Log24

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Tuesday June 30, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:16 pm
Totentanz

Adapted from this afternoon’s
New York Times:

Totentanz: Obituary notices for Pina Bausch and Michael Jackson from the online NY Times, afternoon of Tuesday, June 30, 2009, with a quotation from Ruben Dario

Related material:

And then we’ll see….

Background:

The five Log24 entries from
6:29 PM Tuesday, June 23, to
1:00 AM Sunday, June 28.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Monday June 29, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:29 pm
Calvinist Epiphany
for St. Peter’s Day

Have your people
  call my people.
— George Carlin 


Diamond life, lover boy;
we move in space
with minimum waste
 and maximum joy.

— Sade, quoted here on
 Lincoln’s Birthday, 2003

This is perhaps suitable
for the soundtrack of
the film “Blockheads
  (currently in development)–

Kohs Block Design Test


Diamond Life

Related material from Wikipedia:

“Uta Frith, in her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma,[5] addresses the superior performance of autistic individuals on the block design [link not in Wikipedia] test. This was also addressed in [an] earlier paper.[6] A particularly interesting article demonstrates the differences in construction time in the performance of the block design task by Asperger syndrome individuals and non-Asperger’s individuals. An essential point here is that in an unsegmented version of the task, Asperger’s individuals performed dramatically faster than non-Asperger’s individuals: [7].”

5. Frith, Uta (2003). Autism: explaining the enigma (2nd ed. ). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Pub. ISBN 0-631-22901-9.

6. Shah A, Frith U (Nov 1993). “Why do autistic individuals show superior performance on the block design task?”. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 34 (8): 1351–64. PMID 8294523. 

7. Caron MJ, Mottron L, Berthiaume C, Dawson M (Jul 2006). “Cognitive mechanisms, specificity and neural underpinnings of visuospatial peaks in autism”. Brain 129 (Pt 7): 1789–802. doi:10.1093/brain/awl072. PMID 16597652. “Fig 3”.

Lover Boy

Related material from a film (see Calvinist Epiphany, June 17):

Still from the film 'Adam'-- Adam looking at photo

Related material from another film:

Monty Python - Bright Side of Life

For the relevance of this maxim to autism, see Markoff Process (March 4, 2009).

Monday June 29, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:02 am
Sunday Egyptians

“And what is it
 you’re going to do?”
Eddie Murphy as Pharaoh  

Michael Jackson entertains the Pharaoh

See also

Reba at Heaven’s Gate
and
 The Seventh Symbol:

Stargate-- 'Jackson's identified the seventh symbol.'

“Jackson’s identified
    the seventh symbol.”
Stargate

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Sunday June 28, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:48 pm
Sunday Jews
 by Hortense Calisher*

Sunday Jews … [2002] explores issues of identity in an eclectic family, which includes an art expert, an atheistic rabbi, an anthropologist, and an agnostic Irish Catholic.” —Encyclopaedia Britannica

Excerpt from Calisher's 'Strange Bedfellows' on the meaning of 'uh'

One definition
  of “uh”–

Strange Bedfellows:

Reba McEntire, illustration for her Palm Sunday, 2009, single 'Strange'

For some background,
 see Jefferson’s Birthday.

* Pictured next to John Updike
in “Multimedia” at the top of
 today’s NY Times obituaries
 (pdf, 1 megabyte).

Sunday June 28, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:28 am
  Hell Path

“…right through hell
     there is a path…”
 
  — Malcolm Lowry
 

From 'Ragtime'-- 'He couldn't tell her how to look at a diamond....'

Related material:
 
This morning’s
   New York Times obituaries…

New York Times obituaries: Diamond cutter Antonio Bianco, with ads for Ford Motors

…and The Restaurant Quarré in Berlin,
   with a view of the Brandenburg Gate:

Berlin restaurant with view of Brandenburg Gate

Sunday June 28, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 am

Raven Steals the Light

Raven from the home page of 'Dark Materials' author Philip Pullman

Home page of 'Dark Materials' author Philip Pullman

Thanks for a reference
to this story go to
Robert Bringhurst,
in his own way a
Cleric of the Grammaton.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Saturday June 27, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

Dark Materials

Before thir eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise
Thir embryon Atoms....
                                ... Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage....

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II

Saturday June 27, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am

From the weblog of David Lavery, literature, film, and television scholar/critic, now teaching at Middle Tennessee State University–

Lavery’s quote of the day (6/27/09)-

“Art is based on second love, not first love. In it we make a return to something which we had willfully alienated. The child is occupied mostly with things, but it is because he is still unfurnished with systematic ideas, not because he is a ripe citizen by nature and comes already trailing clouds of glory. Images are clouds of glory for the man who has discovered that ideas are a sort of darkness.”

–John Crowe Ransom

Posted by Lavery on Friday, June 26, 2009, at 9:00 PM

Friday, June 26, 2009

Friday June 26, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:48 pm

Apocatastasis Now

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall.
— WILLIAM BLAKE

"In 'Apocatastasis Now: A Very Condensed Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem' (JBSSJ [Journal of the Blake Society at St James's] 6 [2001] 18–25), Susanne Sklar argues that Blake is not apocalyptic but apocatastatic, that is (following a doctrine of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) he believes that all free creatures will be redeemed by God's universal love."

The Year's Work in English Studies, 2003: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 493-547

Related material:

 

Thriller

 

From the website of Philip Pullman,
president of The Blake Society:

 

"I must create a System…"

The Blake Society, 25 October 2005: St James’s Church, Piccadilly

I see that the title of this lecture is given as BLAKE'S DARK MATERIALS. Now in the lecturer's handbook, the second rule says "You need take no obsessive notice of the title that has been announced in advance." Whether Blake's materials are dark or not I couldn't really say, but I am going to talk about Blake, partly, and partly about religion. Appropriate, perhaps, in a place like this, but you might think not appropriate from someone whose reputation is that of a scoffer or mocker or critic of religion; but I haven't come here to scoff or mock. Nor have I come here to recant, as a matter of fact. I'm profoundly interested in religion, and I think it's extremely important to understand it. I've been trying to understand it all my life, and every so often it's useful to put one's thoughts in order; but I shall never like God.

Download the full lecture
(pdf format, 155.62 KB)

 

For more dark materials
from the Halloween season
of 2005 — in fact, from the
  very date of Pullman's lecture–
see Darkness Doubled.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Thursday June 25, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Apocatastasis

“… T. S. Eliot tried to recompose,
   in Four Quartets, the fragments
   he had grieved over
    in The Waste Land.”

— “Beauty and Desecration,”
   Roger Scruton
 (link at aldaily.com today)

The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness….”

— Carl G. Jung in Aion

Related material:
this journal
one year ago today.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Tuesday June 23, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:29 pm
Picture This

The death of the character Mary O’Brien in the 2002 film “Equilibrium,” broadcast in the U.S.A. Saturday evening, paralleled the reported death of Iran’s Neda Soltan on the same day (June 20). The reported last words of Soltan would also have been fitting for O’Brien. (Any such resemblance between a fictional character and a real person is, of course, purely coincidental.)

Tuesday June 23, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:10 am
You May Already
 Have Won.

The Last Question, in memory of Ed McMahon

Adapted from Google News
of about 9:30 AM EDT

Monday, June 22, 2009

Monday June 22, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 am

Text

Today’s birthday:
Kris Kristofferson

Kris Kristofferson in 'Heaven's Gate'

Heaven’s Gate

One year ago today
George Carlin died.

Online Etymology Dictionary

1369, “wording of anything written,” from O.Fr. texte, O.N.Fr. tixte (12c.), from M.L. textus “the Scriptures, text, treatise,” in L.L. “written account, content, characters used in a document,” from L. textus “style or texture of a work,” lit. “thing woven,” from pp. stem of texere “to weave,” from PIE base *tek- “make” (see texture).

“An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns– but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.” [Robert Bringhurst, “The Elements of Typographic Style”]

Text-book is from 1779.

The 4x4 square grid

“Discuss the geometry
underlying the above picture.”
Log24, June 11, 2009

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Sunday June 21, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Abstraction

From Mitchell Stephens, author of a website mentioned here yesterday:

“This paper is designed to be a conversation….

The ideas are organized loosely around a single theme: the Roman leader Pompey’s forced entry into the most sacred place of the Jewish temple. At issue are the origins and prevalence of doubt, even at the heart of religion….

The paper will be initially presented, with comments and additions, to the working group on ‘Secularism, Religious Authority, and the Mediation of Knowledge’ of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University on December 8, 2006.”

From the paper itself:

“All Pompey’s intrusion into the Holy of Holies will leave behind is one sentence in Tacitus; still, it is not hard to imagine it as a media show. As he enters this hidden room in the Temple of those weird, unGreek, Asian, tribal Jews, this cosmopolitan, sophisticated Roman is not just the insensitive anthropologist. He wants, to continue our imagining, to display the lack of contents of the Holy of Holies in a museum, to take them, like the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, on tour. This all-powerful Roman wields klieg lights; he brings the press. He exposes. His expedition is something of an exposé. The whole scene feels as if it might have been filmed: like Dorothy’s peek behind the curtain at the diminutive Wizard of Oz. It feels as if it might have been televised: like Geraldo Rivera’s opening of Al Capone’s ‘secret vault.’ Pompey has in common with all journalists a desire to shove a microphone in God’s face. He wants to rant about what he has learned on his blog.

In his desecration of the Holy of Holies, Pompey has with him, in other words, what Jacques Derrida, in his essay ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ calls the ‘powers of abstraction’: ‘deracination, delocalization, disincarnation, formalization, universalizing schematization, objectification, telecommunication etc.'”

Related material:

Log24 entries of
 June 9-11, 2009.

Et cetera, et cetera.

Film posters-- 'Solomon and Sheba,' 'Strange Bedfellows'

Sunday June 21, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:45 am
x

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Saturday June 20, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:54 pm
Strange Bedfellows

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090620-ObamaNBC.jpg

The above excerpt from Google News was suggested

  1. by David Lavery’s June 19 weblog entry “Future Books,”
  2. by an example of this sort of book– “The Holy of Holies: The Constituents of Emptiness,”
  3. by the June 19 NY Lottery midday number 354 (the name of an empty page in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, Library of America, 1997), and
  4. by the musical meaning of the numbers 3, 5, 4– the frequency ratios of the notes G, E, C
    The musical notes G, E, C on the piano

    and hence the numerical equivalent of the NBC chimes.
“We have heard
  the chimes at midnight.”
— William Shakespeare 
  and Orson Welles

Saturday June 20, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 am
A Symbol
of the Self

Turn the page.

Google Book Search on Marlowe and Stone

“Unsheathe your
dagger definitions.”
Ulysses 

Dagger on cover of  'The Fraternity of the Stone'

Friday, June 19, 2009

Friday June 19, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:59 pm
Midnight in
the Garden

  continued…

See

 Juneteenth through
Midsummer Night

and

 Juneteenth Revisited.

Friday June 19, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 pm
He wasn’t there
again today

Today’s New York Times:

NY Times ad for 'The God Who Wasn't There,' with  article on pages from medieval manuscripts

And then there are
gemlike numbers
   set free from words…

Today’s New York lottery:

NY Lottery Friday, June 19, 2009: Midday 354, Evening 431

Elsewhere:
 354, 431

These numbers also
name parts of a book
cited here Nov. 6, 2007:

                   … The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark….

— Wallace Stevens in
    Parts of a World, 1942

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Wednesday June 17, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:06 pm
Calvinist Epiphany

NY Times June 17, 2009, on John  Calvin's birthday

The above ad leads to

Still from the film 'Adam'-- Adam looking at photo

… which in turn suggests
a picture linked to in yesterday’s
Bloomsday for Carlin:

Maria Julia 'Maju' Mantilla

Related material:
Hilbert vs. Pascal
(Jan. 23, 2009)

Wednesday June 17, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 am

Back to the Real

Colum McCann on yesterday’s history:

“Fiction gives us access to a very real history.”

The Associated Press thought for today:

“Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.”

— John Hersey, American author (born on this date in 1914, died 1993).

From John Hersey’s The Child Buyer (1960):

“I was wondering about that this morning… About forgetting. I’ve always had an idea that each memory was a kind of picture, an insubstantial picture. I’ve thought of it as suddenly coming into your mind when you need it, something you’ve seen, something you’ve heard, then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out, then maybe it comes back another time…. If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything, where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky? Back home around my bed, where my dreams stay?”

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

— Wallace Stevens

Hotel Bella Vista, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

Postcard from eBay
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I: 

Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall —
Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table… he reached to the floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read. There were really two sheets of uncommonly thin hotel notepaper….

I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Tuesday June 16, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm
V.

"Actualmente Maju estudia Publicidad en la Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Lima, es modelo de la agencia Elite Model Management y viaja por varios paises realizando campañas de publicidad, y es imagen publicitaria exclusiva de varias empresas en su país."

Related material: "His and Hers: Something" (Log24 entry last year for the anniversary of the births of John Calvin and of Maria Julia Mantilla.)

See also Andrew Cusack's
weblog for 8:09 PM today–
"The Order of Malta in Peru."
 
“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,  "V. and V-2," in
  Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays,
  ed. Edward Mendelson.
  Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55).

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Sunday June 14, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am
And the ruby slippers
go to… Thomas Pynchon!

“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
Pynchon

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Saturday June 13, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:09 pm
For the late
   Lee Nagrin


The Passion of
the Children

continued from
   February 25, 2008

 

Jon Stewart at the Academy Awards in 2008


Abstract classicism
illustrated:

Abstract classicism: 'Six and Fifteen'

Performance art
illustrated:

Scene from 'The Amish Project'

The Amish Project

Friday, June 12, 2009

Friday June 12, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 pm

 

New York Times Friday, June 12, 2009, 4:14 PM

 

The Physics of Nothing

At the World Science Festival Thursday night [June 11, 2009], four physicists offered an answer to the question that has plagued philosophers and scientists: Why is there something rather than nothing at all?

Sure they did.

Two years ago:

NY Times June 12, 2007-- Obituaries of Mr. Wizard and performance artist Lee Nagrin

"A strange thing then happened." — L. Frank Baum

Related material:

Introduction to Abstract Classicism

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Thursday June 11, 2009

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

Geometry for Jews

(continued from Michelangelo’s birthday, 2003)

The 4x4 square grid

“Discuss the geometry underlying the above picture.”

Log24, March 6, 2003

Abstraction and the Holocaust  (Mark Godfrey, Yale University Press, 2007) describes one approach to such a discussion: Bochner “took a photograph of a new arrangement of blocks, cut it up, reprinted it as a negative, and arranged the four corners in every possible configuration using the serial principles of rotation and reversal to make Sixteen Isomorphs (Negative) of 1967, which he later illustrated alongside works by Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse in his Artforum article ‘The Serial Attitude.’ [December 1967, pp. 28-33]” Bochner’s picture of “every possible configuration”–

Bochner's 'Sixteen Isomorphs' (or: 'Eight Isomorphs Short of a Load')

Compare with the 24 figures in Frame Tales
(Log24, Nov. 10, 2008) and in Theme and Variations.

Thursday June 11, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:28 am

Epigraph

Above the entrance to Plato's Academy: AGEOMETRETOS MEDEIS EISITO

Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC

(http://www.scrapbookpages.com/USHMM/Exterior.html)

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Wednesday June 10, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 pm
Hello, Columbus

continued from
the two entries of
October 12, 2003:

Part I —
October 12, 2003 —

Vegas background for 'Play It As It Lays'

Above, an image from
Spinnin’ Wheel,
Spinnin’ True

Part II
  October 12, 2003 —

Stars of a film based on a novel, 'True Confessions,' by John Gregory Dunne

Above, an image from
Hello, Columbus

Part III —
June 10, 2009 —

Below, images from
a website:
 Images from a website on race, politics, and religion

“They all laughed at
    Christopher Columbus…”

Ira Gershwin  

Wednesday June 10, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am
Death of an
Abstract Classicist

“It’s going to be accomplished
in steps, this establishment of
the Talented in the
scheme of things.”

— Anne McCaffrey, Radcliffe ’47

Frederick Hammersley, abstract classicist, dies at 90
 
Work by Frederick Hammersley, abstract classicist

Click on images to enlarge.

Related material:

Naturalized Epistemology
and Zero Factorial.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Tuesday June 9, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 pm
Recessional

"I know what 
nothing means."
— Joan Didion, 
Play It As It Lays

President Faust at Harvard Baccalaureate, June 2, 2009

Faust

President Faust of Harvard on Joan Didion:

"She was referring to life as a kind of improvisation: that magical crossroads of rigor and ease, structure and freedom, reason and intuition. What she calls being prepared to 'go with the change.'"
 

Bippity Boppity Boo.


Didion's own words:

"I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that."

From the same book:

"The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place."

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

For a magical crossroads at another university, see the five Log24 entries ending on November 25, 2005:


The sign of the crossroads at Stanford

This holy icon
appeared at
N37°25.638'
W122°09.574'
on August 22, 2003,
at the Stanford campus.

Also from that date,
an example of clarity
  in another holy icon —

A visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem

— in honor of better days
 at Harvard and of a member
of the Radcliffe Class of 1964.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Saturday June 6, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm
IMAGE- Magical Thinking: May 26, 2008-- May 26, 2009

Excerpts from Log24,
with commentary by
Wilhelm and Mather

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Thursday June 4, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:24 pm

The Grasshopper
Lies Heavy

David Carradine dies at 72

“‘Oracle, why did you write
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy?
What are we supposed to learn?'”

— Philip K. Dick

She began throwing the coins.

I Ching Hexagram 61: Inner Truth

Click on image
for further details.

Thursday June 4, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:30 am
A Passage to Egypt
 

The First Draft: Reviews flood in
after Obama's Cairo speech

The conclusion:
a tribute to E. M. Forster

Test-- 'To prove you're a person and not a script'-- type the word 'connect.'

(Image only; not for use.)

Those who prefer spam scripts
to persons may consult
the entry from midnight.
 

Thursday June 4, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am
Steps
continued from
October 16, 2008
 

New collection release:
Pattern in Islamic Art
from David Wade

October 16, 2008

David Wade has partnered with ARTstor to distribute approximately 1,500 images of Islamic art, now available in the Digital Library. These images illustrate patterns and designs found throughout the Islamic world, from the Middle East and Europe to Central and South Asia. They depict works Wade photographed during his travels, as well as drawings and diagrams produced for publication. Reflective of Wade's particular interest in symmetry and geometry, these images analyze and break down common patterns into their basic elements, thereby revealing the underlying principles of order and balance in Islamic art. Islamic artists and craftsmen employed these intricate patterns to adorn all types of surfaces, such as stone, brick, plaster, ceramic, glass, metal, wood, and textiles. The collection contains examples of ornamentation from monumental architecture to the decorative arts.

To view the David Wade: Pattern in Islamic Art collection: go to the ARTstor Digital Library, browse by collection, and click "David Wade: Pattern in Islamic Art;" or enter the Keyword Search: patterninislamicart.

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the David Wade: Pattern in Islamic Art collection page.

 
The above prose illustrates
the institutional mind at work.

Those who actually try to view
the Wade collection will
encounter the following warning:

To access the images in the ARTstor Digital Library you need to be affiliated with a participating institution (university, college, museum, public library or K-12 school).
You say
"go to the ARTstor Digital Library,"
I say
"theatlantic.com/doc/200305/lewis."
 

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Wednesday June 3, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 am
Epigraphs
to Four Quartets:

Epigraphs to Eliot's 'Four Quartets'-- Heraclitus on the common logos and on the way up and the way down


The Dissertations of Maximus Tyrius, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor, printed by C. Whittingham, London, for the translator, 1804, Vol. II, p. 55:

"You see the mutation of bodies, and the transition of generation, a path upwards and downwards according to Heraclitus; and again, as he says, one thing living the death, but dying the life of another. Thus fire lives the death of earth, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air, and earth lives the death of water. You see a succession of life, and a mutation of bodies, both of which are the renovation of the whole."

Eight-rayed star of Venus (also the symmetry axes of the square)

 

For an interpretation
of the above figure
in terms of the classical
four elements discussed
in Four Quartets,
in Dissertations, and
in Angels & Demons,
see
Notes on Mathematics
 and Narrative.

For a more entertaining
interpretation, see Fritz Leiber's
classic story "Damnation Morning."

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Tuesday June 2, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am

Get Quotes

Monday, June 1, 2009

Monday June 1, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 am

“What’s going on”

Marvin Gaye

“The action is in the plot, inaccessible to introspection, and only the characters know what’s going on.”

James Hillman, quoted at David Lavery’s weblog.

See also

Badge ID

Click on image
 for further details.

Powered by WordPress