Professor Garrett will explain the “impossible problem” and its solution after the film.
Background:
Log24 entries of Wednesday, November 19, the day "Good Will Hunting" was shown:
Damnation Morning revisited and
Mathematics and Narrative continued
|
"Of man's first disobedience,
and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe…. A red apple made the rounds, |
"Do you like apples?"
— Good Will Hunting
"Through the unknown,
remembered gate…."
(Epigraph to the introduction,
Parallelisms of Complete Designs
by Peter J. Cameron,
Merton College, Oxford)
"It's still the same old story…."
— Song lyric
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6:
"An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through."
There is a link to an article on St. Olaf College in Arts & Letters Daily today:
"John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too…" more»
The "more" link is to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
For related material on Paradise Lost and higher education, see Mathematics and Narrative.
Sympathy for Baird Bryant
"Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game"
"'Don't you want to
hear him call your name
when you're standing
at the pearly gates?'
I told the Preacher 'Yes, I do,
but I hope he don't call today.'"
— Kenny Chesney, song at the CMA Awards on Wednesday, November 12, quoted here at 9:00 AM on Thursday, Novermber 13
Related material:
LA Times obituary for the experienced bohemian writer and filmmaker Baird Bryant, who died at 80 on Thursday, November 13. Bryant filmed parts of "Easy Rider" in 1968 and of the Altamont concert in 1969. He was apparently a member of the Harvard College Class of 1950.
A more complete account of Bryant's life
Thirty references to the Devil in a book by Bryant
(Log24 entries for November 12, 13, and 14 — the day before Bryant's death, the day of his death, and the day after)
From the previous entry:
“If it’s a seamless whole you want,
pray to Apollo, who sets the limits
within which such a work can exist.”
— Margaret Atwood,
author of Cat’s Eye
Happy birthday
to the late
Eugene Wigner
… and a belated
Merry Christmas
to Paul Newman:
— Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize Lecture, December 12, 1963
From the previous entry:
“If it’s a seamless whole you want,
pray to Apollo, who sets the limits
within which such a work can exist.”
— Margaret Atwood,
author of Cat’s Eye
“The power of the dark is ascending.
The light retreats to security, so that
the dark cannot encroach upon it.”
Related material:
Darkness Visible
Observations suggested by an article on author Lewis Hyde– "What is Art For?"– in today's New York Times Magazine:
Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde's
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art —
"Trickster," says Hyde, "feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation." (71) As Hyde says, "… almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters," (158), although the reverse is not the case. "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
The Trickster
and the Paranormal
and
Martin Gardner on
a disappearing cube —
|
"What happened to that… cube?"
Apollinax laughed until his eyes teared. "I'll give you a hint, my dear. Perhaps it slid off into a higher dimension." "Are you pulling my leg?" "I wish I were," he sighed. "The fourth dimension, as you know, is an extension along a fourth coordinate perpendicular to the three coordinates of three-dimensional space. Now consider a cube. It has four main diagonals, each running from one corner through the cube's center to the opposite corner. Because of the cube's symmetry, each diagonal is clearly at right angles to the other three. So why shouldn't a cube, if it feels like it, slide along a fourth coordinate?" — "Mr. Apollinax Visits New York," by Martin Gardner, Scientific American, May 1961, reprinted in The Night is Large |
this illustration in
Beware of Gardner's
"clearly" and other lies.
From Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a fictional Communist on propaganda:
“It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch.”
Thanks for this quotation to Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, paperback edition Nov. 6, 2007). One of Marton’s nine was Koestler.
From another book related to this exodus:
“Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces– an analysis which is geometrical in nature.”
— Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician
And from Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend of Ulam:
“Riesz’s example is well worth following today.”
Related material: Misunderstanding in the Theory of Design and Geometry for Jews.
For a different approach to ethnicity and the number nine that is also “geometrical in nature,” see The Pope in Plato’s Cave and the four entries preceding it, as well as A Study in Art Education.
(Here CNAC stands for “China National Aviation Corporation,” an organization that in World War II, as part of the Army Air Transport Command, made high-altitude flights over the Himalayas.)
Related material on poetry:
Related material on space machines:
From a review of José Saramago‘s new novel, Death With Interruptions:
“The church has never been asked to explain anything,” the cardinal assures the prime minister. “Our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith.”
Related material:
Sept. 7, 2006- Birthday of Elizabeth I
Sept. 7, 2007- Madeleine L’Engle is Dead
Sept. 7, 2008- From the Finland Station
For some mythology relevant to the first two of these three dates, see “Damnation Morning” and The Big Time. For some non-mythology related to ballistics, faith, and the third of these dates, see Rudy Ratzinger vs. Joseph Ratzinger.
| “V. is whatever lights you to the end of the street: she is also the dark annihilation waiting at the end of the street.” — Tony Tanner, page 36, Happy birthday,
Olga Kurylenko. |
Riverrun
(The first word in Finnegans Wake.
See also the Log24 entries following
the death of Pope John Paul II.)
At Inside Higher Ed, Margaret Soltan ("UD") discusses…
"moments of clarity [cf. related essay (pdf)] that seem, when you look at all of them together late in the day, to disclose our life’s otherwise hidden pattern, meaning, and flow.
'Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory. In death it had its pattern, and we can only hope for as much.'"
— A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean, a story about trout fishing and grace
Related material:
Maclean's fellow author Kilgore Trout and the story he is said to be most proud of, about Bunker Bingo.
See also yesterday's entry, Bob's Country Bunker, and On Linguistic Creation.
Drummer Mitch Mitchell, 61, of
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, was
found dead at 3 AM yesterday
in his hotel room.
“Everybody wants to
go to heaven“
— Kenny Chesney, song at last
night’s Country Music Awards
— Kilgore Trout
(Log24, 5/14/07)
Related material —
the word “experienced”
in yesterday’s entry.
Quantum of Solace
Lottery Numbers
for November 11, 2008:
PA midday 007, evening 628
NY midday 153, evening 069
Experienced readers of this journal will have little difficulty interpreting these results, except for 153. For that enigmatic number, see Object Lesson.
Frame Tales
From June 30 —
("Will this be on the test?")
Frame Tale One:
|
Summer Reading
Subtitle: |
Frame Tale Two:
Barry Sharples
on his version of the
Kaleidoscope Puzzle —
Background:
"A possible origin of this puzzle is found in a dialogue
between Socrates and Meno written by the Greek philosopher,
Plato, where a square is drawn inside a square such that
the blue square is twice the area of the yellow square.
Colouring the triangles produces a starting pattern
which is a one-diamond figure made up of four tiles
and there are 24 different possible arrangements."
"The king asked, in compensation for his toils during this strangest
of all the nights he had ever known, that the twenty-four riddle tales
told him by the specter, together with the story of the night itself,
should be made known over the whole earth
and remain eternally famous among men."
Frame Tale Three:
"The quad gospellers may own the targum
but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck
of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne."
“Beauty is a riddle.”
— Dostoevsky
“Seven is Heaven
Eight is a Gate
Nine is a Vine”
— Folk rhyme
ET SUPER HANC PETRAMBenedict XVI, before he became Pope:
“… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was ‘the God’ and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as ‘the truly divine’ is absolutely no longer sufficient.”
“The lapis manalis (Latin: ‘stone of the Manes‘) was a name given to two sacred stones used in the Roman religion. One covered a gate to Hades, abode of the dead….
One such stone covered the mundus Cereris, a pit thought to contain an entrance to the underworld….
The… mundus was located in the Comitium, on the Palatine Hill. This stone was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead (the Manes) were able to commune with the living. The three days upon which the mundus was opened were August 24, October 5, and November 8. Fruits of the harvest were offered to the dead at this time.”
Log24 on
August 24,
October 5, and
November 8.
— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land“
“In the Roman Catholic tradition, the term ‘Body of Christ’ refers not only to the body of Christ in the spiritual realm, but also to two distinct though related things: the Church and the reality of the transubstantiated bread of the Eucharist….
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘the comparison of the Church with the body casts light on the intimate bond between Christ and his Church. Not only is she gathered around him; she is united in him, in his body….’
….To distinguish the Body of Christ in this sense from his physical body, the term ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ is often used. This term was used as the first words, and so as the title, of the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi of Pope Pius XII.”
Pope Pius XII:
“83. The Sacrament of the Eucharist is itself a striking and wonderful figure of the unity of the Church, if we consider how in the bread to be consecrated many grains go to form one whole, and that in it the very Author of supernatural grace is given to us, so that through Him we may receive the spirit of charity in which we are bidden to live now no longer our own life but the life of Christ, and to love the Redeemer Himself in all the members of His social Body.”
Log24 on this date in 2002:
Religious Symbolism
at Princeton
as well as
and a
“striking and wonderful figure”
from this morning’s newspaper–
At a British puzzle website today I found this, titled “Tiles Puzzle by Steven H. Cullinane”–
“there are 322,560 patterns made by swapping rows, swapping columns and swapping the four 2×2 quadrants!”
Update of Nov. 10, 2008: The error has been corrected.
Billy Graham is 90.
Joni Mitchell is 65.
Buen fin de semana a todos.
— Desconvencida
An example of lifestyle coverage at The New York Times— a 2006 story on visual art in Mexico that included a reference to…
For descriptions of such life, I prefer the literary art of Robert Stone– in particular, Stone’s novel A Flag for Sunrise.
Credit must be given to the Times for an excellent 1981 review of that novel.
The review’s conclusion:
“A Flag for Sunrise is
the best novel of ideas
I’ve read since Dostoyevsky
escaped from Omsk.”
The author of that review, John Leonard, died Wednesday, Nov. 5. This morning’s Times has his obituary.
Death of a Classmate
Michael Crichton,
Harvard College, 1964
Authors Michael Crichton and
David Foster Wallace in today’s
New York Times obituaries
The Times’s remarks above
on the prose styles of
Crichton and Wallace–
“compelling formula” vs.
“intricate complexity”–
suggest the following works
of visual art in memory
of Crichton.
“Crystal”—
Some philosophical
remarks related to
the Harvard background
that Crichton and I share–
Hitler’s Still Point
and
The Crimson Passion.
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