Log24

Her Scalloped Shore –

A meditation for Becket’s Day on James Joyce, Santiago de Compostela, and the death of Pope John Paul II

keen

“There is one story
     and one story only
That will prove
     worth your telling….

…of the undying snake
     from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops
     with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water,
     tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up
     beside her scalloped shore….”

– Robert Graves,
   “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”

Kindred Spirit

On the late film director Robert Mulligan, who died early Saturday [Dec. 20, 2008] at 83:

Mulligan received a best director Oscar nomination in 1963 for “[To Kill a] Mockingbird”….

While some debated whether he had a discernible personal vision in his films, Mulligan was known for his casting and direction of children, including “[Up the Down] Staircase,” where he personally interviewed more than 500 New York high school students.

Sensing a kindred spirit, Francois Truffaut was a vocal champion, particularly cognizant of what he perceived as undue criticism of Mulligan’s work for lacking a particular “style.” Mulligan himself was dismissive of critics/cineaste talk: “I don’t know anything about ‘the Mulligan style,’ ” he told the Village Voice in 1978. “If you can find it, well, that’s your job.”

– Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter

Thanks to desconvencida for a trailer of “The Man in the Moon” (1991), Reese Witherspoon’s first film and Mulligan’s last.

Mulligan also directed Natalie Wood in a personal favorite of mine, “Love with the Proper Stranger.”

Prominent literary intellectuals often like to make familiar reference to the technical terminology of mathematical logic or philosophy of language. A friend of mine overheard the following conversation in Cambridge during l’affaire Derrida, when the proposal to grant an honorary degree to that gentleman met serious academic opposition in the university. A journalist covering the fracas asked a Prominent Literary Intellectual what he took to be Derrida’s importance in the scheme of things. ‘Well,’ the PLI confided graciously, unblushingly, ‘Gödel showed that every theory is inconsistent unless it is supported from outside. Derrida showed that there is no outside.’

Now, there are at least three remarkable things about this. First, the thing that Gödel was supposed to show could not possibly be shown, since there are many demonstrably consistent theories. Second, therefore, Gödel indeed did not show it, and neither did he purport to do so. Third, it makes no sense to say that an inconsistent theory could become consistent by being ‘supported from outside’, whatever that might mean (inconsistency sticks; you cannot get rid of it by addition, only by subtraction). So what Derrida is said to have done is just as impossible as what Gödel was said to have done.

These mistakes should fail you in an undergraduate logic or math or philosophy course. But they are minor considerations in the world of the PLI. The point is that the mere mention of Gödel (like the common invocation of ‘hierarchies’ and ‘metalanguages’) gives a specious impression of something thrillingly deep and thrillingly mathematical and scientific (theory! dazzling! Einstein!) And, not coincidentally, it gives the PLI a flattering image of being something of a hand at these things, an impresario of the thrills. I expect the journalist swooned.

A Sontag Sermon

I:   “Against Interpretation,”
       by Susan Sontag
II:   An interpretation
       of Sontag that introduces
       the concept of
       the interpretive grid
III: An Interpretive Grid

Related commentary:
Texas Law Review and
Michigan Law Review.

Cheap* Epiphanies
^{for the Church of
the Forbidden Planet}

Mid-day lotteries Dec. 19:
* NY 198  PA  918

From 9/18:

O the mind, mind has mountains,
   cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.
   Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

Evening lotteries Dec. 19:
* NY 198  PA 414

From 4/14:

“minds blazing, to the barricades“

– The New York Times
    on the Wheeler effect

See also
Bloomsday for Nash:
The Revelation Game –

     

For details,
click on the
black hole.

x

From The n-Category Cafe today:

David Corfield at 2:33 PM UTC quoting a chapter from a projected second volume of a biography:

“Grothendieck’s spontaneous reaction to whatever appeared to be causing a difficulty… was to adopt and embrace the very phenomenon that was problematic, weaving it in as an integral feature of the structure he was studying, and thus transforming it from a difficulty into a clarifying feature of the situation.”

John Baez at 7:14 PM UTC on research:

“I just don’t want to reinvent a wheel, or waste my time inventing a square one.”

For the adoption and embracing of such a problematic phenomenon, see The Square Wheel (this journal, Sept. 14, 2004).

For a connection of the square wheel with yesterday’s entry for Julie Taymor’s birthday, see a note from 2002:

The New York Times of Sunday, May 6, 2007, on a writer of pulp fiction:

His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. “If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double,” an editor once remarked, “it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.’”

Epigraph for Part One:

“Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane.“

– James A. Michener

Lurid cover:
The Pussycat

Epigraph for Part Two:

“Beware lest you believe that you can comprehend the Incomprehensible….“

– Saint Bonaventure

Lurid cover:
The Owl

Click on the image for a
relevant Wallace Stevens poem.

In memory of
Van Johnson:

“The Voiceless Sinatra.”

In memory of
Cardinal Avery Dulles:

“The God Factor.”

Wikipedia on Rubik’s 2×2×2 “Pocket Cube“–

“Any permutation of the 8 corner cubies is psossible (8! positions).”

Some pages related to this claim–

Simple Groups at Play

Analyzing Rubik’s Cube with GAP

Online JavaScript Pocket Cube.

The claim is of course trivially true for the unconnected subcubes of Froebel’s Third Gift:

© 2005 The Institute for Figuring

"With humor, my dear Zilkov.Always with a little humor."

-- The Manchurian Candidate

“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don’t exactly know what they are!…. Let’s have a look at the garden first!”

– A passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The “garden” part– but not the “ideas” part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, “The Time before First.”

“‘For you… he… we aren’t meaning…’ She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once…. Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. ‘O!’ she cried, ‘O! I can’t keep up! it keeps dividing! There’s too many things to think of!’”

– A passage from Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Chapter 12.

“He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out of nothing and followed each other– what was to will? Will was determination to choose– what was choice? How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not… So swiftly the questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on an unceasing and serpentine journey.”

– A passage from The Place of the Lion, Chapter 10.

“Do you like apples?“

– Good Will Hunting

The Simplest Terms

“Broken down in the simplest terms, the story centres around two warring factions, the ‘Fathers’ and the ‘Friends.’”

– Summary of “Wild Palms”

Today’s birthdays:
Kirk Douglas,
Buck Henry,
John Malkovich.

In a nutshell:
The Soul’s Code and
today’s previous entry.

Premiere on TNT tonight:
The Librarian 3:
Curse of the Judas Chalice

On a book by Margaret Wertheim:

“She traces the history of space beginning with the cosmology of Dante. Her journey continues through the historical foundations of celestial space, relativistic space, hyperspace, and, finally, cyberspace.” –Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago, in Library Journal, 1999 (quoted at Amazon.com)

There are also other sorts of space.

© 2005 The Institute for Figuring

The Dormouse of Perception

This evening I noticed in the New York Times the obituary of Oliver Selfridge, an early writer on artificial intelligence and machine perception. Selfridge apparently died yesterday. The author of the obituary is John Markoff, who wrote a book on the early development of the personal computer in the San Francisco area– What the Dormouse Said.  The title quotes Grace Slick.

For the dormouse himself, see the previous entry.

From Braque’s birthday, 2006:

“The senses deform, the mind forms. Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.”

— Georges Braque,
   Reflections on Painting, 1917

Those who wish to follow Braque’s advice may try the following exercise from a book first published in 1937:

From a page by Bryan Clair

For a different view
of the square and cube
see yesterday’s entry
Abstraction and Faith.