Log24

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Unholy Scripture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:06 pm

From The New York Times

4TH NIGHT FREE

NY Times 1:43 PM Jan. 28, 2010-- News of Salinger's death, with ad-- 'Only in Atlantis: 4th night free'

From this journal —

Sunday, November 5, 2006

Twilight Kingdom

“What he cannot contemplate is the reproach of

    … that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom,

when at length he may meet the eyes….”

On “The Hollow Men”

” … unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom”

Related readings from unholy scripture:
 

  The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040604-Feeling.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A.  The “long twilight struggle” speech of JFK

B.  “The Platters were singing ‘Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,’ and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information.  The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was all information.”

— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

C.
  “I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady.  Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it.  Live burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of arms.  The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?”

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

Today’s Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

Sybil on the Beach

"I was waiting for you," said the young man. "What's new?"

"What?" said Sybil.

"What's new? What's on the program?"

 

Nietzsche on Heraclitus and the 'play of fire with itself'

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Metamorphosis and Metaphor

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:31 pm

"Animation tends to be a condensed art form, using metamorphosis and metaphor to collide and expand meaning. In this way it resembles poetry."

— Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts,
   description of an exhibition–

FRAME BY FRAME: ANIMATED AT HARVARD

January 28–Feb 14, 2010

For example–

Animation — The Animated Diamond Theorem,
                      now shown frame by frame for selected frames

Poetry–

Part I —  "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…."

Part II — Metaphor on the covers of a Salinger book–

Diamond covers for Salinger's 'Nine Stories'

Click image for details.

For other thoughts on
metamorphosis and metaphor,
see Endgame.

Friday, January 29, 2010

More Glass

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Part I:

"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.' She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds."

Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (April 30, 2008), by Barbara Johnson

Part II:

"Did you see more glass?"


Louis Kahn, design for nine large glass cubes forming a Holocaust memorial

Part III:

From the date of Barbara Johnson's death:

"Mathematical relationships were
enough to satisfy him, mere formal
relationships which existed at
all times, everywhere, at once."

Broken Symmetries, 1983

X    
  X  
    X

The X's refer to the pattern on the
cover of a paperback edition
  of Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger.
Salinger died on Wednesday.

"You remember that book he sent me
from Germany? You know–
those German poems.
"

In Germany, Wednesday was
Holocaust Memorial Day, 2010.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Short Story

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Home Delivery

"But wait, there's more!"
Stanley Fish, NY Times today

NY Times 1:43 PM Jan. 28, 2010-- J. D. Salinger has died.

For a larger image, click on The Catcher.

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around– nobody big, I mean– except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff– I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I'd do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.  I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22

The Door into Summertime

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 am

This journal on Aug. 17, 2008:

TIME photo of preacher Rick Warren embracing the Republican candidate (on his right) and the Democratic candidate (on his left)

That post linked to an earlier post illustrating
the triangle formed by Harvard, by the
Mystic River at Somerville, and
by Bunker Hill Community College–

Triangulation illustrated by Harvard, by Mystic River, and by Bunker Hill Community College

That post also linked to the Wikipedia article
Triangulation, which now states that
“Some members of the U.S. Democratic
Party, in particular the left, insist that
triangulation is ‘dead.'”

Perhaps. Click the image below
for some background.

The Mystic Eye of Somerville, with the late Howard Zinn and the late Louis Auchincloss-- 'The eye you see him with is the same eye with which he sees you'-- Father Egan

For a view of Somerville from Harvard for Zinn,
see May 31, 2006. For a view of Summertime
for Auchincloss, see the NY Times obituary
of a political figure who died on Sunday.

On that day, this journal pictured a different
metaphor from Robert Stone’s Father Egan
the jewel in the lotus–

The Jewel in Venn's Lotus (photo by Gerry Gantt)

Euclid’s classic construction
of the equilateral triangle
offers a different view of
the jewel in Venn’s lotus–

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

For a more poetic approach to
this metaphor, see Log24 on
another Sunday– July 1, 2007.

Happy birthday, Rick Warren.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

To Apollo

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

Yesterday's post may, if one likes, be regarded
  as a nod to Dionysus, god of tragedy.

Here is a complementary passage:

Nietzsche on Heraclitus and the 'play of fire with itself'

Related material:
Jung and the Imago Dei

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Symbology

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

From this journal:

Friday December 5, 2008

m759 @ 1:06 PM
 
Mirror-Play of
the Fourfold

For an excellent commentary
 on this concept of Heidegger,

View selected pages
from the book

Dionysus Reborn:

Play and the Aesthetic Dimension
in Modern Philosophical and
Scientific Discourse

(Mihai I. Spariosu,
Cornell U. Press, 1989)

Related material:
the logo for a
web page

Logo for 'Elements of Finite Geometry'

– and Theme and Variations.

Transition to the
Garden of Forking Paths–

(See For Baron Samedi)–

The Found Symbol
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

and Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida,
translated by Barbara Johnson,
London, Athlone Press, 1981–

Pages 354-355
On the mirror-play of the fourfold

Pages 356-357
Shaking up a whole culture

Pages 358-359
Cornerstone and crossroads

Pages 360-361
A deep impression embedded in stone

Pages 362-363
A certain Y, a certain V

Pages 364-365
The world is Zeus's play

Page 366
It was necessary to begin again

 

Monday, January 25, 2010

Key to All Mythologies

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:21 pm

Recent Log24 entries on Hamlet suggest a look at Giorgio de Santillana's Hamlet's Mill on the Web.

There is a useful transcription by Clifford Stetner. See also an excellent review of Hamlet's Mill by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.

The work of Giorgio de Santillana (like that of Stetner) suggests in turn the following recently quoted advice–

"…you should read Middlemarch every five years or so. Every time… it's a different book, and an even more powerful one."

Robert Weisbuch, quoted at Critical Mass on Jan. 23.

Related material: Mr. Casaubon and the Key to All Mythologies.

For a simpler key, see On Linguistic Creation.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Annals of Religious Thought

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

Sting as Hamlet

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100124-SynchronicityDetai.jpgl.JPG

Detail, cover of Synchronicity album, 1983

Further details of the text on the album cover–

Synchronicity:
An Acausal Connecting Principle

Publisher's description

"Jung's only extended work in the field of parapsychology aims, on the one hand, to incorporate the findings of 'extrasensory perception' (ESP) research into a general scientific point of view and, on the other, to ascertain the nature of the psychic factor in such phenomena.

   While he had advanced the 'synchronicity' hypothesis as early as the 1920's, Jung gave a full statement only in 1951, in an Eranos lecture; the following year (he was seventy-seven) he published the present monograph in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel winner) Wolfgang Pauli. Together with a wealth of historical and contemporary material on 'synchronicity,' Jung describes an astrological experiment conducted to test his theory."

Today’s Sermon

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

More Than Matter

Wheel in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913

(f) Poetry

The burden or refrain of a song.

⇒ “This meaning has a low degree of authority, but is supposed from the context in the few cases where the word is found.” Nares.

You must sing a-down a-down, An you call him a-down-a. O, how the wheel becomes it! Shak.

“In one or other of G. F. H. Shadbold’s two published notebooks, Beyond Narcissus and Reticences of Thersites, a short entry appears as to the likelihood of Ophelia’s enigmatic cry: ‘Oh, how the wheel becomes it!’ referring to the chorus or burden ‘a-down, a-down’ in the ballad quoted by her a moment before, the aptness she sees in the refrain.”

— First words of Anthony Powell’s novel “O, How the Wheel Becomes It!” (See Library Thing.)

Anthony Powell's 'O, How the Wheel Becomes It!' along with Laertes' comment 'This nothing's more than matter.'

Related material:

Photo uploaded on January 14, 2009
with caption “This nothing’s more than matter”

and the following nothings from this journal
on the same date– Jan. 14, 2009

The Fritz Leiber 'Spider' symbol in a square

A Singer 7-cycle in the Galois field with eight elements

The Eightfold (2x2x2) Cube

The Jewel in Venn's Lotus (photo by Gerry Gantt)

Saturday, January 23, 2010

O How the Wheel Becomes It!

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:06 pm

Continued from yesterday
and from March 28, 2008–

Being and Nothingness

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100123-Ophelia1.jpg

Jean Simmons and Laurence Olivier, 1948

"Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O…."
– Elaine Showalter, "Representing Ophelia:
Women, Madness, and the
Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism."
Pp. 220-238 in
Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford.
Boston: Bedford Books, 1994.

For Baron Samedi

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

Yesterday's Times —

NY Times banner with Eve and apple

Today's Times —

NY Times ad for Goldstein's '36 Arguments'-- 'Deconstruct the Arguments'

   Annals of Deconstruction —

Click on image for background.

New Yorker cover on Haiti featuring Baron Samedi

Related material
   for Baron Samedi

The Found Symbol
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube
Jacques Derrida on the Looking-Glass garden, 'The Time before First,' and Solomon's seal

Friday, January 22, 2010

Hamlet’s Health Care

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100122-Hamlet.jpg

"…something is rotten in Denmark. And nothing I have read in the news headlines is going to solve it.

Rant over.

Back to our regular programming."

A Circle of Quiet today

Our regular programming:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100122-NYT518sm.jpg

Yesterday’s Man

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Anne Applebaum in the current New York Review of Books on Arthur Koestler

"At the moment, he still seems like yesterday's man, unfashionable and obsolete."

Rather like God. See this journal yesterday– Darkness at Noon.

See also David Levine's portrait of Koestler (Dec. 30, 2009)–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091230-Koestlerr-NYRB19641217.gif

— and an objective correlative to yesterday's post —

LA mayor says storm front will hit region at noon on June 21, 2010

Click to enlarge.

Meta Physics

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

Church Emblem

Yin-Yang emblem of duality in Niels Bohr's coat of arms, Frederiksborg Castle Church

Related material:

Faust in Copenhagen,
Meta Physics,
and yesterday's entry.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Darkness at Noon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

A NY Times review dated Jan. 20 has the headline

Trying to Paint the Deity by Numbers
Against a Backdrop of Jewish Culture

By JANET MASLIN

"…this novel’s bracing intellectual energy never flags. Though it is finally more a work of showmanship than scholarship, it affirms Ms. Goldstein’s position as a satirist…."

The title of the book under review is
36 Arguments for the
Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
.

Related "by the numbers" material–

From the I Ching, commentaries on the lines of Hexagram 36–

"Here the Lord of Light is in a subordinate place and is wounded by the Lord of Darkness…."

"The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100121-IChing36.jpg


The Times review
of 36 Arguments notes that the book's chapters of fiction number 36, as do the 36 philosophical arguments in the book's title and appendix.

The reviewer– "So much for structure. It is not Ms. Goldstein’s strong suit…."

Some structure related to the above occurrence of 36 in the I Ching

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100121-Trigrams.jpg

Another example of eightfold symmetry:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100121-LHCsm.jpg

The Large Hadron Collider

See also Angels & Demons in
Hollywood and in this journal.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

How the Story Goes

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"I need a man who knows
how the story goes."
— Shania Twain

"The causal story is that a crippled epistemology leads to fanaticism, which then leads to the urge for governmental control…

It is only through gaining control of a state in the modern era that a fanatical group could expect to exclude contrary views and thereby maintain the crippled epistemology of their followers. With the power of a state behind them, they can coerce."

— P. 18 in Russell Hardin, "The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism" (Pp. 3-22 in Political Rationality and Extremism, Albert Breton et al., eds., Cambridge University Press, 2002).

This is the source of more recent uses of the phrase "crippled epistemology."

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A Mass for Mel–

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:06 pm

Cognitive Infiltration

"Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be persuaded by an attempt to dispel their theories; they may even characterize that very attempt as further proof of the conspiracy. Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups."

— Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law professor,
abstract of "Conspiracy Theories," Jan. 15, 2008

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100119-Gibson.jpg

Mel Gibson in
"Conspiracy Theory"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100119-SunsteinHLRecord.jpg

Cass Sunstein,
Felix Frankfurter Professor
of Law at Harvard

Some historical background–

The Antagonists:
Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter,
and Civil Liberties in Modern America

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100119-Justice_Hugo_Black.jpg

Justice Hugo Black

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100119-Justice_Felix_Frankfurter.jpg

Justice Felix Frankfurter

Critical Mass Monday, Jan. 18, 2010, 7:06  AM–

Here you've got three high-powered academics… all engaged in highly pernicious and mutually enabling forms of professional dishonesty. Sunstein comes up [with] what Timothy Burke calls a "consensus-politics liberal-leaning version of COINTELPRO," — Erin O'Connor

Critical Mass? Campaigns Work to Get Voters to Polls

— Washington Wire:
Political Insight and Analysis from
The Wall Street Journal Capital Bureau
January 19, 2010, 11:17 AM ET

David Weigel, "Attacks on Sunstein Frustrate Conservative Fans,"
The Washington Independent, 9/9/09–

"The campaign against Sunstein has largely written itself."

Monday, January 18, 2010

The Long Ninth Wave

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:26 pm

Two classics of politics–

1956– The Ninth Wave, by Eugene Burdick

2010– "Scott Brown" in Google's new "As It Happens" format

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Welcome to the Ape Stuff

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

NY Times obituary of Knox Burger,
book editor and agent, who died at 87 on January 4

"As a magazine editor in the 1950s, Knox Burger published Kurt Vonnegut’s first short story….

During Mr. Burger’s tenure at Collier’s, a short story by Vonnegut, whom he had known slightly when both were at Cornell and who was then working in public relations for General Electric, crossed his desk. He asked for changes, which Vonnegut made, and the story, 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect,' appeared in the magazine in February 1950. It was the first published work of fiction for Vonnegut, who recounted the episode decades later….

At least half a dozen authors… honored Mr. Burger by dedicating books to him. Vonnegut, who died in 2007, did, too. His dedication of Welcome to the Monkey House, a 1968 collection of short stories that included 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect,' read:

'To Knox Burger. Ten days older than I am. He has been a very good father to me.'"

A Jesuit at the
Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive

"Bisociation": The Act of Creation

"Koestler’s concept of ‘bisociation’… enters into the very ‘act of creation.’ In every such act, writes Koestler, the creator ‘bisociates,’ that is, combines, two ‘matrices’– two diverse patterns of knowing or perceiving– in a new way. As each matrix carries its own images, concepts, values, and ‘codes,’ the creative person brings together– ‘bisociates’– two diverse matrices not normally connected."

– Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.

Robert Stone in A Flag for Sunrise
(Knopf hardcover, 1981)–

"The eye you see him with is the same eye with which he sees you."

– Father Egan on page 333

Pablo on page 425–

"'…You know, he told me– that old man told me– the eye you look at it with, well, that's the eye it sees you with. That's what he told me.'

Holliwell was moved to recall an experiment he had once read about; he had clipped the report of it for his class. An experimenter endeavoring to observe chimpanzee behavior had fashioned a spy hole in the door of the animals' chamber through which he might watch them unobserved. Putting his eye to it, he had seen nothing more than what he finally identified as the eye of a chimpanzee on the other side of the door. Ape stuff."

More ape stuff from a Jesuit–

"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                Is immortal diamond."

— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
"That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire
and of the comfort of the Resurrection
"

More ape stuff from myself–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100117-TradingPlaces.jpg

Problem: Perform this transformation
by combining the sorts of permutations allowed
in the diamond puzzle. A solution: click here.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Annals of the…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:20 am

American Literary Historical Society
'Spy Game'-- Redford with binoculars, Pitt with camera

Robert Redford and Brad Pitt
in "Spy Game" (2001)

James Dean rises from coffin-- Photo by Dean Stock, LIFE magazine, 1955

James Dean in LIFE, 1955.

Photo by Dennis Stock,
who died on Monday.

"The eye you see him with
is the same eye
with which he sees you."

— Father Egan on page 333
of the classic Robert Stone novel
A Flag for Sunrise
(Knopf hardcover, 1981)

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Annals of Wizardry, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 am

In Julie Taymor's film version of "The Tempest" (now in post-production), Helen Mirren, in a gender switch, plays "Prospera."

See a recent interview, "Helen Mirren Talks About Playing Prospera in The Tempest" (ScreenCrave.com, Friday, January 8, 2010, 4:50 PM, By Mali Elfman)—

"With Prospero you can change it into a woman without changing much of the text, very little of the text has changed, only at the very beginning— the backstory. In fact, one of the most famous of Prospero’s speeches, it’s an invocation— brilliant, fabulous speech— is actually from 'Medea,' almost lifted lock, stock, and barrel from the play 'Medea' and it’s Medea’s speech and Shakespeare just took it. It’s incredible. Like three words have changed. So it’s actually a woman’s speech."

It's actually not from "Medea" (the play by Euripides), but rather from the version of Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 7.

Related material: Blurring the Lines and Mutatis Mutandis.

See also Tuesday's entry on Taymor and theatre.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Annals of Literature

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:32 am

Death and the Apple Tree
continued from January 4

"One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: 'O love! O love!' many times.

At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar; she said she would love to go.

'And why can't you?' I asked.

While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps, and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.

'It's well for you,' she said.

'If I go,' I said, 'I will bring you something.'"

— "Araby," by James Joyce.
 Joyce died on this date in 1941.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

That’s Showbiz

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

New York Times, January 12, 2010, 12:26 PM–

"Spider-Man" Musical Will Refund Tickets

"With… direction by Julie Taymor ['Frida'], 'Spider-Man' has been marred by delays….

The musical’s troubles have unfolded at the same time that the next “Spider-Man” movie has been descending into disarray…."

Related material:

"No Great Magic," by Fritz Leiber–

"The white cosmetic came away, showing sallow skin and on it a faint tattoo in the form of an 'S' styled like a yin-yang symbol left a little open.

'Snake!' he hissed. 'Destroyer! The arch-enemy, the eternal opponent!'"

Ay que bonito es volar  
    A las dos de la mañana
….”
— “La Bruja

Monday, January 11, 2010

One Day of the Vulture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100111-SpyGame.jpg

Robert Redford in "Spy Game."
This 2001 film premiered
on AMC TV last night.

Motto of the British
information technology (IT)
journal The Register

"Biting the hand that feeds IT."

An illustration:

The Register article on Google's Nexus One smartphone, with Register's vulture logo

Click for further details.

Related material:

Christ in the Aberdeen Bestiary

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Leaving Church

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:09 pm

For those who prefer
the Harvard Psychedelic Club to
the Harvard Alcoholic Club
(see The Nexus) —

Nicolas Cage leaving the
church of The Rock

http://www.log24.com/log10/saved/100110-ChurchOfTheRock.jpg

Related material:

From p. 209 of 'Mrs. Kennedy' by Barbara Leaming, 2002 paperback

Leaving Las Vegas, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

A sermon for the father of Kal-El.
See also related material in this journal
on Vegas and on Maniacs.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

1982 Again

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Rock's top 40 on Jan. 9, 1982

Positional Meaning

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:32 am

"The positional meaning of a symbol derives from its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt, whose elements acquire their significance from the system as a whole."

— Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 51, quoted by Beth Barrie in "Victor Turner."

To everything, turn, turn, turn…
— Peter Seeger

The Galois Quaternion:

The Galois Quaternion

Click for context.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Annals of Wizardry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:35 pm

Part I:

Last night's post for the birthday of
Nicolas Cage, which linked to a
description of his upcoming film–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100108-SorcAppr.jpg

Nicolas Cage as Balthazar Blake

Part II:

From this morning's comics:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100108-WizardOfId.gif

The Nexus

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
From Google today, some excerpts from the result of the search “define:nexus”–

  • link: the means of connection between things linked in series
  • a connected series or group
    wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
  • In computing, Nexus is the security kernel in Microsoft’s delayed NGSCB initiative. It provides a secure environment for trusted code to run in. Code running in Nexus mode is out of reach of untrusted applications.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(computing)
  • A Nexus is a place equidistant from the five elements as explained in the TV series Charmed. Using this as a point of reference, it is quite possible that there could be several Nexus points of power scattered throughout the world, though rare. …
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(Charmed)
  • A line-mode browser is a form of web browser that is operated from a single command line.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(web_browser)
This search was suggested by a book review in today’s New York Times that mentions both the Harvard classic The Varieties of Religious Experience and some religious experiences affecting my own Harvard class– that of 1964.

Cuernavaca, Mexico, in August 1960 was the site of what Harvard’s Timothy Leary later called the deepest religious experience of his life.

For some other experiences related to Harvard and Cuernavaca, see a search on those two terms in this journal.

The book under review is titled “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.” My own experiences with the Harvard-Cuernavaca nexus might more appropriately be titled “The Harvard Alcoholic Club.”

Thursday, January 7, 2010

High Concept

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Balthasar Meets Blake

Happy birthday, Nicolas Cage.

Lesson No. One

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:01 am

 

“Zhu Xi maintained that all things are brought into being by the union of two universal aspects of reality: qi, sometimes translated as vital (or physical, material) force; and li, sometimes translated as rational principle (or law).” —Wikipedia

 

“Drop off the key, Lee” — Paul Simon

The 3x3 Grid

Reference frame (Click for details.)

According to Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi],

The word 'Li'

“Li” is “the principle or coherence or order or pattern underlying the cosmos.”

– Smith, Bol, Adler, and Wyatt, Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching,
Princeton University Press, 1990

Related material:

Dynasty and

Lesson Number One.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

ART WARS continued…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

The Difference

There is a small but important difference
between "No One" and "No. One."

Images from a website in this journal
on June 10, 2009:
 Images from a website on race, politics, and religion

That website's author died this afternoon.

For related symbols, see the five Log24 entries
ending on June 10, 2009.

Note the resemblance of the following work
pictured here on that date

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100106-BirthOfCool.jpg

to the 1958 painting "No. One,"
by the late Kenneth Noland–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100106-NoOne.jpg

Brightness at Noon, continued

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

The Galois Quaternion

From The French Mathematician
by Tom Petsinis (Nov. 30, 1998)–

0

I had foreseen it all in precise detail.
One step led inevitably to the next,
like the proof of a shining theorem,
down to the conclusive shot that still echoes
through time and space.
Facedown in the damp pine needles,
I embraced that fatal sphere
with my whole body. Dreams, memories,
even the mathematics I had cherished
and set down in my last will and testament–
all receded. I am reduced to
a singular point; in an instant
I am transformed to i.

i = an imaginary being

Here, on this complex space,
i am no longer the impetuous youth
who wanted to change the world
first with a formula and then with a flame.
Having learned the meaning of infinite patience,
i now rise to the text whenever anyone reads
about Evariste Galois, preferring to remain
just below the surface,
like a goldfish nibbling the fringe of a floating leaf.
Ink is more mythical than blood
(unless some ancient poet slit his
vein and wrote an epic in red):
The text is a two-way mirror
that allows me to look into
the life and times of the reader.
Who knows, someday i may rise
to a text that will compel me
to push through to the other side.
Do you want proof that i exist? Where am i?
Beneath every word, behind each letter,
on the side of a period that will never see the light.

 

Related material:
The Galois Quaternion

The Galois Quaternion

Click for context.
(See also Nativity and the end
of this morning's post.)

Epiphany Revisited

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

January 06, 2007
ART WARS: Epiphany

Picture of Nothing
On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
Pictures of Nothing“–

“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….”

Related material:

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Log24, Aug. 23, 2005:

“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–  theological analogy of Son’s procession  as Verbum Patris, 111-12″ — Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S.J., Yale University Press 1957,  second printing 1963, page 162

“So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil’s Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: ‘In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, from Slate‘s “High Concept” department

'In the beginning' according to Jim Holt

“Bang.”

“…Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal….”

For properties of the “nothing” represented by the 3×3 grid, see The Field of Reason. For religious material related to the above and to Epiphany, a holy day observed by some, see Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star and Shining Forth.


Some Context:

Quaternions in Finite Geometry

Click to enlarge.

See also Nativity.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

For Twelfth Night

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Nativity

Kenneth Nolad, 'Play,' 1960. Noland died on January 5, 2010.

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío

See also diadema and an obituary
for Noland, who died today.

Artifice of Eternity

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am

A Medal

In memory of Byzantine scholar Ihor Sevcenko,
who died at 87 on St. Stephen's Day, 2009–

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060915-Roots.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

William Grimes on Sevcenko in this morning's New York Times:

"Perhaps his most fascinating, if uncharacteristic, literary contribution came shortly after World War II, when he worked with Ukrainians stranded in camps in Germany for displaced persons.

In April 1946 he sent a letter to Orwell, asking his permission to translate 'Animal Farm' into Ukrainian for distribution in the camps. The idea instantly appealed to Orwell, who not only refused to accept any royalties but later agreed to write a preface for the edition. It remains his most detailed, searching discussion of the book."

See also a rather different medal discussed
here in the context of an Orwellian headline from
The New York Times on Christmas morning,
the day before Sevcenko died.
That headline, at the top of the online front page,
was "Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness."

Leibniz, design for medallion showing binary numbers as an 'imago creationis'

The medal, offered as an example of brightness
to counteract the darkness of the Times, was designed
by Leibniz in honor of his discovery of binary arithmetic.
See Brightness at Noon and Brightness continued.

"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118

Monday, January 4, 2010

To a Dark Lady, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100104-PlentyOToole.jpg

"There must be…
50 ways to leave Las Vegas."

This journal on Dec. 19, 2009

Google’s Apple Tree

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100104-Apple.jpg

Google has illuminated its search page today with a falling apple in honor of what it is pleased to call the birthday of Newton. (When Newton was born, the calendar showed it was Christmas Day, 1642; Google prefers to associate Sir Isaac with a later version of the calendar.)

Some related observations–

Adapted from a Log24 entry
of Monday, March 24, 2008–
 

 

"Hanging from the highest limb
of the apple tree are
     the three God's Eyes…"

    — Ken Kesey

"But what's beautiful can't be bad. You're not bad, North Wind?"

"No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful."

"Well, I will go with you because you are beautiful and good, too."

"Ah, but there's another thing, Diamond:– What if I should look ugly without being bad– look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful?– What then?"

"I don't quite understand you, North Wind. You tell me what then."

"Well, I will tell you. If you see me with my face all black, don't be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat's, as big as the whole sky, don't be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith's wife– even if you see me looking in at people's windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener's wife– you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, Diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand?"

"Quite well," said little Diamond.

"Come along, then," said North Wind, and disappeared behind the mountain of hay.

Diamond crept out of bed and followed her.

    — George MacDonald,
      At the Back of the North Wind

   

From Log24 on Sunday, March 23, 2008–

 
A sequel to
The Crimson Passion

Easter Egg

Jill St. John with diamond

Click on image
 for further details.


Duality:


A pair of book covers in honor
  of the dies natalis of T. S. Eliot–

http://www.log24.com/log10/saved/100103-TheAristocrat_files/100104-Duality.jpg

From Virginia Woolf,  "Modern Fiction" (Ch. 13 in The Common Reader, First Series)

Woolf on what she calls "materialist" fiction–

Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable….

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Today’s Sermon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

The 10

A Fresh Start

The Aristocrat
Happy birthday,
Mel Gibson

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Annals of Philosophy

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

AVATAR:

The Legend of Bhagavan


"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Bhagavad Gita 11:32 as translated by
J. Robert Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer, January 1, 1947

LIFE magazine photo, Jan. 1, 1947

African-American Golf Pioneer Bill Powell Dies at 93 on New Year's Eve, 2009

Powell died on New Year's Eve– the day before yesterday. Yesterday's post was dedicated to Will Smith in his role as golf caddy Bagger Vance. In the novel from which the Smith film was taken, "Bagger Vance" is an anglicized form of the term "Bhagavan" from the Bhagavad Gita. In the Gita, "Bhagavan" refers to Krishna– an incarnation, or avatar, of the god Vishnu.

Let us hope that when, on the last day of the old year, Powell met the Reaper, he appeared as neither fearsome Krishna nor grim Oppenheimer, but rather as the kinder, gentler Bagger Vance.

See also "Bhagavad Gita" in this journal.

Friday, January 1, 2010

1001

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:11 am

For Will Smith

"How much for a dream?"

"Five dollars, guaranteed."

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