An image from the opening of the Netflix series “Locke & Key” —
See also Omega in this journal.
“The key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings.”
– Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Philosophy in a New Key
(With apologies to Susanne K. Langer, née Susanne Katherina Knauth)
See too the buzzard-related Catch-22 song —
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Monday, October 21, 2019
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Langer
"Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.—
are just as capable of articulation ,
i.e. of complex combination, as words.
But the laws that govern this sort of articulation
are altogether different from the laws of syntax
that govern language. The most radical difference
is that visual forms are not discursive .
They do not present their constituents successively,
but simultaneously, so the relations determining
a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision."
— Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
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Thursday, August 29, 2019
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Friday, October 20, 2017
Heart of the Monkey God
In Memoriam
"Renowned Canadian theologian Gregory Baum, 94,
author of the first draft of the Second Vatican Council's
'Nostra Aetate,' died Oct. 18 in a Montreal hospital."
— National Catholic Reporter , Oct. 20, 2017
October 18 was St. Luke's Day.
From the Log24 post "Prose" on that date —
"Mister Monkey . . . . is also Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god . . . ."
— Cathleeen Schine in an online October 17 NY Times review.
From the novel under review —
"Only the heart of the monkey god is large enough
to contain the hearts and souls of all the monkeys,
all the humans, the gods, every shining thread
that connects them."
— Francine Prose, Mister Monkey: A Novel (p. 263).
HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
See as well all posts now tagged Prose Monkey.
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Sunday, January 1, 2017
9 PM New Year’s Day
See "Four Gods" in this journal.
Phaedrus 265b: "And we made four divisions
of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods . . . ."
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Thursday, December 11, 2014
Friday, October 24, 2014
New Key
See Langer (Harvard U. Press, Third Edition, Jan. 31, 1957, pp. 3-4-5).
See also Old Key : Pythagoras, harmony, and the 3-4-5 triangle.
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Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Plastic Elements
"Step by step, Kepes follows the liberation of the plastic elements:
lines, planes, and colors, and the creation of a world of forms of our own.
The spatial conception interconnects the meaning fragments and
binds them together just as in another period perspective did when it used
a single station point for naturalistic representation."
— S. Giedion, introduction to Language of Vision by Gyorgy Kepes
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Saturday, January 11, 2020
Mathematical Theology (“Art School Confidential” continues.)
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Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Invisible Weaving
See as well a post from this journal on the above date —
June 12, 2014. (That post revisits a post from today's date —
January 7 — eight years ago, in 2012.)
Related material: Dharma Fabric and Symplectic.
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Dharma Fabric
Lines from "Description Without Place" —
"An age is green or red. An age believes
Or it denies. An age is solitude
Or a barricade against the singular man
By the incalculably plural."
— Wallace Stevens
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Monday, January 6, 2020
Art as Experience (Minus Baldessari)
In memory of an artist who reportedly died in Venice, CA, on Jan. 2 —
Two quotes from the website Quotes Sayings —
"I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window
of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast." — John Baldessari
"A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION
IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE" — John Baldessari
The "dead experience" quote is actually from Gyorgy Kepes:
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Thursday, August 29, 2019
Plan 9
Continuing the themes of the last three posts, which
are now also tagged News Women . . .
"publishDate":"04-07-2017 01:48"
"date":"2019-08-21"
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As Well
For some backstory, see
http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=”I+Ching”+48+well .
See as well “elegantly packaged” in this journal.
“Well” in written Chinese is the hashtag symbol,
i.e., the framework of a 3×3 array.
My own favorite 3×3 array is the ABC subsquare
at lower right in the figure below —
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Friday, June 7, 2019
Photo Opportunity
A post for those who, like Paul Simon,
fear and loathe cartoon graveyards
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/obituaries/
rudolf-von-ribbentrop-dead.html
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Thursday, June 6, 2019
Saturday, April 14, 2018
Snow for Hunter*
“Like a rose under the April snow . . .” — Streisand
* For the “Hunter” of the title, see the previous post.
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Friday, October 20, 2017
Punch Lines
From a post last month —
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
— Roy Scheider in "Jaws"
"We're gonna need more holy water."
— "Season of the Witch"
… and for Tom Hanks, Dan Brown, and Francine Prose —
"You're gonna need more typewriters!"
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Thursday, October 19, 2017
Prose (continued from yesterday)
"While Prose's adult works have touched on various subjects,
her fiction for children, which she began writing in earnest
in the mid-1990s, all has a basis in Jewish folklore."
» Read more.
Aficionados of what Dan Brown has called "symbology"
can read about the above right-chevrons symbol in
Fast Forward, a post of November 21, 2010.
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And Howe
The Harvard Crimson , Feb. 28, 2017 —
Cambridge City Councillors formally requested that the Cambridge
Historical Commission consider designating the Abbott Building in
Harvard Square as a historical landmark at its weekly meeting Monday.
. . . .
“There are only a few gems that give the really Square character.”
Councillor Dennis J. Carlone said. “And in the heart of the square,
it’s this building.”
See as well the cover of
The Monkey Grammarian ,
a book by Octavio Paz —
A related NPR book review yesterday —
"Like Curious George , another vaguely imperialist children's classic —
which Prose refers to frequently — the simian hero of Mister Monkey
gets into trouble in his new urban environment."
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Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Prose
New York Times review of a new novel by Francine Prose —
"Mister Monkey . . . . is also Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god . . . ."
— Cathleeen Schine in in the above October 17 review.
A related book —
See as well The Monkey Grammarian in this journal.
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Wednesday, September 6, 2017
National Comedy
From a search in this journal for "More Holy Water" —
A post of January 7, 2011, has the following:
"Infinite Jest… now stands as the principal contender
for what serious literature can aspire to
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."
— All Things Shining, a work of pop philosophy
published January 4th
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
— Roy Scheider in "Jaws"
"We're gonna need more holy water."
— "Season of the Witch"
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Sunday, January 1, 2017
The Unhurried Curve
From today's previous post —
"The unhurried curve got me.
It was like the horizon of a world
that made a non-world of
all of the space outside it."
— Peter Schjeldahl, "Postscript: Ellsworth Kelly,"
The New Yorker , December 30, 2015
Related figures —
Art critic Robert Hughes in "The Space of Horizons,"
a Log24 post of August 7, 2012:
Religion writer Huston Smith, who reportedly died
on December 30, 2016:
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Like the Horizon
(Continued from a remark by art critic Peter Schjeldahl quoted here
last year on New Year’s Day in the post “Art as Religion.”)
“The unhurried curve got me.
It was like the horizon of a world
that made a non-world of
all of the space outside it.”
— Peter Schjeldahl, “Postscript: Ellsworth Kelly,”
The New Yorker , December 30, 2015
This suggests some further material from the paper
that was quoted here yesterday on New Year’s Eve —
“In teaching a course on combinatorics I have found
students doubting the existence of a finite projective
plane geometry with thirteen points on the grounds
that they could not draw it (with ‘straight’ lines)
on paper although they had tried to do so. Such a
lack of appreciation of the spirit of the subject is but
a consequence of the elements of formal geometry
no longer being taught in undergraduate courses.
Yet these students were demanding the best proof of
existence, namely, production of the object described.”
— Derrick Breach (See his obituary from 1996.)
A related illustration of the 13-point projective plane
from the University of Western Australia:
Projective plane of order 3
(The four points on the curve
at the right of the image are
the points on the line at infinity .)
The above image is from a post of August 7, 2012,
“The Space of Horizons.” A related image —
Click on the above image for further remarks.
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Sunday, July 3, 2016
Articulation
Notes for a monkey grammarian —
"Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.—
are just as capable of articulation ,
i.e. of complex combination, as words.
But the laws that govern this sort of articulation
are altogether different from the laws of syntax
that govern language. The most radical difference
is that visual forms are not discursive .
They do not present their constituents successively,
but simultaneously, so the relations determining
a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision."
— Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
See also Langer's New Key in this journal.
Related material —
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Monday, June 20, 2016
Shema, Salinger
"I've got a brand-new pair of roller skates …"
Related material — Salinger in the Park and
Philosophy in a New Key.
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Saturday, November 1, 2014
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Variation on a Simple Tune
The previous post discussed a tune ending in the following
sequence of notes (symbols as in a Wikipedia article):
C#4 B4 A4 E4 G4 .
(This sequence was approximated in that post by integers
representing the relative frequencies of the notes: 5 9 8 6 7 .)
Yesterday’s simple tune may suggest to some a similar refrain:
D4 E4 C4 C3 G3 .
This is, as a helpful page at Ars Nova Software explains,
the theme from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
The notes of the just intonation major scale:
The corresponding ratios from Close Encounters are…
9/8 5/4 1/1 1/2 3/4 , or, in whole numbers, 9 10 8 4 6.
These numbers also correspond, as in yesterday’s post, to the notes
B4 C#5 A4 A3 E4 .
Click the image below to try this on an online keyboard, playing keys
9 10 8 4 6 for Close Encounters.
“And you can tell everybody this is your song…”
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Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Simple Tune
1 2 3 4 5 9 8 6 7
220 * (1/4) = 55 = A1
220 * (2/4) = 110 = A2
220 * (3/4) = 165 = approximately E3 (164.8)
220 * (4/4) = 220 = A3
220 * (5/4) = 275 = approximately C♯4/D♭4 (277.2)
220 * (6/4) = 330 = approximately E4 (329.6)
220 * (7/4) = 385 = approximately G4 (392.0)
220 * (8/4) = 440 = A4
220 * (9/4) = 495 = approximately B4 (493.9)
Exact frequencies (such as 277.2) are from Wikipedia’s Piano key frequencies.
“It may be quite simple, but now that it’s done….“
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Sunday, September 7, 2014
Sunday School
In memory of Joan Rivers
This post was suggested by the previous post's quote
"the subject’s desires are scripted and orchestrated
by an unconscious fundamental fantasy,"
and by one of my favorite musical fantasies:
Melanie – Brand New Key ('71) .
Academics may prefer the following —
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Monday, August 11, 2014
Syntactic/Symplectic
(Continued from August 9, 2014.)
Syntactic:
Symplectic:
"Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.— are just as capable of
articulation , i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern
this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that
govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not
discursive . They do not present their constituents successively, but
simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped
in one act of vision."
– Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
For examples, see The Diamond-Theorem Correlation
in Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).
This is a symplectic correlation,* constructed using the following
visual structure:
.
* Defined in (for instance) Paul B. Yale, Geometry and Symmetry ,
Holden-Day, 1968, sections 6.9 and 6.10.
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Monday, February 25, 2013
Off the Road
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Saturday, April 21, 2012
Finding a Form
In "Contact," Dr. Arroway is shown the key to the Primer—
In this journal, fictional symbologist Robert Langdon is shown a cube—
"Confusion is nothing new." — Song lyric
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Monday, November 22, 2010
Backstory
Steve Martin's new novel An Object of Beauty will be released tomorrow.
"The most charmingly rendered female schemer since Truman Capote's Holly Golightly."
— Elle magazine
"Martin compresses the wild and crazy end of the millennium
and finds in this piercing novel a sardonic morality tale….
Exposes the sound and fury of the rarified Manhattan art world."
— Publishers Weekly
"Like Steve Martin's Shopgirl , this very different novel will captivate your attention from start to finish."
— Joyce Carol Oates
Martin on his character Ray Porter in the novella Shopgirl (published Oct. 11, 2000)—
"He said, 'I wrote a piece of code
that they just can’t seem to do without.'
He was a symbolic logician. That was his career…."
As the above review notes, Martin's new book is about art at the end of the millennium.
See also Art Wars: Geometry as Conceptual Art
and some of my own notes from 2000 (March 9) in "Is Nothing Sacred?"
Some related material —
A paperback with a striking cover (artist unknown)—
Note that the background may be constructed from
any of four distinct motifs. For another approach to these
motifs in a philosophical context, see June 8, 2010.
"Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.— are just as capable of articulation , i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive . They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision."
– Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
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Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Language and Form
In memory of S. Neil Fujita, who died last Saturday—
Fujita did the cover art for this edition.
Another book by Langer with a striking cover (artist unknown)—
Note that the background may be constructed from
any of four distinct motifs. For another approach to these
motifs in a philosophical context, see June 8, 2010.
"Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.— are just as capable of articulation , i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive . They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision."
— Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
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Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
"Caught up
in circles…"
in circles…"
— Song lyric,
Cyndi Lauper
Alethiometer from
"The Golden Compass"
Update:
See also this morning's
later entry, illustrating
the next line of Cyndi
Lauper's classic lyric
"Time After Time" —
"… Confusion is
nothing new."
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