Wednesday, July 6, 2022
In memory of Alfred Bester, author of The Deceivers:
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Tuesday, December 14, 2021
The Illustrator
This post was suggested by Chapter Two, "The Sprite and the Synergist,"
of Alfred Bester's The Deceivers , and by . . .
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Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Obiter Dicta
The title is a phrase from Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word —
"the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta ,
the words in passing, that give the game away"
The President on July 23, per USA TODAY —
"And there’s a need, whether it is true or not,
there is a need to project a different picture."
Related material —
EVERY LAST EASTER EGG AND REFERENCE
IN EPISODE 6 OF HBO'S WATCHMEN .
Wikipedia — "For the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards,
Damon Lindelof and Cord Jefferson won the award
for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie,
or Dramatic Special for this episode."
See also . . . The Bard of Teaneck —
"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?
He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound,
nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring
the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride,
vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.
Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."
— Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005
Weingarten's remarks were quoted here on that Sunday, along with
the following illustration —
Spear Daddy!
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Wednesday, January 13, 2021
What’s in a name?
” ‘The Maori named him Rog,’ Yael continued,
‘because those were the only I.D. letters that could
be made out on the wreck.’ ”
— Alfred Bester, The Deceivers
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Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Japanese Bed*
The reported death on Monday of the Random House editor of the 1996
book Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics suggests a search in this journal
for “primary colors.” From that search, some non-political quotations —
| From “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” by Wallace Stevens:“The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: ‘I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall’ or ‘Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.’ The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: ‘But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.’ Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less.”
|
* Title suggested in part by Monday evening’s post Annals of Artspeak
and the related Microsoft lockscreen photo credit —
.
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Thursday, August 20, 2020
Milking the Sixteenths
“In the main belly cabin he discovered the reason
for the tropical heat; a naked woman was sweating
and swearing over the maintenance gear surrounding
a transparent incubator. She was tinkering and crawling
over and under the complications like an octopus.
It was his assistant, Dr. Cluny Decco, and Krupp had
never seen her nude before, but his controlled voice
did not betray his delighted amazement.”
— Alfred Bester, The Deceivers . Kindle Edition.
From a post, Dharma Fabric , of January 7, 2020 —
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Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Social Logic
|
Friday, March 10, 2017
The Transformers
|
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Friday, March 10, 2017
The Transformers
"The transformed urban interior is the spatial organisation of
an achiever, one who has crossed the class divide and who uses
space to express his membership of, not aspirations towards,
an ascendant class in our society: the class of those people who
earn their living by transformation— as opposed to the mere
reproduction— of symbols, such as writers, designers, and
academics"
— The Social Logic of Space ,
by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson,
Cambridge University Press, 1984
For another perspective on the achievers, see The Deceivers .
Related material —
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
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Thursday, April 21, 2016
The Alchemist’s Chessboard
Material related to the previous post and to Alfred Bester's
1981 followup to The Stars My Destination titled The Deceivers —
|
The Lapis Philosophorum :
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe." And from Bester's The Deceivers : Meta Physics "'… Think of a match. You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It's the chess legend for real.' 'I don't know it.' 'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.' 'That doesn't sound like much.'" Related material : |
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Thursday, February 13, 2014
Winter’s Game*
Part I: Continued from January 20 — "Arising Heaven" —
Part II: The Stars My Destination in this journal
Part III: Ender's Game —
* The title refers to a character, Rogue Winter, in Alfred Bester's
1981 novel The Deceivers .
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Saturday, February 8, 2014
The Village
From this journal on Jan. 26, 2009 —
See also "Strip Mathematics," by Zoltan Dienes —
This illustration may have first appeared in Dienes's
"Mathematical fun without numbers, letters,
formulae or equations, Part I,"
The New Zealand Mathematics Magazine,
Vol 39, no.1. (May 2002)*
Material related to New Zealand —
See January 29, 2003 in this journal.
Material related to mathematics (without "fun") —
The Representation of Minus One.
General context —
Bester's The Deceivers in this journal.
* Update of 5:48 PM ET Feb. 8, 2014 — From that publication —
"Nowhere will I give away how I stole these patterns
from the mathematician's secret closet." — Zoltan Dienes
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Saturday, October 5, 2013
Dream Girls
Her —
"Please wait as your operating system is initiated."
See also the Oct. 13, 2011, post
"Now, Here's My Plan"
and Bester's The Deceivers —
|
His excitement drove him into the workshop to get a better view of the end product on the giant prime video of his computer. During those few moments the development had accelerated into its dénouement, for he arrived just in time to have the huge screen explode into his face. Demi Jeroux burst out of the computer in a shower of plastic particles, rolled and sprawled on top of him. She was naked, sweating, trembling. “Golly!” she gasped. “Getting in was easy compared to getting out. Are you hurt, darling?” “I’m fine. I’m great. I’m ennobled. I’m stupefied. Hi, hey. Hi, my love. Hi, my darling sprite. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like that?” |
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Sunday, May 19, 2013
Sermon
Best vs. Bester
The previous post ended with a reference mentioning Rosenhain.
For a recent application of Rosenhain's work, see
Desargues via Rosenhain (April 1, 2013).
From the next day, April 2, 2013:
"The proof of Desargues' theorem of projective geometry
comes as close as a proof can to the Zen ideal.
It can be summarized in two words: 'I see!' "
– Gian-Carlo Rota in Indiscrete Thoughts (1997)
Also in that book, originally from a review in Advances in Mathematics ,
Vol. 84, Number 1, Nov. 1990, p. 136:
See, too, in the Conway-Sloane book, the Galois tesseract …
and, in this journal, Geometry for Jews and The Deceivers , by Bester.
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Sunday, October 16, 2011
Synergy*
(Continued from 24 hours ago)
Saturday evening NY lottery: 302 and 0181.
For 302, see OCODE. For 0181, see the bridge
between page 180 and page 181 in
Disjunctive Poetics by Peter Quartermain
(Cambridge University Press, 1992).
* For some narrative related to the title,
see The Deceivers by Alfred Bester.
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Friday, October 14, 2011
Plan 9 (continued)
"All this he knew, but what he didn’t know was that he resonated to the Anima Mundi which produced his extraordinary synergic pattern sense… what I call a 'Phane Sense,' from the Greek phainein meaning to show . It was this phane sense that enabled him to be shown things from apparently unrelated facts and events and synergize them into a whole."
— Alfred Bester, The Deceivers
The Tiffany Epiphany — from Elizabeth Osborne's
Vocabulary from Latin and Greek Roots IV
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Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Wednesday June 6, 2007
It is now 3:07 AM
June 7 in New Zealand.
Today at Cullinane College:
June 7 in New Zealand.
Today at Cullinane College:
Examination Day
(For the college curriculum,
see the New Zealand
Qualifications Authority.)
If Cullinane College were Hogwarts–
Last-minute exam info:
The Lapis Philosophorum
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
— Aion, by C. G. Jung"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe."
— The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
And from Bester's The Deceivers:
Meta Physics
"'… Think of a match. You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It's the chess legend for real.'
'I don't know it.'
'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.'
'That doesn't sound like much.'
'So the rajah said. …'"
Related material:
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Saturday, February 3, 2007
Saturday February 3, 2007
“The church bells
all were broken.“
“Emergentism claims that a whole is ‘something more than the sum of its parts,’ or has properties that cannot be understood in terms of the properties of the parts.”
all were broken.“
— Don McLean
“Emergentism claims that a whole is ‘something more than the sum of its parts,’ or has properties that cannot be understood in terms of the properties of the parts.”
— Michael Silberstein, “Reduction, Emergence and Explanation” (pdf), Chapter Five in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, no matter what you name it.”
— Alfred Bester, Chapter Eight, “The Search,” in The Deceivers
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Sunday, October 2, 2005
Sunday October 2, 2005
Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens
Readings for today:
At the Wallace Stevens online concordance, search for X and for primitive.
In the e-book edition of Bester's The Deceivers, search for X.
"We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,
Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air."
— Wallace Stevens,
Oct. 2, 1879 – Aug. 2, 1955,
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
IX.1-18, from The Auroras of Autumn,
Knopf, NY (1950)
Related material:
(Added Monday, Oct. 3, 8:45 AM)
"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?
He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.
Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."
— Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005
Presenting…
Spear Daddy!
Continuing Bester's Maori theme,
students from Cullinane College:
(See Literature and Geography.)
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Monday, May 23, 2005
Monday May 23, 2005
From the J. Paul Getty Trust:
"I've recently had it brought to my attention that the current accepted primary colors are magenta, cyan, and yellow. I teach elementary art and I'm wondering if I really need to point out that fact or if I should continue referring to the primary colors the way I always have — red, yellow, and blue! Anyone have an opinion?"
Color vs. Pigment
("CMYK" at Whatis.com):
("CMYK" at Whatis.com):
"There is a fundamental difference between color and pigment. Color represents energy radiated…. Pigments, as opposed to colors, represent energy that is not absorbed…."
Illustrations from
Color Box Applet:
Color Box Applet:
Another good background page
for elementary color education:Colored Shadow Explorations.A good starting point for
non-elementary education:
for elementary color education:Colored Shadow Explorations.A good starting point for
non-elementary education:
The "Color" category in Wikipedia.Further background:
From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:
"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."
|
From Bester's The Deceivers (1981):
He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk's cell,
p a t t e r n s |
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Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Wednesday May 11, 2005
Goodbye Girl
From a goodbye letter
by a girl named
Lucero in Cuernavaca
in the early 1960’s:
“Si me de veras quieres,
deja me en paz.”
(See Shining Forth.)
Today’s birthdays —
Natasha Richardson,
Martha Quinn,
Frances Fisher —
remind me of
Natasha Richardson,
Martha Quinn,
Frances Fisher —
remind me of
|
The Sprite and the Synergist Three drinks later he was suddenly inspired. “What I need right now is a girl to lose myself in. That’s the only way to wait for a pattern to show.”
One of his reciprocal Rogues (he had a dozen alternate selves) answered, “Feel free, but you left your big red book in the workshop.” “Why, for jigjeeze sake, can’t I have the little black book, famed in song and story?” “Why can’t you remember a phone number? Never mind. Shall we join the ladies?” He made three calls, all negative. He had three more drinks, all positive. He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk’s cell, thrashed, swore, and slept at last, dreaming crazed p a t t e r n s |
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Saturday, July 10, 2004
Saturday July 10, 2004
Oxford Word
From today's obituary in The New York Times of R. W. Burchfield, editor of A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary:
"Robert William Burchfield was born Jan. 27, 1923, in Wanganui, New Zealand. In 1949, after earning an undergraduate degree at Victoria University College in Wellington, he accepted a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.
There, he read Medieval English literature with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien."
For more on literature and Wanganui, see my entry of Jan. 19. 2003, from which the following is taken.
|
"Cullinane College is a Catholic co-educational college, set to open in Wanganui (New Zealand) on the 29th of January, 2003." The 29th of January will be the 40th anniversary of the death of Saint Robert Frost. New Zealand, perhaps the most beautiful country on the planet, is noted for being the setting of the film version of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a devout Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien. For other New Zealand themes, see Alfred Bester's novels The Stars My Destination and The Deceivers. The original title of The Stars My Destination was Tyger! Tyger! after Blake's poem. For more on fearful symmetry, see the work of Marston Conder, professor of mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. |
Friday, September 5, 2003
Friday September 5, 2003
Recommended Reading
for Cullinane College:
- Trifecta
- The Pegasus Prize
- The Bone People
- Alchemical Kubrick 2001
- The Diamond Archetype
- The Deceivers
- The Demolished Man
- To Ride Pegasus
“The Talented form their own society and that’s as it should be: birds of a feather. No, not birds. Winged horses! Ha! Yes, indeed. Pegasus… the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy. A bloody good symbol for us. You’d see a lot from the back of a winged horse…”
— To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey.
“Born in Cambridge, MA, on April Fool’s Day 1926 (‘I’ve tried very hard to live up to being an April-firster,’ she quips), McCaffrey graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947.”
Born on March 9, 1947, in Christchurch, Keri Hulme won the Pegasus Prize for her Maori novel, The Bone People.
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Sunday, January 19, 2003
Sunday January 19, 2003
|
Literature “Literature begins |
|
“Cullinane College is a Catholic co-educational college, set to open in Wanganui (New Zealand) on the 29th of January, 2003.”
The 29th of January will be the 40th anniversary of the death of Saint Robert Frost.
New Zealand, perhaps the most beautiful country on the planet, is noted for being the setting of the film version of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a devout Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien.
Here is a rather Catholic meditation on life and death in Tolkien’s work:
Frodo: “…He deserves death.”
Gandalf: “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
Personally, I prefer Clint Eastwood’s version of this dialogue:
The Schofield Kid: “Well, I guess they had it coming.”
William Munny: “We all have it coming, Kid.”
For other New Zealand themes, see Alfred Bester’s novels The Stars My Destination and The Deceivers.
The original title of The Stars My Destination was Tyger! Tyger! after Blake’s poem.
For more on fearful symmetry, see the work of Marston Conder, professor of mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
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