This post was suggested by today's Harvard Crimson story
Protest at Primal Scream Leads to Chaotic Exchange.
Frederick Seidel in the September 3, 2012, New Yorker —
"Biddies still cleaned the student rooms."
Above, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in
"Sunshine Cleaning" (2008).
The Cleaner:
A scene from Bridget Fonda's "Point of No Return" (1993)
in a video uploaded six years ago on this date.
Frogs:
"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time."
— Freeman Dyson (See July 22, 2011)
A Rhetorical Question:
"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….
Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"
Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"
Related material:
"Translation in the direction
conceptual -> concrete and symbolic
is much easier than
translation in the reverse direction…."
— The late William P. Thurston
(See also "Atlas to the Text," Harvard Crimson , March 8, 2011).
Related cinematic imagery
Conceptual (thanks to Don DeLillo and The New York Times )—
Concrete and symbolic (thanks to Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, as well as
Frederick Seidel in the September 3, 2012, New Yorker )—
"Biddies still cleaned the student rooms."
(Continued : See Identity, decomposition, and Sunshine Cleaning . )
"What, one might ask, does the suave, debonaire
Roger Thornhill have to do with the notion of
decomposition (emphasized by the unusual
coffin-shaped 'O') implied in the acronym
formed by his initials?"
— Paul Gordon, Dial "M" for Mother ,
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008, page 97
"To stay with the context of Cavell's brilliant reading
of the film's relation to Hamlet, 'there is something rot -ten
in North by Northwest ' that also needs to be explained."
— Paul Gordon, op. cit., page 98
Related remarks— Sunday morning, May 20, 2007.
(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—
"As if an apparently meaningless frame of reference,
traveling at the speed of thought, suddenly became relevant…."
— Stephen Rachman, "Lost in Translation"
Unclean Frame—
Detail from the film "Sunshine Cleaning"
Clean Frame—
See also Psychic Art and "The Speed of Thought."
For another form of psychic art, see Game of Shadows.
Stephen Rachman on "The Purloined Letter"
"Poe’s tale established the modern paradigm (which, as it happens, Dashiell Hammett and John Huston followed) of the hermetically sealed fiction of cross and double-cross in which spirited antagonists pursue a prized artifact of dubious or uncertain value."
For one such artifact, the diamond rhombus formed by two equilateral triangles, see Osserman in this journal.
Some background on the artifact is given by John T. Irwin's essay "Mysteries We Reread…" reprinted in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism .
Related material—
Mathematics vulgarizer Robert Osserman died on St. Andrew's Day, 2011.
A Rhetorical Question
"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….
Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"
A Rhetorical Answer
Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"
From the release date of the film of Alan Glynn’s
novel The Dark Fields (now retitled “Limitless“)—
“The time is now.”
Related material—
“Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because the dog is smarter than the tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.”
Above: Amy Adams in “Sunshine Cleaning”
“Now, I’ll open up a line of credit for you.
You’ll be wantin’ a few toys.”
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