From Wednesday, St. Bridget's Day, 2023 —
Poetic meditation from The New Yorker today —
"If the tendency of rhyme, like that of desire,
is to pull distant things together
and force their boundaries to blur,
then the countervailing force in this book,
the one that makes it go, is the impulse
toward narrative, toward making sense of
the passage of time."
“How’s tricks?” — Cop in “Impulse” (1990).
(See a Log24 search for that word.)
That line of dialogue is in memory of a woman who reportedly
died in Bellingham, Washington, on January 11, 2021.
See also Bellingham in this journal.
| Lines from “Impulse,” a 1990 Sondra Locke film —
He died by two contact Definitely small caliber. There’s almost no rigor, so time of death an anonymous woman If a broad did it, she sure knew |
“Bing bang . . . .” — Song lyric quoted here on 7/01.
The above title was suggested by a scene in Body Double (1984) . . .
Variations, starring Theresa Russell, on related themes —
The De Palma Balcony in Body Double , and “ready for my closeup” —
“Bing bang, I heard the whole gang!”
Summary —
Wil S. Hylton today in the online New York Times —
"It seems to me now, with greater reflection,
that the value of experiencing another person’s art
is not merely the work itself, but the opportunity
it presents to connect with the interior impulse of another.
The arts occupy a vanishing space in modern life:
They offer one of the last lingering places to seek out
empathy for its own sake, and to the extent that
an artist’s work is frustrating or difficult or awful,
you could say this allows greater opportunity to try to
meet it. I am not saying there is no room for discriminating
taste and judgment, just that there is also, I think,
this other portal through which to experience creative work
and to access a different kind of beauty, which might be
called communion."
Or damnation.
See a post by Peter Woit from Sept. 24, 2005 — Dirac's Hidden Geometry.
The connection, if any, with recent Log24 posts on Dirac and Geometry
is not immediately apparent. Some related remarks from a novel —
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From Broken Symmetries by Paul Preuss "He pondered the source of her fascination with the occult, which sooner or later seemed to entangle a lot of thoughtful people who were not already mired in establishmentarian science or religion. It was the religious impulse, at base. Even reason itself could function as a religion, he supposed— but only for those of severely limited imagination. He’d toyed with 'psi' himself, written a couple of papers now much quoted by crackpots, to his chagrin. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand— for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox. Quantum theory was inextricable from the uncertainty relations. The classical fox knows many things, but the quantum-mechanical hedgehog knows only one big thing— at a time. 'Complementarity,' Bohr had called it, a rubbery notion the great professor had stretched to include numerous pairs of opposites. Peter Slater was willing to call it absurdity, and unlike some of his older colleagues who, following in Einstein’s footsteps, demanded causal explanations for everything (at least in principle), Peter had never thirsted after 'hidden variables' to explain what could not be pictured. Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods. The psychic investigators, on the other hand, demanded to know how the mind and the psychical world were related. Through ectoplasm, perhaps? Some fifth force of nature? Extra dimensions of spacetime? All these naive explanations were on a par with the assumption that psi is propagated by a species of nonlocal hidden variables, the favored explanation of sophisticates; ignotum per ignotius . 'In this connection one should particularly remember that the human language permits the construction of sentences which do not involve any consequences and which therefore have no content at all…' The words were Heisenberg’s, lecturing in 1929 on the irreducible ambiguity of the uncertainty relations. They reminded Peter of Evan Harris Walker’s ingenious theory of the psi force, a theory that assigned psi both positive and negative values in such a way that the mere presence of a skeptic in the near vicinity of a sensitive psychic investigation could force null results. Neat, Dr. Walker, thought Peter Slater— neat, and totally without content. One had to be willing to tolerate ambiguity; one had to be willing to be crazy. Heisenberg himself was only human— he’d persuasively woven ambiguity into the fabric of the universe itself, but in that same set of 1929 lectures he’d rejected Dirac’s then-new wave equations with the remark, 'Here spontaneous transitions may occur to the states of negative energy; as these have never been observed, the theory is certainly wrong.' It was a reasonable conclusion, and that was its fault, for Dirac’s equations suggested the existence of antimatter: the first antiparticles, whose existence might never have been suspected without Dirac’s crazy results, were found less than three years later. Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem— they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry." |
Particularly relevant …
"Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him,
mere formal relationships which existed at all times,
everywhere, at once."
Some related pure mathematics —
A passage suggested by the previous post, Box Office:
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From the 1959 Fritz Leiber story "Damnation Morning" — She looked at me and then nodded. She said carefully, “The person you killed or doomed is still in the room.” An aching impulse twisted me a little. “Maybe I should try to go back––” I began. “Try to go back and unite the selves . . .” “It’s too late now,” she repeated. “But I want to,” I persisted. “There’s something pulling at me, like a chain hooked to my chest.” She smiled unpleasantly. “Of course there is,” she said. “It’s the vampire in you—the same thing that drew me to your room or would draw any Spider or Snake. The blood scent of the person you killed or doomed.” |
New York Daily News , 2:55 PM EST today—
Joe Simon, who dreamed up the star-spangled super hero Captain America while riding on a Manhattan bus during the early days of World War II, died Thursday [Dec. 15] after an undisclosed illness. He was 98.
New York Times , about 10 PM EST today—
Joe Simon, a writer, editor and illustrator of comic books who was a co-creator of the superhero Captain America, conceived out of a patriotic impulse as war was roiling Europe, died on Wednesday [Dec. 14] at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
The discrepancy is perhaps due to initial reports that quoted Simon's family as saying he died "Wednesday night."
Simon was a co-creator of Captain America. For some background on Simon and a photo with his fellow comic artist Jerry Robinson, co-creator of The Joker, see a Washington Post article from this afternoon. Robinson died on either Wednesday, Dec. 7, or Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011.
Jerry Robinson, a pioneer in the early days of Batman comics and a key force in the creation of Robin the Boy Wonder; the Joker; Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred; and Two-Face, died Wednesday afternoon [Dec. 7] in New York City. He was 89.
CNN—
Cartoonist Jerry Robinson, who worked on the earliest Batman comics and claimed credit for creating the super-villain The Joker, died Thursday [Dec. 8] at the age of 89, his family confirmed.
A picture by Robinson—
The Joker in January 1943
with a Nov. 27 calendar page
A non-joke from a more recent November 27—
Post 2310 in yesterday evening’s Short Story links to two posts
from 2006 inspired by Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy—
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Thursday, May 25, 2006
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The first paragraph of
“Zeta Functions of Groups: The Quest for Order
Versus the Flight from Ennui,” by Marcus du Sautoy,
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford—
“Mathematics is about the search for patterns,
to see order where others see chaos. We are very lucky
to find ourselves studying a subject which is neither so rigid
that the patterns are easy, yet not too complicated
lest our brains fail to master its complexities.
John Cawelti sums up this interplay perfectly in a book*
not about mathematics but about mystery and romance:
‘if we seek order and security, the result is likely to be
boredom and sameness. But rejecting order for the sake
of change and novelty brings danger and uncertainty…
the history of culture can be interpreted as a dynamic
tension between these two basic impulses…
between the quest for order and the flight from ennui.”’
* John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance:
Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture ,
University of Chicago Press, 1976.
[Cawelti cites as his souce on interpreting “the history
of culture” Harry Berger, Jr., “Naive Consciousness and
Culture Change: An Essay in Historical Structuralism,”
Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association ,
Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 1973): page 35.]
Here du Sautoy paints mathematicians as seekers of order,
apparently not realizing that the author he approvingly quotes
states that seekers of order face the danger of boredom.
Another danger to seekers
of order is, of course, seeing
order where there is none.
"Center loosens, forms again elsewhere…"
— Zelazny, quoted here for Women's History Month.
"I know it's not much but it's the best I can do.
My gift is my song and this one's for you."
— Elton John song. John hosts SNL tonight.
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Blue Jean Baby… |
LA Lady… |
Susanne for Suzanne
From pages 7-8 of William York Tindall’s Literary Symbolism (Columbia U. Press, 1955)—
... According to Cassirer's Essay on Man, as we have seen, art is a symbolic form, parallel in respect of this to religion or science. Each of these forms builds up a universe that enables man to interpret and organize his experience; and each is a discovery, because a creation, of reality. Although similar in func- tion, the forms differ in the kind of reality built. Whereas science builds it of facts, art builds it of feelings, intuitions of quality, and the other distractions of our inner life— and in their degrees so do myth and religion. What art, myth, and religion are, Cassirer con- fesses, cannot be expressed by a logical definition. Nevertheless, let us see what Clive Bell says about art. He calls it "significant form," but what that is he is unable to say. Having no quarrel with art as form, we may, however, question its signifi- cance. By significant he cannot mean important in the sense of having import, nor can he mean having the function of a sign; for to him art, lacking reference to nature, is insignificant. Since, however, he tells us that a work of art "expresses" the emotion of its creator and "provokes" an emotion in its contemplator,he seems to imply that his significant means expressive and provocative. The emotion expressed and provoked is an "aesthetic emotion," contem- plative, detached from all concerns of utility and from all reference. Attempting to explain Bell's significant form, Roger Fry, equally devoted to Whistler and art for art's sake, says that Flaubert's "ex- pression of the idea" is as near as he can get to it, but neither Flaubert nor Fry tells what is meant by idea. To "evoke" it, however, the artist creates an "expressive design" or "symbolic form," by which the spirit "communicates its most secret and indefinable impulses." Susanne Langer,who occupies a place somewhere between Fry and Cassirer, though nearer the latter, once said in a seminar that a work of art is an "unassigned syntactical symbol." Since this defini- End of page 7 tion does not appear in her latest book, she may have rejected it, but it seems far more precise than Fry's attempt. By unassigned she prob- ably intends insignificant in the sense of lacking sign value or fixed reference; syntactical implies a form composed of parts in relation- ship to one another; and a symbol, according to Feeling and Form, is "any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction." Too austere for my taste, this account of symbol seems to need elaboration, which, to be sure, her book provides. For the present, however, taking symbol to mean an outward device for presenting an inward state, and taking unassigned and syntactical as I think she uses them, let us tentatively admire her definition of the work of art.
Oh, the red leaf looks to the hard gray stone
To each other, they know what they mean
— Suzanne Vega, “Song in Red and Gray“
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—
Various forms of “the modern movement” that include “… the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted…” —marxists.org:
“One of the primary critiques of modernism that Learning from Las Vegas was engaged in, as Frederic [sic] Jameson clearly noted, was the dialectic between inside and outside and the assumption that the outside expressed the interior.* Let’s call this the modernist drive for ‘expressive transparency.'”
— Aron Vinegar of Ohio State U., “Skepticism and the Ordinary: From Burnt Norton to Las Vegas“
* Jameson, Frederic [sic]. 1988. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.” The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986. Volume 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 59.
Steven Helmling, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson, SUNY Press, 2001, p. 54–
Jameson “figures the inside/outside problem in the metaphor of the ‘prison-house of language’….”
“… Jung presents a diagram
to illustrate the dynamic
movements of the self….”
…the movement of
a self in the rock…
— Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate,
by Harold Bloom,
Cornell U. Press, 1977
“… just as God defeats the devil:
this bridge exists….”
— Andre Weil
The bridge illustration
is thanks to Magneto.
A Date Which Will
Live in Infamy
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Log24.net Sunday, Annals of Education: Eyes on the Prize Dialogue from Will: He used to just put a belt, Sean: Gotta go with the belt, there. Will: I used to go with the wrench.
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Today’s saint’s day:
St. Ursula
Today’s birthday:
Ursula K. Le Guin
Today’s Scripture:
Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance
“Then, on impulse, Phædrus went over to his bookshelf and picked out a small, blue, cardboard-bound book. He’d hand-copied this book and bound it himself years before, when he couldn’t find a copy for sale anywhere. It was the 2,400-year-old Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. He began to read….
Phædrus read on through line after line, verse after verse of this, watched them match, fit, slip into place. Exactly. This was what he meant. This was what he’d been saying all along, only poorly, mechanistically. There was nothing vague or inexact about this book. It was as precise and definite as it could be. It was what he had been saying, only in a different language with different roots and origins. He was from another valley seeing what was in this valley, not now as a story told by strangers but as a part of the valley he was from. He was seeing it all.
He had broken the code.
He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.”
ART WARS:
Apollo and Dionysus
From the New York Times of October 9, 2002:
Daniel Deverell Perry, a Long Island architect who created the marble temple of art housing the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., died Oct. 2 in Woodstock, N.Y…. He was 97.
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From The Birth of Tragedy, by Friedrich Nietzsche (tr. by Shaun Whiteside):
Chapter 1….
To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that in the Greek world there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.
Chapter 25….
From the foundation of all existence, the Dionysiac substratum of the world, no more can enter the consciousness of the human individual than can be overcome once more by that Apolline power of transfiguration, so that both of these artistic impulses are forced to unfold in strict proportion to one another, according to the law of eternal justice. Where the Dionysiac powers have risen as impetuously as we now experience them, Apollo, enveloped in a cloud, must also have descended to us; some future generation will behold his most luxuriant effects of beauty.
Notes:
“When it opened in 1955, overlooking 140 acres of fields and ponds, Arts News celebrated its elegant galleries as the ‘best organized and most highly functional museum erected anywhere.'”
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