Log24

Stella Octangula

In memory of Irvin Kershner,
director of A FIne Madness  and
The Empire Strikes Back

Kershner reportedly died at 87 on Saturday.

and under budget —

The Tiffany Case

See also Sunday morning’s pictures —

The sound of singing grows louder.

Leslie Nielsen Dies at Age 84

Readings that may or may not* be relevant —

Graham Priest, "The Stone" and The Jewel in the Lotus.

* See Priest in Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Fall 1997 and see Block That Metaphor.

A counterbalance to this morning's New York Times  story (see previous post) on a leftist Columbia University seminar might be C.S. Lewis's famous quote "It's all in Plato."  Unfortunately, a search for discussions of this quote yields, as the top result, a typically shoddy Christian polemic.

From a Christian professor at Seattle Pacific University—

"Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) can serve us well as a negative example. Nietzsche's 'new morality' was 'mere innovation,' according to [C.S.] Lewis  [Christian Reflections ]. Nietzsche announced through Zarathustra (and numerous other ways) the relativity of all values and moralities, saying that each people had adhered to a different scheme of values worked out solely in connection with local conditions. 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted,' states Nietzsche, quoting one of Dostoevsky's characters."

No source is given for either the Nietzsche quote or the alleged Dostoevky quote.

This is from a web page titled "In Defense of the Permanent Things." The Christian professor is, according to a far better scholar, permanently wrong. See Note 8 on pages 586-587 of Walter Kaufmann's Basic Writings of Nietzsche  (Random House, November 28, 2000).

One hopes that a more capable scholar, such as Lewis himself* was, might at some point attack the Columbia University leftist nonsense— and Nietzsche— by quoting a more damning passage, such as

" 'Everything is false! Everything is permitted!' "

(from Kaufmann's edition of The Will to Power , Random House, 1968, page 326)

This version of the "Everything is permitted" quote is much more directly related to Nietzsche's relativism, as seen in this image of Kaufmann's edition—

   (Click to enlarge.)

* Or Steven Michels of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT.
  See his "Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Virtue of Nature"— in particular, note 29.
 

The title phrase is from Art Wars and various posts in this journal.

"Go ahead," he said; he handed her three Chinese brass coins
 with holes in the center. "I generally use these."

— The Man in the High Castle , quoted here on Nov. 14, 2003

See also Tangled Tale, Yonda Lies the Castle, and a gathering in Dublin today.

From a post on the morning of November 22 —

Steve Martin on his character Ray Porter in the novella Shopgirl  (published Oct. 11, 2000)—

"He said, 'I wrote a piece of code
 that they just can’t seem to do without.'
 He was a symbolic logician. That was his career…."

From more recent entertainment news — the new Disney film Tangled , and a related image—

This one ain't no shopgirl, Ray.

Related material — This  journal on the date of the above Guardian story.

For Dan Brown fans—

Today's midday New York Lottery number was 438.

See page 438 of Heinlein's The Number of the Beast  (Fawcett paperback, 1980),
on "ultimate total philosophy."

Other philosophy —

Today's evening New York Lottery number was 772.

See Cheap Diamonds , by Norris Church Mailer, and the symbol
coded (on at least some keyboards) by "Alt 772"—

Alt 772 = ♦

See also Wallace Stevens's "Crude Foyer" in this journal on June 24, 2008 —
the day Cheap Diamonds  was published in paperback.

For fans of Ian Watson's The Embedding , a miglior fabbro — C. S. Lewis on Charles Williams.

This is apparently a brief excerpt from an audio book, "C. S. Lewis Speaks His Mind."

A printed version of Lewis's remarks on Williams, "The Novels of Charles Williams," appears on pages 21-27 of On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature  by C. S. Lewis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt paperback, 2002 reprint of a book first published in 1982, edited and with a preface by Walter Hooper).

From the preface—

"'The Novels of Charles Williams' was written at the request of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Lewis read it over the Third Programme of the BBC on the 11th February 1949. It has never been published before and, indeed, had lain undetected in the BBC Written Archives until I came across it quite by accident in 1980."

Sunday School

Lesson from The Quotable Lewis —

See also Multispeech for Oxford.

Excerpts from a book review titled …

"Saul Bellow’s Quest for the Vernacular Sublime"

“We often stopped before a display of children’s shoes. My mother coveted for me a pair of patent-leather sandals with an elegantissimo strap. I finally got them— I rubbed them with butter to preserve the leather. This is when I was 6 or 7 years old, a little older than Rosie is now. Amazing how it all boils down to a pair of patent-leather sandals.” Saul Bellow recorded that ancient memory, stirred to it by play with his little daughter, in a letter on Feb. 19, 2004, when he was 88 years old. It is the last letter in this magnificent book…."

"… Finally he was— may this, too, be said without irony?— a seeker after truth."

— Leon Wieseltier in the November 21 New York Times Sunday Book Review

Without irony is fine, but don't forget the sandals.

Cover art by Giorgio Morandi—
Still Life , 1953,
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Thanks to A Circle of Quiet  for pointing out this cover.

From the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices—

Related material from this  journal—

Mathematics and Narrative and

Consolation Prize (August 19, 2010)

Related material suggested by last evening's NY lottery number 098—

Fear and Loathing in the Realm of the Mothers and Tarantella.

See also some notes on philosophy found yesterday afternoon.

In memory of film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who died yesterday at 91—

He is listed in Internet Movie Database under “Three Days of the Condor” as “executive producer (uncredited).”

At the end of that film, Cliff Robertson asks Robert Redford, “How do you know they’ll print it?”

One possible answer—

An interpretation for the philosophers of the Times —

See “these rich pages (586-589)” in Husserliana XV—

Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität.
Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929-1935.
Hrsg. von Iso Kern. 1973. lxx + 742 pp.
HB. ISBN 90-247-5030-X

For related material by the author of the above phrase “these rich pages,” see “Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance,” by James G. Hart (pp. 17-45 in a book with the unusually ambitious title Religion and Time ).

A description in Pynchon's Against the Day  of William Rowan Hamilton's October 16th, 1843, discovery of quaterions—

"The moment, of course, is timeless. No beginning, no end, no duration, the light in eternal descent, not the result of conscious thought but fallen onto Hamilton, if not from some Divine source then at least when the watchdogs of Victorian pessimism were sleeping too soundly to sense, much less frighten off, the watchful scavengers of Epiphany."

New York Lottery yesterday, on Hermann Weyl's birthday— Midday 106, Evening 865.

Here 106 suggests 1/06, the date of Epiphany, and 865 turns out to be the title number of Weyl's Symmetry  at Princeton University Press—

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/865.html.

Symmetry and quaternions are, of course, closely related.

A Theory of Pure Design

by Denman Waldo Ross

Lecturer on the Theory of Design
in Harvard University

Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907

PREFACE

"My purpose in this book is to elucidate, so far as I can, the
principles which underlie the practice of drawing and painting
as a Fine Art.  Art is generally regarded as the expression of
feelings and emotions which have no explanation except per-
haps in such a word as inspiration , which is expletive rather
than explanatory.  Art is regarded as the one activity of man
which has no scientific basis, and the appreciation of Art is
said to be a matter of taste in which no two persons can be
expected to agree.  It is my purpose in this book to show how,
in the practice of Art, as in all other practices, we use certain
terms and follow certain principles.  Being defined and ex-
plained, these terms and principles may be known and under-
stood by everybody.  They are, so to speak, the form of the
language.

While an understanding of the terms and principles of Art
will not, in itself, enable any one to produce important works,
such works are not produced without it.  It must be understood,
however, that the understanding of terms and principles
is not, necessarily, an understanding in words.  It may lie in
technical processes and in visual images and may never rise,
or shall I say fall, to any formulation in words, either spoken
or written."

_________________________________________________

One of Ross's protégés, Jack Levine, died yesterday at 95. He
is said to have remarked, "I want to paint with the dead ones."

Related material: This journal on the day of Levine's death
and on the day of Martin Gardner's death.

The latter post has an image illustrating Ross's remarks on
formulations in words—
 

For further details, see Finale, Darkness Visible, and Packed.

"You ain't been blue; no, no, no.
You ain't been blue,
Till you've had that mood_indigo."

–Indigo  (web color) (#4B0082)

"This pigment (web color #4B0082) represents
the way the color_indigo was always reproduced
in pigments, paints, or colored pencils in the 1950s."

For related mythology, see indigo.

See also a search for "Coltrane + telepathic."

"We are the key."

Yesterday's New York Lottery: Midday 069, Evening 885.

This, together with a Log24 post for October 16, 2007, suggests the following musical offering:

Click for a larger and clearer image.

Continued from July 26, 2010 —

Sicut aquila provocans ad volandum pullos suos,
et super eos volitans, expandit alas suas,
et assumpsit eum, atque portavit in humeris suis.

— Deuteronomy 32:11 (Clementine Latin Vulgate)

From last night's post—

"… right now…. winning the day…."

— President Obama on the 16th of October (between 5:19 and 5:37 PM EDT)

This journal on the 16th of October—

Related religious material from Thomas Pynchon—

* Material related to this post's title, "Seize the Day"—

Indirectly related — an ad for the new film Black Swan
accompanying a Halloween story in yesterday's online New York Times —

More directly related —

Black Swan Theory at Wikipedia —

"Is our children learning?"
— George W. Bush, January 11, 2000 (according to TIME)

"… our politics seems so tough right now, and
 facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day…."
— Barack Obama, October 16, 2010 (according to whitehouse.gov)

The same Obama quotation appeared in The New York Times.

Related material on facts and science and argument —

"If you’re interested in particle physics and not regularly reading
 Tommaso Dorigo’s blog, you should be."
 — Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong , March 21, 2009

Click on the above for further details.

See also Plotting Obama's Passage to India (AP)

For Tom Hanks

and Kristin Davis

__________________________________________

Interpretations

7/23/09 — Artistic Vision

7/21/09 — The Lotus

"And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light"

__________________________________________

Background

Sunday night, Tuesday morning and afternoon

Malcolm Lowry, author of
Under the Volcano

Hotel Bella Vista
Gran Baile Noviembre 1938
a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja.
Los Mejores Artistas del radio en accion.
No falte Vd.