It Goes to Show…*

* Context— ChuckBerry.com

Happy birthday to Mira Sorvino (Harvard '89).

Related material: June 9 and June 10, 2008.

A more dramatic presentation, also done on June 9-10, 2008—

Alicia Keys, "Superwoman" video.

Happy dies natalis  to Miles Davis—

"… nothing ever truly dies. The universe wastes nothing. Everything is simply… transformed."

— Keanu Reeves in the 2008 "Day the Earth Stood Still." (See today's 11:07 AM entry.)

From this journal —

A photo from that same day—

Related material: The links from this journal given above —

Harvard '64 and continued.

Happy birthday to the sexton's son.

Saturday night's game… Harvard vs. Brown at Providence—

Harvard 14, Brown 29.

Related philosophy about divine providence—

See also, from 2002, a note on "light inclosed in the dark" versus the late Harvard philosopher Barbara Johnson.

For some context on Harvard and "the Magic of Numbers" see Summer Reading from 2007.

"…as Jeremy R. Knowles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, stated in his Fall 2006 address to the Harvard freshman class, being able to tell if a man is 'talking rot' is the ultimate goal of a liberal arts education."

— Yelena S. Mironova ’12 in The Harvard Crimson  yesterday

Is Mironova talking rot? Apparently not, since Knowles did, it seems, use that phrase in such an address. (See an alleged transcript of his remarks by someone at Facebook identifying herself as Van Le, Harvard '10)

Was Knowles talking rot? Perhaps, since the alleged transcript of his remarks indicates he attributed the phrase to a 1914 lecture by one J. A. Smith, a philosopher at Oxford,  but did not give a source for his quotation.

A Google web search for more accurate information yields no exact source. There are two notable hearsay sources—

The weblog Fairing's Parish  on August 16, 2009, gives a version attributed to Smith in More Christmas Crackers  by John Julius Norwich. (The hardcover first edition of this book was published by Viking on Oct. 14, 1991, according to Amazon.co.uk.)

An earlier book in the Christmas Crackers  series was cited as a Smith source by Michael M. Thomas at Forbes.com on Oct. 24, 2008—

"I happened upon Professor Smith long years ago, in the 1980 edition of John Julius Norwich's Christmas Cracker  [sic ]…."

The weblog Laudator Temporis Acti  of Michael Gilleland on August 29, 2004, says…

The following quotation comes at second or third hand. John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, gave a lecture sometime before WWI, attended by Harold Macmillan. Macmillan reported Smith's words to Isaiah Berlin, and Isaiah Berlin told them to Ramin Jahanbegloo, who reproduced them in Conversations with Isaiah Berlin  (London: Phoenix Press, 1993), p. 29….

Some further bibliographic notes on the Jahanbegloo book—

Ramin Jahanbegloo, Isaiah Berlin en toutes libertés: entretiens avec Isaiah Berlin  (Paris, 1991: Éditions du Félin); repr. in its original English form as Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin  (London, 1992: Peter Halban; New York, 1992: Scribner’s; London, 1993: Phoenix; 2nd ed., London, 2007: Halban); excerpted in Jewish Quarterly  38 No 3 (Autumn 1991), 15–26, Jewish Chronicle,  7 February 1992, Literary Supplement, ii, Guardian,  7 March 1992, 23, and (as ‘Philosophy and Life: An Interview’) New York Review of Books,  28 May 1992, 46–54; trans. Chinese (both scripts), German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish (complete and in part, by different translators)

— http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/interviews/index.html

A Google books  search yields some starting points for a paper chase that might, given library resources like Harvard's, finally nail down the rot quote.

Try smith oxford "talking rot".

The best citation I can find online is not very good. See The Oxford Book of Oxford  (first edition 1978, new edition 2002), edited by Jan (formerly James) Morris, who gives as her source "J. A. Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, opening a lecture course in 1914 (quoted by Harold Macmillan in The Times, 1965)." This does not indicate whether Macmillan was quoting Smith from memory or from a written or printed record. Only the latter would clear Macmillan (and all subsequent purveyors of the alleged Smith quote who did not attribute it to Macmillan) from the suspicion of talking rot.

An Ecumenical Hymn

For those who observed Yom Kippur at
Harvard's Memorial Church on Saturday,
September 18, 2010—

Friday night and the lights are low…

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day for
July 13, 2007— Manhattanhenge.

See also on July 13, 2007, in this  journal, a post
for Harrison Ford's 65th birthday featuring the
ecumenical diamond-in-a-football religious symbol—

The New York Times  today—

Stuart E. Hample, Humorist and Cartoonist, Dies at 84  Enlarge This Image "Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip"/Abrams Mr. Hample, who was also a playwright and performer, wrote “The Silly Book” and was the co-author of “Children’s Letters to God.”

Hample died on Sunday.
 

Composer Geoffrey Burgon died on September 21. Roll credits.

"He can write, but he's got nothing to say."^[42]

— Isaac Babel on Nabokov (Wikipedia)

Vladimir Nabokov

42.  Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921-1941,  page 110.

MIDRASH

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" — Nabokov

"Someday we’ll see each other" — Isaac Babel

"I know no writing— except perhaps Henry James's introductory essays— which conveys so clearly and with such an absence of fuss the excitement of the creative artist."

— Graham Greene on A Mathematician's Apology , review in The Spectator , 20 December 1940

"The mere quality and play of an ironic consciousness in the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world, with the thing he has most wanted to do, with the design more or less realised— some effectual glimpse of that might, by itself, for instance, reward one's experiment."

— Henry James, "Prefaces to the New York Edition," in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986, with introduction and notes by Frank Kermode

"What? You've found a pattern?"

— Greg Egan, "Wang's Carpets"

See also Notes on Mathematics and Narrative, with its discussion of the tiles of the creative artist Patrick Blackburn in the recent (August 2010) Pythagorean novel The Thousand  and the discussion of Wang tiles in Modal Logic,  a  book from November 2002 whose author also happens to be named Patrick Blackburn.

(Credit for the Greene bibliographic information is due to Janelle Robyn Humphreys, whose doctoral thesis, Shadows of Another Dimension, was published in 2009 by the University of Wollongong.)

Smarter Questions —

Click to enlarge.

Smarter Answers —

JillJohnston.com

From Sunday's Sermon for Harvard —

Sects

Each sexton has his sect. The bells have none.
….
Each truth is a sect though no bells ring for it.

— Wallace Stevens

See also Jill Johnston on Jung's Red Book  (March 2010).

There are "worrying signs of a failure to appreciate… 
the legitimate role of religion in the public square."
— Pope Benedict XVI in Westminster Hall on Friday

Related material on the public square —

Lubtchansky's Key,
Wallace Stevens, and
Porcelain Leer

Yesterday evening's Telegraph—

Didi Nearne was inspired by her strong Catholic faith
to believe that she would be well received, and the priest,
appalled at the state of the women, hid them in the bell tower.

In 1944 Nearne, an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who had
parachuted into France, was captured, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo,
sent to a concentration camp, and later escaped.

She died at 89 on September 2, 2010. See this journal on that date.

See also Geheimnis des Glockenturms.

John Hooper in The Guardian  quotes the Pope in Westminster Cathedral this morning—

"Here too I think of the immense suffering caused by the abuse of children, especially within the church and by her ministers. Above all, I express my deep sorrow to the innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes.

"I also acknowledge, with you, the shame and humiliation which all of us have suffered because of these sins; and I invite you to offer it to the Lord with trust that this chastisement will contribute to the healing of the victims and the purification of the church and the renewal of her age-old commitment to the education and care of young people."

The pope made his comments at a service that was the occasion for religious pageantry of a sort rarely seen in Britain. He was preceded into the cathedral by more than 100 scarlet-robed priests and a constellation of bishops and cardinals. To a volley of applause from the congregation, he appeared at the climax of a musical build-up that could have come from the score for a sci-fi movie epic.

Related material— Childhood's Rear End.

— A sequel of sorts to yesterday's post on the number fifteen —

Today's date and the title of the recent Pythagorean novel "The Thousand" suggest a search for the title "The Sixteen." This yields a British music ensemble.

Listen, for instance, to the ensemble performing works by Purcell in honor (partly) of Scottish composer James MacMillan's fiftieth birthday on July 16, 2009.

A check on synchronicity yields the following Log24 posts —

• The White Itself (July 16, 2009)
• Mother of Beauty (July 16, 2009)
• Readings related to those July 16 posts and to
  Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
  (born on September 16, 1950)

Happy birthday, Professor Gates.

New York Times  Sept. 15, 2010—

"Who's the Con Man?"

New York Times  Aug. 11, 2009—

"Oh, Sting, Where Is Thy Death?"

Ask a stupid question…

http://www.wittgen-cam.ac.uk/biogre9.html —

1935

With the expiry of his five-year Research Fellowship at Trinity College Wittgenstein was faced once more with the problem of loss of career. Accordingly he planned a journey to the Soviet Union, to find out whether he could find a suitable post there. Wittgenstein’s constant quest for the right career was not, as it is often misunderstood, a flight from himself. Rather, it was a search for the right place, a being at one with himself: Return him [Man] to his rightful element and everything will unfold and appear as healthy. (MS 125)

Since 1933/34 he had been taking lessons in Russian from the philosopher Fanja Pascal, initially with Francis Skinner. In June he asked Keynes for an introduction to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiski. He sought contacts in two places above all, at the Northern Institute in Leningrad and the Institute for National Minorities in Moscow, writing to Keynes on 6 July: These Institutes, as I am told, deal with people who want to go to the ‘colonies’ the newly colonized parts at the periphery of the U. S. S. R. (Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore)

On 12 September Wittgenstein arrived in Leningrad. There he met the author and educator Guryevich at the Northern Institute, then an autonomous faculty of Leningrad University. On the evening of the following day he travelled on to Moscow, arriving there on the morning of the 14th. Here he had contacts with various western Europeans and Americans, including the correspondent of the Daily Worker, Pat Sloane. Most of his discussions, however, were with scientists, for example the young mathematician Yanovskaya and the philosopher Yushevich from Moscow University, who were both close to so-called Mach Marxism and the Vienna Circle. He was invited by the philosopher Tatiana Nikolayeva Gornstein, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to teach philosophy at Leningrad University. He traveled to Kazakhstan, where he was offered a chair at the famous university where Tolstoy once studied. On 1 October he was back in Cambridge. The trip was shorter than planned, and it appears that he had given up the idea of settling in Russia.

His friend Gilbert Pattison, who picked him up from the ship on his return, recalled that Wittgenstein’s view was that he could not live there himself: One could live there, but only if one kept in mind the whole time that one could never speak one’s mind. … It is as though one were to spend the rest of one’s life in an army, any army, and that is a rather difficult thing for people who are educated. (Interview with Pattison)

c6 d0 x2 y5 p5 d3 x4 y3 p5

Related material— yesterday's Programmers' Day note and 2009's Symbol Story.

In memory of Kevin McCarthy, who died on Saturday, September 11

From a 9/11 post —

Sir Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream." See "Home from Home."

From Script-O-Rama, dialogue from "Slipstream" —

My God, this place
must be a million years old.

Will that be it, sweetie?

I think this gentleman's next.

No, sir. You're next.

Thank you.

That'll be $1.35.

What?

$1.35.

That's all?

Did you want to pay more?

No, it's just so cheap.

That's the way it is out here,
sweetie, free and easy.

Yes, sirree, home on the range
where the buffalo roam,
The deer and the antelope play.

Dolly's Little Diner.
Home from home.

Home from home.

See also "Kevin McCarthy" in this journal.

16 + 9 = 25.

See also this morning's entry and "June 25" in this journal.

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending….

— Four Quartets

June 25, 2010 —

The New York Times  today—

"In his efforts to create complicated positions that would unsettle his opponent, Mr. Larsen often essayed unusual openings that other players did not know. He helped popularize some openings that otherwise might have remained obscure, most notably the queen’s fianchetto, which became known as the Larsen opening after he began playing it regularly in international competitions."

Continued from Halloween 2005—

"They're gonna put me in the movies,
 They're gonna make a big star out of me…"

Sir Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream." See "Home from Home."

Although it's always crowded, you still can find some room…

"Since he couldn’t find traditional backing for the film,
a group of well-wishers… financed it."

— William Grimes on the late Clive Donner  

"We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns"
– Wallace Stevens 

"There's a small hotel
With a wishing well"

— Lorenz Hart

A film director's obituary in today's New York Times—

"Mr. Donner broke through as a director in 1963 with a low-budget black-and-white film of Harold Pinter’s play 'The Caretaker,' with Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence and Robert Shaw. Since he couldn’t find traditional backing for the film, a group of well-wishers that included Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Peter Sellers and Noël Coward financed it."

   A lower-budget version:

All work and no play 

makes Jack a dull boy.

See also "Patrick Blackburn, meet Gideon Summerfield" in Building a Mystery.

From Harvard's 2010 Phi Beta Kappa ceremony—

Think of all the history you’ve read. It started somewhere.
It started at absolute zero, is what you thought.
Just because you couldn’t know what came before.
But imagine: something did.

"To help the graduates find rightness, two addresses are at the heart of the exercises ceremony.
 One is by a poet, who reads a work written for the occasion.
 The other is by an 'orator,' a guest invited to offer timely discourse."

From this morning's New York Times—

Related material—

Immediately following Inspector Pine in this morning's Times  obituary list
is Virginia B. Smith, a former president of Vassar College. Smith died at 87 on August 27.

From her obituary—

Ms. Smith is survived by her partner of 57 years, Florence Oaks.

Sunday's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers— Midday 604, Evening 804.

Related posts— 6/04 and 8/04.

In today's New York Times, mystery author John Grisham tells how he stuck to his day job—

"preparing wills and deeds and contracts."

Related material—

• Will
  
• Deed
  
• Contract
  

The New York Times  this morning—

Sarah McLachlan—

Ooh you're working
Building a mystery
Holding on and holding it in
Yeah you're working
Building a mystery
And choosing so carefully

"It's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment
of the Talented in the scheme of things."
— Anne McCaffrey

From this journal on August 23,
a look at Resurrection Road  in M magazine—

Notes for an unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald—

"There is a place for a hint somewhere
  of a big agent to complete the picture."

Phenomenology of 256 and Requiem for a Force.

These two posts are from February 4, 2010.

See also an Oxford Journals essay from that date.

An Exclamation for Jenny.

The "Jenny" here refers to both Tuesday's Log24 post Page Mark and to a post from Dec. 29, 2005 …

Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell, SciFi channel, 7 PM tonight

Jenny O’Hara

“This world is not conclusion;
a sequel stands beyond.”
— Emily Dickinson

Ode  magazine, June 2007, on Ivan Illich—

When Ivan was 12, Hitler invaded Austria, prompting his decision never to bring children into this world. At the age of 16, before fleeing Vienna, he bribed the secretary of Nazi leader Hermann Goering – who had claimed Illich's family home – to free his grandfather. Ultimately, Illich did do well in school, studying philosophy and theology at the elite Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican, later earning a Ph.D. at the University of Salzburg. He travelled to India and soaked up Eastern philosophy during long discussions with the Indian Hindu and Catholic priest Ramon Panikkar in Varanasi (Benares), along the Ganges river. He was later ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in New York City. He became a professor at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and moved to Mexico, where he founded an educational centre that challenged the Church’s embrace of modern development. He resigned from priesthood in the late 1960s because he no longer felt at home with the dogmas of the Catholic Church – "I have enough Jewish blood to be able to get angry with God" – and began his life as a philosopher and author.

Illich greeted us at his home in Bremen….

Panikkar died on August 26, 2010. See this journal on that date ("Home from Home continued"), with its link to math16.com and the reference there to Stevens's "The Owl in the Sarcophagus."

Related material—

A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma (letters to The Guardian  on Stephen Hawking's new book)
and Panikkar's book (published in Paris in 2002 and in Minneapolis, by a Lutheran press, in 2006)
The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery.

Enigma Variations

The intercept control room in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, 1943—

Photo: GETTY

The above photo is from today's London Telegraph  obituary of Keith Batey, a Bletchley Park codebreaker who died at 91 on St. Augustine's Day, 2010. Also from that obituary—

Batey himself was responsible for some important breakthroughs in decrypting the Abwehr Enigma system, helping MI5 to control the entire German espionage network in Britain. The intelligence was crucial to the Double Cross system – under which MI5 turned German agents sent to Britain and used them to feed the Abwehr false information – as it showed that the information was being accepted as genuine; it further revealed what the Germans did and did not know about the D-Day invasion plans.