"“The Corporation can’t do its work if it’s perfectly transparent.”
— The president of Harvard on the university's governing body,
quoted in The Crimson on 26 May 2022
See as well Transparent Nabokov in this journal.
Thursday, June 2, 2022
Transparent Things
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Friday, June 23, 2023
A Little Drama
The broken pencil in a Dial illustration of June 20 —
"I could a tale unfold . . ." — Hamlet's father's ghost
"Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon
and felled pine to this humble implement, to this
transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle."
— Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things
"… a cardboard tube, more or less the same length as
the inner core of a toilet roll, but thicker. He frowned,
took the roll out, laid it on the desk and poked up it
with the butt end of a pencil. Something slid out.
It looked like a rolled-up black plastic dustbin liner;
but when he unfolded it, he recognised it as the funny
sheet thing he’d found in the strongroom and briefly
described as an Acme Portable Door, before losing
his nerve and changing it to something less facetious."
— Holt, Tom. The Portable Door . Orbit. Kindle Edition.
According to goodreads.com, the Holt book was
"first published March 6, 2003."
See also this journal on March 6, 2003, in a search for
Michelangelo Geometry.
Punchline of the above little drama —
"Try the other end of the pencil, Liz."
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Thursday, June 22, 2023
Unfolded Drama
"I could a tale unfold . . ." — Hamlet's father's ghost
"Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon
and felled pine to this humble implement, to this
transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle."
— Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things
"… a cardboard tube, more or less the same length as
the inner core of a toilet roll, but thicker. He frowned,
took the roll out, laid it on the desk and poked up it
with the butt end of a pencil. Something slid out.
It looked like a rolled-up black plastic dustbin liner;
but when he unfolded it, he recognised it as the funny
sheet thing he’d found in the strongroom and briefly
described as an Acme Portable Door, before losing
his nerve and changing it to something less facetious."
— Holt, Tom. The Portable Door . Orbit. Kindle Edition.
According to goodreads.com, the Holt book was
"first published March 6, 2003."
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Friday, October 9, 2015
Cube Design
For Aaron Sorkin and Walter Isaacson —
Related material —
Bauhaus Cube, Design Cube, and
Nabokov's Transparent Things .
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Friday, January 19, 2007
Friday January 19, 2007
Semantic Transparency
"… semantic transparency … would allow disparate systems to share some understanding of the actual concepts that are represented…"
— IBM Developer Works on October 7, 2003
From Wikipedia's
"Upper Ontology"
and
Epiphany 2007:
"Upper Ontology"
and
Epiphany 2007:
"There is no neutral ground
that can serve as
a means of translating between
specialized (lower) ontologies."
There is, however,
"the field of reason"–
the 3×3 grid:
Click on grid
for details.
From a Log24 entry of January 7, 2007:
"One of the primary critiques of modernism that Learning from Las Vegas was engaged in, as Frederic [sic] Jameson clearly noted, was the dialectic between inside and outside and the assumption that the outside expressed the interior. Let's call this the modernist drive for 'expressive transparency.'"
— Aron Vinegar of Ohio State U., "Skepticism and the Ordinary: From Burnt Norton to Las Vegas"
From this week's New Yorker (issue dated Jan. 22, 2007)–
"A Life," by Zbigniew Herbert
(translated from the Polish by Alissa Vales):
I was a quiet boy a little sleepy and–amazingly–
unlike my peers–who were fond of adventures–
I didn't expect much–didn't look out the window
At school more diligent than able–docile stable
For the rest of the poem, click here.
From the Wikipedia article on Zbigniew Herbert:
"In modern poetry, Herbert advocated semantic transparence. In a talk given at a conference organized by the journal Odra he said: 'So not having pretensions to infallibility, but stating only my predilections, I would like to say that in contemporary poetry the poems that appeal to me the most are those in which I discern something I would call a quality of semantic transparency (a term borrowed from Husserl's logic). This semantic transparency is the characteristic of a sign consisting in this: that during the time when the sign is used, attention is directed towards the object denoted, and the sign itself does not hold the attention. The word is a window onto reality.'"
(Wikipedia cites as the source–
Herbert's talk at the meeting "Poet in face of the present day," organized by the "Odra" journal. Print version: Preface to: Zbigniew Herbert "Poezje," Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1998, ISBN 83-06-02667-5.)
Fom Nabokov's Transparent Things (pdf):
"Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son."
Related material:
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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Tuesday February 15, 2005
Answer
“Are you now, or have you ever been?”
— Question posed to Philip Johnson,
entry of Feb. 12
entry of Feb. 12
“In the case of the Cartesian question, the answer is affirmative, and metaphysics has produced, in the four hundred years since, nothing much better than this. It is not only interesting but supremely practical. What could be more useful than having the means of convincing oneself that one exists whenever the question should arise?”
— Rebecca Goldstein,
Properties of Light
“… a nightshirted boy trying desperately to awake from the iridescent dizziness of dream life. Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it : not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.”
— Vladimir Nabokov,
Transparent Things
Transparent Things
“Le terme que l’on traduit par dédicace est en japonais ekô, littéralement ‘se tourner vers’. Il est composé de deux idéogrammes, e qui signifie ‘tourner le dos, se tourner, revenir en arrière’ et kô, ‘faire face, s’adresser à’.”
For more on Goldstein, see
The New York Times,
Feb. 14, 2005, and
Eight is a Gate,
Dec. 19, 2002.
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Friday, May 9, 2003
Friday May 9, 2003
ART WARS:
The Religion of Cubism
In the dome of the Capitol at Washington, DC, a painting depicts The Apotheosis of Washington . Personally, I prefer the following pair of pictures, which might be titled Apotheosis of the Cube.
logo
A New York Times article says Tony Smith's instructions for fabricating Die were as follows:
"a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel with diagonal internal bracing."
The transparent cube in the upper picture above shows the internal diagonals. The fact that there are four of these may be used to demonstrate the isomorphism of the group of rotations of the cube with the group of permutations on an arbitrary set of four elements. For deeper results, see Diamond Theory.
For an explanation of why our current president might feel that the cube deserves an apotheosis, see the previous entry, "The Rhetoric of Power."
See, too, Nabokov's Transparent Things :
"Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son."
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