For the late Bill Richardson, a child of Mexico City —
Meanwhile, back at The New York Times . . .
"The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been a fixture around
the Santa Fe Institute since its embryonic stages in the
early 1980s. Cormac received a MacArthur Award in 1981
and met one of the members of the board of the MacArthur
Foundation, Murray Gell-Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1969. Cormac and Murray discovered that they
shared a keen interest in just about everything under the sun
and became fast friends. When Murray helped to found the
Santa Fe Institute in 1984, he brought Cormac along, knowing
that everyone would benefit from this cross-disciplinary
collaboration." — https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/
cormac-and-sfi-abiding-friendship
Joy Williams, review of two recent Cormac McCarthy novels —
"McCarthy has pocketed his own liturgical, ecstatic style
as one would a coin, a ring, a key, in the service of a more
demanding and heartless inquiry through mathematics and
physics into the immateriality, the indeterminacy, of reality."
A Demanding and Heartless Coin, Ring, and Key:
COIN
RING
"We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate
an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts"
being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an
infinite family of such 'diamond' rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices
over GF(4)."
KEY
"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."
— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
For those who prefer a "liturgical, ecstatic style" —
A mysterious Google Search result from this evening —
A check of Marshall's announcement reveals an apparent
contradiction to the reported May 24 date of death. Although the
announcement says that Gell-Mann died on May 24, the announcement
itself is timestamped midnight (00:00) at the beginning of May 24
according to Greenwich Mean Time, i.e., at 6 pm May 23 in Santa Fe —
This may or may not help to illustrate the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
For the relentlessly artsy-fartsy at the Santa Fe Institute…
Continued from remarks on Schoenberg on March 10, 2001 —
"First movement from John Adams’ Harmonielehre conducted by
Sir Simon Rattle, performed at BMW Classics, which took place
in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, 10 June 2023." — YouTube
Also on 10 June 2023 —
Tuesday, November 8, 2016, was also the publication date
at Princeton University Press for a book by one Herbert Gintis:
Gintis reportedly died yesterday, Jan. 5, 2023.
"He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania
and then attended Harvard University for post-graduate
work in mathematics. After receiving his master's degree,
he grew disillusioned with the field, and while at Harvard,
became a sandal maker with a shop in Harvard Square."
In later years, Gintis was associated with the Santa Fe Institute.
"How a close group of brilliant friends,
in a tiny German university town, laid
the foundations of modern consciousness"
— Headline for the article whose URL is . . .
https://aeon.co/essays/
english-romanticism-was-born-from-a-serious-germanomania
The article was published by Aeon on December 20, 2022,
and is featured in today's Arts & Letters Daily . On the author:
"Andrea Wulf is a historian and the award-winning author
of several books, including the bestselling
The Invention of Nature (2015) and, most recently,
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and
the Invention of the Self (2022). She is a Miller Scholar
and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature."
Related material — "The Eight" According to Coleridge.
A related problem:
"What powers the Velvet Buzzsaw?"
Perhaps the Santa Fe Institute . . .
Logo of the Santa Fe Institute —
Perhaps Morf Vandewalt …
… Perhaps, as the above Hockney date suggests,
Louis Menand —
From a May 15 review of a new book by Douglas Coupland, author of
the 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture .
"Minimalists are actually extreme hoarders:
they hoard space." — Douglas Coupland
The title of Coupland's new book suggests a review of Schmeikal
in this journal …
Coupland's above remark on hoarders suggests a look at
a wealthy California collector whom, were he not wealthy,
some might call a hoarder.
“I buy things because they strike an emotional bell,
they appeal to my curiosity, to the thrill of discovery
of the extraordinary in the ordinary,” Mr. Cotsen told
The Denver Post in 1998. “They appeal to my sense
of humor, and to my search for the beauty in simplicity.”
He added, “I decided I had a collection when there was
no more space to put anything.”
By the time he died at 88 on May 8 in Beverly Hills, Calif.,
Mr. Cotsen (pronounced COAT-zen) had donated about
half of the material in his collections to institutions like the
Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Princeton University
and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M.
— Richard Sandomir in the online New York Times , May 17
Cotsen reportedly died at 88 on May 8.
See also this journal on that date —
Monday, May 8, 2017
New Pinterest Board
|
Rebecca Goldstein, the author mentioned in
the previous two posts, spoke at Santa Fe Institute
on Easter Monday, April 9, 2012.
This journal on that date:
The Santa Fe Institute logo, together with the previous post,
suggests a review of Whirligig and Quaternion for Goldstein.
A meditation suggested by the April 20 post Complex Reflection
and by the life and April 20 death of a scientist who worked
at Los Alamos (home of the Monte Carlo method) and at
the Santa Fe Institute (home of complexity theory).
A search for 286 in this journal yields "Yet Another Cartoon Graveyard."
That June 1, 2008, post linked to poem 286 in a 1919 anthology.
Here is that poem, together with poem 823.
Together, these poems may be regarded as a meditation on
Simone Weil and her brother André Weil or,
more abstractly, on Love and Death.
Happy birthday to Al Pacino.
"Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist
who pioneered the study of nonverbal
communication and interactions between
members of different ethnic groups,
died July 20 at his home in
Santa Fe, N.M. He was 95."
NY Times piece quoted here on
the date of Hall's death:
"July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA's engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA's true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars." Commentary — |
"Mr. Hall first became interested in
space and time as forms of cultural
expression while working on
Navajo and Hopi reservations
in the 1930s."
Log24, July 29:
"Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern within |
"We are the key."
— Eye of Cat
Paul Newall, "Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy"—
"Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband's. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski's that 'different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.' With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed."
The above photo of Juliette Binoche in Blue accompanying the quotations from Zelazny illustrates Kieślowski's concept, with graphic designs instead of musical notes. Some of the same designs are discussed in Abstraction and the Holocaust (Mark Godfrey, Yale University Press, 2007). (See the Log24 entries of June 11, 2009.)
Related material:
"Jeffrey Overstreet, in his book Through a Screen Darkly, comments extensively on Blue. He says these stones 'are like strands of suspended crystalline tears, pieces of sharp-edged grief that Julie has not been able to express.'….
Throughout the film the color blue crops up, highlighting the mood of Julie's grief. A blue light occurs frequently, when Julie is caught by some fleeting memory. Accompanied by strains of an orchestral composition, possibly her husband's, these blue screen shots hold for several seconds while Julie is clearly processing something. The meaning of this blue light is unexplained. For Overstreet, it is the spirit of reunification of broken things."
— Martin Baggs at Mosaic Movie Connect Group on Sunday, March 15, 2009. (Cf. Log24 on that date.)
For such a spirit, compare Binoche's blue mobile in Blue with Binoche's gathered shards in Bee Season.
From the obituary of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died at 52 on Monday, July 3, 2006, at her home in Santa Fe:
“If she rarely spoke of her private life, few artists have brought such emotional vulnerability to their work, whether it was her sultry portrayal of Myrtle Wilson, the mistress of wealthy Tom Buchanan in John Harbison’s ‘Great Gatsby,’ the role of her 1999 Metropolitan Opera debut, or her shattering performances several years ago in two Bach cantatas for solo voice and orchestra, staged by the director Peter Sellars, seen in Lincoln Center’s New Visions series, with the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, Craig Smith conducting.
In Cantata No. 82, ‘Ich Habe Genug’ (‘I Have Enough’), Ms. Hunt Lieberson, wearing a flimsy hospital gown and thick woolen socks, her face contorted with pain and yearning, portrayed a terminally ill patient who, no longer able to endure treatments, wants to let go and be comforted by Jesus. During one consoling aria, ‘Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen’ (‘Slumber now, weary eyes’), she yanked tubes from her arms and sang the spiraling melody with an uncanny blend of ennobling grace and unbearable sadness.”
Related Entertainment
from Nov. 6, 2003
Today’s birthday:
director Mike Nichols
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