In search of Frye's "powder-room of the Muses" — See 3×3.
Friday, October 22, 2021
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Frye’s
"'Interpenetration'" — Stanley Fish in yesterday evening's online New York Times
"You want Frye's with that?" — A recent humanities graduate
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Saturday, February 5, 2022
Mathieu Cube Labeling
Shown below is an illustration from "The Puzzle Layout Problem" —
- September 2003
-
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2912:500-501
DOI:10.1007/978-3-540-24595-7_50 - Source: DBLP
-
Conference: Graph Drawing, 11th International Symposium,
GD 2003, Perugia, Italy, September 21-24, 2003, Revised Papers - Authors: Kozo Sugiyama, Seok-Hee Hong, Atsuhiko Maeda
Exercise: Using the above numerals 1 through 24
(with 23 as 0 and 24 as ∞) to represent the points
∞, 0, 1, 2, 3 … 22 of the projective line over GF(23),
reposition the labels 1 through 24 in the above illustration
so that they appropriately* illustrate the cube-parts discussed
by Iain Aitchison in his March 2018 Hiroshima slides on
cube-part permutations by the Mathieu group M24.
A note for Northrop Frye —
Interpenetration in the eightfold cube — the three midplanes —
A deeper example of interpenetration:
Aitchison has shown that the Mathieu group M24 has a natural
action on the 24 center points of the subsquares on the eightfold
cube's six faces (four such points on each of the six faces). Thus
the 759 octads of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24) interpenetrate
on the surface of the cube.
* "Appropriately" — I.e. , so that the Aitchison cube octads correspond
exactly, via the projective-point labels, to the Curtis MOG octads.
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Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Groundhog Day Metamorphosis
" Whether correspondences were achieved by means of
wordplay, atavistic formal resemblances, or serendipitous
coincidences, the attendant metamorphosis of literary
material into Frye's own scripture could become tiresome:
'just another shake of the kaleidoscope.' " [Link added.]
— From p. 61 of "The Master of the Myth of Literature:
An Interpenetrative Ogdoad for Northrop Frye,"
by Nohrnberg, James C., Comparative Literature ,
Vol. 53 (1), pp. 58-82, Duke University Press,
January 1, 2001.
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Saturday, October 23, 2021
From the Powder-Room of the Muses
The above title is from Northrop Frye —
"Is it possible* that understanding the nature of clarity and order
can cast suspicion on the very ideas of clarity and order?"
— Douglas Sadao Aoki, University of Alberta, "The Thing Never
Speaks for Itself: Lacan and the Pedagogical Politics of Clarity,"
Harvard Educational Review , Vol. 70, No. 3, Fall 2000,
Copyright © by President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Related scholarly citation by Aoki —
The cited source:
* For the diamond as a symbol of possibility , see modal diamond box .
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Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Marking the End
Miller died on February 7, 2021.
See that date in this journal —
“Before time began, there was the Cube.”
— Hassenfeld Brothers cinematic merchandising slogan.
Update at noon on Wednesday, June 9, 2021 —
Related material on Frye and deconstruction —
|
From "The First Major Theoretician? Northrop Frye Towards the end of his career, when it was clear that literary theory had taken hold in the academy, Frye began to reflect on literary theory. In an interview with Deanne Bogdan, Frye laments, “I am feeling out of the great critical trends today”…. Northrop Frye was right that he was “out of fashion,” both in terms of his own theories and his place in literary theory; however, he did seek to reverse the course. Frye hoped to reclaim literary studies from deconstruction, which had become, in a sense, his chief opponent …. |
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Saturday, March 13, 2021
Eternal Spark
According to Lt. Col. Wayne M. McDonnell in June 1983 —
“… it is accurate to observe that when a person experiences
the out-of- body state he is, in fact, projecting that eternal spark
of consciousness and memory which constitutes the ultimate
source of his identity….”
— Section 27, “Consciousness in Perspective,” of
“Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process.”
A related quotation —
“In truth, the physical AllSpark is but a shell….”
— https://tfwiki.net/wiki/AllSpark
From the post Ghost in the Shell (Feb. 26, 2019) —
See also, from posts tagged Ogdoad Space —
“Like the Valentinian Ogdoad— a self-creating theogonic system
of eight Aeons in four begetting pairs— the projected eightfold work
had an esoteric, gnostic quality; much of Frye’s formal interest lay in
the ‘schematosis’ and fearful symmetries of his own presentations.”
— From p. 61 of James C. Nohrnberg’s “The Master of the Myth
of Literature: An Interpenetrative Ogdoad for Northrop Frye,”
Comparative Literature , Vol. 53 No. 1, pp. 58-82, Duke University
Press (quarterly, January 2001)
— as well as . . .
Related illustration from posts tagged with
the quilt term Yankee Puzzle —
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Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Artifice* of Eternity …
… and Schoolgirl Space
"This poem contrasts the prosaic and sensual world of the here and now
with the transcendent and timeless world of beauty in art, and the first line,
'That is no country for old men,' refers to an artless world of impermanence
and sensual pleasure."
— "Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium' and McCarthy's No Country for Old Men :
Art and Artifice in the New Novel,"
Steven Frye in The Cormac McCarthy Journal ,
Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 14-20.
See also Schoolgirl Space in this journal.
* See, for instance, Lewis Hyde on the word "artifice" and . . .
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Sunday, December 16, 2018
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Literary Doodles
The Great Doodle of Northrop Frye —
Shown below is a "Story Circle" based on the work of Joseph Campbell.
The author of this particular version is unknown.
Note that there are 12 steps in the above Story Circle. This suggests
some dialogue from a recent film . . .
|
Donnie —"We can't ask for help if we don't think there's anyone out there to give it. You have to grasp this concept. And that doesn't have to be fucking Jesus Christ or Buddha or Vanna White." Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=dont-worry-he-wont-get-far-on-foot |
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Monday, August 6, 2018
The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes
|
“All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.” “Gahh,” she said. She began to walk toward the box, but her heart failed her and she retreated back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purred. The seam she had found cracked open and the top of the box began to rise. She squeezed shut her eyes and groped her way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging her ears with her fingers. That song she’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; she used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before she learned card tricks. It was how she’d met Benny: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Benny said, so that was mainly what she sang. She must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first she liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go without it running across her brain or humming on her lips, and God knew she tried; she was smashing herself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Benny played the opening chord and she just couldn’t do it. She could not sing that fucking song. Not again. She broke down, because she was only fifteen, and Benny took her behind the mall and told her it would be okay. But she had to sing. It was the biggest earner. She kind of lost it and then so did Benny and that was the first time he hit her. She ran away for a while. But she came back to him, because she had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like they had a truce: She would not complain about her bruised face and he would not ask her to sing “Lucy.” She had been all right with this. She had thought that was a pretty good deal. Now there was something coming out of a box, and she reached for the most virulent meme she knew. “Lucy in the sky!” she sang. “With diamonds!” • • •
Barry, Max. Lexicon: A Novel (pp. 247-248). |
Related material from Log24 on All Hallows' Eve 2013 —
"Just another shake of the kaleidoscope" —
Related material:
Kaleidoscope Puzzle,
Design Cube 2x2x2, and
Through the Looking Glass: A Sort of Eternity.
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A Connecting Link
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Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Doodle
From "The Educated Imagination: A Website Dedicated
to Northrop Frye" —
"In one of the notebooks for his first Bible book Frye writes,
'For at least 25 years I’ve been preoccupied by
the notion of a key to all mythologies.' . . . .
Frye made a valiant effort to provide a key to all mythology,
trying to fit everything into what he called the Great Doodle. . . ."
From a different page at the same website —
Here Frye provides a diagram of four sextets.
I prefer the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis —
.
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Thursday, May 10, 2018
Backstory for Eden*
* I.e., Hemingway's novel The Garden of Eden.
See also Northrop Frye and "interpenetration"
in this journal and a University of Montana master's
thesis from 1994 on the Hemingway novel,
"And a river went out of Eden," by Howard A. Schmid.
See as well remarks by Stanley Fish quoted here on May 7.
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Thursday, February 16, 2017
Crimson Divinity
See also the Harvard University Press
webpage for Colors of the Mind —
Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts,
the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye.
This… book… aims to open another field of study:
how thought— the act, the experience of thinking—
is represented in literature.
. . . .
Fletcher’s resources are large, and his step is sure.
The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton’s
Satan, the original Thinker,
leaving the pain of thinking
as his legacy for mankind.
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Sunday, February 12, 2017
Colorful Tales
“Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature of modern science
is the emergence of abstract symbolic structures as the hard core
of objectivity behind— as Eddington puts it— the colorful tale of
the subjective storyteller mind.”
— Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and
Natural Science , Princeton, 1949, p. 237
Harvard University Press on the late Angus Fletcher, author of
The Topological Imagination and Colors of the Mind —
From the Harvard webpage for Colors of the Mind —
Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts,
the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye.
This… book… aims to open another field of study:
how thought— the act, the experience of thinking—
is represented in literature.
. . . .
Fletcher’s resources are large, and his step is sure.
The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton’s
Satan, the original Thinker,
leaving the pain of thinking
as his legacy for mankind.
A 1992 review by Vinay Dharwadker of Colors of the Mind —
See also the above word "dianoia" in The Echo in Plato's Cave.
Some context …
This post was suggested by a memorial piece today in
the Los Angeles Review of Books —
A Florilegium for Angus Fletcher
By Kenneth Gross, Lindsay Waters, V. N. Alexander,
Paul Auster, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, K. J. Knoespel,
Mitchell Meltzer, Victoria Nelson, Joan Richardson,
Dorian Sagan, Susan Stewart, Eric Wilson, Michael Wood
Fletcher reportedly died on November 28, 2016.
"I learned from Fletcher how to apprehend
the daemonic element in poetic imagination."
— Harold Bloom in today's Los Angeles florilegium
For more on Bloom and the daemonic, see a Log24 post,
"Interpenetration," from the date of Fletcher's death.
Some backstory: Dharwadker in this journal.
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Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Eightfold Roman
"Frye's largely imaginary eightfold roman
may have provided him a personal substitute—
or alternative— for both ideology and myth."
— P. 63 of James C. Nohrnberg, "The Master of
the Myth of Literature: An Interpenetrative Ogdoad
for Northrop Frye," Comparative Literature Vol. 53,
No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 58-82
See also today's earlier post In Nuce .
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Lumber Room
From "Northrop Frye at Home and Abroad: His Ideas,"
by Jean O'Grady —
"Frye always denied the accusation that
he was trying to make everyone accept
his whole ‘system’ like a straightjacket;
he remarked to an interviewer that perhaps
he would ultimately be found less useful as a
systemizer than as a quarry for later thinkers,
'a kind of lumber-room for later generations…
a resource person for anyone to explore and
get ideas from.' "
From Wikipedia's Lumber Room article —
"The phrase 'lumber room' is found in British fiction
at least during the 19th century …. Probably one of
the most evocative references is the short story by
'Saki' (H. H. Munro) called 'The Lumber Room':
'Often and often Nicholas had pictured to himself
what the lumber-room might be like, that region
that was so carefully sealed from youthful eyes
and concerning which no questions were ever answered.
It came up to his expectations. In the first place it was large
and dimly lit, one high window opening on to the forbidden
garden being its only source of illumination. In the second
place it was a storehouse of unimagined treasures.' "
See also Two by Four in this journal.
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In Nuce
|
Excerpts from James C. Nohrnberg, "The Master of the Myth of Literature: An Interpenetrative Ogdoad for Northrop Frye," Comparative Literature Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 58-82
From page 58 — * P. 22 of Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works , ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, Frye Studies [series] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). [Abbreviated as RF .]
From page 62 —
From page 63 —
From page 69 —
From page 71 —
From page 77 — |
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Sunday, November 27, 2016
A Machine That Will Fit
Or: Notes for the Metaphysical Club
Northrop Frye on Wallace Stevens:
"He… stands in contrast to the the dualistic
approach of Eliot, who so often speaks of poetry
as though it were an emotional and sensational
soul looking for a 'correlative' skeleton of
thought to be provided by a philosopher, a
Cartesian ghost trying to find a machine that
will fit."
Ralph Waldo Emerson on "vacant and vain" knowledge:
"The new position of the advancing man has all
the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It
carries in its bosom all the energies of the past,
yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast
away in this new moment all my once hoarded
knowledge, as vacant and vain."
Harold Bloom on Emerson:
"Emerson may not have invented the American
Sublime, yet he took eternal possession of it."
Wallace Stevens on the American Sublime:
"And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space."
A founding member of the Metaphysical Club:
See also the eightfold cube.
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Friday, November 25, 2016
The Correlative Skeleton
Related material from this journal —
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Saturday, November 5, 2016
Interpenetration
Wikipedia— "The first Million Mask March occurred in 2013."
A check of the date of that march in this journal yields …
See as well, more generally, "Interpenetration" in this journal.
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Friday, August 19, 2016
From Halloween 2013
The orange and black Princeton colors in the previous post
suggest a review of Halloween 2013 —
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Saturday, July 2, 2016
Frozen Narrative
A book by Northrop Frye pictured in the previous post
suggests a Log24 search for "The Great Code."
That search yields …
"Icy white and crystalline"
— Johnny Mercer
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Tuesday, April 19, 2016
The Folding
A recent post about the eightfold cube suggests a review of two
April 8, 2015, posts on what Northrop Frye called the ogdoad :
As noted on April 8, each 2×4 "brick" in the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis may be constructed by folding a 1×8 array from Turyn's
1967 construction of the Golay code.
Folding a 2×4 Curtis array yet again yields the 2x2x2 eightfold cube .
Those who prefer an entertainment approach to concepts of space
may enjoy a video (embedded yesterday in a story on theverge.com) —
"Ghost in the Shell: Identity in Space."
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Friday, April 8, 2016
Ogdoads: A Space Odyssey
"Like the Valentinian Ogdoad— a self-creating theogonic system
of eight Aeons in four begetting pairs— the projected eightfold work
had an esoteric, gnostic quality; much of Frye's formal interest lay in
the 'schematosis' and fearful symmetries of his own presentations."
— From p. 61 of James C. Nohrnberg's "The Master of the Myth
of Literature: An Interpenetrative Ogdoad for Northrop Frye,"
Comparative Literature , Vol. 53 No. 1, pp. 58-82, Duke University
Press (quarterly, January 2001)
See also Two by Four in this journal.
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Sunday, March 20, 2016
Where
"Where indeed might the literary scholar expect to find,
if not in literature, the measure of modern thought?"
— "Ruins of the Ogdoad," by Michael Keefer
"Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate, Nine is a Vine."
— Mnemonic rhyme; author anonymous
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Saturday, March 12, 2016
For the Church of Synchronology*
From the Wikipedia article Bauhaus (band) —
"On 31 October 2013 (Halloween), David J and Jill Tracy released
'Bela Lugosi's Dead (Undead Is Forever),' a cinematic piano-led
rework of 'Bela Lugosi's Dead.'"
Halloween 2013 here (click to enlarge) —
* See "synchronolog…" in this journal.
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Sunday, July 5, 2015
Takeout
A post suggested by today's news from
Calais, Maine (just across the St. Croix
river from St. Stephen in Canada) —
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Friday, February 28, 2014
Score
"Once a verbal structure is read, and reread
often enough to be possessed, it 'freezes.'
It turns into a unity in which all parts exist at
once, without regard to the specific movement
of the narrative. We may compare it to the study
of a music score, where we can turn to any
part without regard to sequential performance."
— Northrop Frye in The Great Code
Gardner reportedly died at 65 on February 19.
A post linked to here on that date suggests some
musical remarks.
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Code
|
From Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature , Ch. 3: Metaphor I — "In the preceding chapter we considered words in sequence, where they form narratives and provide the basis for a literary theory of myth. Reading words in sequence, however, is the first of two critical operations. Once a verbal structure is read, and reread often enough to be possessed, it 'freezes.' It turns into a unity in which all parts exist at once, without regard to the specific movement of the narrative. We may compare it to the study of a music score, where we can turn to any part without regard to sequential performance. The term 'structure,' which we have used so often, is a metaphor from architecture, and may be misleading when we are speaking of narrative, which is not a simultaneous structure but a movement in time. The term 'structure' comes into its proper context in the second stage, which is where all discussion of 'spatial form' and kindred critical topics take their origin." |
Related material:
|
"The Great Code does not end with a triumphant conclusion or the apocalypse that readers may feel is owed them or even with a clear summary of Frye’s position, but instead trails off with a series of verbal winks and nudges. This is not so great a fault as it would be in another book, because long before this it has been obvious that the forward motion of Frye’s exposition was illusory, and that in fact the book was devoted to a constant re-examination of the same basic data from various closely related perspectives: in short, the method of the kaleidoscope. Each shake of the machine produces a new symmetry, each symmetry as beautiful as the last, and none of them in any sense exclusive of the others. And there is always room for one more shake."
— Charles Wheeler, "Professor Frye and the Bible," South Atlantic Quarterly 82 (Spring 1983), pp. 154-164, reprinted in a collection of reviews of the book. |
For code in a different sense, but related to the first passage above,
see Diamond Theory Roullete, a webpage by Radamés Ajna.
For "the method of the kaleidoscope" mentioned in the second
passage above, see both the Ajna page and a webpage of my own,
Kaleidoscope Puzzle.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Voilà
"Waiting for Ogdoad" continues…
"You want Frye's with that?" — A recent humanities graduate.
Frye's backstory: Ogdoad.
Other material suggested by the previous post and by the time of this post…
No Man's Land, Gods and Monsters, and Forty and Eight.
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Thursday, November 21, 2013
Quad Rants
Continued from 24 hours ago.
"AA had no rules but many traditions (that were, in fact, rules).
One of the most ironclad was that you never made a Twelfth Step
call on an active alcoholic by yourself, unless the alkie in question
was safely incarcerated in a hospital, detox, or the local bughouse.
If you did, you were apt to end up matching him drink for drink and
line for line."
— King, Stephen (2013-09-24). Doctor Sleep: A Novel
(p. 272). Scribner. Kindle Edition.
" Aus 'It' wurde 'Es', und King sprach es so aus,
dass man sich alleine vom Klang des Titels
gruselte: 'Essssss!' "
— Last night's online
Hamburger Abendblatt
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Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Culinary Note
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Thursday, October 31, 2013
Interpenetrative Ogdoad
The title is from an essay by James C. Nohrnberg—
"Just another shake of the kaleidoscope" —
Related material:
Kaleidoscope Puzzle,
Design Cube 2x2x2, and
Through the Looking Glass: A Sort of Eternity.
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Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Waiting for Ogdoad
The title is from p. xxxix of Michael Dolzani's
introduction to
The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye,
1964-1972: The Critical Comedy
(University of Toronto Press, 2002).
Those whose interests are more mathematical
than literary may consult the similar word "octad"
in this journal.
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Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Logo
"The universe, then, is less intimation
than cipher: a mask rather than a revelation
in the romantic sense. Does love meet with love?
Do we receive but what we give? The answer is
surely a paradox, the paradox that there are
Platonic universals beyond, but that the glass
is too dark to see them. Is there a light beyond
the glass, or is it a mirror only to the self?
The Platonic cave is even darker than Plato
made it, for it introduces the echo, and so
leaves us back in the world of men, which does
not carry total meaning, is just a story of events."
than cipher: a mask rather than a revelation
in the romantic sense. Does love meet with love?
Do we receive but what we give? The answer is
surely a paradox, the paradox that there are
Platonic universals beyond, but that the glass
is too dark to see them. Is there a light beyond
the glass, or is it a mirror only to the self?
The Platonic cave is even darker than Plato
made it, for it introduces the echo, and so
leaves us back in the world of men, which does
not carry total meaning, is just a story of events."
– Betty Jay, reader's guide to A Passage to India
Judy Davis in the Marabar Caves
The above image is from this journal on Sunday, April 13, 2008.
The preceding cover of a book by Northrop Frye was suggested
by material in this journal from February 2003.
See also Yankee Puzzle and Doodle Dandy.
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Wednesday, November 2, 2011
For All Souls Day
"It's still the same old story…"
See Glory in this journal.
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean— neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master— that's all.'
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they're the proudest— adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs— however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'
'Would you tell me please,' said Alice, 'what that means?'
'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'
'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'
See also Interpenetration in this journal… and in Northrop Frye.
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