Log24

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From Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column of June 9, 2002:

“The shape of the government is not as important as the policy of the government. If he makes the policy aggressive and pre-emptive, the president can conduct the war on terror from the National Gallery of Art.”

To order, see the
Amazing Music Box & Gifts Company.

As a Little Child

Today’s birthdays:

Francis Ford Coppola and
Russell Crowe.

From MindfulGroup.com:

ART WARS:
Mother of Beauty

In memory of architect Pierre Koenig…

Mother of Beauty: A Note on Modernism.

“… Case Study House #22 … was high drama — one in which the entire city becomes part of the architect’s composition. Approached along a winding street set high in the Hollywood Hills, the house first appears as a blank concrete screen. From here, the visitor steps out onto a concrete deck that overlooks a swimming pool. Just beyond it, the house’s living room — enclosed in a glass-and steel-frame — cantilevers out from the edge of the hill toward the horizon.

The house was immortalized in a now famous image taken by the architectural photographer Julius Shulman. In it, two women, clad in immaculate white cocktail dresses, are perched on the edge of their seats in the glass-enclosed living room, their pose suggesting a kind of sanitized suburban bliss. A night view of the city spreads out beneath them, an endless grid of twinkling lights that perfectly captures the infinite hopes of the postwar American dream….

    “My blue dream…”  
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Perhaps no house, in fact, better sums up the mix of outward confidence and psychic unease that defined Cold War America….”

— Los Angeles Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff

Religious remarks in the Times Literary Supplement
issue dated April 7, 2023 (Good Friday) suggest a
review of other remarks — from July 1, 2019 —now
tagged The Exploded Cube.  Some will prefer more useful
types of explosions.

The New York Times  reports an April 7 death —

For the title, see Mnemonic and April 7, 2005.

Continued from Music Box – The Theory (April 21)
in memory of jazz enthusiast Ann Sneed,
who reportedly died in Las Vegas at 87 on that date.

Hollywood homicide detective Harry Bosch at home.

See also Mother of Beauty (April 7, 2004).

In memory of a mathematician who
reportedly died at 64 on April 4 

Part I: A review by that mathematician — 

Part II: The mathematician's funeral —

"Funeral service will be held at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, April 7, 2017 . . . ."
— See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dispatch/
obituary.aspx?n=David-Mark-Goss&pid=184946410

This journal at 1:37 p.m. ET on Friday, April 7, 2017 —

Related material:
The previous post and posts tagged The Gray Legacy.

"Skip the preface, and it's in the bag!"

— Character in a short story by Nabokov,
"Ultima Thule," in The New Yorker  of April 7, 1973

From the American Mathematical Society today —

See also Huber-Dyson in this  journal.

A heavenly image from yesterday's
Sunday Dinner  link "milestone award"—

An Oprah-related quote from the Tuesday, April 7,
ceremonial dedication of the Maya Angelou stamp—

“They say Easter was Sunday, but we are still
having church,” promised MSNBC talk show
host Melissa Harris-Perry, the ceremony’s emcee…."

In that spirit … a different sort of kitchen —

The Scholarly Kitchen —

Continued from a post of April 10, 2015 —

  
Maya Angelou stamp with
misattributed quote and 
Oprah on April 7, 2015

Trailer for "Welcome to Me" published on Feb. 23, 2015 —

Related material:  Manifest O  (April 1, 2015).

From an informative April 7 essay in The Nation —

See also searches in this  journal for Core and for Kernel.
See as well Fabric Design and Symplectic.

George Steiner —

"Man is, in Lévi-Strauss's view, a mythopoetic primate
(it's a difficult phrase but we don't have a better one)…."

Wikipedia —

"Primate is a title or rank bestowed on some bishops in certain Christian churches." 

Pope Benedict XVI at the 2012 Easter Vigil on April 7 —

"The great hymn of the Exsultet, which the deacon sings at the beginning of the Easter liturgy, points us quite gently towards a further aspect. It reminds us that this object, the candle, has its origin in the work of bees. So the whole of creation plays its part. In the candle, creation becomes a bearer of light.

But in the mind of the Fathers, the candle also in some sense contains a silent reference to the Church. The cooperation of the living community of believers in the Church in some way resembles the activity of bees. It builds up the community of light."

http://twitter.com/#!/skdh —

“Next to the bookcase stands a wooden cabinet with 24 drawers that looks like something you might have seen in a library decades ago, or perhaps in an old apothecary. The drawers are marked with the names of her novels or characters in the novels and crammed with indexed notes.

She pulls open a drawer marked ‘Lozen,’ the name of a main female character in another historical western novel, ‘The Ghost Warrior,’ and reads a few of the index tabs: ‘social relationships, puberty, death, quotes….'”

— From an article on Lucia St. Clair Robson in The Baltimore Sun  by Arthur Hirsch, dated 1:31 p.m. EDT April 30, 2011*

From this  journal later that same day —

Robson’s most recent novel is Last Train from Cuernavaca .

“A corpse will be transported by express!”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

* Update of 5:48 AM EDT May 3—
The same article was also published with a different  dateline— April 28.
Enthusiasts of synchronicity may lament the confusion, or they may
turn to April 28 in this journal for a different  24-part invention.
See also Art Wars, April 7, 2003 and White Horse .

From University Book Store, Seattle, Washington—

Related material—

From a page on Reality Hunger: A Manifesto  at DavidShields.com—

"The book's epigraph is a statement from Picasso: 'All art is theft.'"

Update of 3 PM EDT April 7—

"… we get inspiration from everywhere, and there's a bright line between inspiration and slavish imitation. (I was going to throw in the Picasso quote 'All art is theft' here, but I've looked that up in both the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (and the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, just in case) and in the new Yale Book of Quotations, and can't find it. So I'll just have to steal without the glamour of Picasso having said it was okay.)"

— Weblog post by Erin McKean

The “greatest generation” theme from Art Wars– April 7, 2003 continues in two obituaries from this morning’s New York Times:

The first obituary says that Goldberg

“saw abstract painting… as ‘still the primary visual challenge of our time. It might get harder and harder to make an abstract image that’s believable, but I think that just makes the challenge greater.'”  The Times says that Goldberg was a veteran of Merrill’s Marauders in World War II (as well as of the last century’s art wars).

The second obituary notes that Astor’s books include A Blood-Dimmed Tide (a phrase from Yeats)– an account of the Battle of the Bulge– and a biography of Dr. Josef Mengele.

Both men died on Sunday, December 30, 2007. From Log24 on that date, an abstract image and a cinematic portrait of Dr. Mengele:

 

“As though their knowledge of the quantum secrets came with the power of prophecy, some three dozen of Europe’s best physicists ended their 1932 meeting in Copenhagen with a parody of Goethe’s ‘Faust.’….

It was only in retrospect that the silliness became profound. The players were becoming possessors of ‘a truth with implicit powers of good and evil,’ Gino Segrè writes in ‘Faust in Copenhagen,’ his inventive new book about the era. And ‘the devil… was in the details.'” –George Johnson

Seven

“Research & Ideas” memo from Harvard Business School dated April 17, 2006:

“The word experience comes from the Latin words ex pericolo, which mean ‘from danger.'”

— Etymology by Professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard University.  Badaracco gives no evidence for his dubious claim.

Related (if only temporally):
Easter Monday, April 17, 2006.

      — Online Etymology Dictionary

The title of this entry refers to the time it was posted. Related references to seven: April 7, 2003, and today’s previous entry.

See also an entry from 2/29, 2004
(Leap Day and Oscar Night):

Harvard persons from parts of the university that are more scholarly than the Business School may sneer at the above-quoted Online Etymology Dictionary.  They can consult the following:

On “experience”

From J.L. Austin, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play:

“Scholars, such as Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymolgisches Worterbuch, 1959), trace ‘experience’ right back to hypothetical Indo-European base or root *per-, ‘to attempt, venture, risk,’ whence the Greek peira,”experience,” the source of our word ’empirical.’ It is also the verbal root which derives the Germanic *feraz, giving rise to Old English faer, “danger, sudden calamity,” whence Modern English ‘fear.’ Already, we see the ‘cognitive’ directions taken by * per-, through the Greek route, and affective ones, through the Germanic — which would have interested Dilthey, one may be sure! But more directly ‘experience’ derives, via Middle English and Old French, from the Latin experientia, denoting ‘trial, proof, experiment,’ itself generated from experiens, the present participle of experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from from ex-, ‘out’ + base per as in peritus, ‘experienced,’ ‘having learned by trying.’ The suffixed extended form of *per is peri-tlo-, whence the Latin periclum, periculum, “trial, danger, peril. Once more, we find experience linked with risk, straining towards ‘drama,’ crisis, rather than bland cognitive learning!”

“… Finally, ‘experiment,’ like ‘experience,’ is derived from Latin experiri “to try or test.” If we put these various senses together we have a ‘laminated’ semantic system focused on ‘experience,’ which portrays it as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, an exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we ‘fare’ ‘fearfully’ through ‘perils,’ taking ‘experimental’ steps. …” (17-18)

The above is taken from an anonymous weblog entry.  The author of the entry identified the source as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.  The author of the entry falsely stated that the author of this book was J. L. Austin.  In fact, the book was written by Victor Turner, apparently the same philosophical sociologist whom we encountered in the previous entry and in the Log24 entry for the recent feast of St. Max Black.  Turner may have been quoting Austin; pages from the book are not available online.  Another author, however, says the quotation is by Turner himself.  See Rena Fraden’s Imagining Medea, pp. 218-219.

Today’s previous entry is a sort of “ritual passage” for a Nobel Prize winner. For a ritual passage more directly related to Professor Badaracco, see the Brookline TAB obituary of his 23-year-old daughter, who died on Monday, August 21, 2006.  According to today’s online Harvard Crimson, “she was walking along Hammond Street in Newton [Mass.] when an 84-year-old driver jumped the curb and struck her.”

From her Brookline TAB obituary of Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006:

“Funeral services will be held Friday [Aug. 25, 2006] at 10 a.m. at St. Mary’s of the Assumption Church, at 67 Harvard St.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Centro Romero Community Center in Chicago: 6216 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60660.”

April 7 two years ago:

Welcome to our imaginative and inspiring toy catalog!

Today is Wednesday 7-April 2004. On this day in 30 Jesus crucified by Roman troops in Jerusalem (scholars’ estimate).

11:07:16

"Serious numbers
will always be heard."
— Paul Simon (64 on Oct. 13)

"Her wall is filled with pictures."
— Chuck Berry (79 today)

Collegiate Church of
St. Mary Magdalene,
Atrani, Amalfi Coast, Italy:
 
"An interior made exterior"
— Wallace Stevens

Big Dreams

“For more than a century, Los Angeles has been synonymous with big dreams. The Australian writer and critic Clive James said it this way. ‘Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like… The fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.'”

— Today’s inaugural address by Mayor Villaraigosa

See also the previous entry.

Update of 2:24 PM July 2:

Yesterday afternoon I picked up a copy of George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation I had ordered.  A check of Amazon.com to see what others had to say about this book yielded the following:

“Steiner’s account of Hope as something exclusively transcendental and relative to the future is poor and superficial: the person who hopes is not only walking ‘towards’ Eternal Life, but is already walking ‘in’ Eternal Life, walking the Kingdom.”

— Matías Cordero, Santiago, Chile

See also an entry of April 7, 2005, Nine is a Vine.

The Mysteries of 26

My entry of May 26, 2003 —

Many Dimensions — Why 26? —

dealt with the question of whether this number, said to be of significance (as a number of dimensions) in theoretical physics, has any purely mathematical properties of interest.

That entry contained the above figure, a so-called Levi graph illustrating point/line incidence in the finite projective plane with 13 points and 13 lines, PG(2,3).

It turns out that in a paper of April 7, 2000, John H. Conway and Christopher S. Simons discussed a close connection between this plane and the Monster group.  See

26 Implies the Bimonster 

(Journal of Algebra. Vol. 235, no. 2.
MR 2001k:20028).

Conway had written about such a connection as early as 1985.

I apologize for not knowing about this sooner, and so misleading any mathematical readers about the number 26, which it seems does have considerable purely mathematical significance.

Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil
on Shakespeare’s Birthday

Tony Scherman on an April 7, 1968, recording by Nina Simone:

“…nobody could telescope more emotion into a single, idiosyncratically turned syllable (listen to the way she says the word “Savannah” in her spoken intro to “Sunday in Savannah.” It breaks your heart — and she ain’t even singin’ yet!).”

See also the following entries on midnight in the garden:

Trinity, Oct. 25, 2002

Midnight in the Garden, Oct. 26, 2002

Point of No Return, Dec. 10, 2002

Culture Clash at Midnight, Dec. 11, 2002

Dead Poets Society, Dec. 13, 2002

For the Dark Lady, Dec. 18, 2002

Nightmare Alley, Dec. 21, 2002

For the Green Lady, Dec. 21, 2002

“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”

— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness Isaiah 5:20

As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her….  The Archivist

The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today Cole Porter