Log24

Monday, May 11, 2020

Nietzsche for Comedians

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:33 am

See also Shangri-La  and  “At the Back of the North Wind .”

Update from the Times —

Some things that happen for the first time….” — Song lyric

Friday, November 29, 2013

Centered

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

"I have now come to the most difficult part of my story."

George MacDonald

"265" — Page number and centered square number

"153" — Triangular number (as noted by St. Augustine)

"265/153" — Object Lesson

An accurate description of such number lore:

"These are odd facts, very suitable for puzzle columns
and likely to amuse amateurs, but there is nothing
in them which appeals much to a mathematician.
The proofs are neither difficult nor interesting—
merely a little tiresome. The theorems are not serious;
and it is plain that one reason (though perhaps not the
most important) is the extreme speciality of both the
enunciations and the proofs, which are not capable of
any significant generalization." — G. H. Hardy

See also some remarks on figurate numbers in this journal.

Nothing went wrong at the back of the north wind
Neither was anything quite right, he thought. 
Only everything was going to be right some day….

"What a queer place it must be!"

"It's a very good place."

"Do you want to go back again?"

"No; I don't think I have left it; I feel it here, somewhere."

"Did the people there look pleased?"

"Yes— quite pleased, only a little sad."

"Then they didn't look glad?"

"They looked as if they were waiting to be gladder some day."

George MacDonald

Monday, January 4, 2010

Google’s Apple Tree

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100104-Apple.jpg

Google has illuminated its search page today with a falling apple in honor of what it is pleased to call the birthday of Newton. (When Newton was born, the calendar showed it was Christmas Day, 1642; Google prefers to associate Sir Isaac with a later version of the calendar.)

Some related observations–

Adapted from a Log24 entry
of Monday, March 24, 2008–
 

 

"Hanging from the highest limb
of the apple tree are
     the three God's Eyes…"

    — Ken Kesey

"But what's beautiful can't be bad. You're not bad, North Wind?"

"No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful."

"Well, I will go with you because you are beautiful and good, too."

"Ah, but there's another thing, Diamond:– What if I should look ugly without being bad– look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful?– What then?"

"I don't quite understand you, North Wind. You tell me what then."

"Well, I will tell you. If you see me with my face all black, don't be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat's, as big as the whole sky, don't be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith's wife– even if you see me looking in at people's windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener's wife– you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, Diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand?"

"Quite well," said little Diamond.

"Come along, then," said North Wind, and disappeared behind the mountain of hay.

Diamond crept out of bed and followed her.

    — George MacDonald,
      At the Back of the North Wind

   

From Log24 on Sunday, March 23, 2008–

 
A sequel to
The Crimson Passion

Easter Egg

Jill St. John with diamond

Click on image
 for further details.


Duality:


A pair of book covers in honor
  of the dies natalis of T. S. Eliot–

http://www.log24.com/log10/saved/100103-TheAristocrat_files/100104-Duality.jpg

From Virginia Woolf,  "Modern Fiction" (Ch. 13 in The Common Reader, First Series)

Woolf on what she calls "materialist" fiction–

Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable….

Monday, March 24, 2008

Monday March 24, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Death and
the Apple Tree

Today's New York Times on the late "fifth Beatle" Neil Aspinall, who died Easter night in Manhattan:

"… he played tambura (an Indian drone instrument) on 'Within You Without You'."

Related material:

In the Details

Valentine to a Dark Lady

"Hanging from the highest limb
of the apple tree are
     the three God's Eyes…"

    — Ken Kesey  

"But what's beautiful can't be bad. You're not bad, North Wind?"

"No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful."

"Well, I will go with you because you are beautiful and good, too."

"Ah, but there's another thing, Diamond:– What if I should look ugly without being bad– look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful?– What then?"

"I don't quite understand you, North Wind. You tell me what then."

"Well, I will tell you. If you see me with my face all black, don't be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat's, as big as the whole sky, don't be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith's wife– even if you see me looking in at people's windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener's wife– you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, Diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand?"

"Quite well," said little Diamond.

"Come along, then," said North Wind, and disappeared behind the mountain of hay.

Diamond crept out of bed and followed her.

    — George MacDonald,
      At the Back of the North Wind

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Thursday December 15, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:48 pm
In honor of Freeman Dyson’s birthday:

Dance of the Numbers

“Mahlburg likens his approach to an analogous one for deciding whether a dance party has an even or odd number of attendees. Instead of counting all the participants, a quicker method is to see whether everyone has a partner—in effect making groups that are divisible by 2.

In Mahlburg’s work, the partition numbers play the role of the dance participants, and the crank splits them not into couples but into groups of a size divisible by the prime number in question. The total number of partitions is, therefore, also divisible by that prime.

Mahlburg’s work ‘has effectively written the final chapter on Ramanujan congruences,’ Ono says.

‘Each step in the story is a work of art,’ Dyson says, ‘and the story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.'”

Erica Klarreich in Science News Online, week of June 18, 2005

This would seem to meet the criteria set by Fritz Leiber for “a story that works.” (See previous entry.)  Whether the muse of dance (played in “Xanadu” by a granddaughter of physicist Max Born– see recent entries) has a role in the Dyson story is debatable.

Born Dec. 11, 1882, Breslau, Germany.

Died Jan. 5, 1970, Göttingen,
West Germany.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051215-Born.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Max Born

Those who prefer less abstract stories may enjoy a mythic tale by Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise, or a Christian tale by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.

Related material:

“The valley spirit never dies. It’s named the mystic woman.”

Tao Te Ching

For an image of a particular
incarnation of the mystic woman
(whether as muse, as goddess,
or as the White Witch of Narnia,
I do not know) see Julie Taymor.

“Down in the valley,
 valley so low,
 hang your head over,
 hear the wind blow.”

Folk song

“Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in
    the same bare place

For the listener,
    who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there
    and the nothing that is.”

Wallace Stevens

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