— Joseph Dewey,
Beyond Grief and Nothing:
A Reading of Don DeLillo,
Chapter 4,
“Narratives of Redemption,”
page 123
.
Online New York Times
this morning, about 9:18 AM EDT:
Related material:
Click for background
and the meditation on
the word “Anastasia”
in this morning’s
previous entry.
Quality
Hint:
The above symbol
does not stand for
"Walter Winchell."
— Oct. 15, 2008
From the link
at the end of
yesterday's entry:
|
Noah: Jenny, what's troubling you? Jenny: Sigh. I was reading this book, but the words stopped in mid-sentence at the bottom! What… what do I do, Noah? Noah: Turn the page. Turns page. Falls in love amidst turmoil. |
The King and the Corpse, pp. 265-266:
"… the goddess at last bodily appeared to him, dark and slender, hair hanging free, and standing on the back of her tawny lion. He gave her greeting. And Kali, 'The Dark One,' addressed him with the voice of a
THE KING AND THE CORPSE
cloud of thunder: 'For what reason have you called? Make known your wish. Though it were unattainable, my appearance would guarantee its fulfillment.'"
“On the producer side,
you may be working with
people you did not
hand-pick. Do the research.”
— Julie Taymor
— First of all we are in the country now, so no more black.
— No more black? Are you insane?
— You heard me. Only high-powered, neurotic, castrating, Manhattan career bitches wear black. Is that what you want to be?
— Ever since I was a little girl.
— Dialogue from remake of The Stepford Wives
|
Hotel Puzzle by John Tierney "Russell Crowe arrives at the Hotel Infinity looking tired and ornery. He demands a room. The clerk informs him that there are no vacancies…."
|
Footprints from California today
(all by a person or persons using Firefox browsers):
7:10 AM
http://m759.xanga.com/679142359/concepts-of-space/?
Concepts of Space: Euclid vs. Galois
8:51 AM
http://m759.xanga.com/689601851/art-wars-continued/?
Art Wars continued: Behind the Picture
1:33 PM
http://m759.xanga.com/678995132/a-riff-for-dave/?
A Riff for Dave: Me and My Shadow
2:11 PM
http://m759.xanga.com/638308002/a-death-of-kings/?
A Death of Kings: In Memory of Bobby Fischer
2:48 PM
http://m759.xanga.com/691644175/art-wars-in-review–/?
Art Wars in review– Through the Looking Glass: A Sort of Eternity
3:28 PM and
http://m759.xanga.com/684680406/annals-of-philosophy/?
Annals of Philosophy: The Dormouse of Perception
4:28 PM
http://m759.xanga.com/641536988/epiphany-for-roy-part-i/?
Epiphany for Roy, Part I
6:03 PM
http://m759.xanga.com/641949564/art-wars-continued/?
At the Still Point: All That Jazz
6:22 PM
http://m759.xanga.com/644330798/where-entertainment-is-not-god/?
Where Entertainment is Not God: The Just Word
7:14 PM
http://m759.xanga.com/643490468/happy-new-yorker-day/?
Happy New Yorker Day– Class Galore
7:16 PM
http://m759.xanga.com/643812753/the-politics-of-change/?
The Politics of Change: Jumpers
Welcome to the
Black Hole Café
"Our lifelong friendship made me not only an admirer of the depth, scholarship, and sheer energy of his mathematical work (and of his ceaseless activities as an editorial entrepreneur on behalf of mathematics) but one in awe of his status as the ultimate relaxed sophisticate."
|
Psychoshop
by Alfred Bester
|
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon
“Anakin Skywalker, otherwise known
as Darth Vader, is arguably
the central character in
George Lucas’s ‘Star Wars’….“
— Amazon.com review
Ken Annakin, classic action
filmmaker, dies at 94 —
“Annakin’s last name
was the source
of the name for
Anakin Skywalker.”
“Contrary to previous reports that George Lucas named the ‘Star Wars’ character Anakin Skywalker (Darth Vader) after Annakin, Lucas said via his publicist Thursday that he did not.”
Mike O’Sullivan, Voice of America LA bureau chief, in 2007:
“Annakin inadvertently gave his own name to a film character, although the spelling is slightly different, when the actor Alec Guinness suggested the name to director George Lucas for a character in the Star Wars films.
At a screening of the film, Annakin asked Lucas about it.
‘He was running his picture with Anakin Skywalker in it, and I went over to him and said, “you know, you never got permission for this.” He said, “but I dropped an ‘n’ and therefore I got away with it,”‘ Annakin said.”
This morning’s NY Times
obituaries include…
The British-born Annakin
(best known for war epics),
British cinematographer Jack Cardiff,
and Santha Rama Rau (author
of a 1960 play based on the
novel A Passage to India) —
Passage O soul to India!
Eclaircise the myths Asiatic,
the primitive fables.
Not you alone proud truths of the world,
Nor you alone ye facts of modern science,
But myths and fables of eld,
Asia’s, Africa’s fables,
The far-darting beams of the spirit,
the unloos’d dreams,
The deep diving bibles and legends….
For Cardiff, cinematographer
of “A Matter of Life and Death“
and of “Black Narcissus” —
Happy Birthday
to a Dark Lady
| Sweden Speedy |
…&uid=37798719 | 4/23/2009 4:33 PM |
Related material:
Vide today’s midday PA lottery number, 177, the 1919 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, and the time (interpreted, in a Joycean manner, as a date) of this morning’s first entry.
(continued from April 16)
Background:
Click on the image for an
interview with the author of
Giordano Bruno and
the Geometry of Language.
Related material:
Joyce on language —
Click on images for details.
“Timothy J. Holst, who joined the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus as a lowly Keystone Kops clown, rose to the role of singing ringmaster, and ultimately became the show’s talent czar, died April 16 in São Paulo, Brazil, during a visit to sign up circus acts. He was 61.”
(Background:
Truth and Style)
“We are here in the
Church of St. Frank,
where moral judgments
permit the true believer
to avoid any semblance
of thought.”
— Marjorie Garber on
Frank Kermode
Today’s sermon is a
link to a London publication
where one can purchase
Kermode’s excellent review
of the following:
Those who prefer
Garber’s Harvard sneer
may consult
The Crimson Passion
and the following
resurrection figure:
The Harvard Jesus
Crimson/Nancy K. Dutton
Begettings of
the Broken Bold
Thanks for the following
quotation (“Non deve…
nella testa“) go to the
weblog writer who signs
himself “Conrad H. Roth.”
|
… Yesterday I took leave of my Captain, with a promise of visiting him at Bologna on my return. He is a true A PAPAL SOLDIER’S IDEAS OF PROTESTANTS 339 representative of the majority of his countrymen. Here, however, I would record a peculiarity which personally distinguished him. As I often sat quiet and lost in thought he once exclaimed “Che pensa? non deve mai pensar l’uomo, pensando s’invecchia;” which being interpreted is as much as to say, “What are you thinking about: a man ought never to think; thinking makes one old.” And now for another apophthegm of his; “Non deve fermarsi l’uomo in una sola cosa, perche allora divien matto; bisogna aver mille cose, una confusione nella testa;” in plain English, “A man ought not to rivet his thoughts exclusively on any one thing, otherwise he is sure to go mad; he ought to have in his head a thousand things, a regular medley.” Certainly the good man could not know that the very thing that made me so thoughtful was my having my head mazed by a regular confusion of things, old and new. The following anecdote will serve to elucidate still more clearly the mental character of an Italian of this class. Having soon discovered that I was a Protestant, he observed after some circumlocution, that he hoped I would allow him to ask me a few questions, for he had heard such strange things about us Protestants that he wished to know for a certainty what to think of us. |
Notes for Roth:
The title of this entry,
“Begettings of the Broken Bold,”
is from Wallace Stevens’s
“The Owl in the Sarcophagus”–
This was peace after death, the brother of sleep, The inhuman brother so much like, so near, Yet vested in a foreign absolute, Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines, An immaculate personage in nothingness, With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth, Generations of the imagination piled In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread, In the weaving round the wonder of its need, And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet By which to spell out holy doom and end, A bee for the remembering of happiness. Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind, Damasked in the originals of green, A thousand begettings of the broken bold. This is that figure stationed at our end, Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed Out of our lives to keep us in our death.... |
Related material:
Some further context:
Roth’s entry of Nov. 3, 2006–
“Why blog, sinners?“–
and Log24 on that date:
“First to Illuminate.”
Click on the image for an
interview with the author of
Giordano Bruno and
the Geometry of Language.
For the birthday of
red-haired revolutionary
Thomas Jefferson
Dialogue from the classic film Forbidden Planet—
"… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one of us gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost."
— Taken from a video (5:18-5:24 of 6:09) at David Lavery's weblog in the entry of Tuesday, April 7.
(Cf. this journal on that date.)
Thanks to Professor Lavery for his detailed notes on his viewing experiences.
My own viewing recently included, on the night of Good Friday, April 10, the spiritually significant film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The mystic circle of 13 aliens at the end of that film, together with Leslie Nielsen's Forbidden Planet remark quoted above, suggests the following:
|
"The aim of Conway’s game M13 is to get the hole at the top point and all counters in order 1,2,…,12 when moving clockwise along the circle." —Lieven Le Bruyn
The illustration is from the weblog entry by Lieven Le Bruyn quoted below. The colored circles represent 12 of the 13 projective points described below, the 13 radial strokes represent the 13 projective lines, and the straight lines in the picture, including those that form the circle, describe which projective points are incident with which projective lines. The dot at top represents the "hole."
From "The Mathieu Group M12 and Conway’s M13-Game" (pdf), senior honors thesis in mathematics by Jeremy L. Martin under the supervision of Professor Noam D. Elkies, Harvard University, April 1, 1996–
"Let P3 denote the projective plane of order 3. The standard construction of P3 is to remove the zero point from a three-dimensional vector space over the field F3 and then identify each point x with -x, obtaining a space with
Conway [3] proposed the following game…. Place twelve numbered counters on the points… of P3 and leave the thirteenth point… blank. (The empty point will be referred to throughout as the "hole.") Let the location of the hole be p; then a primitive move of the game consists of selecting one of the lines containing the hole, say There is an obvious characterization of a move as a permutation in S13, operating on the points of P3. By limiting our consideration to only those moves which return the hole to its starting point…. we obtain the Conway game group. This group, which we shall denote by GC, is a subgroup of the symmetric group S12 of permutations of the twelve points…, and the group operation of GC is concatenation of paths. Conway [3] stated, but did not prove explicitly, that GC is isomorphic to the Mathieu group M12. We shall subsequently verify this isomorphism. The set of all moves (including those not fixing the hole) is given the name M13 by Conway. It is important that M13 is not a group…." [3] John H. Conway, "Graphs and Groups and M13," Notes from New York Graph Theory Day XIV (1987), pp. 18–29. Another exposition (adapted to Martin's notation) by Lieven le Bruyn (see illustration above):
"Conway’s puzzle M13 involves the 13 points and 13 lines of P3. On all but one point numbered counters are placed holding the numbers 1,…,12 and a move involves interchanging one counter and the 'hole' (the unique point having no counter) and interchanging the counters on the two other points of the line determined by the first two points. In the picture [above] the lines are represented by dashes around the circle in between two counters and the points lying on this line are those that connect to the dash either via a direct line or directly via the circle. In the first part we saw that the group of all reachable positions in Conway's M13 puzzle having the hole at the top position contains the sporadic simple Mathieu group M12 as a subgroup." |
For the religious significance of the circle of 13 (and the "hole"), consider Arthur and the 12 knights of the round table, et cetera.
From a professor’s weblog:
Saturday, April 11, 2009Quote of the Day (4/11/09) (Elias Canetti Week)“The novel should not be in any hurry. Once, hurry belonged to its sphere, now the film has taken that over; measured by the film, the hasty novel must always remain inadequate. The novel, as a creature of calmer times, may carry something of that old calm into our new hastiness. It could serve many people as slow-motion; it could induce them to tarry; it could replace the empty meditations of their cults.” –Elias Canetti, The Human Province Posted by David Lavery at 1:00 AM |
Pilate Goes
to Kindergarten
“There is a pleasantly discursive
treatment of Pontius Pilate’s
unanswered question
‘What is truth?’.”
— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987,
introduction to Trudeau’s
remarks on the “Story Theory“
of truth as opposed to the
“Diamond Theory” of truth in
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
Consider the following question in a paper cited by V. S. Varadarajan:
E. G. Beltrametti, “Can a finite geometry describe physical space-time?” Universita degli studi di Perugia, Atti del convegno di geometria combinatoria e sue applicazioni, Perugia 1971, 57–62.
Simplifying:
“Can a finite geometry describe physical space?”
Simplifying further:
“Yes. Vide ‘The Eightfold Cube.'”
“What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?”
Image from April 4, 2007:
the key date in The Eight
and the date that year of
Spy Wednesday:
Nature morte à l’échiquier
(les cinq sens),
“vers 1655, une narration
à valeur symbolique…”
Huile sur bois, 73 x 55 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Related material:
One Ring to
Rule Them All
(Sept. 2, 2003)
and
Indiana Jones and the
Diadem of Death
(May 29, 2008)
“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
— Thomas Pynchon in
Gravity’s Rainbow
“Since 1963, when Pynchon’s first novel, V., came out, the writer– widely considered America’s most important novelist since World War II– has become an almost mythical figure,
— Nancy Jo Sales in the November 11, 1996, issue of New York Magazine
(Click on images for their
source in past entries.)
In a Nutshell:
“Plato’s Ghost evokes Yeats’s lament that any claim to worldly perfection inevitably is proven wrong by the philosopher’s ghost….”
— Princeton University Press on Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (by Jeremy Gray, September 2008)
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Good’s Singularity
Irving John “I.J.” Good died Sunday, April 5, 2009.
The date of his death was also Palm Sunday and the day of the Academy of Country Music Awards.
Information from Wikipedia:
Good, 92, was a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park during World War II.
“He was born as Isidore Jacob Gudak to a Jewish family in London. In his publications he was called I. J. Good. He studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1938. He did research work under G.H. Hardy and Besicovitch before moving to Bletchley Park in 1941 on completing his doctorate.
At Bletchley Park, he was initially in Hut 8 under the supervision of Alan Turing…”
[Related material: the death of Turing (a major fan of the Evil Queen in Snow White) and yesterday’s entry]
Wikipedia states that “I. J. Good’s vanity car license plate, hinting at his spylike wartime work, was ‘007 IJG’…. He played chess to county standard, and helped to popularise Go, an Asian boardgame, through a 1965 article in New Scientist (he had learned the rules from Turing). In 1965, he described a concept similar to today’s meaning of technological singularity, in that it included in it the advent of superhuman intelligence:
| “Some say the symbol of Apple Computers, the apple with a bite out of it, is a nod to Alan Turing.”– from “Alan Turing and the Apple” at Flickr, uploaded on Epiphany 2006 by guano |
Above: Composite by “guano” at Flickr
Will: Do you like apples?
Clark: Yeah.
Will: Well, I got her number.
How do you like them apples?
Happy Spy Wednesday.
|
Bright Star and Dark Lady “Mexico is a solar country — but it is also a black country, a dark country. This duality of Mexico has preoccupied me since I was a child.” — Octavio Paz, |
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Bright Star
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Amen.
|
Dark Lady
|
The same story on
May 11, 2005
with a different
dark lady:
About the People:
Race to Witch Mountain
— President Obama in Strasbourg on Friday, April 3, 2009
"George Bernard Shaw once wrote, 'Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?'"
— Robert Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
|
George Bernard Shaw:
THE SNAKE. I can talk of many things. I am very wise. It was I who whispered the word to you that you did not know. Dead. Death. Die. EVE [shuddering] Why do you remind me of it? I forgot it when I saw your beautiful hood. You must not remind me of unhappy things. THE SERPENT. Death is not an unhappy thing when you have learnt how to conquer it. EVE. How can I conquer it? THE SERPENT. By another thing, called birth. EVE. What? [Trying to pronounce it] B-birth? THE SERPENT. Yes, birth. EVE. What is birth? THE SERPENT. The serpent never dies. Some day you shall see me come out of this beautiful skin, a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That is birth. EVE. I have seen that. It is wonderful. THE SERPENT. If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast when I am renewed. I call that renewal being born. EVE. Born is a beautiful word. THE SERPENT. Why not be born again and again as I am, new and beautiful every time? EVE. I! It does not happen: that is why. THE SERPENT. That is how; but it is not why. Why not? EVE. But I should not like it. It would be nice to be new again; but my old skin would lie on the ground looking just like me; and Adam would see it shrivel up and– THE SERPENT. No. He need not. There is a second birth. EVE. A second birth? THE SERPENT. Listen. I will tell you a great secret…. |
"Listen, I tell you a mystery…."
— Saul of Tarsus
About the People
(with apologies to
Zenna Henderson):
"We've got to stop meeting like this."
Los Angeles Times, April 1:
obituary for the green demon of
Joss Whedon‘s TV series “Angel“–
“As you read,
watch for patterns.”
— “Pattern in The Defense,”
apparently by Jeff Edmunds
Related material:
Today’s previous entries
and
“Force Field of Dreams“
(which contains the
above quotation)
in this journal on
Sept. 22, 2002
"… in some autistic enchantment,
pure as one of Bach's inverted canons or Euler's formula for polyhedra."
— George Steiner, "A Death of Kings," in The New Yorker, issue dated Sept. 7, 1968
A correspondence underlying
The Steiner here is
Jakob, not George.
See "Pope to Pray on
Autism Sunday 2009."
See also Log24 on that
Sunday– February 8:
Other knight figures:
Click on the SpringerLink
knight for a free copy
(pdf, 1.2 mb) of
the following paper
dealing with the geometry
underlying the R.T. Curtis
knight figures above:
Context:
Literature and Chess and
Sporadic Group References
Details:
| Adapted (for HTML) from the opening paragraphs of the above paper, W. Jonsson's 1970 "On the Mathieu Groups M22, M23, M24…"–
"[A]… uniqueness proof is offered here based upon a detailed knowledge of the geometric aspects of the elementary abelian group of order 16 together with a knowledge of the geometries associated with certain subgroups of its automorphism group. This construction was motivated by a question posed by D.R. Hughes and by the discussion Edge [5] (see also Conwell [4]) gives of certain isomorphisms between classical groups, namely
where A8 is the alternating group on eight symbols, S6 the symmetric group on six symbols, Sp(4,2) and PSp(4,2) the symplectic and projective symplectic groups in four variables over the field GF(2) of two elements, [and] PGL, PSL and SL are the projective linear, projective special linear and special linear groups (see for example [7], Kapitel II). The symplectic group PSp(4,2) is the group of collineations of the three dimensional projective space PG(3,2) over GF(2) which commute with a fixed null polarity tau…." References 4. Conwell, George M.: The three space PG(3,2) and its group. Ann. of Math. (2) 11, 60-76 (1910). 5. Edge, W.L.: The geometry of the linear fractional group LF(4,2). Proc. London Math. Soc. (3) 4, 317-342 (1954). 7. Huppert, B.: Endliche Gruppen I. Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer 1967. |
Notes on Finite Geometry
The web pages at finitegeometry.org are currently down, but most of them are still available at the Internet Archive.
“Lord, I remember”
— Bob Seger
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
— Bernard Holland in The New York Times of Monday, May 20, 1996
Yesterday’s afternoon entry cited philosopher John Holbo on chess. This, together with Holland’s remark above and Monday’s entries on Zizek, suggests…
In this excellent analysis,
Holbo quotes Kierkegaard:
“… the knight of faith
‘has the pain of being unable to
make himself intelligible to others'”
(Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling)
Cardinal Manning
Click on the cardinal
for a link to some remarks
related to the upcoming film
“Angels & Demons” and to
a Paris “Sein Feld.”
Context: the five entries
ending at 9:26 AM
on March 10, 2009…
and, for Kierkegaard,
Diamonds Are Forever.
for the late
Pope John Paul II —
Numbers from the
State of Grace:
Midrash:
Lottery Hermeneutics
In memory of
physics historian
Martin J. Klein,
(June 25, 1924-
March 28, 2009)
"… in physics itself, there was what appeared, briefly, to be an ending, which then very quickly gave way to a new beginning: The quest for the ultimate building-blocks of the universe had been taken down to the molecular level in nineteenth-century kinetic theory… and finally to the nuclear level in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. For a moment in the 1920s the quest appeared to have ended…. However… this paradise turned out to be, if not exactly a fool's paradise, then perhaps an Eden lost."
— No Truth Except in the Details: Essays in Honor of Martin J. Klein, introduction by A.J. Kox and Daniel Siegel, June 25, 1994
New York Times obituary dated April 1, 2009:
"Martin J. Klein, a historian of modern physics…. died Saturday, [March 28, 2009] in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 84 and lived in Chapel Hill."
Klein edited, among other things, Paul Ehrenfest: Collected Scientific Papers (publ. by North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1959).
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Related material:
"Almost every famous chess game
is a well-wrought urn
in Cleanth Brooks’ sense."
— John Holbo,
Now We See
Wherein Lies the Pleasure
"The entire sequence of moves in these… chapters reminds one– or should remind one– of a certain type of chess problem where the point is not merely the finding of a mate in so many moves, but what is termed 'retrograde analysis'…."
— Vladimir Nabokov, foreword to The Defense
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