Log24

This post was suggested by the December 4th death
of modernist composer Jonathan Harvey, 73,
and by Harvey's reflections on his 2007 opera
Wagner Dream .

For related reflections, see the Oct. 10 post on
the Dürer magic square in Mann's Doctor Faustus .

See also a December 2nd post on the Nov. 18 death of
chess grandmaster Elena Akhmilovskaya Donaldson.

From a Jamestown (NY) Post-Journal  article yesterday on
"the sold-out 10,000 Maniacs 40th anniversary concert at
The Reg Lenna Center Saturday" —

" 'The theater has a special place in our hearts. It’s played
a big part in my life,' Gustafson said.

Before being known as The Reg Lenna Center for The Arts,
it was formerly known as The Palace Theater. He recalled
watching movies there as a child…."

This, and the band's name, suggest some memories perhaps
better suited to the cinematic philosophy behind "Plan 9 from
Outer Space."

 "With the Tablet of Ahkmenrah and the Cube of Rubik,
my power will know no bounds!"
— Kahmunrah in a novelization of Night at the Museum:
Battle of the Smithsonian , Barron's Educational Series

The above 3×3 Tablet of Ahkmenrah  image comes from
a Log24 search for the finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(3) that 
was, in turn, suggested by last night's post "Making Space."

See as well a mysterious document from a website in Slovenia
that mentions a 3×3 array "relating to nine halls of a mythical
palace where rites were performed in the 1st century AD" —

"The Magician’s finest trick was to
dismantle the pretensions of genius
while preserving his own lofty stature." 

— Alex Ross in The New Yorker , Jan. 17, 2022

Related material —

Meanwhile . . .

And now, General, time presses; and America is in a hurry.
Have you realized that though you may occupy towns and win battles,
you cannot conquer a nation? — The Devil's Disciple

A figure related to Dürer's "magic" square posted during Devil's Night —

A sequel to last night's Chess Problem —

See as well a related CV .

This journal on Saturday, Dec. 19 —

In memory of Madame Claude, who
reportedly died in Nice December 19:

"There were fairies and spirits."

Amen.

For John Milton at the Cervecería XX —

• Bingo in this journal, as well as
• Black Mass and 
• “The Platonic Heritage in Under the Volcano“
  (Studies in Canadian Literature, v. 3, no. 1, 1978)

Related material: Peter J. Cameron on Bertrand Russell
in A Midnight Exorcism.

This morning's New York Times  obituaries—

These suggest a look at Solving Nabokov's Lolita Riddle ,
by Joanne Morgan (Sydney: Cosynch Press, 2005).

That book discusses Lolita as a character like Lewis Carroll's Alice.

(The Red Queen and Alice of course correspond to figures in
the first two thumbnails above.)

From the obituary associated with the third thumbnail above:

"Front-page headlines combined concision and dark humor." 

The title of this post, Bend Sinister , is not unlike such a headline.
It is the title of a novel by Nabokov (often compared with Orwell's 1984 )
that is discussed in the Lolita Riddle  book.

Related material— The bend sinister found in Log24 searches
for Hexagram 14 and for the phrase Hands-On—

The New York Times  today—
 "Reality and our perception of it are incommensurate…."

The above New York Times Wire  item from 3:35 PM ET today
mentions two topics touched on in today's earlier Log24 post
Bowling in Diagon Alley— magic (implied by the title) and
incommensurability. The connection in that post
between the two topics is the diagonal  of a square.

The  wire item shows one detail from a Times  illustration
of the linked article— a blindfolded woman.

Another detail from the same illustration—

Hands-on Wand Work

See also remarks on Magic in this journal and on Harry Potter.

I dislike both topics.

Anthony Hopkins on time:

"For me time is God, God is time…. I'm fascinated by the fact that we can't grasp anything about time. The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time." —Cinema Blend

"For me time is God, God is time. It's an equation, like an Einstein equation." —Washington Square News

A Marxist on time:

"God demands scrutiny beyond his menacingly comic aspects. Primarily, the [Saramago] Gospel 's God is time, and not truth, the other attribute he asserts. Saramago, a Marxist (an eccentric one), and not a Christian, subverts St. Augustine on the theodicy of time. If time is God, then God can be forgiven nothing, and who would desire to forgive him anyway?"

—Harold Bloom on José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ  (1991). Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.

Rosalind Krauss
in "Grids," 1979:

"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit.  From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.

Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."

"He was looking at
the nine engravings
and at the circle,
checking strange
correspondences
between them."
— The Club Dumas,1993

"And it's whispered that soon
if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us
to reason."
— Robert Plant,1971

The nine engravings of
The Club Dumas
(filmed as "The Ninth Gate")
are perhaps more an example
of the concrete than of the
universal.

An example of the universal*–
or, according to Krauss, a
"staircase" to the universal–
is the ninefold square:

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect    

For more on the field
of reason, see
Log24, Oct. 9, 2006.

A reasonable set of
"strange correspondences"
in the garden of Apollo
has been provided by Ezra Brown
in a mathematical essay (pdf).

Unreason is, of course,
more popular.

* The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel:

"Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."

— Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, "Idea of a Concrete Universal Unity"

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon   
 

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight,