And then there is Bing . . .

"When nation spoke unto nation, they did it via Fantail."

— Alderman, Naomi. The Future  (p. 5). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

The title is taken from the New York Times  obituary
of an artist who reportedly died today.

See also the retrofuture concept in this  journal.

The twin-column illustration above is 
adapted from Shakespeare's Birthday 2013.

(Continued)

Orwell Meets Waugh

Daily Globe  Meets  Daily PlaNet

Office scene from "Spotlight," a 2015 film about The Boston Globe

Detail of the above office scene 

A photo from the Web of Mount Baker and Bellingham WA 
that may or may not match the "Spotlight" picture's location.

Update of 1 AM on March 3, 2016 —

A much better match for the "Spotlight" office picture is this image of
Mount Illimani and La Paz, Bolivia, from dreamstime.com. 

Johnny Cash*  Meets  Fritz Leiber**

*  "You can run on for a long time…"

** See Spider + Snake in this journal.

(Continued from this date last year,
  "Spiel ist nicht Spielerei. ")

Related material:

Agents of a Great Despair and A Kirk for Spock —

See High White in this journal.

Related material:

The Astoria Column
on Coxcomb Hill,
Astoria, Oregon

See also a tale from today's Daily Astorian  
(click the AP link in Parks and Recreation) and…

(Continued)

Today's 11:01 AM post discussed time concepts
in Eliot's Four Quartets.

For the temporally challenged, here is
a somewhat simpler conceptual framework—

The White Itself

David Ellerman has written that

"The notion of a concrete universal occurred in Plato's Theory of Forms [Malcolm 1991]."

A check shows that Malcolm indeed discussed this notion ("the Form as an Ideal Individual"), but not under the name "concrete universal."

See Plato on the Self-Predication of Forms, by John Malcolm, Oxford U. Press, 1991.

From the publisher's summary:

"Malcolm…. shows that the middle dialogues do indeed take Forms to be both universals and paradigms…. He shows that Plato's concern to explain how the truths of mathematics can indeed be true played an important role in his postulation of the Form as an Ideal Individual."

Ellerman also cites another discussion of Plato published by Oxford:

For a literary context, see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., "The Structure of the Concrete Universal," Ch. 6 in Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.

Other uses of the phrase "concrete universal"– Hegelian and/or theological– seem rather distant from the concerns of Plato and Wimsatt, and are best left to debates between Marxists and Catholics. (My own sympathies are with the Catholics.)

Two views of "the white itself" —

 "So did God cause the big bang?
 Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
 I finally reach over to my bookshelf
 for The Devil's Bible.
 Turning to Genesis I read:
 'In the beginning
 there was nothing.
 And God said,
 'Let there be light!'
 And there was still nothing,
 but now you could see it.'"
 
 -- Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
    Slate's "High Concept" department 

 

  

"The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light."

-- Delmore Schwartz

High Concept, continued:

“In the beginning there was nothing.
 And God said, ‘Let there be light!’
 And there was still nothing,
 but now you could see it.“

— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
    Slate‘s “High Concept” department

Related material:

1. On the phrase “verbum mentis”
2. From Satan’s Rhetoric, by Armando Maggi
   (University of Chicago Press, 2001):

Related background on Pearson — 

Related background on Roberts —

Related material from a Log24 search for “Holy Cross” —

Alan Portner on Jan. 24, reviewing a current Kansas City production
of David Auburn's 2000 play "Proof" —

"PROOF is a term from the world of
high level theoretical mathematics.
It is a mathematical expression that
describes a new conceptual idea."

My reaction to this production and to the review —

"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.

Frogs:

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time."

— Freeman Dyson (See July 22, 2011)

A Rhetorical Question:

Robert Osserman in 2004—

"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….

Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"

A Rhetorical Answer:

Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"

Related material:

• "Decomposition" in this journal 
• "What is Truth (continued)," May 1, 2012
• The Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT)
• Remarks on SAT by Stanislav Busygin
• A related remark on complexity by Busygin
• Hashtag #sexyface and the Empty Chair

University Diaries  today—

"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."

This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .

Today's New York Lottery—

A quote suggested by the UD  post—

"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté  (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."

— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut

Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut  and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—

(Click images to enlarge.)

Cool Mystery:

Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."

As for the midday numbers—

For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).

For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs.
Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of
mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in
concepts that unify our thinking and bring together
diverse problems from different parts of the
landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see
only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in
the details of particular objects, and they solve
problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but
many of my best friends are birds. The main theme
of my talk tonight is this. Mathematics needs both
birds and frogs. Mathematics is rich and beautiful
because birds give it broad visions and frogs give it
intricate details. Mathematics is both great art and
important science, because it combines generality
of concepts with depth of structures. It is stupid to
claim that birds are better than frogs because they
see farther, or that frogs are better than birds
because they see deeper. The world of mathematics
is both broad and deep, and we need birds and
frogs working together to explore it.

This talk is called the Einstein lecture…."

— Freeman Dyson, Notices of the American
Mathematical Society , February 2009

The Didion reading was suggested by the "6212" in yesterday evening's New York Lottery.

Continued from May 18, 2010.

Previous logo for the New York Times  feature "The Stone"—

Today's new logo, appearing retroactively—

Comparison—

From the October 3 "The Stone," Hegel on Wall Street—

The “Phenomenology” is a philosophical portrait gallery that presents depictions, one after another, of different, fundamental ways in which individuals and societies have understood themselves.  Each self-understanding has two parts: an account of how a particular kind of self understands itself and, then, an account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart.  Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond.  With great drama, he claims that his narrative is a “highway of despair.”

— J.M. Bernstein of the New School for Social Research

A two-part self-understanding that is not  from Hegel—

1. An account of how a particular kind of self understands itself:

2. An account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart:

or, Deja Vu All Over Again

Top two obituaries in this morning's NY Times list–

Simons reportedly died on April 5,
Aubrey on April 6.

This journal on those dates–

April 5 —

April 6 —

From James A. Michener‘s The Source:

“Trouble started in a quarter that neither Uriel nor Zadok could have foreseen.  For many generations the wiser men of Zadok’s clan had worshipped El-Shaddai with the understanding that whereas Canaanites and Egyptians could see their gods directly, El-Shaddai was invisible and inhabited no specific place.  Unequivocally the Hebrew patriarchs had preached this concept and the sager men of the clans accepted it, but to the average Hebrew who was not a philosopher the theory of a god who lived nowhere, who did not even exist in corporeal form, was not easy to comprehend.  Such people were willing to agree with Zadok that their god did not live on this mountain– the one directly ahead– but they suspected that he did live on some mountain nearby, and when they said this they pictured an elderly man with a white beard who lived in a proper tent and whom they might one day see and touch.  If questioned, they would have said that they expected El-Shaddai to look much like their father Zadok, but with a longer beard, a stronger voice, and more penetrating eyes.

Now, as these simpler-minded Hebrews settled down outside the walls of Makor, they began to see Canaanite processions leave the main gate and climb the mountain to the north, seeking the high place where Baal lived, and they witnessed the joy which men experienced when visiting their god, and the Hebrews began in subtle ways and easy steps to evolve the idea that Baal, who obviously lived in a mountain, and El-Shaddai, who was reported to do so, must have much in common.  Furtively at first, and then openly, they began to climb the footpath to the place of Baal, where they found a monolith rising from the highest point of rock.  Here was a tangible thing they could comprehend, and after much searching along the face of the mountain, a group of Hebrew men found a straight rock of size equal to the one accorded Baal, and with much effort they dragged it one starless night to the mountain top, where they installed it not far from the home of Baal….”

Rabbi Chitrik died on
Valentine’s Day, 2006,
having had a heart attack
on Feb. 8, 2006–

Grammy Night.

The above monolith is perhaps more
closely related to El-Shaddai than to
Madonna, Grammy Night, and Baal.
It reflects my own interests
(Mathematics and Narrative)
and those of Martin Buber
(Jews on Fiction):
 

“Among Buber’s early philosophical influences were Kant’s Prolegomena, which he read at the age of fourteen, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.  Whereas Kant had a calming influence on the young mind troubled by the aporia of infinite versus finite time, Nietzsche’s doctrine of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’ constituted a powerful negative seduction.  By the time Buber graduated from Gymnasium he felt he had overcome this seduction, but Nietzsche’s prophetic tone and aphoristic style are evident in Buber’s subsequent writings.”

— Plato.stanford.edu

Martin Buber

Rabbi Chitrik

The Lincoln Brigade



Marches On.

As yesterday’s Lincoln’s Birthday entry indicated, my own sympathies are not with the “created equal” crowd.  Still, the Catholic Fascism of Franco admirer Andrew Cusack seems somewhat over-the-top.  A more thoughtful approach to these matters may be found in a recommendation by Ross Douthat at The American Scene:

Read Eve Tushnet on the virtues of The Man in the High Castle.

Related material: Log24 on Nov. 14, Nov. 15, and Nov. 16, 2003.

Another item of interest from Eve:

“Transubstantiation [is equivalent but not equal to] art (deceptive accident hides truthful substance), as vs. Plato’s condemnation of the physical & the fictive? (Geo. Steiner)”

Related material:

“In Grammars of Creation, more than in his 1989 book Real Presences, Steiner acknowledges that his argument rests on inescapably Christian foundations. In fact, he has in the past sometimes written in a strongly anti–Christian vein, while the present book reflects the influence of, among others, Miri Rubin, whose Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture is credited in a footnote. Steiner asserts that, after the Platonisms and Gnosticisms of late antiquity, it is the doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation that mark ‘the disciplining of Western syntax and conceptualization’ in philosophy and art. ‘Every heading met with in a study of “creation,” every nuance of analytic and figural discourse,’ he says, derives from incarnation and transubstantiation, ‘concepts utterly alien to either Judaic or Hellenic perspectives– though they did, in a sense, arise from the collisions and commerce between both.’….

The incarnation of God in the Son, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into his body and blood, are ‘a mysterium, an articulated, subtly innervated attempt to reason the irrational at the very highest levels of intellectual pressure.’ ‘Uniquely, perhaps, the hammering out of the teaching of the eucharist compels Western thought to relate the depth of the unconscious and of pre-history with speculative abstractions at the boundaries of logic and of linguistic philosophy.’ Later, the ‘perhaps’ in that claim seems to have disappeared:

At every significant point, Western philosophies of art and Western poetics draw their secular idiom from the substratum of Christological debate. Like no other event in our mental history, the postulate of God’s kenosis through Jesus and of the never-ending availability of the Savior in the wafer and wine of the eucharist, conditions not only the development of Western art and rhetoric itself, but at a much deeper level, that of our understanding and reception of the truth of art– a truth antithetical to the condemnation of the fictive in Plato.

This truth reaches its unrepeated perfection in Dante, says Steiner. In Dante, ‘It rounds in glory the investigation of creativity and creation, of divine authorship and human poesis, of the concentric spheres of the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the theological. Now truth and fiction are made one, now imagination is prayer, and Plato’s exile of the poets refuted.’ In the fashionable critical theories of our day, we witness ‘endeavors of the aesthetic to flee from incarnation.’ ‘It is the old heresies which revive in the models of absence, of negation or erasure, of the deferral of meaning in late–twentieth–century deconstruction. The counter-semantics of the deconstructionist, his refusal to ascribe a stable significance to the sign, are moves familiar to [an earlier] negative theology.’ Heidegger’s poetics of ‘pure immanence’ are but one more attempt ‘to liberate our experience of sense and of form from the grip of the theophanic.’ But, Steiner suggests, attempted flights from the reality of Corpus Christi will not carry the day. ‘Two millennia are only a brief moment.’

George W. Bush,
Liberal!

Part I:

Part II:

A search on liberal “free trade” leads to the following quote:

“One of the central concepts of classical liberal economic thought is the superiority of free trade over protectionism.”

Therefore George W. Bush, by courageously advocating free trade despite its political unpopularity, is a classic liberal.

Part III:

Context for the above quote:

The Liberal Agenda for the 21st Century

George W. Bush’s free-trade policy
fits right in.

Part IV:

The Conservative Alternative…

Patrick J. Buchanan,

author of “The Death of Manufacturing“

and A Republic, Not an Empire.

“Let it be said: George Bush is beatable. He has no explanation and no cure for the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs at Depression rates, no plan to stop the outsourcing of white-collar jobs to Asia, no desire or will to stop the invasion from Mexico.

Yet, he remains a favorite against Kerry, because Kerry has no answers, either. Both are globalists. Both are free-traders. Both favor open borders. Again, it needs to be said:  There is no conservative party in America.”

— Patrick J. Buchanan, Feb. 2, 2004

Not yet, there isn’t.

Mental Health Month, Day 24:

The Sacred Day of
Kali, the Dark Lady

On this day, Gypsies from all over Europe gather in Provence for the sacred day of St. Sarah, also known as Kali.

Various representations of Kali exist; there is a novel about the ways men have pictured her:

The above is one of the best descriptions of Kali I know of in literature; another is in a short story by Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning.”   It is not coincidental that one collection of Leiber’s writings is called “Dark Ladies.”

My journal note “Biblical Proportions” was in part inspired by Leiber.

Frank Sinatra may have pictured her as Ava Gardner.  I think I saw her the night Sinatra died… hence my entries of March 31 and April 2, 2003. 

It is perhaps not irrelevant that Kali is, among other things, a mother goddess, and that my entry “Raiders of the Lost Matrix” of May 20 deals with this concept and with the number 24.

The above religious symbol (see “Damnation Morning“) pictures both the axes of symmetry of the square¹ and a pattern with intriguing combinatorial properties².  It also is the basis of a puzzle³ I purchased on August 29, 1997 — Judgment Day in Terminator 2.  Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in that film is an excellent representation of the Dark Lady, both as mother figure and as Death Goddess.

 
Sarah Connor

Background music: “Bit by bit…” — Stephen Sondheim… See Sondheim and the Judgment Day puzzle in my entry of May 20. The Lottery Covenant.

¹ A. W. Joshi, Elements of Group Theory for Physicists, Third Edition, Wiley, 1982, p. 5

² V. K. Balakrishnan, Combinatorics, McGraw-Hill, 1995, p. 180

³ The Izzi Puzzle