Log24

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Lexicon

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

"A blank underlies the trials of device." — Wallace Stevens

IMAGE- The ninefold square .

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Lexicon

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:45 pm

Continued .

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Lexicon

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

(Continued)

An antidote to Derrida.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Lexicon (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 pm

Online biography of author Cormac McCarthy—

" he left America on the liner Sylvania, intending to visit
the home of his Irish ancestors (a King Cormac McCarthy
built Blarney Castle)." 

Two Years Ago:

Blarney in The Harvard Crimson

Melissa C. Wong, illustration for "Atlas to the Text,"
by Nicholas T. Rinehart:

Thirty Years Ago:

Non-Blarney from a rural outpost—

Illustration for the generalized diamond theorem,
by Steven H. Cullinane: 

See also Barry's Lexicon .

Friday, June 21, 2013

Lexicon

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From the final pages of the new novel
Lexicon , by Max Barry:

"… a fundamental language
of the human mind—
the tongue in which the human animal
speaks to itself at the basest level.
The machine language, in essence…."

"… the questions raised by
this underlying lexicon.
What are its words?
How many are there? ….
Can we learn to speak them?
What does it sound like
when who we are is expressed
in its most fundamental form?
Something to think about."

       R. Lowell

Related material:

IMAGE- Hypokeimenon in Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon

"… the clocks were striking thirteen." — 1984

Friday, June 10, 2022

Songlines.space

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:36 am

To me, the new URL "Songlines.space" suggests both the Outback
and the University of Western Australia. For the former, see
"'Max Barry' + Lexicon" in this journal. For the latter, see SymOmega.

The new URL forwards to a combination of these posts.

A related song

'The Eddington Song'

Sunday, September 5, 2021

Linguistics

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:39 pm

A Letterman introduction for Plato's Academy Awards:

"Cunning, Anna. Anna, Cunning." (Rimshot.)

But seriously . . .

"This work [of Wierzbicka and colleagues] has led to
a set of highly concrete proposals about a hypothesized
irreducible core of all human languages. This universal core
is believed to have a fully ‘language-like’ character in the sense
that it consists of a lexicon of semantic primitives together with
a syntax governing how the primitives can be combined
(Goddard, 1998)." — Wikipedia, Semantic Primes

Goddard C. (1998) — Bad arguments against semantic primitives. 
Theoretical Linguistics  24:129-156.

Related fiction . . . Lexicon , by Max Barry (2013).  See Barry in this  journal.

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Mad Max and the Nation-States

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:10 am

“All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.”

“Gahh,” she said. She began to walk toward the box, but her heart failed her and she retreated back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purred. The seam she had found cracked open and the top of the box began to rise. She squeezed shut her eyes and groped her way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging her ears with her fingers. That song she’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; she used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before she learned card tricks. It was how she’d met Benny: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Benny said, so that was mainly what she sang. She must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first she liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go without it running across her brain or humming on her lips, and God knew she tried; she was smashing herself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Benny played the opening chord and she just couldn’t do it. She could not sing that fucking song. Not again. She broke down, because she was only fifteen, and Benny took her behind the mall and told her it would be okay. But she had to sing. It was the biggest earner. She kind of lost it and then so did Benny and that was the first time he hit her. She ran away for a while. But she came back to him, because she had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like they had a truce: She would not complain about her bruised face and he would not ask her to sing “Lucy.” She had been all right with this. She had thought that was a pretty good deal.

Now there was something coming out of a box, and she reached for the most virulent meme she knew. “Lucy in the sky!” she sang. “With diamonds!”

•   •   •

Barry, Max. Lexicon: A Novel  (pp. 247-248).
Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Monday, August 6, 2018

The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180806-Lexicon-image-search.jpg

“All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.”

“Gahh,” she said. She began to walk toward the box, but her heart failed her and she retreated back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purred. The seam she had found cracked open and the top of the box began to rise. She squeezed shut her eyes and groped her way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging her ears with her fingers. That song she’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; she used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before she learned card tricks. It was how she’d met Benny: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Benny said, so that was mainly what she sang. She must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first she liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go without it running across her brain or humming on her lips, and God knew she tried; she was smashing herself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Benny played the opening chord and she just couldn’t do it. She could not sing that fucking song. Not again. She broke down, because she was only fifteen, and Benny took her behind the mall and told her it would be okay. But she had to sing. It was the biggest earner. She kind of lost it and then so did Benny and that was the first time he hit her. She ran away for a while. But she came back to him, because she had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like they had a truce: She would not complain about her bruised face and he would not ask her to sing “Lucy.” She had been all right with this. She had thought that was a pretty good deal.

Now there was something coming out of a box, and she reached for the most virulent meme she knew. “Lucy in the sky!” she sang. “With diamonds!”

•   •   •

Barry, Max. Lexicon: A Novel  (pp. 247-248).
Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Related material from Log24 on All Hallows' Eve 2013

"Just another shake of the kaleidoscope" —

Related material:

Kaleidoscope Puzzle,  
Design Cube 2x2x2, and 
Through the Looking Glass: A Sort of Eternity.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Bucharest Semiotics

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

See Solomon Marcus in this journal.

Related art —

 

Related fictions: The Seventh Function of Language  (2017)
and Lexicon  (2013).  I prefer Lexicon .

Friday, August 5, 2016

Sleight of Post

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From an earlier Log24 post —

Friday, July 11, 2014

Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

See Cube Symbology.

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

Da hats ein Eck 

From a post of the next day, July 12, 2014 —

"So there are several different genres and tones
jostling for prominence within Lexicon :
a conspiracy thriller, an almost abstract debate
about what language can do, and an ironic
questioning of some of the things it’s currently used for."

Graham Sleight in The Washington Post 
     a year earlier, on July 15, 2013

For the Church of Synchronology, from Log24 on the next day — 

From a post titled Circles on the date of Marc Simont's death —

See as well Verhexung  in this journal.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

The Tombstone Code

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:00 am

For Dan Brown enthusiasts, a sequel to the previous post, "The Tombstone Source."

As that post notes, the following symbol is now used as a story-end "tombstone" at
T : The New York Times Style Magazine.  The Times  uses style-sheet code, not
the rarely used unicode character below, to produce the tombstone.

Related material — The novel The Flame Alphabet  by Ben Marcus
that was reviewed in January 2012 by Commentary  magazine :

Fiction, Fiction, Burning Bright

D. G. MYERS / JAN. 19, 2012

Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet 
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
304 pp. $25.95.

According to the Jews, the world begins
with speech. God says, “There is light,”
and so there is light. But what if something
happened — it doesn’t really matter what —
and speech turned lethal?

That’s the premise of The Flame Alphabet ,
the third novel by Ben Marcus,
a creative writing professor at Columbia
University….

A much better novel along these lines is Lexicon  (2013) by Max Barry.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Bareword

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:26 pm

Continued from Epiphany* —

Today's New York Times  Word of the Day  is "lexicon."

* The word "lexicon" appeared in a Log4 post of Epiphany, 2014, but
    ​only within a link— "bareword  "— to a search for Barry + Lexicon.

Monday, January 6, 2014

Triumph of the Will

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm

"… the human will cannot be simultaneously
triumphant and imaginary."

— Ross Douthat, Defender of the Faith,
     in this afternoon's New York Times  at 3:25* PM ET

Some— even some Catholics— might say the will
cannot be triumphant unless  imaginary.

Related material The Galois Quaternion: A Story.

See also C. S. Lewis on enchantment

* Cf.,  in this  journal,  the most recent 3/25 , 
  and a bareword —

Click image for some context.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Down Under

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:02 am

"If I am to have a meeting it shall be down,
down in the invisible,
and the moment I re-emerge
it shall be alone.
In the visible world I am alone, an isolate instance.
My meeting is in the underworld, the dark."

— D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo , Chapter 7,
   "The Battle of Tongues."

The web edition of this book says it was
"Last updated Tuesday,  June 18, 2013."

This was also the publication date of Max Barry's
2013 novel Lexicon . (See that date in this journal.)

Sunday, July 7, 2013

The Educated Merchant Class

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:40 pm

In memory of Douglas J. Dayton, who reportedly died last Friday

The Studio of Gratifying Discourse.

See also Barry's Lexicon  and (for The Blake School)

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Big Rock

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From the LA Times  online obituaries today:

Michael Feran Baigent was born in Nelson, New Zealand,
in 1948. After graduating from New Zealand's University
of Canterbury with a degree in psychology, he worked as a
photographer and magazine editor in Australia, New
Zealand and Spain before taking up research for a
documentary called "The Shadow of the Templars."

From 1998 he lectured on and led tours of the temples and
tombs in Egypt, and from 2001 he was editor of the
magazine "Freemasonry Today."

Elliott Reid

Longtime film, TV actor with a comic touch

Elliott "Ted" Reid, 93, a longtime character actor in films
and on television, stage and radio who played opposite
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in the classic comedy
"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," died Friday [June 21, 2013]
in Studio City, said his nephew Roger R. Jackson.

From a post last Saturday, June 22, and the earlier
​post last Friday, June 21, that preceded it:

The Eliade passage was quoted in a 1971 Ph.D. thesis
on Wallace Stevens.

Some context— Stevens's Rock in this journal.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Lexicon

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:00 PM

From the final pages of the new novel
Lexicon , by Max Barry: 

"… a fundamental language
of the human mind— 
the tongue in which the human animal 
speaks to itself at the basest level. 
The machine language, in essence…."

"… the questions raised by 
this underlying lexicon
What are its words? 
How many are there? ….
Can we learn to speak them?
What does it sound like 
when who we are is expressed
in its most fundamental form? 
Something to think about."

       R. Lowell

See also, in this journal, Big Rock.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Modes of Being

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

From today's earlier post, Stevens and the Rock

"Rock shows him something that transcends
the precariousness of his humanity:
an absolute mode of being.
Its strength, its motionlessness, its size
and its strange outlines
are none of them human;
they indicate the presence of something
that fascinates, terrifies, attracts and threatens,
all at once."

— Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion  (1958)

An object with such an "absolute mode of being"
is the plot center of a new novel discussed here previously
Max Barry's Lexicon . From a perceptive review:

I believe he’s hit on something special here.
It’s really no surprise that Matthew Vaughn
of Kick-Ass  and X-Men: First Class  fame
has bought the rights to maybe make the movie;
Lexicon  certainly has the makings of a fine film.

Or graphic  novel  Whatever.

Kitty in Uncanny X-Men #168 (April 1983)

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Mise-en-Scène

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

IMAGE- 'Lexicon,' a novel by Max Barry published June 18, 2013

This journal on May 14, 2013:

IMAGE- Valéry on ornament in 'Method of Leonardo,' with Valéry's serpent-and-key emblem

"And let us finally, then, observe the
parallel progress of the formations of thought
across the species of psychical onomatopoeia
of the primitives, and elementary symmetries
and contrasts, to the ideas of substances,
to metaphors, the faltering beginnings of logic,
formalisms, entities, metaphysical existences."

— Paul Valéry, Introduction to the Method of
    Leonardo da Vinci

But first, a word from our sponsor

Multispeech

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:48 pm

(Continued)

For those who prefer Trudeau's
"Story Theory" of truth to his "Diamond Theory"

IMAGE- Janet Maslin's review of Max Barry's novel 'Lexicon'

Related material: Click images below for the original posts.

See as well the novel  "Lexicon" at Amazon.com 
and the word  "lexicon" in this journal.

Friday, June 7, 2013

For Donut Day

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

A predecessor to the Max Barry novel Lexicon .
(The latter will be published on June 18.)

 See, too, an MAA Spectrum book:

Click on images for details.

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