Log24

A meditation on this morning's New York Times  obituaries:

Happy birthday to jazz pianist Clint Eastwood.

Related material: Skylark in this journal and Return to Paradise.

Yesterday, May 29, was JFK's birthday.
The above is a belated quotation for that occasion.

Click on the quotation for truth instead of rhetoric.

(Why the above Google Books description of the quotation's
source is in Danish, I do not know. A search for
Bohr + Chinese in this journal may be relevant, as may
also be Faust in Copenhagen.)

(Continued)

A May 27, 2013, Washington Post  story by Ellen Nakashima:

Confidential report lists U.S. weapons system designs
compromised by Chinese cyberspies

Related entertainment:

From Ayn Sof  (January 7, 2011): 

"You're gonna need a bigger boat." — Roy Scheider in Jaws

"We're gonna need more holy water." — Season of the Witch

Battleship —

Liam Neeson (right) and Taylor Kitsch

Holy Water —

These stories suggest a meditation by Kierkegaard
and some related remarks from July 2, 2009.

"The final ingredient of the design conception
was its most important and its most dangerous…."

— The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera

Starring Michael Douglas:

Related material: 

Happy Birthday, Mary Shelley (August 30, 2003)

Disney image:

"But you cannot un-ring that bell." — Matt Damon

"Classy." — Emma Watson

… from yesterday— Bling Ring and Church Logic.

Related narratives— Get Quotes (source of image below)

as well as Helprin's Doors and Trickster.

This post is continued from "Church Narrative," a Log24 post of November 17, 2010.

In memory of Ray Manzarek, remarks from a different weblog on that same date:

Click images for details.

Seth and Stefon, eat your hearts out.

Related material: Diamond Girl and the following ad
for Eliza Doolittle Day:
 

A followup to last midnight's Black Hole Revisited .

See also Victor Turner on liminality, together with Paul Goodman
on public squares, in a post of May 8, 2007. 

Related material: Midnight in Dostoevsky (St. Andrew's Day, 2009).

Backstory: The two previous Log24 posts
Raiders of the Lost Aleph (May 14) and
The Crying of Bucharest (May 15).

The following sequence of images was suggested by
Peter Woit's May 16 post "One Ring to Rule Them All."

Also from Devil's Night 2008:

From the May 16 Nobel Symposium talk discussed in
Woit's "One Ring to Rule Them All":

Related material:

All Souls' Day at the Still Point (Nov. 2, 2003) and

Frodo and the Oxford Murders (Oct. 13, 2011).

From a reported interview with Terry Gilliam:

Question: "You said in an interview that The Zero Theorem
was very influenced by Bucharest. In what way?"

Some related material from Log24:

See also a Google search from this evening—

— and the beginning of the Zero Theorem  screenplay —

FADE IN:
A rim of swirling light appears, circling helplessly into a
gigantic BLACK HOLE. It spirals inward…

Shem and Shaun present… NewsArse!

Part I:  Camp Germania

Part II:  NewsArse

From Uncle Walt.

For the late Bob Stewart:

"She was a panelist on many game shows, including
'What’s My Line?' and 'The Hollywood Squares.'"

Translation Studies Continued:

See Cameron's Kernel and…

 (Click image for some background.)

For a pundit of pugilism:  Plan 9 continues.

"She was a panelist on many game shows, including
'What’s My Line?' and 'The Hollywood Squares.'*
These appearances had a fitting symmetry:
It was as a game-show contestant that Dr. Brothers
had received her first television exposure."

— Margalit Fox in this evening's online New York Times

* A language game for Hofstadter: click on "Seeing As"
   in today's noon post.

"On Seeing A's and Seeing As" — Hofstadter

"Man redet dann vom Kern der Dinge." — Heidegger

"So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern"

— Four Quartets

See also yesterday's "Multi-Levels to Keep All Happy"
and past posts that mention Multispeech.

The title is from today's noon post, Core.

It also appears, quoted from Popovič, in Susan Bassnett's
Translation Studies  (third edition, Routledge, 2002)—

"It is an established fact in Translation Studies that if a dozen
translators tackle the same poem, they will produce a dozen
different versions. And yet somewhere in those dozen versions there
will be what Popovič calls the ‘invariant core’ of the original poem.
This invariant core, he claims, is represented by stable, basic and
constant semantic elements in the text, whose existence can be
proved by experimental semantic condensation. Transformations, or
variants, are those changes which do not modify the core of meaning
but influence the expressive form. In short, the invariant can be
defined as that which exists in common between all existing
translations of a single work. So the invariant is part of a dynamic
relationship and should not be confused with speculative arguments
about the ‘nature’, the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ of the text; the ‘indefinable
quality’ that translators are rarely supposed to be able to capture."

"A writer hopes to leave behind a work no one forgets…."

— Song sung on NBC's Smash  tonight

Fulsere vere candidi mihi soles….

— André Weil, The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician

nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque….

— Catullus, quoted in Bassnett's Translation Studies

Vale puella, iam Catullus obdurat.

From Amazon.com:

Book Description
"Publication Date: April 23, 2013
James Blish called him the “finest conscious artist
science fiction ever produced.” Kurt Vonnegut based
the famous character Kilgore Trout on him. And
such luminaries as Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, and
Octavia Butler have hailed him as a mentor.
Theodore Sturgeon was both a popular favorite and
a writer’s writer…."

A writers' writer's writer:

"A writer's writer, Mrs. Le Guin 
brings reality itself to the proving ground."

— Theodore Sturgeon

* Shakespeare's birthday, April 23

"Why history?
Well, the essence of history  is story ,
and a good story is an end in itself."

— Barry Mazur, "History of Mathematics  as a tool,"
    February 17, 2013

See also today's previous post.

(Continued)

Click a course description below for some related material.

See also Strike That Pose and Gone to China.

Or:  Ready When You Are, C. B.

Dennis McLellan, Special to The Los Angeles Times , May 7, 2013:

Born in Los Angeles on June 29, 1920, Harryhausen was 13
when he saw "King Kong" during its run at Grauman's Chinese
Theater in Hollywood.

"I haven't been the same since," he is repeatedly quoted
as saying over the years.

"I came out of the theater awestruck," Harryhausen elaborated
in a 1999 interview with the Chicago Tribune. "It was such a
totally different, unusual film. The story line led you from the
mundane world into the most outrageous fantasy that's ever
been put on the screen."

See Damascus Gate.

Harvard Gazette , March 4th, 2013:

"Winfrey will speak on May 30 during Commencement day’s
Afternoon Exercises, which serve as the annual meeting of
the Harvard Alumni Association. The exercises will take place
in the Tercentenary Theatre of Harvard Yard,
between Memorial Church and Widener Library."

On the 1977 Octavia Butler novel Mind of My Mind :

"The first chapter in a history that Butler has already taken up
at a much later stage in Patternmaster  (1976).
Mind of My Mind  begins with Doro, a ruthless mutant
as old as the pyramids who has spent the last 4,000 years
trying to breed a race in his own image. The culminating
experiment is his daughter Mary. But, to Doro's astonishment,
Mary's first instinct on attaining her full powers is to begin
building a mental community— a Pattern— out of the
wretched thousands of Doro's half-telepathic failures
and partial successes. Despite some ragged moments,
Butler is clearly on to a promising vein— something like
Zenna Henderson's 'People' stories without their
saccharine silliness. There's a lot of intrinsic energy in the
Pattern idea, and one wants to see where this erratic, gifted
storyteller will pick it up next."

— Kirkus Reviews , Vol. XLV, No. 8 (1977), p. 453.

See this journal on Butler's dies natalis , the feast of St. Matthias, 2006.

Those who prefer Eastern approaches to religion may consult
Robert Thurman and his daughter Uma.

"Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah." — David Letterman