For some, yesterday was just another Maniac Monday.
Today being Tuesday suggests a Belgium-related search
in this journal . . .
Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Heart of Darkness
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Tuesday, December 12, 2023
If It’s Tuesday…
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“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, — Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy, |
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Saturday, September 30, 2023
The Algorithm and Mrs. Davis
On the recent Peacock series "Mrs. Davis" —
"The algorithm is known as Mrs. Davis … and is
the all-seeing, all-knowing, not-quite-all-merciful
manifestation of artificial intelligence to whom
humanity has plighted its troth in this eight-part
manifestation of real intelligence from creators
Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof."
— John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal ,
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
For The Algorithm , see last evening's Michaelmas post and . . .
For a different Mrs. Davis, see . . .
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From Tom McCarthy's review yesterday of The Maniac , a novel about 1940s social life at Los Alamos — "The mathematician Martin Davis’s wife, Lydia, storms out of a Trinity dinner party, condemning the men’s failure to fully take on board the consequences of their atom splitting. Besides sharing her name with our own age’s great translator of Blanchot and Proust, this Lydia Davis is a textile artist — a hanging detail that points back toward the novel’s many looms and weavings. For the Greeks, the fates spinning the threads of human lives were female (as Conrad knew, recasting them as Belgian secretaries in 'Heart of Darkness'). So was Theseus’ wool-ball navigator, Ariadne. And so, too, was the Ithacan ur-weaver Penelope, whose perpetual making and unraveling of her tapestry beat Gödel to an incompleteness theory by thousands of years. 'Text,' by the way, means something woven, from which we get 'textile.' It might just be that Penelope was not only testing her own version of the ontological limit, but also embedding it — in absent form, a hole — within the weft and warp of what we would eventually call the novel." |
Martin Davis reportedly died this year on New Year's Day.
This journal on that date —
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Thursday, February 23, 2023
“Where Whirled and Well”
— Conrad Aiken, Great Circle
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"
About the Centre:
See also Dorm Room.
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Thursday, May 14, 2020
Art Issue*
"… the beautiful object
that stood in
for something else.”
— Holland Cotter quoting an art historian
in The New York Times on May 13
From a post of April 27, 2020 —
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which lies within the shell
of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside
like a kernel but outside….”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
The beautiful object —
Something else —
* The title is a reference to other posts now also tagged Art Issue.
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Monday, April 27, 2020
The Cracked Nut
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable
conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being –
the reward he seeks –the only reward he really cares about, without which
there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life,
the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the
essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its
complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation
group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside…."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
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Sunday, April 26, 2020
Crux
This post was suggested by a David Justice weblog post yesterday,
Coincidence and Cosmos. Some related remarks —
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us.”
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
See as well posts now tagged Crux.
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Friday, July 25, 2014
Magic in the Moonshine
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us.”
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
“Spectral evidence is a form of evidence
based upon dreams and visions.” —Wikipedia
See also Moonshine (May 15, 2014) and, from the date of the above
New York Times item, two posts tagged Wunderkammer .
Related material: From the Spectrum program of the Mathematical
Association of America, some non-spectral evidence.
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Thursday, May 15, 2014
Moonshine
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Photo of full moon over Oslo last night by Josefine Lyche:
A scene from my film viewing last night:
Some background (click to enlarge):
Note:
The “I, Frankenstein” scene above should not be interpreted as
a carrying of Martin Gardner through a lyche gate. Gardner
is, rather, symbolized by the asterisk in the first image from
the above Google search.
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Thursday, September 5, 2013
Kernel and Glow
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Kernel — See Nocciolo.
Glow — See Moonshine and Moonshine II.
See also Cold Open (Jan. 29, 2011) and
Where Entertainment is God (Aug. 25, 2013).
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Wednesday, October 24, 2012
In a Nutshell
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut.
But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode
was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out
only as a glow brings out a haze,
in the likeness of one of these misty halos
that sometimes are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
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Wednesday, February 22, 2012
For Ash Wednesday
"And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."
— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"
This suggested a search for commentary on
Conrad Aiken's phrase "where whirled and well."
Of the nine (Google) search results, one is not from
my own journal entries—
[PDF] TIME! TIME! TIME!
https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/id/131009/UBC_1968_A8%20C33.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
by G Cameron – 1968 – Related articles
well where whirled and well where whirled and well—
-3. The stress on words such as "wing" is expanded for use
in Aiken's musical paragraph as follows: …
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Sunday, May 29, 2011
A Mathematical Operation
New York Lottery, May 28, 2011—
General Boulanger
That the General was 'reactionary' and that the C of C bureaucracy had a 'defiant residue' of Boulangism, continues the characterization of the organization for which the Chums 'work'.
See p. 543 above, regarding a 2007 book in which Boulanger is called the 'father of fascism'.
timbres fictifs
French: fictive postage stamps. Cf "Lot 49".
Yes, stamps mean something in Pynchon's works; here, it seems important that these stamps are characterized as frauds.
transform
A mathematical operation that "maps" a relation from one domain to another.
Here, "Belgian Congo" maps to "Balkan Penninsula". By 1912, everyone at Yz-le-Bans would be familiar with Conrad's Heart of Darkness , if not with other descriptions of the atrocities of exploitation of indigenous people in Congo. The conversation here and to follow describes the dawning realization of the imperialist exploitation of Eastern Europe by European powers. (Zora Neale Hurston famously commented that Hitler did in Europe what Europeans had been doing in Africa for a century. Cf. The Hereros sections in V .). It begins with railroads and "other straight line" constructions.
The themes of ATD might also "map" to current events in another warzone, where a contemporary Great Game is being played out.
common in dreams
Such as Frank's and Reef's. And/or, dreams require interpretation.
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Sunday, April 3, 2011
On to Chicago!
Commentary on last night—
Tonight: The After-Party.
In related news…
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning
of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of
one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine."
– Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness , quoted here in
Cold Open (Saturday night, January 29, 2011)
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Saturday, January 29, 2011
Cold Open
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Some background—
An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins
"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"
— "Massive Attack"
"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."
"Live… Uh, check that… From New York, it's Saturday Night! "
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Thursday, March 17, 2005
Thursday March 17, 2005
Readings for
St. Patrick's Day
Time of this entry: 12:00:36 PM.
Hence,
"Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration."
- A commentary on "Darkening of the Light," the I Ching, Hexagram 36:
-
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
- Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
-
Narrativity: Theory and Practice, by Philip John Moore Sturgess
Sturgess's book deals with the narrative logic of the above novels by Koestler and Conrad, as well as some Irish material:
Narrativity: Theory and Practice Pt. I The Theory of Narrativity Introduction 3 1 Narrativity and its Definitions 5 2 A Logic of Narrativity 28 3 Narrativity and Double Logics 68 4 Narrativity and the Case against Contradiction 93 5 Narrativity, Structure, and Spatial Form 117 6 Narrativity and the French Perspective 139 Pt. II The Practice of Narrativity Introduction 161 7 The Logic of Duplicity and Design in Under Western Eyes 166 8 A Story of Narrativity in Ulysses 189 9 Narrative Despotism and Metafictional Mastery: The Case of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds 235 10 A Double Logic and the Nightmare of Reason: Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon 260 Conclusion. A Reading of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent 287 Bibliography and Further Reading 312 Index 317
These readings are in opposition to the works of Barbara Johnson published by Harvard University Press.
For some background, see The Shining of May 29 (JFK's birthday).
Discussion question:
In the previous entry, who represents the
Hexagram 36 "dark power"