Log24

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Child’s Play Continues — La Despedida

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:03 pm

This post was suggested by the phrase "Froebel Decade" from
the search results below.

This journal a decade ago had a post on the late Donald Westlake,
an author who reportedly died of a heart attack in Mexico on Dec. 31,
2008, while on his way to a New Year's Eve dinner.

One of Westlake's books —

Related material —

"La Despedida " and "Finality indeed, and cleavage!"

Thursday, February 15, 2018

The Search for Child’s Play

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am

Yesterday morning's post "Child's  Play" suggests . . .

"Jinx! Jinx again!"

— "Love is an Open Door," from Disney's "Frozen"

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Child’s Play

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:19 am

From a search for Child's Play in this journal —

See also the previous post.

"In pascuis herbarum adclinavit me."

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Child’s Play

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:56 pm

(Continued)

“A set having three members is a single thing
wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as
‘three in one’ should be child’s play.”

– Max Black, Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language, Logic, and Art
, Cornell U. Press, 1975

IMAGE- The Trinity of Max Black (a 3-set, with its eight subsets arranged in a Hasse diagram that is also a cube)

Related material—

The Trinity Cube

IMAGE- The Trinity Cube (three interpenetrating planes that split the eightfold cube into its eight subcubes)

Monday, May 21, 2012

Child’s Play (continued*)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm

You and I …

we are just like a couple of tots…

Sinatra

JOSEFINE LYCHE

Born 1973 in Bergen. Lives and works in Oslo.

Education

2000 – 2004 National Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo
1998 – 2000 Strykejernet Art School, Oslo, NO
1995 – 1998 Philosophy, University of Bergen

University of Bergen—

 It might therefore seem that the idea of digital and analogical systems as rival fundaments to human experience is a new suggestion and, like digital technology, very modern. In fact, however, the idea is as old as philosophy itself (and may be much older). In his Sophist, Plato sets out the following ‘battle’ over the question of ‘true reality’:

What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality [γιγαντομαχία περì της ουσίας] ….One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word. (…) Their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality [την αληθινήν ουσίαν] consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps [εν μέσω δε περι ταυτα απλετος αμφοτέρων μάχη τις (…) αει συνέστηκεν]. (…) It seems that only one course is open to the philosopher who values knowledge and truth above all else. He must refuse to accept from the champions of the forms the doctrine that all reality is changeless [and exclusively immaterial], and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party who represent reality as everywhere changing [and as only material]. Like a child begging for 'both', he must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once [το όν τε και το παν συναμφότερα] (Sophist 246a-249d).

The gods and the giants in Plato’s battle present two varieties of the analog position. Each believes that ‘true reality’ is singular, that "real existence belongs only to" one side or other of competing possibilities. For them, difference and complexity are secondary and, as secondary, deficient in respect to truth, reality and being (την αληθινήν ουσίαν, το όν τε και το παν). Difference and complexity are therefore matters of "interminable battle" whose intended end for each is, and must be (given their shared analogical logic), only to eradicate the other. The philosophical child, by contrast, holds to ‘both’ and therefore represents the digital position where the differentiated two yet belong originally together. Here difference, complexity and systematicity are primary and exemplary.

It is an unfailing mark of the greatest thinkers of the tradition, like Plato, that they recognize the digital possibility and therefore recognize the principal difference of it from analog possibilities.

— Cameron McEwen, "The Digital Wittgenstein,"
    The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen

* See that phrase in this journal.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Child’s Play

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Click to enlarge

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12A/120503-Payne-Froebel-500w.jpg

"… a long seat, or a seat with a back,
     or a throne for the Queen;
     or again, a cross, a doorway, etc."

     — Joseph Payne

"… etc., etc." — Yul Brynner

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Child’s Play

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Image-- 'Aion pais esti paizon....'

… twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther….

— "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," by Gerard Manley Hopkins

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100710-Nabokov-Black.GIF

Related material:

Max Black — "Beginners are taught that a set having three members is a single thing, wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them. After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as 'three in one' should be child's play." ("The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, June 1971, p. 615– as quoted by Bill Vallicella)


 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….

59 … The perichoresis  or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”


 ”Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann


Saturday, July 1, 2023

Mechanical Plaything (Hinged) vs. Conceptual Art (Unhinged)

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:44 pm

"Infinity Cube" … hinged plaything, for sale —

"Eightfold Cube" … un hinged concept, not for sale—

See as well yesterday's Trickster Fuge ,
and a 1906 discussion of the eightfold cube:

Page from 'The Paradise of Childhood,' 1906 edition

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Playing the Palace

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:54 am

From a Jamestown (NY) Post-Journal  article yesterday on
"the sold-out 10,000 Maniacs 40th anniversary concert at
The Reg Lenna Center Saturday" —

" 'The theater has a special place in our hearts. It’s played
a big part in my life,' Gustafson said.

Before being known as The Reg Lenna Center for The Arts,
it was formerly known as The Palace Theater. He recalled
watching movies there as a child…."

This, and the band's name, suggest some memories perhaps
better suited to the cinematic philosophy behind "Plan 9 from
Outer Space."

IMAGE- The Tablet of Ahkmenrah, from 'Night at the Museum'

 "With the Tablet of Ahkmenrah and the Cube of Rubik,
my power will know no bounds!"
— Kahmunrah in a novelization of Night at the Museum:
Battle of the Smithsonian , Barron's Educational Series

The above 3×3 Tablet of Ahkmenrah  image comes from
a Log24 search for the finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(3) that 
was, in turn, suggested by last night's post "Making Space."

See as well a mysterious document from a website in Slovenia
that mentions a 3×3 array "relating to nine halls of a mythical
palace where rites were performed in the 1st century AD" —

Monday, December 28, 2020

Childermas

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:24 pm

Related material for innocents — Siobhan Roberts
on Conway’s Game of Life in today’s New York Times .

Those desiring greater literary depth may consult
this  journal’s  Gameplayers.

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Play

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:51 pm

Continued from Monday morning, for Lev Grossman —

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase Two

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:57 am

See Phase One in earlier posts.

Darker views —

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

The Play’s the Thing

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:45 pm

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Math for Child Buyers

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:42 am

See also "Child Buyer" in this journal.

Friday, May 4, 2012

That Krell Lab (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

“… 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.

Friday, February 3, 2023

Putting the “n” back in Mensa

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:20 pm

"The child is father of the man." — Wordsworth

"Suck any sense from that who can." — Hopkins

Illustration —

Sucking the sense from Albright.

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Solomon’s Mental Health Month

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:21 pm

May 2003 was "Solomon's Mental Health Month" in this journal.

An essay linked to on the 9th of May in that month —

"Taking the Veil," by Jessica Kardon

https://web.archive.org/web/20021102182519/
http://www.thespleen.com/otherorgans/otherorgans/
index.php?artID=724

James Hillman, writing in The Soul's Code, argues for his "acorn theory" of human individual identity, and suggests that "each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived." He insists we are born with a given character, a daimon, the carrier of destiny. This theory is closely linked to the beautiful myth described by Plato in his Republic, when the soul stands before Lachesis and receives his specific soul guardian. Hillman maintains that the daimon will always emerge somehow, even if thwarted or unrecognized.

I never had ambitions that reached fruition in the adult world. I have had only two career interests in my life – both formed precognitively. I wanted to be a mermaid or a nun. By the time I learned – shockingly late – that I could not be a mermaid, I had realized I would not be a nun. I concur with Hillman's emphasis on the persistence of early disposition, and I like to imagine that my dreamy, watery, Victorian and self-righteous psyche has held aspects of both of these early interests, throughout my life.

I was adopted one month after my birth. I was tended by nuns during the first four weeks of my life. Thereafter, I spent my whole educational life in convent schools. It was the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul that gave me my favorite musical and my early distortions about romantic love and the gender plans of Our Lord. My misconceptions about love and marriage were culled from the Lerner Loewe musical Gigi, a wonderful film based loosely on a Colette novel. I was summoned along with my whole class to the gymnasium to view the movie under the edgy eye of Sister Bernadette.

Sister Bernadette was a large, mesomorphic nun famed for the beatings she gave to boys and girls alike, and feared for the mean zest with which she bestowed her favors upon many of us. I was not beaten – but once, believing I was wearing lipstick, she held my head in a sink and scrubbed my lips until they bled, then slapped me. I recall this with a mild, rueful whimsy. We were all manhandled. In memory, Bernadette seems more like an angry and troubled older sibling than a true figure of authority.

Anyway, I loved Gigi. It fed directly into my Francophilia. I was convinced that at some future date, I, like Gigi, would be trained as a courtesan. I, too, would cause some hard case, experienced roué to abandon his chill and irony. I saw myself strolling down the Champs Elysee with Louis Jordan in rapt attendance, pushing a baby carriage, wearing a hat the size of a manhole cover, hoisting a parasol above that to assure the longevity of my adorable pallor.

The gender plans of Our Lord had recently been revealed to me too. Sister B. had drawn a ladder on the blackboard, a ladder with three rungs. At the top, she explained, were the priests, the nuns, and the monks. These souls had surrendered their lives to God. All would be taken directly to heaven upon their passing from this vale of tears, as we all referred to the world in those lean emotional times. On the middle rung stood the married. If you married and kept the law – which meant leaving every act of marital congress open to the reception of a child, you would be eligible for heaven. If you were foul in marriage, seeking your pleasure, you were going to be damned. On the bottom rung were those selfish souls who had remained single and had imagined their lives their own. This group had never given themselves to Our Lord. They were headed to hell in a sort of preternatural laundry chute.

So we little ladies had two viable options: marry and breed without ceasing – or take the veil.

Despite my hat and perambulator fantasies, once given the sorry news of the ladder, the veil became the clear romantic favorite. Therefore I began my research. I obtained a catalogue of nunnery. It offered photographs of each order, describing the duties of the specific order, and displaying the garb of that order. I was looking for two things – a great looking veil and gown, and a contemplative order. I had no desire to sully my glorious vision of myself with a life in the outer world. It was apparent to me that the teaching of children was going to involve a whole range of miseries – making them cry, telling them the bad news about the ladder, and so forth. This was not for me. I saw myself kneeling on the floor of my pristine little cell, serene and untouched by human hands. Teaching would be certain to interfere with the proper lighting. Yoked to a bunch of messy children, I could not possibly have the opalescent illumination of heaven falling reliably on my upturned visage.

What divided me from my dream of rebirth as a mermaid was the force of what was real: I could not morph. What divided me from my dream of life as a nun was the force of the erotic: I would not abstain.

Now, long years later, I am still underwater, and I am still bending the knee. I live in the blue shadows of hidden grottoes, and I am swimming, too, in the gold of my drifting prayers.

September 7th, this dream. I am standing in a dimly lit room, gazing at a group of heavy, antique silk burqas that look weirdly like Fortuny gowns. A holy woman approaches me, and tells me that my soul will leave my body, and enter these garments. She turns and points at a young girl standing nearby, a child with close-cropped hair and a solemn look. My heart knows her, but my eyes don't.

For a moment I am thinking, exactly as I did in the seventies when holding a joint: "This isn't working." Suddenly, these things: I feel the shape of flame, then I am the shape. I am released into the air, and as pure essence I enter other forms, dissolving in them, gathering my energy back into myself, and flying out again. This was a sensation so exquisite that my dreaming brain woke up and announced to me: "This is a dream about death."

I saw that child again as I flew. This time my eyes knew her. I flew to her, but the flame of my soul would not cohere with hers, this child who was, of course, my own self.

In the shadows alone, I heard myself whisper: "I'm in the wind. I'm in the water."

This lovely dream, which gave me the sublime gift of a little visceral preview of the soul in the death process, also showed me my guardian spirit; divided, but viable.

I pass through my life swimming in one self, kneeling in the other. I thought of Rilke's 29th Sonnet to Orpheus and realized this was what I had been dreaming about all my life, moving between them.

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

– Stephen Mitchell, translating Rainer Marie Rilke.

by jessica kardon
iowa city, iowa
2002-09-23

See as well yesterday's post "At a Still Point."

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Cold Comfort Dam

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:50 am

"And, as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts,
there are only good and bad things and black and white
things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere."

— John Steinbeck, author's epigraph to The Pearl

From the Season 4 finale of Westworld :
uploading Dolores's pearl at Hoover Dam —

For those who prefer greater theological simplicity . . .

Optimus Prime on a different Hoover Dam figure, that of 
the AllSpark: "Before time began, there was the Cube."

Simplifying even more . . .

“A set having three members is a single thing
wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as
‘three in one’ should be child’s play.”

– Max Black, Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language, Logic, and Art
 , Cornell U. Press, 1975

IMAGE- The Trinity of Max Black (a 3-set, with its eight subsets arranged in a Hasse diagram that is also a cube)

As above, Black's theology forms a cube.

Saturday, October 2, 2021

Woodstock Hat Check

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:49 am

♫  The way you wear your hat . . .
   The way your smile just beams . . .

Later . . .

Richie Havens performed onstage at
the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair
in Bethel, New York, August 15, 1969.

Havens in Rolling Stone

I thought, "Oh, God, they're going to kill me. I'm not going out there first. What, are you crazy?" It was about 2:30 or 3 p.m. on Friday afternoon, and the concert was already almost three hours late. I was supposed to be fifth on the bill, but the other entertainers were still at the hotel, seven miles away. I thought, "Jeez, they're gonna throw beer cans at me because the concert's late." So I did a little fast talking, a little rap, and then I did a nearly three-hour set, until some of the others finally showed up. My bass player, Eric Oxendine, had gotten caught in the traffic on the New York State Thruway. He abandoned his car 30 miles away and walked, and he arrived just as we got offstage. When we left the festival, there wasn't another car on the thruway except ours. For 75 miles cars were parked five deep. That was the most surrealistic thing I've ever seen in my life. My fondest memory was realizing that I was seeing something I never thought I'd ever see in my lifetime — an assemblage of such numbers of people who had the same spirit and consciousness. And believe me, you wouldn't want to be in a place with that many people if they weren't like-minded! It was the first expression of the first global-minded generation born on the planet. Live Aid was a baby Woodstock, a child of Woodstock, which I call Globalstock. The history of the be-in is interesting. Originally it wasn't just about music. It was: "Let's go out to the park and throw Frisbees and be with each other." It went from that to the Monterey Pop Festival, which was a nonprofit concert in 1967, and from that came the hint: "Let's try to do one of these things, but let's try to make some money." That's where their heads were at, but that didn't happen. It turned into the world's largest be-in, which I call the Cosmic Accident. It was totally unexpected. The organizers thought that if it were like Monterey Pop — which drew 50 to 60,000 people — they'd make off like bandits. However, there were about 400,000 people the first afternoon, and it was free before it started. The only people who made off like bandits was Warner Bros., who got the movie rights. So the merits of Woodstock being love, peace, and harmony still stand on pillars of "Let's make money." That's what it was in the beginning. The consciousness was realized afterward. The movie chronicled that consciousness. It didn't make a big deal out of the music. You saw some of the musicians playing a song or two, but it was less than half the musicians who performed. So it wasn't a true depiction of what happened onstage, but you did see members of the older generation, like the police chief, saying, "Leave the kids alone, the kids are great, they're not bothering anybody." That was much more influential than the music on the people who went to see it. Woodstock wasn't just sex, drugs and rock & roll. Thank God for the movie, because the people who saw it got a touch of the Woodstock spirit, the spirit of people just being people.

A version of this story was originally published in the August 24th, 1989 print edition of Rolling Stone.

Thursday, August 19, 2021

A Scalpel for Einstein

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:08 pm

(A sequel to this morning's post A Subtle Knife for Sean.)

Exhibit A —

Einstein in The Saturday Review, 1949

"In any case it was quite sufficient for me 
if I could peg proofs upon propositions
the validity of which did not seem to me to be dubious.
For example, I remember that an uncle told me
the Pythagorean theorem before the holy geometry booklet
had come into my hands. After much effort I succeeded
in 'proving' this theorem on the basis of the similarity
of triangles
;
in doing so it seemed to me 'evident' that
the relations of the sides of the right-angled triangles
would have to be completely determined by one of the
acute angles. Only something which did not in similar fashion
seem to be 'evident' appeared to me to be in need of any proof
at all. Also, the objects with which geometry deals seemed to
be of no different type than the objects of sensory perception,
'which can be seen and touched.' This primitive idea, which
probably also lies at the bottom of the well-known Kantian
problematic concerning the possibility of 'synthetic judgments
a priori' rests obviously upon the fact that the relation of
geometrical concepts to objects of direct experience
(rigid rod, finite interval, etc.) was unconsciously present."

Exhibit B —

Strogatz in The New Yorker, 2015

"Einstein, unfortunately, left no … record of his childhood proof.
In his Saturday Review essay, he described it in general terms,
mentioning only that it relied on 'the similarity of triangles.' 
The consensus among Einstein’s biographers is that he probably
discovered, on his own, a standard textbook proof in which similar
triangles (meaning triangles that are like photographic reductions
or enlargements of one another) do indeed play a starring role.
Walter Isaacson, Jeremy Bernstein, and Banesh Hoffman all come
to this deflating conclusion, and each of them describes the steps
that Einstein would have followed as he unwittingly reinvented
a well-known proof."

Exhibit C —

Schroeder in a book, 1991

Schroeder presents an elegant and memorable proof. He attributes
the proof to Einstein, citing purely hearsay evidence in a footnote.

The only other evidence for Einstein's connection with the proof
is his 1949 Saturday Review  remarks.  If Einstein did  come up with
the proof at age 11 and discuss it with others later, as Schroeder
claims, it seems he might have felt a certain pride and been more
specific in 1949, instead of merely mentioning the theorem in passing
before he discussed Kantian philosophy relating concepts to objects.

Strogatz says that . . .

"What we’re seeing here is a quintessential use of
a symmetry argument… scaling….

Throughout his career, Einstein would continue to
deploy symmetry arguments like a scalpel, getting to
the hidden heart of things." 

Connoisseurs of bullshit may prefer a faux-Chinese approach to
"the hidden heart of things." See Log24 on August 16, 2021 —

http://m759.net/wordpress/?p=96023 —
In a Nutshell: The Core of Everything .

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

On Location

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:02 pm

Above: a 1965 film.

A setting for Daisy Clover:
Room 15 at the Grope ’n’ Feel Motel —

Five miles north of Big Snake

Above: a 1970 novel.

Above: a 1991 film.

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

The Shop on the Corner

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:38 am

George Steiner on chess —

"… the common bond between chess, music, and mathematics
may, finally, be the absence of language."

— George Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik ,
Viking hardcover, June 1974.

In memory of George Steiner, of Walter Tevis, and of B&B Smoke Shop,
corner of Third Ave. and Liberty St., Warren, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s,
where I purchased . . .

At that point in my life, language interested me more than chess.
But I can identify with the protagonist of Walter Tevis's  Queen's Gambit ,
(the book, not the film) who visited a similar smoke shop in 1960 —

… There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she
got the cigarettes, she turned 
and began looking.  Senator
Kennedy’s picture was on the 
cover of Time  and Newsweek :
he was running for Pres
ident . . . . 

. . . Walking home with the folded [chess] magazine tucked
securely against her flat belly she thought again about that
rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said
Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the
history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven,
and Black had better not take it with his knight because…
She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking
somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed
lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After  the
second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining
rook could slide over, and if the black player took
the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…

      She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy
could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing
itself with a check. If he did  take it, the white pawn
moved again, and then the bishop went the other way
and there was nothing Black could do. There it was.  One
of the little boys across the street began crying. There was
nothing Black could do.  The game would be over in
twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it
had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He
hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had. 

      Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog
continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly
home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a
perfect, stunning diamond.

***

Monday, August 19, 2019

A Couple of Tots

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:15 pm

The title is from the post "Child's Play" of May 21, 2012 . . .

"It seems that only one course is open to the philosopher
who values knowledge and truth above all else. He must
refuse to accept from the champions of the forms the
doctrine that all reality is changeless [and exclusively
immaterial], and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party
who represent reality as everywhere changing [and as only
material]. Like a child begging for 'both', he must declare
that reality or the sum of things is both at once  [το όν τε και
το παν συναμφότερα] (Sophist  246a-249d)."

Related material —

"Schoolgirl Space: 1984 Revisited" (July 9, 2019) and
posts tagged Tetrahedron vs. Square.

Thursday, May 9, 2019

Counter Culture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

" Alan Watts wrote of The Making of a Counter Culture 
in the San Francisco Chronicle  in 1969, 'If you want to
know what is happening among your intelligent and
mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. . . .' "

— The University of California Press

" 'I count a lot of things that there’s no need to count,'
Cameron said. 'Just because that’s the way I am.
But I count all the things that need to be counted.' "

— Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western ,
Simon & Schuster, 1974

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050109-Hawkline.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

See as well Hawkline in this  journal.

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Nicht Spielerei

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

(Continued)

"The absence of adults forces children to practice their social skills."

This is from . . .

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180901-Play-and-Politics-NYT.gif

See also . . .

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

An Illusion of Brilliance

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:25 pm

” . . . the 3 by 3, the six-sided, three-layer configuration of
the original Rubik’s Cube, which bestows an illusion of brilliance
on those who can solve it.”

— John Branch in the online New York Times  today,
“Children of the Cube”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/sports/
cubing-usa-nationals-max-park.html

Cube-solving, like other sports, allows for displays of
impressive and admirable skill, if not “brilliance.”

The mathematics — group theory — that is sometimes associated
with Rubik’s Cube is, however, not  a sport.  See Rubik + Group
in this journal.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180815-Alperin-Bell-preface-1995.gif

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Plato and Paradigms, Revisited

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

"Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things"

— W. B. Yeats, "Among School Children"

Monday, July 9, 2018

Beaty Confidential

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:24 pm

See also Lumet's "Child's Play."

Related entertainment —

Sunday, June 17, 2018

Bead Game Introduction

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:11 pm

From The Abacus Conundrum

Bastian Perrot… constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time values of the notes, and so on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it.… …what later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.”

— Das Glasperlenspiel  (Hermann Hesse, 1943)

See also Web Audio Resources at GitHub.

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Dot

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:41 pm

The late Philip J. Davis in his 2004 essay 

"A Brief Look at Mathematics and Theology,"
Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal ,
Issue 27, Article 14. Available at:
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/hmnj/vol1/iss27/14/ 

wrote —

"In my childhood, the circle persisted as a potent magic figure
in the playtime doggerel 'Make a magic circle and sign it with a dot.'
The interested reader will find thousands of allusions to the phrase
'magic circle' on the Web."

There are fewer allusions to "magic circle" + "sign it with a dot."

One such allusion (click to enlarge) is . . .

Davis died on Pi Day .

Friday, February 16, 2018

Nicht Spielerei

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:19 pm

"What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?"

— The concluding lines of
"Sonatina to Hans Christian,"
by Wallace Stevens
(in Harmonium  (second edition, 1931))

". . . in the end the space itself is the star. . . ."

Related material — The death Tuesday night
of Prince Consort Henrik of Denmark, and the
New Year's Eve speech on Dec. 31, 2015, of
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

Distantly  related material — Yesterday morning's
post The Search for Child's Play.

Friday, February 2, 2018

For Plato’s Cave

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:06 pm

"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."

— From the Occupy Space gallery in Ireland

IMAGE- Patrick McGoohan as 'The Prisoner,' with lapel button that says '6.'

Sunday, January 21, 2018

At Which Point

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:06 pm

"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 .

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in 'Lost in Translation'

Image in a Log24 post
of March 12, 2009.

Saturday, December 30, 2017

A Dream

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:26 am

Say You, Say Me

Lionel Richie
. . . .

"I had a dream,
     I had an awesome dream
People in the park
     playing games in the dark
And what they played
     was a masquerade
And from behind walls of doubt
     a voice was crying out"
. . . .

 "Something else was behind this . . .
  because it makes no sense.”

— The author reviewed in today's previous post,
as quoted yesterday in The Boston Globe

Say you, say me, say  IT . . .

A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times  philosophy series The Stone  —

Thursday, November 2, 2017

History of Mathematics for All Souls’ Day

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

Schoolgirl Problem  

"Buy this image" . . . Or not.

Related material from the date of the above photo —

For related drama, see "Child's Play" in this journal.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Into the Wood

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:12 am

"As the shellshocked Milne newly returned from the Western Front,
Mr. Gleeson wears a virtually unvarying expression of acute intestinal distress.
Unable to connect with the infant or continue to write his popular plays, Milne
drags the child and his ghastly wife (Margot Robbie) — “I had a baby to
cheer you up!,” she whines — to the paradisiacal forest in Sussex where
the books will take shape."

— Jeannette Catsoulis

See also Princeton's Christopher Robin.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Humanitarian Award

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:22 pm

The New York Times  on a film director who reportedly died today

"Mr. Hiller was born on Nov. 13, 1923, in Edmonton, Alberta,
one of three children of Harry Hiller and the former Rose Garfin,
Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father ran a secondhand
musical instrument store in Edmonton.

His first contact with show business came through his parents,
who formed a community theater in Edmonton to present plays
in Yiddish. He helped his parents build and paint sets, and made
his acting debut at age 11."

Other news from Edmonton —

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Relax, He Said

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:15 pm

From the online New York Times  this afternoon

James Houghton, the founder and, until recently, the artistic director of the Signature Theater Company, one of Off Broadway’s essential nonprofit theaters and perhaps the nation’s leading safe house for playwrights, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 57. ….

From 2006 until his death, he was director of the drama division at the Juilliard School, which was founded in 1968  by John Houseman. Like Professor Kingsfield, the Harvard law scholar famously played by Houseman in the 1973 film “The Paper Chase,” the drama division was long known for its emphasis on discipline and for upholding rigorous standards that kept the pressure on the small number of students who were admitted after auditions. (In 2016 there 2,000 applicants for 18 spots.)

Mr. Houghton altered the Juilliard audition process and is credited with relaxing the atmosphere of the program. ….

“I don’t think there was anyone in the theater community more beloved than Jim,” the playwright Tony Kushner wrote in an email ….

— Bruce Weber

Related theater — Child's Play.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Entertainment in Plato’s Cave

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

"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."

From the Occupy Space gallery in Ireland

IMAGE- Patrick McGoohan as 'The Prisoner,' with lapel button that says '6.'

See also the number 6 in yesterday's posts,
Perfect Number and Perfect Universe.

Friday, May 20, 2016

Well Received

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:25 pm

Steve Almasy, CNN

Updated 10:46 PM ET, Fri., May 20, 2016

" (CNN)  Alan Young, who played the hapless yet protective
owner of a talking horse on the popular television comedy
'Mister Ed,' has died at age 96, according to officials at the
Motion Picture & Television Home in Woodland Hills, California.

He died Thursday of natural causes with his children at his side,
the organization said.

Young also was a well-received voice actor, with appearances
as Scrooge McDuck in many Disney productions . . . ."

[McDuck link added.]

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

A Hard Card

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:25 pm

From the April 2 obituary of a counterculture figure —

"Ms. Crystal was born Jacqueline Diamond
on Dec. 21, 1947, in Manhattan and grew up
in Mamaroneck, N.Y. Her father, Jack, owned
J. Diamond Furs. Her mother, the former Rita
Dunn, was a fur model who, after marrying,
stayed home to raise her children."

— William Grimes in The New York Times

"Jack o' Diamonds is a hard card to play."

From Log24 on the reported date of Ms. Crystal's death —

On 'The Public Square,' from 'Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens, and the Poetics of American Privacy'- 'A slash of angular blacks...'

Friday, April 1, 2016

Latin Class

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:26 pm

Opening of the film 'Child's Play,' with commentary

See also The Play's the Thing and Rivalry.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Cut Short: Requiem for a Frankfurter

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:22 pm

Just a lying rhyme for seven!
— Playwright Tom Stoppard on Heaven

" 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy!' wrote William Wordsworth, one of Geoffrey Hartman’s beloved Romantics….

For Hartman, in 2010 proclaimed by his Yale colleague Paul Fry to be 'arguably the finest Wordsworth critic who has ever written,' those lines from 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' must have been especially bittersweet. His own childhood had been cut short; born in Frankfurt in 1929…."

— "Remembering Geoffrey Hartman —
Wordsworthian, Critic and Holocaust Scholar,"
by Talya Zax today at Forward.com

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Will Success Spoil Jenny Wells?

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:00 am

"… ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns." — Franz Kafka

Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post  yesterday on the late actress Betsy Drake —

" She also wrote a novel, Children, You Are Very Little  (1971),
about a 10-year-old girl who goes to outrageous comic lengths
to defy the mean adults in her life and unite her broken family.
A Time  magazine reviewer praised its 'flair and ferocity.'

'Adults demand that children understand what they’re trying to say,' 
Ms. Drake remarked at the time, 'but too often they interpret a child’s
most serious moments as stupid or cute or funny. So children, in
self-defense, learn to play for the laugh. It’s a style of craziness,
a style of survival, a style of distancing. I learned this style as a child
but I’m not really impressed with my comic or ironic side. I’d much
rather write straight out of despair.' "

The New York Times  in 2014 on Drake's friend, painter Bernard Perlin —

" His early gallery work reflected the realist influence of Ben Shahn,
who had been a colleague at the United States Office of War Information
in 1942 and 1943. Perhaps Mr. Perlin’s most notable work from this period
is 'Orthodox Boys,' from 1948, which depicts two Jewish boys discussing
a Jewish text in front of a wall covered with graffiti. "

Midrash for Perlin —

See this morning's previous post on two un-orthodox Jewish boys and an
un-orthodox text.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Ghosts and Shadows

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:31 pm

For Poetry Month

From the home page of Alexandre Borovik:

Book in progress: Shadows of the Truth

This book (to be published soon) can be viewed
as a sequel to Mathematics under the Microscope ,
but with focus shifted on mathematics as it was
experienced by children (well, by children who
became mathematicians). The cover is designed
by Edmund Harriss.

See also Harriss's weblog post of Dec. 27, 2008, on the death
of Harold Pinter: "The Search for the Truth Can Never Stop."

This suggests a review of my own post of Dec. 3, 2012,
"The Revisiting." A figure from that post:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/GEB.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Literary Notes

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 am

From an interview by Glen Duncan with author
Susanna Moore published on January 29, 2013 —

When did you first realize that you wanted to write fiction? Was there an epiphanic moment?

I was a voracious reader as a child, clearing out the local library (my mother had given me a letter for the librarian, attesting that the books that I borrowed were for her reading alone), and I began to write plays, usually starring myself, when I was 9 or 10. There were years of bad poetry. I was features editor of the Punahou school newspaper. But at no moment did I clearly decide that I was going to be a writer, nor did it feel as if I had always been one. I left home for the mainland (I grew up in Hawaii) when I was 17 with no money or education beyond Punahou and the books that I’d read, and knew that I had to earn my living. I had a fantasy that I’d be a reporter and was sent by an equally naïve friend to Walter Annenberg, the owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer , who promptly sent me to the classified ad room, where I became an ad-taker. I’ve always thought that it was very good training: A man would call to place an ad in the hope of selling his used bed, and I would have to write a convincing few sentences on his behalf. I later read scripts for Jack Nicholson and oddly enough had to do the same thing – condense a complicated proposal into a statement of a dozen words.

We’ve talked before about how feeling different from the people around us – “mutant” was the word you used – informs or underpins the burgeoning writer’s mentality. Could you expand on that?

By mutant, I mean that state in childhood and adolescence of isolation, sometimes blissful, often bewildering, when you realize that you have little in common with the people closest to you – not because you are superior in intelligence or sensitivity, but because you perceive the world in an utterly different way, which you assume to be a failing on your part. It was only through reading and discovering characters who shared that feeling that I realized when I was about 14 that I wasn’t insane. And yes, I think that the sensation, the awareness and then the conviction that your perception of the world is not what might be called conventional, is essential to the making of an artist. It is a little like speaking a different language from the people around you – it affords you solitude, but it also means that you are sometimes misunderstood.

Related material:

Midnight Politics,  X-Woman,  "Welcome to Me,"  and
the following meditation on the word "binder"—

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Ideas

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:48 pm

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The princess is caged in the consulate.
The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.
The naked woman on the ledge outside the window
on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or
the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be
‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes
some difference whether the naked woman is about to
commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest
or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the
human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible
in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral
lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select
the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely,
especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line
upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned
to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual
experience.”

Joan Didion

This evening’s New York Lottery:  659 and 7326.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Mathematics, Not Theology

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:00 pm

(Continued)

“A set having three members is a single thing
wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as
‘three in one’ should be child’s play.”

— Max Black, Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language, Logic, and Art
 , Cornell U. Press, 1975

IMAGE- The Trinity of Max Black (a 3-set, with its eight subsets arranged in a Hasse diagram that is also a cube)

“There is  such a thing as a three-set.”
— Saying adapted from a novel by Madeleine L’Engle

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Core Curriculum Vocabulary:

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:01 pm

Separatrix  and  Mulligan

An image from this journal on September 16, 2013:

Carey Mulligan as a separatrix

IMAGE- Kipnis on Derrida's 'separatrix'

Mulligan:

“A mulligan, in a game, happens when a player gets a second chance
to perform a certain move or action.” — Wikipedia

New York Times  obituary for Richard Mellon Scaife:

“He had the caricatured look of a jovial billionaire promoting ‘family values’
in America: a real-life Citizen Kane with red cheeks, white hair, blue eyes and
a wide smile for the cameras. Friends called him intuitive but not intellectual.
He told Vanity Fair  his favorite TV show was ‘The Simpsons,’ and his favorite
book was John O’Hara’s  Appointment in Samarra , about a rich young
Pennsylvanian bent on self-destruction.” — Robert D. McFadden

Click image below for some nuclear family values in memory of Scaife:

See also the previous post,
Core Curriculum.

Core Curriculum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

This post was suggested by reviews of the David Hare play “Skylight” at
The New York Times , at WorldSocialism.org, and at ChicagoCritic.com.

 Vide  Atoms in the Family , by Laura Fermi, a book I read in high school.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Public Relations

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 am

Click image below for the source.

“Together in heaven” — Phrase quoted in Norwegian, Piper Laurie, 1958

“As a little child” — Biblical phrase

“Cool.” — Phrase suggested by this morning’s weather:

IMAGE- 35 degrees F. at 8:40 AM

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Inspired by Design

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

It’s 10 PM.  Do you know where your childen are?

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Fork

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 am

IMAGE- NY Times- 'Saloon Priest' and Dan Brown

IMAGE- Alyssa Milano as a child, with fork

"When you come to 
a fork in the road, take it."
— Yogi Berra

See also Deconstructing Alice.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Ready When You Are, C. B.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:15 am

The late film director Micky Moore playing St. Mark as a child:

See also a clip introducing St. Mark from DeMille's 1927 "The King of Kings." 

Moore reportedly died at 98 at his Malibu home on March 4th.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Raiders of the Lost Tesseract

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:33 pm

(An episode of Mathematics and Narrative )

A report on the August 9th opening of Sondheim's Into the Woods

Amy Adams… explained why she decided to take on the role of the Baker’s Wife.

“It’s the ‘Be careful what you wish’ part,” she said. “Since having a child, I’m really aware that we’re all under a social responsibility to understand the consequences of our actions.” —Amanda Gordon at businessweek.com

Related material—

Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning  "quickly learns the rules and ropes of her unlikely new market. (For instance, there are products out there specially formulated for cleaning up a 'decomp.')" —David Savage at Cinema Retro

Compare and contrast…

1.  The following item from Walpurgisnacht 2012

IMAGE- Excerpt from 'Unified Approach to Functional Decompositions of Switching Functions,' by Marek A. Perkowski et al., 1995

2.  The six partitions of a tesseract's 16 vertices 
       into four parallel faces in Diamond Theory in 1937

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Dance Theology

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Background: Geometry of the Dance (May 9)
and Midnight in Oslo (May 10).

Peter Pesic has described the action of the
symmetric group S4 on a tetrahedron as a dance

IMAGE- 'The geometry of the dance' is that of a tetrahedron, according to Peter Pesic

Compare and contrast:

The following figure may be seen as a tetrahedron,
viewed from above

IMAGE- The 'Shield of the Trinity' may be viewed as a tetrahedron, as in Peter Pesic's 'Geometry of the Dance.'

See also Masterman and Child’s Play.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Cube to Tesseract

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 am

Yesterday's post Child's Play displayed a cube formed
by a Hasse diagram of the 8 subsets of a 3-set.*

This suggests a review of a post from last January

IMAGE- Tesseract (i.e., hypercube) formed by a Hasse diagram of the 16 subsets of a 4-element set

* See a comment on yesterday's post relating it to earlier,
  very similar, remarks by Margaret Masterman.
  I was unaware yesterday that those remarks exist. 

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Staging the Self

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am
 
SPOILER ALERT

This post links to a column that
partially reveals the ending of
The Hunger Games  series of novels.

The title is from a column by Stanley Fish
on The Hunger Games  books in today's
online New York Times . The column
was posted at 9 PM EDT on May 7th, but I
did not see it until this morning.

Fish says—

"In the end… [spoiler details omitted]…
children… 'don’t know they play
on a graveyard'…."

For some literary background, see last night's post
on the May 7th, 2012, NY Times  obituaries as well
as the May 7th, 2006, Log24 post featuring 24 squares
arranged in a rectangular frame.

IMAGE- 4x6 grid

See also Frame Tales and, more generally,
The King and the Corpse.

"Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." — Yul Brynner

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Occupy Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:35 am

A chess set previously mentioned in this journal—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111120-ChessSet-419x1180.jpg

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.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Reflection Group

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

The European Reflection Group report of Saturday, May 8, 2010—
"Project Europe 2030: Challenges and Opportunities" (pdf, 46 pp.)—

"All our members agree on one fundamental issue:
Europe is currently at a turning point in its history."

This journal on the same date— "A Better Story"—

"…I can imagine the decisive evolutionary beginnings of humans and societies… not in an adult version, but in the playful mentality of children…. An unlikely story? Perhaps. I am looking out for a better story."

Hans G. Furth, Desire for Society: Children's Knowledge as Social Imagination, published by Springer, 1996, p. 181

"The clocks were striking thirteen." — George Orwell

See also this journal during the rest of May 2010 and "Sermon" from Sunday, February 20, 2011.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Life’s Persistent Questions

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:01 pm

This afternoon's online New York Times  reviews "The Tree of Life," a film that opens tomorrow.

With disarming sincerity and daunting formal sophistication “The Tree of Life” ponders some of the hardest and most persistent questions, the kind that leave adults speechless when children ask them. In this case a boy, in whispered voice-over, speaks directly to God, whose responses are characteristically oblique, conveyed by the rustling of wind in trees or the play of shadows on a bedroom wall. Where are you? the boy wants to know, and lurking within this question is another: What am I doing here?

Persistent answers… Perhaps conveyed by wind, perhaps by shadows, perhaps by the New York Lottery.

For the nihilist alternative— the universe arose by chance out of nothing and all is meaningless— see Stephen Hawking and Jennifer Ouellette.

Update of 10:30 PM EDT May 26—

Today's NY Lottery results: Midday 407, Evening 756. The first is perhaps about the date April 7, the second about the phrase "three bricks shy"— in the context of the number 759 and the Miracle Octad Generator. (See also Robert Langdon and The Poetics of Space.)

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Hard Bargain

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:31 am

Continued from Good Friday

Emmylou Harris and Rivka Galchen in the May 2, 2011 New Yorker

The New Yorker , in the above excerpt, says of David Deutsch that
"his books have titles of colossal confidence
('The Fabric of Reality,' 'The Beginning of Infinity')."

The Fabric of Reality — A post from Good Friday

Friday, April 22, 2011

Hard Bargain

m759 @ 11:01 PM

In memory of Hazel Dickens, two links —
Unique Figure and Hello Stranger .

Weepin' like a willow, mournin' like a dove
Weepin' like a willow, mournin' like a dove
There's a girl of the country
That I really love

The Beginning of Infinity — Another Good Friday death—

Sidney Michaels, adapter of the 1962 play "Tchin-Tchin."

"At play's end they are Chaplinesque waifs living in the charmed circle
of innocents that includes saints, children, drunkards and madmen.
Subliminally, Tchin-Tchin is a Christian existential fable." — TIME

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Time Travel Poem

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:11 pm

From “This Week’s Hype II,” a post at Peter Woit’s physics weblog this afternoon, a comment—

TedUnger says:
March 17, 2011 at 5:34 pm

“… there’s been nothing from these CERN scientists
except some lousy boring data on physics!
They better at least give us some time travel or else!

You know that is what Joe Public is thinking.”

The commenter’s identity is not clear. Even less clear is the identity of his subject, Joe Public.

For some remarks on time travel from literature rather than science, see “Damnation Morning” in this journal.

Erin O’Connor’s St. Patrick’s Day post this morning says,

“[Roddy] Doyle’s take on the Irish struggle for independence,
A Star Called Henry , has a lovely touch of magical realism.”

Note that the remarks by Henry Baker in this morning’s post here  were dated Thursday, 11 September 1913.

Related material—

Yet they were of a different kind
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

William Butler Yeats, “September 1913

Remarks on Reality

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:12 am

Conclusion of “The Place of Pure Mathematics” —

“Dogmas and philosophies, it would seem, rise and fall. But gradually accumulating throughout the ages, from the earliest dawn of history, there is a body of doctrine, a reasoned insight into the relations of exact ideas, painfully won and often tested. And this remains the main heritage of man; his little beacon of light amidst the solitudes and darknesses of infinite space; or, if you prefer, like the shout of children at play together in the cultivated valleys, which continues from generation to generation.

Yes, and continues for ever! A universe which has the potentiality of becoming thus conscious of itself is not without something of which that which we call memory is but an image. Somewhere, somehow, in ways we dream not of, when you and I have merged again into the illimitable whole, when all that is material has ceased, the faculty in which we now have some share, shall surely endure; the conceptions we now dimly struggle to grasp, the joy we have in the effort, these are but part of a greater whole. Some may fear, and some may hope, that they and theirs shall not endure for ever. But he must have studied Nature in vain who does not see that our spiritual activities are inherent in the mighty process of which we are part; who can doubt of their persistence.

And, on the intellectual side, of all that is best ascertained, and surest, and most definite, of these; of all that is oldest and most universal; of all that is most fundamental and far-reaching, of these activities, Pure Mathematics is the symbol and the sum.”

— From a 1913 address by geometry saint Henry Frederick Baker, who died on this date in 1956

The feast of another saint, Patrick, also falls on 3/17.  The date itself is related, if only by chance, to the following remark—

“317 is a prime, not because we think so,
or because our minds are shaped in one way
rather than another, but because it is so,
because mathematical reality is built that way.”

— From a 1940 book by the somewhat less saintly number theorist G. H. Hardy

Monday, February 21, 2011

The Abacus Conundrum*

From Das Glasperlenspiel  (Hermann Hesse, 1943) —

“Bastian Perrot… constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time values of the notes, and so on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it.… …what later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.”

From “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (Lewis Padgett, 1943)—

…”Paradine looked up. He frowned, staring. What in—
…”Is that an abacus?” he asked. “Let’s see it, please.”
…Somewhat unwillingly Scott brought the gadget across to his father’s chair. Paradine blinked. The “abacus,” unfolded, was more than a foot square, composed of thin,  rigid wires that interlocked here and there. On the wires the colored beads were strung. They could be slid back and forth, and from one support to another, even at the points of jointure. But— a pierced bead couldn’t cross interlocking  wires—
…So, apparently, they weren’t pierced. Paradine looked closer. Each small sphere had a deep groove running around it, so that it could be revolved and slid along the wire at the same time. Paradine tried to pull one free. It clung as though magnetically. Iron? It looked more like plastic.
…The framework itself— Paradine wasn’t a mathematician. But the angles formed by the wires were vaguely shocking, in their ridiculous lack of Euclidean logic. They were a maze. Perhaps that’s what the gadget was— a puzzle.
…”Where’d you get this?”
…”Uncle Harry gave it to me,” Scott said on the spur of the moment. “Last Sunday, when he came over.” Uncle Harry was out of town, a circumstance Scott well knew. At the age of seven, a boy soon learns that the vagaries of adults follow a certain definite pattern, and that they are fussy about the donors of gifts. Moreover, Uncle Harry would not return for several weeks; the expiration of that period was unimaginable to Scott, or, at least, the fact that his lie would ultimately be discovered meant less to him than the advantages of being allowed to keep the toy.
…Paradine found himself growing slightly confused as he attempted to manipulate the beads. The angles were vaguely illogical. It was like a puzzle. This red bead, if slid along this  wire to that  junction, should reach there— but it didn’t. A maze, odd, but no doubt instructive. Paradine had a well-founded feeling that he’d have no patience with the thing himself.
…Scott did, however, retiring to a corner and sliding beads around with much fumbling and grunting. The beads did  sting, when Scott chose the wrong ones or tried to slide them in the wrong direction. At last he crowed exultantly.
…”I did it, dad!”
…””Eh? What? Let’s see.” The device looked exactly the same to Paradine, but Scott pointed and beamed.
…”I made it disappear.”
…”It’s still there.”
…”That blue bead. It’s gone now.”
…Paradine didn’t believe that, so he merely snorted. Scott puzzled over the framework again. He experimented. This time there were no shocks, even slight. The abacus had showed him the correct method. Now it was up to him to do it on his own. The bizarre angles of the wires seemed a little less confusing now, somehow.
…It was a most instructive toy—
…It worked, Scott thought, rather like the crystal cube.

* Title thanks to Saturday Night Live  (Dec. 4-5, 2010).

Saturday, November 20, 2010

The Seeker

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:23 am

Excerpts from a book review titled …

"Saul Bellow’s Quest for the Vernacular Sublime"

“We often stopped before a display of children’s shoes. My mother coveted for me a pair of patent-leather sandals with an elegantissimo strap. I finally got them— I rubbed them with butter to preserve the leather. This is when I was 6 or 7 years old, a little older than Rosie is now. Amazing how it all boils down to a pair of patent-leather sandals.” Saul Bellow recorded that ancient memory, stirred to it by play with his little daughter, in a letter on Feb. 19, 2004, when he was 88 years old. It is the last letter in this magnificent book…."

"… Finally he was— may this, too, be said without irony?— a seeker after truth."

Leon Wieseltier in the November 21 New York Times Sunday Book Review

Without irony is fine, but don't forget the sandals.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Cartoon Graveyard continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:30 am

The New York Times  today—

Stuart E. Hample,
Humorist and Cartoonist,
Dies at 84

NY Times Enlarge-This Icon Enlarge This Image



"Dread & Superficiality:
Woody Allen as Comic Strip"/Abrams

Mr. Hample, who was also a playwright and performer,
wrote “The Silly Book” and was the co-author of
“Children’s Letters to God.”

Hample died on Sunday.
 

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Home from Home continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:02 pm

Or— Childhood's Rear End

This post was suggested by…

  1. Today's New York Times
    "For many artists Electric Lady has become a home away from home…. For Jimmy Page the personal imprimaturs of Hendrix and Mr. Kramer made all the difference when Led Zeppelin mixed parts of 'Houses of the Holy' there in 1972."
  2. The album cover pictures for "Houses of the Holy"
  3. Boleskine House, home to Aleister Crowley and (occasionally) to Jimmy Page.

Related material:

The Zeppelin album cover, featuring rear views of nude children, was shot at the Giant's Causeway.

From a page at led-zeppelin.org—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100826-Causeway.jpg

See also Richard Rorty on Heidegger

Safranski, the author of ''Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy,'' never steps back and pronounces judgment on Heidegger, but something can be inferred from the German title of his book: ''Ein Meister aus Deutschland'' (''A Master From Germany''). Heidegger was, undeniably, a master, and was very German indeed. But Safranski's spine-chilling allusion is to Paul Celan's best-known poem, ''Death Fugue.'' In Michael Hamburger's translation, its last lines are:

death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith.

No one familiar with Heidegger's work can read Celan's poem without recalling Heidegger's famous dictum: ''Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.'' Nobody who makes this association can reread the poem without having the images of Hitler and Heidegger — two men who played with serpents and daydreamed — blend into each other. Heidegger's books will be read for centuries to come, but the smell of smoke from the crematories — the ''grave in the air'' — will linger on their pages.

Heidegger is the antithesis of the sort of philosopher (John Stuart Mill, William James, Isaiah Berlin) who assumes that nothing ultimately matters except human happiness. For him, human suffering is irrelevant: philosophy is far above such banalities. He saw the history of the West not in terms of increasing freedom or of decreasing misery, but as a poem. ''Being's poem,'' he once wrote, ''just begun, is man.''

For Heidegger, history is a sequence of ''words of Being'' — the words of the great philosophers who gave successive historical epochs their self-image, and thereby built successive ''houses of Being.'' The history of the West, which Heidegger also called the history of Being, is a narrative of the changes in human beings' image of themselves, their sense of what ultimately matters. The philosopher's task, he said, is to ''preserve the force of the most elementary words'' — to prevent the words of the great, houses-of-Being-building thinkers of the past from being banalized.

Related musical meditations—

Shine On (Saturday, April 21, 2007), Shine On, Part II, and Built (Sunday, April 22, 2007).

Related pictorial meditations—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100826-CameronBlog.jpg

The Giant's Causeway at Peter J. Cameron's weblog

and the cover illustration for Diamond Theory (1976)—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100826-CoverArt.jpg

The connection between these two images is the following from Cameron's weblog today

… as we saw, there are two different Latin squares of order 4;
one, but not the other, can be extended to a complete set
of 3 MOLS [mutually orthogonal Latin squares].

The underlying structures of the square pictures in the Diamond Theory cover are those of the two different Latin squares of order 4 mentioned by Cameron.

Connection with childhood—

The children's book A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle. See math16.com. L'Engle's fantasies about children differ from those of Arthur C. Clarke and Led Zeppelin.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

The Game

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:07 pm
'Magister Ludi,' or 'The Glass Bead Game,' by Hermann Hesse

We shall now give a brief summary of the beginnings of the Glass Bead Game. It appears to have arisen simultaneously in Germany and in England. In both countries, moreover, it was originally a kind of exercise employed by those small groups of musicologists and musicians who worked and studied in the new seminaries of musical theory. If we compare the original state of the Game with its subsequent developments and its present form, it is much like comparing a musical score of the period before 1500, with its primitive notes and absence of bar lines, with an eighteenth-century score, let alone with one from the nineteenth with its confusing excess of symbols for dynamics, tempi, phrasing, and so on, which often made the printing of such scores a complex technical problem.

The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and musicians. And as we have said, it was played both in England and Germany before it was ‘invented’ here in the Musical Academy of Cologne, and was given the name it bears to this day, after so many generations, although it has long ceased to have anything to do with glass beads.

The inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, a rather eccentric but clever, sociable, and humane musicologist, used glass beads instead of letters, numerals, notes, or other graphic symbols. Perrot, who incidentally has also bequeathed to us a treatise on the Apogee and Decline of Counterpoint, found that the pupils at the Cologne Seminary had a rather elaborate game they used to play. One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue among ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach — although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas, but in practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice.

Bastian Perrot in all probability was a member of the Journeyers to the East. He was partial to handicrafts and had himself built several pianos and clavichords in the ancient style. Legend has it that he was adept at playing the violin in the old way, forgotten since 1800, with a high-arched bow and hand-regulated tension of the bow hairs. Given these interests, it was perhaps only natural that he should have constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes, and so on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it; it was imitated and became fashionable in England too. For a time the game of musical exercises was played in this charmingly primitive manner. And as is so often the case, an enduring and significant institution received its name from a passing and incidental circumstance. For what later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.

Hermann Hesse

“For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”

— “Albertus Secundus,” epigraph to The Glass Bead Game

From DownloadThat.com

(Click to enlarge.)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100815-ThePaletteSm.jpg

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Philosophers’ Keystone

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:02 am

(Background— Yesterday's Quarter to Three,
A Manifold Showing, Class of 64, and Child's Play.)

Image-- Notes on Lowry's arrival in Mexico on the ship 'Pennsylvania'

Image-- PA Lottery Saturday, July 10, 2010-- Midday 017, Evening 673

Hermeneutics

Fans of Gregory Chaitin and Harry Potter
may consult Writings for Yom Kippur
for the meaning of yesterday's evening 673.

(See also Lowry and Cabbala.)

Fans of Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner,
and the Dark Lady may consult Prime Suspect
for the meaning of yesterday's midday 17.

For some more serious background, see Dante—

"….mirando il punto 
a cui tutti li tempi son presenti
"

– Dante, Paradiso, XVII, 17-18

The symbol    is used throughout the entire book
in place of such phrases as ‘Q.E.D.’  or
‘This completes the proof of the theorem’
to signal the end of a proof.”

Measure Theory, by Paul R. Halmos, Van Nostrand, 1950      

           
Halmos died on the date of Yom Kippur —  
October 2, 2006.            

Saturday, May 8, 2010

A Better Story —

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Or, “Get me rewrite!”

Today’s New York Times online–

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein imagines a story about academics discussing literary theory—

“Rumors had reached us of a doctrine called Theory emanating from distant corners of the university. We in the Department of Philosophy understood it immediately as a grand hoax. I will not dwell on my particular amusement, in which I was so tragically at odds with my collaborator, Theo Rhee….

… It was at this moment that Hans Furth appeared and ambled over….”

And thanks to Google Books, here he is—

“…I can imagine the decisive evolutionary beginnings of humans and societies… not in an adult version, but in the playful mentality of children…. An unlikely story? Perhaps. I am looking out for a better story.”

Hans G. Furth, Desire for Society: Children’s Knowledge as Social Imagination, published by Springer, 1996, p. 181

As am I. (See previous post.) One possibility, from 1943— “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.”

Another possibility, from 1953—  not Theo Rhee, but rather “Loo Ree.”

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Field Theory

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:29 pm

Parker’s Wake

A continuation of Wednesday’s “Field of Dreams” link

Internet Movie Database comment

“The Kid From Left Field” is a wonderful baseball film made in the early fifties and breathes the nostalgia of that time period. Child actor Billy Chapin becomes a batboy for the woeful Bisons (a copy of the old St. Louis Browns) and proceeds to inform the players of how they can correct their individual problems. Unbeknownst to the team, Chapin’s wisdom is from his father, a washed-up player who has become a peanut vendor and lacks confidence and courage– in spite of his obvious baseball knowledge. Pretty soon, Chapin becomes the nine year old manager of the team with dramatic results that bind father to son; you can’t help but root for the Bisons! A baseball fantasy– but filled with much innocence and charm.

“…dramatic results that bind father to son….”

Not to mention the Holy Ghost. See Fess Parker, who died Thursday, in the “Left Field” film and in an essay by Roger Cooke in the April Notices of the American Mathematical Society

Life on the Mathematical Frontier: Legendary Figures and Their Adventures

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100320-Field.jpg

Fess Parker in
“The Kid from Left Field,” 1953

Possible associative links between recent Log24 posts and the baseball theme of the April AMS Notices

  1. The film “Field of Dreams” mentioned above is a resurrection story.
  2. Wednesday’s link to simultaneous multiple-level associations leads to the Gameplayers of Zan cover that also appears in Thursday’s post. That cover deals with a resurrection myth in Gameplayers.
  3. The Finnegans Wake resurrection myth is mentioned in Wednesday’s post “Spring Training.”

Associative links, though entertaining, have of course their limitations in logical argument.

A notable recent example– Jon Stewart’s parody of Glenn Beck.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Spring Training

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am

A search for previous mentions of Alexandre Borovik in this journal (see previous entry) yields the following–

In Roger Rosenblatt's academic novel Beet, committee members propose their personal plans for a new, improved curriculum:

“… Once the students really got into playing with toy soldiers, they would understand history with hands-on excitement.”

To demonstrate his idea, he’d brought along a shoe box full of toy doughboys and grenadiers, and was about to reenact the Battle of Verdun on the committee table when Heilbrun stayed his hand. “We get it,” he said.

“That’s quite interesting, Molton,” said Booth [a chemist]. “But is it rigorous enough?”

At the mention of the word, everyone, save Peace, sat up straight.

“Rigor is so important,” said Kettlegorf.

“We must have rigor,” said Booth.

“You may be sure,” said the offended Kramer. “I never would propose anything lacking rigor.”

This passage suggests a search for commentary on rigor at Verdun. Voilà

d) The Great War: a study in systematic rigor

… Because treaties had been signed, national pride staked, hands shaken, and honor pledged, two thousand years of civilization based on energetic, creative sacrifice and belief in every person’s sacred spark dissolved in smoldering ruins.  Europe’s leaders played at the “game” of honor without duly considering whether their ends were honorable.  The old boys incited their children— others’ children, and often their own— to volunteer for the slaughterhouse because “death for the fatherland is sweet and fitting.” 7

     If men will thus fling their own sons into the fiery furnace in an obsession with making the system go, what hope is there that a mere game— a true game, a joyful pastime— will liberate itself from systematic rigor to increase the quality of play or to allow more players on the field?

7 Wilfrid Owen borrowed this line from the Roman elegist Horace to mock bitterly the European Old Guard’s staunch support of the War.  The poem was one of Owen’s last: he was killed one week before the Armistice.

— "A  Synthetic Meditation on Baseball, Racism, Closed Systems, and Spiritual Rigor Mortis," by John R. Harris

The Beet excerpt is from a post of Sunday, May 25, 2008– "Hall of Mirrors."

Related material on death and rigor appears in a 1963 commentary by Thornton Wilder on a novel by James Joyce–

"… Joyce's interest is not primarily in the puns but in the simultaneous multiple-level associations which they permit him to pursue. Finnegans Wake appears to me as an immense poem whose subject is the continuity of what is Living, viewed under the guise of a resurrection myth. This poem is conducted under the utmost formal rigor controlling every word and in a style that enables the author through apparently preposterous incongruities to arrive at an ultimate unification and harmony."

"Build it and they will come." — Field of Dreams

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Deconstructing Alice

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Alyssa is  Wonderland

Manohla Dargis in The New York Times  yesterday

“Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in ‘Wonderland’ and in the sequel, ‘Through the Looking-Glass,’ which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination. (She is  Wonderland.)”

Alyssa Milano as a child, with fork

From Inside the White Cube

“The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear, and so does one of the great projective laws of modernism: as modernism gets older, context becomes content. In a peculiar reversal, the object introduced into the gallery ‘frames’ the gallery and its laws.”

From Yogi Berra–

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Related material:  For Baron Samedi and…

Symbology
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube
Jacques Derrida on the Looking-Glass garden, 'The Time before First,' and Solomon's seal

Friday, February 19, 2010

Mimzy vs. Mimsy

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

 

Deep Play:

Mimzy vs. Mimsy

From a 2007 film, "The Last Mimzy," based on
the classic 1943 story by Lewis Padgett
  "Mimsy Were the Borogoves"–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100219-LastMimzyTrailer.jpg

As the above mandala pictures show,
the film incorporates many New Age fashions.

The original story does not.

A more realistic version of the story
might replace the mandalas with
the following illustrations–

The Eightfold Cube and a related page from a 1906 edition of 'Paradise of Childhood'

Click to enlarge.

For a commentary, see "Non-Euclidean Blocks."

(Here "non-Euclidean" means simply
other than  Euclidean. It does not imply any
  violation of Euclid's parallel postulate.)

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Unholy Scripture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:06 pm

From The New York Times

4TH NIGHT FREE

NY Times 1:43 PM Jan. 28, 2010-- News of Salinger's death, with ad-- 'Only in Atlantis: 4th night free'

From this journal —

Sunday, November 5, 2006

Twilight Kingdom

“What he cannot contemplate is the reproach of

    … that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom,

when at length he may meet the eyes….”

On “The Hollow Men”

” … unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom”

Related readings from unholy scripture:
 

  The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040604-Feeling.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A.  The “long twilight struggle” speech of JFK

B.  “The Platters were singing ‘Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,’ and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information.  The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was all information.”

— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

C.
  “I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady.  Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it.  Live burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of arms.  The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?”

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Infantilizing the Audience

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

“Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts.”

— David Brooks in today’s New York Times

What else is new?

Sesame Street 40th anniversary celebration at Google

I prefer the impermissible
and intolerant Stan Lee
(author of novels, not comic books):

'Dunn's Conundrum,' a 1985 novel by Stanley R. Lee

Dunn’s Conundrum is reportedly
the basis of a screenplay titled,
after the novel’s main character,
“The Garbageman.”

Sesame Street at Google: O is for Oscar

Monday, June 29, 2009

Monday June 29, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:29 pm
Calvinist Epiphany
for St. Peter’s Day

Have your people
  call my people.
— George Carlin 


Diamond life, lover boy;
we move in space
with minimum waste
 and maximum joy.

— Sade, quoted here on
 Lincoln’s Birthday, 2003

This is perhaps suitable
for the soundtrack of
the film “Blockheads
  (currently in development)–

Kohs Block Design Test


Diamond Life

Related material from Wikipedia:

“Uta Frith, in her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma,[5] addresses the superior performance of autistic individuals on the block design [link not in Wikipedia] test. This was also addressed in [an] earlier paper.[6] A particularly interesting article demonstrates the differences in construction time in the performance of the block design task by Asperger syndrome individuals and non-Asperger’s individuals. An essential point here is that in an unsegmented version of the task, Asperger’s individuals performed dramatically faster than non-Asperger’s individuals: [7].”

5. Frith, Uta (2003). Autism: explaining the enigma (2nd ed. ). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Pub. ISBN 0-631-22901-9.

6. Shah A, Frith U (Nov 1993). “Why do autistic individuals show superior performance on the block design task?”. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 34 (8): 1351–64. PMID 8294523. 

7. Caron MJ, Mottron L, Berthiaume C, Dawson M (Jul 2006). “Cognitive mechanisms, specificity and neural underpinnings of visuospatial peaks in autism”. Brain 129 (Pt 7): 1789–802. doi:10.1093/brain/awl072. PMID 16597652. “Fig 3”.

Lover Boy

Related material from a film (see Calvinist Epiphany, June 17):

Still from the film 'Adam'-- Adam looking at photo

Related material from another film:

Monty Python - Bright Side of Life

For the relevance of this maxim to autism, see Markoff Process (March 4, 2009).

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Thursday February 5, 2009

Through the
Looking Glass:

A Sort of Eternity

From the new president’s inaugural address:

“… in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

The words of Scripture:

9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

First Corinthians 13

“through a glass”

[di’ esoptrou].
By means of
a mirror [esoptron]
.

Childish things:

Froebel's third gift, the eightfold cube
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
 

Not-so-childish:

Three planes through
the center of a cube
that split it into
eight subcubes:
Cube subdivided into 8 subcubes by planes through the center
Through a glass, darkly:

A group of 8 transformations is
generated by affine reflections
in the above three planes.
Shown below is a pattern on
the faces of the 2x2x2 cube
that is symmetric under one of
these 8 transformations–
a 180-degree rotation:

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

(Click on image
for further details.)

But then face to face:

A larger group of 1344,
rather than 8, transformations
of the 2x2x2 cube
is generated by a different
sort of affine reflections– not
in the infinite Euclidean 3-space
over the field of real numbers,
but rather in the finite Galois
3-space over the 2-element field.

Galois age fifteen, drawn by a classmate.

Galois age fifteen,
drawn by a classmate.

These transformations
in the Galois space with
finitely many points
produce a set of 168 patterns
like the one above.
For each such pattern,
at least one nontrivial
transformation in the group of 8
described above is a symmetry
in the Euclidean space with
infinitely many points.

For some generalizations,
see Galois Geometry.

Related material:

The central aim of Western religion– 

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
 masculine and feminine,
 life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy–

 Dualities of Pythagoras
 as reconstructed by Aristotle:
  Limited Unlimited
  Odd Even
  Male Female
  Light Dark
  Straight Curved
  ... and so on ....

“Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.”

— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)

“In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…
And the song of love’s recision
is the music of the spheres.”

— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded:

“Art inherited from the old religion
the power of consecrating things
and endowing them with
a sort of eternity;
museums are our temples,
and the objects displayed in them
are beyond history.”

— Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52

From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space:

Inside the White Cube

“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090205-cube2x2x2.gif

“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses  

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Thursday January 29, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:23 am
Dagger Definitions

From 'Ulysses,' 1922 first edition, page 178-- 'dagger definitions'
 
Midrash by a post-bac:

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

“Horseness is
the whatness of allhorse”:
Thingism vs. Thisness

By Amy Peterson

Jacques Derrida once asked the surly and self-revealing question, “Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?” As with philosophers generally, literary critics come with their own inaccessible argot, some terms of which are useful, but most of which are not and only add more loops to literary criticism’s spiraling abstraction. Take for example, James Wood’s neologism thisness (h/t: 3 Quarks Daily):

The project of modernity in Wood’s eyes is largely in revealing the contour and shape, the specific ‘feel’ of that essential mystery. He even borrows a concept from the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, haecceitas or ‘thisness,’ to explain what he means: ‘By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion.’ (my emphasis)

Wood is clearly taking his cue here from the new trend in literary criticism of referring to realism by its etymological meaning, thingism. Where thingism is meant to capture the materialism of late nineteenth and early 20th century Realist literature, thisness, it seems, is meant to capture the basic immaterialism of Modern realist literature. In this, it succeeds. Realism is no longer grounded in the thingism, or material aspect, of reality as it was during the Victorian era. In contemporary literature, it is a “puff of palpability” that hints at reality’s contours but does not disturb our essential understanding of existence as an impalpable mystery. So now we have this term that seems to encompass the Modern approach to reality, but is it useful as an accurate conception of reality (i.e. truth, human existence, and the like), and how are we to judge its accuracy?

I think that, as far as literature is concerned, the test of the term’s accuracy lies in the interpretation of the Modernist texts that Wood champions as truthful but largely abstract depictions of human experience:

‘Kafka’s ‘”Metamorphosis” and Hamsun’s “Hunger” and Beckett’s “Endgame” are not representations of likely or typical human activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts.’

For brevity’s sake, I’ll pick a passage from a different Modernist text that I think exemplifies the issues involved in the question of thingism and thisness’ reality. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, a pub discussionhttp://www.log24.com/images/asterisk8.gif of art’s purpose arises in which the writer Geoffrey Russell asserts that “Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences”; in his thoughts, Stephen Dedalus prepares to counter this:

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepy crawl after [William] Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

To give my best translation of Stephen-think: The physical being of the horse (“horseness”) grounds the over-arching, abstract idea of the horse (“allhorse”) in reality (“whatness”). God—the ultimate abstraction—is elusive and rarely manifests himself as a material reality (when listening to children playing earlier in the book, Stephen asserts that God is a “shout in the street”). Space—the material world—must be observed to make sense of abstract ideas (like God). Stephen’s opponents who believe that art must depict the abstract and the essential make claims about existence that have very little basis in material reality so that they can grasp at the divine through the work of such famously fantastic artists as William Blake, whose unrealistic poetry and paintings Stephen evidently holds in little esteem here, though he’s kinder to Blake elsewhere. Finally, the present makes concrete the abstract possibilities of the future by turning them into the realities of the past.

Ulysses elucidates the distinction between abstractly based and materially based realism because, while abstract to be sure, Joyce’s writing is deeply rooted in material existence, and it is this material existence which has given it its lasting meaning and influence. The larger point that I’m trying to make here is that material reality gives meaning to the abstract. (As a corollary, the abstract helps us to make sense of material reality.) There can be no truth without meaning, and there can be no meaning without a material form of existence against which to judge abstract ideas. To argue, as Wood does, that the abstract can produce concrete truths with little reference to material reality is to ignore the mutual nature of the relationship between material reality and truth. The more carefully we observe material reality, the more truth we gain from our abstractions of its phenomena, or, to state it in the vocabulary—though not the style—of literary criticism: thisness is a diluted form of thingism, which means that thisness is productive of fewer (and lesser) truths.

http://www.log24.com/images/asterisk8.gif “Space: what you
  damn well
     have to see.”

Amy Peterson
has failed to see
that the unsheathing
of dagger definitions
takes place not in
a pub, but in
The National Library
of Ireland
.

The Russell here is not
Geoffrey but rather
George William Russell,
also known as AE.

Related material:

Yesterday’s Log24 entry
for the Feast of
St. Thomas Aquinas,
Actual Being,”
and the four entries
that preceded it.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Tuesday December 23, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:20 am

Kindred Spirit

On the late film director Robert Mulligan, who died early Saturday [Dec. 20, 2008] at 83:

Mulligan received a best director Oscar nomination in 1963 for “[To Kill a] Mockingbird”….

While some debated whether he had a discernible personal vision in his films, Mulligan was known for his casting and direction of children, including “[Up the Down] Staircase,” where he personally interviewed more than 500 New York high school students.

Sensing a kindred spirit, Francois Truffaut was a vocal champion, particularly cognizant of what he perceived as undue criticism of Mulligan’s work for lacking a particular “style.” Mulligan himself was dismissive of critics/cineaste talk: “I don’t know anything about ‘the Mulligan style,’ ” he told the Village Voice in 1978. “If you can find it, well, that’s your job.”

Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter

Thanks to desconvencida for a trailer of “The Man in the Moon” (1991), Reese Witherspoon’s first film and Mulligan’s last.

Mulligan also directed Natalie Wood in a personal favorite of mine, “Love with the Proper Stranger.”

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Sunday July 6, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

"Hancock" Powers to the Top
of July Fourth Box Office

This evening's online
  New York Times

New York Lottery
Sunday, July 6,
2008:
Mid-day 307
Evening  921

Log24  3/07:

Symbols:


Three 3x3 symbols of a language game:  the field, the game, checkmate

Log24  9/21:

"The consolations of form,
the clean crystalline work"
— Iris Murdoch, 
"Against Dryness"

Will Smith
on Chess

Will Smith with chessboard

Will Smith

The Independent, 9 July 2004:

"A devoted father, Smith passes on his philosophy of life to his children through chess, among other things.

'My father taught me how to play chess at seven and introduced beautiful concepts that I try to pass on to my kids. The elements and concepts of life are so perfectly illustrated on a chess board. The ability to accurately assess your position is the key to chess, which I also think is the key to life.'

He pauses, searching for an example. 'Everything you do in your life is a move. You wake up in the morning, you strap on a gun, and you walk out on the street– that's a move. You've made a move and the universe is going to respond with its move.

'Whatever move you're going to make in your life to be successful, you have to accurately access the next couple of moves– like what's going to happen if you do this? Because once you've made your move, you can't take it back. The universe is going to respond.'

Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: 'It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I'm teaching my kids.'"

Related material:

"Philosophers' Stone"
and other entries
of June 25, 2008

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Saturday May 10, 2008

MoMA Goes to
Kindergarten

"… the startling thesis of Mr. Brosterman's new book, 'Inventing Kindergarten' (Harry N. Abrams, $39.95): that everything the giants of modern art and architecture knew about abstraction they learned in kindergarten, thanks to building blocks and other educational toys designed by Friedrich Froebel, a German educator, who coined the term 'kindergarten' in the 1830's."

— "Was Modernism Born
     in Toddler Toolboxes?"
     by Trip Gabriel, New York Times,
     April 10, 1997
 

RELATED MATERIAL

Figure 1 —
Concept from 1819:

Cubic crystal system
(Footnotes 1 and 2)

Figure 2 —
The Third Gift, 1837:

Froebel's third gift

Froebel's Third Gift

Froebel, the inventor of
kindergarten, worked as
an assistant to the
crystallographer Weiss
mentioned in Fig. 1.

(Footnote 3)

Figure 3 —
The Third Gift, 1906:

Seven partitions of the eightfold cube in 'Paradise of Childhood,' 1906

Figure 4 —
Solomon's Cube,
1981 and 1983:

Solomon's Cube - A 1981 design by Steven H. Cullinane

Figure 5 —
Design Cube, 2006:

Design Cube 4x4x4 by Steven H. Cullinane

The above screenshot shows a
moveable JavaScript display
of a space of six dimensions
(over the two-element field).

(To see how the display works,
try the Kaleidoscope Puzzle first.)

For some mathematical background, see

Footnotes:
 
1. Image said to be after Holden and Morrison, Crystals and Crystal Growing, 1982
2. Curtis Schuh, "The Library: Biobibliography of Mineralogy," article on Mohs
3. Bart Kahr, "Crystal Engineering in Kindergarten" (pdf), Crystal Growth & Design, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2004, 3-9

Friday, January 25, 2008

Friday January 25, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:01 pm

Time and the River

Harvard Class of 1964
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report:

"At this writing (November, '88), President-elect Bush has just announced his intention to name me to his Cabinet and to nominate me as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Given the state of play in Washington, I suppose I may find myself in premature retirement by the time this report is published.

That is not an entirely unattractive prospect. Kath (Kathleen Emmet, '64) and I live in an idyllic setting, overlooking the Little Falls of the Potomac, just twelve minutes upstream from the Capitol. She writes– she's now completing a book on American writers in Paris after World War II. Our children (Willy and Jonathan) do what healthy growing twelve- and seven-year-olds do. The river works its way peacefully over the falls and riffles around a woodsy island through the Chain Bridge narrows, and then on into the familar wide mud-basin of Washington– a wholly different world.

When I was an undergraduate, I asked all the adolescent questions. I still do: Why does the river flow the way it does? Why does one move downstream and back? The allure of such simple questions is as great for me today as when we talked of them so seriously and so long at the University Restaurant or the Casablanca, or on the steps of Widener. The only difference seems to be that I'm now a bit more willing to settle for answers that seem simpler, less profound, sometimes even trite. But only a bit."

— Richard Darman, who died today at 64

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Tuesday November 20, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:44 am
Death on a Friday

and the
Magic of Numbers

PA Lottery Friday, Nov. 16, 2007: Midday 717, Evening 419

Above: PA Lottery on
Friday, November 16th,
the date of death
for noted leftist attorney
Victor Rabinowitz

“Mr. Rabinowitz was a member
of the Communist Party
from 1942 until the early 1960s,
he wrote in his memoir,
Unrepentant Leftist (1996).
He said the party
seemed the best vehicle
to fight for social justice.”

The New York Times,
 Nov. 20, 2007

Related material:

7/17,
4/19,
and
 Friday.

From the Harvard Crimson on Friday:

“Robert Scanlan, a professor of theater
who knew Beckett personally,
directed the plays….
He said that performing Beckett as part of
the New College Theatre’s inaugural series
represents an auspicious beginning.”

From Log24 on 4/19–
Drama Workshop“–
a note of gratitude
from the Virginia Tech killer:

“Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ,
to inspire generations of the weak
and the defenseless people.”

“It’s not for me. For my children,
for my brothers and sisters…
I did it for them.”

Manifesto of Cho  

Party on, Victor.

For further drama, see

The Crimson Passion.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Thursday October 11, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:26 pm
Words and Music
suggested by the recent
Princeton symposium
"Deep Beauty"

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071011-vonNeumann.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

1. From my childhood:

"You remind me of a man."
"What man?"
"The man with the power."
"What power?"
"The power of hoodoo."
"Hoodoo?"
"You do."
"Do what?
"Remind me of a man…."

— Dialogue from
"The Bachelor and the
Bobby-Soxer" (1947)

2.  From later years:

"When I was a little boy,
(when I was just a boy)
and the Devil would
call my name
(when I was just a boy)
I'd say 'now who do,
who do you think
you're fooling?'"

Paul Simon, 1973 

"At times, bullshit can
only be countered
with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer

(See A Harvard Education
in a Sentence.)

From Plato's Cave:

A description of caveman life
translated from German

John von
 Neumann

"Soon Freud, soon mourning,
Soon Fried, soon fight.
Nevertheless who know this language?"

(Language courtesy of
Google's translation software)

Picture of von Neumann courtesy of
Princeton University Library

More from Rhymin' Simon–

"one funny mofo"–

"Oh, my mama loves,
she loves me,
she get down on her knees
and hug me
like she loves me
like a rock.
She rocks me
like the rock of ages"

Related material:

The previous Log24 entries
of Oct. 7-11, 2007, and
the five Log24 entries
ending with "Toy Soldiers"
(Valentine's Day, 2003).

See also

"Taking Christ to the Movies,"
by Anna Megill, Princeton '06
.

Friday, September 7, 2007

Friday September 7, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm

The New York Times online,
Friday, Sept. 7, 2007:

Madeleine L’Engle,
Children’s Writer,
Is Dead

"Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday [Sept. 6, 2007] in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux."

More >>

Related material:

Log24 entries of
August 31

"That is how we travel."

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/070831-Ant2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A Wrinkle in Time,
Chapter 5,
"The Tesseract"

— and of 
September 2
(with update of
 September 5)–

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
A Wrinkle in Time  

Friday, August 10, 2007

Friday August 10, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:31 am

The Ring of Gyges

10:31:32 AM ET

Commentary by Richard Wilhelm
on I Ching Hexagram 32:

“Duration is… not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression.
Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing
movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in
accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every ending.”

Related material

The Ring of the Diamond Theorem

Jung and the Imago Dei

Log24 on June 10, 2007: 

WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask. —Joan Didion

Iago states that he is not who he is. —Mark F. Frisch

“Not Being There,”
by Christopher Caldwell
,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Magazine:

“The chance to try on fresh identities was the great boon that life online was supposed to afford us. Multiuser role-playing games and discussion groups would be venues for living out fantasies. Shielded by anonymity, everyone could now pass a ‘second life’ online as Thor the Motorcycle Sex God or the Sage of Wherever. Some warned, though, that there were other possibilities. The Stanford Internet expert Lawrence Lessig likened online anonymity to the ring of invisibility that surrounds the shepherd Gyges in one of Plato’s dialogues. Under such circumstances, Plato feared, no one is ‘of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.’Time, along with a string of sock-puppet scandals, has proved Lessig and Plato right.”

“The Boy Who Lived,”
by Christopher Hitchens
,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Book Review:

On the conclusion of the Harry Potter series:”The toys have been put firmly back in the box, the wand has been folded up, and the conjuror is discreetly accepting payment while the children clamor for fresh entertainments. (I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.)”

I, on the other hand,
recommend Tolkien…
or, for those who are
already familiar with
Tolkien, Plato– to whom
The Ring of Gyges” may
serve as an introduction.

“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato:
bless me, what do they
teach them at these schools!”
C. S. Lewis

Monday, May 14, 2007

Monday May 14, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:30 am

Seven Bridges

"Make me young…"
Kilgore Trout

For the old at heart:  

The Mathematical Association of America in this
Euler Tercentenary Year honors the seven bridges of
Königsberg, Prussia (birthplace of David Hilbert).

For Kilgore Trout:

A song about the road to (and from)
Hank Williams's memorial marker:

"There are stars in the Southern sky
and if ever you decide you should go
there is a taste of time-sweetened honey
down the Seven Bridges Road

Now I have loved you like a baby
like some lonesome child
and I have loved you in a tame way
and I have loved you wild"

Steve Young

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070514-Dance.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Nicole Kidman dances 
"Sweet Home Alabama"

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Tuesday May 8, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm
The Public Square

Center of Town, Cuernavaca, from Paul Goodman's Communitas

On the words “symbology” and “communitas” (the former used, notably, as the name of a fictional field at Harvard in the novel The Da Vinci Code)–

Symbology:

“Also known as ‘processual symbolic analysis,’ this concept was developed by Victor Turner in the mid-1970s to refer to the use of symbols within cultural contexts, in particular ritual. In anthropology, symbology originated as part of Victor Turner’s concept of ‘comparative symbology.’ Turner (1920-1983) was professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and finally he was Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Virginia.” —Wikipedia

Symbology and Communitas:

 From Beth Barrie’s
  Victor Turner
“‘The positional meaning of a symbol derives from its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt, whose elements acquire their significance from the system as a whole’ (Turner, 1967:51). Turner considered himself a comparative symbologist, which suggests he valued his contributions to the study of ritual symbols. It is in the closely related study of ritual processes that he had the most impact.

The most important contribution Turner made to the field of anthropology is his work on liminality and communitas. Believing the liminal stage to be of ‘crucial importance’ in the ritual process, Turner explored the idea of liminality more seriously than other anthropologists of his day.

As noted earlier Turner elaborated on van Gennep’s concept of liminality in rites of passage. Liminality is a state of being in between phases. In a rite of passage the individual in the liminal phase is neither a member of the group she previously belonged to nor is she a member of the group she will belong to upon the completion of the rite. The most obvious example is the teenager who is neither an adult nor a child. ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (Turner, 1969:95). Turner extended the liminal concept to modern societies in his study of liminoid phenomena in western society. He pointed out the similarities between the ‘leisure genres of art and entertainment in complex industrial societies and the rituals and myths of archaic, tribal and early agrarian cultures’ (1977:43).

Closely associated to liminality is communitas which describes a society during a liminal period that is ‘unstructured or rudimentarily structured [with] a relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders’ (Turner, 1969:96).

The notion of communitas is enhanced by Turner’s concept of anti-structure. In the following passage Turner clarifies the ideas of liminal, communitas and anti-structure:

I have used the term ‘anti-structure,’… to describe both liminality and what I have called ‘communitas.’ I meant by it not a structural reversal… but the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses (1982:44).

It is the potential of an anti-structured liminal person or liminal society (i.e., communitas) that makes Turner’s ideas so engaging. People or societies in a liminal phase are a ‘kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social developments, of societal change’ (Turner, 1982:45).

Turner’s ideas on liminality and communitas have provided scholars with language to describe the state in which societal change takes place.”

Turner, V. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.

Turner, V. (1977). Variations of the theme of liminality. In Secular ritual. Ed. S. Moore & B. Myerhoff. Assen: Van Gorcum, 36-52.

Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theater: The human seriousness of play. New York: PAJ Publications.

Related material on Turner in Log24:

Aug. 27, 2006 and Aug. 30, 2006.  For further context, see archive of Aug. 19-31, 2006.

Related material on Cuernavaca:

Google search on Cuernavaca + Log24.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Thursday April 19, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:06 am
Acting Out


From the Library of Congress:

On April 19, 1775, troops under the command of Brigadier General Hugh Percy played "Yankee Doodle" as they marched from Boston to reinforce British soldiers already fighting the Americans at Lexington and Concord. Whether sung or played on that occasion, the tune was martial and intended to deride the colonials:

Yankee Doodle came to town,
For to buy a firelock;
We will tar and feather him
And so we will John Hancock.

 

(CHORUS)
Yankee Doodle, keep it up,
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Mind the Music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.

There are numerous conflicting accounts of the origin of "Yankee Doodle." Some credit its melody to an English air, others to Irish, Dutch, Hessian, Hungarian and Pyrenean tunes or a New England jig….

"Yankee Doodle" was well known in the New England colonies before Lexington and Concord but only after the skirmishes there did the American militia appropriate it. Tradition holds that the colonials began to sing it as they forced the British back to Boston on April 19, 1775, after the battles of Lexington and Concord. It is documented that the Americans sang the following verse at Bunker Hill:

Father and I went down to camp,
along with Captain Good'in,
And there we see the men and boys
as thick as hasty puddin'. 

 

From 30 Rock:

"Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.''

"It's not for me. For my children, for my brothers and sisters… I did it for them.''

From Log24:

James Cagney and Herald Square peace march ad

 

Eureka!

Max Bialystock discovers a new playwright

 

Friday, February 16, 2007

Friday February 16, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:16 am

The Judas Seat

Janet Maslin in today’s New York Times:

“The much-borrowed Brown formula involves some very specific things. The name of a great artist, artifact or historical figure must be in the book’s story, not to mention on its cover. The narrative must start in the present day with a bizarre killing, then use that killing as a reason to investigate the past. And the past must yield a secret so big, so stunning, so saber-rattling that all of civilization may be changed by it. Probably not for the better.

This formula is neatly summarized….”

Cover illustration
for
The Judas Seat:
The Narrative:

The Secret:

Part I

“Little ‘Jack’ Horner was actually Thomas Horner, steward to the Abbot of Glastonbury during the reign of King Henry VIII…. Always keen to raise fresh funds, Henry had shown a interest in Glastonbury (and other abbeys). Hoping to appease the royal appetite, the nervous Abbot, Richard Whiting, allegedly sent Thomas Horner to the King with a special gift. This was a pie containing the title deeds to twelve manor houses in the hope that these would deflect the King from acquiring Glastonbury Abbey. On his way to London, the not so loyal courier Horner apparently stuck his thumb into the pie and extracted the deeds for Mells Manor, a plum piece of real estate. The attempted bribe failed and the dissolution of the monasteries (including Glastonbury) went ahead from 1536 to 1540. Richard Whiting was subsequently executed, but the Horner family kept the house, so the moral of this one is: treachery and greed pay off, but bribery is a bad idea.” –Chris Roberts, Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme

Part II

“The Grail Table has thirteen seats, one of which is kept vacant in memory of Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ.” —Symbolism of King Arthur’s Round Table

“In medieval romance, the grail was said to have been brought to Glastonbury in Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and his followers. In the time of Arthur, the quest for the Grail was the highest spiritual pursuit.” —The Camelot Project

Part III

The Log24 entry
for the date–
February 13, 2007–
of the above Bible scholar’s death,

and the three entries preceding it:

“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
they can tell you, being dead:
the communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Wednesday January 24, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am
The Dead Shepherd
starring E. Howard Hunt
and James Jesus Angleton

From this morning’s
New York Times:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070124-Hunt.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Tim Weiner in today’s New York Times:

“Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends….

Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, the son of a lawyer and a classically trained pianist who played church organ. He graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941.

He worked as a wartime intelligence officer in China, a postwar spokesman for the Marshall Plan in Paris and a screenwriter in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had just bought his fourth novel, ‘Bimini Run,’ a thriller set in the Caribbean, when he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in April 1949.

Mr. Hunt was immediately assigned to train C.I.A. recruits…. He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife, the former Dorothy L. Wetzel.

In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala….

By the time of the coup, Mr. Hunt had been removed from responsibility. He moved on to uneventful stints in Japan and Uruguay. Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history.

The C.I.A. had received orders from both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel in Cuba. Mr. Hunt’s assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the C.I.A.’s cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island…. 

He retired from the C.I.A. in 1970 and secured a job with an agency-connected public relations firm in Washington. Then, a year later, came a call from the White House….

Mr. Hunt’s last book, ‘American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate and Beyond,’ written with Greg Aunapu, is to be published on March 16 with a foreword by his old friend William F. Buckley Jr.

Late in life, he said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs.”

Related Material:

Game Boy,
Philosophy Wars,
and the following:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070124-Solomon.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Andre Furlani, quoted in
Log24 on January 19:

“In his study of The Cantos,
Davenport defines the Poundian
ideogram as ‘a grammar of images,
emblems, and symbols, rather than
a grammar of logical sequence….
An idea unifies, dominates, and
controls the particulars that make
the ideogram’.”

For such an ideogram,
see Bright Star and the
(clickable) symbol from
Philosophy Wars:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070103-DoubleCross.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070124-Pound2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Photo from Miami University site

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Saturday December 23, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 am
Black Mark

Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:

“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”

Log24 on Monday,
Dec. 18, 2006:

“I did a column in
Scientific American
on minimal art, and
I reproduced one of
Ed Rinehart’s [sic]
black paintings.”

Martin Gardner (pdf)

“… the entire profession
has received a very public
and very bad black mark.”

Joan S. Birman (pdf)

Lottery on Friday,
Dec. 22, 2006:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061222-PAlottery.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

5/04
, 2005:

Analysis of the structure
of a 2x2x2 cube

The Eightfold Cube

via trinities of
projective points
in a Fano plane.

7/15, 2005:

“Art history was very personal
through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt.”

  — Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives
of American Art

Also on 7/15, 2005,
a quotation on Usenet:

“A set having three members is a
single thing wholly constituted by
its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine
of the Trinity as ‘three in one’
should be child’s play.”

— Max Black,
Caveats and Critiques:
Philosophical Essays in
Language, Logic, and Art

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Wednesday December 20, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:26 am
Spike

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon  

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061220-Spike.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Also on the card is Adrien Brody ('The Thin Red Line') as a poseur proto-punk who lives in his parents' converted garage and strips at an underground gay club. He takes heat from his former friends– the aforementioned neighborhood toughs– for affecting an English accent and wearing a mohawk…."

Rob Blackwelder review of Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam" (1999)

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061220-BrodySign.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"With its white community focus, Summer of Sam is something of a departure for Lee. But with its immaculate script, faultless acting and Lee's own cameo performance, it is a typical Spike Lee film. Plenty of rapid-fire, wise-cracking dialogue and hectic crowd scenes make it fraught with tension from beginning to end. Hectic, inventive, gritty, witty, edgy and provocative, no detail is too small to escape Lee's attention and no issue too large as the film's perceptive dissection of human nature moves effortlessly between humour and horror."

Andrea Henry review

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061222-BrodyDiner.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"At another end of the sexual confusion spectrum, there's Vinny's childhood friend, now turned spiky-haired punk rocker, Ritchie (Adrien Brody). Recently he's started dating Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), erstwhile neighborhood tramp. They are both redeemed by their relationship, which at least at first, involves no sex, technically. Where Vinny struggles with his culturally instilled madonna-whore complex, Ritchie's just back from a stint living in the Village, looking for an identity that's distinct from his Italian gotta-be-macho upbringing. Eventually, he gets a gig at CBGB's ('How do you spell that?' wonders Vinny), but in order to make ends meet (and pay for his new guitar), he's dancing and turning tricks at Male World, a decrepit gay club where he performs fellatio with a life-sized dummy on stage, and, you assume, with clients offscreen."

Cynthia Fuchs revew (title: "Sex and the City")
 

Oscar's War on Women: 

Susan G. Cole on the  
75th Annual Academy Awards,
presented March 23, 2003 —

"I watched Halle Berry wipe her mouth off after Adrien Brody, in the heat of his excitement, laid the lip-lock on her for five full excruciating seconds. She was stunned, and seemed to have no idea what had happened to her. I'll tell you what happened, Halle: it's called sexual assault."

Mephisto vs. the X-Men, Vol. 1, No. 3

The Kiss…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061220-Kiss.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Where's the Oscar
for the mouth-wipe?

Monday, December 11, 2006

Monday December 11, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am
Geometry and Death

J. G. Ballard on “the architecture of death“:

“… 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.”

The Guardian, March 20, 2006

Edward Hirsch on Lorca:

“For him, writing is a struggle both with geometry and death.”

— “The Duende,” American Poetry Review, July/August 1999

“Rosenblum writes with
absolute intellectual honesty,
and the effect is sheer liberation….
The disposition of the material is
a model of logic and clarity.”

Harper’s Magazine review
quoted on back cover of
Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,
by Robert Rosenblum
(Abrams paperback, 2001)

SINGER, ISAAC:
“Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?”
 — Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.
“Sets forth his own aims in writing for children
 and laments ‘slice of life’ and chaos in
children’s literature. Maintains that children
like good plots, logic, and clarity,
and that they have a concern for
‘so-called eternal questions.'”

An Annotated Listing of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson

“She returned the smile, then looked
across the room to her youngest brother,
Charles Wallace, and to their father,
who were deep in concentration, bent
over the model they were building
of a tesseract: the square squared,
and squared again: a construction
of the dimension of time.”

A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L’Engle

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061211-Swiftly2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For “the dimension of time,”
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.

For a more adult audience —

In memory of General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday in Santiago, Chile, a quotation from Federico Garcia Lorca‘s lecture on “the Duende” (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933):

“… Philip of Austria… longing to discover the Muse and the Angel in theology, found himself imprisoned by the Duende of cold ardors in that masterwork of the Escorial, where geometry abuts with a dream and the Duende wears the mask of the Muse for the eternal chastisement of the great king.”


Perhaps. Or perhaps Philip, “the lonely
hermit of the Escorial,” is less lonely now.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Tuesday November 28, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am
Christkindl

“Christmas markets have been part of this festive time for centuries in Germany. They were usually held in front of churches and were looked at as part of a church visit. The oldest recorded market dates to 1310 in Munich, Germany. It was called Nikolausdult and was very different from the markets of today. It was an opportunity for farmers to come to town, do some shopping and at the same time, offer their wares.

The reformation of the church in the 16th century brought changes to the Christmas markets. Nikolaus was replaced by the Christkindl (Christchild) as the gift giver and the Nikolaus markets became Christkindl markets. This custom began in the Protestant areas of Bavaria with Nuremberg being the first city to call its market Christkindlesmarkt. Munich, a Catholic city, changed its Nikolausdult to Christkindlmarkt in 1805.”

Background for Christkindl Market in Kitchener, Ontario

This will also serve as background for today’s New York Times story on Chicago’s Christkindlmarkt:

“The Christkindl, the Christmas Fairy, is a cherished highlight during the Holiday Tree Lighting. The Christmas Fairy proclaims the opening of Christkindlmarket Chicago.”

Also from the official Chicago Christkindl website:

On the “Christkindl,” the Christmas Fairy & our sister-market visit

  • www.christkindlesmarkt.de

    The famous “Christkindl,” the Christmas Fairy, is the trademark of Christkindlmarket Chicago and its sister-market Christkindlesmarket Nürnberg, Germany

In its English version, the Nuremberg website calls the alleged “Christmas Fairy” an angel:

“The Nuremberg Christmas Angel with her white and golden dress, long blond curls and her golden crown, has been the symbol for the Christmas Market for many decades. During Advent time, the Christmas Angel is the most important representative of the city and of the traditional Christmas Market.

Every year, on the Friday before the first Advent Sunday, the Nuremberg Christmas Angel opens the Nuremberg Christmas Market by reciting a solemn prologue.”

The German version of the Nuremberg site calls the Christmas Angel the Christkind (Christ Child).  This confusion of the Christ Child with a supernatural bringer of gifts– hence, later, an angel, and, in Chicago, a fairy– is said to have originated with Martin Luther.

From a Radio Deutsche Welle website–

Nuremberg, City of Angels

The making of a myth

 

The Christkind was originally introduced in the 16th century by religious reformer Martin Luther.  Until then, it was always Saint Nicholas who brought gifts on Dec. 6.  But as Protestants can’t have saints, Luther needed a new Christmas tradition for his followers. “Luther wanted to move the gift-giving away from the Catholic holiday on Dec. 6,” said Nuremberg tourism manager Michael Weber. “So he reinvented the tradition for Protestants by moving it to Christmas Eve and making the Christkind— really, the baby Jesus– the person who brought the gifts.”

 

It was under the rule of the National Socialists that the image of today’s Christkind was ultimately anchored in the collective German mind.  They built on Nuremberg’s tradition of producing tinsel angels, and in 1933, had a young girl in an angel costume open the city’s Christmas Market for the first time.  After the second World War, Nuremberg’s tinsel angels became simply the Nuremberg Christkind, and the figures were sold nation-wide. 

Here is the banner for the Nuremberg site:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061128-Nuremberg2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

  The banner reads:
Nuremberg Christkindlesmarkt–
Where the Christ Child
is at home

Maybe.

Sunday, November 5, 2006

Sunday November 5, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Twilight Kingdom

"What he cannot contemplate is the reproach of

    … that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom,

when at length he may meet the eyes…."

On "The Hollow Men"

" … unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom"

Related readings from unholy scripture:

  The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040604-Feeling.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A.  The "long twilight struggle" speech of JFK

B.  "The Platters were singing 'Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,' and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver's-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information.  The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was all information."

— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

C.
  "I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady.  Sully your kind suffering child's eyes with it.  Live burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of arms.  The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?"

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

The image and A, B, C are from Log24 on June 4, 2004.
 

Monday, September 11, 2006

Monday September 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 am

Sontag’s Sermon
continued from yesterday

Conclusion:

“My image of myself since age 3 or 4– the genius-schmuck. I allow one to pay off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one or the other….

Sartre (cf. ‘Les Mots’) the only other person I know of who had this ‘certainty’ of genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood of a famous man.)

A kind of suicide– with the ‘work’ of genius you know you’ll do when adult your tombstone. The most glorious tombstone possible.

Sartre was very ugly– and knew it. So he didn’t have to develop ‘the schmuck’ to pay off the others for being ‘the genius.’ Nature had taken care of the problem for him. He didn’t have to invent a cause of failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself ‘stupid’ in personal relations. (For ‘stupid,’ also read ‘blind.’)”

Susan Sontag in The New York Times Magazine yesterday

Meanwhile, back at MIT:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060911-Doonesbury.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Doonesbury 9/11

Related material

from MIT’s School of
Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences
(SHASS),

and Log24 on
Sunday morning
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060911-SHASS3.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The Moralist:

“‘For the modern post-religious man,’ Susan Sontag wrote in a 1961 essay, ‘the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.'”

— “The Moralist,” by Scott McLemee, The Boston Globe, July 16, 2006

The Moral:

The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were ‘I love you.’  Over and over again, the message was the same, ‘I love you.’ …. Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock:  we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death.”

The Rev. Kenneth E. Kovacs

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Wednesday August 30, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Seven

“Research & Ideas” memo from Harvard Business School dated April 17, 2006:

“The word experience comes from the Latin words ex pericolo, which mean ‘from danger.'”

— Etymology by Professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard University.  Badaracco gives no evidence for his dubious claim.

Related (if only temporally):
Easter Monday, April 17, 2006.

experience

1377, from O.Fr. experience, from L. experientia “knowledge gained by repeated trials,” from experientem (nom. experiens), prp. of experiri “to try, test,” from ex- “out of” + peritus “experienced, tested.” The v. (1533) first meant “to test, try;” sense of “feel, undergo” first recorded 1588.

      — Online Etymology Dictionary

The title of this entry refers to the time it was posted. Related references to seven: April 7, 2003, and today’s previous entry.

See also an entry from 2/29, 2004
(Leap Day and Oscar Night):

Vita Brevis

“In many ways, the arts are the highest achievements of man.”

— Harvard President
   Lawrence H. Summers,
   Feb. 26, 2004 

”We intensively train children in the Arts and ritual because deep down we know that these are the only things that really MATTER. This is what we must share first with the young, in case they DIE.”

— Lucy Ellmann, Dot in the Universe, quoted in today’s [2/29/04] New York Times

Harvard persons from parts of the university that are more scholarly than the Business School may sneer at the above-quoted Online Etymology Dictionary.  They can consult the following:

On “experience”

From J.L. Austin, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play:

“Scholars, such as Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymolgisches Worterbuch, 1959), trace ‘experience’ right back to hypothetical Indo-European base or root *per-, ‘to attempt, venture, risk,’ whence the Greek peira,”experience,” the source of our word ’empirical.’ It is also the verbal root which derives the Germanic *feraz, giving rise to Old English faer, “danger, sudden calamity,” whence Modern English ‘fear.’ Already, we see the ‘cognitive’ directions taken by * per-, through the Greek route, and affective ones, through the Germanic — which would have interested Dilthey, one may be sure! But more directly ‘experience’ derives, via Middle English and Old French, from the Latin experientia, denoting ‘trial, proof, experiment,’ itself generated from experiens, the present participle of experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from from ex-, ‘out’ + base per as in peritus, ‘experienced,’ ‘having learned by trying.’ The suffixed extended form of *per is peri-tlo-, whence the Latin periclum, periculum, “trial, danger, peril. Once more, we find experience linked with risk, straining towards ‘drama,’ crisis, rather than bland cognitive learning!”

“… Finally, ‘experiment,’ like ‘experience,’ is derived from Latin experiri “to try or test.” If we put these various senses together we have a ‘laminated’ semantic system focused on ‘experience,’ which portrays it as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, an exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we ‘fare’ ‘fearfully’ through ‘perils,’ taking ‘experimental’ steps. …” (17-18)

The above is taken from an anonymous weblog entry.  The author of the entry identified the source as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.  The author of the entry falsely stated that the author of this book was J. L. Austin.  In fact, the book was written by Victor Turner, apparently the same philosophical sociologist whom we encountered in the previous entry and in the Log24 entry for the recent feast of St. Max Black.  Turner may have been quoting Austin; pages from the book are not available online.  Another author, however, says the quotation is by Turner himself.  See Rena Fraden’s Imagining Medea, pp. 218-219.

Today’s previous entry is a sort of “ritual passage” for a Nobel Prize winner. For a ritual passage more directly related to Professor Badaracco, see the Brookline TAB obituary of his 23-year-old daughter, who died on Monday, August 21, 2006.  According to today’s online Harvard Crimson, “she was walking along Hammond Street in Newton [Mass.] when an 84-year-old driver jumped the curb and struck her.”

From her Brookline TAB obituary of Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006:

“Funeral services will be held Friday [Aug. 25, 2006] at 10 a.m. at St. Mary’s of the Assumption Church, at 67 Harvard St.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Centro Romero Community Center in Chicago: 6216 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60660.”

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Wednesday August 9, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

Night Listener
 
(See previous entry.)

Thanks to Natalie at
KHYI, 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas
(hard country music),
for just now playing
A Fine Line, by Radney Foster:

There’s a curve in the highway, just south of town
where a man has pulled over to figure life out
with only his concience and the lonesome sound
of diesels winding up grade
he’s got a wife and two kids, and they love him so
he’s got a woman down in georgia,
   and she’s startin’ to show
he’s damned if he leaves her,
   and he’s sure damned if he don’t
and he wonders how life got this way
cuase it’s a fine line in between right and wrong
yea he’s been crossing over that border
   way too long
he should’ve seen it coming at him
   right from the start
now there aint’ no escape from a broken heart
now the call of the highway is a powerful thing
like the pull of a lover, or a child in a swing
gave his heart to two women
   only one wears his ring
they’re both gonna have his babies now
so how do you confess,
   what words don’t explain
he never intended to cause this much pain
now he feels like a farmer
   who went praying for the rain
got more than he bargained from the clouds
[chorus]
he’ll turn his car around tonight,
   go home and try to face the truth
everyone involved’s getting hurt,
   now there aint nothing he can do
[chorus]

Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
Thus the superior man:
If he sees good,
he imitates it;
If he has faults,
he rids himself of them.

Hexagram 42

  (10:00:42 PM ET)

Update of 11:08 PM ET…

and, Natalie, for playing
Late Night Grande Hotel
just now, thanks big time.

Friday, August 4, 2006

Friday August 4, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:12 am

ART WARS
Continued from
Nov. 25, 2005

The Frankfurter School

From today’s New York Times:

A review of a current Manhattan art exhibition

“It begins with a juxtaposition of early body-oriented videos by Mr. Nauman and Paul McCarthy, who, quickly following Mr. Nauman’s lead, was in his studio in Los Angeles videotaping home-alone performance pieces by 1970. The contrast is pure Apollo-versus-Dionysus.”

More on Paul McCarthy from artandculture.com:

“If you walk into a room and find everything you held dear in childhood degraded, chances are it’s a Paul McCarthy installation. McCarthy is known for shocking, sexually charged pieces that feature benign cartoon and pop-culture characters — Olive Oyl and Santa Claus, among others — in a bacchanalia of blood and feces.

The 1974 video ‘Hot Dog’ shoots to the heart of the adolescent ‘gross-out’ as McCarthy tapes his penis into a hot dog bun, then packs his pie hole full of franks and wraps himself in gauze. Another piece from the 70s called ‘Sailor’s Meat’ finds the artist dressed as a blonde hooker smeared with blood and ‘knowing’ a pile of raw meat….

Critics often compare his work with that of the Viennese Actionists whose performances were also characterized by gore, raw sexuality, and abused food.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041215-Frankfort.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:
The Wiener Kreis in
yesterday’s 1:06 PM entry
and the five entries
ending the afternoon of
Nov. 25, 2005.

For an approach to art
more in the spirit of Apollo
than of Dionysus, see
Geometry for Jews.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Thursday July 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm
Carpe Diem

From the new MySpace.com
weblog of Michio Kaku:

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Hyperspace and a Theory of Everything

What lies beyond our 4 dimensions?
By Michio Kaku

When I was a child, I used to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I would spend hours fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond just inches beneath the lily pads, just beneath my fingers, totally oblivious to the universe above them.

I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp?

 
A child, or Maurits Escher:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060713-ThreeWorlds.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Three Worlds,
1955

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Tuesday July 11, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:11 pm

Not Crazy Enough?

Some children of the sixties may feel that today's previous two entries, on Syd Barrett, the Crazy Diamond, are not crazy enough.  Let them consult the times of those entries– 2:11 and 8:15– and interpret those times, crazily, as dates: 2/11 and 8/15.

This brings us to Stephen King territory– apparently the natural habitat of Syd Barrett.

See Log24 on a 2/11, Along Came a Dreamcatcher, and Log24 on an 8/15, The Line.

From 8/15, a remark of Plato:

"There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on…"

(Compare with the remarks by Abraham Cowley for Tom Stoppard's recent birthday.)

From 2/11, two links: Halloween Meditations  and We Are the Key.

From Dreamcatcher (the film and the book):

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060211-Freeman2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060324-Dreamcatcher.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For Syd Barrett as Duddits,

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060711-Duddits.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

see Terry Kirby on Syd Barrett
(edited– as in Stephen King
and the New Testament
for narrative effect):

"He appeared as the Floyd performed the song 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond.' It contains the words: 'Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond. Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.'

At first, they didn't recognise the man, whose head and eyebrows were shaved….

But this was the 'crazy diamond' himself: Syd Barrett, the subject of the song….

When Roger Waters saw his old friend, he broke down….

Rick Wright, the keyboards player, later told an interviewer:

… 'Roger [Waters] was in tears, I think I was; we were both in tears. It was very shocking… seven years of no contact and then to walk in while we're actually doing that particular track. I don't know – coincidence, karma, fate, who knows? But it was very, very, very powerful.'"

Remarks suitable for Duddits's opponent, Mister Gray, may be found in the 1994 Ph.D. thesis of Noel Gray.

"I refer here to Plato's utilisation in the Meno of graphic austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave."

Plato's Diamond

Shine on, gentle Duddits.

Sunday, July 2, 2006

Sunday July 2, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 pm
Jews on Buddhism:

Is a puzzlement!

Related material:

The obituary of Jaap Penraat
in today’s New York Times

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060702-Jaap.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Hudson Talbott, a longtime friend of Mr. Penraat’s who wrote a children’s book about his experiences (Forging Freedom: A True Story of Heroism During the Holocaust) said his research indicated there was a daredevil aspect to the missions.

‘The feeling I get is that he just loved the idea of putting one over on the Nazis,’ Mr. Talbott said in an interview with The Albany Times Union. ‘It wasn’t a joke, or a game, but clearly there was something about fooling them that was an important aspect of this.'” –Douglas Martin in today’s New York Times

See also:

Log24, Jan. 6-8, 2006,

and

Jaap’s Puzzle Page.

Monday, March 27, 2006

Monday March 27, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:17 am

A Living Church

A skeptic’s remark:

“…the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day if you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections.”

— Xanga blogger “sejanus”

A reply from G. K. Chesterton
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2004):

“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.”

For Reba McEntire:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060327-Reba.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sunday’s lottery in the
State of Grace
(Kelly, of Philadelphia):

Mid-day: 024
Evening: 672

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/HoldingWonder.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A meditation on  
Sunday’s numbers —

From Log24, Jan. 8, 2005:

24

The Star
of Venus

“He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here….”

Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra

From Log24, Oct. 23, 2002:

An excerpt from
Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel Glory Road

    “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”

    “Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

    She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

    “Is that one of your names?”

    “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ”

    ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

Related material:

672 Astarte and
The Venerable Bede
(born in 672).

672 illustrated:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060327-BedeStar.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
The Venerable Bede
and the Star of Venus

The 672 connection is, of course,
not a real connection
(in the sense of “sejanus” above)
but it is nevertheless
not without interest.

Postscript of 6 PM

A further note on the above
illustration of the 672 connection:

The late Buck Owens
(see previous entry for
Owens, Reba, and the
star of Venus)
once described
his TV series as
“a show of fat old men
and pretty young girls”
(today’s Washington Post).

A further note on
lottery hermeneutics:

Those who prefer to interpret
random numbers with the aid
of a dictionary
(as in Is Nothing Sacred?)
may be pleased to note that
“heehaw” occurs in Webster’s
New World Dictionary,
College Edition
, 1960,
on page 672.

In today’s Washington Post,
Richard Harrington informs us that
“As a child, Owens worked cotton and
  maize fields, taking the name Buck
from a well-liked mule….”

Hee. Haw.
 

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Saturday March 25, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:23 pm
Built

In memory of Rolf Myller,
who died on Thursday,
March 23, 2006, at
Mount Sinai Hospital
in Manhattan:

Myller was,
according to the
New York Times,
an architect
whose eclectic pursuits
included writing
children’s books,
The Bible Puzzle Book, and
Fantasex: A Book of Erotic Games.

He also wrote, the Times says,
Symbols and Their Meaning
(1978), a graphic overview of
children’s nonverbal communication.”
This is of interest in view of the
Log24 reference to “symbol-mongers”
on the date of Myller’s death.

In honor of Women’s History Month
and of Myller’s interests in the erotic
and in architecture, we present
the following work from a British gallery.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060325-WhiteCube.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

This work might aptly be
  retitled “Brick Shithouse.”

Related material:

(1) the artist’s self-portrait

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060325-LizaLouSelfPortrait.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

and, in view of the cover
illustration for Myller’s
The Bible Puzzle Book,

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060325-Tower.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(2) the monumental treatise
by Leonard Shlain

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

For devotees of women’s history
and of the Goddess,
here are further details from
the White Cube gallery:

Liza Lou

03.03.06 – 08.04.06

White Cube is pleased to present the first UK solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou.

Combining visionary, conceptual and craft approaches, Lou makes mixed-media sculptures and room-size installations that are suggestive of a transcendental reality. Lou’s work often employs familiar, domestic forms, crafted from a variety of materials such as steel, wood, papier-mâché and fibreglass, which is then covered with tiny glass beads that are painstakingly applied, one at a time, with tweezers. Dazzling and opulent and constantly glistening with refracted light, her sculptures bristle with what Peter Schjeldahl has aptly described as ‘surreal excrescence’.

This exhibition, a meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the architecture of confinement, will include several new figurative sculptures as well as two major sculptural installations. Security Fence (2005) is a large scale cage made up of four steel, chain link walls, topped by rings of barbed wire and Cell (2004-2006), as its name suggests, is a room based on the approximate dimensions of a death row prison cell, a kind of externalized map of the prisoner’s mind. Both Security Fence and Cell, like Lou’s immense earlier installations Kitchen (1991-1995) and Back Yard (1995-1999) are characterized by the absence of their real human subject. But whereas the absent subject in Kitchen and Back Yard could be imagined through the details and accessories carefully laid out to view, in Lou’s two new installations the human body is implied simply through the empty volume created by the surrounding architecture. Both Cell and Security Fence are monochromatic and employ iconic forms that make direct reference to Minimalist art in its use of repetition, formal perfection and materiality. In contrast to this, the organic form of a gnarled tree trunk, Scaffold (2005-2006), its surface covered with shimmering golden beads, juts directly out from the wall.

Lou’s work has an immediate ‘shock’ content that works on different levels: first, an acknowledgement of the work’s sheer aesthetic impact and secondly the slower comprehension of the labour that underlies its construction. But whereas in Lou’s earlier works the startling clarity of the image is often a counterpoint to the lengthy process of its realization, for the execution of Cell, Lou further slowed down the process by using beads of the smallest variety with their holes all facing up in an exacting hour-by-hour approach in order to ‘use time as an art material’.

Concluding this body of work are three male figures in states of anguish. In The Seer (2005-2006), a man becomes the means of turning his body back in on himself. Bent over double, his body becomes an instrument of impending self-mutilation, the surface of his body covered with silver-lined beads, placed with the exactitude and precision of a surgeon. In Homeostasis (2005-2006) a naked man stands prostrate with his hands up against the wall in an act of surrender. In this work, the dissolution between inside and outside is explored as the ornate surface of Lou’s cell-like material ‘covers’ the form while exposing the systems of the body, both corporeal and esoteric. In The Vessel (2005-2006), Christ, the universal symbol of torture and agony holds up a broken log over his shoulders. This figure is beheaded, and bejewelled, with its neck carved out, becoming a vessel into which the world deposits its pain and suffering.

Lou has had numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo and Fondació Joan Miró, Barcelona. She was a 2002 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Liza Lou’s film Born Again (2004), in which the artist tells the compelling and traumatic story* of her Pentecostal upbringing in Minnesota, will be screened at 52 Hoxton Square from 3 – 25 March courtesy of Penny Govett and Mick Kerr.

Liza Lou will be discussing her work following a screening of her film at the ICA, The Mall, London on Friday 3 March at 7pm. Tickets are available from the ICA box office (+ 44 (0) 20 7930 3647).

A fully illustrated catalogue, with a text by Jeanette Winterson and an interview with Tim Marlow, will accompany the exhibition.

White Cube is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10.00 am to 6.00 pm.

For further information please contact Honey Luard or Susannah Hyman on + 44 (0) 20 7930 5373

* Warning note from Adrian Searle
    in The Guardian of March 21:
   “How much of her story is
    gospel truth we’ll never know.”

For deeper background on
art, patriarchal religion,
and feminism, see
The Agony and the Ya-Ya.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Monday March 13, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:01 pm
Christ at the
Lapin Agile

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060313-WasleyChrist1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The Christ by Wasley,
on wall under his right arm
the Picasso painting.”

Le Républicain Lorrain du 14 janvier 2001

Le Lapin Agile veille sur la Butte (par Michel Genson)

24 décembre 1900. Dans son atelier glacial du Bateau Lavoir, à  flanc de la colline de Montmartre, Picasso se frotte les yeux. C’est bien Wasley, son ami Wasley, qu’il aperçoit traversant la place Ravignan, courbé sous le poids d’un grand Christ en croix. Le sculpteur titube et s’en va gravissant un à un les escaliers qui mènent au sommet de la Butte, direction la rue des Saules. Car l’œuvre est destinée aux murs du petit estaminet où la bande a trouvé asile, pour y échanger chaque soir des refrains, bocks et vaticinations les plus folles. La bande, c’est à dire Utrillo, Max Jacob, Modigliani et les autres… Un siècle et un souffle de légende plus tard, le même Christ blanc occupe toujours la même place, sous les lumières tamisées du Lapin Agile. À l’abri sous son aisselle droite, l’autoportrait de Picasso en Arlequin a été authentique en son temps. Jusqu’au jour où le grand Frédé, tenancier mythique du lieu, s’est gratté la barbe avant de le céder à un amateur suédois de passage. Depuis l’original a fait le voyage du MAM (Modern Art Museum) de New-York, et la Butte se contente d’une copie.

Pour le reste, rien a changé ou presque pour le doyen des cabarets parisiens. Ni le décor, ni l’esprit. L’incroyable patine noire des murs, posée là par des lustres de tabagies rigolardes ou inspirées, rappelle au générique les voix des habituées de jadis, Apollinaire, Carco, Dullin, Couté, puis Pierre Brasseur, et plus proches de nous encore d’autres débutants, Caussimon, Brassens, François Billetdoux… La liste exhaustive serait impossible à dresser de tous ceux qui ont émargé au livre d’or du Lapin Agile.
 
« En haut de la rue Saint-Vincent… » La goualante roule sa rime chaotique sur le pavé de la Butte. Au carrefour de la rue des Saules, la façade est avenante, sans apprêts, avec son acacia dans la cour, et cette étrange dénomination, née des amours burlesques entre l’imagination d’un dessinateur et les facéties des usagers. En 1875, André Gill, caricaturiste ami de Rimbaud, croque en effet, pour l’enseigne de l’ancien Cabaret des Assassins, un lapin facétieux sautant d’une marmite. Le temps d’un jeu de mots et le Lapin à Gill gagne son brevet d’agilité. L’épopée commence, que perpétue Yves Mathieu, aujourd’hui propriétaire, mémoire et continuateur d’une histoire somme toute unique. Histoire, qui, pour l’anecdote, faillit se terminer prématurément, sous la pioche des démolisseurs. Vers 1900, les bicoques du maquis montmartrois doivent laisser place à un grand projet immobilier. C’est Aristide Bruant qui sauvera in extremis le cabaret. Il achète l’établissement, laisse Frédé dans les murs qu’il revendra pour « un prix amical » à Paulo, le fils du même Frédé. Lequel Paulo n’est autre que le beau-père de l’actuel patron : « C’est un truc de famille. J’ai commencé à chanter ici en 48, égrène Yves Mathieu. Ensuite j’ai fait de l’opérette à la Gaîté Lyrique, de la revue aux Folies Bergères, je suis parti en Amérique… En revenant j’ai repris le cabaret, ma femme y chante, mes fils sont là, ils apprennent le métier… C’est comme le cirque, c’est le même esprit. »

Malgré les tempêtes et les modes, le Lapin Agile dure et perdure donc. Et sa silhouette pour carte postale inspire toujours les peintres venus de partout. Comme si la halte faisait partie d’un parcours initiatique immuable. Deux pièces pour un minuscule rez-de-chaussée, dans la première, mi-loge, mi-vestiaire, une guitare attend son tour de projecteur. En l’occurrence un faisceau unique clouant le chanteur (l’humoriste ou le diseur) au rideau rouge de la seconde salle. Là où le spectacle se déroule depuis toujours, là où l’on s’accoude sans vergogne à la table d’Apollinaire, sous les lampes toujours drapées de rouge, pour écouter Ferré, Aragon, Mac Orlan ou les rengaines du Folklore populaire montmartrois. Yves Mathieu reste ferme, « ici, pas de sonorisation, pas de haut-parleur. Les gens découvrent la voix humaine. » Un refrain de Piaf glisse jusqu’au « laboratoire », le réduit où les autres artistes du programme dissertent sur l’état du monde. Les meubles de Bruant sont encore là, au hasard d’un coffre breton, un autre de marine, la façade d’un lit clos… « Des trucs d’origine » pour Yves Mathieu, qui malgré les vicissitudes du temps – il s’ingénie toute l’année durant à entretenir un établissement qui ne bénéficie d’aucun classement officiel, ni d’aucun subside – prêche haut et fort sa confiance, « parce qu’on aura plus que jamais besoin de racines, de repères, et qu’ici, c’est tout un pan de patrimoine qu’on défend à travers la chanson française, celle qu’on chante tous ensemble… » Le même secoue sa longue carcasse et se fend d’un sourire entendu : « Quand je descends à Paris, c’est pas pareil. Ici, le jour, c’est comme dans une église. Il y a le silence, et l’impression de ressentir les ondes laissées pare les cerveaux de ces types, là… » Aux murs, dessins ou tableaux laissés par Mac Orlan, Maclet ou Suzanne Valadon jouent avec l’ombre amicale.

Le Lapin Agile, 22 rue des Saules, 75018 Paris. Tel : 01 46 06 85 87

Source:
http://www.au-lapin-agile.com/info4.htm

Note the above description
of Christmas Eve 1900,
and the remark that
“Ici, le jour, c’est comme
dans une église.”

A search for more material on
the Wasley Christ leads to
Princeton’s Nassau Church:

The fullness of time. I don’t have to call on the physicists among us to conclude that this fullness was not meant to be the end of the time line. That Paul must not have been talking about time in a linear way. Fullness. Complete. Almost perfect. Overflowing with grace. Just right. Fullness. As in “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Fullness. As in “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all of the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Fullness. As in “For in Christ, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman.”

I can remember Christmas Eve as a child….

— Christmas Eve, 2004,
    Sermon at Nassau Church by
    The Rev. Dr. David A. Davis

Related material from Log24:

Religious Symbolism at Princeton,
on the Nassau Church,

Counting Crows on
the Feast of St. Luke
(“Fullness… Multitude”),

The Quality of Diamond,
in memory of
Saint Hans-Georg Gadamer,
who died at 102
four years ago on this date,

and

Diamonds Are Forever.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Friday February 24, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 pm

Final Club

For the feast of St. Matthias
(traditional calendar)–
from Amazon.com, a quoted Library Journal review of Geoffrey Wolff‘s novel The Final Club:

“‘What other colleges call fraternities, Princeton calls Eating Clubs. The Final Club is a group of 12 Princeton seniors in 1958 who make their own, distinctive club….
Young adults may find this interesting, but older readers need not join The Final Club.’
— Previewed in Prepub Alert, Library Journal 5/1/90.  Paul E. Hutchison, Fisherman’s Paradise, Bellefonte, Pa. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.”

From The Archivist, by Martha Cooley:

“Although I’ve always been called Matt, my first name isn’t Matthew but Matthias: after the disciple who replaced Judas Iscariot.  By the time I was four, I knew a great deal about my namesake.  More than once my mother read to me, from the New Testament, the story of how Matthias had been chosen by lot to take the place of dreadful Judas.  Listening, I felt a large and frightened sympathy for my predecessor.  No doubt a dark aura hung over Judas’s chair– something like the pervasive, bitter odor of Pall Malls in my father’s corner of the sofa.
As far as my mother was concerned, the lot of Matthias was the unquestionable outcome of an activity that seemed capricious to me: a stone-toss by the disciples.  I tried with difficulty to picture a dozen men dressed in dust-colored robes and sandals, playing a child’s game.  One of the Twelve had to carry on, my mother explained, after Judas had perpetrated his evil.  The seat couldn’t be left empty.  Hence Matthias: the Lord’s servants had pitched their stones, and his had traveled the farthest.”

Saturday, February 4, 2006

Saturday February 4, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:00 am
Raiders of
the Lost Matrix

(continued)

The Archaeologist
with a Thousand Faces

"From often humble beginnings, and often with a childhood fascination for antiquity, the archaeologist leaves familiar surroundings to undergo exacting professional training under a series of mentors and when armed, at last, with the intellectual weapons of the profession, sets off for unfamiliar or exotic realms, braving opposition and danger to solve an ancient mystery.  The lives of… real-life archaeologists… have lent themselves to this style of retelling… as have such fictional heroes as John Cullinane (Michener 1965) and Indiana Jones."

— From "Promised Lands and Chosen Peoples: The Politics and Poetics of Archaeological Narrative," by Neil Asher Silberman, pp. 249-262 in Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology, edited by Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett, Cambridge University Press, paperback, published Feb. 8, 1996.

From Today in History,
by the Associated Press:

Thought for Today:
"Character consists of what you do
on the third and fourth tries."

James Michener,
American author (1907-1997),
attributed by
Simpson's Contemporary Quotations
to Chesapeake, Random House, 78.

The Matrix:

First try:

On Linguistic Creation
June 25, 1999

Second try:
Art Wars: Picasso's Birthday,
Oct. 25, 2002

Third try:
Matrix of the Death God,
May 25, 2003

Fourth try:
Happy Birthday,
July 26, 2004

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Wednesday February 1, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:22 pm
The Actor, 2005

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060201-Cinder1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

See also

Russell Crowe as Santa’s helper,
Communion, and the subsequent
Playing God: The Color of Collateral.

From “Collateral“– 

  FELIX: Do you believe
  in Humpty Dumpty?

MAX: No.

FELIX: Do you believe
  in Santa Claus?

MAX: No.

FELIX: Neither do I.
 But my children do.
 They are still small.
But do you know who they like
even better than Santa Claus?
His helper, Pedro Negro. Black Peter.
There’s an old Mexican tale that tells
 of how Santa Claus got so very busy
looking out for the good children
that he had to hire some help
to look out for the bad children.
So he hired Pedro.
And Santa Claus gave him a list….

And all that jazz….

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060201-Jazz2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Wednesday February 1, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:49 am

“Good Night and Good Luck”

— Morgan Freeman, closing remarks  
at the Screen Actors Guild Awards
on January 29, 2006

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060201-SAG1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
A History
of Death
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060201-SAG2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Review by Stephen Hunter  
of “Good Night and Good Luck”–

“The film, therefore, is like
a child’s view of these events,
untroubled by complexity,
hungry for myth and simplicity.”

“A larger poem for a larger audience….
A mythological form, a festival sphere,
A great bosom, beard and being,
alive with age.”

— Wallace Stevens, quoted in 
Log24, January 29, 2006

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060131-PolarSanta1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Stephen Hunter on Senator McCarthy:

He “forever tarnished
by association the reputations
of the security services
charged with keeping us safe
from the actual–
yes, Virginia, there was
such a thing– Red menace.”

Friday, January 6, 2006

Friday January 6, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:24 am


Epiphany

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051123-Star.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“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.'”

— William T. Noon, Society of Jesus,
Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas,
Yale University Press, 1957

Epigraphs to The Shining, by Stephen King:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051231-Shining.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For more about shining, click on the star.

Friday, December 30, 2005

Friday December 30, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:10 pm
Rhapsody in Indigo
or:
We are stardust,
We are golden,
continued

1971:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051230-Blue.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Joni Mitchell, Blue

1994:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051230-Indigo.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Joni Mitchell, Turbulent Indigo

"Some call them
'Emissaries from Heaven,'
others say the 'New Kids'
or even the
'Children of the New Earth.'
They are best known as
 the Indigo Children…."

Brood Indigo  

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051230-Children1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Children of the Damned (1963)

(Set at
 St. Dunstan-in-the-East Church,
London)

Related material:
Shining Through
on
May 19, 2005,
 St. Dunstan's Day–

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050519-Anakin.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

This was the opening date for
 the final episode of Star Wars.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Sunday December 18, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:11 am

The Meadow

"Heaven– Where Is It?
  How Do We Get There?"

To air on ABC
Tuesday, Dec. 20
(John Spencer's birthday)

By Trevanian, who died on
Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005:

From
 Shibumi

"Well… the flow of the play was just right, and it began to bring me to the meadow. It always begins with some kind of flowing motion… a stream or river, maybe the wind making waves in a field of ripe rice, the glitter of leaves moving in a breeze, clouds flowing by. And for me, if the structure of the Go stones is flowing classically, that too can bring me to the meadow."

"The meadow?"

"Yes. That's the place I expand into. It's how I recognize that I am resting."

"Is it a real meadow?"

"Yes, of course."

"A meadow you visited at one time? A place in your memory?"

"It's not in my memory. I've never been there when I was diminished."

"Diminished?"

"You know… when I'm in my body and not resting."

"You consider normal life to be a diminished state, then?"

"I consider time spent at rest to be normal. Time like this… temporary, and… yes, diminished."

"Tell me about the meadow, Nikko."

"It is triangular. And it slopes uphill, away from me. The grass is tall. There are no animals. Nothing has ever walked on the grass or eaten it. There are flowers, a breeze… warm. Pale sky. I'm always glad to be the grass again."

"You are the grass?"

"We are one another. Like the breeze, and the yellow sunlight. We're all… mixed in together."

"I see. I see. Your description of the mystic experience resembles others I have read. And this meadow is what the writers call your 'gateway' or 'path.' Do you ever think of it in those terms?"

"No."

"So. What happens then?"

"Nothing. I am at rest. I am everywhere at once. And everything is unimportant and delightful. And then… I begin to diminish. I separate from the sunlight and the meadow, and I contract again back into my bodyself. And the rest is over." Nicholai smiled uncertainly. "I suppose I am not describing it very well, Teacher. It's not… the kind of thing one describes."

"No, you describe it very well, Nikko. You have evoked a memory in me that I had almost lost. Once or twice when I was a child… in summer, I think… I experienced brief transports such as you describe. I read once that most people have occasional mystic experiences when they are children, but soon outgrow them. And forget them…."

"And we may see
the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline."

— Johnny Mercer,
  "Midnight Sun"

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Wednesday December 14, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am
From Here
to Eternity

For Loomis Dean

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051214-MorenoCover.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

See also
For Rita Moreno
on Her Birthday

(Dec. 11, 2005)

Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005

OBITUARIES

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051214-LoomisDean.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

LOOMIS DEAN
After many years at Life magazine,
he continued to find steady work
as a freelancer and as a still
photographer on film sets.
(Dean Family)

Loomis Dean, 88;
Life Magazine Photographer
Known for Pictures of
Celebrities and Royalty

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

 
  • "There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
  • there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles —

    • that minds should really touch, or
    • that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing)
    • that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy;
  • and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me."

    Fritz Leiber in "The Button Molder"

 

Friday, December 9, 2005

Friday December 9, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:01 pm
Fairy Tales

It’s all in Plato.”
— C. S. Lewis 

Talking Narnia to Your Neighbors
ChristianityToday.com
by Keri Wyatt Kent

“The summer Lindy Lowry was 20,
she rejected the Christian faith
she’d had since childhood–
dismissing it as a fairy tale
that made no sense
in a world full of evil.”

Tales from
The New Yorker:

       The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051209-Cin.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

  “Brokeback Mountain” and

“The Chronicles of Narnia.”

  by ANTHONY LANE

Brokeback Mountain:

“This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western….”

The Chronicles of Narnia:

“If the movie has to forgo Lewis’s narrative tone, with its grimly Oxonian blend of the bluff and the twee (‘And now we come to one of the nastiest things in this story’), that is fine by me. And, if there is Deep Magic, as Lewis called it, in his tale, it resides not in the springlike coming of Aslan but in the dreamlike, compacted poetry of Lewis’s initial inspiration—the sight of a faun….”

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

From The Circle is Unbroken,
a web page in memory of
June Carter Cash:

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), quoting Socrates–

“By Hera,” says Socrates, “a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to Acheloüs and the Nymphs.” 

See, too, Q’s quoting of Socrates’s prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker:

 

  For a discussion of the music that
Pan is playing (today’s site music),
see my entry of Sept. 10, 2002,
The Sound of Hanging Rock.”

Friday, November 18, 2005

Friday November 18, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am
Crank Power!

One night in Bangkok
and the world’s your oyster

Tonight’s Bangkok Post
on a new $100 laptop
from an MIT designer:

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No logo for the initiative has yet been released, but designers could do worse than adopting as their symbol the bright yellow hand-crank that protrudes from the side of the laptop. This throwback to the days of the gramophone is designed to enable users to manually crank up electricity to run the laptop in places with irregular or non-existent access to the fixed electric power grid.

Details from Wired News
Kevin Poulsen, 12:58 PM Nov. 17, 2005 PT:

TUNIS, Tunisia — If tech luminary Nicholas Negroponte has his way, the pale light from rugged, hand-cranked $100 laptops will illuminate homes in villages and townships throughout the developing world, and give every child on the planet a computer of their own by 2010.

The MIT Media Lab and Wired magazine founder stood shoulder to shoulder with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to unveil the first working prototype of the “$100 laptop” — currently more like $110 — at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society here Wednesday. The Linux-based machine instantly became the hit of the show, and Thursday saw diplomats and dignitaries, reporters and TV cameras perpetually crowded around the booth of One Laptop Per Child — Negroponte’s nonprofit — craning for a glimpse of the toy-like tote.

With its cheery green coloring and Tonka-tough shell, the laptop certainly looks cool. It boasts a 7-inch screen that swivels like a tablet PC, and an electricity-generating crank that provides 40 minutes of power from a minute of grinding.

Related material:
Certified Crank.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Wednesday November 16, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:04 pm
Images

Adam Gopnik on C. S. Lewis in this week's New Yorker:
 
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images…."

"The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."

"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote…."

"We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery…."

"The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images– the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse– are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew."

Related material:

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Click on pictures for details.

See also Windmills and
Verbum sat sapienti?
as well as

an essay

 at Calvin College
on Simone Weil,
Charles Williams,
Dante, and
"the way of images."

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Sunday November 13, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:48 am
Reunion:
An Introduction
to Multispeech

From Log24, Oct. 31, 2005:

“They don’t understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once.”

— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion

From Finnegans Wake:

“And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there’ll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care….”

From Urban Legends Reference Pages:

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See also
the previous two entries,
Ten is a Hen and Structure,
about a mother and child.

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