* Continued from the previous post.
Sunday, March 5, 2023
Geometry and Death Continued* —
The Case of Richard Brautigan
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The Case of Richard Brautigan
The Case of Richard Brautigan
Saturday, March 4, 2023
Geometry and Death: The Pacific Version
An actor's obituary in The New York Times today suggests
a review of the phrase "geometry and death" in this journal.
In that review, the phrase, by J. G. Ballard in a 2006 article,
refers to German fortifications in World War II. Ballard had
earlier used the same phrase in connection with French
nuclear-test structures in the Pacific —
— From Rushing to Paradise by J. G. Ballard, 1994.
Those interested in the religious meaning of the phrase "Saint-Esprit"
may consult this journal on the date of Ballard's death.
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Monday, July 30, 2012
Geometry and Death
A Necessary Truth—
James Singer, "A Theorem in Finite Projective Geometry
and Some Applications to Number Theory," Transactions
of the American Mathematical Society 43 (1938), 377-385.
A Contingent Truth—
Singer Tony Martin reportedly died Friday evening, July 27, 2012.
In his memory, some references to a "Singer 7-Cycle."
See also this journal 7 years prior to Martin's death.
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Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Geometry and Death
Continued from other posts.
Related material from Washington Jewish Week—
"Abramson did not always get his way; he didn't have to win, but never took his eye off the ball— the Museum had to emerge the better. He did not take loses personally but pragmatically. A design for the Museum building done by an architect from his firm was charitably speaking 'mediocre.' It was replaced by a brilliant building designed by James Ingo Freed who rightfully regarded it as the master work of his distinguished career. Abramson became Freed's champion. He pushed the design team for a happy ending, saying that he knew the American people and they needed an uplifting ending since the subject of the Holocaust was so very depressing."
— and from the Holocaust Memorial Museum—
Update of 5:01 AM March 13—
See also yesterday's post The Line and
the section "The Pythagorean/ Platonic tradition"
at David Wade's website Pattern in Islamic Art.
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Wednesday, June 3, 2015
For Soccer Moms
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Monday, October 8, 2012
Issue 16
From triplecanopy, Issue 16 —
International Art English, by Alix Rule and David Levine (July 30, 2012)
… In what follows, we examine some of the curious lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features of what we call International Art English. We consider IAE’s origins, and speculate about the future of this language through which contemporary art is created, promoted, sold, and understood. Some will read our argument as an overelaborate joke. But there’s nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use testifies to the stakes involved. We are quite serious….*
…
Space is an especially important word in IAE and can refer to a raft of entities not traditionally thought of as spatial (the space of humanity ) as well as ones that are in most circumstances quite obviously spatial (the space of the gallery ). An announcement for the 2010 exhibition “Jimmie Durham and His Metonymic Banquet,” at Proyecto de Arte Contemporáneo Murcia in Spain, had the artist “questioning the division between inside and outside in the Western sacred space”—the venue was a former church—“to highlight what is excluded in order to invest the sanctum with its spatial purity. Pieces of cement, wire, refrigerators, barrels, bits of glass and residues of ‘the sacred,’ speak of the space of the exhibition hall … transforming it into a kind of ‘temple of confusion.’”
Spatial and nonspatial space are interchangeable in IAE. The critic John Kelsey, for instance, writes that artist Rachel Harrison “causes an immediate confusion between the space of retail and the space of subjective construction.” The rules for space in this regard also apply to field , as in “the field of the real”—which is where, according to art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “the parafictional has one foot.” (Prefixes like para -, proto -, post -, and hyper – expand the lexicon exponentially and Germanly, which is to say without adding any new words.) It’s not just that IAE is rife with spacey terms like intersection , parallel , parallelism , void , enfold , involution , and platform ….
* Footnote not in the original—
See also Geometry and Death from the date of the above article.
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Monday, July 30, 2012
Something to Read
Eric M. Friedlander, President of the
American Mathematical Society (AMS),
in the March 2011 AMS Notices —
"I think the best thing the AMS does by far is the Notices .
It could easily be in all doctors’ and dentists’ offices."
Notices : "Really?"
Friedlander: "It could be."
Related material from this journal:
— Annals of Art Education:
Geometry and Death
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Thursday, March 15, 2012
Yonda
The Grind House of My Father
—New York Times headline for the latest
Will Ferrell film, Casa de Mi Padre
Related material—
- The Log24 post of March 13, "Geometry and Death"
- A post of March 13 nine years earlier, "Death Knell"
- The update to that post from nine years ago tomorrow
- The Majestic
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Wednesday, June 15, 2011
A for Anastasios
The title was suggested by this evening's 4-digit NY lottery number.
"… the rhetoric might be a bit over the top."
According to Amazon.com, 2198 (i.e., 2/1/98) was the publication
date of Geometry of Vector Sheaves , Volume I, by Anastasios Mallios.
Related material—
The question of S.S. Chern quoted here June 10: —
"What is Geometry?"— and the remark by Stevens that
accompanied the quotation—
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
The work of Mallios in pure mathematics cited above seems
quite respectable (unlike his later remarks on physics).
His Vector Sheaves appears to be trying to explore new territory;
hence the relevance of Stevens's "Alpha." See also the phrase
"A-Invariance" in an undated preprint by Mallios*.
For the evening 3-digit number, 533, see a Stevens poem—
This meditation by Stevens is related to the female form of Mallios's Christian name.
As for the afternoon numbers, see "62" in The Beauty Test (May 23, 2007), Geometry and Death, and "9181" as the date 9/1/81.
* Later published in International Journal of Theoretical Physics , Vol. 47, No. 7, cover date 2008-07-01
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Monday, June 6, 2011
Tree of Life — Jewish Version
Today's midday NY Lottery number was 753, the number of a significant page in Gravity's Rainbow .
An excerpt from that page ((Penguin Classics paperback, June 1, 1995)—
"… the Abyss had crept intolerably close, only an accident away…."
Midrash— See Ben Stein in this journal.
But seriously… See "Geometry and Death" in this journal.
See also PlanetMath.org on the Hesse configuration—
A picture of the Hesse configuration—
.
Some context— A Study in Art Education.
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Friday, February 20, 2009
Friday February 20, 2009
The Cross
of Constantine
mentioned in
this afternoon's entry
"Emblematizing the Modern"
was the object of a recent
cinematic chase sequence
(successful and inspiring)
starring Mira Sorvino
at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
In memory of
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,
dead by his own hand
on this date
four years ago —
There is
another sort of object
we may associate with a
different museum and with
a modern Constantine …
See "Art Wars for MoMA"
(Dec. 14, 2008).
This object, modern
rather than medieval,
is the ninefold square:
It may suit those who,
like Rosalind Krauss
(see "Emblematizing"),
admire the grids of modern art
but view any sort of Christian
cross with fear and loathing.
For some background that
Dr. Thompson might appreciate,
see notes on Geometry and Death
in this journal, June 1-15, 2007,
and the five Log24 entries
ending at 9 AM Dec. 10. 2006,
which include this astute
observation by J. G. Ballard:
"Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom."
Selah.
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Saturday, August 2, 2008
Saturday August 2, 2008
Geometry and Death
(continued from
June 15, 2007)
Today is the anniversary
of the 1955 death of poet
Wallace Stevens.
Related material:
an essay on the
relationships between
poets and philosophers —
“Bad Blood,” by
Leonard Michaels —
and
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Monday, May 26, 2008
Monday May 26, 2008
Crystal Vision
Stevie Nicks
is 60 today.
On the author discussed
here yesterday,
Siri Hustvedt:
“… she explores
the nature of identity
in a structure* of
crystalline complexity.”
— Janet Burroway,
quoted in
ART WARS
“Is it safe?”
— Annals of Art Education:
Geometry and Death
* Related material:
the life and work of
Felix Christian Klein
and
Report to the Joint
Mathematics Meetings
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Friday, June 15, 2007
Friday June 15, 2007
Geometry and Death
(continued from Dec. 11, 2006):
J. G. Ballard on "the architecture of death":
"… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death."
— The Guardian, March 20, 2006
From the previous entry, which provided a lesson in geometry related, if only by synchronicity, to the death of Jewish art theorist Rudolf Arnheim:
"We are going to keep doing this until we get it right."
Here is a lesson related, again by synchronicity, to the death of a Christian art scholar of "uncommon erudition, wit, and grace"– Robert R. Wark of the Huntington Library. Wark died on June 8, a date I think of as the feast day of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest-poet of the nineteenth century.
From a Log24 entry on the date of Wark's death–
Samuel Pepys on a musical performance (Diary, Feb. 27, 1668):
"When the Angel comes down"
"When the Angel Comes Down, and the Soul Departs," a webpage on dance in Bali:
"Dance is also a devotion to the Supreme Being."
"I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain…."
The above three quotations were intended to supply some background for a link to an entry on Taymor, on what Taymor has called "skewed mirrors," and on a related mathematical concept named, using a term Hopkins coined, "inscapes."
They might form part of an introductory class in mathematics and art given, like the class of the previous entry, in Purgatory.
Wark, who is now, one imagines, in Paradise, needs no such class. He nevertheless might enjoy listening in.
A guest teacher in
the purgatorial class
on mathematics
and art:
"Is it safe?"
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Sunday, February 11, 2007
Sunday February 11, 2007
George Sadek, 78,
Graphic Design Educator,
Dies
Graphic Design Educator,
Dies
Sadek died on Feb. 5.
Related material:
“Geometry and Death”
(entries of December 2006),
“Release Date”
in “Immortal Diamond”
(Feb. 5 four years ago).
The design over Sadek’s
head is a St. Bridget’s cross.
(See the “Release Date”
link above.)
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Monday, December 11, 2006
Monday December 11, 2006
Geometry and Death
J. G. Ballard on “the architecture of death“:
“… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”
— The Guardian, March 20, 2006
“For him, writing is a struggle both with geometry and death.”
— “The Duende,” American Poetry Review, July/August 1999
“Rosenblum writes with
absolute intellectual honesty,
and the effect is sheer liberation….
The disposition of the material is
a model of logic and clarity.”
absolute intellectual honesty,
and the effect is sheer liberation….
The disposition of the material is
a model of logic and clarity.”
— Harper’s Magazine review
quoted on back cover of
Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,
by Robert Rosenblum
(Abrams paperback, 2001)
SINGER, ISAAC:
“Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?”
— Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.
“Sets forth his own aims in writing for children
and laments ‘slice of life’ and chaos in
children’s literature. Maintains that children
like good plots, logic, and clarity,
and that they have a concern for
‘so-called eternal questions.'”
“Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?”
— Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.
“Sets forth his own aims in writing for children
and laments ‘slice of life’ and chaos in
children’s literature. Maintains that children
like good plots, logic, and clarity,
and that they have a concern for
‘so-called eternal questions.'”
— An Annotated Listing of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson
“She returned the smile, then looked
across the room to her youngest brother,
Charles Wallace, and to their father,
who were deep in concentration, bent
over the model they were building
of a tesseract: the square squared,
and squared again: a construction
of the dimension of time.”
— A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L’Engle
For “the dimension of time,”
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.
For a more adult audience —
In memory of General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday in Santiago, Chile, a quotation from Federico Garcia Lorca‘s lecture on “the Duende” (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933):
“… Philip of Austria… longing to discover the Muse and the Angel in theology, found himself imprisoned by the Duende of cold ardors in that masterwork of the Escorial, where geometry abuts with a dream and the Duende wears the mask of the Muse for the eternal chastisement of the great king.”
Perhaps. Or perhaps Philip, “the lonely
hermit of the Escorial,” is less lonely now.
hermit of the Escorial,” is less lonely now.
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Sunday, December 10, 2006
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Librarian
"Like all men of the Library,
I have traveled in my youth."
— Jorge Luis Borges,
The Library of Babel
"Papá me mandó un artículo
de J. G. Ballard en el que
se refiere a cómo el lugar
de la muerte es central en
nuestra cultura contemporánea."
— Sonya Walger,
interview dated September 14
(Feast of the Triumph of the Cross),
Anno Domini 2006
Sonya Walger,
said to have been
born on D-Day,
the sixth of June,
in 1974
Walger's father is, like Borges,
from Argentina.
She "studied English Literature
at Christ Church College, Oxford,
where she received
a First Class degree…. "
"… un artículo de J. G. Ballard…."–
A Handful of Dust, by J. G. Ballard
(The Guardian, March 20, 2006):
"… The Atlantic wall was only part of a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.
Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about….
… modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line…
Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom. Architects were in the vanguard of the new movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety."
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect
(Click on picture for details.)
— The Left Hand of God, by Adolf Holl
Related material:
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