A weblog post today by University Diaries suggests
a review in this weblog of "Florence."
Literary Florence
Thursday, January 4, 2024
Florence
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Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Florence 2001
Or: Coordinatization for Physicists
This post was suggested by the link on the word "coordinatized"
in the previous post.
I regret that Weyl's term "coordinatization" perhaps has
too many syllables for the readers of recreational mathematics —
for example, of an article on 4×4 magic squares by Conway, Norton,
and Ryba to be published today by Princeton University Press.
Insight into the deeper properties of such squares unfortunately
requires both the ability to learn what a "Galois field" is and the
ability to comprehend seven-syllable words.
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Wednesday, July 12, 2023
The Sunset of Dissolution
Dwight Garner today on the late Milan Kundera:
"Kundera’s novels, especially his later ones, could be abstract and
heavy-handed. His characters, at times, were little more than chess pieces.
Their author could be pretentious. His work is filled with observations such as:
'In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia,
even the guillotine.' But his best fiction retains its moments of sweep and power."
Illustration for Florence King's 1989 review of The Eight , a novel
by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4.
See also "Dissolution" in this journal.
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Monday, June 8, 2020
The Crimson Blade
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Thursday, October 4, 2018
Art Trail
“There’s always a place at the edge of our knowledge,
where what’s beyond is unimaginable, and that edge,
of course, moves.” — Physicist Leon Lederman in
The New York Times yesterday afternoon.
An image from Florence, SC —
Click image for related material.
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Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Nobel Literature Prize
The New York Times today —
Leon Lederman, 96, Explorer (and Explainer) of
the Subatomic World, Dies
By George Johnson
Oct. 3, 2018
Leon Lederman, whose ingenious experiments with particle accelerators
deepened science’s understanding of the subatomic world, died
early Wednesday in Rexburg, Idaho. He was 96.
His wife, Ellen Carr Lederman, confirmed the death, at a care facility.
She and Dr. Lederman, who had long directed the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory outside Chicago, had retired to eastern Idaho.
"… novelist, poet and minister George MacDonald . . . ."
See as well Jess Lederman, Investment Banker.
"I have three children with my first wife, Florence Gordon.
Daughter Rena is an anthropologist,
son Jesse is an investment banker
and daughter Rachel a lawyer."
— Leon Lederman at nobelprize.org.
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Thursday, September 20, 2018
1971 Mystery Box
Vincent Canby in The New York Times ,
January 28, 1971, reviews the film "The Statue" —
There is not much point in going into the dialogue,
but you'll get the idea from the line spoken by
a little girl who is shown gazing in wonderment
at the copy of Michelangelo's work in the
Piazza della Signoria in Florence.
"Golly," she says, "if that's David, I'd like to see Goliath!"
"The Statue" may have the distinction of being the first
adolescent comedy about penis envy.
In keeping with filmmaker J.J. Abrams's philosophy of the "mystery box" —
Canby's phrase "you'll get the idea" suggests a Log24 review . . .
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Sunday, October 15, 2017
An Interesting Symbol
"His story is tragic and fascinating, but also
an interesting symbol for the 20th century."
— "Pawn Sacrifice" review by Jordan Hoffman,
Sept. 18, 2015
See as well William J. Lombardy's obituary in
today's online New York Times .
Other symbols —
Logo for a current New York Times series —
A 1989 New York Times illustration for Florence King's review of The Eight ,
a novel by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4 —
Illustration by Rodrigo Shopis
See also recent posts now tagged Five Movements for Lombardy.
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Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Annals of Critical Epistemology
"But unlike many who left the Communist Party, I turned left
rather than right, and returned—or rather turned for the first time—
to a critical examination of Marx's work. I found—and still find—
that his analysis of capitalism, which for me is the heart of his work,
provides the best starting point, the best critical tools, with which—
suitably developed—to understand contemporary capitalism.
I remind you that this year is also the sesquicentennial of the
Communist Manifesto , a document that still haunts the capitalist world."
— From "Autobiographical Reflections," a talk given on June 5, 1998, by
John Stachel at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin
on the occasion of a workshop honoring his 70th birthday,
"Space-Time, Quantum Entanglement and Critical Epistemology."
From a passage by Stachel quoted in the previous post —
From the source for Stachel's remarks on Weyl and coordinatization —
Note that Stachel distorted Weyl's text by replacing Weyl's word
"symbols" with the word "quantities." —
This replacement makes no sense if the coordinates in question
are drawn from a Galois field — a field not of quantities , but rather
of algebraic symbols .
"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
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Monday, April 4, 2016
Midnight for Paris
Illustration for Florence King's 1989 review of The Eight , a novel
by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4.
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Sunday, January 10, 2016
Sunday Morning Narrative
Madeleine L'Engle meets Captain America —
This is from a Jan. 27, 2012, post on mathematics and narrative.
Related literary criticism by the late Florence King —
"Given all the historical personages the author whistles in,
one more won't hurt. Nicolas Boileau, the 17th-century
French literary critic, gave writers a piece of advice that
Ms. Neville could use: 'Make not your tale of accidents
too full / too much variety will make it dull / Achilles' rage
alone, when wrought with skill /Abundantly does a whole
"Iliad" fill.' "
— NY Times review of The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville
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Field of Force
The title is adapted from that of George Steiner's book
Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik
(Published by Viking Adult on June 25, 1974.)
For fields of narrative force, see the previous post.
See as well a memorable review by the late Florence King
of the novel The Eight by Katherine Neville. An illustration
from that review (The New York Times , January 15, 1989) —
Related material: Closing the Circle (Log24, Sept. 24, 2009).
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Saturday, January 9, 2016
When Sisterhood Was in Flower
The title is a tribute to the late Florence King, who
reportedly died last Wednesday, January 6, 2016.
It is the title of one of her novels.
Related material from the date of King's death —
An excerpt from King's obituary —
|
Over the years, some critics took Miss King’s writing to task not for its ideology — the ideology, it was widely understood, went hand in glove with the work — but for its rhetorical excesses. “She is sharp, no doubt about it,” the novelist and journalist Mary Cantwell wrote in The Times Book Review in 1982, reviewing Miss King’s satirical novel “When Sisterhood Was in Flower.” “Too bad she tends to blunt her points by pushing them too hard.” But even a blunt instrument, Miss King made plain, admirably served her desired ends. |
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Sunday, October 12, 2014
In Memoriam
From the online Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Piero della Francesca, original name
Piero di Benedetto dei Franceschi
(born c. 1416/17, Sansepolcro, Republic of Florence [Italy]—
died Oct. 12, 1492, Sansepolcro),
painter whose serene, disciplined exploration of perspective
had little influence on his contemporaries but came to be
recognized in the 20th century as a major contribution to
the Italian Renaissance. The fresco cycle “The Legend of
the True Cross” (1452–66) and the diptych portrait of
Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, and his consort
(1465) are among his best known works.
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Monday, January 28, 2013
Encounter
"Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.' Milton was thirty years old—his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, 'Paradise Lost,' all lay before him….
Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter— it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman— there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe."
— Jonathan Rosen, The New Yorker , June 2, 2008, "Return to Paradise"
More in the spirit of Superman and Batman:
"Huh. You know what? Galileo didn't even write this."
"What!"
"The poem is signed John Milton."
"John Milton ?" The influential English poet who wrote
Paradise Lost was a contemporary of Galileo's and a
savant who conspiracy buffs put at the top of their list
of Illuminati suspects. Milton's alleged affiliation with
Galileo's Illuminati was one legend Langdon
suspected was true. Not only had Milton made a
well documented 1638 pilgrimage to Rome to
"commune with enlightened men," but he had held
meetings with Galileo during the scientist's house
arrest, meetings portrayed in many Renaissance
paintings….
"Milton knew Galileo, didn't he?" Vittoria said, finally
pushing the folio over to Langdon. "Maybe he wrote
the poem as a favor?"
— Angels & Demons , by Dan Brown
(first published in 2000)
See also this journal on August 16, 2009.
Addendum for Aaron Swartz (see today's previous post)—
"The Vatican, it seemed, took their archives
a bit more seriously than most." — Dan Brown
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Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Grand Design
From Harvard's 2010 Phi Beta Kappa ceremony—
Think of all the history you’ve read. It started somewhere.
It started at absolute zero, is what you thought.
Just because you couldn’t know what came before.
But imagine: something did.
"To help the graduates find rightness, two addresses are at the heart of the exercises ceremony.
One is by a poet, who reads a work written for the occasion.
The other is by an 'orator,' a guest invited to offer timely discourse."
From this morning's New York Times—
Related material—
Immediately following Inspector Pine in this morning's Times obituary list
is Virginia B. Smith, a former president of Vassar College. Smith died at 87 on August 27.
From her obituary—
Ms. Smith is survived by her partner of 57 years, Florence Oaks.
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Wednesday August 22, 2007
The Enchanted Twilight
The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
GENEVA: British-born author Magdalen Nabb, whose crime novels about a quirky Italian investigator were acclaimed by her idol Georges Simenon, has died, her Swiss publishing house said Tuesday. She was 60.
Nabb, who also wrote stories for children and young adults, died of a stroke on Saturday [August 18, 2007] in Florence, Italy, where she had lived and worked since 1975, said Diogenes Verlag AG of Zurich….
Nabb published 13 books for children and young adults, including “The Enchanted Horse,” “Twilight Ghost” and the “Josie Smith” series about a “girl who always has plenty of ideas.”
See also, from the
date of Nabb’s death,
date of Nabb’s death,
Happy Birthday,
Robert Redford:
A Concrete Universal.
“No matter how it’s done,
you won’t like it.“
— Robert Redford to
Robert M. Pirsig in Lila
Material related to
Twilight Ghost:
Logos and Epiphany
and
Fire Chaplain.
“A twilight ghost doesn’t come to
frighten people, though it might
want to tell them something.
A twilight ghost is just
a kind of long lost memory….”
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Thursday, August 19, 2004
Thursday August 19, 2004
5:01:58 AM ET:
A link for Jill St. John's birthday —
Twinkle, twinkle…
Beach reading for
brilliant redheads…
and for everyone else:
Click on pictures for details.
Sunday, February 8, 2004
Sunday February 8, 2004
The Quality of Diamond
On February 3, 2004, archivist and abstract painter Ward Jackson died at 75. From today’s New York Times:
“Inspired by painters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Mr. Jackson made austere, hard-edged geometric compositions, typically on diamond-shaped canvases.”
|
On a 2003 exhibit by Pablo Helguera that included Mr. Jackson: Parallel Lives recounts and recontextualizes real episodes from the lives of five disparate individuals including Florence Foster Jenkins, arguably the world’s worst opera singer; Giulio Camillo, a Renaissance mystic who aimed to build a memory container for all things; Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten education system, the members of the last existing Shaker community, and Ward Jackson, the lifelong archivist of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Parallel Lives pays homage to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) and his system of philosophical hermeneutics built through an exploration of historicity, language, and art. This exhibition, which draws its title from the classic work by Plutarch, is a project that explores biography as a medium, drawing from the earlier innovation of the biographical practice in works like Marcel Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives” (1896) and John Aubrey’s “Brief Lives” (1681). Through display means, the project blends the lives of these individuals into one basic story, visually stating the relationship between individualism and society as best summarized by Gadamer’s famous phrase: “we all are others, and we all are a self.” |
On February 3, the day that Jackson died, there were five different log24.net entries:
Parallels with the Helguera exhibit:
Florence Foster Jenkins: Janet Jackson in (2) above.
Giulio Camillo: Myself as compiler of the synchronistic excerpts in (5).
Friedrich Froebel: David Wade in (4).
The last Shakers: Christopher Alexander and his acolytes in (1).
Ward Jackson: On Feb. 3, Jackson became a permanent part of
Some thoughts of Hans-Georg Gadamer
relevant to Jackson’s death:
|
by G.T. Karnezis The pleasure it [art] elicits “is the joy of knowledge.” It does not operate as an enchantment but “a transformation into the true.” Art, then, would seem to be an essentializing agent insofar as it reveals what is essential. Gadamer asks us to see reality as a horizon of “still undecided possibilities,” of unfulfilled expectations, of contingency. If, in a particular case, however, “a meaningful whole completes and fulfills itself in reality,” it is like a drama. If someone sees the whole of reality as a closed circle of meaning” he will be able to speak “of the comedy and tragedy of life” (genres becoming ways of conceiving reality). In such cases where reality “is understood as a play, there emerges the reality of what play is, which we call the play of art.” As such, art is a realization: “By means of it everyone recognizes that that is how things are.” Reality, in this viewpoint, is what has not been transformed. Art is defined as “the raising up of this reality to its truth.” |
As noted in entry (3) above
on the day that Jackson died,
“All the world’s a stage.”
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Wednesday, January 8, 2003
Wednesday January 8, 2003
Into the Woods
From the Words on Film site:
"The proximal literary antecedents for Under the Volcano are Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, especially The Inferno, on the one hand, and on the other, the Faust legend as embodied in the dramatic poem Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the play Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe."
|
"In the opening page of the novel, we find the words "The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands on a slightly higher hill …" (Lowry, Volcano p. 3). "Selva" is one of the Spanish words for "woods." One of the cantinas in the novel is named El Bosque, and bosque is another Spanish word for "woods." The theme of being in a darkling woods is reiterated throughout the novel." |
Literary Florence |
Tonight's site music is "Children Will Listen,"
by Stephen Sondheim, from "Into the Woods."
Stephen Hawking is 61 today.
An appropriate gift might be a cassette version of
The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis,
narrated by John Cleese.
See also this review of Lewis's That Hideous Strength
and my entries of Dec. 31, 2002, and Jan. 4, 2003.