Log24

In memory of a Chess Records star who died on March 18, 2017 —

See also Chess War posts.

A review of the dramatic legacy of Arthur Schnitzler
(La Ronde , Traumnovelle ) seems in order.

(Continued)

Two visions of happy neurons:

This post was suggested by a link in today's New York Times —

"Simon Denny, the New Zealand artist whose work incorporates
board games, intervenes by introducing his own pieces into an attic of
the late-18th-century Haus zum Kirschgarten, already filled with
'old historical dollhouses, board games, chess games' and the like …."

From March 9 four years ago—

* See this journal and the novel.

Update of 10 AM May 9—

Midrash for Gnostics —

A post linked to under "this journal" (above) has a brief discussion of theology and Wallace Stevens—

"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself '…."

I have more confidence that God is to be found in the Ping Pong balls of the New York Lottery.

This suggests a check of yesterday's NY numbers. They were… Midday 780, Evening 302.

A search for 780 in this journal yields a post quoting The Scotsman 's reporter Rhiannon Edward.

Related material:

Rhiannon's Scotsman  story of May 6—

Rapist gets 20 years after justice system finally believes his victims

See also this  journal on May 7 —

Stranger Than Fiction

For yesterday's NY evening 302, see the "780" post involving Rhiannon—

Glenn Ford as a playboy from Argentina —

— and "302" interpreted as "3/02," which yields…

"Yo sé de un laberinto griego que es una línea única, recta."
 —Borges, "La Muerte y la Brújula"

"I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line."
—Borges, "Death and the Compass"

For some background music, click here.

See also Nabokov + chess + patterns.

The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains tributes to the admirable personal qualities and mathematical work of the late Harvard professor George Mackey.  For my own tributes, see Log24 on March 17, 2006,  April 29, 2006, and March 10, 2007.  For an entry critical of Mackey’s reductionism– a philosophical, not mathematical, error– see Log24 on May 23, 2007 (“Devil in the Details”).

Here is another attack on reductionism, from a discussion of the work of another first-rate mathematician, the late Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT:

“Another theme developed by Rota is that of ‘Fundierung.’ He shows that throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain pieces of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain pieces of wood or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an act of generosity is founded upon something’s being handed over. In perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon it; what we see is far more than meets the eye. Rota gives striking examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity. His point is strongly antireductionist. Reductionism is the inclination to see as ‘real’ only the foundation, the substrate of things (the piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon, and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true existence of that which is founded. Rota’s arguments against reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, of intelligence, of emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even as we deny it in our theories.”

— Robert Sokolowski, foreword to Rota’s Indiscrete Thoughts

Father Robert Sokolowski Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. — Thomas Aquinas College newsletter

The tributes to Mackey are contained in the first of two feature articles in the August 2007 AMS Notices.  The second feature article is a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter.  For some remarks related to that article, see Thursday’s Log24 entry “Not Mathematics but Theology.”

Culture War

The New York Times, August 6, 2003,
on its executive editor Bill Keller:

“‘It is past time for our magnificent coverage of culture and lifestyles, so essential to our present allure and to our future growth, to get the kind of attention we routinely bestow on hard news,’ Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail message to the staff.”

The New York Times, June 25, 2006,
on art in Mexico:

“At the Hilario Galguera gallery, newly opened in a fortresslike, century-old building, was Damien Hirst’s gory new series ‘The Death of God– Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools.’  He conceived the work at his part-time home in the Mexican surf town Troncones.”

Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep:

   “I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover.  I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems.  I reached down and moved a knight, then pulled my hat and coat off and threw them somewhere.  All this time the soft giggling went on from the bed, that sound that made me think of rats behind a wainscoting in an old house.

…………

    I looked down at the chessboard.  The move with the knight was wrong.  I put it back where I had moved it from.  Knights had no meaning in this game.  It wasn’t a game for knights.”

Canon

A brief note to place Edward Bennett Marks, who died either on Saturday, October 8, 2005 (Washington Post), or on Monday, October 10, 2005 (New York Times), in my personal canon of saints.  Today’s New York Times says that Marks spent his career “aiding refugees as an executive of American and international agencies, both official and volunteer.”  This alone was commendable, but not miraculous.  The miraculous is contained in three words from the Log24 entry of October 10, the date of death of Orson Welles, of Yul Brynner, and perhaps of Marks: “All come home.”

For a rather different perspective on St. Yul Brynner, see “Shall We Dance?”–  a profile by Calvin Tomkins in this week’s New Yorker (issue dated 2005 10/17, posted 10/10) of an artist raised in Bangkok.  It is perhaps not irrelevant that the chess enthusiast Marcel Duchamp plays a prominent role in this piece.

 
Marcel Duchamp

For some remarks on art by St. Edward, see UN Chronicle, Issue 4, 1998.

Show Business
according to Fritz Leiber

(Leiber's "Changewar" is my
favorite mythology.)

From the Changewar story
"No Great Magic" (1963) Part V:

Even little things are
turning out to be great things
and becoming intensely interesting.
Have you ever thought about
the properties of numbers?
— The Maiden

"I've had this idea– it's just a sort of fancy, remember– that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing-room and a sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it…."

For the remainder of this section
of Leiber's story, see

Show Business.

Related material:
The previous entry,
The Eight, and
Now We See Wherein
Lies the Pleasure.

HURRY UP PLEASE
IT’S TIME

— T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land, II
“A Game of Chess”

Jan. 9 obituary of Brian Gibson —

“In 2002 he was executive producer of the film ‘Frida,’ about the artist Frida Kahlo….”

Captured for the Queen

Joan Aiken

Photo by Alex Gotfryd,
circa 1972 

Jan. 9 obituary of Joan Aiken —

“Joan Aiken was born in Rye, England, a daughter of the American poet Conrad Aiken….”

Dust jacket of a novel — 

“Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano must be, for anyone who loves the English language, a sheer joy.”

— Conrad Aiken

“He was never inclined to small talk.”

— Jan. 9 obituary of Steven Edward Dorfman, writer of questions (i.e., answers) for the game show “Jeopardy!”

“What’s the Hellfire Club?”

— Joan Aiken, beginning of the final chapter of The Shadow Guests

Note that Dorfman, Gibson, and Aiken
all died on Sunday, Jan. 4, 2004.
For some related material, see

Sunday in the Park with Death.

Toy

“If little else, the brain is an educational toy.  While it may be a frustrating plaything — one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them — it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don’t have to put it together on Christmas morning.

The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too.  Sometimes they’d rather play with yours than theirs.  Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs.  The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated.  If you don’t play some people’s game, they say that you have ‘lost your marbles,’ not recognizing that,

while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.

One brain game that is widely, if poorly, played is a gimmick called ‘rational thought.’ “

— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Sol LeWitt
June 12, 1969:

“I took the number twenty-four and there’s twenty-four ways of expressing the numbers one, two, three, four.  And I assigned one kind of line to one, one to two, one to three, and one to four.  One was a vertical line, two was a horizontal line, three was diagonal left to right, and four was diagonal right to left.  These are the basic kind of directions that lines can take…. the absolute ways that lines can be drawn.   And I drew these things as parallel lines very close to one another in boxes.  And then there was a system of changing them so that within twenty-four pages there were different arrangements of actually sixteen squares, four sets of four.  Everything was based on four.  So this was kind of a… more of a… less of a rational… I mean, it gets into the whole idea of methodology.”

Yes, it does.
See Art Wars, Poetry’s Bones, and Time Fold.

The Tables of Time

Implied by previous two entries:

See, too, Art Wars and Time Fold.

In the Labyrinth of Memory

Taking a cue from Danny in the labyrinth of Kubrick’s film “The Shining,” today I retraced my steps.

My Jan. 6 entry, “Dead Poet in the City of Angels,” links to a set of five December 21, 2002, entries.  In the last of these, “Irish Lament,” is a link to a site appropriate for Maud Gonne’s birthday — a discussion of Yeats’s “Among School Children.”

Those who recall a young woman named Patricia Collinge (Radcliffe ’64) might agree that her image is aptly described by Yeats:

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat

This meditation leads in turn to a Sept. 20, 2002, entry, “Music for Patricias,” and a tune familiar to James Joyce, “Finnegan’s Wake,” the lyrics of which lead back to images in my entries of Dec. 20, 2002, “Last-Minute Shopping,” and of Dec. 28, 2002, “Solace from Hell’s Kitchen.”  The latter entry is in memory of George Roy Hill, director of “The Sting,” who died Dec. 27, 2002.

The Dec. 28 image from “The Sting” leads us back to more recent events — in particular, to the death of a cinematographer who won an Oscar for picturing Newman and Redford in another film — Conrad L. Hall, who died Saturday, Jan. 4, 2003. 

For a 3-minute documentary on Hall’s career, click here.

Hall won Oscars for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “American Beauty,” and may win a posthumous Oscar for “Road to Perdition,” last year’s Irish-American mob saga:

“Tom Hanks plays Angel of Death Michael Sullivan. An orphan ‘adopted’ by crime boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), Sullivan worships Rooney above his own family. Rooney gave Sullivan a home when he had none. Rooney is the father Sullivan never knew. Too bad Rooney is the

Rock Island
branch of Capone’s mob.”

In keeping with this Irish connection, here is a set of images.

“Like a chess player, he knows that to win a tournament, it is sometimes wise to offer a draw in a game even when you think you can win it.”

— Roger Ebert on Robert Duvall’s character in “A Civil Action”

Director Steven Zaillian will take part in a tribute to Conrad L. Hall at the Palm Springs International Film Festival awards ceremony on Jan 11.  Hall was the cinematographer for Zaillian’s films “A Civil Action” and “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” 

“A Civil Action” was cast by the Boston firm Collinge/Pickman Casting, named in part for that same Patricia Collinge (“hollow of cheek”) mentioned above.

See also “Conrad Hall looks back and forward to a Work in Progress.”  (“Work in Progress” was for a time the title of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.)

What is the moral of all this remembrance?

An 8-page (paper) journal note I compiled on November 14, 1995 (feast day of St. Lawrence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin, allegedly born in 1132) supplies an answer in the Catholic tradition that might have satisfied Joyce (to whom 1132 was a rather significant number): 

How can you tell there’s an Irishman present
at a cockfight?
     He enters a duck.
How can you tell a Pole is present?
     He bets on the duck.
How can you tell an Italian is present?
     The duck wins.