Log24

Friday, November 7, 2014

The Missing ART

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:31 am

IMAGE- Harvard art museum director: 'This is brand new museum.'

Back together, but missing an article.

“An article (abbreviated ART) is a word (or prefix or suffix)
that is used with a noun to indicate the type of reference
being made by the noun.” — Wikipedia

Perhaps Tommy Lee Jones has it.

Geometry was very important to us in this movie.”

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Art for Nihilists

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:45 pm

"I am serious about my study. I am a distinguished professor of mathematics at Brown University, though I have not for decades concerned myself with arithmetic, calculus, matrices, theorems, Hausdorff spaces, finite lattice representations, or anything else that involves values or numbers or representations of values or numbers or any such somethings, whether they have substance or not. I have spent my career in my little office on George Street in Providence contemplating and searching for nothing. I have not found it."

Everett, Percival. Dr. No: A Novel  (p. 6).
Graywolf Press. Kindle Edition, November 1, 2022.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

A Missing Link

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 pm

Ben Brantley's review  tonight of an Irish Repertory Theater
production of "The Seafarer" suggests a look at an
earlier New York Times  article on the same play.

From that article  (Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007) —

The target of a link in this  journal on the above 2007 date —

Reflection groups in Wikipedia

"You've got to pick up every stitch . . . ." — Donovan

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Something Missing?

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am

The title refers to this morning's previous post.

The above links from today's aldaily.com :  Cubism,  Bernstein,  Hell.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Art at Midnight

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

Art in America 

"After considering and dismissing a number of definitions,
Danto comes down on one that he thinks captures the
'artness of art': artworks are embodied meanings. As such,
they elicit from viewers acts of interpretation designed to
'grasp the intended meaning they embody.' " 

The New York Times —

"The critic Hilton Kramer, writing in The New Criterion
in 1987, likened Mr. Danto’s views to one of 'those
ingenious scenarios that are regularly concocted to
relieve the tedium of the seminar room and the
philosophical colloquium.' "

Sounds about right.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Joyce’s Nightmare…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:42 pm

Continues.

Today's AP history notes


The above image suggests a search for Missing Art.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Core Values

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:20 am

"Yankee Doodle went to London" — Song lyric

  November Man

Geometry was very important to us in this movie.”

— The Missing ART   (Log24, November 7th, 2014)

ART —

"Faculty Approve Theater Concentration, Affirmation
of Integrity" — Recent Harvard Crimson  headline

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Stark and Bleak

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:33 pm

C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy in the foreword to 
A Mathematician's Apology :

"… he had another favourite entertainment. 
'Mark that man we met last night,'
he said, and someone had to be marked
out of 100 in each of the categories
Hardy had long since invented and defined.  
STARK, BLEAK ('a stark man is not necessarily
bleak: but all bleak men without exception
want to be considered stark')…."

Related material :

Tommy Lee Jones in The New York Times  on Nov. 6th, 2014,
and Pierce Brosnan in the 2014 film "The November Man:

  

Geometry was very important to us in this movie.”

The Missing ART   (Log24, November 7th, 2014)

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

“If It’s Tuesday…”

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:14 pm

https://www.sadanduseless.com/adam-douglas-thompson/

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:19 am

Art Space: The Missing Links

Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023. Tags:  — m759 @ 4:07 PM

Related material:  "Ducky" died,  Circle Zen,  Palmervision

Saturday, May 6, 2023

The Chico Hallows

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:33 pm

The above illustration is from Log24 on the dies natalis
day of birth into heaven, in the Catholic tradition —
of Grace C. Hertlein, a sort of patron saint of computer art
from Chico, California, who reportedly died at 91 in 2015.

It supplies the parts missing from a J. K. Rowling design
See Cinco de Mayo , 2011.

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Shadow Box Profile:  Location, Location, Location

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:54 pm

https://navy.togetherweserved.com/usn/
servlet/tws.webapp.WebApp?
cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=EventExt&ID=228739

MICHENER: Returning in the dark from a routine mission my pilot kept missing the poorly lit New Caledonia air strip. We braced for a crash landing, just made it, and were badly shaken. If I had died, I would have left nothing behind. I was approaching 40, mind you. That near crash prompted me to draft South Pacific stories running through my mind.

QUESTIONER: Your first draft was written on the island of Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, south of Guadalcanal, in a Quonset hut, by pecking at a typewriter with your two index fingers. What was the story line?

MICHENER: Tales of the South Pacific consisted of 18 loosely connected stories about the comedy, boredom, shenanigans of Navy life on a Pacific island between military battles. The stories showed the interplay of Navy men, Navy nurses, and conniving natives; the funny aspects of military planes, jeeps, bulldozers, canned goods imposed on simple people living on beautiful islands.

Comedy and Boredom —

Shenanigans —

Friday, October 30, 2020

Rare Shells and Stratagems

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:15 am

Patricia Lockwood quoting Nabokov —

‘I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water
with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible
upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which
to my confused adversary was all ooze and
squid-cloud.’ Conceptions of space, dimension,
movement, strategy.

London Review of Books ,
Vol. 42 No. 21 · 5 November 2020

Related images —

From this journal on October 26:

From this journal this morning:

A dancer forms a heart shape with her hands. Finishing the gesture,
she recovers the point missing from the bottom of the above shield . . .

Friday, June 26, 2020

Persons and Operators and Things

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:13 pm
Harvard University Press on a book,
Persons and Things,
it published on March 31, 2010

Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons. In Persons and Things , Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with

the most elementary thing we know:
deconstruction calls attention to
gaps

and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds.

The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us.

I prefer the more straightforward insanity of  Operators and Things .

Barbara Johnson reportedly died on Aug. 27, 2009.  See that date
in other posts now tagged Autistic Enchantment. (That phrase is
the sort of sneering tag one may expect from deplorable academics.)

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Another 48 Hours

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180901-Elliott-Gould-in-Oceans-8.jpg

Backstory:  See The Plaid Overnight Case in this journal.

Investigators: First 48 Hours Most Critical
In Locating Missing Children Who Entered
Portal To Fantastical World

See as well a post from 10:16 PM ET Thursday, August 30, 2018.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Another 48 Hours

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

The Onion  on Friday, July 1, 2016 —

Investigators: First 48 Hours Most Critical
In Locating Missing Children Who Entered
Portal To Fantastical World

From Friday afternoon —

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Not Even

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:29 am

"At CERN the LHC has reached design luminosity,
and is breaking records with a fast pace of new
collisions. This may have something to do with the
report that the LHC is also about to tear open
a portal to another dimension
."

— Peter Woit, Thursday, June 30, 2016,
    at 1:01 PM ET 

See as well The Onion  yesterday (Friday, July 1) —

Investigators: First 48 Hours Most Critical
In Locating Missing Children Who Entered
Portal To Fantastical World

Friday, June 24, 2016

Contrast

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:24 pm

From a work cited in the previous post —

"… representation of hell and the horrors
of the burial ground are missing."

— Page 384 of Joseph Campbell's The Mythic Image ,
    Princeton University Press, 1981
    (First published in 1974)

For those who regret the above omission

A review of a book published in 1977 —

"Its materials are fear and death, hallucination
and the burning of souls." 

The book's author reportedly died Thursday, June 23, 2016.

See also, from 11 AM ET that day, "Raiders of the Lost Code."

Friday, May 27, 2016

Raiders of the Lost Crucible…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am

Continues .

Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz

For more on the modern physicist analyzed by von Franz,
see The Innermost Kernel , by Suzanne Gieser.

The above passage suggests a meditation on this morning's
New York Times * —

"When shall we three meet again?" — William Shakespeare

“We three have scattered, leaving only me behind
to clean up the scene,” Ms. Yang wrote.
“I am alone, missing us three.” — Amy Qin

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Autistic Enchantments

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:45 pm

Continued )

Log24  on January 31, 2015 —

Spellbound (continued)

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 3:33 AM

The New York Times  this morning, in an
obituary for a maker of crossword puzzles :

“… the first known crossword puzzle appeared in
an American newspaper. (Called a ‘word-cross’
and shaped like a diamond, it was published in
The New York World  on Sunday, Dec. 21, 1913.)”

See St. Nicholas  magazine, November 1874, p. 59 :

For the answer, see this  journal on Aug. 29, 2002
(with a scene from Spellbound ) and on July 15, 2004.

On that same date 

The Seattle Times , Feb. 8, 2015, updated Feb. 12—

How to solve the puzzle:

“… you begin by filling in the missing words
for the limericks.

Dice, yAhtzee, woN, yahTzee, twicE;
Wall, dRawl, geOrgia’s, staTe, minnEsota;
Truck, rEd, fiReman’s, blaZe, hydrAnt;
Bob, sLob, prAy, saiNt, thanK.

The capital letters help to show what comes next,
as clued by the 1,2,3,4,5 in the title.

You take the first letter of the first inserted word,
the second of the second and so on. The resulting
message is ‘Dante wrote terza blank.’ The blank
is RIMA, as terza rima was the rhyme scheme
Dante used in the Divine Comedy.”

See also two other dates, June 3, 2015, and June 10, 2015,
in this  journal and in the life of the puzzle author.

The date of the puzzle’s answer, Feb. 8, 2015, is also
not without interest.

IMAGE- Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) and Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes), 'Mercury Rising' (1998)

“Click on fanciful .”

Saturday, July 26, 2014

OOPs

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Or:  Two Rivets Short of a Paradigm

Detail from an author photo:

IMAGE- 'House of Cards,' book on Bear Stearns, author photo, with two missing rivets

From rivet-rivet.net:

The philosopher Graham Harman is invested in re-thinking the autonomy of objects and is part of a movement called Object-Oriented-Philosophy (OOP). Harman wants to question the authority of the human being at the center of philosophy to allow the insertion of the inanimate into the equation. With the aim of proposing a philosophy of objects themselves, Harman puts the philosophies of Bruno Latour and Martin Heidegger in dialogue. Along these lines, Harman proposes an unconventional reading of the tool-being analysis made by Heidegger. For Harman, the term tool does not refer only to human-invented tools such as hammers or screwdrivers, but to any kind of being or thing such as a stone, dog or even a human. Further, he uses the terms objects, beings, tools and things, interchangeably, placing all on the same ontological footing. In short, there is no “outside world.”

Harman distinguishes two characteristics of the tool-being: invisibility and totality. Invisibility means that an object is not simply used but is: “[an object] form(s) a cosmic infrastructure of artificial and natural and perhaps supernatural forces, power by which our last action is besieged.” For instance, nails, wooden boards and plumbing tubes do their work to keep a house “running” silently (invisibly) without being viewed or noticed. Totality means that objects do not operate alone but always in relation to other objects–the smallest nail can, for example, not be disconnected from wooden boards, the plumbing tubes or from the cement. Depending on the point of view of each entity (nail, tube, etc.) a different reality will emerge within the house. For Harman, “to refer to an object as a tool-being is not to say that it is brutally exploited as a means to an end, but only that it is torn apart by the universal duel between the silent execution of an object’s reality and the glistening aura of its tangible surface.”

— From "The Action of Things," an M.A. thesis at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, by Manuela Moscoso, May 2011, edited by Sarah Demeuse

From Wikipedia, a programming paradigm:

See also posts tagged Turing's Cathedral, and Alley  Oop (Feb. 11, 2003).

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Heaven’s Gate

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:01 pm

Yesterday's post Devil's Gate provided a dark view of life and culture.

A more cheerful view is provided by the late Gail Levin,
a maker of PBS "American Masters" documentaries
that included, notably, Jeff Bridges and Marilyn Monroe.

Levin reportedly died at 67 on July 31, 2013.*

An image from an interview with Levin —

The date in the image, July 19th, 2006, is the broadcast
date of the PBS "American Masters" program on Monroe.
A check for synchronicity shows there was no Log24 post
on that date.

See, however, posts for the day before— "Sacred Order"—
and the day after— "Bead Game."

A related quote from an article linked to in the latter—

"First world culture, which is 'pagan and in the majority
everywhere,' has as its defining characteristic
a 'primacy of possibility,' or pop— a broadly inclusive
concept that covers everything from the Aboriginal
dreamtime to Plato’s Forms."

Review by Jess Castle of Philip Rieff’s 
Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. 1: My Life among the
Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority
,
University of Virginia Press, 2006. 256 pages, $34.95.

This quote may serve as the missing July 19, 2006, post.

Related material:  Dreamtime,  Possibility,  and Plato's Forms.

* See that date in this journal for two less famous American
  masters, artist Edward Valigursky and writer Robert Silverberg.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Mad Day

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

A perceptive review of Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

IMAGE- The perception of doors

"Page 185: 'Whatever else we are, we are also mad.' "

Related material— last night's Outside the Box and, from Oct. 22 last year

"Some designs work subtly.
Others are successful through sheer force."

Par exemple—

IMAGE- The Cartier diamond ring from 'Inside Man'

See also Cartier in this journal.

The Cartier link leads to, among other things

A Mad Day’s Work: From Grothendieck to Connes and Kontsevich.
The Evolution of Concepts of Space and Symmetry
,”
by Pierre Cartier, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society ,
Vol. 38 (2001) No. 4, pages 389-408

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Raven Light

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:40 am

"…a fundamental cognitive ability known as 'fluid' intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things. …

…matrices are considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests. Anyone who has taken an intelligence test has seen matrices like those used in the Raven’s: three rows, with three graphic items in each row, made up of squares, circles, dots or the like. Do the squares get larger as they move from left to right? Do the circles inside the squares fill in, changing from white to gray to black, as they go downward? One of the nine items is missing from the matrix, and the challenge is to find the underlying patterns— up, down and across— from six possible choices. Initially the solutions are readily apparent to most people, but they get progressively harder to discern. By the end of the test, most test takers are baffled."

— Dan Hurley, "Can You Make Yourself Smarter?," NY Times , April 18, 2012

See also "Raven Steals the Light" in this  journal.

Related material:

Plan 9 from MIT and, perhaps exemplifying crystallized  rather than fluid  intelligence, Black Diamond.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Group Actions

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 4:30 pm

The December 2012 Notices of the American
Mathematical Society  
has an ad on page 1564
(in a review of two books on vulgarized mathematics)
for three workshops next year on “Low-dimensional
Topology, Geometry, and Dynamics”—

(Only the top part of the ad is shown; for further details
see an ICERM page.)

(ICERM stands for Institute for Computational
and Experimental Research in Mathematics.)

The ICERM logo displays seven subcubes of
a 2x2x2 eight-cube array with one cube missing—

The logo, apparently a stylized image of the architecture
of the Providence building housing ICERM, is not unlike
a picture of Froebel’s Third Gift—

 

Froebel's third gift, the eightfold cube

© 2005 The Institute for Figuring

Photo by Norman Brosterman from the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring (co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)

The eighth cube, missing in the ICERM logo and detached in the
Froebel Cubes photo, may be regarded as representing the origin
(0,0,0) in a coordinatized version of the 2x2x2 array—
in other words the cube invariant under linear , as opposed to
more general affine , permutations of the cubes in the array.

These cubes are not without relevance to the workshops’ topics—
low-dimensional exotic geometric structures, group theory, and dynamics.

See The Eightfold Cube, A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168, and
The Quaternion Group Acting on an Eightfold Cube.

Those who insist on vulgarizing their mathematics may regard linear
and affine group actions on the eight cubes as the dance of
Snow White (representing (0,0,0)) and the Seven Dwarfs—

.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Lost Cornerstone

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 am

This post was suggested by this morning's New York Times  story on the missing cornerstone of St. Patrick's Cathedral and by the recent design for an official T-shirt celebrating Harvard's 375th anniversary—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111011-HtshirtSm.jpg

In Harvard's case, the missing piece beneath the cathedral-like spire* is the VERITAS on the college shield.

Possible sources for a shield image representing VERITAS—

1. "Patrick Blackburn" in this journal, which might be combined with

2. Reflections on Kurt Gödel ** by Hao Wang, Chapter 9, "To Fit All the Parts Together"—

"The metaphor of fitting parts together readily suggests
  the concrete image of solving a picture puzzle…." (p. 243)

Or the image of a Wang tiles puzzle.

A graphic image, colorful but garish, that summarizes these two sources—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111013-WangShield.bmp

  Shield with matching Wang tiles

* The Lowell House bell tower
** MIT Press, first published in 1987

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Romancing the Cube

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

It was a dark and stormy night…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110420-DarkAndStormy-Logicomix.jpg

— Page 180, Logicomix

“… the class of reflections is larger in some sense over an arbitrary field than over a characteristic zero field.”

– Julia Hartmann and Anne V. Shepler, “Jacobians of Reflection Groups

For some context, see the small cube in “A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168.”

See also the larger cube in “Many Dimensions” + Whitehead in this journal (scroll down to get past the current post).

That search refers to a work by Whitehead published in 1906, the year at the top of the Logicomix  page above—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110420-Whitehead1906Axioms.jpg

A related remark on axiomatics that has metaphysical overtones suitable for a dark and stormy night

“An adequate understanding of mathematical identity requires a missing theory that will account for the relationships between formal systems that describe the same items. At present, such relationships can at best be heuristically described in terms that invoke some notion of an ‘intelligent user standing outside the system.'”

— Gian-Carlo Rota, “Syntax, Semantics, and…” in Indiscrete Thoughts . See also the original 1988 article.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Mysteries of Faith

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

From today's NY Times

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100216-NYTobits.jpg

Obituaries for mystery authors
Ralph McInerny and Dick Francis

From the date (Jan. 29) of McInerny's death–

"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.'"

Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (Walpurgisnacht, 2008), by Barbara Johnson

From the date (Feb. 14) of Francis's death–

2x2x2 cube

The EIghtfold Cube

The "something missing" in the above figure is an eighth cube, hidden behind the others pictured.

This eighth cube is not, as Johnson would have it, a void and "vanishing point," but is instead the "still point" of T.S. Eliot. (See the epigraph to the chapter on automorphism groups in Parallelisms of Complete Designs, by Peter J. Cameron. See also related material in this journal.) The automorphism group here is of course the order-168 simple group of Felix Christian Klein.

For a connection to horses, see
a March 31, 2004, post
commemorating the birth of Descartes
  and the death of Coxeter–

Putting Descartes Before Dehors

     Binary coordinates for a 4x2 array  Chess knight formed by a Singer 7-cycle

For a more Protestant meditation,
see The Cross of Descartes

Descartes

Descartes's Cross

"I've been the front end of a horse
and the rear end. The front end is better."
— Old vaudeville joke

For further details, click on
the image below–

Quine and Derrida at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Friday, January 29, 2010

More Glass

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Part I:

"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.' She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds."

Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (April 30, 2008), by Barbara Johnson

Part II:

"Did you see more glass?"


Louis Kahn, design for nine large glass cubes forming a Holocaust memorial

Part III:

From the date of Barbara Johnson's death:

"Mathematical relationships were
enough to satisfy him, mere formal
relationships which existed at
all times, everywhere, at once."

Broken Symmetries, 1983

X    
  X  
    X

The X's refer to the pattern on the
cover of a paperback edition
  of Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger.
Salinger died on Wednesday.

"You remember that book he sent me
from Germany? You know–
those German poems.
"

In Germany, Wednesday was
Holocaust Memorial Day, 2010.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Monday October 5, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:00 am
Continued from Saturday— 

Pieces missing from Wechsler block design test and from IZZI puzzle

Context
for the 16:

Block Designs
and Art

Context
for the 70:

Symmetry
and Counting

  “Kunst ist nicht einfach.
— Sondheim in translation
 

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Saturday October 3, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:31 am

Missing Pieces: 'Build It' art by Cullinane and Bochner

Related material:

Frame Tales, as well as
The Sacred Day of Kali,
this morning's
New York Times obituaries,
and
Mental Health Month, 2003:

Wechsler blocks (illustrating the 'Blockheads' theme)

WAIS blocks

IZZI puzzle
IZZI puzzle

Michael Douglas in 'The Game'

Sondheim: 'Putting It Together'

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Tuesday June 9, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 pm
Recessional

"I know what 
nothing means."
— Joan Didion, 
Play It As It Lays

President Faust at Harvard Baccalaureate, June 2, 2009

Faust

President Faust of Harvard on Joan Didion:

"She was referring to life as a kind of improvisation: that magical crossroads of rigor and ease, structure and freedom, reason and intuition. What she calls being prepared to 'go with the change.'"
 

Bippity Boppity Boo.


Didion's own words:

"I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that."

From the same book:

"The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place."

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

For a magical crossroads at another university, see the five Log24 entries ending on November 25, 2005:


The sign of the crossroads at Stanford

This holy icon
appeared at
N37°25.638'
W122°09.574'
on August 22, 2003,
at the Stanford campus.

Also from that date,
an example of clarity
  in another holy icon —

A visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem

— in honor of better days
 at Harvard and of a member
of the Radcliffe Class of 1964.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Tuesday September 30, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:14 am
Hole in the Wall

Loren Eiseley,
Notes of an Alchemist:

I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.

— “The Invisible Horseman”

This quotation is the result of
the following meditation:

Part I:

The Feast of St. Michael
and All Angels

On Michaelmas 2008 (yesterday):

The mailman brought next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. On the last page was an essay by Steven Millhauser, “The Ambition of the Short Story.” It said that…

“The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there– right there, in the palm of its hand– lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved.”

Part II:
An Actor’s Lesson

A search for the “grain of sand” phrase in this journal yielded a quotation from actor Will Smith:

“Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: ‘It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I’m teaching my kids.'”

The quotation’s source is The Independent of July 9, 2004.

Part III:
A date with Reba

The date of The Independent‘s story turns out to contain, in this journal, a meditation on white-trash food and Reba McEntire.

(Recall her classic lyric
“I might have been born
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name.”)


It also contains the Notes of an Alchemist quotation above.


“Let, then, winged Fancy find
Thee a mistress to thy mind”

— John Keats, “Fancy

A passage closely related to Keats’s poem:

“Fullness… Multitude.”

These are the missing last words of Inman in Cold Mountain, added here on the Feast of St. Luke, 2004.  For the meaning of these words, click on Luke.

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Saturday July 5, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am
The Bacchae
by Euripides

New York Lottery
on the Fourth of July:
 
Mid-day 678
Evening 506

These numbers may be
interpreted as references to a
current Lincoln Center play —
The Bacchae, by Euripides.

Line 678 of The Bacchae —

From a Brandeis class’s translation (2006):

Messenger:

[677] Our feeding herds of cattle were just climbing
[678] above the treeline when the sun
[679] sent forth its rays to warm the earth.

Related cartoon by Ed Arno
(See yesterday morning’s Log24
and entries of June 27):

Van Gogh portrait by Ed Arno: the artist in sunlight, having written 'DEAR THEO' on his canvas

Related review by Charles Isherwood in today’s New York Times:

“A god deserves a great entrance. And Dionysus, the god of wine and party boy of Mount Olympus, whose celebratory rituals got the whole drama thing rolling in the first place, surely merits a spectacular one….”

Line 506 of The Bacchae —

From a 1988 translation (pdf) by Matthew A. Neuburg

Dionysus:

[506] You don’t know what you’re saying, what you’re doing, who you are.

Translator’s note:

506 The state of this line in the MSS has driven editors to despair; in particular, the first of the things Pentheus is said not to know is, in Greek, “what you are living,” which seems doubtful Greek. Many emendations have been proposed; I accept here DODDS’s emendation, but I have a feeling we’re missing something.

AMEN.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Thursday December 27, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:22 am
Chronicles
 
"Fullness… Multitude."

— The missing last words
of Inman in Cold Mountain,
added here on the
Feast of St. Luke, 2004

II Chronicles 1:

7: In that night did God appear unto Solomon, and said unto him, Ask what I shall give thee.
8: And Solomon said unto God, Thou hast shewed great mercy unto David my father, and hast made me to reign in his stead.
9: Now, O LORD God, let thy promise unto David my father be established: for thou hast made me king over a people like the dust of the earth in multitude.
10: Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?

On Kirk Varnedoe

"At 42– a professor with no museum experience– he was named curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. It was, and is, the most influential job in the fluid, insular, fiercely contentious world of modern art. Just two decades past his last Amherst game, the lineman from Savannah was sitting in the chair where the most critical decisions in his profession are made– 'the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity,' according to his Olympian predecessor Alfred Barr. The Modern and its chief curator serve the American art establishment as a kind of aesthetic Supreme Court, and most of their rulings are beyond appeal."

Hal Crowther

On Quality

Varnedoe, in his final
Mellon lecture at
the National Gallery,
quoted "Blade Runner"–
"I've seen things
you people wouldn't believe….

"Frank Rich of The New York Times
on the United States of America:
"A country where
entertainment is god."

Rich's description may or may not
be true of the United States, but
it certainly seems true of
The New York Times:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071227-NYTobitsSm.jpg

Click on image to enlarge.

Related material:

Art Wars

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Thursday February 1, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am
Turing Award
for Jim Gray

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070201-JimGray.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Gray

Vast search off coast
for data wizard

Gray was last heard from on
  Sunday, Jan. 28, at about 10 AM.
His sailboat was reported missing
on Sunday evening.

He is known for, among other things,
work on the SkyServer program
and on the data cube operator.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Wednesday July 26, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:44 pm
Partitions,
continued

"Mistakes are inevitable and may be either in missing a true signal or in thinking there is a signal when there is not. I am suggesting that believers in the paranormal (called 'sheep' in psychological parlance) are more likely to make the latter kind of error than are disbelievers (called 'goats')."

— "Psychic Experiences:
     Psychic Illusions,"
     by Susan Blackmore,
     Skeptical Inquirer, 1992

For Harvard mathematician
Frederick Mosteller,
dead on Sunday, July 23, 2006:
 
"… a drama built out of nothing
but numbers and imagination"

— Freeman Dyson, quoted in Log24
on the day Mosteller died

From Log24 on
Mosteller's last birthday,
December 24, 2005:

The Club Dumas

by Arturo Perez-Reverte

One by one, he tore the engravings from the book, until he had all nine.  He looked at them closely.  "It's a pity you can't follow me where I'm going.  As the fourth engraving states, fate is not the same for all."

"Where do you believe you're going?"

Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

"To meet someone" was his enigmatic answer. "To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso."

"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"
(Faust, Part Two)

Carl Gustav Jung,   
born on this date

Today's other birthday:
Mick Jagger

"Pleased to meet you,
hope you guess my name."

Friday, December 9, 2005

Friday December 9, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:01 pm
Fairy Tales

It’s all in Plato.”
— C. S. Lewis 

Talking Narnia to Your Neighbors
ChristianityToday.com
by Keri Wyatt Kent

“The summer Lindy Lowry was 20,
she rejected the Christian faith
she’d had since childhood–
dismissing it as a fairy tale
that made no sense
in a world full of evil.”

Tales from
The New Yorker:

       The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051209-Cin.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

  “Brokeback Mountain” and

“The Chronicles of Narnia.”

  by ANTHONY LANE

Brokeback Mountain:

“This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western….”

The Chronicles of Narnia:

“If the movie has to forgo Lewis’s narrative tone, with its grimly Oxonian blend of the bluff and the twee (‘And now we come to one of the nastiest things in this story’), that is fine by me. And, if there is Deep Magic, as Lewis called it, in his tale, it resides not in the springlike coming of Aslan but in the dreamlike, compacted poetry of Lewis’s initial inspiration—the sight of a faun….”

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

From The Circle is Unbroken,
a web page in memory of
June Carter Cash:

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), quoting Socrates–

“By Hera,” says Socrates, “a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to Acheloüs and the Nymphs.” 

See, too, Q’s quoting of Socrates’s prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker:

 

  For a discussion of the music that
Pan is playing (today’s site music),
see my entry of Sept. 10, 2002,
The Sound of Hanging Rock.”

Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Tuesday April 5, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:10 pm
“Bingo!”

Part I On Linguistic Creation
Part II Saul Bellow
Part III Sequel

“Call the Vatican.
Ask them if anything’s missing.”

Analyze This   

Sunday, May 2, 2004

Sunday May 2, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

The Script

Hollywood Writers, Producers
 Fail to Reach Agreement

Some scripts just write themselves.

Falluja Plan in Doubt
as U.S. Deals With
Furor Over Abuse


The Siege, 1998

Our Man in Baghdad
by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker
,
issue of 2004-05-03,
posted 2004-04-26:

“My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin…. He lives on the river, in an imposing house supplied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to which he has close ties….

Ayad Jamaluddin dismissed the idea of the Iraqis policing themselves any time in the near future. He believed that Iraq needed shock treatment, and that it would be best administered by the Americans.


The New Yorker,
online images

‘Iraqis are sick, you know, and what they need is a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘For thirty-five years, Saddam Hussein didn’t allow Iraqis to think. The Iraqi people are missing something: they are missing a soul. They need a dictator—that is their problem. The Shia want their dictator; the Sunnis want theirs. Unfortunately for us, the Iraqi people’s only model of a leader is Saddam Hussein.’

I remarked that his hopes for a sweeping transformation of a national psyche had few historical precedents, at least under modern American stewardship. The postwar transformations of Germany and Japan were possible only because there was a wholesale capitulation by the regimes in both countries after devastating military assaults. In Japan’s case, this had come about after the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast offering Japan’s unconditional surrender, and the admission that he was not a divine being. Jamaluddin smiled: ‘Then maybe what we need is another Hiroshima for Iraq. Maybe Fallujah will be our Hiroshima. Inshallah.’ ”

“Lovely.
Just lovely.” 

 

 


Devil’s
Advocate

See, too, The New Yorker‘s press release for

 May 1, 2004 — Law Day —

on the legal career of presidential candidate John Kerry:

“Kerry says his background as a prosecutor made criminal-defense work unappealing. ‘I took a court appointment once in a criminal case,’ Kerry says, ‘and I realized I just didn’t want the guy out on the street. I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.’ “

Recall the conclusion of Devil’s Advocate:

“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”

Sunday, December 14, 2003

Sunday December 14, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 am

Riddle

From Robert Stone's Damascus Gate:

"God… that Great F—ing Thing, the Lord of Sacrifices, the setter of riddles."

(See the Web site "Stone, not Wood.")

Christianity may be a religion of lies, but it sometimes has a certain charm.  If in fact there is a heaven, part of it must strongly resemble Paris in the 1890's, as suggested by the picture below.

From today's New York Times:

"The Very Rev. Sturgis Lee Riddle, dean emeritus of the American Episcopal Cathedral in Paris, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 94.

His death was reported on the cathedral's Web site."

From the cathedral's Web site,
a Christmas card:

Après l'Office à l'Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Noël 1890
(After the Service at Holy Trinity Church,
Christmas 1890) Jean Béraud

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."
— Ernest Hemingway,
   Death in the Afternoon, Ch. 11

"There is never any ending to Paris…."
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

 

See, too, my Paris-related entry for December 9, the date of Riddle's death, and recall that in Wild Palms, "the much sought-after Go chip [is] the missing link in the Senator's bid to be immortal, 'like Jesus.' "

Scene from Wild Palms

 

Monday, December 30, 2002

Monday December 30, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:30 pm

Homer

“No matter how it’s done, you won’t like it.”
— Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila

The evening before Harriet injures Roy,
she asks him, in a restaurant car,
whether he has read Homer.”
Oxford website on the film of The Natural

“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
— Cole Porter lyric for a show that opened
on December 30, 1948

Judy Davis as Harriet Bird

                                        

Thine eyes I love…
Shakespeare, Sonnet 132

“Roy’s Guenevere-like lover is named Memo Paris,
presumably the face that launched a thousand strikes.”
Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Nicole Kidman
as Memo Paris

“Iris is someone to watch over Roy.”
Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch

From the second-draft screenplay
for The Sting,
with Robert Redford as Hooker:

HOOKER
(shuffling a little)
I, ah…thought you might wanna come out for a while.  Maybe have a drink or somethin’.

LORETTA
You move right along, don’t ya.

HOOKER
(with more innocence than confidence)
I don’t mean nothin’ by it.  I just don’t know many regular girls, that’s all.

LORETTA
And you expect me to come over, just like that.

HOOKER
If I expected somethin’, I wouldn’t be still standin’ out here in the hall.

Loretta looks at him carefully.  She knows it’s not a line.

LORETTA
(with less resistance now)
I don’t even know you.

HOOKER
(slowly)
You know me.  I’m just like you…
It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.

The two just stand there in silence a second.  There’s nothing more to say.  She stands back and lets him in.

Iris Murdoch on Plato’s Form of the Good,
by Joseph Malikail:

For Murdoch as for Plato, the Good belongs to Plato’s Realm of Being not the Realm of Becoming…. However, Murdoch does not read Plato as declaring his faith in a divine being when he says that the Good is

the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which [one who] would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed (Republic…).

Though she acknowledges the influence of Simone Weil in her reading of Plato, her understanding of Plato on Good and God is not Weil’s (1952, ch.7)*. For Murdoch,

Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos in the Republic… is a façon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the ‘gods.’ There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person (1992, 38)**.

As she understands Plato:

The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo … Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give the sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God (ibid., 475)**.

Mary Warnock, her friend and fellow-philosopher, sums up Murdoch’s metaphysical view of the Vision of the Good:

She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God.

Or as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.’ (1992, 496)**”

*Weil, Simone. 1952. Intimations of Christianity Among The Ancient Greeks. Ark Paperbacks, 1987/1952.

**Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. London: Chatto and Windus. 

From the conclusion of Lila,
by Robert M. Pirsig:

“Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame.”

Thursday, October 10, 2002

Thursday October 10, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:22 pm

Happy National Depression Day!

Welcome to Hilbert’s Hotel

Moray Eel Desk Clerk by Ralph Steadman
(missing drawing from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
15″x 22″. Edition of 50. $175

“Although it’s always crowded,
you still can find some room…”

“Some of our patrons have
very SPECIFIC tastes.” 

       

A Room at the
Heartbreak Hotel

Song by U2,
Lyrics from Scott A. Yanoff

(These lyrics differ from the official
 version, but I like them better.)

From where I stand
I can see through you
And well ya said pretty woman
“I know it got to you”

I see the stars in your eyes
I want the truth but you want the lies
I dream you come, I run to you
You gave your life for rock ‘n roll a-ha

Stay, we’re on the dark side of love
You’ve got everything you wanted
But what you needed you gave away
For primitive love

And we’re riding the mystery train
For primitive love
A room at the heart
Hearbreak hotel
A room at the heartbreak
Heartbreak hotel
A room at the heartbreak
Heartbreak hotel

(Rest of song continues as above)

You say it’s love, it’s not the money
You let them suck your life out
   like honey
Full of tricks
You’re on the street
Selling your kisses so very sweet

(I’m back.  And I’m gonna make it
I’m gonna make it
Oh the prize is to hold you back)

A primitive love
And we’re riding the mystery train
A primitive love
A room at the heart
Heartbreak hotel.

(Guitar fills, etc.)

See also the official U2 site.

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