Log24

"Does the name 'Coulter' mean anything to you?"

See as well this  journal on 07/19/2021, the Lotus-page date above. 

A Harvard student* attempts to summarize Nabokov’s aesthetics —

“Take ‘Pale Fire,’ his 1962 poem-as-novel
bursting with butterfly as theme:

‘I can do what only a true artist can do —
pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation …
see the web of the world,
and the warp and the weft of that web.’ “

“True artist” here refers to Kinbote, not Nabokov.

* Tessa K.J. Haining, Harvard Crimson  Contributing Opinion Writer.
Tessa K.J. Haining ’23 lives in Adams House. Her column appears on
alternate Fridays. December 11, 2020.

(to that of the previous post) —

Click the image for
      the source.

Related literature —

“There is  such a thing as  ▦  .”

— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.

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.

"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"

"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.

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.

"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.

(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.

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

“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.

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.”