Friday, October 29, 2021
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Into the Woods
Detail from the above image —
Timestamp for when I saw an obituary for
a science writer quoted here in 2004 —
Click the timestamp for the obituary.
See also the phrase “willow on a tombstone”
in this journal.
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Monday, August 29, 2016
Into the Woods
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Friday, August 12, 2011
Into the Woods
"What’s best about us, I hope, is that we teach them
the ‘forest of symbols,’ to borrow deliberately from
a poem called ‘Correspondences,’ by Baudelaire."
— The late Stanley Bosworth, founding headmaster
of St. Ann's School in Brooklyn
Bosworth died Sunday.
Related material—
- Saturday's Correspondences,
- Sunday's Coordinated Steps, and
- Monday's Organizing the Mine Workers.
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Saturday, October 2, 2021
Woodstock Hat Check
♫ The way you wear your hat . . .
The way your smile just beams . . .
Later . . .
Richie Havens performed onstage at
the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair
in Bethel, New York, August 15, 1969.
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Havens in Rolling Stone — I thought, "Oh, God, they're going to kill me. I'm not going out there first. What, are you crazy?" It was about 2:30 or 3 p.m. on Friday afternoon, and the concert was already almost three hours late. I was supposed to be fifth on the bill, but the other entertainers were still at the hotel, seven miles away. I thought, "Jeez, they're gonna throw beer cans at me because the concert's late." So I did a little fast talking, a little rap, and then I did a nearly three-hour set, until some of the others finally showed up. My bass player, Eric Oxendine, had gotten caught in the traffic on the New York State Thruway. He abandoned his car 30 miles away and walked, and he arrived just as we got offstage. When we left the festival, there wasn't another car on the thruway except ours. For 75 miles cars were parked five deep. That was the most surrealistic thing I've ever seen in my life. My fondest memory was realizing that I was seeing something I never thought I'd ever see in my lifetime — an assemblage of such numbers of people who had the same spirit and consciousness. And believe me, you wouldn't want to be in a place with that many people if they weren't like-minded! It was the first expression of the first global-minded generation born on the planet. Live Aid was a baby Woodstock, a child of Woodstock, which I call Globalstock. The history of the be-in is interesting. Originally it wasn't just about music. It was: "Let's go out to the park and throw Frisbees and be with each other." It went from that to the Monterey Pop Festival, which was a nonprofit concert in 1967, and from that came the hint: "Let's try to do one of these things, but let's try to make some money." That's where their heads were at, but that didn't happen. It turned into the world's largest be-in, which I call the Cosmic Accident. It was totally unexpected. The organizers thought that if it were like Monterey Pop — which drew 50 to 60,000 people — they'd make off like bandits. However, there were about 400,000 people the first afternoon, and it was free before it started. The only people who made off like bandits was Warner Bros., who got the movie rights. So the merits of Woodstock being love, peace, and harmony still stand on pillars of "Let's make money." That's what it was in the beginning. The consciousness was realized afterward. The movie chronicled that consciousness. It didn't make a big deal out of the music. You saw some of the musicians playing a song or two, but it was less than half the musicians who performed. So it wasn't a true depiction of what happened onstage, but you did see members of the older generation, like the police chief, saying, "Leave the kids alone, the kids are great, they're not bothering anybody." That was much more influential than the music on the people who went to see it. Woodstock wasn't just sex, drugs and rock & roll. Thank God for the movie, because the people who saw it got a touch of the Woodstock spirit, the spirit of people just being people. A version of this story was originally published in the August 24th, 1989 print edition of Rolling Stone. |
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Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Notes for Katz, the Musical
From a memoir published in 1997 —
The author and his friend Katz :
I couldn’t believe it.
— ‘You want to come with me?’
— ‘If it’s a problem, I understand.’
— ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no, no.
You’re very welcome.
You are extremely welcome.’ “
— A Walk in the Woods , by Bill Bryson.
(Crown, Kindle edition. p. 20.)
From a novel published in 1971 —
“In the bluish light emanating from the TV,
EE looked at him, her eyes veiled. ‘You want me
to come while you watch.’ Chance said nothing.
. . . .
‘I think I understand now.’ She got up,
paced swiftly up and down the room,
crossing in front of the TV screen;
every now and then a word escaped her lips,
a word scarcely louder than her breath.”
— Being There , by Jerzy Kosinski
Back to the present . . .
See also Dance 101: A Leg Up.
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Sunday, November 4, 2018
Dead Poet
The New York Times today on a poet, Judith Kazantzis,
"who died on Sept. 18 at 78" —
"Judith’s oldest sister is Antonia Fraser, the biographer
and novelist and widow of the playwright Harold Pinter."
"Her [Judith’s] death was confirmed by Andy Croft, who runs
Smokestack Books, the publisher of 'Sister Intervention' [sic* ]
(2014), Ms. Kazantzis’ last collection of poetry. He did not
specify the cause or where she died."
Notable lines from that book's poem "In the Garden" —
Two trees of life, not in the woods,
but in the garden.
See also the post "Death Day" in this journal on Sept. 18.
* The title is actually "Sister Invention ."
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Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Aesthetics
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From "The Phenomenology of Mathematical Beauty," The Lightbulb Mistake . . . . Despite the fact that most proofs are long, and despite our need for extensive background, we think back to instances of appreciating mathematical beauty as if they had been perceived in a moment of bliss, in a sudden flash like a lightbulb suddenly being lit. The effort put into understanding the proof, the background material, the difficulties encountered in unraveling an intricate sequence of inferences fade and magically disappear the moment we become aware of the beauty of a theorem. The painful process of learning fades from memory, and only the flash of insight remains. We would like mathematical beauty to consist of this flash; mathematical beauty should be appreciated with the instantaneousness of a lightbulb being lit. However, it would be an error to pretend that the appreciation of mathematical beauty is what we vaingloriously feel it should be, namely, an instantaneous flash. Yet this very denial of the truth occurs much too frequently. The lightbulb mistake is often taken as a paradigm in teaching mathematics. Forgetful of our learning pains, we demand that our students display a flash of understanding with every argument we present. Worse yet, we mislead our students by trying to convince them that such flashes of understanding are the core of mathematical appreciation. Attempts have been made to string together beautiful mathematical results and to present them in books bearing such attractive titles as The One Hundred Most Beautiful Theorems of Mathematics . Such anthologies are seldom found on a mathematician’s bookshelf. The beauty of a theorem is best observed when the theorem is presented as the crown jewel within the context of a theory. But when mathematical theorems from disparate areas are strung together and presented as “pearls,” they are likely to be appreciated only by those who are already familiar with them. The Concept of Mathematical Beauty The lightbulb mistake is our clue to understanding the hidden sense of mathematical beauty. The stark contrast between the effort required for the appreciation of mathematical beauty and the imaginary view mathematicians cherish of a flashlike perception of beauty is the Leitfaden that leads us to discover what mathematical beauty is. Mathematicians are concerned with the truth. In mathematics, however, there is an ambiguity in the use of the word “truth.” This ambiguity can be observed whenever mathematicians claim that beauty is the raison d’être of mathematics, or that mathematical beauty is what gives mathematics a unique standing among the sciences. These claims are as old as mathematics and lead us to suspect that mathematical truth and mathematical beauty may be related. Mathematical beauty and mathematical truth share one important property. Neither of them admits degrees. Mathematicians are annoyed by the graded truth they observe in other sciences. Mathematicians ask “What is this good for?” when they are puzzled by some mathematical assertion, not because they are unable to follow the proof or the applications. Quite the contrary. Mathematicians have been able to verify its truth in the logical sense of the term, but something is still missing. The mathematician who is baffled and asks “What is this good for?” is missing the sense of the statement that has been verified to be true. Verification alone does not give us a clue as to the role of a statement within the theory; it does not explain the relevance of the statement. In short, the logical truth of a statement does not enlighten us as to the sense of the statement. Enlightenment , not truth, is what the mathematician seeks when asking, “What is this good for?” Enlightenment is a feature of mathematics about which very little has been written. The property of being enlightening is objectively attributed to certain mathematical statements and denied to others. Whether a mathematical statement is enlightening or not may be the subject of discussion among mathematicians. Every teacher of mathematics knows that students will not learn by merely grasping the formal truth of a statement. Students must be given some enlightenment as to the sense of the statement or they will quit. Enlightenment is a quality of mathematical statements that one sometimes gets and sometimes misses, like truth. A mathematical theorem may be enlightening or not, just as it may be true or false. If the statements of mathematics were formally true but in no way enlightening, mathematics would be a curious game played by weird people. Enlightenment is what keeps the mathematical enterprise alive and what gives mathematics a high standing among scientific disciplines. Mathematics seldom explicitly acknowledges the phenomenon of enlightenment for at least two reasons. First, unlike truth, enlightenment is not easily formalized. Second, enlightenment admits degrees: some statements are more enlightening than others. Mathematicians dislike concepts admitting degrees and will go to any length to deny the logical role of any such concept. Mathematical beauty is the expression mathematicians have invented in order to admit obliquely the phenomenon of enlightenment while avoiding acknowledgment of the fuzziness of this phenomenon. They say that a theorem is beautiful when they mean to say that the theorem is enlightening. We acknowledge a theorem’s beauty when we see how the theorem “fits” in its place, how it sheds light around itself, like Lichtung — a clearing in the woods. We say that a proof is beautiful when it gives away the secret of the theorem, when it leads us to perceive the inevitability of the statement being proved. The term “mathematical beauty,” together with the lightbulb mistake, is a trick mathematicians have devised to avoid facing up to the messy phenomenon of enlightenment. The comfortable one-shot idea of mathematical beauty saves us from having to deal with a concept that comes in degrees. Talk of mathematical beauty is a cop-out to avoid confronting enlightenment, a cop-out intended to keep our description of mathematics as close as possible to the description of a mechanism. This cop-out is one step in a cherished activity of mathematicians, that of building a perfect world immune to the messiness of the ordinary world, a world where what we think should be true turns out to be true, a world that is free from the disappointments, ambiguities, and failures of that other world in which we live. |
How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
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Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Shema, Faust
"The quotes create the illusion
that the dead are still speaking
to the reader. Faust writes about
the efforts of spiritualists to believe
in an afterlife for their slain kin, but
she’s the one summoning spirits."
— April Yee, Harvard Crimson
staff writer, February 7, 2008
"0! = 1"
See also yesterday's Into the Woods
and posts now tagged Willow and Mandorla.
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Friday, November 27, 2015
Einstein and Geometry
(A Prequel to Dirac and Geometry)
"So Einstein went back to the blackboard.
And on Nov. 25, 1915, he set down
the equation that rules the universe.
As compact and mysterious as a Viking rune,
it describes space-time as a kind of sagging mattress…."
— Dennis Overbye in The New York Times online,
November 24, 2015
Some pure mathematics I prefer to the sagging Viking mattress —
Readings closely related to the above passage —
Thomas Hawkins, "From General Relativity to Group Representations:
the Background to Weyl's Papers of 1925-26," in Matériaux pour
l'histoire des mathématiques au XXe siècle: Actes du colloque
à la mémoire de Jean Dieudonné, Nice, 1996 (Soc. Math.
de France, Paris, 1998), pp. 69-100.
The 19th-century algebraic theory of invariants is discussed
as what Weitzenböck called a guide "through the thicket
of formulas of general relativity."
Wallace Givens, "Tensor Coordinates of Linear Spaces," in
Annals of Mathematics Second Series, Vol. 38, No. 2, April 1937,
pp. 355-385.
Tensors (also used by Einstein in 1915) are related to
the theory of line complexes in three-dimensional
projective space and to the matrices used by Dirac
in his 1928 work on quantum mechanics.
For those who prefer metaphors to mathematics —
Rota fails to cite the source of his metaphor.
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Monday, November 25, 2013
Into the Bereshit*
From a slide show of Pinter's "No Man's Land"—
* Footnotes on the title—
For Hirst: Wikipedia.
For Spooner: Into the Woods.
For the groundlings: Urban Dictionary.
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Monday, August 13, 2012
Raiders of the Lost Tesseract
(An episode of Mathematics and Narrative )
A report on the August 9th opening of Sondheim's Into the Woods—
Amy Adams… explained why she decided to take on the role of the Baker’s Wife.
“It’s the ‘Be careful what you wish’ part,” she said. “Since having a child, I’m really aware that we’re all under a social responsibility to understand the consequences of our actions.” —Amanda Gordon at businessweek.com
Related material—
Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning "quickly learns the rules and ropes of her unlikely new market. (For instance, there are products out there specially formulated for cleaning up a 'decomp.')" —David Savage at Cinema Retro
Compare and contrast…
1. The following item from Walpurgisnacht 2012—
2. The six partitions of a tesseract's 16 vertices
into four parallel faces in Diamond Theory in 1937—
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Without Diamond-Blazons
Excerpt from Wallace Stevens's
"The Pediment of Appearance"—
Young men go walking in the woods,
Hunting for the great ornament,
The pediment* of appearance.
They hunt for a form which by its form alone,
Without diamond—blazons or flashing or
Chains of circumstance,
By its form alone, by being right,
By being high, is the stone
For which they are looking:
The savage transparence.
* Pediments, triangular and curved—
— From "Stones and Their Stories," an article written
and illustrated by E.M. Barlow, copyright 1913.
Related geometry—
(See Štefan Porubský: Pythagorean Theorem .)
A proof with diamond-blazons—
(See Ivars Peterson's "Square of the Hypotenuse," Nov. 27, 2000.)
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Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Mathematics and Gestalt
"We acknowledge a theorem's beauty
when we see how the theorem 'fits'
in its place, how it sheds light around itself,
like a Lichtung, a clearing in the woods."
— Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts
Here Rota is referring to a concept of Heidegger.
Some context—
"Gestalt Gestell Geviert: The Way of the Lighting,"
by David Michael Levin in The Philosopher's Gaze
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Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Wednesday June 27, 2007
Juneteenth Revisited:
A Long and Strange Day
Time and chance
yesterday:
A Long and Strange Day
Time and chance
yesterday:
Pennsylvania Lottery
June 26, 2007–
Mid-day 040
Evening 810
040:
A discussion of the work of Ralph Ellison:
"… why do you think he did not finish these novels? He wrote on them for many, many years– 40 years, I think."
"Yes, he worked for 40 years."
See Ellison's novel Juneteenth (New York Times review, 1999)
810:
"But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
turning and turning back
With the same terror,
into the deep thicket
Beside the highway,
at home in the dark thicket.
I say the wood within is the dark wood…."
John Baez, Diary, entry of June 22, 2007:
"On Tuesday the 19th….
I hiked down the completely dark but perfectly familiar gravel road with my suitcase in hand, listening to the forest creatures. But then, I couldn't find my parents' driveway! It was embarrassing: I could see their house perfectly well, off in the distance, but it was so darn dark I couldn't spot the driveway. It felt like a dream: after a long flight with many delays, one winds up walking to ones parents house, lost in a spooky forest….
… I sort of enjoy this kind of thing, as long as there's no real danger. It's also sort of scary. The well-lit grid of civilization slowly falls away, and you're out there alone in the night…
Anyway: I considered hiking straight through the woods to my parents' house, but I decided things were already interesting enough, so instead I called my mom and ask her to drive down the driveway a bit, just so I could see where it was. And so she did, and then it was obvious.
So, I got home shortly before midnight. A long and strange day. My dad was already in bed, but I said hi to him anyway."
Related material:
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Monday, June 25, 2007
Monday June 25, 2007
Object Lesson
"… the best definition
I have for Satan
is that it is a real
spirit of unreality."
"… the best definition
I have for Satan
is that it is a real
spirit of unreality."
M. Scott Peck,
People of the Lie
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"Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs, Secure. It was difficult to sing in face Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves Or else avert the object."
— Wallace Stevens, |
Today is June 25,
anniversary of the
birth in 1908 of
Willard Van Orman Quine.
Quine died on
Christmas Day, 2000.
Today, Quine's birthday, is,
as has been noted by
Quine's son, the point of the
calendar opposite Christmas–
i.e., "AntiChristmas."
If the Anti-Christ is,
as M. Scott Peck claims,
a spirit of unreality, it seems
fitting today to invoke
Quine, a student of reality,
and to borrow the title of
Quine's Word and Object…
Word:
An excerpt from
"Credences of Summer"
by Wallace Stevens:
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"Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times The thrice concentred self, having possessed
The object, grips it
— "Credences of Summer," VII, |
Object:
From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:
From Christmas 2005:
Click on the images
for further details.
For a larger and
more sophisticaled
relative of this object,
see yesterday's entry
At Midsummer Noon.
The object is real,
not as a particular
physical object, but
in the way that a
mathematical object
is real — as a
pure Platonic form.
"It's all in Plato…."
— C. S. Lewis
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Monday, May 19, 2003
Monday May 19, 2003
DAY OF THE MOTHER SHIP
Part II: A Mighty Wind
I just saw the John Travolta film “Phenomenon” for the first time. (It was on the ABC Family Channel from 8 to 11.)
Why is it that tellers of uplifting stories (like Zenna Henderson, in “Day of the Mother Ship, Part I,” or the authors of “Phenomenon” or the Bible) always feel they have to throw in some cockamamie and obviously false miracles to hold people’s attention?
On May 11 (Mother’s Day), Mother Nature got my attention with a mighty wind waving the branches of nearby trees, just before a tornado watch was issued for the area I was in. This made me recall a Biblical reference I had come across in researching references to “Our Lady of the Woods” for my Beltane (May 1) entry.
…And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.
This is what I thought of on May 11 watching branches swaying in the wind on Mother’s Day — which some might regard as a festival of Our Lady of the Woods. John Travolta in “Phenomenon” sees a very similar scene partway through the picture; then, at the end, explains to his girlfriend how the swaying branches made him feel — without mentioning the branches — by asking her to describe how she would cradle and rock a child in her arms. At the very end of the film, she herself is reminded of his question by the swaying branches of another tree.
Events like these are miracle enough for me.
Thursday, May 1, 2003
Thursday May 1, 2003
Rhymes with Puck
Readings for May Day, also known as Beltane.
I. The Playboy of the Western World
- Operation Playmate
- Puck Fair
- Playboy Magazine, June 2003:
See cover headline at top left.
II. Beltane
III. A is for Art
- Wrestling Pablo Picasso
- Terpsichore’s Birthday
- Bell/Taine (see below)
Bell/Taine
In 1993, The Mathematical Association of America published Constance Reid’s
THE SEARCH FOR E. T. BELL
also known as John Taine.
This is a biography of Eric Temple Bell, a mathematician and writer on mathematics, who also wrote fiction under the name John Taine.
On page 194, Reid records a question Bell’s son asked as a child. Passing a church and seeing a cross on the steeple, he inquired, “Why is the plus up there?”
For an answer that makes some sort of sense
-
in the context of Part II above, and
-
in the context of last month’s “Math Awareness Month” theme, mathematics and art,
consider the phrase “A is for Art,” so aptly illustrated by Olivia Newton-John in “Wrestling Pablo Picasso,” then examine the photograph of ballerina Margaret “Puck” Petit on page 195 of Reid’s book. Puck, as the mother of Leslie Caron (see Terpsichore’s Birthday), clearly deserves an A+.
Wednesday, January 8, 2003
Wednesday January 8, 2003
Into the Woods
From the Words on Film site:
"The proximal literary antecedents for Under the Volcano are Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, especially The Inferno, on the one hand, and on the other, the Faust legend as embodied in the dramatic poem Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the play Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe."
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"In the opening page of the novel, we find the words "The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands on a slightly higher hill …" (Lowry, Volcano p. 3). "Selva" is one of the Spanish words for "woods." One of the cantinas in the novel is named El Bosque, and bosque is another Spanish word for "woods." The theme of being in a darkling woods is reiterated throughout the novel." |
Literary Florence |
Tonight's site music is "Children Will Listen,"
by Stephen Sondheim, from "Into the Woods."
Stephen Hawking is 61 today.
An appropriate gift might be a cassette version of
The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis,
narrated by John Cleese.
See also this review of Lewis's That Hideous Strength
and my entries of Dec. 31, 2002, and Jan. 4, 2003.
Thursday, December 5, 2002
Thursday December 5, 2002
For Otto Preminger's birthday:
Lichtung!
Today's symbol-mongering (see my Sept. 7, 2002, note The Boys from Uruguay) involves two illustrations from the website of the Deutsche Schule Montevideo, in Uruguay. The first, a follow-up to Wallace Stevens's remarks on poetry and painting in my note "Sacerdotal Jargon" of earlier today, is a poem, "Lichtung," by Ernst Jandl, with an illustration by Lucia Spangenberg.
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manche meinen |
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by Ernst Jandl |
The second, from the same school, illustrates the meaning of "Lichtung" explained in my note The Shining of May 29:
"We acknowledge a theorem's beauty when we see how the theorem 'fits' in its place, how it sheds light around itself, like a Lichtung, a clearing in the woods."
— Gian-Carlo Rota, page 132 of Indiscrete Thoughts, Birkhauser Boston, 1997
From the Deutsche Schule Montevideo mathematics page, an illustration of the Pythagorean theorem:
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Braucht´s noch Text? |
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