… and for Louise Bourgeois
"The épateurs were as boring as the bourgeois,
two halves of one dreariness."
— D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent
Monday, May 31, 2010
Memorial for Galois
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Sunday, May 30, 2010
A Post for Galois
Evariste Galois, 1811-1832 (Vita Mathematica, V. 11)
- Paperback: 168 pages
- Publisher: Birkhäuser Basel; 1 edition (December 6, 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 3764354100
- ISBN-13: 978-3764354107
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #933,939 in Books
Awarded 5 stars by Christopher G. Robinson (Cambridge, MA USA).
See also other reviews by Robinson.
Galois was shot in a duel on today's date, May 30, in 1832. Related material for those who prefer entertainment to scholarship—
"It is a melancholy pleasure that what may be [Martin] Gardner’s last published piece, a review of Amir Alexander’s Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs & the Rise of Modern Mathematics, will appear next week in our June issue." —Roger Kimball of The New Criterion, May 23, 2010.
Today is, incidentally, the feast day of St. Joan of Arc, Die Jungfrau von Orleans. (See "against stupidity" in this journal.)
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720 in the Book
"Princeton's Baccalaureate service is an end-of-the-year ceremony focused on members of the senior class. It includes prayers and readings from various religious and philosophical traditions."
One such tradition— the TV series "Lost."
Another— the Pennsylvania Lottery—
For some context,
see May 6, 2010.
See also this journal's post
"The Omen" on the date 6/6/6.
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Trilateral
"Greater East Asia" (大東亜 Dai-tō-a)
was a Japanese term
(banned during the post-war Occupation)
referring to Far East Asia. —Wikipedia
Related historical remarks from Wikipedia—
"From the Japanese point of view, one common principal reason stood behind both forming the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and initiating war with the Allies: Chinese markets. Japan wanted their 'paramount relations' in regard to Chinese markets acknowledged by the U.S. government. The U.S., recognizing the abundance of potential wealth in these markets, refused to let the Japanese have an advantage in selling to China."
"Shine on, shine on,
there is work to be done
in the dark before the dawn."
"The exhibition title Theme and Variations
hints at the analytical-intellectual undertone
Josefine Lyche takes this time, but
not without humorous touches."
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Saturday, May 29, 2010
An Icon for Hopper
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Packed
Significant Passage:
On the Writing Style of Visual Thinkers
"The words are filled with unstated meaning.
They are (the term is Ricoeur's) 'packed'
and need unpacking." —Gerald Grow
From the date of Ricoeur's death,
May 20, 2005—
“Plato’s most significant passage
may be found in Phaedrus 265b…."
|
With a little effort, cross-referenced." — Opening sentence
|
Mozart's K 265 is variations on the theme
now known as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
For darker variations on the Twinkle theme,
see the film "Joshua" and Martin Gardner's
Annotated Alice (Norton, 2000, pp. 73-75).
For darker variations on the asterisk theme,
see Darkness Visible (May 25)
and Vonnegut's Asterisk.
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Friday, May 28, 2010
Multispeech for Oxford
Happy Birthday,
Carey Mulligan
Star of "An Education"
In "An Education," Mulligan's character
applies for admission to Oxford.
Today's New York Times:
| Education »
Oxford Tradition Comes to This: ‘Death’ (Expound) |
Related material:
|
Such words arrive on the page like suitcases at the baggage claim: You know there is something in them and they have travelled far, but you cannot tell what the writer means. The words are filled with unstated meaning. They are (the term is Ricoeur's) "packed" and need unpacking. This method of using language, however, is not always a defect; radiantly evocative words have long been the language of myth, mysticism, and love. Also, in earlier centuries, educated readers expected to interpret writing on several different levels at once (e.g., literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical or spiritual), so that multiple meanings were the norm. This was before the era of clear, expository, fully-explicit prose. Visual thinkers are accustomed to their own kind of interpreting; the very act of visual perception, as Gregory (1966, 1970) and Gombrich (1959) have shown, is interpretive. When oral thinkers leave you to guess at something they have written, it is usually something that would have been obvious had the writing been a conversation. Such is not the case with visual thinkers, even whose spoken words can be mysterious references to visual thoughts invisible to anyone but the thinker. Writing done in this "packed" manner makes more sense when read as poetry than when read as prose. References: Gombrich, E. H. (1959). Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon. Gregory, R. L. (1966). Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gregory, R. L. (1970). The Intelligent Eye. New York: McGraw-Hill. — "Stacking, Packing, and Enfolding Words," by Gerald Grow in "The Writing Problems of Visual Thinkers" |
Those wishing to emulate Mulligan's
character in "An Education" might,
having read the Times article above,
consult this journal's post of May 17,
"Rolling the Stone."
That post contains the following
image from the Times—
May 17 was, by the way, the day
that R. L. Gregory, author of
The Intelligent Eye, died.
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Multispeech
For Memorial Day Weekend:
See also Time and Chance: Log24 Posts of Oct. 24, 2006*, which include a link to the work of Msgr.✝ Robert Sokolowski of the Catholic University of America.
* For the connection between Finnegans Wake and the date October 24, 2006, see Polyglot Joyce, p. 223, and Phrase Finder.
✝ From the posts of Saturday, May 22— "The Lyche Gate was the covered gateway at the entrance of the church yard, where the corpse was rested until the priest issued from the church to meet the procession."
— Ancient English Ecclesiastical Architecture, by Frank Wills, published by Stanford and Swords, 1850
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Thursday, May 27, 2010
Masks
Charles Isherwood on the death last Saturday of a fellow theater critic—
"...as it happened, I heard about his death just as I was entering the Lunt-Fontanne to see 'The Addams Family.' For a second time. By myself.
Now, there are happier ways to spend a Saturday night than attending a show you didn’t particularly like for the second time, by yourself. (Long story.) But then there’s no happy way to spend the night a friend dies."
For what it's worth— night thoughts from this journal, Saturday night to Sunday morning—
- Annals of Conceptual Art (2:02 AM ET Sunday)
- Annals of Philosophy (3:33 AM ET Sunday)
- Sunday School (9:00 AM ET Sunday)
From "Sunday School"—
"Nine tailors make a man."
– Dorothy Sayers
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A Gathering for Gardner
"You ain't been blue; no, no, no.
You ain't been blue,
Till you've had that mood indigo."
— Song lyrics, authorship disputed
Indigo (web color) (#4B0082)
"Pigment indigo (web color indigo) represents
the way the color indigo was always reproduced
in pigments, paints, or colored pencils in the 1950s."
Related mythology:
Indigo Children and the classic
1964 film Children of the Damned
Related non-mythology:
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Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Sisteen
"Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers,
was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars….
Fuvver, that Skand, he was up in Norwood's sokaparlour…."
— Finnegans Wake
To counteract the darkness of today's 2:01 AM entry—
Part I— Artist Josefine Lyche describes her methods—
A— "Internet and hard work"
B— "Books, both fiction and theory"
Part II— I, too, now rely mostly on the Internet for material. However, like Lyche, I have Plan B— books.
Where I happen to be now, there are piles of them. Here is the pile nearest to hand, from top to bottom.
(The books are in no particular order, and put in the same pile for no particular reason.)
- Philip Rieff— Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. I: My Life Among the Deathworks
- Dennis L. Weeks— Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of Coinherence and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams
- Erwin Panofsky— Idea: A Concept in Art Theory
- Max Picard— The World of Silence
- Walter J. Ong, S. J.— Hopkins, the Self, and God
- Richard Robinson— Definition
- X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, eds.— An Introduction to Poetry
- Richard J. Trudeau— The Non-Euclidean Revolution
- William T. Noon, S. J.— Joyce and Aquinas
- Munro Leaf— Four-and-Twenty Watchbirds
- Jane Scovell— Oona: Living in the Shadows
- Charles Williams— The Figure of Beatrice
- Francis L. Fennell, ed.— The Fine Delight: Centenary Essays on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Hilary Putnam— Renewing Philosophy
- Paul Tillich— On the Boundary
- C. S. Lewis— George MacDonald
Lyche probably could easily make her own list of what Joyce might call "sisteen shimmers."
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ART WARS continued
Darkness Visible
The inevitable tribute to Martin Gardner
has now appeared at the AMS website—
Related Imagery—
The following is an image from Saturday morning—
See also Art Wars and
Mathematics and Narrative.
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Monday, May 24, 2010
Finale
The weekend's posts in this journal coincided,
more or less, with the finale of the TV series "Lost."
Recalling each story brings to mind
the subtitle of Heinrich Zimmer's classic
The King and the Corpse —
Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil.
Here, in the spirit of "The Fifth Element," is a
brief graphic summary of such a conquest—
The Soul
Evil
(from Saturday morning)
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Sunday, May 23, 2010
For Your Consideration —
Cannes Festival Readies for Awards Night
Uncertified Copy
The pictures in the detail are copies of
figures created by S. H. Cullinane in 1986.
They illustrate his model of hyperplanes
and points in the finite projective space
known as PG(3,2) that underlies
Cullinane's diamond theorem.
The title of the pictures in the detail
is that of a film by Burkard Polster
that portrays a rival model of PG(3,2).
The artist credits neither Cullinane nor Polster.
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Sunday School
"Mathematics is forever."
— Gian-Carlo Rota
"Nine is a very powerful
Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville
"Nine tailors make a man."
— Dorothy Sayers
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Annals of Philosophy
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Annals of Conceptual Art
Josefine Lyche's
"Theme and Variations" (Oslo, 2009)—
Some images in reply—
Frame Tale
Click on images for further details.
"In the name of the former
and of the latter
and of their holocaust.
Allmen."
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Saturday, May 22, 2010
In the Details
Today's New York Times—
|
"…there were fresh questions about whether the intelligence overhaul that created the post of national intelligence director was fatally flawed, and whether Mr. Obama would move gradually to further weaken the authorities granted to the director and give additional power to individual spy agencies like the . Mr. Blair and each of his predecessors have lamented openly that the intelligence director does not have enough power to deliver the intended shock therapy to America’s byzantine spying apparatus." |
Catch-22 in Doonesbury today—
From Log24 on Jan. 5, 2010—
Artifice of Eternity—
A Medal
In memory of Byzantine scholar Ihor Sevcenko,
who died at 87 on St. Stephen's Day, 2009–
Thie above image results from a Byzantine
meditation based on a detail in the previous post—
"This might be a good time to
call it a day." –Today's Doonesbury
"TOMORROW ALWAYS BELONGS TO US"
Title of an exhibition by young Nordic artists
in Sweden during the summer of 2008.
The exhibition included, notably, Josefine Lyche.
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But seriously…
Lyche Gate
| Title | Ancient English ecclesiastical architecture and its principles, applied to the wants of the church at the present day American culture series II ; 029.008 |
| Author | Frank Wills |
| Publisher | Stanford and Swords, 1850 |
| Original from | the New York Public Library |
| Digitized | Apr 24, 2008 |
| Length | 120 pages |
| Subjects | Architecture, Medieval Church architecture |
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Art Space
From an interview with artist Josefine Lyche (see previous post) dated March 11, 2009—
– Can you name a writer or book, fiction or theory that has inspired your works?
– Right now I am reading David Foster Wallace, which is great and inspiring. Others would be Aleister Crowley, Terence McKenna, James Joyce, J.L Borges, J.D Ballard, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and Plato to mention some. Books, both fiction and theory are a great part of my life and work.
This journal on the date of the interview had a post about a NY Times story, ”Paris | A Show About Nothing."
Related images—
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Pictorial version |
|
“Space: what you damn well have to see.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
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Friday, May 21, 2010
The Oslo Version
From an art exhibition in Oslo last year–
The artist's description above is not in correct left-to-right order.
Actually the hyperplanes above are at left, the points at right.
Compare to "Picturing the Smallest Projective 3-Space,"
a note of mine from April 26, 1986—
Click for the original full version.
Compare also to Burkard Polster's original use of
the phrase "the smallest perfect universe."
Polster's tetrahedral model of points and hyperplanes
is quite different from my own square version above.
See also Cullinane on Polster.
Here are links to the gallery press release
and the artist's own photos.
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Thursday, May 20, 2010
The Prize
Update of NY Times Art & Design
(See today's earlier posts
Annals of Conceptual Art and View.)
The architecture award ceremony was
at Ellis Island on Monday evening.
Related material:
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View
Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)
Related material:
A Handful of Dust
by J. G. Ballard
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Annals of Conceptual Art
New York Times Art & Design section, morning of Thursday, May 20, 2010—
Arakawa, Whose Art Tried to Halt Aging, Dies at 73
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Published: May 19, 2010
Arakawa, a Japanese-born conceptual artist and designer, who with his wife, Madeline Gins, explored ideas about mortality by creating buildings meant to stop aging and preclude death, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 73.
He had been hospitalized for a week, said Ms. Gins, who declined to give the cause of death.
Perhaps it was white space—
|
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Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Preforming
Photo caption in NY Times today— a pianist "preforming" in 1967. (See today's previous post.)
The pianist's life story seems in part to echo that of Juliette Binoche in the film "Bleu." Binoche appeared in this journal yesterday, before I had seen the pianist in today's Times obituaries. The Binoche appearance was related to the blue diamond in the film "Duelle " (Tuesday morning's post) and the saying of Heraclitus "immortals mortal, mortals immortal" (Tuesday afternoon's post).
This somewhat uncanny echo brings to mind Nabokov—
Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Whether sense or nonsense, the following quotation seems relevant—
"Archetypes function as living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions." –C.G. Jung in Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, the section titled "On the Concept of the Archetype."
That section is notable for its likening of Jungian archetypes to Platonic ideas and to axial systems of crystals. See also "Cubist Tune," March 18 —
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Blue Note à Quatre
The Concert à Quatre "was Messiaen's last work, left unfinished on his desk at his death. His widow undoubtedly followed his wishes and style in completing the orchestration." —Leslie Gerber
Related material:
See also yesterday's Stone Junction, this morning's note on Heidegger 's Geviert, and Moulin Bleu from Beethoven's birthday, 2003—
Juliette Binoche in "Bleu"
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Mathematics and Gestalt
"We acknowledge a theorem's beauty
when we see how the theorem 'fits'
in its place, how it sheds light around itself,
like a Lichtung, a clearing in the woods."
— Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts
Here Rota is referring to a concept of Heidegger.
Some context—
"Gestalt Gestell Geviert: The Way of the Lighting,"
by David Michael Levin in The Philosopher's Gaze
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