From Josefine Lyche's website —
* For the title, see Apollo + Outram in this journal.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
To Apollo*
Comments Off on To Apollo*
Sunday, September 8, 2024
Sunday Morning Koppel
Today's host for a special political edition of CBS Sunday Morning
is Ted Koppel. Vocabulary review:
Koppel's appearance today was backed by the usual CBS Sunday Morning
sun-disk Apollo symbol. An Apollo symbol that some may prefer —
The Ninefold Square
|
Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal— or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason…." |
Comments Off on Sunday Morning Koppel
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Ex Fano Apollinis
|
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159) What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld…. The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart. |
"As a Chinese jar . . . ."
— Four Quartets
|
Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal— or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, |
The "Katz" of the August 7 post Art Angles
is a product of Princeton's
Department of Art and Archaeology.
ART —
.jpg)
ARCHAEOLOGY —
"This pattern is a square divided into nine equal parts.
It has been called the 'Holy Field' division and
was used throughout Chinese history for many
different purposes, most of which were connected
with things religious, political, or philosophical."
– The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China,
by Alfred Schinz, Edition Axel Menges, 1996, p. 71
Comments Off on Ex Fano Apollinis
Monday, February 17, 2020
RIP Charles Portis
See also "True Grid " in this journal.
|
Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal— or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason…." |
See as well . . .
Comments Off on RIP Charles Portis
Thursday, August 9, 2018
True Grids
From a search in this journal for "True Grid,"
a fanciful description of the 3×3 grid —
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
– John Outram, architect
A fanciful instance of the 4×2 grid in
a scene from the film "The Master" —
A fanciful novel referring to the number 8,
and a not -so-fanciful reference:
-actions-500w.jpg)
Illustrated above are Katherine Neville's novel The Eight and the
"knight" coordinatization of the 4×2 grid from a page on the exceptional
isomorphism between PSL(3,2) (alias GL(3,2)) and PSL(2,7) — groups
of, respectively, degree 7 and degree 8.
Literature related to the above remarks on grids:
Ross Douthat's New York Times column yesterday purported, following
a 1946 poem by Auden, to contrast students of the humanities with
technocrats by saying that the former follow Hermes, the latter Apollo.
I doubt that Apollo would agree.
Comments Off on True Grids
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
The Field of Reason*
Or perhaps the Richman.
Roger Richman, agent who represented image rights for the
estates of celebrities, reportedly died on October 9, 2013.
This journal on that date —
 |
* For the title, see Apollo + Outram in this journal.
Comments Off on The Field of Reason*
Monday, August 26, 2013
Dark Side Tales
"Got to keep the loonies on the path."
— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon
For those who, like Tom Stoppard, prefer the dark side—
|
NEW ANGLE:
INT. OFFICE BUILDING – NIGHT
NIGHT WATCHMAN
Bateman wheels around and shoots him.
NEW ANGLE:
INT. PIERCE & PIERCE LOBBY – NIGHT
— AMERICAN PSYCHO |
Not quite so dark—
"And then one day you find ten years have got behind you."
— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon
This journal ten years ago, on August 25, 2003—
|
… We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
— Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening |
"A view of New Haven, say…." —
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
John Outram, architect
A similar version of this Apollonian image —
Detail:
Related material for the loonies:
Comments Off on Dark Side Tales
Saturday, January 8, 2011
True Grid (continued)
"Rosetta Stone" as a Metaphor
in Mathematical Narratives
For some backgound, see Mathematics and Narrative from 2005.
Yesterday's posts on mathematics and narrative discussed some properties
of the 3×3 grid (also known as the ninefold square ).
For some other properties, see (at the college-undergraduate, or MAA, level)–
Ezra Brown, 2001, "Magic Squares, Finite Planes, and Points of Inflection on Elliptic Curves."
His conclusion:
When you are done, you will be able to arrange the points into [a] 3×3 magic square,
which resembles the one in the book [5] I was reading on elliptic curves….
This result ties together threads from finite geometry, recreational mathematics,
combinatorics, calculus, algebra, and number theory. Quite a feat!
5. Viktor Prasolov and Yuri Solvyev, Elliptic Functions and Elliptic Integrals ,
American Mathematical Society, 1997.
Brown fails to give an important clue to the historical background of this topic —
the word Hessian . (See, however, this word in the book on elliptic functions that he cites.)
Investigation of this word yields a related essay at the graduate-student, or AMS, level–
Igor Dolgachev and Michela Artebani, 2009, "The Hesse Pencil of Plane Cubic Curves ."
From the Dolgachev-Artebani introduction–
In this paper we discuss some old and new results about the widely known Hesse
configuration of 9 points and 12 lines in the projective plane P2(k ): each point lies
on 4 lines and each line contains 3 points, giving an abstract configuration (123, 94).
PlanetMath.org on the Hesse configuration—
A picture of the Hesse configuration–
(See Visualizing GL(2,p), a note from 1985).
Related notes from this journal —
From last November —
|
From the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices—
Related material from this journal— Consolation Prize (August 19, 2010) |
From 2006 —
|
Sunday December 10, 2006
“Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry
– J. G. Ballard on Modernism
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance –
— Daniel J. Boorstin, |
Also from 2006 —
|
Sunday November 26, 2006
Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal*– or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason…."
For more on the field of reason, see
A reasonable set of "strange correspondences" Unreason is, of course, more popular. * The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel: "Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."
– Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy ,
"For every kind of vampire, |
And from last October —
|
Friday, October 8, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .
"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage."
– "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,
* The Web version's title has a misprint— |
Comments Off on True Grid (continued)
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Thursday May 10, 2007
Riverdance
The above scene from
The Best of Riverdance
furnishes an exercise in
what Victor Turner has called
“comparative symbology.”
The circular symbol at top
may be seen as representing
the solar deity Apollo,
Leader of the Muses.
The nine female dancers
may be seen as
the nine muses,
with Jean Butler
at the center
as Terpsichore,
Muse of Dance.
Related Material —
“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect
For another look at
Terpsichore in action,
see Jean Butler at
CRC Irish Dance Camp.
For those who prefer
a different sort of camp
there is of course
Xanadu.
I prefer Butler.
Comments Off on Thursday May 10, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Saturday March 10, 2007
The Logic of Dreams
From A Beautiful Mind–
“How could you,” began Mackey, “how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof…how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you…?”
Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. “Because,” Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”
Ideas:
These numbers may, in the mad way so well portrayed by Sylvia Nasar in the above book, be regarded as telling a story… a story that should, of course, not be taken too seriously.
Friday’s New York numbers (midday 214, evening 711) suggest the dates 2/14 and 7/11. Clicking on these dates will lead the reader to Log24 entries featuring, among others, T. S. Eliot and Stephen King– two authors not unacquainted with the bizarre logic of dreams.
A link in the 7/11 entry leads to a remark of Noel Gray on Plato’s Meno and “graphic austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave.”
Also Friday: an example of graphic austerity– indeed, Gray graphic austerity– in Log24:
This illustration refers to chess rather than to geometry, and to the mind of an addict rather than to that of a slave, but chess and geometry, like addiction and slavery, are not unrelated.
Friday’s Pennsylvania numbers, midday 429 and evening 038, suggest that the story includes, appropriately enough in view of the above Beautiful Mind excerpt, Mackey himself. The midday number suggests the date 4/29, which at Log24 leads to an entry in memory of Mackey.
(Related material: the Harvard Gazette of April 6, 2006, “Mathematician George W. Mackey, 90: Obituary“– “A memorial service will be held at Harvard’s Memorial Church on April 29 at 2 p.m.“)
Friday’s Pennsylvania evening number 038 tells two other parts of the story involving Mackey…
As Mackey himself might hope, the number may be regarded as a reference to the 38 impressive pages of Varadarajan’s “Mackey Memorial Lecture” (pdf).
More in the spirit of Nash, 38 may also be taken as a reference to Harvard’s old postal address, Cambridge 38, and to the year, 1938, that Mackey entered graduate study at Harvard, having completed his undergraduate studies at what is now Rice University.
Returning to the concept of graphic austerity, we may further simplify the already abstract chessboard figure above to obtain an illustration that has been called both “the field of reason” and “the Garden of Apollo” by an architect, John Outram, discussing his work at Mackey’s undergraduate alma mater:
Let us hope that Mackey,
a devotee of reason,
is now enjoying the company
of Apollo rather than that of
Tom O’Bedlam:
For John Nash on his birthday:
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
Comments Off on Saturday March 10, 2007
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Tuesday December 19, 2006
Joseph Barbera
at the Apollo
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
— Paul Simon
at the Apollo
Click on picture
for related symbolism.
“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect
I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
— Paul Simon
In memory of Joseph Barbera–
co-creator ot the Flintstones–
who died yesterday, a photo
from today’s Washington Post:
Playing the role of
recording angel —
Halle Berry as
Rosetta Stone:
Related material:
“Citizen Stone“
and
“Putting the X in Xmas.”
Comments Off on Tuesday December 19, 2006
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Librarian
"Like all men of the Library,
I have traveled in my youth."
— Jorge Luis Borges,
The Library of Babel
"Papá me mandó un artículo
de J. G. Ballard en el que
se refiere a cómo el lugar
de la muerte es central en
nuestra cultura contemporánea."
— Sonya Walger,
interview dated September 14
(Feast of the Triumph of the Cross),
Anno Domini 2006
Sonya Walger,
said to have been
born on D-Day,
the sixth of June,
in 1974
Walger's father is, like Borges,
from Argentina.
She "studied English Literature
at Christ Church College, Oxford,
where she received
a First Class degree…. "
"… un artículo de J. G. Ballard…."–
A Handful of Dust, by J. G. Ballard
(The Guardian, March 20, 2006):
"… The Atlantic wall was only part of a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.
Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about….
… modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line…
Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom. Architects were in the vanguard of the new movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety."
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect
(Click on picture for details.)
— The Left Hand of God, by Adolf Holl
Related material:
Comments Off on Sunday December 10, 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Sunday November 26, 2006
Rosalind Krauss
in "Grids," 1979:
"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.
Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at
the nine engravings
and at the circle,
checking strange
correspondences
between them."
— The Club Dumas,1993
"And it's whispered that soon
if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us
to reason."
— Robert Plant,1971
The nine engravings of
The Club Dumas
(filmed as "The Ninth Gate")
are perhaps more an example
of the concrete than of the
universal.
An example of the universal*–
or, according to Krauss, a
"staircase" to the universal–
is the ninefold square:
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect
For more on the field
of reason, see
Log24, Oct. 9, 2006.
A reasonable set of
"strange correspondences"
in the garden of Apollo
has been provided by Ezra Brown
in a mathematical essay (pdf).
Unreason is, of course,
more popular.
* The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel:
"Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."
— Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, "Idea of a Concrete Universal Unity"
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon
Comments Off on Sunday November 26, 2006
Monday, October 9, 2006
Monday October 9, 2006
ART WARS:
To Apollo
To Apollo
“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect
To Apollo (10/09/02)
Art Wars: Apollo and Dionysus (10/09/02)
Balanchine’s Birthday (01/09/03)
Art Theory for Yom Kippur (10/05/03)
A Form (05/22/04)
Ineluctable (05/27/04)
A Form, continued (06/05/04)
Parallelisms (06/06/04)
Ado (06/25/04)
Deep Game (06/26/04)
Gameplayers of Zen (06/27/04)
And So To Bed (06/29/04)
Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah (09/15/04)
Derrida Dead (10/09/04)
The Nine (11/09/04)
From Tate to Plato (11/19/04)
Art History (05/11/05)
A Miniature Rosetta Stone (08/06/05)
High Concept (8/23/05)
High Concept, Continued (8/24/05)
Analogical Train of Thought (8/25/05)
Today’s Sermon: Magical Thinking (10/09/05)
Balance (10/31/05)
Matrix (11/01/05)
Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate (11/12/05)
Nine is a Vine (11/12/05)
Apollo and Christ (12/02/05)
Hamilton’s Whirligig (01/05/06)
Cross (01/06/06)
On Beauty (01/26/06)
Sunday Morning (01/29/06)
Centre (01/29/06)
New Haven (01/29/06)
Washington Ballet (02/05/06)
Catholic Schools Sermon (02/05/06)
The Logic of Apollo (02/05/06)
Game Boy (08/06/06)
Art Wars Continued: The Krauss Cross (09/13/06)
Art Wars Continued: Pandora’s Box (09/16/06)
The Pope in Plato’s Cave (09/16/06)
Today’s Birthdays (09/26/06)
Symbology 101 (09/26/06)
Comments Off on Monday October 9, 2006
Sunday, February 5, 2006
Sunday February 5, 2006
The Logic of Apollo
“The icon that I use… is the nine-fold square…. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason….”
— Architect’s notes on the design of a college campus
“Binary image morphological operations are well suited to a large class of basic image processing applications. These operations include image analysis tasks such as shape recognition, image segmentation, noise reduction, and feature extraction.”
— A Programmable Logic-based Implementation of Ultra-fast Parallel Binary Image Morphological Operations (pdf), by Kenneth G. Ricks et al., ISCA 18th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications (March 2003)
Comments Off on Sunday February 5, 2006
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Saturday July 30, 2005
Born today: Laurence Fishburne
Matrix
“The nine-fold square has centre, periphery, axes and diagonals. But all are present only in their bare essentials. It is also a sequence of eight triads. Four pass through the centre and four do not. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason, sheltered by the Gate from the turmoil of the Delta, with its endless cycles of erasure and reinscription. This is the Temple of Solomon, as inscribed, for example, by a nine-fold compartmentation to provide the ground plan of Yale….”– Architects John Outram Associates
on work at Rice University
on work at Rice University
Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001:
“When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
Last year History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred.
Scully said the colony’s founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a ‘nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'”
“Real and unreal are two in one:
New Haven
Before and after one arrives….”
— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’ XXVIII
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Sunday April 27, 2003
ART WARS:
Graphical Password
From a summary of “The Design and Analysis of Graphical Passwords“:
“Results from cognitive science show that people can remember pictures much better than words….
The 5×5 grid creates a good balance between security and memorability.”
— Ian Jermyn, New York University; Alain Mayer, Fabian Monrose, Michael K. Reiter, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies; Aviel Rubin, AT&T Labs — Research
Illustration — Warren Beatty as
a graphical password:
“Town & Country,”
released April 27, 2001
Those who prefer the simplicity of a 3×3 grid are referred to my entry of Jan. 9, 2003, Balanchine’s Birthday. For material related to the “Town & Country” theme and to Balanchine, see Leadbelly Under the Volcano (Jan. 27, 2003). (“Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in town…” – Huddie Ledbetter). Those with more sophisticated tastes may prefer the work of Stephen Ledbetter on Gershwin’s piano preludes or, in view of Warren Beatty’s architectural work in “Town & Country,” the work of Stephen R. Ledbetter on window architecture.
As noted in Balanchine’s Birthday, Apollo (of the Balanchine ballet) has been associated by an architect with the 3×3, or “ninefold” grid. The reader who wishes a deeper meditation on the number nine, related to the “Town & Country” theme and more suited to the fact that April is Poetry Month, is referred to my note of April 27 two years ago, Nine Gates to the Temple of Poetry.
Intermediate between the simplicity of the 3×3 square and the (apparent) complexity of the 5×5 square, the 4×4 square offers an introduction to geometrical concepts that appears deceptively simple, but is in reality fiendishly complex. See Geometry for Jews. The moral of this megilla?
32 + 42 = 52.
Comments Off on Sunday April 27, 2003
Friday, January 10, 2003
Friday January 10, 2003
Story
"How much story do you want?"
— George Balanchine
While researching yesterday's entry on Balanchine, Apollo, and the nine Muses, I came across this architect's remarks, partially quoted yesterday and continued here:
"The icon that I use for this element is the nine-fold square…. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason…. This is the Temple of Solomon, as inscribed, for example, by a nine-fold compartmentation to provide the ground plan of Yale, as described to me by Professor Hersey."
Checking this out yesterday, I came across the following at a Yale University Art Gallery site:
"This exhibition of nine boldly colored, asymmetrically designed quilts selected from a private collection will be displayed in the Matrix Gallery….
With the guidance of Professor Maude Southwell Wahlman, author of 'Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts,' the collector has explored and gathered examples…."
Exploring and gathering examples myself today, I received a book in the mail — W. M. Spackman's On the Decay of Humanism (Rutgers University Press, 1967) — and picked up a second-hand book at a sale — Barbara Michaels's Stitches in Time (Harper Collins Publishers, 1995).
The Spackman book includes the following poem at the end:
In sandarac etui for sepulchre
lies the cered body of a poisoned queen;
and in her mouth and hair, and at her feet,
and in the grey folds of her winding-sheet,
there sifts a dreamy powder, smooth and green,
the magic of an idle sorcerer,
an ancient spell, cast when the shroud was spun.
In death her hands clasp amourously a bowl
that still contains the fragments of her soul,
a tale of Beauty sought, and Beauty won,
his false lips kissed, and Beauty dead for her.
— Alexander B. Griswold, Princeton '28, in the
Nassau Literary Magazine of December 1925
From a synopsis of Michaels's Stitches in Time:
"Michaels follows Rachel, a graduate student studying women's crafts–weaving, spinning, quilting, embroidery–and the superstitions connected with them. Linking all important rites of passage to the garments created as markers of these occasions leads Rachel to her theory: in societies in which magic was practiced, the garment was meant to protect its wearer. She gains evidence that her theory is valid when an evil antique bridal quilt enters her life."
Although Stitches in Time is about a quilt — stitched, not spun — Griswold's line
"an ancient spell, cast when the shroud was spun"
is very closely related to the evil spell in Michaels's book.
The above events display a certain synchronicity that Wallace Stevens might appreciate, especially in light of the following remark in a review of Stitches in Time:
"…the premise is too outlandish for even the suspension of disbelief…." (Publishers Weekly, 4/24/95)
Stevens might reply,
The very man despising honest quilts
Lies quilted to his poll in his despite.— "The Comedian as the Letter C," Part V
Finally, those who prefer stories to the more formal qualities of pure dance (ballet) pure mathematics (see previous entry), pure (instrumental) music, and pure (abstract, as in quilt designs) art, can consult the oeuvre of Jodie Foster — as in my
Pearl Harbor Day entry on Buddhism.
An art historian named Griswold — perhaps that very same Griswold quoted above — might have a thing or two to say to Jodie on her recent film "Anna and the King." In the April, 1957, issue of The Journal of the Siam Society, Alexander B. Griswold takes issue with Broadway's and Hollywood's "grotesque caricature" of Siamese society, and ultimately with Anna herself:
"The real fault lies in the two books they ultimately spring from — The English Governess at the Court of Siam and The Romance of the Harem — both written by Mrs. Anna Leonowens.''
See also The Diamond 16 Puzzle for some quilt designs.
Comments Off on Friday January 10, 2003
Thursday, January 9, 2003
Thursday January 9, 2003
Balanchine's Birthday
Today seems an appropriate day to celebrate Apollo and the nine Muses.
From a website on Balanchine's and Stravinsky's ballet, "Apollon Musagete":
In his Poetics of Music (1942) Stravinsky says: "Summing up: What is important for the lucid ordering of the work– for its crystallization– is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it." Stravinsky conceived Apollo as a ballet blanc– a "white ballet" with classical choreography and monochromatic attire. Envisioning the work in his mind's eye, he found that "the absence of many-colored hues and of all superfluities produced a wonderful freshness." Upon first hearing Apollo, Diaghilev found it "music somehow not of this world, but from somewhere else above." The ballet closes with an Apotheosis in which Apollo leads the Muses towards Parnassus. Here, the gravely beautiful music with which the work began is truly recapitulated "on high"– ceaselessly recycled, frozen in time.
— Joseph Horowitz
Another website invoking Apollo:
The icon that I use… is the nine-fold square…. The nine-fold square has centre, periphery, axes and diagonals. But all are present only in their bare essentials. It is also a sequence of eight triads. Four pass through the centre and four do not. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason….
In accordance with these remarks, here is the underlying structure for a ballet blanc:
This structure may seem too simple to support movements of interest, but consider the following (click to enlarge):
As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, paraphrasing Horace, remarks in his Whitsun, 1939, preface to the new edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse, "tamen usque recurret Apollo."
The alert reader will note that in the above diagrams, only eight of the positions move.
Which muse remains at the center?
Consider the remark of T. S. Eliot, "At the still point, there the dance is," and the fact that on the day Eliot turned 60, Olivia Newton-John was born. How, indeed, in the words of another "sixty-year-old smiling public man," can we know the dancer from the dance?