Search this journal for the three words of the title.
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Monday, December 11, 2006
Monday December 11, 2006
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
“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.”
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.'”
“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
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.
hermit of the Escorial,” is less lonely now.
Comments Off on Monday December 11, 2006
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Thursday July 27, 2006
Real Numbers:
720,
513
(NY Lottery today)
“Was there really a cherubim
waiting at the star-watching rock…?
Was he real?
What is real?”
— Madeleine L’Engle,
A Wind in the Door,
quoted at math16.com
7/20:
Real
5/13:
A Fold in Time
Comments Off on Thursday July 27, 2006
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Saturday May 13, 2006
ART WARS continued…
A Fold in Time
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Above: Braque and tesseract
“The senses deform, the mind forms. Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.”
— Georges Braque, Reflections on Painting, 1917
Those who wish to follow Braque’s advice may try the following exercise from a book first published in 1937:
Hint: See the above picture of
Braque and the construction of
a tesseract.
Related material:
Storyline and Time Fold
(both of Oct. 10, 2003),
and the following–
(both of Oct. 10, 2003),
and the following–
“Time, for L’Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated, ‘When you bring a sheet off the line, you can’t handle it until it’s folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can’t exist until it’s folded– or it’s a story without a book.'”
— Cynthia Zarin on Madeleine L’Engle,
“The Storyteller,” in The New Yorker,
issue dated April 12, 2004
Friday, October 10, 2003
Friday October 10, 2003
Storyline
To hear a story, or to read it straight through from start to finish, is to travel along a one-dimensional line. A well-structured story has, however, more than one dimension.
Juxtaposing scenes shows that details that seem to be far apart in the telling (or the living) of a story may in fact be closely related.
Here is an example from the film “Contact,” in which a young girl’s drawing and a vision of paradise are no longer separated by the time it takes to tell (or live) the story:
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(See my entry of Michaelmas 2002.)
For details of how time is “folded”
by artists and poets, see the following:
Comments Off on Friday October 10, 2003