Log24

A more sophisticated alpha and omega . . .

The title pun is from a letter about Google's new parent
company, named "Alphabet" by its founders.

Related material:  Alpha and Omega in this journal.

Demystifying Alpha Delta, the original 'Animal House' —

"Dartmouth officially recognized its chapter of
the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity in 1846."

Harvard, on the other hand . . .

All the Way to the Bank

A check of the phrase "memory-alpha" in the above URL
reveals that it comes from a 1969 Star Trek episode 
written by Shari Lewis and her husband Jeremy Tarcher.

Tarcher reportedly died on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2015.
From this journal on that date —

On the editor of the anthology Space, Space, Space :

"Sloane’s writing is drum-tight, but his approach
is looser; he pulls the reader in and then begins
turning up the heat. He understood that before
a pot can boil, it must simmer." — Stephen King

Of related literary interest to fans of the late Russell Banks,
whose novel title Cloudsplitter  refers to Mt. Marcy, the 
highest mountain in New York State —

Marcy was a New York State politician who is said to have
coined the above phrase 

"to the victor go the spoils."

A remark by Esther Dyson on Jan. 19:

See as well the above group-theory author here  on Jan. 19.

Related material:  "Same Staircase, DIfferent Day."

"FILE – Retired Sandinista Gen. Hugo Torres poses for portrait
at his home, in Managua, Nicaragua, May 2, 2018."

— Photo caption from a Feb. 12 Washington Post  obituary 

Also on May 2, 2018 —

Related theology —

Α, ϴ, Ω 

Alpha,    Theta,    Omega

Related line: 

"Falls  the  Shadow."
 

Also from a Culture Desk  of sorts:

Related art — Background colors for the letters in the NPR logo —

“…problems can be solved by manipulating just two symbols, 1 and 0….”
— George Johnson, obituary of Claude Shannon

“The female and the male continue this charming dance, populating
the world with all living beings.”
— Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,
Penguin Arkana paperback, 1999, Chapter 17,
“Lingam/Yoni” 

"Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville.
Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one." 

"A very short space of time through very short times of space….
Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"

— James Joyce, Ulysses , Proteus chapter

See also the previous post and Masks of the Illuminati .

Or:  Je repars .

From Wallace Stevens —

"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."

— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI

Mathematician Hanfried Lenz reportedly died in Berlin on June 1, 2013.

This journal that weekend —

From Annals of Technology —

Continues.

A YouTube description —

"Walter Klien performing Mozart's 12 Variations in C Major
on the French Song: "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman" K.265 on
the piano. Used in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa Baa
Black Sheep, and the Alphabet Song."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS7yiD6cz8A —

"Published on May 23, 2010"

See also this  journal on May 23, 2010 —

Posts now tagged Death Story.

Related material —

[Revised throughout the day on Sept. 24, 2018.]

"Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to explain
how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty."

— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016

Atiyah's remarks today on the Riemann hypothesis, based on his earlier
remarks on "arithmetic physics" and α, the fine-structure constant,
seem to exemplify the "magic and mystery" approach.

From some previous Log24 posts —

Update of 6:06 PM ET the same day —

https://twitter.com/mpoessel/status/1044131977950109696 —

For related magic and mystery, see Log24 posts tagged on090405.

"In 'Sophistry,' a new play by Jonathan Marc Sherman
at the Playwrights Horizons Studio, a popular tenured
professor stands accused of sexual harassment
by a male student."

— Frank Rich in The New York Times , theater review
on October 12, 1993

"At which point another play, inchoate but arresting,
edges into view." — Rich, ibid.

"Johansson began acting during childhood,
after her mother started taking her to auditions.
She made her professional acting debut
at the age of eight in the off-Broadway production
of 'Sophistry' with Ethan Hawke, at New York's
Playwrights Horizons."

— IMDb Mini Biography by: Pedro Borges 

" 'Suddenly, I was 19 again and I started to remember
all the men I'd known who had taken advantage of
the fact that I was a young woman who didn't yet have
the tools to say no, or to understand the value of
my own self-worth,' the Avengers star described. 
'I had many relationships both personal and professional
where the power dynamic was so off that I had to create
a narrative in which I was the cool girl who could hang in
and hang out, and that sometimes meant compromising
what felt right for me . . . . ' "

— Scarlett Johansson yesterday at the 2018 Women's March
in Los Angeles, as reported in E! News .

Image in a Log24 post
of March 12, 2009.

From a 2009-2016 exhibition by David Link

Related material —

A post suggested by remarks of J. D. Salinger in 
The New Yorker  of November 19, 1955 —

See also Polarity in this journal.

* A phrase adapted, via Salinger,
from a poem by Sappho—

Ἴψοι δὴ τὸ μέλαθρον,
     Υ᾽μήναον
ἀέρρετε τέκτονεσ ἄνδρεσ,
     Υ᾽μήναον
γάμβροσ ἔρχεται ἶσοσ Ά᾽ρευϊ,
     [Υ᾽μήναον]
ανδροσ μεγάλο πόλυ μείζων
     [Υ᾽μήναον]

RSS feed screenshot of 1:53 AM ET today —

1. "Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read"
2. "Alpha Dog"
3. "B. J. Leggett is professor emeritus at UT Knoxville"
4. "Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate, Nine is a Vine"

Update of about 6:40 AM ET on June 22, 2016 —

"Que cantaba el rey David."  Happy birthday to Kris Kristofferson.

(Continued)

The New York Lottery numbers yesterday evening:
897 and 3454. See the corresponding Log24 posts.

Related material: Moloney (op. cit.), pp. 91 and 92.

From a New York Times  obituary today —

"The Rev. Fernando Cardenal, a son of privilege
who embraced Latin America’s poor as a revolutionary
priest and brazenly defied Pope John Paul II’s order to
quit Nicaragua’s leftist cabinet in the 1980s, died on
Saturday in Managua. He was 82."

Photo caption from the same obituary —

"Fernando Cardenal in 1990. As education minister of
Nicaragua under the Sandinistas in the 1980s, he
oversaw a sweeping campaign credited with reducing
illiteracy to 13 percent from 51 percent."

This alleged literacy improvement makes him sound like
a Protestant  revolutionary.

For a Catholic  view of literacy, see The Gutenberg Galaxy .

See also the post Being Interpreted (Aug. 14, 2015) — 

Stealth (the movie) and Stealth (the Super Bowl ad)

The previous post dealt with one of the 64 symbols
(in a redesigned format) of the ancient Chinese classic 
The I Ching .

For those who prefer to be guided by programmed
responses to alphabetical  symbols …

A lyric by Ira Gershwin —

A cinematic "T" —

See also "T for Texas" in this journal and
George Clooney's recent attempt to commercialize
both the space program and the letter Omega: 

From a post of May 13, 2015 —

"The Stone" column in yesterday's New York Times :

"But where, exactly, is the border between
the private exchange of money or gifts
and the impersonal profit-making of the market?"

Good question.

Some background on the market —

Last Saturday's post Against Dryness quoted "Gone Girl,"
a recent film about an untypical couple. 

Other works of interest:

The Flame Alphabet  (Ben Marcus, 2012) and
The Folded Clock  (Heidi Julavits, 2015).

Marcus and Julavits are husband and wife. As in
"Gone Girl," both are very bright, and the wife
writes a diary. (No other resemblance between
the couples is apparent.)

Update of 6:40 PM ET March 31:

A 1983 review by the parents of Ben Marcus —

Update of 7:09 PM March 31:

Continued from Putting the A in VANITY,
Putting the AI in FAIR, and Core Problem:

From a song discussed in yesterday’s online NY Times :

“Blue, blue, my love is blue.”*

Trigger warning from SNL’s Weekend Update on April 12, 2014:

“It was announced this week that in an upcoming issue of
Life With Archie , the main character Archie Andrews
will die, following a lifelong struggle with blue balls.”

* Misheard version of Bryan Blackburn‘s “blue, blue, my world is blue”
translation of the Pierre Cour lyric “bleu, bleu, l’amour est bleu “

This post was suggested by the recent Log24
posts Film Politics,  The Wind Rises,  and
Figure and Ground, as well as the related
Wikipedia article The Wind Has Risen.

Cover design by Helen Yentus.​
 

Μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον σπεῦδε,
τὰν δ' ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν.

— Pindar, Pythian III ,  epigraph to
Le Cimetière Marin  by Paul Valéry (1920)
 

O mon âme, n’aspire à la vie immortelle,
mais épuise le champ du possible.

— Pindar, 3^e Pythique ,  epigraph to
   The Myth of Sisyphus  by Albert Camus (1942)
 

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,
but exhaust the limits of the possible.

— Pindar, Pythian iii , as translated 
    from the French (or Greek) by Justin O'Brien
​    in the Knopf Myth of Sisyphus , 1955

In memory of Leonard Shlain, author
of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

Alphabet logo from the website
of a religious publishing company—

A logo for Charlize Theron, who played
a goddess figure in "Hancock"—

Click images for further details.

In memory of two figures from tonight's NY Times  obituaries index
(not  Nora Ephron and Anthony J. Wiener)—

Tower Envy

Erin Burnett and Jenga blocks yesterday

Related material—

The Bible Puzzle Book

and the monumental treatise
by Leonard Shlain

The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict
Between Word and Image.

“… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one  of us
 gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”

— American adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest , 1956

From "The Onto-theological Origin of Play:
Heraclitus and Plato," by Yücel Dursun, in
Lingua ac Communitas  Vol 17 (October 2007)—

"Heraclitus’s Aion and His Transformations

 The saying is as follows:

αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων·
παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη

(Aion is a child playing draughts;
the kingship is the child’s)

(Krell 1972: 64).*

 * KRELL, David Farrell.
   “Towards an Ontology of Play:
   Eugen Fink’s Notion of Spiel,”
   Research in Phenomemology ,
   2, 1972: 63-93.

This is the translation of the fragment in Greek by Krell.
There are many versions of the translation of the fragment….."

See also Child's Play and Froebel's Magic Box.

Update of May 5— For some background
from the date May 4 seven years ago, see
The Fano Plane Revisualized.

For some background on the word "aion,"
see that word in this journal.

"In linear algebra, the basis of a vector space
is an alphabet in which all vectors
can be expressed uniquely. The thing to remember
is that there are many such alphabets."

—  "A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel,"
       by Yoon Ha Lee

See also Starflight in this journal.

To a
Dark Lady*

“Something inside
is telling me that
I’ve got your secret.
Are you still listening?
Fear is the lock, and laughter
the key to your heart….

… you are what you are.
And you make it hard,
and you make it hard….”

— Stephen Stills Songbook

* Suggested by…

  (1) A Harvard Crimson opinion piece
       of Oct. 12, “A Psychosexual Sham”
  (2) Remarks on the sin of masturbation
        (Ask Father Hardon)
  (3) Shem was a sham…. (FW I.7, 170).

  See also the Crimson on Jack Nicholson
  and Log24 on a food joke.

  “Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane.”
    — The Source, by James A. Michener
  
   Tell it to James Joyce.

“In Praise of Those Who Stole the Fire, M. de Villepin’s grandest literary effort to date…. will enhance his reputation within a small Paris set, but not in Washington, where he is already regarded as too clever by half.”

— Philip Delves Broughton,
    “De Villepin bares soul
     as France’s politician poet,”
    The Telegraph, May 23, 2003

The Titan Prometheus was “‘… chained to Mount Caucasus where an eagle preyed on his liver’ (Bullfinch [sic] 939).”  The study guide does not say whether 939 is a page number or paragraph number, nor does it name which edition of Bulfinch’s Mythology is meant.

“Prometheus —  One of the Titans of Greek myth, famous as a benefactor of man. Zeus had him make men out of mud and water; however, pitying mankind, he stole fire from heaven and gave it to them. As punishment, Zeus chained him to Mount Caucasus where an eagle preyed on his liver all day, the liver being renewed at night. Hercules eventually released him and killed the eagle. Zeus sent Pandora to Earth with her box of evils to balance the gift of fire.”

Eight is a Gate,
continued

“The eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called ‘Chet’ (rhymes with ‘let’) and has the (light scraping) sound of ‘ch’ as in ‘Bach.'”

— Akhlah.com    

Passion

From the previous entry:

 1.
Oscar:
military phonetic
for the letter
‘O’

From an entry of Dec. 21, 2002, some background in literary theory:

At the Oscars Sunday night, a thought attributed by Billy Crystal to Sean Connery:

“Pussy Galore! I just got it! That’s vulgar.”

For further background, see

Passing the Crown (Aug. 24, 2003) and

The Agony and the Ya-Ya (Oct. 4, 2002).

JAN. 12, 2003,  N. Y. TIMES OBITUARIES
C. Douglas Dillon, Financier Who Served in Kennedy Cabinet, Dies at 93 By ERIC PACE .Douglas Dillon was named secretary of the Treasury by President Kennedy and ambassador to France under President Eisenhower. Monique Wittig, 67, Feminist Writer, Is Dead By DOUGLAS MARTIN Monique Wittig was a French writer and literary theorist whose imaginative, fiercely innovative books tried to create a new mythology for the feminist movement.				Getty Images Maurice Gibb, Bassist for the Bee Gees, Dies at 53 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Maurice Gibb played bass and keyboard for the Bee Gees, whose 1977 album, "Saturday Night Fever," sold more than 40 million copies.

Added Jan. 13, 2003 (feast day of St. James Joyce):

For more on feminism and mythology, see

• This Will Kill That,
   
  Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Book 5, Ch. 2, on the printing press versus architecture, and
   
• The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. 

For the rest of the Dillon story,
click on the big red C above.

In this case, the victory of the alphabet over the goddess may have been rather short-lived. Here is Miss Audrey Hepburn (the original film Sabrina) as a very credible — and victorious — goddess:

See also the journal entries below.

To Ophelia
at the Winter Solstice

Introduction

“There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling…

… is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling,
How many the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?”

— Robert Graves, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”

Illustrations

The Virgin’s Beauty 

 On the Beach

A Maiden’s Prayer

Answered Prayer

Dialogue

Act III Scene ii:

Quotations

“Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?” 
— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

“At the still point, there the dance is.” 
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“I know what ‘nothing’ means….”
— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays

“How do you solve a problem like Maria?”
— Oscar Hammerstein II

“…problems can be solved by manipulating just two symbols, 1 and 0….” 
— George Johnson, obituary of Claude Shannon

“The female and the male continue this charming dance, populating the world with all living beings.” 
— Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,
    Penguin Arkana paperback, 1999, Chapter 17,
    “Lingam/Yoni” 

“According to Showalter’s essay*, ‘In Elizabethan slang, ‘nothing’ was a term for the female genitalia . . . what lies between maids’ legs, for, in the male visual system of representation and desire…. Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O — the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation.’ (222)* Ophelia is a highly sexual being…”

— Leigh DiAngelo,
   “Ophelia as a Sexual Being“

S. H. Cullinane: “No shit, Sherlock.”

*Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford Books of St.Martin’s Press, 1994. 220-238.

Dénouement

Is that nothing between your legs or are you just happy to see me?

See also The Ya-Ya Monologues.