"Sultan" was a pseudonym of Peter Lindbergh, now a
well-known fashion photographer. Click image for the source.
Related art — Diamond Theory Roullete, by Radames Ajna,
2013 (Processing code at ReCode Project based on
"Diamond Theory" by Steven H. Cullinane, 1977).
"Right through hell there is a path . . . ." — Malcolm Lowry
This quotation is from a Log24 search for "1966."
That search was suggested by the now-streaming film
"MaXXXine" and by . . .
* Title of a book by Nanavira Thera.
Flashback to April 12, 2011 —
|
In the landscape of minimalism, John McCracken cuts a unique figure. He is often grouped with the “light and space” artists who formed the West Coast branch of the movement. Indeed, he shares interests in vivid color, new materials, and polished surfaces with fellow Californians enamored of the Kustom Kar culture. On the other hand, his signature works, the “planks” that he invented in 1966 and still makes today, have the tough simplicity and aggressive presence of New York minimalism…. “They kind of screw up a space because they lean,” McCracken has said of the planks. Their tilting, reflective surfaces activate the room, leaving the viewer uncertain of traditional boundaries. He notes that the planks bridge sculpture (identified with the floor) and painting (identified with the wall)…. His ultimate goal, as with all mystics, is unity— not just of painting and sculpture, but of substance and illusion, of matter and spirit, of art and life. Such ideas recall the utopian aspirations of early modernists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. Related Art —
Unity
—Roman numeral I For a related figure, see a film review by A. O. Scott at The New York Times (September 21, 2010)— “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” begins with an unseen narrator— , sounding a lot like — paraphrasing . You may remember the quotation from high school English, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The observation is attributed to the playwright himself (“Shakespeare once said”), rather than to Macbeth, whose grim experience led him to such nihilism, but never mind. In context, it amounts to a perfectly superfluous statement of the obvious. If life signifies nothing, perhaps the tall dark figure above signifies something . Discuss. |
Related (if only phonetically) drama . . . Detective Cruz at Planck's Café.
From Quanta Magazine on Monday, May 6, 2024, in
"A Rosetta Stone for Mathematics," by Kevin Hartnett —
" Then he came to the main point of his letter:
He was building such a bridge. He wrote,
'Just as God defeats the devil: this bridge exists.'
The bridge that Weil proposed
is the study of finite fields…."
This is damned nonsense.
From Log24 on June 23, 2005 —
|
In “A 1940 Letter of André Weil on Analogy in Mathematics,” (pdf), translated by Martin H. Krieger, Notices of the A.M.S., March 2005, Weil writes that “The purely algebraic theory of algebraic functions in any arbitrary field of constants is not rich enough so that one might draw useful lessons from it. The ‘classical’ theory (that is, Riemannian) of algebraic functions over the field of constants of the complex numbers is infinitely richer; but on the one hand it is too much so, and in the mass of facts some real analogies become lost; and above all, it is too far from the theory of numbers. One would be totally obstructed if there were not a bridge between the two. And just as God defeats the devil: this bridge exists; it is the theory of the field of algebraic functions over a finite field of constants…. On the other hand, between the function fields and the ‘Riemannian’ fields, the distance is not so large that a patient study would not teach us the art of passing from one to the other, and to profit in the study of the first from knowledge acquired about the second, and of the extremely powerful means offered to us, in the study of the latter, from the integral calculus and the theory of analytic functions. That is not to say that at best all will be easy; but one ends up by learning to see something there, although it is still somewhat confused. Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often. Be that as it may, my work consists in deciphering a trilingual text {[cf. the Rosetta Stone]}; of each of the three columns I have only disparate fragments; I have some ideas about each of the three languages: but I know as well there are great differences in meaning from one column to another, for which nothing has prepared me in advance. In the several years I have worked at it, I have found little pieces of the dictionary. Sometimes I worked on one column, sometimes under another.” |
Quanta Magazine's statement:
"The bridge that Weil proposed
is the study of finite fields…."
Here "the study of finite fields" is a contemptibly distorted
dumbing-down of Weil's phrase
"the theory of the field of algebraic functions
over a finite field of constants."
For that topic, see (for instance) . . .
Update at 5:35 PM ET —A different reaction to the Hartnett article —
Other "Styx"-related material posted here earlier today . . .
Note that the above Styx communications protocol should not be
confused with the much newer Styx operating system —
"Right through hell there is a path . . . ." — Malcolm Lowry
"Experience the magic of Mexico." — Delta vacations ad.
See also Midnight in the Garden (March 15, 2011)
and New Day Nina (September 22, 2011).
* Song lyric, soundtrack album of
“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil“
From a New York Times obituary today recounting
the life of a psychoanalyst who reportedly died at 94 on
January 16 —
"Dr. Shengold began treating Dr. Sacks in 1966 for
an amphetamine addiction. He continued to see him for
nearly a half-century.
'Above all, Shengold has taught me attention,'
Dr. Sacks said in an interview in 2012 for the website
Web of Stories, an archive of stories told by prominent
scientists and other people. 'And what is sometimes
called listening with a third ear — listening to what is
behind the babble.' "
The New Yorker, issue dated July 23, 2007, page 42:
“While out-of-body experiences have the character of
a perceptual illusion (albeit a complex and singular one),
near-death experiences have all the hallmarks of mystical
experience, as William James defines it….”
— Oliver Sacks,“A Bolt from the Blue”
The New Yorker, same issue, page 70:
In memoriam: Guitarist, studio engineer Jimmy Johnson, 1943-2019 .
Johnson reportedly died on Thursday, Sept. 5.
See also, from the first of the seven posts of Thursday, August 29 —
* See a reference to that literary saloon from June 11, 2013.
The title is from a phrase spoken, notably, by Yul Brynner
to Christopher Plummer in the 1966 film “Triple Cross.”
Related structures —
Greg Egan’s animated image of the Klein quartic —
For a smaller tetrahedral arrangement, within the Steiner quadruple
system of order 8 modeled by the eightfold cube, see a book chapter
by Michael Huber of Tübingen —
For further details, see the June 29 post Triangles in the Eightfold Cube.
See also, from an April 2013 philosophical conference:
| Abstract for a talk at the City University of New York:
The Experience of Meaning Once the question of truth is settled, and often prior to it, what we value in a mathematical proof or conjecture is what we value in a work of lyric art: potency of meaning. An absence of clutter is a feature of such artifacts: they possess a resonant clarity that allows their meaning to break on our inner eye like light. But this absence of clutter is not tantamount to ‘being simple’: consider Eliot’s Four Quartets or Mozart’s late symphonies. Some truths are complex, and they are simplified at the cost of distortion, at the cost of ceasing to be truths. Nonetheless, it’s often possible to express a complex truth in a way that precipitates a powerful experience of meaning. It is that experience we seek — not simplicity per se , but the flash of insight, the sense we’ve seen into the heart of things. I’ll first try to say something about what is involved in such recognitions; and then something about why an absence of clutter matters to them. |
For the talk itself, see a YouTube video.
The conference talks also appear in a book.
The book begins with an epigraph by Hilbert —
"The philosopher Jerry Fodor was important for the same reason
you’ve probably never heard of him: he was unimpressed,
to put it politely, by the intellectual trends of the day."
— Stephen Metcalf in The New Yorker , Dec. 12, 2017
See also "The French Invasion," a Dec. 11 Quarterly Conversation
essay about Derrida in Baltimore in 1966, and the Dec. 10 posts
in this journal tagged Interlacing Derrida. (The deplorable Derrida
trend is apparently still alive in Buffalo.)
According to Metcalf, Fodor's "occasional review-essays in the L.R.B.
were masterpieces of a plainspoken and withering sarcasm. To Steven
Pinker’s suggestion that we read fiction because ' it supplies us with a
mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday,' for
instance, Fodor replied, ' What if it turns out that, having just used the ring
that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my
new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to
continue to be immortal and rule the world? ' "
In the Fodor-Pinker dispute, my sympathies are with Pinker.
Related material — Google Sutra (the previous Log24 post) and earlier posts
found in a Log24 search for Ring + Bear + Jung —
Two songs by Chuck Berry on Chess Records in 1958 —
Sweet Little Sixteen and Sweet Little Rock and Roller .
She's 9 years old and sweet as she can be
All dressed up like a downtown Christmas tree
Dancin' and hummin' a rock-roll melody
For meditations on Sixteen , see Berry + Sixteen in this journal.
A meditation on Rock and Roller —
Related material — From the above post's date,
March 21, 2017, a memoir by one Siva Vaidhyanathan,
"Robertson Professor of Media Studies and Director of
the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia."
"Deutsche Ordnung." — Yul Brynner
in the 1966 film "Triple Cross"
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.
Quoted here on December 16, 2006 —
See also …
Reviews of Reynolds' 2015 film "Self/Less" and of
the earlier similar film "Seconds" —
4 July 2015 9:00 AM, PDT | The Wrap |
"Ben Kingsley plays a New York real estate mogul who
pays big bucks to have his consciousness microwaved
into Ryan Reynolds' body in 'Self/less,' but the real
reheating of leftovers has already occurred: this new
science-fiction thriller borrows the foundation of a much
better film — John Frankenheimer’s 1966 'Seconds' —
and strips it of any larger meaning."
The date of the "Seconds" review above, 16 Dec. 2006, was
the reason for the requotation in the first paragraph above.
From "The Magis way: Notes on the publishing culture,"
by Giampiero Bosoni, at http://www.magisdesign.com/magis-world/ —
|
"… perhaps it is interesting to reflect further on the relationship between a design object and a literary work, by reading (in whatever interpretative key you choose) the illuminating definition given by the great semiologist Roland Barthes of the act of writing and of the literary value of a text. 'Writing,' Barthes tells us, 'is historically an action that involves constant contradiction, based on dual expectations. One aspect of writing is essentially commercial, a means of control and segregation, steeped in the most materialistic aspect of society. The other is an act of pleasure, connected to the deepest urges of the body and to the subtlest and most successful products of art. This is how the written text is woven. All I have done is to arrange and reveal the threads. Now each can add his own warp to the weft.' [3] Magis’ long and highly advanced experience has given evidence, further confirmed by this latest publishing catalogue, of an ever-growing awareness of this necessary interweaving between warp and weft, between the culture of craftsmanship and that of industry, between design culture and business culture, between form and technique, between symbolic codes and practical functions, between poetry and everyday life." — Giampiero Bosoni [3] Barthes R., Variations sur l’écriture (1972), Editions du Seuil, Paris 1994, published in the second volume of the Oeuvres complètes 1966-1975 (freely translated from the Italian translation, Variazioni sulla scrittura seguite da Il piacere del testo , Ossola C. (editor) Einaudi, Turin 1999). |
See as well "Interweaving" in this journal.
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
A passage linked to here on the afternoon of Dec. 6, 2015 —
|
From news.artnet.com, Dec. 16, 2014 — "Kosuth's early roots were in analytical philosophy, and his neons fiddle with that legacy: it's language that considers the nature of language as it describes the world—as it makes meaning and creates objects. So the earliest here, Five Fives (to Donald Judd) , from 1965, is five rows of five words, of the numbers one through to 25 which stack up like bricks in an unfinished wall. Like the nearby phrase "An Object Self-Defined" (Self-Defined Object [green], 1966), or the four colored words of Four Colours Four Words (1966) it's a test of the relationship of a thing to an idea to a word. These texts short-circuit the question of how visual art relates to how we speak about it, dating from a period when modern art had gotten stuck with a certain idea of what modern art should look like, and how it should be talked about." |
"Pilgrims to James Joyce's grave in Zurich, Switzerland,
continue to have their reveries fed by Hebald's 1966
life size bronze capturing the great modernist author
deep in thought, with open book in hand."
— LA Times obituary for Milton Hebald, sculptor,
who reportedly died at 97 on Twelfth Night
(Monday, January 5, 2014)
Related material: Joyce + Zurich + Serpent
in this journal.
"Bercovitch’s first published article, in 1964, was on
'Dramatic Irony in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground ';
his second and his third, in 1965, on 'Romance and Anti-Romance
in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ' and 'Three Perspectives on
Reality in Paradise Lost .' Only thereafter does his publication record
begin to reflect his interest in the vagaries of early American culture,
when he published in 1966 his essay, 'New England Epic:
Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana .'"
— "Scholar and Exegete: A Tribute to Sacvan Bercovitch,
Honored Scholar of Early American Literature," by
Christopher Looby
Bercovitch reportedly died at 81 on Dec. 9, 2014.
See his New York Times obituary from this evening
as well as a passage from Nicholas of Cusa quoted
here, also on Dec. 9, 2014 —
Bercovitch was a professor at Harvard (an institution
apparently unable to state accurately the date of
his death). The translator of of the above Nicholas of
Cusa passage may, I surmise, have been my section
man in a freshman philosophy course at Harvard
in the academic year 1960-1961.
"The way which directs a pilgrim to a city
is not the name of that city."
— Nicholas of Cusa
Or: The Long, Long Trailer
See also a Log24 post from the date of the above tweet: Welcome to the Ape Stuff.
Surreal requiem for the late Jonathan Winters:
"They 'burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars,'
as Jack Kerouac once wrote. It was such a powerful
image that Wal-Mart sells it as a jigsaw puzzle."
— "When the Village Was the Vanguard,"
by Henry Allen, in today's Wall Street Journal
See also Damnation Morning and the picture in
yesterday evening's remarks on art:
The concept of "deep structure," once a popular meme,
has long been abandoned by Chomskians.
It still applies, however, to the 1976 mathematics, diamond theory ,
underlying the formal patterns discussed in a Royal Society paper
this year.
A review of deep structure, from the Wikipedia article Cartesian linguistics—
|
[Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in the original 1966 Harper edition of Chomsky's book Cartesian Linguistics .] Deep structure vs. surface structure "Pursuing the fundamental distinction between body and mind, Cartesian linguistics characteristically assumes that language has two aspects" (32). These are namely the sound/character of a linguistic sign and its significance (32). Semantic interpretation or phonetic interpretation may not be identical in Cartesian linguistics (32). Deep structures are often only represented in the mind (a mirror of thought), as opposed to surface structures, which are not. Deep structures vary less between languages than surface structures. For instance, the transformational operations to derive surface forms of Latin and French may obscure common features of their deep structures (39). Chomsky proposes, "In many respects, it seems to me quite accurate, then, to regard the theory of transformational generative grammar, as it is developing in current work, as essentially a modern and more explicit version of the Port-Royal theory" (39). Summary of Port Royal Grammar The Port Royal Grammar is an often cited reference in Cartesian Linguistics and is considered by Chomsky to be a more than suitable example of Cartesian linguistic philosophy. "A sentence has an inner mental aspect (a deep structure that conveys its meaning) and an outer, physical aspect as a sound sequence"***** This theory of deep and surface structures, developed in Port Royal linguistics, meets the formal requirements of language theory. Chomsky describes it in modern terms as "a base system that generates deep structures and a transformational system that maps these into surface structures", essentially a form of transformational grammar akin to modern studies (42). |
The corresponding concepts from diamond theory are…
"Deep structure"— The line diagrams indicating the underlying
structure of varying patterns
"A base system that generates deep structures"—
Group actions on square arrays… for instance, on the 4×4 square
"A transformational system"— The decomposition theorem
that maps deep structure into surface structure (and vice-versa)
(Continued from March 10, 2012)
An inaccuracy in a passage linked to yesterday—
“The created universe, the whole of things, is,
in words from Joyce’s Ulysses , ‘predicated on the void.'”
The “predicated” phrase seems to be absent from Ulysses .
Joyce does, however, have the following (from ricorso.net)—
| “William Blake” (March 1912) – cont.: ‘Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michaelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimising space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom. [See note, infra.]To him, each moment shorter than a pulse-beat was equivalent in its duration to six thousand years, because in such an infinitely short instant the work of the poet is conceived and born. To him, all space larger than a red globule of human blood was visionary, created by the hammer of Los, while in a space smaller than a globule of blood we approach eternity, of which our vegetable world is but a shadow. Not with the eye, then, but beyond the eye, the soul and the supreme move must look, because the eye, which was born in the night while the soul was sleeping in rays of light, will also die in the night. […] The mental process by which Blake arrives at the threshold of the infinite is a similar process. Flying from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars, his soul is consumed by the rapidity of flight, and finds itself renewed and winged and immortal on the edge of th dark ocean of God. And althought he based his art on such idealist premises, convinced that eternity was in love with the products of time, this sons of God with the sons of [MS ends here].’ (Critical Writings, 1959, 1966 Edn., pp.221-22; quoted [in part] in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.330.) [For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Major Authors”, via index, or direct.] Note – for “void” [supra] , cf. Stephen in “Scylla & Charybdis”: ‘Fatherhood […] is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void.’ (Ulysses, Penguin Edn. 1967, p.207; [my itals.].) |
Some academics may prefer a more leftist version of
“predicated on the void”—
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—
|
William Hamilton, the retired theologian who declared in the 1960s that God was dead, died Tuesday [Feb. 28, 2012] in his downtown Portland apartment at 87. Hamilton said he'd been haunted by questions about God since he was a teenager. Years later, when his conclusion was published in the April 8, 1966, edition of Time Magazine, he found himself in a hornet's nest. Time christened the new movement "radical theology" and Hamilton, one of its key figures, received death threats and inspired angry letters to the editor in newspapers that carried the story. He encountered hostility at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, where he had been teaching theology, and lost his endowed chair in 1967. Hamilton moved on to teach religion at New College in Sarasota, Fla. |
(See also this journal on Leap Day.)
From New College: The Honors College of Florida—
|
Oct. 11, 1960: New College is founded as a private college 1961: Trustees obtain options to purchase the former Charles Ringling estate on Sarasota Bay and 12 acres of airport land facing U.S. 41 held by private interests. The two pieces form the heart of the campus Nov. 18, 1962: the campus is dedicated. Earth from Harvard is mixed with soil from New College as a symbol of the shared lofty ideals of the two institutions. |
See also, in this journal, "Greatest Show on Earth" and The Harvard Crimson—
| The Harvard Crimson, Online Edition |
Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006 |
|
POMP AND
Friday, Oct. 6:
The Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus has come to town, and yesterday the animals were disembarked near MIT and paraded to their temporary home at the Banknorth Garden. |
OPINION At Last, a By THE CRIMSON STAFF The Trouble By SAHIL K. MAHTANI |
For Women's History Month—
The Beam of Pink Light
From a post linked to on Lyxe's upload date, Feb. 6, 2012—
“… with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion
coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality….”
— Carl G. Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,”
Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature,
Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in
Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.
See also the NY Lottery for St. Luke's Day, 2011, publication date
of the new edition of Philip K. Dick's VALIS quoted above.
A chess set previously mentioned in this journal—
These chessmen appeared in the weblog Minimalissimo
on Sept. 20, 2010. In Log24 on that date, the issue was
not so much the chessmen as the underlying board.
See "The Unfolding." See also the following from
the Occupy Space gallery in Limerick today—
| C A V E S – Anthony Murphy Solo Exhibition Opening 7 pm Thursday 1st Dec Exhibition 2nd – 22nd Dec 2011 Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners, inhabiting the cave since childhood, immobile, facing an interior wall. A large fire burns behind the prisoners, and as people pass this fire their shadows are cast upon the cave's wall, and these shadows of the activity being played out behind the prisoner become the only version of reality that the prisoner knows. C A V E S is an exhibition of three large scale works, each designed to immerse the viewer, and then to confront the audience with a question regarding how far they, as privileged viewers of the shadows and reflections being played out upon the walls, are willing to allow themselves to believe what they know to be a false reality. The works are based on explorations of simple 2D shapes; regular polygons are exploded to create fractured pattern, or layered upon one another until intricate forms emerge, upon which the projections can begin to draw out a third dimension. |
Continuing this afternoon's meditation on Hollywood
endings, recall the ending of the 1966 David Niven
version of Casino Royale—
"Eventually, Jimmy's atomic pill explodes, destroying Casino Royale
along with everyone inside…. Sir James and all of his agents then
appear in heaven, with angel wings and harps and Jimmy Bond is
shown descending into the fires of hell." — Wikipedia
This evening's NY Lottery numbers are 169 and 1243.
An occurence of 169 in this journal on June 18, 2008—
In the landscape of minimalism, John McCracken cuts a unique figure. He is often grouped with the “light and space” artists who formed the West Coast branch of the movement. Indeed, he shares interests in vivid color, new materials, and polished surfaces with fellow Californians enamored of the Kustom Kar culture. On the other hand, his signature works, the “planks” that he invented in 1966 and still makes today, have the tough simplicity and aggressive presence of New York minimalism….
“They kind of screw up a space because they lean,” McCracken has said of the planks. Their tilting, reflective surfaces activate the room, leaving the viewer uncertain of traditional boundaries. He notes that the planks bridge sculpture (identified with the floor) and painting (identified with the wall)….
His ultimate goal, as with all mystics, is unity— not just of painting and sculpture, but of substance and illusion, of matter and spirit, of art and life. Such ideas recall the utopian aspirations of early modernists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky.
Related Art —
Unity
—Roman numeral I
as well as capital I
For a related figure, see a film review by A. O. Scott at The New York Times (September 21, 2010)—
“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” begins with an unseen narrator— , sounding a lot like — paraphrasing . You may remember the quotation from high school English, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The observation is attributed to the playwright himself (“Shakespeare once said”), rather than to Macbeth, whose grim experience led him to such nihilism, but never mind. In context, it amounts to a perfectly superfluous statement of the obvious.
If life signifies nothing, perhaps the tall dark figure above signifies something . Discuss.
Related Art Criticism —
For more on light and space, see this journal on the date of McCracken’s death—
Note planks.
Happy Birthday,
Carey Mulligan
Star of "An Education"
In "An Education," Mulligan's character
applies for admission to Oxford.
Today's New York Times:
| Education »
Oxford Tradition Comes to This: ‘Death’ (Expound) |
Related material:
|
Such words arrive on the page like suitcases at the baggage claim: You know there is something in them and they have travelled far, but you cannot tell what the writer means. The words are filled with unstated meaning. They are (the term is Ricoeur's) "packed" and need unpacking. This method of using language, however, is not always a defect; radiantly evocative words have long been the language of myth, mysticism, and love. Also, in earlier centuries, educated readers expected to interpret writing on several different levels at once (e.g., literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical or spiritual), so that multiple meanings were the norm. This was before the era of clear, expository, fully-explicit prose. Visual thinkers are accustomed to their own kind of interpreting; the very act of visual perception, as Gregory (1966, 1970) and Gombrich (1959) have shown, is interpretive. When oral thinkers leave you to guess at something they have written, it is usually something that would have been obvious had the writing been a conversation. Such is not the case with visual thinkers, even whose spoken words can be mysterious references to visual thoughts invisible to anyone but the thinker. Writing done in this "packed" manner makes more sense when read as poetry than when read as prose. References: Gombrich, E. H. (1959). Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon. Gregory, R. L. (1966). Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gregory, R. L. (1970). The Intelligent Eye. New York: McGraw-Hill. — "Stacking, Packing, and Enfolding Words," by Gerald Grow in "The Writing Problems of Visual Thinkers" |
Those wishing to emulate Mulligan's
character in "An Education" might,
having read the Times article above,
consult this journal's post of May 17,
"Rolling the Stone."
That post contains the following
image from the Times—
May 17 was, by the way, the day
that R. L. Gregory, author of
The Intelligent Eye, died.
See Annals of Aesthetics,
January 13, 2009,
which features the following
example of modernism:
… and for readers of
the Sunday New York Times …
The book's author, Audrey Niffenegger, has stated that her title refers to "the doubling and twinning and opposites" that are "essential to the theme and structure of the book." For examples of doubling, twinning, and opposites that I prefer to Niffenegger's, see this journal's Saturday and Sunday entries.
Fans of the New York Times's cultural coverage may prefer Niffenegger's own art work. They may also enjoy images from the weekend's London Art Book Fair that suggested the rather different sort of book in Saturday's entry.
Today's Readings:
Plato and the "concrete universal"-- Log24 on Thursday, July 16, 2009
Context for a Log24 entry of July 16: "So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light...."
An essay on Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
A racial incident in Cambridge on Thursday, July 16, 2009
Race relations in Academia
"... the glue that binds the brotherhood is ultimately made not of love and interracial harmony, but of something stronger and more enduring: shame, fear, and greed." -- Review of New England White
Cf. Eugene Burdick and The Word, 1966. More recently, Tom Wolfe and The Word and Pig and Rat Get Lost.
"I know what 'nothing' means…."
— Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990 paperback, page 214
"In 1935, near the end of a long affectionate letter to his son George in America, James Joyce wrote: 'Here I conclude. My eyes are tired. For over half a century they have gazed into nullity, where they have found a lovely nothing.'"
— Lionel Trilling, "James Joyce in His Letters," Commentary, 45, no. 2 (Feb. 1968), abstract
"The quotation is from The Letters of James Joyce, Volume III, ed. Richard Ellman (New York, 1966), p. 359. The original Italian reads 'Adesso termino. Ho gli occhi stanchi. Da più di mezzo secolo scrutano nel nulla dove hanno trovato un bellissimo niente.'"
— Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics, by William M. Chace, Stanford U. Press, 1980, page 198, Note 4 to Chapter 9
"Space: what you damn well have to see."
— James Joyce, Ulysses
"What happens to the concepts of space and direction if all the matter in the universe is removed save a small finite number of particles?"
— "On the Origins of Twistor Theory," by Roger Penrose
"… we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything…"
— Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon (See previous entry.)
"A strange thing then happened."
Thoughts suggested by Saturday's entry–
"… with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality…."
— Carl G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.
For a video of such undifferentiated chaos, see the Four Tops' "Loco in Acapulco."
"Yes, you'll be goin' loco
down in Acapulco,
the magic down there
is so strong."
This song is from the 1988 film "Buster."
(For a related religious use of that name– "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"– see Fritz Leiber's "Damnation Morning," quoted here on Sept. 28.)
Art, science, and religion are not apparent within the undifferentiated chaos of the Four Tops' Acapulco video, which appears to incorporate time travel in its cross-cutting of scenes that seem to be from the Mexican revolution with contemporary pool-party scenes. Art, science, and religion do, however, appear within my own memories of Acapulco. While staying at a small thatched-roof hostel on a beach at Acapulco in the early 1960's, I read a paperback edition of Three Philosophical Poets, a book by George Santayana on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Here we may regard art as represented by Goethe, science by Lucretius, and religion by Dante. For a more recent and personal combination of these topics, see Juneteenth through Midsummer Night, 2007, which also has references to the "primitives" and "magical mentality" discussed by Jung.
"The major structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the 'mask' which the person presents [to] the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which the person feels ashamed and guilty about."
— Brent Dean Robbins, Jung page at Mythos & Logos
As for shame and guilt, see Malcolm Lowry's classic Under the Volcano, a novel dealing not with Acapulco but with a part of Mexico where in my youth I spent much more time– Cuernavaca.
Lest Lowry's reflections prove too depressing, I recommend as background music the jazz piano of the late Dave McKenna… in particular, "Me and My Shadow."
McKenna died on Saturday, the date of the entry that included "Loco in Acapulco." Saturday was also the Feast of Saint Luke.
Eight is a Gate (continued)
|
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers:
"Heaven, how can I believe in Heaven?" she sings at the finale. "Just a lying rhyme for seven!"
"To begin at the beginning: Is God?…" [very long pause]
|
|
From "Space," by Salomon Bochner
Makom. Our term “space” derives from the Latin, and is thus relatively late. The nearest to it among earlier terms in the West are the Hebrew makom and the Greek topos (τόπος). The literal meaning of these two terms is the same, namely “place,” and even the scope of connotations is virtually the same (Theol. Wörterbuch…, 1966). Either term denotes: area, region, province; the room occupied by a person or an object, or by a community of persons or arrangements of objects. But by first occurrences in extant sources, makom seems to be the earlier term and concept. Apparently, topos is attested for the first time in the early fifth century B.C., in plays of Aeschylus and fragments of Parmenides, and its meaning there is a rather literal one, even in Parmenides. Now, the Hebrew book Job is more or less contemporary with these Greek sources, but in chapter 16:18 occurs in a rather figurative sense:
Late antiquity was already debating whether this makom is meant to be a “hiding place” or a “resting place” (Dhorme, p. 217), and there have even been suggestions that it might have the logical meaning of “occasion,” “opportunity.” Long before it appears in Job, makom occurs in the very first chapter of Genesis, in:
This biblical account is more or less contemporary with Hesiod's Theogony, but the makom of the biblical account has a cosmological nuance as no corresponding term in Hesiod. Elsewhere in Genesis (for instance, 22:3; 28:11; 28:19), makom usually refers to a place of cultic significance, where God might be worshipped, eventually if not immediately. Similarly, in the Arabic language, which however has been a written one only since the seventh century A.D., the term makām designates the place of a saint or of a holy tomb (Jammer, p. 27). In post-biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, in the first centuries A.D., makom became a theological synonym for God, as expressed in the Talmudic sayings: “He is the place of His world,” and “His world is His place” (Jammer, p. 26). Pagan Hellenism of the same era did not identify God with place, not noticeably so; except that the One (τὸ ἕν) of Plotinus (third century A.D.) was conceived as something very comprehensive (see for instance J. M. Rist, pp. 21-27) and thus may have been intended to subsume God and place, among other concepts. In the much older One of Parmenides (early fifth century B.C.), from which the Plotinian One ultimately descended, the theological aspect was only faintly discernible. But the spatial aspect was clearly visible, even emphasized (Diels, frag. 8, lines 42-49). BIBLIOGRAPHY Paul Dhorme, Le livre de Job (Paris, 1926). H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin, 1938). Max Jammer, Concepts of Space… (Cambridge, Mass., 1954). J. M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (Cambridge, 1967). Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (1966), 8, 187-208, esp. 199ff.
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Related material: In the previous entry — "Father Clark seizes at one place (page eight)
upon the fact that…."
Father Clark's reviewer (previous entry) called a remark by Father Clark "far fetched."
This use of "place" by the reviewer is, one might say, "near fetched."
In memory of
Rudolf Arnheim,
who died on
Saturday, June 9
From the Wikipedia article on Gestalt psychology prior to its modification on May 31, 2007:
“Emergence, reification, multistability, and invariance are not separable modules to be modeled individually, but they are different aspects of a single unified dynamic mechanism.
For a mathematical example of such a mechanism using the cubes of psychologists’ block design tests, see Block Designs in Art and Mathematics and The Kaleidoscope Puzzle.”
The second paragraph of the above passage refers to my own work.
Some Gestalt-related work of Arnheim:
Time of this entry:
1:06:18 AM ET.
May '68 Revisited
"At his final Paris campaign rally… Mr. Sarkozy declared himself the candidate of the 'silent majority,' tired of a 'moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.'
'I want to turn the page on May 1968,' he said of the student protests cum social revolution that rocked France almost four decades ago.
'The heirs of May '68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.'
Denouncing the eradication of 'values and hierarchy,' Mr. Sarkozy accused the Left of being the true heirs and perpetuators of the ideology of 1968."
— Emma-Kate Symons, Paris, May 1, 2007, in The Australian
Related material:
From the translator's introduction to Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1981, page xxxi —
"Both Numbers and 'Dissemination' are attempts to enact rather than simply state the theoretical upheavals produced in the course of a radical reevaluation of the nature and function of writing undertaken by Derrida, Sollers, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other contributors to the journal Tel Quel in the late 1960s. Ideological and political as well as literary and critical, the Tel Quel program attempted to push to their utmost limits the theoretical revolutions wrought by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Heidegger."
This is the same Barbara Johnson who has served as the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard.
Johnson has attacked "the very essence of Logic"–
"… the logic of binary opposition, the principle of non-contradiction, often thought of as the very essence of Logic as such….
Now, my understanding of what is most radical in deconstruction is precisely that it questions this basic logic of binary opposition….
Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither 'either/or', nor 'both/and' nor even 'neither/nor', while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either."
— "Nothing Fails Like Success," SCE Reports 8, 1980
Such contempt for logic has resulted, for instance, in the following passage, quoted approvingly on page 342 of Johnson's translation of Dissemination, from Philippe Sollers's Nombres (1966):
"The minimum number of rows– lines or columns– that contain all the zeros in a matrix is equal to the maximum number of zeros located in any individual line or column."
For a correction of Sollers's Johnson's damned nonsense, click here.
Update of May 29, 2014:
The error, as noted above, was not Sollers's, but Johnson's.
See also the post of May 29, 2014 titled 'Lost in Translation.'
Excerpt:
"We are left to conclude that there was something significant in Hobbes's philosophy that motivated Wallis to engage in the lengthy and vitriolic denunciation of all things Hobbesian.
In point of fact, Wallis made no great secret of his motivations for attacking Hobbes's geometry, and the presence of theological and political motives is well attested in a 1659 letter to Huygens. He wrote:
But regarding the very harsh diatribe against Hobbes, the necessity of the case, and not my manners, led to it. For you see, as I believe, from other of my writings how peacefully I can differ with others and bear those with whom I differ. But this was provoked by our Leviathan (as can be easily gathered fro his other writings, principally those in English), when he attacks with all his might and destroys our universities (and not only ours, but all, both old and new), and especially the clergy and all institutions and all religion. As if the Christian world knew nothing sound or nothing that was not ridiculous in philosophy or religion; and as if it has not understood religion because it does not understand philosophy, nor philosophy because it does not understand mathematics. And so it seemed necessary that now some mathematician, proceeding in the opposite direction, should show how little he understand this mathematics (from which he takes his courage). Nor should we be deterred from this by his arrogance, which we know will vomit poison and filth against us. (Wallis to Huygens, 11 January, 1659; Huygens 1888-1950,* 2: 296-7)
The threats that Hobbes supposedly posed to the universities, the clergy, and all religion are a consequence of his political and theological doctrines. Hobbes's political theory requires that the power of the civil sovereign be absolute and undivided. As a consequence, such institutions as universities and the clergy must submit to the dictates of the sovereign in all matters. This extends, ironically enough, to geometry, since Hobbes notoriously claimed that the sovereign could ban the teaching of the subject and order 'the burning of all books of Geometry' if he should judge geometric principles 'a thing contrary to [his] right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion' (Leviathan (1651) 1.11, 50; English Works** 3: 91). In the area of church government, Hobbes's doctrines are a decisive rejection of the claims of Presbyterianism, which holds that questions of theological doctrine is [sic] to be decided by the elders of the church– the presbytery– without reference to the claims of the sovereign. As a Presbyterian minister, a doctor of divinity, and professor of geometry at Oxford, Wallis found abundant reason to reject this political theory."
* Huygens, Christiaan. 1888-1950. Les oeuvres complètes de Chrisiaan Huygens. Ed. La Société Hollandaise des Sciences. 22 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
** Hobbes, Thomas. [1839-45] 1966. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth. Edited by William Molesworth. 11 vols. Reprint. Aalen, Germany: Scientia Verlag.
"But what is it?"
Calvin demanded.
"We know that it's evil,
but what is it?"
"Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!"
Mrs. Which's voice rang out.
"Itt iss Eevill. Itt iss thee
Ppowers of Ddarrkknesss!"
"After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published, it was pointed out to me that the villain, a naked disembodied brain, was called 'It' because It stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth which involves the whole of us, heart as well as mind. That acronym had never occurred to me. I chose the name It intuitively, because an IT does not have a heart or soul. And I did not understand consciously at the time of writing that the intellect, when it is not informed by the heart, is evil."
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Photo by Mark J. Terrill / AP
Above: Christina Aguilera performs “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in tribute to the late James Brown during the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 11, 2007.
This morning’s New York Times:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 11– Recalling her coming of age as the only girl in a privileged, tradition-bound family in Virginia horse country, Drew Gilpin Faust, 59, has often spoken of her “continued confrontations” with her mother “about the requirements of what she usually called femininity.” Her mother, Catharine, she has said, told her repeatedly, “It’s a man’s world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be.”….
… Asked Sunday whether her appointment signified the end of sex inequities at the university, Dr. Faust said: “Of course not. There is a lot of work still to be done, especially in the sciences.”
What would her mother, who never went to college and died in 1966, have to say about her appointment? “I’ve often thought about that,” she said. “I’ve had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.”
Then she added with a rueful smile, “I think in many ways that comment– ‘It’s a man’s world, sweetie’– was a bitter comment from a woman of a generation who didn’t have the kind of choices my generation of women had.”
“But it wouldn’t mean
nothin’ … nothin’ …
without a woman or a girl.”
— James Brown,
who died last year
on Christmas Day
The Presbyterian Exorcist
In memory of
Charles W. Dunn, Harvard Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures Emeritus, who died July 24, 2006, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston at the age of 90. Dunn was master of Quincy House from 1966 to 1981.
“‘He brought a taste of Scotland to the House, initiating an annual rite of exorcism in September to cleanse the place of evil spirits, during which a Scots bagpiper led a march of residents around the courtyard and Charles intoned an incantation while waving a large baton, banishing ghosts and other harbingers of ill will. His leadership was at its best during magnificent evenings in the Master’s lodging when he taught guests Scottish country dances. Students were fond of him, and he of them.’
Born in Arbuthnott, Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Dunn began his schooling in Aberdeen and Edinburgh….”
— Harvard University Gazette online, Aug. 2, 2006
Related material:
In Memory of Wallace Stevens,
Presbyterian Saint
(also from Aug. 2, 2006),
and Deaconess.
John Cusack is 40,
(See midnight on
Midsummer’s Eve.)
“Like Gone with the Wind
on mescaline”
— a description of Savannah
Noon
in the Garden of
Good and Evil:
Related material
from December 2005:
Intelligence/Counterintelligence,
Prequel on St. Cecilia’s Day,
Intelligence/Counterintelligence
Continued
For Loomis Dean
See also
For Rita Moreno
on Her Birthday
(Dec. 11, 2005)
|
Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005
OBITUARIES 
LOOMIS DEAN Loomis Dean, 88; By Jon Thurber, Times Staff Writer
Loomis Dean, a Life magazine photographer who made memorable pictures of the royalty of both Europe and Hollywood, has died. He was 88.
Dean died Wednesday [December 7, 2005] at Sonoma Valley Hospital in Sonoma, Calif., of complications from a stroke, according to his son, Christopher. In a photographic career spanning six decades, Dean's leading images included shirtless Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck trying a one-handed chin-up on a trapeze bar, the ocean liner Andrea Doria listing in the Atlantic and writer Ernest Hemingway in Spain the year before he committed suicide. One of his most memorable photographs for Life was of cosmopolitan British playwright and composer Noel Coward in the unlikely setting of the Nevada desert. Dean shot 52 covers for Life, either as a freelance photographer or during his two stretches as a staffer with the magazine, 1947-61 and 1966-69. After leaving the magazine, Dean found steady freelance work in magazines and as a still photographer on film sets, including several of the early James Bond movies starring Sean Connery. Born in Monticello, Fla., Dean was the son of a grocer and a schoolteacher. When the Dean family's business failed during the Depression, they moved to Sarasota, Fla., where Dean's father worked as a curator and guide at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Dean studied engineering at the University of Florida but became fascinated with photography after watching a friend develop film in a darkroom. He went off to what is now the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was known for its photography school. After earning his degree, Dean went to work for the Ringling circus as a junior press agent and, according to his son, cultivated a side job photographing Ringling's vast array of performers and workers. He worked briefly as one of Parade magazine's first photographers but left after receiving an Army Air Forces commission during World War II. During the war, he worked in aerial reconnaissance in the Pacific and was along on a number of air raids over Japan. His first assignment for Life in 1946 took him back to the circus: His photograph of clown Lou Jacobs with a giraffe looking over his shoulder made the magazine's cover and earned Dean a staff job. In the era before television, Life magazine photographers had some of the most glamorous work in journalism. Life assigned him to cover Hollywood. In 1954, the magazine published one of his most memorable photos, the shot of Coward dressed for a night on the town in New York but standing alone in the stark Nevada desert. Dean had the idea of asking Coward, who was then doing a summer engagement at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, to pose in the desert to illustrate his song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun." As Dean recalled in an interview with John Loengard for the book "Life Photographers: What They Saw," Coward wasn't about to partake of the midday sun. "Oh, dear boy, I don't get up until 4 o'clock in the afternoon," Dean recalled him saying. But Dean pressed on anyway. As he related to Loengard, he rented a Cadillac limousine and filled the back seat with a tub loaded with liquor, tonic and ice cubes — and Coward. The temperature that day reached 119 as Coward relaxed in his underwear during the drive to a spot about 15 miles from Las Vegas. According to Dean, Coward's dresser helped him into his tuxedo, resulting in the image of the elegant Coward with a cigarette holder in his mouth against his shadow on the dry lake bed. "Splendid! Splendid! What an idea! If we only had a piano," Coward said of the shoot before hopping back in the car and stripping down to his underwear for the ride back to Las Vegas. In 1956, Life assigned Dean to Paris. While sailing to Europe on the Ile de France, he was awakened with the news that the Andrea Doria had collided with another liner, the Stockholm. The accident occurred close enough to Dean's liner that survivors were being brought aboard. His photographs of the shaken voyagers and the sinking Andrea Doria were some of the first on the accident published in a U.S. magazine. During his years in Europe, Dean photographed communist riots and fashion shows in Paris, royal weddings throughout Europe and noted authors including James Jones and William S. Burroughs. He spent three weeks with Hemingway in Spain in 1960 for an assignment on bullfighting. In 1989, Dean published "Hemingway's Spain," about his experiences with the great writer. In 1965, Dean won first prize in a Vatican photography contest for a picture of Pope Paul VI. The prize included an audience with the pope and $750. According to his son, it was Dean's favorite honor. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Deborah, and two grandsons. Instead of flowers, donations may be made to the American Child Photographer's Charity Guild (www.acpcg.com) or the Make-A-Wish Foundation. |
Related material:
The Big Time
(Log 24, July 29, 2003):
A Story That Works
|
For Samira Bellil,
who died in Paris on
Friday, Sept. 3, 2004…
From the link at
Symmetry and Change
in the Dreamtime,
Part 8, Friday,
Sept. 3, 2004,
Noon…
Three songs from Sept. 10
in various preceding years–
“Good morning little schoolgirl
Good morning little schoolgirl
Can I come home with
Can I come home with you“
— Rod Stewart, Sept. 10, 1964
“Tell your mamma, girl, I can’t stay long
We got things we gotta catch up on
Mmmm, you know
You know what I’m sayin’ “
— Neil Diamond, Sept. 10, 1966
“A time of war, a time of peace
A time of love, a time of hate
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing“
— The Byrds, Sept. 10, 1965
Further verses from the Byrds
seem appropriate on this, the day
of Samira Bellil’s funeral:
To everything, turn, turn, turn,
there is a season, turn, turn, turn…
“It’s not even called rape. They call it
a tournante, or pass-round.
The banality is deliberate:
a joint, a girl – same difference.”
… and a time to every purpose
under heaven.
“… The kind of school where teacher
Fabrice Genestal kept hearing
the word “tournante” and didn’t click
what it meant, till he and Sillam
sat the kids down in after-school
workshops, and got talking.”
Ideas and Art
— Motto of
Plato's Academy
|
From Minimalist Fantasies,
All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. … What you see is what you see.
Minimal Art remains too much a feat of ideation, and not enough anything else. Its idea remains an idea, something deduced instead of felt and discovered.
The artists even questioned whether art needed to be a tangible object. Minimalism … Conceptualism — suddenly art could be nothing more than an idea, a thought on a piece of paper….
There was a period, a decade or two ago, when you could hardly open an art journal without encountering the quotation from Frank Stella I used as an epigraph. The bit about “what you see is what you see” was reproduced ad nauseam. It was thought by some to be very deep. In fact, Stella’s remarks—from a joint interview with him and Donald Judd—serve chiefly to underscore the artistic emptiness of the whole project of minimalism. No one can argue with the proposition that “what you see is what you see,” but there’s a lot to argue with in what he calls “the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.” We do not, of course, see ideas. Stella’s assertion to the contrary might be an instance of verbal carelessness, but it is not merely verbal carelessness. At the center of minimalism, as Clement Greenberg noted, is the triumph of ideation over feeling and perception, over aesthetics. |
|
From How Not Much Is a Whole World, Decades on, it's curious how much Minimalism, the last great high modern movement, still troubles people who just can't see why … a plain white canvas with a line painted across it
should be considered art. That line might as well be in the sand: on this side is art, it implies. Go ahead. Cross it. …. The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated, either. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism's bottom line. If what results can sometimes be more fodder for the brain than exciting to look at, it can also have a serene and exalted eloquence…. That line in the sand doesn't separate good art from bad, or art from nonart, but a wide world from an even wider one. |
I maintain that of course
we can see ideas.
Example: the idea of
invariant structure.
"What modern painters
are trying to do,
if they only knew it,
is paint invariants."
— James J. Gibson, Leonardo,
Vol. 11, pp. 227-235.
Pergamon Press Ltd., 1978
For a discussion
of how this works, see
Block Designs,
4×4 Geometry, and
Diamond Theory.
Incidentally, structures like the one shown above are invariant under an important subgroup of the affine group AGL(4,2)… That is to say, they are not lost in translation. (See previous entry.)
The Horn at Midnight
(See the two previous entries.)
HORATIO
I think it lacks of twelve.
HAMLET
No, it is struck.
HORATIO
Indeed? I heard it not:
then it draws near the season
Wherein the spirit held
his wont to walk.A flourish of trumpets,
and ordnance shot off, withinWhat does this mean, my lord?
……………………………………..
HORATIO
Look, my lord, it comes!
Enter Ghost
HAMLET
Angels and ministers of grace
defend us!
___________________________
In memory of
Peter Ustinov and Alistair Cooke
From today’s New York Times:
Mr. Cooke’s daughter contacted Mr. Cooke’s biographer to inform him of her father’s death at midnight [on the night of March 29-March 30, 2004].
ANGEL
On Peter Ustinov, also from the New York Times:
“He received [an Emmy for his role] as Socrates in ‘Barefoot in Athens’ in 1966.”
The Times on “Barefoot in Athens”:
“Socrates falls from grace, and becomes the lone voice of democracy amongst the corruption of his fellow Athenians in this television adaptation of Maxwell Anderson’s play.”
MINISTER OF GRACE
On Alistair Cooke in today’s Times:
“At Jesus College, Cambridge, Mr. Cooke edited a literary magazine, put on plays and acted in them as a co-founder of the Cambridge Mummers, and pursued a rigorous social life….
Quiller-Couch taught him about writing.”
GRACE
For more on Jesus College, Quiller-Couch, Socrates, and grace, see
| Number 61 |  |
For Joan Didion on her birthday
From “On Keeping a Notebook” (1966)
in Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write- on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, “That’s my old football number”)….
I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line “That’s my old football number” touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably “The Eighty-Yard Run.”
From a 1994 interview with Tommy Lee Jones by Bryant Gumbel:
Gumbel: While majoring in English, Jones was also an offensive guard on the Harvard football team. Number 61 in your program, his last game, against Yale, proved to be one of the most famous games every played. Harvard scored 16 points in the last 42 seconds to gain a 29-all tie. (Photo of Jones in football uniform, footage of 1968 football game.)
Mr. J: It couldn’t have been a more spectacular way to leave the game that had been so important to me all my life. The grass had never looked that green, nor the sky that blue.
Gumbel: That lucky game was for Jones a precursor of good fortune to come. It seems Harvard´s team doctor, Thomas Quigley, had caught some of Tommy Lee’s off the field plays and come away impressed. (Photo of Jones at rehearsal)
Mr. J: And when I was about to graduate, he asked if I had thought about going to New York, and I said I didn’t know. He said, “Well, if you do, take this letter and give it to my daughter, she’s doing a play.”
Ms. Jane Alexander (Actress): And I opened it. It was from my father, and it said: “This young man excels at Harvard. He is a good football player, but he wants to be an actor. Take care of him.” So I introduced him to a few agents, and right away he got a job.
Mr. J: And I had one line…. The line was five words long.
Gumbel: Were this a fairy tale, it would be….
Joan Didion: “That’s my old football number.”
Death of a Holy Man
Part I: An American Religion
Hiroshima Mayor Says
US Worships Nukes
“HIROSHIMA — Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba warned that the world is moving toward war and accused Washington of ‘worshipping’ nuclear weapons during Wednesday’s ceremony marking the 58th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city….
… the Hiroshima mayor blamed the United States for making the world a more uncertain place through its policy of undermining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
‘A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of growing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment,’ Akiba said. ‘The chief cause of this is the United States’ nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small ‘useable’ nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.’ “
— Mainichi Shimbun, Aug. 6, 2003
Part II: Holy Men and
Sons of Bitches
“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
— Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
Director of Los Alamos
John Steinbeck describing Cannery Row in Monterey:
“Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
“Now we are all sons of bitches.”
— Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge,
Director of Trinity Test
Part III: Death of a Holy Man
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The New York Times, Aug. 10, 2003: Atom-Bomb Physicist Dies at 98 “Henry A. Boorse, a physicist who was one of the original scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project in the development of the atomic bomb, died on July 28 in Houston, where he lived…. Dr. Boorse was a consultant to the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1958 and to the Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1951 to 1955. He and Lloyd Motz wrote a two-volume work, The World of the Atom (1966), and — with Jefferson Hane Weaver — a one-volume book, The Atomic Scientists (1989).” |
From a review of The Atomic Scientists:
“… the authors try to add a personal element that can excite the reader about science.”
For more excitement, see Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Götterdämmerung
As our celebration of Wagner’s May 22 birthday draws to a close, let us recall that on this date in 1966 the Beatles released “Paperback Writer” in the US. Perhaps our most notable paperback writer is now Stephen King; in honor of a recurring theme in his Hearts in Atlantis, our site music today is “Twilight Time.”
Divine Right of Empire
and the
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Sunday Lottery
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Operation James From The Glasgow Daily Record:
Commando raiders tightened the Allies’ grip on Basra yesterday by storming a key suburb of Iraq’s besieged second city. The raid was named Operation James, after James Bond. Targets were codenamed Goldfinger, Blofeld and Pussy Galore. |
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Operation Playmate From Yahoo News: Friday, March 28, 2003 – During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their “Operation Playmate” project…. Those… efforts… had their roots in the Vietnam War, when 1966 Playmate of the Year Jo Collins traveled to the combat zone and flew aboard a helicopter gunship…. Now, in light of the war in Iraq, “Operation Playmate” has returned. |
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Doctorow’s Epiphany
E. L. Doctorow is 72 today.
The above is a phrase from The Midrash Jazz Quartet in Doctorow’s novel City of God.
Tonight’s site music is “Black Diamond.”
William T. Noon, S.J., Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University Press, 1957:
A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)… has this to say: “Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class — for Joyce knew no Greek — that ‘Epiphany’ meant ‘a shining forth.'”
From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:
Danny Torrance: Is there something bad here?
Dick Hallorann: Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who “shine” can see. Just like they can see things that haven’t happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of ’em was good.
From a website on author Willard Motley:
“Willard Motley’s last published novel is entitled, Let Noon Be Fair, and was actually published post-humously in 1966. The story line takes place in Motley’s adopted country of Mexico, in the fictional fishing village of Las Casas, which was based on Puerta [sic] Vallarta.”
See also “Shining Forth” and yesterday’s entry “Culinary Theology.”
Point of No Return
From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar for December 10:
An album recorded in September 1961:
Songs in the above list:
September Song * When the World was Young
I’ll Be Seeing You * I’ll See You Again
Memories of You * There Will Never Be Another You
Somewhere Along the Way * A Million Dreams Ago
It’s a Blue World * I’ll Remember April
These Foolish Things
Not in the list, but in the album:
As Time Goes By
The Savannah Connection:
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
William Tecumseh Sherman,
1892-1903 (installed 1903)
Central Park, New York City
From
by Wallace Stevens
(New York: Knopf, 1951)
(New York: Vintage Books, 1966):
“The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety….”
Part of a journal entry for
October 25, 2002:
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Trinity See… Bonaventure’s
a graves list for Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, |
Point of No Return was Sinatra’s
last album for Capitol.
Note the strategic placement
of the Capitol Records logo
on the album cover.
Introduction to
Harmonic Analysis
From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar for Oct. 22:
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“I hear the sound of a On the wind that lifts — The Beach Boys |
The Sound of Hanging Rock
On this date, director Robert Wise was born in Winchester, Indiana. Credits include
“Born to Kill,”
“I Want to Live,” and
“The Sound of Music.”
“Director Robert Wise suggests that we all share a collective dark side.” — Robert Weston
According to various Web sources,
Good morning little schoolgirl
Good morning little schoolgirl
Can I come home with
Can I come home with you
Tell your mama and your papa
I once was a schoolboy too
A time of war, a time of peace
A time of love, a time of hate
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing
On this date in 1966, Neal Diamond sings his first chart song, “Cherry Cherry.”
Tell your mamma, girl, I can’t stay long
We got things we gotta catch up on
Mmmm, you know
You know what I’m sayin’
With the exception of The Byrds, the above music seems to reflect the spirit of Pan, a god discussed in my September 9 notes below.
For a perhaps more accurate rendition of the spirit of Pan, see the classic Australian film
“From the opening shot of Hanging Rock, lovingly framed by cinematographer Russell Boyd, accompanied by the strains of the pan flute played by Gheorghe Zamfir, the film sets its elegant, restrained tone….”
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