Log24

"… to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic"

— The aim of the artist, according to Thomas Wolfe 

Related entertainment—

High-minded— Many Dimensions .

Not so high-minded— The Cosmic Cube .

A non-Lyche* gate—

Part of the Andrew Amesbury series Archway to Highgate.

* See Lyche gate  in this journal.

Happy feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

Click image for some context. See also tonight's previous
post and Cliffs of Moher in this journal.

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

  Click word for details.

  See also a related poetic meditation
  from one for whom…

  The world is not enough. 

* Continued.

In memory of two figures from tonight's NY Times  obituaries index
(not  Nora Ephron and Anthony J. Wiener)—

Tower Envy

Erin Burnett and Jenga blocks yesterday

Related material—

The Bible Puzzle Book

and the monumental treatise
by Leonard Shlain

The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict
Between Word and Image.

Remarks on Wallace Stevens's poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"
from Michael Bryson—

Or the woman-hero…

From a Log24 post on June 1, 2004—

“A tongue-in-cheek comment by programmers is worth thinking about: ‘Sometimes you have a programming problem and it seems like the best solution is to use regular expressions; now you have two problems.’  Regular expressions are amazingly powerful and deeply expressive. That is the very reason writing them is just as error-prone as writing any other complex programming code.”

– David Mertz, Learning to Use Regular Expressions

Happy birthday to the late Willard Van Orman Quine.

The New York Times  this morning reports the death
last Tuesday (June 19, 2012) in Boston
of Gerhard Kallman, a Brutalist architect
born in Berlin in 1915.

Some Log24 images from the date of his death—

The above view shows the south side of Kirkland Street (at Quincy).

A more appealing architectural image, from the other side
of Kirkland Street—

"The Double-Cross System, or XX System, was a World War II
anti-espionage and deception operation of the British military
intelligence arm, MI5. Nazi agents in Britain… were captured,
turned themselves in or simply announced themselves and were
then used by the British to broadcast mainly disinformation to
their Nazi controllers." —Wikipedia

The XX —

The Double Cross of Fritz Leiber—

Source: Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs

The New York Times  today—
 "Reality and our perception of it are incommensurate…."

The above New York Times Wire  item from 3:35 PM ET today
mentions two topics touched on in today's earlier Log24 post
Bowling in Diagon Alley— magic (implied by the title) and
incommensurability. The connection in that post
between the two topics is the diagonal  of a square.

The  wire item shows one detail from a Times  illustration
of the linked article— a blindfolded woman.

Another detail from the same illustration—

Hands-on Wand Work

See also remarks on Magic in this journal and on Harry Potter.

I dislike both topics.

In memory of art historian John Golding,
whose obituary appeared (finally) in
today’s online Telegraph—

“His most recent book, Paths to the Absolute  (based on
his 1997 series of AW Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts
delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC),
addressed seven abstract artists — Mondrian, Kazimir
Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Barnett Newman, Rothko
and Clyfford Still — and argued that abstract art was
not simply decorative but ‘heavily imbued with meaning
[and] with content’. The book won the Mitchell Prize for
the History of Art in 2002.”

Commentary on Golding’s obituary suggested by
this evening’s 4-digit New York Lottery number,
1051—

Post  1051 in this journal, together with a post from
April 1, 2012 found in a search for the digits  1051
in Log24. That search may serve as a review.

* A phrase from Gravity’s Rainbow

In memory of actor Richard Lynch, 76, who was found
dead at his California home on Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Lynch's last role was apparently as the Reverend John Hawthorne 
in the upcoming film The Lords of Salem .

(For a post on some related theological territory, see this journal
on the date Lynch's body was found.)

Wikipedia on the Salem film—

Lords of Salem  is the third film from Haunted Films,*
the first two being Paranormal Activity  and Insidious .

For other tales of paranormal activity, see the Bible.

For a post in this journal from the Insidious  release date,
see Mathematics Awareness Month (April 1, 2011).

See, too, related discussions of Finnegans Wake  by 
James S. Atherton in The Books at the Wake—

Pages 146-147 and 199-200.

* At IMDb, Haunted Movies. See also Blumhouse Productions.

For those who prefer a cinematic approach…

"I was alone, I took a ride…"

— Sound track of the 2010 film Steve Jobs on Flash

A quote from The Oxford Murders , 
a novel by Guillermo Martinez—

"Anyone can follow the path once it’s been marked out.
But there is of course an earlier moment of illumination, 
what you called the knight’s move. Only a few people, 
sometimes only one person in many centuries, 
manage to see the correct first step in the darkness.”

“A good try,” said Seldom.

In memory of Victor Spinetti, who died today—

"Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow."

— Courtesy of Steve Jobs and Aldous Huxley—

The New York Times online front page last night—

"Microsoft introduced its own tablet computer,
called Surface, illustrating the pressure
Apple's success has put on it to marry
software and hardware more tightly."

Commentary—

Google Maps image

Related material—

"Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
 erfassen und gestalten?"

Walter Gropius,

The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus  (1923)

Update of Feb. 3, 2013:
See also The Perception of Doors in this journal.

In memory of Paul Sussman, author of archaeological 
mystery novels about Egypt—

Sussman's last novel, not yet published, was

The Labyrinth of Osiris .

Sussman, 45, reportedly died suddenly on May 31, 2012.

A perhaps relevant thought—

"A world of made
is not a world of born— pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical 
ultraomnipotence."

– e. e. cummings, 1944

The Fog of Law continues…

Egypt's highest court
declares parliament invalid

By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 11:36 AM EDT, Thu June 14, 2012

* See State of a Nation (Alicia Keys's birthday, 2012)