Log24

In memory of poet May Swenson and sports novelist Rozanne Ruth “Zan” Knudson:

Maureen Dowd in today’s New York Times:

“It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in ‘Pat and Mike.’

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, ‘You are the wrong jockey for this chick.’

‘You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,’ he says, later adding, ‘When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?'”

“Then she has a vision of herself,
enclosed by an unfolded hypercube,
and then an immense screen
behind it covered by complex,
     ever-shifting patterns….”

“Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?“
— Robert A. Heinlein

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games“
and “Is Nothing Sacred?“

ART WARS continued…

Braque

“The senses deform, the mind forms.  Work to perfect the mind.  There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.”

— Georges Braque, Reflections on Painting, 1917

Those who wish to follow Braque’s advice may try the following exercise from a book first published in 1937:

Hint: See the above picture of
Braque and the construction of
a tesseract.

Wikipedia on the tesseract:

Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road:

Johnny Cash: “And behold, a white horse.”

On The Last Battle, a book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis:

Lewis said in “The Weight of Glory”—
 

On enchantments that need to be broken:

See the description of the Eater of Souls in Glory Road and of Scientism in

• Mathematics and Narrative,

• The Rhetoric of Scientism,

• and the C. S. Lewis classic,
  That Hideous Strength.

The Tony Nominations

Dannie Abse quoting Robert Penn Warren:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

 Dannie Abse

Abse deserves a Tony Smith award¹ for his play Pythagoras.

Frank Rich on Bush’s Top Gun speech:

“Only hours before President Bush’s prime-time speech came news of what Variety headlined on Page 1 as ‘Regime Change’ in Hollywood — the departure of the [West Wing] creator, the writer Aaron Sorkin.”

 George W. Bush

President Bush deserves a Tony Smith award² for his performance aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

 Madeleine L’Engle on the religion of Cubism:

“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”

 Madeleine L’Engle

L’Engle, former librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, deserves a Tony Smith award³ for insisting on the existence of the tesseract, or 4-dimensional cube, as an object of conceptual art.

L’Engle is perhaps the best defender of the religious, or “story,” theory of truth, as opposed to the “diamond” theory of truth. (See my earlier May 12 entry, “Death and Truth,” which deals with the bishop of L’Engle’s cathedral.)

¹ See Tony Smith on mathematics.

² See Tony Smith on foreign policy.

³ See Tony Smith on conceptual art.

On Madeleine L’Engle’s birthday:

There is such a thing as a tesseract.