"Redgrave proceeded to focus on the end of Blue Nights ,
and Didion’s determination to maintain momentum after
the death of Quintana, when she and Redgrave mounted
their production of The Year of Magical Thinking . Here,
St John the Divine became a setting in the narrative of
Blue Nights  yet again – this time, as Quintana’s final resting
place in St Ansgar’s Chapel within the cathedral."

The feast of St. Ansgar is Feb. 3. See that date this year.

Related song lyric from "Finian's Rainbow" —

Necessity,
That's the maximum that a minimum thing could be,
There's nothing lower than less unless it's Necessity.

From the Wikipedia Manual of Style —

Scholium:

Related art:

From a post of Tuesday, May 7, 2019 —

Breach

“Honored in the Breach:
Graham Bader on Absence as Memorial”

Artforum International , April 2012 

See also Breach  in this  journal, as well as Void.

* Literary background — The word “Purloined” in this  journal.

John Horgan in Scientific American  magazine on October 8, 2019 —

"In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest
for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific.
Physicists want to show that all things came from
one thing:  a force, or essence, or membrane
wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that
manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their
search for this primordial symmetry, however,
physicists have gone off the deep end . . . ."

Other approaches —

See "Story Theory of Truth" in this  journal and, from the November 2019  
Notices of the American Mathematical Society . . .

"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime

The title is that of a 1977 poem by Jon Lang.

A different sort of narrative tree, from The Onion  on the
date Friday, July 1, 2016, was illustrated in the previous post.

Material from this  journal related to July 1, 2016,
and the following day, a Saturday, is now tagged
"Saturday Night in the Labyrinth."

"A Damned Serious Business." — Rex Harrison on comedy

See as well Stein in posts tagged Narrative Labyrinth.

From a search in this journal for "Public Square" —

See also Gresham in this journal.

A search for the phrase "nonlinear Boolean algebra" yields few results.

"Nonlinear Boolean functions " seems to be the phrase intended.

On the mathematics of nonlinear Boolean functions —

A memorable death —

For those who prefer narrative to mathematics —

A related image —

"In 'Sophistry,' a new play by Jonathan Marc Sherman
at the Playwrights Horizons Studio, a popular tenured
professor stands accused of sexual harassment
by a male student."

— Frank Rich in The New York Times , theater review
on October 12, 1993

"At which point another play, inchoate but arresting,
edges into view." — Rich, ibid.

"Johansson began acting during childhood,
after her mother started taking her to auditions.
She made her professional acting debut
at the age of eight in the off-Broadway production
of 'Sophistry' with Ethan Hawke, at New York's
Playwrights Horizons."

— IMDb Mini Biography by: Pedro Borges 

" 'Suddenly, I was 19 again and I started to remember
all the men I'd known who had taken advantage of
the fact that I was a young woman who didn't yet have
the tools to say no, or to understand the value of
my own self-worth,' the Avengers star described. 
'I had many relationships both personal and professional
where the power dynamic was so off that I had to create
a narrative in which I was the cool girl who could hang in
and hang out, and that sometimes meant compromising
what felt right for me . . . . ' "

— Scarlett Johansson yesterday at the 2018 Women's March
in Los Angeles, as reported in E! News .

Image in a Log24 post
of March 12, 2009.

For those who prefer mathematics to narrative —

"The heart of the doctor's show is a magic mirror that allows
those who go through it to experience another dimension of
their own minds. Once inside, people choose for good or evil,
opting for — to give one example — either the difficult but
rewarding heights of Mt. Parnassus or the easy pleasures of
Mr. Nick's Lounge Bar. As the doctor angrily puts it when asked
what he's playing at, 'We don't play, what we do is deadly serious,' 
which means nothing less than the eternal battle with the devil
for the spirit of man."

— Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times  film critic, Christmas Day 2009,
reviewing "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus."

In terms that might interest the late museum director of the previous post …

Quoted here from The New Criterion  on June 2, 2017 —

Quoted here from The New York Times  on June 1, 2017 —

MoMA’s Makeover Rethinks the Presentation of Art

"The new design calls for more gallery space and a transformed
main lobby, physical changes that, along with the re-examination
of art collections and diversity, represent an effort to open up MoMA
and break down the boundaries defined by its founder, Alfred Barr.

'It’s a rethinking of how we were originally conceived,' Glenn D. Lowry,
the museum’s director, said in an interview at MoMA. 'We had created
a narrative for ourselves that didn’t allow for a more expansive reading
of our own collection, to include generously artists from very different
backgrounds.'"

"Minow is the daughter of former Federal Communications Commission chairman 
Newton Minow, and his wife, Josephine (Baskin) Minow. She graduated from 
New Trier Township High School in 1972." — Wikipedia

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden, 
  Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
  Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?" 

See Log24 posts of January 7, 2012.

That was the date of death for mathematician Herbert S. Wilf.

For some related narrative, see posts tagged Consciousness Growth.

… For those taken aback by the tone of midnight's report
on the death of a 1960's counterculture figure.

See Didion's view of the counterculture in her classic
Slouching Towards Bethlehem .

A search in this journal for Didion + Nihilism yields …

Ghostwriters!

(This post was suggested by a New Yorker  piece online
today about Donald Trump's ghostwriter Tony Schwartz.)

The "ghost writer" link above leads to …

The title is a reference to the Chicago character named "Four"
in Veronica Roth's Divergent  series.

"In July 2014, Roth revealed that she initially wrote 
Divergent  from Four's point of view . . . ." — Wikipedia

Other Chicago-related stories — "Raiders of the Lost Code" 
(on the recent murder-suicide of two Chicago Jungians)
and the following —

See also Jungian narrative art in

https://redice.tv/news/
on-the-nature-of-four-jung-s-quarternity-mandalas-the-stone-and-the-self .

The Hypertime  post from 11 PM yesterday suggests
a review of one sort of narrative sequence —

Here the aleph may be regarded as a sort of 
glass slipper (see last midnight's post) found by
Alan Moore. (Moore​, mentioned in last night's
Hypertime post, is the author of Lost Girls .)

Some narrative for a ghost writer —

I prefer the following narrative —

Part I:  Stevens’s verse from “The Rock” (1954) —
“That in which space itself is contained”

Part II:  Mystery Box III: Inside, Outside (2014)

(Continued)

Beloved professor dies unexpectedly

"Wesson also said Cottier had 'an encyclopedic
knowledge of everything historical and archaeological,'
and that he lectured straight from memory using
storytelling as a teaching method. 

'He was absolutely the best lecturer that I've ever had,
spellbinding,' Wesson said. 'He would tell the most
amazing narratives, and the one thing that I could say,
that I've said to a couple of people today, is he was the
closest thing to a real Indiana Jones that there ever will be.
He lived an extraordinary life, just absolutely unusual
in every way and was unafraid of anything. He was the
most fearless person that I've ever met.'" 

See also Pawn Sacrifice (June 28, 2015).

"I am trying to introduce a narrative,
something magical and seductive…."

— Oslo artist Josefine Lyche, translated
from the Norwegian by Google

Perhaps something like Arcade Fire or
Taylor Swift? (Click links for related posts.)

(An episode of Mathematics and Narrative .)

Mathematician Peter J. Cameron this morning 
on a Paris anthropological exhibition subtitled 
Révélation d’un temps sans fin —

"I was reminded of Herbert Read’s
novel The Green Child ."

Related recent posts from this  journal:

Seal for the Seventh, Forthright, and Fourth Right.

A passage from The Green Child : 

"He watched over her until he too began to feel
overpowered by a desire to sleep. He therefore
got out on to the ledge of the trough and pulled
the Green Child after him. The rock there was
warm, smooth as jade to the flesh. They lay there
and sank into a profound slumber."

Sweet dreams, Mr. Taylor.

Green Child on the Rocks —

On Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators :

“Yet as the book’s five hundred–plus pages unwind, Isaacson interrupts himself to present small bromides about what it means to innovate and what we might learn from these innovators, our presumed betters. “Innovation requires articulation,” he tells us, after explaining how the main strength of Grace Hopper, a trailblazing computer scientist for the US Navy, was her ability to speak in the languages of mathematicians, engineers, programmers, and soldiers alike. ‘One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them,’ he offers later.

The book is peppered with these kinds of passages, which often intrude on the narrative, depriving us of moments of real emotional power.”

— Jacob Silverman in Bookforum , Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

From Isaacson’s book:

Related material:

In memory of T. S. Eliot…

… and in memory of Stanley Chase, producer of Colossus: The Forbin Project
and of Threepenny Opera :

Ninefold square from Colossus
(“There is another system”) —

Fourfold square introducing Brecht
in  Dreigroschen Trifft Vierfarben —

For Dorothy Maharam Stone, mathematician, who reportedly
died on Sept. 27, 2014 (Gwyneth Paltrow’s birthday):

“When I die…. I want it to be Hollywood all the way.
I don’t want some rabbi rambling on; I want
Meryl Streep crying, in five different accents….”

— Joan Rivers

How about Meryl Streep as Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg
saying Kaddish in Angels in America ?

Recommended reading for Josefine Lyche:

See also Ayn Sof (Jan. 7, 2011).

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The princess is caged in the consulate.
The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.
The naked woman on the ledge outside the window
on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or
the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be
‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes
some difference whether the naked woman is about to
commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest
or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the
human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible
in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral
lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select
the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely,
especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line
upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned
to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual
experience.”

― Joan Didion

This evening’s New York Lottery:  659 and 7326.

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 :

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.”

On The Blazing World , a new novel —

“Hustvedt uses fragment-stories, frame narratives, and unreliable
narrators to talk about the ways in which brilliant women across
history have been silenced, forgotten, and appropriated by men.
This is a narrative suspicious of narratives, a story that
demonstrates how damaging stories can be.”

— Review by Amal El-Mohtar

The protagonist of Hustvedt’s novel is named Harriet Burden.

A midrash for Darren Aronofsky, director of The Fountain*  and Noah—

Part I: The Burden of Proof —

Part II: The Story of Noam —

* See The Fountain  in “The Story Theory of Truth,” Columbus Day, 2013

The following is from a web page by
Andreas Schöter, developer of  The Symbol Game.

Building the Narrative

The game can simply be played as a competitive board game,
simply trying to accumulate the most points. However,
to play this way is to miss the main purpose of the Symbol Game.

The author’s page on the game itself —

(This post was suggested by this afternoon’s post  Diamond Space.)

(Continued)

The front page of The New York Times Book Review 
for next Sunday (March 30, 2014) is devoted to a
review of Siri Hustvedt’s new novel  The Blazing World .
See two posts from St. Patrick’s day:  Her and Narratives.

The review’s author is Fernanda Eberstadt.

The review is titled “Outsider Art.”
See also that phrase in this journal.

"Once a verbal structure is read, and reread
often enough to be possessed, it 'freezes.'
It turns into a unity in which all parts exist at
once, without regard to the specific movement
of the narrative. We may compare it to the study
of a music score, where we can turn to any
part without regard to sequential performance."

— Northrop Frye in The Great Code

Gardner reportedly died at 65 on February 19.
A post linked to here on that date suggests some
musical remarks.

The title, that of a novel by Arthur Koestler,
has appeared before in this journal.

The title was quoted in a Log24 note of
May 29, 2002 (G.K. Chesterton's birthday).

The link in Saturday evening's post to a Chesterton
essay suggested a further search that yielded
the following quotation—

Then silence sank. And slowly
      Arose the sea-land lord
Like some vast beast for mystery,
He filled the room and porch and sky,
And from a cobwebbed nail on high
      Unhooked his heavy sword.

— G. K. Chesterton,
   The Ballad of the White Horse

This, together with some Log24 remarks 
from 2004, suggests two images—

Above: A 1955 cover design by Robert Flynn.

The arrow theme also appears in a figure from
John Sealander's Road to Nowhere in the 2004
remarks:

The remarks quoting the Sealander image, from 
March 5, 2004, were on mathematics and narrative.

Related material from a year later:

See an announcement, saved from March 16, 2005,
of a conference on mathematics and narrative that
was held in July 2005. Some context: Koestler's novel.

For the late Carolyn Cassady, once a wife of Neal Cassady
(Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac's classic novel On the Road ).
She reportedly died at 90 in England on Friday, September 20,
2013.

From a post in this journal on the night of September 20-21,
with waning Harvest Moon:

Click on "Aooo" for some related posts, tagged "Howl."

(Mathematics and Narrative, continued from May 9, 2013)

See also Scriba's The Concept of Number and,
from the date of his death, The Zero Theorem.

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:

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).

Excerpt from an essay cached nine years ago:

"The current dominant conceptual framework
which pictures the self as an inner entity
is slowly breaking up. And I am convinced that
some, if not all, of the approaches to the self
sketched here will form the basis for a new
conceptual framework…."

Context for the essay: 

A journal issue titled "The Opening of Narrative Space" (pdf, 475 KB)

For one sort of narrative space, see Giordano Bruno in this journal.

See also Nine Years.