Log24

The "1961" Oscars ceremony shown above was for the films of 1961.
The ceremony itself was held on April 9, 1962.

For a different Tiffany, see Tuesday's Another Day.

From a 1962 young-adult novel —

"There's something phoney in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten in the state of Camazotz."

Song adapted from a 1960 musical —

"In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happy-ever-aftering
Than here in Camazotz!"

"There is  such a thing as a desktop."

— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.

The previous post's search for Turing + Dyson yielded a
quotation from Kierkegaard on possibility and necessity. 
Further details —

See also . . .

"But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
     To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
     Between two worlds become much like each other…."

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Related obituary:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/obituaries/tom-cade-dead.html

Related date:

"as of Feb. 6, 2019" (from a post at 12 AM ET Feb. 7) —

"There is  such a thing as a four-dimensional finite affine space."
— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel by Madeleine L'Engle

See Harmonic Analysis in this journal.

See also Loop.

"Here we go loop de lie."

From the University of Notre Dame in an obituary dated June 17 —

Related material (update of 9:20 PM ET on June 19) —

For Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan —

See also a Log24 post from the above Cube Theory date —
April 12, 2016 — Lyrics for a Cartoon Graveyard — as well as . . .

(A sequel to the previous post, Up to Date) 

"Dr. Sekler lectured around the world, but one trip proved life-changing.
In 1962, the year he married, Dr. Sekler made his first trip to Nepal.
'It was the way it had been for centuries — a beautiful valley filled with
happy, peaceful people. It seemed like Shangri-La,' he told the Harvard
Gazette  in 2004."

— Bryan Marquard in The Boston Globe  today

See also "Eight is a gate" in this  journal.

(A prequel to an Ursula K. Le Guin story
in Fantastic  magazine, September 1962)

Cover art by Lloyd Birmingham for "Plane Jane"

Ursula K. Le Guin, in Amazing Stories , Sept. 1992, published
"The Rock That Changed Things" (pp. 9-13) and her story from
thirty years earlier, "April in Paris" (Fantastic Stories , Sept. 1962.)
The latter (pp. 14-19) was followed by some brief remarks (p. 19)
comparing the two stories.

For "The Rock," see Le Guin + Rock in this journal.

"April in Paris" is about time travel by means of an alchemist's
pentagram. The following figure from 1962 is in lieu of a pentagram —

See as well a search for 1962 in this journal.

"From 1962 to 1969 Mr. Moore was Simon Templar . . . ."

— The New York Times  online today

A related post — "Intruders for Mira" (Sept. 28, 2015).

A search for recent activity by the Liesl Schillinger of
the previous post yields …

Talk amongst yourselves.

Midrash for elitists —

The novel 2666  by Roberto Bolaño (see Bolaño in this journal
and Adam Kirsch in the above) and …

Matt Helm in Donald Hamilton's 1962 novel The Silencers —

"I cleaned up a little, went downstairs, and, rather than
get the pickup out of hock, paid sixty cents to have a taxi
take me to the international bridge. Two cents let me walk
across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The river bed was
almost dry. The usual skinny dark kids were playing their
usual incomprehensible games around the pools below
the bridge. Stepping off the south end of the span, I was
in a foreign country. Mexicans will tell you defensively that
Juarez isn't Mexico-that no border town is-but it certainly
isn't the United States of America, even though Avenida
Juarez, the street just south of the bridge, does bear a
certain resemblance to Coney Island. I brushed off a
purveyor of dirty pictures and shills for a couple of dirty
movie houses." 

Midrash for populists —

The photo in the New York Times  obituary
above is from the 1966 film based, very
loosely, on Donald Hamilton's The Silencers.

"All on a Saturday night" — Johnny Thunder, 1962

From Log24 earlier —

More recently, an image from the above March 18 VUDU date —

"On a Saturday night" — Johnny Thunder, 1962

"Only a peculiar can enter a time loop." — Tim Burton film, 2016

Highly qualified —

From Models and Metaphors , by Max Black,
Cornell University Press, 1962 —

I do not recommend the work of Lewin, nor that of a later
science groupie, Keith Devlin. 

In September 2014, Devlin wrote an ignorant column about
a sort of bad mathematical joke based on a divergent infinite series.

He has now returned to the topic, this time writing more about
its proper mathematical background: analytic continuation .

Lewin is to Devlin as Lévi-Strauss is to Chomsky.
None of these four should be taken very seriously.

Max Black, however, should .

From "Night Moves," by Bob Seger —

And oh, the wonder
Felt the lightning
Yeah, and we waited on the thunder
Waited on the thunder

I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far-off, I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain't it funny* how the night moves?

See as well Johnny Thunder on Diamond Records in 1962 —

* Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.

"The record, released on the Diamond label,
became a big hit, rising to no. 4 on the
Billboard  Hot 100 in early 1963." — Wikipedia

For "the Trojan family" —

Related material on the late Solomon W. Golomb —

"While at JPL, Sol had also been teaching some classes
at the nearby universities: Caltech, USC and UCLA. In
the fall of 1962, following some changes at JPL—and
perhaps because he wanted to spend more time with
his young children— he decided to become a full-time
professor. He got offers from all three schools. He
wanted to go somewhere where he could 'make
a difference'. He was told that at Caltech 'no one has
any influence if they don’t at least have a Nobel Prize',
while at UCLA 'the UC bureaucracy is such that no one
ever has any ability to affect anything'. The result was
that—despite its much-inferior reputation at the time—
Sol chose USC. He went there in the spring of 1963 as
a Professor of Electrical Engineering—and ended up
staying for 53 years." — Stephen Wolfram, 5/25/16

See also Priority (Nov. 25) and "What's in a Name" (Dec. 1).

From last evening's online New York Times —

"Mr. Hamner moved to California in 1962
and got his first break when 'The Twilight Zone'
accepted two of his story ideas. His eight scripts
for the series included 'The Hunt,' about a man
who is dead but does not realize it until his hunting
dog prevents him from wandering into hell . . . ."

— William Grimes

Hamner reportedly died on Thursday, March 24.
See this journal on that date.

See a link referencing The Gutenberg Galaxy  (a Catholic's 1962 view of literacy)
in a Log24 post yesterday suggested by a New York Times  obituary.

A different obituary this evening in that newspaper describes a Jew's 1979 view
of literacy.  See "Elizabeth Eisenstein, Historian of Movable Type, Dies at 92."

Related material — McLuhan in Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent
of Change , Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Eisenstein reportedly died on January 31, 2016. Synchronologists may
consult some media-related material reposted here on that date —

Fittingly, the Times  concludes Eisenstein's obituary as follows —

"This article will be set in 8.7 point Imperial and printed on
one of several presses, including the Goss Colorliner."

For a perhaps more interesting printing press related to change,
see Despedida  in this journal.

CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES – OCTOBER 1962:
People watching President John F. Kennedy’s
TV announcement of Cuban blockade during the
missile crisis in a department store.  (Photo by
Ralph Crane/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images) 

A Sunday opinion column from 2011,
"The Enduring Cult of Kennedy" —

"In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up
like the Overlook Hotel." — Ross Douthat
on November 27, 2011

From this journal on that date —

The title of the previous post, "For Quantum Mystics,"
suggests a search in this journal for Quantum + Mystic.

That search in turn suggests, in particular, a review of
a post of October 16, 2007 — a discussion of the 
P.T. Barnum-like phrase "deep beauty" used to describe
a topic under discussion at Princeton by physicists.

Princeton, by the way, serves to illustrate the "gutter"
mentioned by Sir Laurence Olivier in a memorable
classroom scene from 1962. 

Hexagram 51:

"I woke last night to the sound of thunder,
How far off, I sat and wondered.
Started humming a song from 1962.
Ain't it funny how the night moves?"

An essay linked to here on the date of Kuhn’s
death discussed the film “Good Will Hunting”:

“You can be sure that when an experienced movie director
like Gus Van Sant selects an establishing shot for the lead
character, he does so with considerable care, on the advice
of an expert.”

Establishing shots —

1. From a post of January 29, 2014:

2. From a post of April 12, 2011:

Parting shot —

From another post of January 29, 2014:

Note Watson‘s title advice.

… Continues.

A post by Margaret Soltan this morning:

Links (in blue) from the above post:
Cane and Mondo Cane.

Bagger Vance — “Time for you to see the field.”

From Pictures for Kurosawa (Sept. 6, 2003) —

“As these flowing rivers that go towards the ocean,
when they have reached the ocean, sink into it,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the ocean only, exactly thus these sixteen parts
of the spectator that go towards the person (purusha),
when they have reached the person, sink into him,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the person only, and he becomes without parts and
immortal. On this there is this verse:

‘That person who is to be known, he in whom these parts
rest, like spokes in the nave of a wheel, you know him,
lest death should hurt you.’ “

— Prasna Upanishad

Related material — Heaven’s Gate  images from Xmas 2012:

“This could be heaven or this could be hell.” — Hotel California

Those who prefer mathematics to narrative may consult Root Circle.

"Give 'em hell." — Ben Bernanke at Princeton's Baccalaureate, 2013

Some background — Janet Leigh and the Museum of Modern Art

"The Varnedoe Debacle," by Hilton Kramer (Dec. 1991)

Hell… Hell. — Sinatra in The Manchuran Candidate

You say goodbye, I say …

A YouTube video uploaded on March 2, 2012—

This  journal on the date of the above video's uploading— March 2, 2012:

"…des carreaux mi-partis de deux couleurs par une ligne diagonale…."

See also Josefine Lyche in Vril Chick and Bowling in Diagon Alley.

  Source: Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs

The American Mathematical Society
(AMS) yesterday:

Some related material:

• A 1990 AMS review of a book by another mathematician,
  Harmonic Analysis in Phase Space , that is closely
  related to Hörmander's research (and perhaps more
  accessible to the nonspecialist than his books),
• Mathematical Imagery (Log24, Jan. 19, 2012),
• The Eight-Pointed Star, and yesterday's
• Point.

See also posts on Damnation Morning and, from the
date of Hörmander's death,

• Will and Representation.

(Continued from Midsummer Eve)

"At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit."

— Norman Mailer, March 3, 1992, PBS transcript

"Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all."

— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 1962, as quoted in The Enneagram of Paradigm Shifting

"In the spiritual traditions from which Jung borrowed the term, it is not the SYMMETRY of mandalas that is all-important, as Jung later led us to believe. It is their capacity to reveal the asymmetry that resides at the very heart of symmetry." 

— The Enneagram as Mandala

I have little respect for Enneagram enthusiasts, but they do at times illustrate Mailer's maxim.

My own interests are in the purely mathematical properties of the number nine, as well as those of the next square, sixteen.

Those who prefer bullshit may investigate non-mathematical properties of sixteen by doing a Google image search on MBTI.

For bullshit involving nine, see (for instance) Einsatz  in this journal.

For non-bullshit involving nine, sixteen, and "asymmetry that resides at the very heart of symmetry," see Monday's Mapping Problem continued. (The nine occurs there as the symmetric  figures in the lower right nine-sixteenths of the triangular analogs  diagram.)

For non-bullshit involving psychological and philosophical terminology, see James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology .

In particular, see Hillman's "An Excursion on Differences Between Soul and Spirit."

(Mythopoetic continued)

Voice of America  today—

Thousands of Norwegians Defy Confessed Killer Breivik in Song

"The demonstrators waved roses and flags
Thursday as they and Norwegian folk singer
Lillebjoern Nilsen sang an adaptation
of the children's song, 'My Rainbow Race,' 
which Breivik in court last week called
an example of Marxist brainwashing."

[See also PETE SEEGER AND LILLEBJØRN NILSEN.
Click on the image below for Seeger's original version.]

Liberia Reacts to Taylor Conviction With Mixed Emotions

"As the verdict was read out, a rainbow was seen
in the sky, encircling the sun.  For many Liberians,
superstition is a part of life.  The rainbow heralded
a new era, they said, beginning with the verdict of Taylor."

["You're not the only one… with mixed emotions."]

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday, April 2, 2012—

"I think there is in this country a war on religion.
 I think there is a desire to establish a religion
 in America known as secularism."

Nancy Haught of The Oregonian  on Leap Day, Feb. 29, 2012—

(See also this  journal on Leap Day.)

From New College: The Honors College of Florida—

See also, in this journal, "Greatest Show on Earth" and The Harvard Crimson—

Steve Buscemi last night on Saturday Night Live
describing Christmas tree ornaments with his mate Sheila—

"This one's a little computer."

"Beep Boop Beep"

"This one's a little pinecone. … Beep Boop Beep"

Meanwhile…

In related news…

"Her name drives me insane."

— Rosetta Stone, 1978 cover of "Sheila," Tommy Roe's 1962 classic

Click image for sketch.

A search on the word "innermost" in a PDF copy of a book
by Suzanne Gieser on Jung and Pauli yields no definite meaning
for the book's title, The Innermost Kernel  (Springer, 2005).

The author does, however, devote a section (pp. 36-41) to the
influence of Schopenhauer on Jung and Pauli, and that section at least
suggests that the historical  origin of her title is in Schopenhauer's
reformulation of Kant's "Ding an sich."

The Innermost Kernel , p. 37—

"… an expression of an underlying invisible world,
the one that forms the innermost essence of reality,
the thing-in-itself. This is the will, a blind existence
that forms an omnipresent entity beyond time, space
and individuality." *

* Arthur Schopenhauer, "Über die Vierfache Wurzel
  des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde" (1813),
  Kleinere Schriften, SämtlicheWerke III 
  (Stuttgart, 1962), 805–806.

* See also Mann on Schopenhauer and an "innermost kernel."

COLLEGE OF THE DESERT
Minutes — Organization Meeting
11:00 a.m., Saturday, July 1, 1961—

15. Preparation of College Seal:

By unanimous consent preparation of a College
Seal to contain the following features was
authorized: A likeness of the Library building
set in a matrix of date palms, backed by
a mountain skyline and rising sun; before
the Library an open book, the Greek symbol
Alpha on one page and Omega on the other;
the Latin Lux et Veritas, College of the
Desert, and 1958 to be imprinted within or
around the periphery of the seal.

From the website http://geofhagopian.net/ of
Geoff Hagopian, Professor of Mathematics,
College of the Desert—

Note that this version of the seal contains
an Aleph  and Omega instead of Alpha and Omega.

From another Hagopian website, another seal.

Continued from Good Friday —

The New Yorker , in the above excerpt, says of David Deutsch that
"his books have titles of colossal confidence
('The Fabric of Reality,' 'The Beginning of Infinity')."

The Fabric of Reality — A post from Good Friday —

The Beginning of Infinity — Another Good Friday death—

Sidney Michaels, adapter of the 1962 play "Tchin-Tchin."

"At play's end they are Chaplinesque waifs living in the charmed circle
of innocents that includes saints, children, drunkards and madmen.
Subliminally, Tchin-Tchin is a Christian existential fable." — TIME

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,  translated by
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper hardcover, 1962, p. 262—

"…the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve
the force of the most elemental words…."

Heidegger was quoted, in a different translation, by Richard Rorty in 1998
in a review of Ein Meister aus Deutschland.

Related material: an August 18 death and this journal on that date—

"… it is impossible that there should be time if there is no soul,
  except that there could be that X which time is…."
  — Aristotle, Physics, IV.14, translated by Edward Hussey

See also Berlinerblau in this journal on August 10.

“There are two silences.
One when no word is spoken.
The other when perhaps a torrent
of language is being employed.”

— Harold Pinter, 1962

Stille Nacht…

Pinter died on December 24, 2008:

Heilige Nacht…

Also on Christmas Eve, 2008

(“24/12/08  3:23 pm”):

Click to enlarge.

“Treatment of Autistic Schizophrenic Children with LSD-25 and UML-491“–

“Autistic schizophrenic children present challenging and baffling problems in treatment…. Many of the children have been followed subsequently into later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood…. Meanwhile, a new group of young autistic children are always available for new treatment endeavors as the new modes become available.”*

In the above screenshot of New York Times obituaries on the date of Brewster Beach’s death, Tim Russert seems to be looking at the obituary of Air Force Academy chapel architect Walter Netsch.

This suggests another chapel, more closely related to my own experience, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Some background…

Walter Netsch in Oral History (pdf, 467 pp.):

“I also had a book that inspired me– this is 1947– called Communitas by Percival and Paul Goodman. Percival Goodman was the architect, and Paul Goodman was the writer and leftist. And this came out of the University of Chicago– part of the leftist bit of the University of Chicago….

I had sort of in the back of my mind, Communitas appeared from my subconscious of the new town out of town, and there were other people who knew of it….”

Log24, May 8, 2007:

Log24, Feb. 24, 2008:

Chapel, Cuernavaca, Mexico

“God As Trauma”
by Brewster Yale Beach:
“The problem of crucifixion is
  the beginning of individuation.”

“Si me de veras quieres,
deja me en paz.”

— Lucero Hernandez,
Cuernavaca, 1962

A more impersonal approach
to my own drunkard’s walk
(Cuernavaca, 1962, after
reading the above words):

Cognitive Blending
and the Two Cultures

An approach from the culture
(more precisely, the alternate
religion) of Scientism–
The Drunkard’s Walk:
How Randomness
Rules Our Lives—
is sketched in
Today’s Sermon:
The Holy Trinity vs.
The New York Times
(Sunday, June 8, 2008).

The Times illustrated its review
of The Drunkard’s Walk
with facetious drawings
by Jessica Hagy, who uses
Venn diagrams to make
cynical jokes.

A less cynical use of
a Venn diagram:

“No se puede vivir sin amar.”

— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano

(March 3, 2004)

The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains tributes to the admirable personal qualities and mathematical work of the late Harvard professor George Mackey.  For my own tributes, see Log24 on March 17, 2006,  April 29, 2006, and March 10, 2007.  For an entry critical of Mackey’s reductionism– a philosophical, not mathematical, error– see Log24 on May 23, 2007 (“Devil in the Details”).

Here is another attack on reductionism, from a discussion of the work of another first-rate mathematician, the late Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT:

“Another theme developed by Rota is that of ‘Fundierung.’ He shows that throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain pieces of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain pieces of wood or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an act of generosity is founded upon something’s being handed over. In perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon it; what we see is far more than meets the eye. Rota gives striking examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity. His point is strongly antireductionist. Reductionism is the inclination to see as ‘real’ only the foundation, the substrate of things (the piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon, and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true existence of that which is founded. Rota’s arguments against reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, of intelligence, of emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even as we deny it in our theories.”

— Robert Sokolowski, foreword to Rota’s Indiscrete Thoughts

Father Robert Sokolowski Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. — Thomas Aquinas College newsletter

The tributes to Mackey are contained in the first of two feature articles in the August 2007 AMS Notices.  The second feature article is a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter.  For some remarks related to that article, see Thursday’s Log24 entry “Not Mathematics but Theology.”

Instance

Log24, Feb. 25, 2004:

From a review by Adam White Scoville of Iain Pears’s novel titled An Instance of the Fingerpost:

“Perhaps we are meant to see the story as a cubist retelling of the crucifixion, as Pilate, Barabbas, Caiaphas, and Mary Magdalene might have told it. If so, it is sublimely done so that the realization gradually and unexpectedly dawns upon the reader. The title, taken from Sir Francis Bacon, suggests that at certain times, ‘understanding stands suspended’ and in that moment of clarity (somewhat like Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time,’ I think), the answer will become apparent as if a fingerpost were pointing at the way.”

Another instance:

The film “Barabbas” (1962) shown on Turner Classic Movies at 8 PM Friday, Nov. 10.

Compare and contrast–

• Barabbas emerging from prison as if from Plato’s cave, and Barabbas’s vision of Christ in blinding sunlight: “Flung into the sunlight, he stands blinking at a young man in white robes; is it merely the unaccustomed light that dazzles his eyes, or does he really see a radiance streaming from the young man’s face?” —TIME Magazine, 1962
• 1 Peter 2 on Christ as the “living stone”
• The cover of the novel Stone 588 shown in Friday’s 11:20 PM entry

The film is based on the novel by Par Lagerkvist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Lagerkvist novel may be of more enduring interest than Stone 588, but, as Friday’s lottery numbers indicate, even lesser stories have their place.

for Isak Dinesen,
who died in 1962
on this date

 Meanwhile…

Click on pictures for details.

“… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how ‘perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra’ ….”

— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25

The Great Bartender
by Peter Viereck (1948)

Being absurd as well as beautiful,
Magic– like art– is hoax redeemed by awe.
(Not priest but clown,
     the shuddering sorcerer
Is more astounded than
     his rapt applauders:
“Then all those props and Easters
     of my stage
Came true?  But I was joking all the time!”)
Art, being bartender, is never drunk;
And magic that believes itself, must die.
My star was rocket of my unbelief,
Launched heavenward as
     all doubt’s longings are;
     It burst when, drunk with self-belief,
I tried to be its priest and shouted upward:
“Answers at last!  If you’ll but hint
     the answers
For which earth aches, that famous
     Whence and Whither;
Assuage our howling Why? with final fact.”

— As quoted in The Practical Cogitator,
   or The Thinker’s Anthology,
   Selected and Edited by
   Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and
   Ferris Greenslet,
   Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
   With a new Introduction by
   John H. Finley, Jr.,
   Houghton Mifflin Company,
   Boston, 1962

The dates of Viereck’s birth and death are according to this morning’s New York Times.

Dance

Yesterday’s AP “Thought for Today”–

“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist (1904-1967).

From Log24 on Dec. 17, 2002:

The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
by Gary Zukav, Harvard ’64:

“The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than ‘discovering the endless diversity of nature.’ They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology.”

“Eastern religions have nothing to say about physics, but they have a great deal to say about human experience. In Hindu mythology, Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol for the infinite diversity of experience. Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her toe.

This full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer. Hindus know the impossibility of seducing her or conquering her and the futility of loving her or hating her; so they do the only thing that they can do. They simply honor her.”

How could I dance with another….?

— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1962-1963  

For more background, see the Log24.net entry of 3 AM Friday, the date of Meader’s death. See also a Boston Globe obituary that quotes John F. Kennedy: “Vaughn Meader was busy tonight, so I came myself.”

Note that Rousmaniere was John F. Kennedy’s roommate at Harvard.

Note, too, that Kennedy’s daughter Caroline attended Sister Salisbury’s school.

A memorial Mass for Sister Salisbury will be held on Monday, November 22, 2004, at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, 980 Park Avenue, at 5:30 pm.  

What does all this Camelot portend?   I do not know, but the following quote seems appropriate.

“Flores, flores para los muertos.”

— Tennessee Williams, 1947

Counting Crows
on the Feast of St. Luke

"In the fullness of time,
educated people will believe
there is no soul
independent of the body,
and hence no life after death."

— Francis Crick, who was awarded
a Nobel Prize on this date in 1962

"She went to the men on the ground and looked at them and then she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had a coldwater spring rising out of a rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream, the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together.  Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn crops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud.  Everything coming around at once.  And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs.  There was something he wanted to say."

— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

"Fullness… Multitude."
 

Today in History:
The Comeback Kid

(Courtesy of Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar)

On this date:

In 1962, having lost the California governor’s race, Richard Nixon said to the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”

In 1972, Republican incumbent President Richard Nixon was re-elected, defeating Democratic candidate George McGovern, 520 electoral votes to 17.

From the archives of singer/songwriter Shannon Campbell (“voice of an angel, mouth of a truckdriver”)–

Feb. 6, 2002: The Essential Matrix

NEO: (whines) Who am I?

TRINITY: You are The One.

EVERYONE ELSE: Eh, he might be The One.

TRINITY: He is The One.

NEO: I am not The One.

TRINITY: You are The One.

THE ORACLE: You are not The One, but you can’t tell anybody.

NEO: (whines) But I wanted to be The One. I want to go home….

TRINITY: Fuck. He’s not The One.

EVERYONE ELSE: Told you so.

MORPHEUS: Sure wish someone was The One. I’m in deep shit.

Trance of the Red Queen

In memory of playwright George Axelrod, who died Saturday, June 21, 2003.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

"In 1987, Mr. Axelrod was saluted at the New York Film Festival. He told the admiring crowd: 'I always wanted to get into the major leagues, and I knew my secret: luck and timing. I had a small and narrow but very, very sharp talent, and inside it, I'm as good as it gets.'

'The Manchurian Candidate,' in 1962, based on Richard Condon's novel about wartime brainwashing and subversive politics, may have been Mr. Axelrod's best achievement. He declared in 1995 that the script 'broke every rule. It's got dream sequences, flashbacks, narration out of nowhere . . . Everything in the world you're told not to do.'

He considered 'The Manchurian Candidate' a comedy…."

"Don't you draw the queen of diamonds,
     boy, she'll beat you if she's able.
You know the queen of hearts
     is always your best bet."

— The Eagles, "Desperado"

Another quotation that seems relevant:

"The hypnosis was performed by
the good and pious nuns…."

For the Diocese of Phoenix 

See entries of June 4 and June 15.

See also two items from Tuesday, June 17, 2003:

A 6/17 Arizona Daily Star article on Phoenix bishop Thomas O'Brien, and the 6/17 cartoon below.

Tony Auth, Philadelphia Inquirer,
June 17, 2003

For background, see Frank Keating in the New York Times, 6/17/03.

My entry of 5 PM EDT Saturday, June 14, 2003, which preceded the death involving Bishop O'Brien, may also be of interest.

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.

Opening of the Graves

colporteur

Durga

Today's site music* is in honor of a memorable date. *© 1963 Northern Songs. Quiet may be restored by using the midi control box at the top right of this page.  Please let me know if your browser is not showing this control box.

Veronica

From a June/July 1997
Hadassah Magazine article:

"Plato is obviously Jewish."

— Rebecca Goldstein

Readings on the Dark Lady  

From a July 27, 1997
New York Times article
by Holland Cotter:

"The single most important and sustained model for Khmer culture was India, from which Cambodia inherited two religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and an immensely sophisticated art. This influence announces itself early in this exhibition in a spectacular seventh-century figure of the Hindu goddess Durga, whose hip-slung pose and voluptuous torso, as plush and taut as ripe fruit, combine the naturalism and idealism of the very finest Indian work."

From The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
by Gary Zukav, Harvard '64:

"The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."

"Eastern religions have nothing to say about physics, but they have a great deal to say about human experience. In Hindu mythology, Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol for the infinite diversity of experience. Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her toe.

This full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer. Hindus know the impossibility of seducing her or conquering her and the futility of loving her or hating her; so they do the only thing that they can do. They simply honor her."

How could I dance with another….?

— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1962-1963  

Back to You, Kylie

From the 440 International Archives:

1988 – And speaking of music trivia (thanks to http://www.rockdate.co.uk Rockdate Diary): “The Loco-Motion”, by Kylie Minogue hit #4 on the “Billboard Hot 100” this day, the song became the first to reach the top-5 in the U.S. for three different artists (Little Eva in 1962, Grand Funk in 1974).

Click here for a nicely done vibraphone-midi version of “Locomotion.”  To honor Kylie’s unforgettable video of that classic, this site’s music is now one of my childhood favorites.

Kylie, 1988

Down by the Station

Down by the station early in the morning,
See the little puffer bellies all in a row.
See the engine driver pull the little throttle:
Puff, puff, Toot! Toot! Off we go!

As Sinatra said,
“Whatever gets you through the night, baby.”

Eleven Years Ago Today…

On October 23, 1991, I placed in my (paper) journal various entries that would remind me of the past… of Cuernavaca, Mexico, and a girl I knew there in 1962. One of the entries dealt with a book by Arthur Koestler, The Challenge of Chance. A search for links related to that book led to the following site, which I find very interesting:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2740/.

This is a commonplace-book site, apparently a collection of readings for the end of the century and millennium. No site title or owner is indicated, but the readings are excellent. Accepting the challenge of chance, I reproduce one of the readings… The author was not writing about Cuernavaca, but may as well have been.

The Shining of Lucero

From my journal note, “Shining Forth“:

The Spanish for “Bright Star” is “Lucero.”

The Eye of the Beholder:

When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction.

— John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“

From Broken Symmetries, by Paul Preuss, 1983:

He’d toyed with “psi” himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand — for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….   

Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after “hidden variables” to explain what could not be pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.

………………

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem — they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry. (Ch. 16)

From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:

Minakis caught up and walked beside him in silence, moving with easy strides over the bare ground, listening as Peter [Slater] spoke. “Delos One was ten years ago — quantum theory seemed as natural as water to me then; I could play in it without a care. If I’d had any sense of history, I would have recognized that I’d swallowed the Copenhagen interpretation whole.”

“Back then, you insisted that the quantum world is not a world at all,” Minakis prompted him. “No microworld, only mathematical descriptions.”

“Yes, I was adamant. Those who protested were naive — one has to be willing to tolerate ambiguity, even to be crazy.”

“Bohr’s words?”

“The party line. Of course Bohr did say, ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ Meaning that when we start to talk what sounds like philosophy, our colleagues should rip us to pieces.” Peter smiled. “They smell my blood already.”

………………  Peter glanced at Minakis. “Let’s say there are indications — I have personal indications — not convincing, perhaps, but suggestive, that the quantum world penetrates the classical world deeply.” He was silent for a moment, then waved his hand at the ruins. “The world of classical physics, I mean. I suppose I’ve come to realize that the world is more than a laboratory.”

“We are standing where Apollo was born,” Minakis said. “Leto squatted just there, holding fast to a palm tree, and after nine days of labor gave birth to the god of light and music….”

To Lucero, in memory of
1962 in Cuernavaca

From On Beauty, by Elaine Scarry,
Princeton University Press, 1999 —

“Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never anywhere seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely….

I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman…
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.

Wait, once I saw the like —
in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar —
the young slip of a palm-tree
springing into the light.”

From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:

“When we try to look inside atoms,” Peter said, “not only can we not see what’s going on, we cannot even construct a coherent picture of what’s going on.”

“If you will forgive me, Peter,” Minakis said, turning to the others. “He means that we can construct several pictures — that light and matter are waves, for example, or that light and matter are particles — but that all these pictures are inadequate. What’s left to us is the bare mathematics of quantum theory.”

…. “Whatever the really real world is like, my friend, it is not what you might imagine.”

………………

 

Talking physics, Peter tended to bluntness. “Tell me more about this real world you imagine but can’t describe.”

Minakis turned away from the view of the sunset. “Are you familiar with John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

“No I’m not.”

………………

“Read Cramer. I’ll give you his papers. Then we can talk.” 

 From John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“:

Advanced waves could perhaps, under the right circumstances, lead to “ansible-type” FTL communication favored by Le Guin and Card…. 

For more on Le Guin and Card, see my journal notes below.

For more on the meaning of “lucero,” see the Wallace Stevens poem “Martial Cadenza.”