Log24

Special Topics

From a review by Liesl Schillinger in the Aug. 13 New York Times of a new novel by Marisha Pessl:

“… Special Topics in Calamity Physics tells the story of a wise newcomer who joins a circle of students who orbit a charismatic teacher with a tragic secret. The newcomer, a motherless waif named Blue van Meer, spent most of her life driving between college towns with her genius poli-sci professor father, Gareth….  Gareth is fond of making oracular statements, which his daughter laps up as if they were Churchill’s: ‘Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,’ he tells her. And, he cautions, ‘never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story.’

…. Heeding Gareth van Meer’s dictum that the most page-turning read known to man is the collegiate curriculum, with its ‘celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam,’ Pessl structures Blue’s mystery like a kind of Great Books class…. A professor is all-powerful, Gareth liked to tell his daughter, he puts ‘a veritable frame around life,’ and ‘organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order– simply divine.’ Blue’s syllabus also includes a murder or two. Her book’s last pages are a final exam. You will be relieved to learn it is mostly multiple choice, and there is no time limit.”

Multiple choice:
The examination below, taken from a page by a scholar at a Jesuit university, is on the Borges story “The Garden of Forking Paths”– a classic of multiple choice.

No time limit:
See the first question.

Examination on
“The Garden of Forking Paths“

“What is the meaning of the idea expressed by Yu Tsun that ‘everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen’? What is the significance of the emphasis on the present moment, the here and now? Is this related to the carpe diem (‘seize the day’) idea? How? How is the present effectively connected to the past and the future? How is the present associated simultaneously to choices, actions, and consequences? How is the present moment relevant to the idea of the ‘forking paths’? What is the symbolic meaning of forking paths when understood as a crossroads? What is a person confronted with when standing at a crossroads? What are the implications of a choice of road? May this be connected to the myth of Oedipus and its concerns with human choices and supposed predestination? What is suggested by the idea that ‘in all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pen, he chooses– simultaneously– all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork’? What does it mean to make all choices at once? What view of life do such beliefs embody?”

The Last Word

Beethoven Week on the BBC ended at midnight June 10.

“With Beethoven, music did not grow up, it regressed to adolescence. He was a hooligan who could reduce Schiller’s Ode to Joy to madness, bloodlust, and megalomania.”

— Arts and Letters Daily, lead-in to an opinion piece in The Guardian of Tuesday, June 7, 2005:

Beethoven Was a Narcissistic Hooligan “If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences…. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.” — Dylan Evans, former Lacanian psychotherapist (pdf) and now head of the undergraduate robotics program at the University of the West of England.

Speak for yourself, Dylan.

“Evil did not have the last word.”

—  Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Evil may have had the last word in Tuesday’s Guardian, but now that Beethoven Week has ended, it seems time for another word.

For another view of Beethoven, in particular the late quartets, see the Log24 Beethoven’s Birthday entry of December 16, 2002:

See also the previous entry.
 

"Professor Krauss even uses many of the same decorations with which she festooned earlier volumes. Bataille’s photograph of a big toe, for example, which I like to think of as her mascot, reappears. As does her favorite doodle, a little graph known as a 'Klein Group' or 'L Schema' whose sides and diagonals sport arrows pointing to corners labeled with various opposing pairs: e.g., 'ground' and 'not ground,' 'figure' and 'not figure.' Professor Krauss seems to believe that this device, lifted from the pages of structuralist theory, illuminates any number of deep mysteries: the nature of modernism, to begin with, but also the essence of gender relations, self-consciousness, perception, vision, castration anxiety, and other pressing conundrums that, as it happens, she has trouble distinguishing from the nature of modernism. Altogether, the doodle is a handy thing to have around. One is not surprised that Professor Krauss reproduces it many times in her new book."
 

From Drid Williams,
The Semiotics of Human Action,
Ritual, and Dance:

This is closely related to
Beckett's "Quad" figure

A Jungian on this six-line figure: "They are the same six lines that exist in the I Ching…. Now observe the square more closely: four of the lines are of equal length, the other two are longer…. For this reason symmetry cannot be statically produced and a dance results."   — Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time (1970)

and to the Greimas "semiotic square":

"People have believed in the fundamental character of binary oppositions since at least classical times. For instance, in his Metaphysics Aristotle advanced as primary oppositions: form/matter, natural/unnatural, active/passive, whole/part, unity/variety, before/after and being/not-being.*  But it is not in isolation that the rhetorical power of such oppositions resides, but in their articulation in relation to other oppositions. In Aristotle's Physics the four elements of earth, air, fire and water were said to be opposed in pairs. For more than two thousand years oppositional patterns based on these four elements were widely accepted as the fundamental structure underlying surface reality….

The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully…."

 

— Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners.

* Compare Chandler's list of Aristotle's primary oppositions with Aristotle's list (also in the  Metaphysics) of Pythagorean oppositions (see Midrash Jazz Quartet).
 

Skewed Views

The Baltimore Sun on Saul Bellow, who died April 5, and women:

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice McDermott said she most admires the way that Mr. Bellow carefully structured his novels and short stories.

“He’s a writer’s writer,” she said…. “There’s a classical shape to everything he writes, and that gives his novels and stories an air of inevitability….”

…. In spite, or perhaps because, of all the praise, Mr. Bellow also had detractors….  Critic Alfred Kazin thought the author had become a “university intellectual” with “contempt for the lower orders.”

Even Ms. McDermott said she had to “park my feminism at the door” while reading Mr. Bellow’s work.

“Despite all my resistance to his characters’ worldview, through his prose he’s able to let you enter fully into the life of this white, Jewish intellectual who has a skewed view of women,” she said.

A great woman artist on skewed views:

“That’s what you’re supposed to do as an artist. We’re not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that,” [Julie] Taymor said. “We’re here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That’s what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you’re not painting an exact reproduction….”

Finally, a skewed view
of Pope John Paul II in Paradise:

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Dinner Theater?

“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
— Bernard Holland in the New York Times of Monday, May 20, 1996

From an entry of last Monday,
“Lynchburg Law” — 

Critic Frank Rich in Wednesday’s Times on a recent televised promotion:

“… it was a manufactured scandal, as over-the-top as a dinner theater production of ‘The Crucible.’ “

From a Friday, Nov. 19, entry:

“the Platonist… is more interested in deriving an abstraction of the object into a universal….”

— Radu Surdulescu, Form, Structure, and Structurality

From El Universal online today:

“Meanwhile, [Mexico] continued to deal with the savagery of Tuesday night’s televised lynchings, with some saying the media had exploited the occurrence.

‘This is a new and worrisome phenomenon,’ security analyst José Reveles said in an interview… ‘It’s like the evil offspring of all the violent exploitation in the media.’  ‘It was Fuenteovejuna,’ he said, referring to the work by the Spanish golden age playwright Lope de Vega in which an entire town covers up the slaying of a corrupt official.”

Frank Rich has the last word:

“A ‘moral values’ crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country where entertainment is god.”

Aluminum, Your Shiny Friend

(Continued)

Citicorp Center Vital Statistics: Location: New York, NY Completion Date: 1977 Cost: $175 million Height: 915 feet Stories: 59 Materials: Steel Facing Materials: Aluminum, reflective glass

Click photo for larger image.

“From the very beginning, the Citicorp Center (today, the Citigroup Center) in New York City was an engineering challenge. When planning for the skyscraper began in the early 1970s, the northwest corner of the proposed building site was occupied by

The church allowed Citicorp to build the skyscraper under one condition: a new church would have to be built on the same corner, with no connection to the Citicorp building and no columns passing through it.

How did the engineers do it? They set the 59-story tower on four massive columns, positioned at the center of each side, rather than at the corners. This design allowed the northwest corner of the building to cantilever 72 feet over the new church.”

Source: PBS, Building BIG.

Citigroup (NYSE:C) is said to be the largest financial services conglomerate in the world. 

For more on the close relationship between churches and banks, see the works of T. S. Eliot and a description of the City of London,

The Square Mile.

For more on Eliot, architecture,  and another Harvard man, use links in the previous entry.

The Fullness of Time

In memory of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who died yesterday:

“Having solved one of the basic mysteries of life here on Earth, Dr. Crick seems happy to skewer any notions of a life beyond. For him, the most profound implication of an operational understanding of consciousness is that ‘it will lead to the death of the soul.’

‘The view of ourselves as “persons” is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth,’ he said. He predicted that ‘this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years.’

‘In the fullness of time,’ he continued, ‘educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.'”

— “After the Double Helix: Unraveling the Mysteries of the State of Being,” by Margaret Wertheim in The New York Times of April 13, 2004

“Perhaps people will revert to private social networks–ones they manage locally….

Perhaps the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links–would become more apparent, and perhaps that would be a good thing.

I’m not sure how good that is as a business model, but it works as a social model.”

The beautiful, brilliant, and charming Esther Dyson seems to have suffered a temporary lapse in brilliance with the above remark on the strength of ties in social networks….

“the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links….”

Here are some useful references encountered while fact-checking Ms. Dyson’s assertion about the “law of networks” —

Links on Graph Theory and Network Analysis

The Navigability of Strong Ties:
Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology (pdf)

Modeling Coleman’s Friendly Association Networks (pdf)

The Strength of Weak Ties:
A Network Theory Revisited (pdf)

Scientific Collaboration Networks, II (pdf)
(Deals specifically with tie-strength computation.) 

Dynamic Visualization of Social Networks

and, finally, a diagram of social networks in Shakespeare that conclusively demonstrates that there is no simple relationship between strength of ties and number of ties:

Cleopatra’s Social Ties (png)

Perhaps what Ms. Dyson had in mind was the following (courtesy of The Motley Fool):

“Metcalfe’s Law of Networks states that the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network. Translated, this means that a network that is twice as large as another network will actually be at least four times as valuable. Why? Because four times as many interconnections are possible between participants in the larger network.

When you add a fourth person to a group of three, you don’t add just one more networked relationship. You add several. The new individual can network with all three of the existing persons, and vice versa. The Internet is no different. It became more and more valuable as the numbers of computers using it grew.”

For another perspective on this alleged law, from science fiction author Orson Scott Card, see The Group, a Log24 entry of Sept. 24, 2002.

Elsewhere, in a discussion of social-networking software:

“Esther Dyson starts with a request that people turn to their left and ask the person next to them, ‘Will you be my friend?’ The room erupts in chatter, but, of course, the problem is we don’t have enough information about one another to make a snap decision about that question.”

Obviously, ties resulting from such a request will be weak, rather than strong.  However, as study of the above network-theory links will reveal, weak ties can sometimes be more useful than strong ties.  An example:

Passing the Peace at Mass.

Compare and contrast with
Ms. Dyson’s request to turn and
ask the Mr. Rogers question,
“Will you be my friend?”

The best response to this question
that I know of was contained in
a good-bye letter from a girl named
Lucero in Cuernavaca
in the early 1960’s:

“Si me deveras quieres,
deja me en paz.”

(See Shining Forth.)

The Quality with No Name

And what is good, Phædrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

— Epigraph to
   Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance

Brad Appleton discusses a phrase of Christopher Alexander:

“The ‘Quality Without A Name‘ (abbreviated as the acronym QWAN) is the quality that imparts incommunicable beauty and immeasurable value to a structure….

Alexander proposes the existence of an objective quality of aesthetic beauty that is universally recognizable. He claims there are certain timeless attributes and properties which are considered beautiful and aesthetically pleasing to all people in all cultures (not just ‘in the eye of the beholder’). It is these fundamental properties which combine to generate the QWAN….”

See, too, The Alexander-Pirsig Connection.

Jazz on St. Lucia’s Day

December 13, Saturday, was
the feast day of St. Lucia.

Lauryn Hill
at St. Lucia

Log24 entry for December 13:

Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
Was it a mistake?
There is pain with the power…
Time’s friction at the edges…
Center loosens, forms again elsewhere…

— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat

Washington Post, Names and Faces,
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2003

“A Christmas concert at the Vatican may not be the best place to criticize the Catholic Church for the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued it for the past few years. Or maybe it’s the perfect place.

Musician Lauryn Hill did just that while performing there Saturday night. The Grammy winner read a statement during the concert that scolded the church and its leaders….

La Repubblica newspaper quoted her as saying, ‘I realize some of you may be offended by what I’m saying, but what do you say to the families who were betrayed by the people in whom they believed?’ …

The Vatican said Sunday it had no comment.”

“Now you has jazz.”
– High Society, 1956   

Related entries:
9/28/03, 8/29/02.

The Proof and the Lie

A mathematical lie has been circulating on the Internet.

It concerns the background of Wiles’s recent work on mathematics related to Fermat’s last theorem, which involves the earlier work of a mathematician named Taniyama.

This lie states that at the time of a conjecture by Taniyama in 1955, there was no known relationship between the two areas of mathematics known as “elliptic curves” and “modular forms.”

The lie, due to Harvard mathematician Barry Mazur, was broadcast in a TV program, “The Proof,” in October 1997 and repeated in a book based on the program and in a Scientific American article, “Fermat’s Last Stand,” by Simon Singh and Kenneth Ribet, in November 1997.

“… elliptic curves and modular forms… are from opposite ends of the mathematical spectrum, and had previously been studied in isolation.”

— Site on Simon Singh’s 1997 book Fermat’s Last Theorem

“JOHN CONWAY: What the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture says, it says that every rational elliptic curve is modular, and that’s so hard to explain.

BARRY MAZUR: So, let me explain.  Over here, you have the elliptic world, the elliptic curves, these doughnuts.  And over here, you have the modular world, modular forms with their many, many symmetries.  The Shimura-Taniyama conjecture makes a bridge between these two worlds.  These worlds live on different planets.  It’s a bridge.  It’s more than a bridge; it’s really a dictionary, a dictionary where questions, intuitions, insights, theorems in the one world get translated to questions, intuitions in the other world.

KEN RIBET: I think that when Shimura and Taniyama first started talking about the relationship between elliptic curves and modular forms, people were very incredulous….”

— Transcript of NOVA program, “The Proof,” October 1997

The lie spread to other popular accounts, such as the column of Ivars Peterson published by the Mathematical Association of America:

“Elliptic curves and modular forms are mathematically so different that mathematicians initially couldn’t believe that the two are related.”

— Ivars Peterson, “Curving Beyond Fermat,” November 1999 

The lie has now contaminated university mathematics courses, as well as popular accounts:

“Elliptic curves and modular forms are completely separate topics in mathematics, and they had never before been studied together.”

— Site on Fermat’s last theorem by undergraduate K. V. Binns

Authors like Singh who wrote about Wiles’s work despite their ignorance of higher mathematics should have consulted the excellent website of Charles Daney on Fermat’s last theorem.

A 1996 page in Daney’s site shows that Mazur, Ribet, Singh, and Peterson were wrong about the history of the known relationships between elliptic curves and modular forms.  Singh and Peterson knew no better, but there is no excuse for Mazur and Ribet.

Here is what Daney says:

“Returning to the j-invariant, it is the 1:1 map betweem isomorphism classes of elliptic curves and C*. But by the above it can also be viewed as a 1:1 map j:H/r -> C.  j is therefore an example of what is called a modular function. We’ll see a lot more of modular functions and the modular group. These facts, which have been known for a long time, are the first hints of the deep relationship between elliptic curves and modular functions.”

“Copyright © 1996 by Charles Daney,
All Rights Reserved.
Last updated: March 28, 1996″

Update of Dec. 2, 2003

For the relationship between modular functions and modular forms, see (for instance) Modular Form in Wikipedia.

Some other relevant quotations:

From J. S. Milne, Modular Functions and Modular Forms:

“The definition of modular form may seem strange, but we have seen that such functions arise naturally in the [nineteenth-century] theory of elliptic functions.”

The next quote, also in a nineteenth-century context, relates elliptic functions to elliptic curves.

From Elliptic Functions, a course syllabus:

“Elliptic functions parametrize elliptic curves.”

Putting the quotes together, we have yet another description of the close relationship, well known in the nineteenth century (long before Taniyama’s 1955 conjecture), between elliptic curves and modular forms.

Another quote from Milne, to summarize:

“From this [a discussion of nineteenth-century mathematics], one sees that arithmetic facts about elliptic curves correspond to arithmetic facts about special values of modular functions and modular forms.”

Serge Lang apparently agrees:

“Elliptic functions parametrize elliptic curves, and the intermingling of the analytic and algebraic-arithmetic theory has been at the center of mathematics since the early part of the nineteenth century.”

— Editorial description of Lang’s Elliptic Functions (second edition, 1987)

Update of Dec. 3, 2003

“The theory of modular functions and modular forms, defined on the upper half-plane H and subject to appropriate tranformation laws with respect to the group Gamma = SL(2, Z) of fractional linear transformations, is closely related to the theory of elliptic curves, because the family of all isomorphism classes of elliptic curves over C can be parametrized by the quotient Gamma\H. This is an important, although formal, relation that assures that this and related quotients have a natural structure as algebraic curves X over Q. The relation between these curves and elliptic curves predicted by the Taniyama-Weil conjecture is, on the other hand, far from formal.”

— Robert P. Langlands, review of Elliptic Curves, by Anthony W. Knapp.  (The review  appeared in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, January 1994.)

The Mysterious West

Thanks again to KHYI, Plano, Texas, for great poetry.  In tonight’s KHYI playlist…

From Spike and Jamie:

WAIT A WHILE AND YOU’LL GROW OLDER;
NEVER MIND WHAT THE OLD FOLKS SAY.

JUST KEEP AN ANGEL ON YOUR SHOULDER;
AND NEVER THROW YOUR DREAMS AWAY
FOR THEY MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE ONE DAY.

SONG IS JUST A BOX OF VISIONS;
YOU CAN UNLOCK IT WITH A KEY–

A MESSAGE ROLLED UP INSIDE A BOTTLE
AND DROPPED INTO THE SALTY SEA.

SONG IS JUST A BOX OF VISIONS,
A JAR OF HARPS AND GYPSY’S EARS,
 
A LABYRINTH OF WILD ROSES,
A JOURNEY THROUGH A HOUSE OF MIRRORS.

WAIT A WHILE AND YOU’LL GROW STRONGER;
NEVER MIND WHAT THE SAD FOLKS SAY.

From Tish Hinojosa:

“It’s the way of life in the real west…”

A search for information on the singer of “Real West” led to a site in Japan that mentions Hinojosa, among many other makers of recommended music:

From Japan–

Random Diary & Essay…

“an example of understand beyond language is still possible”

Such an example is one of the themes in a movie I admire greatly….

Ghost Dog – The Way of the Samurai.

The hero’s understanding of what his friend says, even though he does not know the friend’s language, is a recurring theme in this film.

As for me… “No entiendo.  Sigo trabajando.”

Storyline

To hear a story, or to read it straight through from start to finish, is to travel along a one-dimensional line.  A well-structured story has, however, more than one dimension.

Juxtaposing scenes shows that details that seem to be far apart in the telling (or the living) of a story may in fact be closely related.

Here is an example from the film “Contact,” in which a young girl’s drawing and a vision of paradise are no longer separated by the time it takes to tell (or live) the story:

(See my entry of Michaelmas 2002.)

For details of how time is “folded”
by artists and poets, see the following:

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle,

and Time Fold, by S. H. Cullinane.

Contrapuntal Structure

Click here for a web page based on my Sept. 16 entry The Form, the Pattern.

Crystal and Dragon

David Wade published a book called Crystal and Dragon in 1993 about the apparent opposites of structure and fluidity, order and chaos, law and freedom, and so on.

Here is a page on these concepts as they relate to my mathematical work.

Wake

From my entry of Epiphany 2003,

Dead Poet in the City of Angels:

On this, the day when Orangemen parade in Northern Ireland, it seems appropriate to expand on the two links I cited last Epiphany.

For the implicate order and Finnegans Wake, see sections 33 and 34 of

Understanding the (Net) Wake.

The second link in the box above is to the Chi-Rho page in the Book of Kells.  For a commentary on the structure of this page and the structure of Finnegans Wake, see

James Joyce’s Whirling Mandala.

Raiders of the Lost Matrix

“In general, a matrix… is something that provides support or structure, especially in the sense of surrounding and/or shaping. It comes from the Latin word for ‘womb,’ itself derived from the Latin word for ‘mother,’ which is mater [as in alma mater].” — Wikipedia

For a mystical interpretation of the above matrix as it relates to the Hebrew words at the center of the official Yale seal, see Talmud. 

Orwell’s question, according to
an admirer of leftist Noam Chomsky:

“When so much of the BS is right out in the open,
why is it that we know so little about it?
Why don’t we see what’s right in front of our eyes?”

Oscar

Deep Chomsky: Lying, Truth-Telling, and the Social Order

Michael  Moore

“First of all, I’d like to thank the Academy….”
— Quotation attributed to Plato

The New Yorker of March 31, 2003, discusses leftist academic Noam Chomsky.  The online edition provides a web page listing pro-Chomsky links.

Chomsky’s influence is based in part on the popularity of his half-baked theories on linguistics, starting in the 1950’s with “deep structure” and “transformational,” or “generative,” grammar.

Chomsky has abandoned many of his previous ideas and currently touts what he calls The Minimalist Program.

For some background on Chomsky’s recent linguistic notions, see the expository essay “Syntactic Theory,” by Elly van Gelderen of the Arizona State University English Department.  Van Gelderen lists her leftist political agenda on her “Other Interests” page.  Her department may serve as an example of how leftists have converted many English departments in American universities to propaganda factories.

Some attacks on Chomsky’s scholarship:

The Emperor’s New Linguistics

The New Grammarians’ Funeral

Beyond Chomsky

Could Chomsky Be Wrong? 

Forty-four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken

Call for Papers, Chomsky 2003

Chomsky’s (Mis)Understanding of Human Thinking

Anatomy of a Revolution… Chomsky in 1962

…Linguistic Theory: The Rationality of Noam Chomsky

A Bibliography

Some attacks on Chomsky’s propaganda:

LeftWatch.com Chomsky page

Destructive Generation excerpt

The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky

Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers

Chomsky and Plato’s Diamond

Like another purveyor of leftist nonsense, Jacques Derrida, Chomsky is fond of citing Plato as a precedent.  In particular, what Chomsky calls “Plato’s problem” is discussed in Plato’s Meno.  For a look at the diamond figure that plays a central role in that dialogue, see Diamond Theory.  For an excellent overview of related material in Plato, see Theory of Forms.

Center of Time

“The old man of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ imagined the city’s power as being able to ‘gather’ him into ‘the artifice of eternity’— presumably into ‘monuments of unageing intellect,’ immortal and changeless structures representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time.”

— Karl Parker, Yeats’ Two Byzantiums 

“I wrote Fermata listening to Suzanne Vega, particularly her album ‘99.9° F.’  It affected my mood in just the right way. I found a kind of maniacal intensity in her music that helped me as I typed. So if Fermata is attacked, maybe I can say i’m not responsible because I was under the spell of Suzanne Vega.”

— Nicholson Baker, interview

For some real monuments of unageing intellect, see “Geometrie” in the weblog of Andrea for February 10, 2003.

The Recruit

From an obituary of Walt W. Rostow, advisor to presidents and Vietnam hardliner:

“During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor agency to the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Rostow died on Thursday, February 13, 2003, the anniversary of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden.

Like von Neumann, Rostow exemplified the use of intellectuals by the state.  From a memoir by Rostow:

“…in mid-1941…. American military intelligence… was grossly inadequate….

…military leaders… learned that they needed intellectuals….

Thus the link was forged that yielded the CIA, RAND, the AEC, and all the other institutionalized links between intellectual life and national security that persist down to the present.”

— Walt W. Rostow, “Recollections of the Bombing,”
    University of Texas web page

“Look at that caveman go!”

— Remark in my entry of February 13, 2003

“So it goes.”

— Remark of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five

See also

Tralfamadorian Structure
in Slaughterhouse-Five,

which includes the following passage:

“…the nonlinear characterization of Billy Pilgrim emphasizes that he is not simply an established identity who undergoes a series of changes but all the different things he is at different times.”

For a more recent nonlinear characterization, see the poem “Fermata” by Andrew Zawacki in The New Yorker magazine, issue dated Feb. 17 and 24, 2003, pp. 160-161.  Zawacki is thirty years younger than I, but we share the same small home town.

Beethoven’s Birthday

“Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132, is one of the transcendent masterworks of the Western classical tradition. It is built around its luminous third movement, titled ‘Holy song of thanksgiving by one recovering from an illness.’

In this third movement, the aging Beethoven speaks, clearly and distinctly, in a voice seemingly meant both for all the world and for each individual who listens to it. The music, written in the ancient Lydian mode, is slow and grave and somehow both a struggle and a celebration at the same time.

This is music written by a supreme master at the height of his art, saying that through all illness, tribulation and sorrow there is a strength, there is a light, there is a hope.”

—  Andrew Lindemann Malone

“Eliot’s final poetic achievement—and, for many, his greatest—is the set of four poems published together in 1943 as Four Quartets…. Structurally—though the analogy is a loose one—Eliot modeled the Quartets on the late string quartets of Beethoven, especially… the A Minor Quartet; as early as 1931 he had written the poet Stephen Spender, ‘I have the A Minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.'”

— Anonymous author at a
Longman Publishers website

“Each of the late quartets has a unique structure, and the structure of the Quartet in A Minor is one of the most striking of all. Its five movements form an arch. At the center is a stunning slow movement that lasts nearly half the length of the entire quartet…

The third movement (Molto adagio) has a remarkable heading: in the score Beethoven titles it ‘Hymn of Thanksgiving to the Godhead from an Invalid,’ a clear reflection of the illness he had just come through. This is a variation movement, and Beethoven lays out the slow opening section, full of heartfelt music. But suddenly the music switches to D major and leaps ahead brightly; Beethoven marks this section ‘Feeling New Strength.’ These two sections alternate through this movement (the form is A-B-A-B-A), and the opening section is so varied on each reappearance that it seems to take on an entirely different character each time: each section is distinct, and each is moving in its own way (Beethoven marks the third ‘With the greatest feeling’). This movement has seemed to many listeners the greatest music Beethoven ever wrote. and perhaps the problem of all who try to write about this music is precisely that it cannot be described in words and should be experienced simply as music.”

—  Eric Bromberger,
Borromeo Quartet program notes 

In accordance with these passages, here is a web page with excellent transcriptions for piano by Steven Edwards of Beethoven’s late quartets:

The 16 String Quartets.

Our site music for today, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Opus 132, Movement 3 (1825), is taken from this web page.

For Elia Kazan:

A Birthday Song:
Las Mañanitas

(Song, lyrics, and animated story) 

Today is the anniversary of the opening of the New York Post Office Building in 1914.

Today is National Postal Workers Day.

From the website Elia Kazan: Postage Paid…

“Many years later Kazan said ‘Viva Zapata!,’ which he was filming during the time of his committee testimony, ‘was structured to expose the ineffectiveness of idealistic revolutionaries, I believe that democracy progresses through internecine war, through constant tension – we grow only through conflict. And that’s what democracy is. In that sense, people have to be vigilant, and that vigilance is effective. I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.’ This was a profound statement about his values and beliefs. Kazan never backed away from his statements.”

Note: In honor of Kazan and of Brando, who really is a contender, the background music of this website has been hushed, so that those who click “A Birthday Song” above can hear it clearly.