Log24

Friday, November 2, 2012

By Candlelight

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

"Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate" — Memory rhyme

For Rebekah Gay

IMAGE- Book cover (horse, girl at gate) of 'Can I Get There by Candlelight?,' illus. by Ted Lewin

Click for image source.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Quaternion at Candlebrow

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

From a Groundhog Day post in 2009 —

The Candlebrow Conference
in Pynchon's Against the Day:

The conferees had gathered here from all around the world…. Their spirits all one way or another invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries.

"Fact is, our system of so-called linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic phenomenon– the earth's own spin. Everything spins, up to and including, probably, the whole universe. So 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–"

Quaternion in finite geometry
Quaternion  by  S. H. Cullinane

"Um, Professor–"….

… Those in attendance, some at quite high speed, had begun to disperse, the briefest of glances at the sky sufficing to explain why. As if the professor had lectured it into being, there now swung from the swollen and light-pulsing clouds to the west a classic prairie "twister"….

… In the storm cellar, over semiliquid coffee and farmhouse crullers left from the last twister, they got back to the topic of periodic functions….

"Eternal Return, just to begin with. If we may construct such functions in the abstract, then so must it be possible to construct more secular, more physical expressions."

"Build a time machine."

"Not the way I would have put it, but if you like, fine."

Vectorists and Quaternionists in attendance reminded everybody of the function they had recently worked up….

"We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no long 'passes,' with a linear velocity, but 'returns,' with an angular one…. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly."

"Born again!" exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened.

Above, the devastation had begun.

"As if the professor had lectured it into being . . . ."

See other posts now tagged McLuhan Time.

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

“If It’s Tuesday…” Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:33 pm

A nihilist altarpiece, from other posts tagged "Ghent Links" —

Some will prefer the "Better to light one candle" philosophy and . . .

Candle from Sense8, Season 1,  Episode 1: “Limbic Resonance” —

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Waiting for the Low-Hanging Fruit

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:23 pm

How many miles to Babylon?*
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?**
Yes, and back again.

Mary Gaitskill's latest substack meditation —

"I am thinking of Susan Sontag, writer, philosopher,
political activist and some-time pain in the ass;
she went to Sarajevo during the siege in order to
put on a theatrical production of Waiting for Godot. 
She didn’t get paid and none of the actors did either.
They rehearsed in the dark and performed by sparse
candlelight . . . ."

"How many  bananas ?"

"Drei . . . or else Vier ."

See also the comedy writers of  Elsevier

Saturday, August 5, 2023

Cornered

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:27 am

Foursquare philosophy:

"It is better to light one candle . . ."

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

There and Back Again

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

Vigil for a teacher slain yesterday —

"Another student tweeted today to bring a candle
to Danvers High School at 8 p.m. tonight."

"How many miles to Babylon?"

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Shakespeare’s Rhyme

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:01 am

From Saturday Night Live  last night—

IMAGE- Louis C. K. as Shakespeare on SNL

Related material from the Log24 post "Now Lens"
(March 11, 2011)—

Errol Morris in The New York Times  on March 9, 2011

"If everything is incommensurable, then everything
is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ."

"Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, 'there is nothing
more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.' [72]"

See also Borges on Shakespeare, everything, and nothing 
in a note from September 7, 2006.

Everything and nothing in Peter J. Cameron's weblog yesterday—

The existence of everything entails the existence of nothing;
indeed, the existence of anything (any set A) entails
the existence of the empty set (the set {x∈A:x≠x}).
But not the other way round.

Right, I had better put on my anorak and go out now …

Illustration added by m759—

How many miles to Babylon?*
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?**
Yes, and back again.

* Suggested by the Pindar link in this journal yesterday.

** Quoted in the "Seven is Heaven" post on All Souls' Day.

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Logo

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:18 pm

IMAGE- 'Yankee Puzzle' quilt block pattern on cover of Northrop Frye's 'Anatomy of Criticism'

On Universals and
A Passage to India
 :
 
"The universe, then, is less intimation
than cipher: a mask rather than a revelation
in the romantic sense. Does love meet with love?
Do we receive but what we give? The answer is
surely a paradox, the paradox that there are
Platonic universals beyond, but that the glass
is too dark to see them. Is there a light beyond
the glass, or is it a mirror only to the self?
The Platonic cave is even darker than Plato
made it, for it introduces the echo, and so
leaves us back in the world of men, which does
not carry total meaning, is just a story of events."
 
– Betty Jay, reader's guide to A Passage to India

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080413-Marabar.jpg

Judy Davis in the Marabar Caves

The above image is from this journal on Sunday, April 13, 2008.

The preceding cover of a book by Northrop Frye was suggested
by material in this journal from February 2003.

See also Yankee Puzzle and Doodle Dandy.

Friday, April 13, 2012

The Primate and the Bee

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

George Steiner —

"Man is, in Lévi-Strauss's view, a mythopoetic primate
(it's a difficult phrase but we don't have a better one)…."

Wikipedia —

"Primate is a title or rank bestowed on some bishops in certain Christian churches." 

Pope Benedict XVI at the 2012 Easter Vigil on April 7 —

"The great hymn of the Exsultet, which the deacon sings at the beginning of the Easter liturgy, points us quite gently towards a further aspect. It reminds us that this object, the candle, has its origin in the work of bees. So the whole of creation plays its part. In the candle, creation becomes a bearer of light.

But in the mind of the Fathers, the candle also in some sense contains a silent reference to the Church. The cooperation of the living community of believers in the Church in some way resembles the activity of bees. It builds up the community of light."

http://twitter.com/#!/skdh —

Sabine Hossenfelder's (Bee's) Easter Tweet

Monday, September 27, 2010

The Social Network…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:29 am

… In the Age of Citation

1. INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM
Social network analysis is focused on the patterning of the social
relationships that link social actors. Typically, network data take the
form of a square-actor by actor-binary adjacency matrix, where
each row and each column in the matrix represents a social actor. A
cell entry is 1 if and only if a pair of actors is linked by some social
relationship of interest (Freeman 1989).

— "Using Galois Lattices to Represent Network Data,"
by Linton C. Freeman and Douglas R. White,
Sociological Methodology,  Vol. 23, pp. 127–146 (1993)

From this paper's CiteSeer page

Citations

766  Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications – WASSERMAN, FAUST – 1994
100 The act of creation – Koestler – 1964
 75 Visual Thinking – Arnheim – 1969

Visual Image of the Problem—

From a Google search today:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100927-GardnerGaloisSearch.jpg

Related material—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100927-GoogleBirthdayCake.jpg

"It is better to light one candle…"

"… the early favorite for best picture at the Oscars" — Roger Moore

Monday, February 2, 2009

Monday February 2, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:30 am

Against the Day

is a novel by Thomas Pynchon
published on Nov. 21, 2006, in
hardcover, and in paperback on
Oct. 30, 2007 (Devil's Night).

Perhaps the day the title
refers to is one of the above
dates… or perhaps it is–

Groundhog Day

The Candlebrow Conference
in Pynchon's Against the Day:

The conferees had gathered here from all around the world…. Their spirits all one way or another invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries.

"Fact is, our system of so-called linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic phenomenon– the earth's own spin. Everything spins, up to and including, probably, the whole universe. So 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–"

Quaternion in finite geometry
Quaternion by
S. H. Cullinane

"Um, Professor–"….

… Those in attendance, some at quite high speed, had begun to disperse, the briefest of glances at the sky sufficing to explain why. As if the professor had lectured it into being, there now swung from the swollen and light-pulsing clouds to the west a classic prairie "twister"….

… In the storm cellar, over semiliquid coffee and farmhouse crullers left from the last twister, they got back to the topic of periodic functions….

"Eternal Return, just to begin with. If we may construct such functions in the abstract, then so must it be possible to construct more secular, more physical expressions."

"Build a time machine."

"Not the way I would have put it, but if you like, fine."

Vectorists and Quaternionists in attendance reminded everybody of the function they had recently worked up….

"We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no long 'passes,' with a linear velocity, but 'returns,' with an angular one…. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly."

"Born again!" exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened.

Above, the devastation had begun.

 
Related material:
Yesterday's entry and
Pynchon on Quaternions.

Happy birthday,
James Joyce.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Sunday September 14, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:09 pm
Part I:
McCain

by David Foster Wallace


On John McCain’s presidential campaign eight years ago
:

“He always pauses a second for effect and then says: ‘I’m going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don’t agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.’ This is McCain’s closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder. Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well, it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They’re cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain’s resume and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters’ pain but relief from it. Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated. It hurts.

We learn this at like age four– it’s grownups’ first explanation to us of why it’s bad to lie (‘How would you like it if…?’). And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks– that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you’re supposed to believe in’s really just a game based on lies….

… It’s painful to believe that the would-be ‘public servants’ you’re forced to choose between are all phonies… who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they’ve just got to believe you’re an idiot.”

Part II:
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Related material:
Log24 last Wednesday

Monday, May 5, 2008

Monday May 5, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 pm
Time and the River

“At the edge of the meadow
flowed the river.

Nick was glad
to get to the river.

He walked upstream
through the meadow.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pennsylvania Lottery
May 5, 2008:

PA Lottery May 5, 2008: mid-day 216, evening 725

Related material:

2/167/25

“In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today.”

— Ernest Hemingway,
Big Two-Hearted River

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Thursday January 31, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:24 am
From G. K. Chesterton,
The Black Virgin
 
As the black moon
of some divine eclipse,
As the black sun
of the Apocalypse,
As the black flower
that blessed Odysseus back
From witchcraft; and
he saw again the ships.

In all thy thousand images
we salute thee.

Earlier in the poem….
 
Clothed with the sun
or standing on the moon
Crowned with the stars
or single, a morning star,
Sunlight and moonlight
are thy luminous shadows,
Starlight and twilight
thy refractions are,
Lights and half-lights and
all lights turn about thee.

 
From Oct. 16, 2007,
date of death of Deborah Kerr:

"Harish, who was of a
spiritual, even religious, cast
and who liked to express himself in
metaphors, vivid and compelling,
did see, I believe, mathematics
as mediating between man and
what one can only call God."
R. P. Langlands

From a link of Jan. 17, 2008
Time and Eternity:

Abstract Symbols of Time and Eternity

Jean Simmons and Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus
Jean Simmons (l.) and Deborah Kerr (r.)
in "Black Narcissus" (1947)

and from the next day,
Jan. 18, 2008:

… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

Rubén Darío,
born January 18, 1867

Related material:

Dark Lady and Bright Star,
Time and Eternity,
Damnation Morning

Happy birthday also to
the late John O'Hara.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Wednesday April 18, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:00 pm
Vigil

Candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech, April 17, 2007

Andrew Russell, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech,
Tuesday, April 17, 2007

VA lottery April 17, 2007: Day 826, Night 102.

Virginia Lottery, Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Candlelight Vigil, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

“I love those Bavarians… so meticulous.”

— “In the Garden of Allah

Click on images to enlarge.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Monday June 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Snippets:
A Reply to John Updike

See Updike on digitized snippets.

The following four snippets were pirated from the end of MathPages Quotations, compiled by Kevin Brown.

They are of synchronistic interest in view of the previous two Log24 entries, which referred (implicitly) to a Poe story and (explicitly) to Pascal.

"That is another of your odd notions,"
said the Prefect, who had the fashion
of calling everything 'odd' that was
beyond his comprehension, and thus
lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities.'
Edgar Allan Poe

I knew when seven justices could not
take up a quarrel, but when the parties
were met themselves, one of them
thought but of an If, as, 'If you said so,
then I said so'; and they shook hands
and swore brothers. Your If is the only
peacemaker; much virtue in If.
Shakespeare

I have made this letter longer than usual
because I lack the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Dante, 1302

For translations of the Dante (including one by Dorothy Sayers), see everything2.com.

An anonymous author there notes that Dante describes a flame in which is encased a damned soul. The flame vibrates as the soul speaks:

If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore
cease shaking.

But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.

-- Dante, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66,
translated by Dorothy Sayers

Updike says,

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web but much of it is grievously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, I have the impression, to inflame what is most informally and non-critically human about us. Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.”

Note Updike’s use of “inflame.”

For an aw-shucks version of “what is most informally and non-critically human about us,” as well as a theological flame, see both the previous entry and the above report from Hell.

Note that the web serves also to correct material that is inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. For examples, see Mathematics and Narrative. The combination of today’s entry for Pascal’s birthday with that web page serves both to light one candle and to curse the darkness.

Thursday, October 16, 2003

Thursday October 16, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:23 pm

Cursing the Darkness

From my entries on this date last year

“…we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out.”

Thought for today:

Render unto Rome that which is Rome’s.

See also my remarks of January 29, 2003,
on the opening in New Zealand of
Cullinane College.

Wednesday, February 5, 2003

Wednesday February 5, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:25 pm

Release Date

From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar —

  • Novelist William S. Burroughs [of the Burroughs adding machine family], author of Naked Lunch, was born on this day in 1914.
  • The Charlie Chaplin film “Modern Times was released on this day in 1936.
  • The adding machine employing depressible keys was patented on this day in 1850.

“It all adds up.” — Saul Bellow, book title

“I see my light come shining
 From the west unto the east.
 Any day now, any day now,
 I shall be released.”
     — Bob Dylan

“The theme of the film is heavily influenced by its release date….”

— Jonathan L. Bowen, review of “Modern Times”

At left:
Judy Davis in
Naked Lunch

 

See also my journal entry “Time and Eternity”
of 5:10 AM EST Saturday, February 1, 2003.
 

5:10 AM Feb. 1


Judy Davis
as Kali, or Time

9:00 AM Feb. 1

TIME

From Robert Morris’s page on Hopkins (see note of Sunday, February 2 (Candlemas)):

“Inscape” was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for a special connection between the world of natural events and processes and one’s internal landscape–a frame of mind conveyed in his radical and singular poetry….

This is false, but suggestive.

Checked, corrected, and annotated

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Wednesday October 16, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:20 am

"History is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake"
— James Joyce in Ulysses

"Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God's grace shall never be put out."
— Hugh Latimer, former Bishop of Worcester, to his friend Nicholas Ridley, former private chaplain to Henry VIII, on the occasion of their being burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic queen Bloody Mary Tudor on October 16, 1555

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