Log24

See the "symbol of Apollo" in the previous post
as well as posts tagged on050730, and
Conrad H. Roth on "The E at Delphi."

* The now-famous Oscars accountant

The title is that of an essay by Rebecca Goldstein
in Tikkun  (Nov.-Dec. 1997).  An excerpt:

"… And so it was that I became an analytic philosopher.
If my story ended there, it would make sense.
But against logic, I also became a writer of fiction.
My hopeless passion for fiction had seemed to me,
in the days when I hung exclusively with philosophers,
a rather shameful little aberration. Plato had planned to
rid his utopia of the epic poets, who were the novelists
of his day. Fiction writers are enchanters, those who
spread their dreams abroad; and Plato— whom I still revere—
thoroughly disapproved of enchantment."

See also the previous post.

* For the title, see Sunday morning.

In memory of a reported long-ago date —

Or:  Deep  Link

Thanks to The New York Times  for the "Love" title above —
the subtitle of today's Maureen Dowd column.

Dowd quotes a memorable phrase by another writer,
Lloyd Grove —

“King Lear meets Rodney Dangerfield.”

I prefer Rodney Crowell.

Click on Crowell for another old link, to remarks on
the poet Anne Sexton.

"Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" — Bat Out of Hell  album, Oct. 1977

See also Kostant in this  journal and a link in a 
Log24 post Friday on another mathematical death —

Hollywood Easter Egg (Groundhog Day, 2017).

Groundhog Day was the day Kostant reportedly died.

"The deepest strain in a religion is
the particular and particularistic doctrine
it asserts at its heart,
in the company of such pronouncements as
‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’
Take the deepest strain of religion away…
and what remains are the surface pieties — 
abstractions without substantive bite — 
to which everyone will assent
because they are empty, insipid, and safe."

— Stanley Fish, quoted here on July 3, 2007…
The opening date of the film "Transformers."

The opening pronouncement of "Transformers" —

"Before time began, there was the Cube."

Those who prefer Fish's abstractions  may consult 
the previous post.

From a webpage linked to here in the post 
"Outside the Box" (June 10, 2012).

"… the good news is that there are companies that do
get it right in the Russian market, even on the first try."

—  Chris Crowl, director of operations at TD International,
in a speech of 27 May 2010, "Russia: Getting It Right
the First Time." The quote is from a webpage that is
no longer online.

The above figure, Russian mathematician Igor Shafarevich,
reportedly died on Feb. 19, 2017. (See remarks in a Feb. 22 post
by Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong .)

An old post revisited here on Feb. 19, 2017, Shafarevich's
reported date of death —

Related material —

Hollywood Easter Egg (Groundhog Day, 2017).

"What Yokoyama does in Six Four  evokes — improbably —
the fastidious ethical parsings of a novel by Henry James,
all qualms and calibrations, and while that might not sound
like a good idea, he makes it work. He writes, fortunately,
in plain, declarative prose (ably translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies),
and because Mikami is such an ordinary man the mental gymnastics
he puts himself through are moving and sometimes deeply funny.
A Jamesian police procedural — 'The Wings of the Perp,' maybe?
Not exactly. But this novel is a real, out-of-the-blue original.*
I’ve never read anything like it."

 — Terrence Rafferty in the online New York Times 
      on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2017

Illustration from this journal on that date —

See also the previous post, "Six Four."
 

Update of 10 PM ET Feb. 23, 2017 —

A pathetic asterisk for, and by, Rafferty —

* A passage from Rafferty's essay
in The New York Times  on July 27, 2003:

"…  the message is clear: screenwriters are pathetic.
You can hear, clearly, the voice of Joe Gillis,
describing himself from beyond his watery grave:
'Nobody important, really. Just a movie writer with
a couple of B pictures to his credit. The poor dope.' "
 

See as well  this  journal on July 27, 2003.

Key sentence meets key title …

The title, Six Four , of the book under review is more interesting than
either of the headlines assigned by the Times to the review itself.

For another mystery related to the numbers six and four, see
this  journal on Feb. 21.

Click to enlarge:

See also, in this  journal, "Go Set a Structure,"
"Interior/Exterior," and "Midnight Special."

A memorable phrase —

"the transcendental horizon of the ‘I’."

For some backstory, see a Google search for

Marion + transcendental + horizon.

For a perhaps more intelligible horizon, see

Line at Infinity  in this journal.

"According to Thelemic legend, in 1918 Aleister Crowley
came into contact with a interdimensional entity
named Lam, who by the way is a dead ringer for
the popular conception of the 'alien grey '
depicted on the cover of Whitley Strieber's Communion ."

Related material —

"Robert Langdon stood mesmerized at the glass portal,
absorbing the power of the landscape below him."

Also …

"Ting-a-ling." — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

* See the film "The End of the Tour."

Broken Symmetries  in  Diamond Space  —

"… a pathetic asterisk of condescension" — Steven Goldstein

See also the Vonnegut asterisk in this journal.

From today's print version of the New York Times —

“He eliminates anything that’s not essential
from the face of this little rabbit until it’s really
reduced to the absolute minimum,”
Mr. Dibbits said. “And he does the same for
the text of his children’s books. He uses a
language that’s not simple or stupid, but he
reduces to the bare essentials.”

About his own work, Mr. Bruna once said,
“I spend a long time making my drawings
as simple as possible, throwing lots away,
before I reach that moment of recognition.”
He added, “I leave plenty of space for children’s
imagination.”

The result is a series of “Zen-like” tales,
Ms. Vogt said, “and that’s also part of the
universal appeal.”

The passage above is from an obituary for an artist who
reportedly died on Feb. 16.

See also, in this journal, "How deep the rabbit hole goes."

Accentuating the positive —

"Among Mr. Grey’s accomplishments is
the enormously lucrative “Transformers” franchise;
a new installment is scheduled for this summer."

See as well (Click to enlarge) . . .

Steve Martin on his character Ray Porter 
in the novella Shopgirl  —

"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…."

"In short, he seeks to objectify crucial areas . . . ."

Or crucify objective areas.

Continued from "Religion at Harvard,"  May 7, 2010 —

Aaron Diaz at Dresden Codak

"The warnings come after  the spells." — Doctor Strange

See also, on Feb. 8 in this journal, Damning.

(Continued from February 5, 2016)

Related material — the Feb. 5 death
of the above music figure David Axelrod.

See "Against Bewitchment" in this journal
on that date.

"Talkin' 'bout strange " — Lou Rawls
(See posts from the date of Rawls's death.)

See also the Harvard University Press
webpage for Colors of the Mind —

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts,
the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye.
This… book…  aims to open another field of study:
how thought— the act, the experience of thinking—
is represented in literature.

. . . .

Fletcher’s resources are large, and his step is sure.
The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton’s

Satan, the original Thinker,
leaving the pain of thinking
as his legacy for mankind.

Commentary on Inferno ,  Canto XVI,  line 84 —

* " when it pleases you to say 'I was' " —
 

See also a 1992 poem by Thomas Lux.

“Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.”

— C. S. Lewis, quoted here during November 2005.

A review of that month was suggested by the following search …

… which itself was suggested by an obituary in tonight’s online
New York Times  and by this morning’s post “Rhyme.”

The previous post, "Colorful Tales," on the Nov. 28, 2016, death
of one Angus Fletcher, together with the remarks indexed above,
suggest a review from …

The archives of The New York Times  —

"THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE
Literature as a Way of Life
By Harold Bloom
357 pp. Yale University Press. $32.50.

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.

A version of this review appeared in print
on May 22, 2011, on Page BR1 of the 
Sunday Book Review with the headline:
'An Uncommon Reader.'"

"By this time, Bloom had burrowed into a cave,
its lamplit forms and shapes merging into
an occult mythos scarcely intelligible
even to other scholars. 'Bloom had an idea,' 
Christopher Ricks said; 'now the idea has him.' 
Cynthia Ozick, meanwhile, called him an 'idol-maker.' 
In contrast to Cleanth Brooks . . . ."

An illustration from "The Echo in Plato's Cave" linked to
in the previous post —

Judy Davis in the Marabar Caves
 

Cynthia Ozick on Bloom —

See also Dharwadker in the previous post and on the Higgs boson.

"Skip the preface, and it's in the bag!"

— Character in a short story by Nabokov,
"Ultima Thule," in The New Yorker  of April 7, 1973

Smullyan reportedly died on Monday, February 6, 2017. 

This journal on that date —

The title was suggested by the previous post and by
the novels of Harlan Kane.

RSS feed screenshot of 1:53 AM ET today —

"Siri Hustvedt is an award-winning and versatile American
writer and essayist. She earned her PhD in Literature at
Columbia University in 1986. She often points to her
Norwegian family background in her works, and she is
known as one of the foremost interpreters of Norwegian-
American identity in English literature."

— University of Oslo,
     "Siri Hustvedt: Honorary doctor 2014"

See also Hustvedt in this journal.

See also the previous post.

See also other news on that date.

See also Jeremiah Denton in Wikipedia.

Those for whom entertainment is God
may enjoy a film based on a book by Denton, 
"When Hell Was in Session," starring
Hal Holbrook and Eva Marie Saint.

Denton reportedly died on March 28, 2014.
See a Log24 post from that date, "Blazing Thule."

"You've got to pick up every stitch." — Donovan

(A sequel to the previous post, Damning.)

The New York Times  at 11:44 AM today —

BuzzFeed, Tuesday, January 10, 2017, on "the damning letter"—

From the Jan. 10 BuzzFeed story —

A searchable text of the alleged 1986 letter, along with the
alleged attached statement, is now available at
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/08/
coretta-scott-kings-letter-opposing-jeff-sessions-1986-full-text/21709762/.

A search of the letter and statement at that webpage yields
no instances of the phrases "racial practices," "established and enforced,"
or "personally hostile."

Hence the word "alleged" above.

Update of 1:44 PM ET on Feb. 9, 2017:

A relevant Wikipedia article —
Questioned document examination.

Dore Ashton's Picasso on Art —

"We all know that Art is not truth.
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth,
at least the truth that is given us
to understand." — Pablo Picasso

From a poem by Bécquer translated by Robert Lowell —

Some other love will sound his fireword for you
and wake your heart, perhaps, from its cool sleep

Physicist Marjorie D. Corcoran in a photo from her Rice University
home page. Corcoran reportedly died on Friday, Feb. 3, 2017.

This post was suggested by the date in the photo: 2003/07/27.

Accepting for Professor Corey … Thomas Pynchon.

The previous post included an image of a group
of eleven women in the cover photo for the current
Vanity Fair  Hollywood Issue.

To be fair and balanced, here is a twelfth, rather different,
feminine figure …

Related philosophy by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in
remarks published July 12, 2016, on Plato and mathematical beauty —

"Thinking in a narrow and amoral way about our own self-interest
is, for Plato, almost the definition of irrationality. Our self-centeredness
makes us not only stupid but nasty."

"I'm with Nasty."

"You may say that I'm a dreamer . . . ."

A footnote in memory of a preservationist —

Title page of a thesis on language by Miles Spencer Kimball from 1984

The previous post's quotation from the Kimball thesis contains
a reference (numbered 23) to the source of Wittgenstein's 
"savages" remark: Philosophical Investigations , § 194.

Kimball's  remarks quoted in the previous post are from
page 121 of his thesis, under the heading "Wittgenstein's
Battle Against Bewitchment by Language."

From a cinematic example of such bewitchment —

"On a Saturday night" — Johnny Thunder, 1962

"Only a peculiar can enter a time loop." — Tim Burton film, 2016

Highly qualified —

Hermeneutics —

The above quote occurs in a search called up by clicking on the image
of Amy Adams in the noon post on Groundhog Day (yesterday).

For a "universal message" see the final post of Groundhog Day.
For an "unintelligible secret," see today's previous post.

See also kernel  in this journal.

This post was suggested by today's National Prayer Breakfast,
the 1990 film Total Recall , and a post of July 20, 2015.

Detail from that post —

* See also the title phrase in Wikipedia.

Search results suggested by the previous post :

See also Wechsler in this journal.

In a New Yorker  "Cultural Comment" column today,
Richard Brody describes a 2004 novel that he says …

"… dramatizes the American character as
vast, manifold, and inchoate;
it can use its prodigious and uninhibited energy
for good or for evil, and it shifts
under the sudden force of unforeseeable events.
The shifts and pivots of the American nation
at large are also those of each individual American.
The grand political stage and the intimate life
are inseparable; identity itself is inextricable
from the currents of history. The novel’s
mighty psychological weight rests upon
a terrifyingly delicate balance of circumstances
that depend on whims of chance." 

I prefer the shifts and pivots in earlier fictions; for example,
those of Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988.

Some backstory :  Glory Road  in this journal.

Announcement of a Harvard event:

"The Future of News: Journalism in a Post-Truth Era,"
 Tuesday, January 31, 4 – 6 pm., Sanders Theatre,
 Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass."

The event as reported by The Harvard Crimson —

Related material — This  journal at 12:31 PM ET Tuesday —
"The Devil's Arithmetic," a post with title taken from a 1988
fiction by Jane Yolen.

From the Jan. 28 post Cranking It Up —

"We are rooted in yoga and love the magic
that happens when that practice is
cranked up to eleven." — The late Trevor Tice