Log24

Final arrangements, continued:

Justice at Heaven’s Gate

“Gate — Early term for a Jazz musician.
Armstrong is the original Swing Jazz player that’s why they call used to call him ‘Gate.’“
— All About Jazz

“Armstrong is also frequently cited as the main source or popularizer of words like scat, gate (a greeting among jazz musicians that became a popular WWII term for a buddy or pal)²

² The term apparently goes back to Louis’s own adolescent nickname, ‘Gatemouth.'”
— Jazz Institute of Chicago

High Concept, continued:

“In the beginning there was nothing.
 And God said, ‘Let there be light!’
 And there was still nothing,
 but now you could see it.“

— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
    Slate‘s “High Concept” department

Related material:

1. On the phrase “verbum mentis”
2. From Satan’s Rhetoric, by Armando Maggi
   (University of Chicago Press, 2001):

Black Moses

For an explanation of the title, see
the previous entry and
Robert P. Moses and The Algebra Project.

For another algebra project, see
Log24 entries of April 14-25 as well as
the following “X in a box” figure

from March 10, 2005 and
April 5, 2005.

Those interested in artistic rather than mathematical figures may compare this diagram with that of Samuel Beckett in Quad (1981):

Related quotations:

Barry Mazur on a seminal paper of algebraist Saunders Mac Lane:

The paper was rejected “because the editor thought that it was ‘more devoid of content’ than any other he had read.  ‘Saunders wrote back and said, “That’s the point,”‘ Mazur said.  ‘And in some ways that’s the genius of it. It’s the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary that incorporates the theory and nothing else.'”

J. Peter May, a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago quoted in the Chicago Tribune:

“There are some ideas you simply could not think without a vocabulary to think them.”

Amen.

Symmetry and Change
in the Dreamtime

Notes from the Journal
of Steven H. Cullinane

Summary:

Aug 31 2004  07:31:01 PM	Early Evening, Shining Star
Sep 01 2004 09:00:35 AM	Words and Images
Sep 01 2004 12:07:28 PM	Whale Rider
Sep 02 2004 11:11:42 AM	Heaven and Earth
Sep 02 2004 07:00:23 PM	Whale Road
Sep 03 2004 12:00:54 AM	Cinderella’s Slipper
Sep 03 2004 10:01:56 AM	Another September Morn
Sep 03 2004 12:00:25 PM	Noon
Sep 03 2004 01:13:49 PM	De Nada
Sep 03 2004 03:17:13 PM	Ite, Missa Est

Symmetry and Change, Part 1…

Early Evening,
Shining Star

7:31:01 PM ET

Hexagram 01
The Creative:

The Image

The movement of heaven
is full of power.

Click on picture
for details.

The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 2…

Words and Images

9:00:35 AM ET

Hexagram 35
Progress:

The Image

The sun rises over the earth.

For
James Whale
and
William French Anderson —

Words
In the Spirit of
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs:

Stay for just a while…
Stay, and let me look at you.
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you.
Standing in the door…
Stay with me a while.
I only want to talk to you.
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again.

Look at what you’ve done…
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl…

— Neil Diamond

Images
In the Spirit of
September Morn:

The Last Day of Summer:
Photographs by Jock Sturges

“In 1990, the FBI entered Sturges’s studio and seized his work, claiming violation of child pornography laws.”

Related material:

Bill’s Diamond Theory

and

Log24 entries of
Aug. 15, 2004.

Those interested in the political implications of Diamond’s songs may enjoy Neil Performs at Kerry Fundraiser.

I personally enjoyed this site’s description of Billy Crystal’s remarks, which included “a joke about former President Clinton’s forthcoming children’s book — ‘It’s called The Little Engine That Could Because It Could.'”

“Puff, puff, woo, woo, off we go!” 

Symmetry and Change, Part 3…

Whale Rider

12:07:28 PM

Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:

The Image

The lake rises
above the trees.

Cullinane College News:

“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”

For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and

Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004) 

Thursday, September 2, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 4…

Heaven and Earth

11:11:42 AM ET

Hexagram 42
Increase:

The Image

Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.

“This time resembles that of
the marriage of heaven and earth”

“What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever… You just couldn’t march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn’t even hear it… It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be.”

— The Grifters, Ch. 10, 1963, by
James Myers Thompson

“The Old Man’s still an artist
with a Thompson.”
— Terry in “Miller’s Crossing”

For some of “the music which
each person had inside,”
click on the picture
with the Thompson.

It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357:

(Hits counter at
The Quality of Diamond
as of 11:05 AM Sept. 2, 2004)

For more on
“the marriage of heaven and earth,”
see
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star. 

Thursday, September 2, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 5…

Whale Road

7:00:23 PM

Hexagram 23
Splitting Apart:

The Image

The mountain rests
on the earth.

“… the plot is different but the monsters, names, and manner of speaking will ring a bell.”

— Frank Pinto, Jr., review of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf 

Other recommended reading, found during a search for the implications of today’s previous entry, “Hexagram 42”:

Water Wings.

This excellent meditation
on symmetry and change
comes from a site whose
home page
has the following image:

Friday, September 3, 2004

 Symmetry and Change, Part 6…

Cinderella’s Slipper

12:00:54 AM ET

Hexagram 54
The Marrying Maiden:

The Image

Friday, September 3, 2004  

Symmetry and Change, Part 3…

Whale Rider

12:07:28 PM

Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:

The Image

The lake rises
above the trees.

Cullinane College News:

“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”

For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and

Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004)

Popcorn Theology,
Part II:

Justice at
the Supremes’ Court

From today’s New York Times:

LeRoy Myers, tap dancer and
road manager for the original Supremes,
died April 26, 2004.

From a log24 entry of April 26, 2004:

Popcorn Theology

Today is the birthday of Star Wars director George Lucas and also the date of Frank Sinatra’s death.

Two notes that may be
suitable for the occasion —

From All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Atlanta:

POPCORN THEOLOGY
“On Friday, May 14 at 7:00 p.m. in Ellis Hall, Popcorn Theology is pleased to present Chicago. This is a cautionary tale set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, told with sharp satire and black humor.”

From Chicago photographer Art Shay:

His Kind of Town 

“We are not saints”
— Alcoholics Anonymous

Government by Crackpots

Morning briefing:

Paul Krugman on Laurie Mylroie in today’s New York Times…

Get Me Rewrite!,

Peter Bergen in the Washington Monthly…

Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’
Favorite Conspiracy Theorist,

and Cecil Adams in the Chicago Reader on…

Leo Strauss and
the Neocon Crackpots.

Strauss lectured on Plato at the University of Chicago.  For more on Plato and philosophy at the University of Chicago, see the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Quantum Logic:

A memorial to the late Alan Bullock,
founding master of St. Catherine’s College,
Oxford, and historian of the Third Reich.

Bullock died on Groundhog Day.

From an obituary:

“Hitler: a Study in Tyranny was published in 1952 with the aphorism from Aristotle: ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep out the cold.’  In the same year Alan Bullock took up his appointment to the oddly-named office of ‘Censor’ of St. Catherine’s Society – a male society, constitutionally part of the University, with a handful of tutors and no residential accommodation.  Ten years later it became a College….”

Explaining what these Catherine wheels symbolize seems an appropriate task for Oxford philosophers.  From the St. Catherine’s College site: “The College’s motto – Nova et Vetera (the new and the old) – sums up its unique quality among Oxford colleges.”

See also today’s previous entry, prompted by a recent MIT Press book on philosophy and quantum theory.

Command at Mount Sinai

Tuesday, Nov. 25, was the feast day of St. Catherine, patroness of a monastery at Mount Sinai. (See entries for that date.)

“In a landmark essay,* the anthropologist Bernard S. Cohn showed how the command of language† could become the language of command.‡“

— “Right formula for a nation in the making,”
     by Asad Latif

* “The Command of Language
    and the Language of Command,”
    Subaltern Studies IV, pp. 276- 329

Meditation for the High Holy Days:

Noble Lies or Criminal Fraud?

On Noble Lies:

“Leo Strauss, who for many years taught an esoteric reading of Plato at the University of Chicago, believed that an educated elite could rule through deception. A circle of his former students, now in appointed public office, are in a position to make Strauss’s teaching national practice.”

— America, the Jesuit weekly, July 7, 2003

(“Words are events.”– Walter J. Ong, S.J.) 

On Criminal Fraud:

“There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas…. This whole thing was a fraud.”

— Sen. Ted Kennedy on the Iraq war, Sept. 18, 2003

“Nothing could be a more serious violation of public trust than to consciously make a war based on false claims…. [The Bush administration’s] handling of intelligence and its retaliation against its critics may have been criminal.”

— Gen. Wesley Clark, Oct. 3, 2003

On the Good versus the True

According to one reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance– a book that deals with, among other things, the reading of Plato at the University of Chicago (see the Jesuit remarks above)– the Good is the enemy of the True.  This is a reading that may well appeal to Bush supporters, who would of course like to be on the side of the Good.  Let them recall two Middle Eastern sayings:

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,”
 
 and

“Satan is the father of lies.” 

Seek and Ye Shall Find:

On the Mystical Properties
of the Number 162

On this date in history:

May 22, 1942:  Unabomber Theodore John Kaczynski is born in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Ill., to Wanda Kaczynski and her husband Theodore R. Kaczynski, a sausage maker. His mother brings him up reading Scientific American.

From the June 2003 Scientific American:

“Seek and ye shall find.” – Michael Shermer

Here is a connection to runes:

Mayer, R.M., “Runenstudien,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 21 (1896): pp. 162 – 184.

Here is a connection to Athenian bastions from a UN article on Communist educational theorist Dimitri Glinos:

“Educational problems cannot be scientifically solved by theory and reason alone….” (D. Glinos (1882-1943), Dead but not Buried, Athens, Athina, 1925, p. 162)

“Schools are…. not the first but the last bastion to be taken by… reform….”

“…the University of Athens, a bastion of conservatism and counter-reform….”

I offer the above with tongue in cheek as a demonstration that mystical numerology may have a certain heuristic value overlooked by fanatics of the religion of Scientism such as Shermer.

For a more serious discussion of runes at the Acropolis, see the photo on page 16 of the May 15, 2003, New York Review of Books, illustrating the article “Athens in Wartime,” by Brady Kiesling.

The Walk to Paradise Garden

The Braidwoods

The Walk to Paradise Garden

The New York Times, Friday, Jan. 17, 2003:

Mr. and Mrs. Braidwood

By STUART LAVIETES 

Robert J. Braidwood, a University of Chicago archaeologist who uncovered evidence of the beginnings of agriculture and the subsequent rise of civilization in the Middle East, died on Wednesday [Jan. 15, 2003] in Chicago. He was 95.

From close to the beginning of his career, Dr. Braidwood worked in partnership with his wife, Linda S. Braidwood, also an archaeologist. She died several hours later on Wednesday in the same hospital. She was 93. The couple lived in LaPorte, Ind.

Related reading:

• For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard
• All the Strange Hours, by Loren Eiseley

William Golding
and the Lost Boys

Author William Golding was born on this date in 1911.

Theater review,
‘The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan’
at House Theatre in Chicago

By Chris Jones

“J. M. Barrie’s famous 1904 tale of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys is fertile ground for post-modern exploration.”

See also the Stephen King novel

Hearts in Atlantis.

(Forget the movie, which does not even mention William Golding.)

For a somewhat more cheerful variation on the Lost Boys theme, see the new

Kingdom Hearts game.

Of course, mature audiences might react to this Disney production by recalling the classic question, “Why did Mickey Mouse divorce Minnie Mouse?”

See also the

Lord of the Flies game

at the Nobel Prize Foundation site.