Log24

The phrase "funk to a reality" in the previous post suggests …

For the Toronto Star —

DECODING MATHEMATICS AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
"Dissecting a passage of text in a language other than one's
native language is a daunting task and requires a strategy.
When dissecting mathematical language, readers are faced
with the same challenges, whether the mathematics is in
the form of an equation or in the form of a word problem." 

— https://www.jstor.org/stable/20876351

The problem, in this case, is with the word "functoriality."

The solution:  See the following article.

* A title for Harlan Kane, suggested by obituaries
from The New York Times  (this afternoon) and from
CBC News (on May 14, below) . . .

. . . as well as by illustrations shown here on May 13 and by
a screenwriter quoted here on May 12 —

“When I die,” he liked to say, “I’m going to have written
on my tombstone, ‘Finally, a plot!’”

— Robert D. McFadden in The New York Times

Another quote that seems relevant —

“I need a photo opportunity, I want a shot at redemption.
 Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.”
 — Paul Simon

"It's hard to get by just upon a smile, girl."

A search in this  journal for "Toronto Star" yields A Problem.

Thesis —

A 1911 essay by T. E. Hulme,
"Romanticism and Classicism" —

"There is a general tendency to think that verse means
little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion.
People say: 'But how can you have verse without sentiment?'
You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival
to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death
of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap
caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should
have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry
is utterly inconceivable to them."

Antithesis —

A 1961 reaction against Hulme,
"Against Dryness" —

"Against the consolations of form, the clean crystalline
work, the simplified fantasy-myth, we must pit the
destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic
idea of character.

Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is
destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination."

— Iris Murdoch, January 1961

Synthesis —

The tortoise of the previous post suggests . . .

"Is it the good turtle soup
 or merely the mock?" 

Related material from the above
Toronto premiere date —

Solomon and the Ring.

See also Log24 remarks from the date of Greene's death
in posts now tagged Bregnans. 

A page related to Eleanor Cook's "wonderful first line"
quoted above from A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens :

A Reader's Guide to Eleanor Cook —

Suggested by the previous post …

Wikipedia —

" 'Dark Horse' is a song recorded by American singer
Katy Perry featuring rapper Juicy J. It was originally
released on September 17, 2013, by Capitol Records
as the first promotional single from Perry's fourth
studio album, Prism (2013)."

See also a link from the above date in this journal —

"In the Neighborhood of Mathematical Space,"
by Karen Shenfeld (1993).

Publisher's description of a book about everything —

"When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts—
indeed, so great that the sum far transcends the parts
and represents something utterly new and different—
we call that phenomenon emergence."

— Oxford University Press

Titles for Harlan Kane, from the date that
the above book's author reportedly died —

• The Toronto Problem
• The Barth Spielfeld
• The Zero Obit
• The Green Night.

For Katy Perry

Halftime Show — 

The "Pyramid Dance" from this journal
on Dec. 3, 2014, the date of death for
mathematics author James Stewart —

Backstory:

See a TIME story from yesterday:

See also a post from the above date:

Friday, May 23, 2014

She  Meets Her

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:01 PM

She :

The White Goddess in this journal.

Her :

“Eventually we see snow particles….”
— Screenplay by Spike Jonze

She:

The White Goddess in this journal.

Her:

“Eventually we see snow particles….”
— Screenplay by Spike Jonze

Excerpt from a poem by Johanna Skibsrud
(Toronto Quarterly , April 2, 2011)—

Related material: Into the Bereshit.

See also the remarks on space in Skibsrud's
January 2012 doctoral thesis at the University
of Montreal—

" 'The nothing that is': An Ethics of Absence
    Within the Poetry of Wallace Stevens."

— as well as Bull Run I and Bull Run II.

(Continued)

Google News this morning —

For some remarks in greater depth, see 
"In the Neighborhood of Mathematical Space,"
by Karen Shenfeld (1993).

For Women's Day—

• Reviews of GCB  from Dallas and Toronto
• Sweater, a post of 2:02 PM EST Monday
  (1:02 PM Monday, Dallas time)
• Schedule for a Monday afternoon event in Dallas
• NY Times  front page Monday evening, featuring
  remarks by "The Stone" philosopher Colin McGinn
• A 10 PM Monday link to a Harvard Crimson  review
  of a book by McGinn

Everett Ellin, pioneer of art museum technology, died on September 16th.

"Few bastions of the humanities have withstood the march of technology more tenaciously than the art museum,” Mr. Ellin wrote in a journal article in 1969. "But now, at long last, the computer has entered the house of the Muse and— like the man who came to dinner— the guest is here to stay. It would behoove the host to know something about his visitor’s care and feeding."

— Margalit Fox in tonight's online New York Times

From this journal on the date of Ellin's death—

Click image for some context.

Serious Men, or
Alarm Bells for the Goys
(A Sequel to Household Name)

(Also on 11 Sept 2006– Sontag's Sermon)

German Catholic sex abuse scandals draw link to Pope

Wed Mar 10, 2010 9:03pm IST

By Tom Heneghan, Reuters Religion Editor

PARIS (Reuters)–

"… The alarm bells are tolling all the more urgently in Rome, where tenuous links run from Bavarian boarding schools all the way to the German-born Pope Benedict. Critics are asking what he knew and did then and what he will do now.

His brother, Rev. Georg Ratzinger, has admitted to slapping boys in his Regensburg choir repeatedly."

For some background on the brother's admission, see today's Belfast Telegraph.

Related material: "Beware the Jabberwock!" — Joshua

Alice and Joshua in Central Park

"You are retracing your steps."
— Jacques Derrida

“What, nephew,” said the king,
“is the wind in that door?”
SIR THOMAS MALORY
Le Morte d’Arthur

— Epigraph to
A Wind in the Door,
by Madeleine L’Engle

Vaine the ambition of Kings,
Who seeke by trophies and dead things,
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

— John Webster,
The Devil’s Law Case

From Eliot’s
The Waste Land,

Part II, “A Game of Chess”:

Eliot’s note:
118. Cf. Webster: “Is the wind
in that door still?”

The line cited in Eliot’s note
is from John Webster’s
The Devil’s Law Case,
3.2.162.

"Professor Krauss even uses many of the same decorations with which she festooned earlier volumes. Bataille’s photograph of a big toe, for example, which I like to think of as her mascot, reappears. As does her favorite doodle, a little graph known as a 'Klein Group' or 'L Schema' whose sides and diagonals sport arrows pointing to corners labeled with various opposing pairs: e.g., 'ground' and 'not ground,' 'figure' and 'not figure.' Professor Krauss seems to believe that this device, lifted from the pages of structuralist theory, illuminates any number of deep mysteries: the nature of modernism, to begin with, but also the essence of gender relations, self-consciousness, perception, vision, castration anxiety, and other pressing conundrums that, as it happens, she has trouble distinguishing from the nature of modernism. Altogether, the doodle is a handy thing to have around. One is not surprised that Professor Krauss reproduces it many times in her new book."
 

From Drid Williams,
The Semiotics of Human Action,
Ritual, and Dance:

This is closely related to
Beckett's "Quad" figure

A Jungian on this six-line figure: "They are the same six lines that exist in the I Ching…. Now observe the square more closely: four of the lines are of equal length, the other two are longer…. For this reason symmetry cannot be statically produced and a dance results."   — Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time (1970)

and to the Greimas "semiotic square":

"People have believed in the fundamental character of binary oppositions since at least classical times. For instance, in his Metaphysics Aristotle advanced as primary oppositions: form/matter, natural/unnatural, active/passive, whole/part, unity/variety, before/after and being/not-being.*  But it is not in isolation that the rhetorical power of such oppositions resides, but in their articulation in relation to other oppositions. In Aristotle's Physics the four elements of earth, air, fire and water were said to be opposed in pairs. For more than two thousand years oppositional patterns based on these four elements were widely accepted as the fundamental structure underlying surface reality….

The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully…."

 

— Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners.

* Compare Chandler's list of Aristotle's primary oppositions with Aristotle's list (also in the  Metaphysics) of Pythagorean oppositions (see Midrash Jazz Quartet).
 

Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints. Today is the Feast of All Souls.

Those of us who are not saints may profit from the writings of both the saintly Thomas Wolfe and the more secular Tom Wolfe.

From Log24.net on the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, a quotation from St. Thomas Wolfe:

See also a Wolfe quotation from the Feast of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins in 2003. 

For the Feast of St. Thomas Wolfe himself, see the Log24 entries of Sept. 15 (the date of Wolfe’s death).

Readings more suited to today, All Souls’ Day, than to yesterday, All Saints’:

Bright Young Things,
Andrew at St. Andrews,
and, of course,
Under the Volcano.

Andrew at St. Andrews recommends the remarks, in The Guardian, of Tom Wolfe on today’s election.

The fact that the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s new novel is a virgin from the hill country of North Carolina, combined with the above entry on Nell from the Feast of St. Ignatius, brings us back to the earlier Wolfe…  For the later, secular Wolfe on the earlier, saintly Wolfe, see

Be Afraid.
Be Very Afraid.

Click on picture for details.

Frances Hansen died on Friday, July 9. For more on words and The Roots of Coincidence (the subject of the previous entry), see the entries of July 8-10.

Feel lucky?
Well, do you?

  This entry was inspired by the following…
1.  A British blogger’s comment today.  This man, feeling like a miserable failure himself, was cheered up by the following practical joke: “If really fed up you could try putting in, miserable failure, (no quote marks) into Google and pressing the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button.”

2. The page, excerpts from which are shown  above, that you get if you put lucky (no quote marks) into Google and press the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

3. My own entries of May 31 on Language Games and of June 1 on language and history,  Seize the Day and One Brief  Shining Moment.

4.  The related June 1 entry of Loren Webster, Carpe Diem, on the Marilyn Monroe rose.  Images from Carpe and Shining are combined below:

5.  The fact that the “day” to be seized in Language Games is numbered 22, and that on day 22 of November 1963,  the  following died:

C. S. Lewis
John F. Kennedy
  Aldous Huxley.

6. The fact that November 22 is the feast of  Cecilia, patron saint of music.

7. Yesterday’s entry about the alignment of stars, combined with the alignment of Venus with Apollo (i. e., the sun) scheduled for June 8.

All of the above suggest the following readings from unholy scripture:

A.  The “long twilight struggle” speech of JFK

B.  “The Platters were singing ‘Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,’ and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information.  The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was all information.”

— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

C.  “I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady.  Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it.  Live burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of arms.  The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?”

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

Room 1010

Continuing the hotel theme of the previous entry….

John Gregory Dunne has a letter in the New York Review of Books of December 20 (St. Emil's Day in the previous entry), 1990.  In this letter, he reveals that he and his wife had at one time worked on a Grand Hotel screenplay based in Las Vegas.

For related material in memory of Dunne, see In Lieu of Rosebud, which contains entries for 10/10-10/12, 2002.
 

Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

Resurrection

The previous entry, on Christian theology, does not imply that all religion is bad.  Consider, for instance, the following from a memorial web page: 

“Al Grierson’s song Resurrection was sung by Ray Wylie Hubbard, on his outstanding Dangerous Spirits album. The song is awesome, and fits right into Ray Wylie’s spirit ‘and an angel lay on a mattress and spoke of history and death with perfume on her lingerie and whiskey on her breath . . . he’s loading up his saddlebags on the edge of wonder, one is filled with music and the other’s filled with thunder.’ Wow.”

Amen.
Grierson died on November 2, 2000
— All Souls Day, Dia de los Muertos.

My own favorite resurrection story is “Damnation Morning,” by Fritz Leiber; see Why Me? 

For more on the Day of the Dead, see Under the Volcano.

These are, of course, just stories, but may reflect some as yet unknown truth.

By the way, thanks, Joni, for leading me to KHYI.com on the day of the Toronto Stones concert.

Toronto Day

Today is said to be the day Toronto was founded, and is the day, they say, of what will be the largest concert in the history of Canada….

The Rolling Stones at
Downsview Park, Toronto. 

Comparisons to Woodstock have been made, with attendance expected to be about half a million strong.  Thoughts of Woodstock reminded me of Joni Mitchell, and so I sought Joni’s advice for an alternative to the spirit of this event, recalling her words

Oh honey you turn me on
I’m a radio
I’m a country station
I’m a little bit corny
………………………………
I’m a broadcasting tower
Waving for you
And I’m sending you out
This signal here
I hope you can pick it up
Loud and clear

A search for the promised
country station yielded….

The redneck alternative….

KHYI 95.3 FM Plano, Texas TWANG ‘EM!

Today’s culture wars quote:

“God help me, I do love it so.” 

Orwell’s question, according to
an admirer of leftist Noam Chomsky:

“When so much of the BS is right out in the open,
why is it that we know so little about it?
Why don’t we see what’s right in front of our eyes?”

Oscar

Deep Chomsky: Lying, Truth-Telling, and the Social Order

Michael  Moore

“First of all, I’d like to thank the Academy….”
— Quotation attributed to Plato

The New Yorker of March 31, 2003, discusses leftist academic Noam Chomsky.  The online edition provides a web page listing pro-Chomsky links.

Chomsky’s influence is based in part on the popularity of his half-baked theories on linguistics, starting in the 1950’s with “deep structure” and “transformational,” or “generative,” grammar.

Chomsky has abandoned many of his previous ideas and currently touts what he calls The Minimalist Program.

For some background on Chomsky’s recent linguistic notions, see the expository essay “Syntactic Theory,” by Elly van Gelderen of the Arizona State University English Department.  Van Gelderen lists her leftist political agenda on her “Other Interests” page.  Her department may serve as an example of how leftists have converted many English departments in American universities to propaganda factories.

Some attacks on Chomsky’s scholarship:

The Emperor’s New Linguistics

The New Grammarians’ Funeral

Beyond Chomsky

Could Chomsky Be Wrong? 

Forty-four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken

Call for Papers, Chomsky 2003

Chomsky’s (Mis)Understanding of Human Thinking

Anatomy of a Revolution… Chomsky in 1962

…Linguistic Theory: The Rationality of Noam Chomsky

A Bibliography

Some attacks on Chomsky’s propaganda:

LeftWatch.com Chomsky page

Destructive Generation excerpt

The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky

Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers

Chomsky and Plato’s Diamond

Like another purveyor of leftist nonsense, Jacques Derrida, Chomsky is fond of citing Plato as a precedent.  In particular, what Chomsky calls “Plato’s problem” is discussed in Plato’s Meno.  For a look at the diamond figure that plays a central role in that dialogue, see Diamond Theory.  For an excellent overview of related material in Plato, see Theory of Forms.

ART WARS:

The Reader
Over Your Shoulder

See also last night’s entry on “Red Dragon” and
this news story on a Chinese cannibal-artist
from today’s Toronto Globe and Mail.

For the Dark Lady

On this midnight in the garden of good and evil, our new site music is “Nica’s Dream.”

From a website on composer Horace Silver:

“Horace Silver apparently composed Nica’s Dream (1956) for Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter-Rothschild, an English aristocrat and a very dear friend of his. She was known to the New York press as the Jazz Baroness and to the black musicians for whom she was something of a patron, simply as Nica. Her apartment in the fashionable Hotel Stanhope on Fifth Avenue became a ‘hospitality suite for some of the greatest jazz players of the day, whom she treated generously.’ (Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, University of Toronto Press, 1985, 1:248)

This music is not unrelated to the work of Thomas Pynchon.  From an essay by Charles Hollander:  

“There are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as V., who started her career with ‘…a young crude Mata Hari act.’ (V.; 386)….  Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext. Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us to attend in V.: disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, ‘The Big One, the century’s master cabal,’ and ‘the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name’ (V.; 226)….” 

See also my journal entry for the December 16-17 midnight, “Just Seventeen.”

Great Simplicity

Today

is the day that Daisetsu Suzuki attained satori,
according to the Zen Calendar.  “Daisetsu” is
said to mean “Great Simplicity.”

For those who prefer Harry Potter and
Diagon Alley, here is another calendar:

To Have and Have Not

Those who prefer traditional Western religions may like a site on the Trinity that contains this:

“Zen metaphysics is perhaps most succinctly set forth in the words ‘not-two.”  But even when he uses this expression, Suzuki is quick to assert that it implies no monism.  Not-two, it is claimed, is not the same as one.*  But when Suzuki discusses the relationship of Zen with Western mysticism, it is more difficult to escape the obvious monistic implications of his thinking.  Consider the following:

We are possessed of the habit of looking at Reality by dividing it into two… It is all due to the human habit of splitting one solid Reality into two, and the result is that my ‘have’ is no ‘have’ and my ‘have not’ is no ‘have not.’  While we are actually passing, we insist that the gap is impassable.**”

*See: Daisetz T. Suzuki, ‘Basic Thoughts Underlying  Eastern Ethical and Social Practice’ in Philosophy and Culture — East and West: East-West Philosophy in Practical Perspective, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), p. 429

** Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Mysticism Christian and Buddhist (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957, Unwin paperback, 1979), p. 57.

Personally, I am reminded by Suzuki’s satori on this date that today is the eve of the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.  I am also reminded by the rather intolerant tract on the Trinity quoted above that the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert at a test site named Trinity.  Of course, sometimes intolerance is justified.

Concluding unscientific postscript:

On the same day in 1896 that D. T. Suzuki attained satori,
lyricist Ira Gershwin was born.

Dies irae, dies illa.

From On All Hallows’ Eve, by Grace Chetwin:

“Please continue your account of Morgan le Fay.”

“People think of her as bad. They say that she tried to murder her brother, King Arthur of the Round Table…. But she did good things too. She gave Arthur his sword, Excalibur, and, well, when he lay dying, she and two other queens took him onto their barge and bore him from the world to heal his wounds and make him whole again. It was ‘… a dusky barge, Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,’ and the three queens wore ‘crowns of gold’….”

Greylen smiled. “Very good. You like this Morgan le Fay very much, it is clear.”….

“I know more than that,” Meg went on quickly. “She is also called Nimue and Vivian, but those names are wrong, too.  Her true name goes right back to the Mabinogion — that’s a really old collection of Welsh bardic tales.  Her real name is Rhiannon….”

In honor of Grace Chetwin, this site’s music is now a theme more suitable for All Hallows’ Eve.