For the title, see a post of Nov. 4, 2007.
Related material:
Hexagram 29, Water, and a pattern resembling
the symbol for Aquarius:
.
For some backstory about the former,
see the June 21 post Hallmark.
For some backstory about the latter,
see today’s post Toward Evening.
Tom Wolfe has supplied some scaffolding*
to support the concept.
“There’s a Michelangelo joke to be made.”
— Remark in the recent film “The Monuments Men”
Vide Michelangelo in this journal.
(Friday’s Latin Club posts, continued)
The poet Allen Grossman reportedly died in
the morning on Friday, June 27, 2014.
Fish Story
See also Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form in an online PDF.
New York Times lead obit at 11:06 PM ET June 28:
Compare and contrast:
The above video promoting a book, The OMG Chronicles , was
uploaded by a marketer on March 1, 2011. For a different perspective,
see this journal on that date.
“We specialize in bachelorette parties.”
“What’s on the program?”
— Seymour Glass to Sybil in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”
Related material from yesterday afternoon…
… and from this morning:
(Continued from 10:09 AM today)
The quotation below is from a webpage on media magnate
Walter Annenberg.
Annenberg Hall at Harvard, originally constructed to honor
the Civil War dead, was renamed in 1996 for his son Roger,
Harvard Class of ’62.
www.broadcastpioneers.com/
walterannenberg.html —
“It was said that Roger was ‘moody and sullen’
spending large parts of his time reading poetry
and playing classical music piano. It had been
reported that Roger attempted suicide at the
age of eleven by slitting his wrists. He recovered
and was graduated Magna Cum Laude from
Episcopal Academy in our area. For awhile,
Roger attended Harvard, but he was removed
from the school’s rolls after Roger stopped doing
his school work and spent almost all his time
reading poetry in his room. He then was sent to
an exclusive and expensive treatment center
in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At that facility,
Roger became more remote. It was said that he
often didn’t recognize or acknowledge his father.
On August 7, 1962, Roger Annenberg died from
an overdose of sleeping pills.”
A more appropriate Annenberg memorial, an article
in The Atlantic magazine on June 25, notes that…
“Among those who ended up losing their battles
with mental illness through suicide are
Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh,
John Berryman, Hart Crane, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus,
Anne Sexton, and Arshile Gorky.”
The authors of the following offer an introduction to symmetry
in quilt blocks. They assume, perhaps rightly, that their audience
is intellectually impaired:
“A quilt block is made of 16 smaller squares.
Each small square consists of two triangles.”
Study this example of definition.
(It applies quite precisely to the sorts of square patterns
discussed in the 1976 monograph Diamond Theory , but
has little relevance for quilt blocks in general.)
Some background for those who are not intellectually impaired:
Robinson’s book Definition , in this journal and at Amazon.
"History is a deep and complicated puzzle—
especially when it involves more dimensions than time."
— Introduction to a novella in Analog Science Fiction
"Annenberg Hall" at Harvard was originally part of a memorial for
Civil War dead. Formerly "Alumni Hall," it was renamed in 1996.
In memory of an actor “who as a boy was one of the few Jewish children
in his mostly Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn” —
See the link nocciolo from The Book of Abraham (Oct. 7, 2013).
Introduction to a review of two books in
The American Interest , June 17, 2014:
“A believer and an atheist seek out their antitheses.
Do they meet somewhere in the middle,
or pass in the murk of half-baked pseudo-syntheses?”
“Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, passing in the murk.”
Related material:
This morning’s passage by Friedrich Gundolf.
For some backstory, see Gundolf in
Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle ,
by Robert E. Norton, Cornell University Press, 2002.
… und Nachtformen des Urgrundes
From George , by Friedrich Gundolf (Berlin, Bondi, 1920):
Wenn das Schlußgedicht des Teppichs "Der Schleier"
das ganze gestaltige "Leben" des Dichters als
einen Traum-nu des Geistes zeigt so ist damit
der Geistestag vollbracht und der Geist selbst
der dies vermag ist am Ende seiner Herrschaft
er steht vor dem Urgrund der ihn bewegt:
er erkennt sich selbst wenn nicht als Stoff
so doch als Kraft zu träumen. Die kosmische Nacht
in die er blickt ist zugleich Widerspiel des Gestaltenreiches
das er als Geist der Erde verwirk licht
und Widerspiel des Gesetzes das er als Geist des Lebens
verewigt kurz sie ist Traum und Tod "Traum"
nicht als die Fülle der Gesichte sondern als "Maja"
die Scheinung des Wesens vermöge
deren der Urgrund sich der Bindung im Raum immer wieder entzieht
wie er im Tod der Bindung durch die Zeit entgeht.
Traum ist die Aufhebung des Raum-Ichs,
Tod die Aufhebung des Zeit-Ichs— beides sind
Nachtformen des Urgrundes
die raumschaffende und -vernichtende Bewegung und
das zeitschaffende und -vernichtende Sein.
The original:
Related material: Die Scheinung in this journal.
Or: Mathematics and Narrative, Continued
In memory of a Stanford Arabist who reportedly died yesterday:
Another dream palace, from science fiction:
From Catherine Asaro’s The Spacetime Pool :
|
She couldn’t believe him. That he sounded sane made none of this more plausible. “And you have no idea how this gate works?” she challenged. His gaze flashed. “Of course I do. It’s a branch. From here to your mountains.” “A tree, you mean?” “No. A branch cut to another page. Your universe is one sheet, mine is another.” She gaped at him. “Do you mean a Riemann sheet? A branch cut from one Riemann sheet to another?” “That’s right.” He hesitated. “You know these words?” She laughed unsteadily. “It’s nonsense. Not the sheets, I mean, but they’re just mathematical constructs! They don’t actually exist. You can’t physically go through a branch cut any more than you could step into a square root sign.” He was watching her with an expression that mirrored how she had felt when he told her about his prophecy. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Complex variable analysis.” She felt as if she were in a play where she only knew part of the script. “A branch cut is like a slit in a sheet of paper. It opens onto another sheet. I suppose you could say the sheets are alternate universes. But they aren’t real.” “They seem quite real,” he said. |
Related material: From Sunday, the day of the Stanford Arabist’s death,
a quotation from a 2013 book on “the rise of complex function theory.”
Some bizarre remarks on “purity” in the previous post
suggest a review of some pure mathematics.
A suitable hallmark for
the previous post, Logical Death:
Hexagram 29: "K'an represents…
the principle of light inclosed in the dark."
— The Richard Wilhelm I Ching
A related page from Stanford:
The May 29 death of a Stanford logician, combined
with this morning’s previous post, suggests a review
of the May 29 post Lost in Translation.
Context— Posts tagged “Bregnans.”
“… near-death experiences have all the
hallmarks of mystical experience…”
— “Bolt from the Blue,” by Oliver Sacks
(See “Annals of Consciousness,” June 20, 2014)
The late Charles Barsotti once “worked for Kansas City-based
Hallmark Cards,” according to an obituary.
See also Mad Day.
Some related deconstructive criticism:
A search for the late Charles Barsotti’s art
in this journal leads to the following passage:
For related material from Bloomsday 2014,
the date of Barsotti’s death, see posts tagged
“consciousness growth.”
Update of 2 AM June 21, 2014:
“… near-death experiences have all the
hallmarks of mystical experience…”
— “Bolt from the Blue,” by Oliver Sacks
Barsotti once “worked for Kansas City-based
Hallmark Cards,” according to an obituary.
Tonight I finally got around to seeing "Return of the King,"
the end of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and
listened to Annie Lennox sing "Into the West"* over the
closing credits.
Searching for some background on the song, I found it
was said to have been first publicly performed at the funeral
of a young New Zealand filmmaker, Cameron Duncan.
Duncan reportedly died in Houston, Texas,
on November 12, 2003. See posts from that day and
the day before now tagged 'For Cameron Duncan."
* There is a 1992 film with the same title about Irish Travellers.
The title refers to…
Online Etymology Dictionary on the title of the first Holden Caulfield
story, “I’m Crazy,” in Collier’s , December 22, 1945 —
Meaning “full of cracks or flaws” is from 1580s;
that of “of unsound mind, or behaving as so” is from 1610s.
Jazz slang sense “cool, exciting” attested by 1927….
Phrase crazy like a fox recorded from 1935.
This journal on the morning of January 27, 2010,
the day of J. D. Salinger’s death, had a post on
Nietzsche and Heraclitus titled “To Apollo.”
Related material:
“… the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies
on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered.”
— From the opening sentence of the first Holden Caulfield
story, published in the Collier’s of December 22, 1945
See also Peter Matthiessen on Zen, Salinger and Vedanta,
and Heraclitus in this journal. Some background—
A quotation from Nietzsche…
(Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (KSA).
Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980):
“Nietzsche wrote:
‘Seeing the world as a divine game and beyond good and evil:
in this both the Vedanta and Heraclitus are my predecessors.'”
— KSA vol. 11, page 26, as quoted by André van der Braak
in a chapter from his 2011 book Nietzsche and Zen
(Darin, dass die Welt ein göttliches Spiel sei
und jenseits von Gut und Böse —
habe ich die Vedanta-Philosophie
und Heraklit zum Vorgänger.)
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