Log24

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Review

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:52 pm

The title of the previous post, "Church and Temple," together
with today's online New York Times  obituaries for singer 
Lara Saint Paul (d. May 8) and playwright Leah Rose Napolin
(d. May 13), suggests a review

See as well a Log24 search for Isaac Singer.

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

The Pentagram Papers

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:40 pm

(Continued)

From a Log24 post of March 4, 2008 —

SINGER, ISAAC:
"Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?"
— Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.

"Sets forth his own aims in writing for children and laments
'slice of life' and chaos in children's literature. Maintains that
children like good plots, logic, and clarity, and that they
have a concern for 'so-called eternal questions.'"

— An Annotated Listing of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson

"She returned the smile, then looked across the room to
her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, and to their father,
who were deep in concentration, bent over the model
they were building of a tesseract: the square squared,
and squared again: a construction of the dimension of time."

— A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L'Engle

Cover of 'A Swiftly Tilting Planet' and picture of tesseract

For "the dimension of time," see A Fold in TimeTime Fold,
and Diamond Theory in 1937

A Swiftly Tilting Planet  is a fantasy for children 
set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by
Chile and Argentina.

Ibid.

The pen's point:

Wm. F. Buckley as Archimedes, moving the world with a giant pen as lever. The pen's point is applied to southern South America.
John Trever, Albuquerque Journal, 2/29/08

Note the figure on the cover of National Review  above —

A related figure from Pentagram Design

See, more generally,  Isaac Singer  in this  journal.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Occupy Space  Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:33 am

Alternate Title —

Types of Ambiguity:
The Circle in the Triangle,
the Singer in the Song.

From an excellent June 17 Wall Street Journal  review of a new
Isaac Bashevis Singer book from Princeton University Press

" 'Old Truths and New Clichés,' a collection of 19
prose articles, most appearing in English for the
first time, reveals that Singer was as consummate
an essayist as he was a teller of tales." — Benjamin Balint 

From a search in this  journal for Singer

Related material —

From a post of June 2, "Self-Enclosing" —

"… the self-enclosing processes by which late 20th-century
American academics established and secured their status
(you painfully develop a thesis in competition with your peers,
then you keep on elaborating it until you die)."

— Colin Burrow in the June 9, 2022 issue 
of London Review of Books

Affine transformation of 'magic' squares and triangles: the triangle Lo Shu 

From the December 14, 2021, post Notes on Lines —

Triangle (percussion instrument)

The triangle, a percussion instrument that was
featured prominently in the Tom Stoppard play
"Every Good Boy Deserves Favour."

Friday, September 5, 2008

Friday September 5, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:23 pm
Adult Books
 

On author Madeleine L’Engle:

“Madeleine’s adult books– including the autobiographical titles that eventually would be grouped together as the Crosswicks Journals– A Circle of Quiet (1971), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), The Irrational Season (1976), and Two-Part Invention (1988)– were edited by Robert Giroux. If Roger Straus was FSG’s [Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s] worldly sophisticate presiding over editorial meetings, Bob Giroux was the white-haired, rosy-cheeked favorite uncle (if you happened to have an erudite uncle who had edited T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Isaac Bashevitz Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy).”

Sandra Jordan, School Library Journal, November 1, 2007

On Robert Giroux, who died early this morning:

the gold standard of literary taste.”

For a less demanding standard, see today’s previous entry.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Wednesday March 5, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:09 pm
(Context: March 2-4)

For CENTRAL
Central Intelligence:

"God does not play dice."
— Paraphrase of a remark
by Albert Einstein

Another Nobel Prize winner,
Isaac Bashevis Singer

"a God who speaks in deeds,
not in words, and whose
vocabulary is the Cosmos"

From "The Escapist:
The Reality of Fantasy Games
"–

Platonic solids as Dungeons & Dragons dice
Dungeons & Dragons Dice

 

From today's New York Times:

NY Times obituaries online, March 5, 2008: Gary Gygax, Wm. F. Buckley, Kaddish ad by Hadassah

A Kaddish for Gygax:

 

 

"I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)"


Related material:

For more on the word
"phantasmagoria," see
Log24 on Dec. 12, 2004
and on Sept. 23, 2006.

For phantasmagoria in action,
see Dungeons & Dragons
and Singer's (and others')
Jewish fiction.

For non-phantasmagoria,
see (for instance) the Elements
of Euclid, which culminates
in the construction of the
Platonic solids illustrated above.

See also Geometry for Jews.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Tuesday March 4, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm
… And for a
    Swiftly Tilting
       Shadowed Planet …

Wm. F. Buckley as Archimedes, moving the world with a giant pen as lever. The pen's point is applied to southern South America.
John Trever, Albuquerque Journal, 2/29/08

The pen's point:

Log24, Dec. 11, 2006

SINGER, ISAAC:
"Are Children the
Ultimate Literary Critics?"
— Top of the News 29
(Nov. 1972): 32-36.

"Sets forth his own aims in writing for children and laments 'slice of life' and chaos in children's literature. Maintains that children like good plots, logic, and clarity, and that they have a concern for 'so-called eternal questions.'"

An Annotated Listing
of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson

"She returned the smile, then looked across the room to her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, and to their father, who were deep in concentration, bent over the model they were building of a tesseract: the square squared, and squared again: a construction of the dimension of time."

A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L'Engle

 

Cover of 'A Swiftly Tilting Planet' and picture of tesseract

For "the dimension of time,"
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937
 
A Swiftly Tilting Planet  is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Monday December 11, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am
Geometry and Death

J. G. Ballard on “the architecture of death“:

“… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”

The Guardian, March 20, 2006

Edward Hirsch on Lorca:

“For him, writing is a struggle both with geometry and death.”

— “The Duende,” American Poetry Review, July/August 1999

“Rosenblum writes with
absolute intellectual honesty,
and the effect is sheer liberation….
The disposition of the material is
a model of logic and clarity.”

Harper’s Magazine review
quoted on back cover of
Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,
by Robert Rosenblum
(Abrams paperback, 2001)

SINGER, ISAAC:
“Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?”
 — Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.
“Sets forth his own aims in writing for children
 and laments ‘slice of life’ and chaos in
children’s literature. Maintains that children
like good plots, logic, and clarity,
and that they have a concern for
‘so-called eternal questions.'”

An Annotated Listing of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson

“She returned the smile, then looked
across the room to her youngest brother,
Charles Wallace, and to their father,
who were deep in concentration, bent
over the model they were building
of a tesseract: the square squared,
and squared again: a construction
of the dimension of time.”

A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L’Engle

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061211-Swiftly2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For “the dimension of time,”
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.

For a more adult audience —

In memory of General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday in Santiago, Chile, a quotation from Federico Garcia Lorca‘s lecture on “the Duende” (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933):

“… Philip of Austria… longing to discover the Muse and the Angel in theology, found himself imprisoned by the Duende of cold ardors in that masterwork of the Escorial, where geometry abuts with a dream and the Duende wears the mask of the Muse for the eternal chastisement of the great king.”


Perhaps. Or perhaps Philip, “the lonely
hermit of the Escorial,” is less lonely now.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Monday August 28, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am
Today's Sinner:

Augustine of Hippo, who is said to
have died on this date in 430 A.D.

"He is, after all, not merely taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Augustine

Here is a rather different attempt
to combine the eternal with the temporal:

 

The Eternal

Symbol of necessity,
immutability, and
atemporal eternity:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060828-Cube.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For details, see
finite geometry of
the square and cube
.

The Temporal

Symbol of the
God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060828-Cloud.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For details, see
Under God
(Aug. 11, 2006)

The eternal
combined with
the temporal:

 

Singer 63-cycle in the Galois field GF(64) used to order the I Ching hexagrams

Related material:

Hitler's Still Point and
the previous entry.
 

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Wednesday March 30, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:28 pm

Logocentric Theology

Logic is all about the entertaining of possibilities.”

— Colin McGinn,
Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning,
Harvard U. Press (See yesterday’s entry.)

“God is the sum of all possibilities.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer, according to
the Associated Press “Today in History
feature for today, March 30, 2005

“A probability space is a measure space with total measure one.”

Gregory F. Lawler, Probability Notes

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

Deuteronomy 6:4

For other illustrations of logocentric theology, see

Matrix of the Death God (May 25, 2003),

Transcendental Meditation (July 30, 2003),

and, for Warren Beatty’s birthday today,

Graphical Password
(April 27, 2003).

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