Deep Dark Teen Vogue
"You've got to pick up every stitch …." — Song lyric
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
For Connoisseurs of Hallucination
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Friday, August 21, 2020
Logic and Efficiency
From remarks in this journal on Aug. 7 —
“You’ve got to pick up every stitch.” — Donovan
“Looking carefully at Golay’s code
is like staring into the sun.”
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Wednesday, April 18, 2018
A Missing Link
Ben Brantley's review tonight of an Irish Repertory Theater
production of "The Seafarer" suggests a look at an
earlier New York Times article on the same play.
From that article (Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007) —
The target of a link in this journal on the above 2007 date —
"You've got to pick up every stitch . . . ." — Donovan
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Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Annals of Critical Epistemology
"But unlike many who left the Communist Party, I turned left
rather than right, and returned—or rather turned for the first time—
to a critical examination of Marx's work. I found—and still find—
that his analysis of capitalism, which for me is the heart of his work,
provides the best starting point, the best critical tools, with which—
suitably developed—to understand contemporary capitalism.
I remind you that this year is also the sesquicentennial of the
Communist Manifesto , a document that still haunts the capitalist world."
— From "Autobiographical Reflections," a talk given on June 5, 1998, by
John Stachel at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin
on the occasion of a workshop honoring his 70th birthday,
"Space-Time, Quantum Entanglement and Critical Epistemology."
From a passage by Stachel quoted in the previous post —
From the source for Stachel's remarks on Weyl and coordinatization —
Note that Stachel distorted Weyl's text by replacing Weyl's word
"symbols" with the word "quantities." —
This replacement makes no sense if the coordinates in question
are drawn from a Galois field — a field not of quantities , but rather
of algebraic symbols .
"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
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Thursday, February 9, 2017
Conspiracy Theory
See also Jeremiah Denton in Wikipedia.
Those for whom entertainment is God
may enjoy a film based on a book by Denton,
"When Hell Was in Session," starring
Hal Holbrook and Eva Marie Saint.
Denton reportedly died on March 28, 2014.
See a Log24 post from that date, "Blazing Thule."
"You've got to pick up every stitch." — Donovan
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Monday, May 25, 2015
A Stitch in Time
The most recent version of a passage
quoted in posts tagged "May 19 Gestalt" —
"You've got to pick up every stitch." — Donovan
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Friday, May 23, 2014
Free-Floating Signs
“You’ve got to pick up every stitch…”
— Donovan, song on closing credits of To Die For
“…’Supersymmetry’ was originally written
specifically for Her ….” — Pitchfork
“Eventually we see snow particles….”
— Her screenplay by Spike Jonze
This journal on January 24, 2006:
Context: See Free-Floating Signs.
Backstory: Digital Member and Uneven Break.
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Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Stitch
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by means of our language." — Wittgenstein
"You've got to pick up every stitch…
Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
Today's morning post, Rubric, suggests a check
of Alexander Bogomolny's tweets:
Clicking the hint leads to Bogomolny's Ambiguities in Plain Language:
See also, in this journal, alea (which appears within the derived word "aleatory").
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Sunday, April 10, 2011
Finishing Up at Noon
From last October—
| Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .
"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage." – "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa, * The Web version's title has a misprint— |
A stitch in time…
Related material—
See also "Putting Mental Health on the Map at Harvard"—
Harvard Crimson , Friday, April 8, 2011, 2:09 AM—
They're outside the Science Center with their signs, their cheer, and their smiles. They've been introducing themselves over House lists, and they want you to ask questions. They're here for you. They're the Student Mental Heath Liaisons.
Harvard's SMHL crew—they pronounce it smile—have recently launched a new website and recruited more members in their effort to foster an informed and understanding environment on campus….
Mental Health Services, SMHL said, are not meant for "students who are really 'crazy.'" Everyone is entitled to a little help smiling.
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Friday, April 8, 2011
Windows
Roberta Smith in today's New York Times —
"… the argument that painting may ultimately be about
little more than the communication of some quality of
light and space, however abstract or indirect."
— Review of "Rooms With a View" at the Met
Lowry —
Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano
Hollywood —
Related material —
| Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .
"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage." – "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa, * The Web version's title has a misprint— |
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Tuesday, April 5, 2011
For Ned*
(A sequel to last night's "For Taylor")
On Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote the script for the 1975 film "Nashville"—
She urges writers to continue to generate new ideas
and new material. "Keep writing. The hardest thing
is to sell one script and not have another to follow it with."
One script— Yesterday's link titled "An Ordinary Evening in Tennessee"
Another— "A Point of Central Arrival"
Related material from last October—
| Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .
"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage." – "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa, * The Web version's title has a misprint— |
"You've got to pick up every stitch…"
* A former governor of Tennessee who died at 80 yesterday in Nashville
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Saturday, January 8, 2011
True Grid (continued)
"Rosetta Stone" as a Metaphor
in Mathematical Narratives
For some backgound, see Mathematics and Narrative from 2005.
Yesterday's posts on mathematics and narrative discussed some properties
of the 3×3 grid (also known as the ninefold square ).
For some other properties, see (at the college-undergraduate, or MAA, level)–
Ezra Brown, 2001, "Magic Squares, Finite Planes, and Points of Inflection on Elliptic Curves."
His conclusion:
When you are done, you will be able to arrange the points into [a] 3×3 magic square,
which resembles the one in the book [5] I was reading on elliptic curves….
This result ties together threads from finite geometry, recreational mathematics,
combinatorics, calculus, algebra, and number theory. Quite a feat!
5. Viktor Prasolov and Yuri Solvyev, Elliptic Functions and Elliptic Integrals ,
American Mathematical Society, 1997.
Brown fails to give an important clue to the historical background of this topic —
the word Hessian . (See, however, this word in the book on elliptic functions that he cites.)
Investigation of this word yields a related essay at the graduate-student, or AMS, level–
Igor Dolgachev and Michela Artebani, 2009, "The Hesse Pencil of Plane Cubic Curves ."
From the Dolgachev-Artebani introduction–
In this paper we discuss some old and new results about the widely known Hesse
configuration of 9 points and 12 lines in the projective plane P2(k ): each point lies
on 4 lines and each line contains 3 points, giving an abstract configuration (123, 94).
PlanetMath.org on the Hesse configuration—
A picture of the Hesse configuration–
(See Visualizing GL(2,p), a note from 1985).
Related notes from this journal —
From last November —
|
From the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices—
Related material from this journal— Consolation Prize (August 19, 2010) |
From 2006 —
|
Sunday December 10, 2006
“Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry
– J. G. Ballard on Modernism
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance –
— Daniel J. Boorstin, |
Also from 2006 —
|
Sunday November 26, 2006
Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal*– or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason…."
For more on the field of reason, see
A reasonable set of "strange correspondences" Unreason is, of course, more popular. * The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel: "Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."
– Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy ,
"For every kind of vampire, |
And from last October —
|
Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .
"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage."
– "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,
* The Web version's title has a misprint— |
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Friday, January 7, 2011
Ayn Sof
(A continuation of this morning's Coxeter and the Aleph)
"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
| Mathematics and Narrative, Illustrated | |
|
 Narrative |
"As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental.
For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph ,
the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes
the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show
that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's
Mengenlehre , it is the symbol of transfinite numbers,
of which any part is as great as the whole."
— Borges, "The Aleph"
From WorldLingo.com —
|
"Infinite Jest… now stands as the principal contender
for what serious literature can aspire to
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."
— All Things Shining, a work of pop philosophy published January 4th
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." — Roy Scheider in "Jaws"
"We're gonna need more holy water." — "Season of the Witch," a film opening tonight
See also, with respect to David Foster Wallace, infinity, nihilism,
and the above reading of "Ayn Sof" as "nothingness,"
the quotations compiled as "Is Nothing Sacred?"
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