Log24

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Illustrators of the Word

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:30 am

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word  (1975) 

“I am willing (now that so much has been revealed!)
to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan
or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great
retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75,
the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal
figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de Kooning, and
Johns-but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg.
Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half
by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of
the period … a little ‘fuliginous flatness’ here … a little
‘action painting’ there … and some of that ‘all great art
is about art’ just beyond. Beside them will be small
reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of
the Word from that period….”

The above group of 322,560 permutations appears also in a 2011 book —

From 'Beautiful Mathematics,' by Martin Erickson, an excerpt on the Cullinane diamond theorem (with source not mentioned)

— and in 2013-2015 papers by Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland:

Saturday, November 7, 2015

The Painted Word (Illustrated)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Related material:

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The Word

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:12 pm

Crucial

(In memory of art critic Hilton Kramer,
who died this morning)

See also “crucial” in this journal.

Saturday, June 10, 2023

Green Mountain, Red Mountain

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:28 am

Tom Wolfe on art theorists in The Painted Word  (1975) :

"It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde  understood, they
were not only theories but … hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene."

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker  on June 2, 2023 —

"The album cover was a minor but deliriously popular art form
that was limited not just by shape—a neat fit, incidentally, for
the square format favored by many modish photographers of
the sixties—but also by the prospect of its own inevitable death.
Technology gave, and technology hath taken away."

See as well a mountain along with red and green album covers
in this  journal  on June 8.

Some will prefer the green and red crystal from Melencolia I
(adapted from the uncolored original) on the cover of the
1948 edition of Doctor Faustus.

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Nuance

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:07 pm

"Her attention to the nuances of language
is both intuitive and painstaking." 

— Testimonials page at 
https://www.lesliekendalldye.net/testimonials.html

The birth name of Leslie Kendall Dye was Leslie Engelberg.

Related remarks —

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word  (1975):

“It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde  understood, they
were not only theories but hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene.”

Report from Angel Mountain —

"Turn to page three hundred and ninety-four."

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Obiter Dicta

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:58 pm

The title is a phrase from Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word —

"the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta ,
the words in passing, that give the game away"

The President on July 23, per USA TODAY

"And there’s a need, whether it is true or not,
there is a need to project a different picture."

Related material —

EVERY LAST EASTER EGG AND REFERENCE
IN EPISODE 6 OF HBO'S WATCHMEN
 .

Wikipedia — "For the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, 
Damon Lindelof and Cord Jefferson won the award
for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie,
or Dramatic Special for this episode."

Wikipedia on Lindelof

See also . . . The Bard of Teaneck —

"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?

He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound,
nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring
the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride,
vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.

Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."

—  Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
     Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005

Weingarten's remarks were quoted here  on that Sunday, along with
the following illustration —

Spear Daddy!

'The Deceivers'— A novel by Alfred Bester, author of 'The Stars My Destination

Monday, May 28, 2018

Epstein on Art

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:16 pm

Joseph Epstein in the online Weekly Standard
on May 24, 2018, at 3:03 PM —

Hilton Kramer, in a powerful essay called “Revenge of the Philistines,” praised Wolfe’s account of the sociology of the visual art of the time. On the comedy inherent in the subject, he noted, Wolfe “is illuminating and often hilarious.” Yet, when it came to the analysis of ideas, Kramer felt, “when it comes down to actual works of art and the thinking they both embody and inspire, Wolfe is hopelessly out of his depth . . . and, no doubt, beyond his true interests.” He faulted Wolfe for his inability to understand the historical context of the contemporary situation in art or how we have come to where we are in a way that carries us well beyond “the drawing-room comedy of The Painted Word .” Kramer concluded: “It is this fundamental incomprehension of the role of criticism in the life of art—this enmity to the function of theory in the creation of culture—that identifies The Painted Word , despite its knowingness and its fun, as a philistine utterance, an act of revenge against a quality of mind it cannot begin to encompass and must therefore treat as a preposterous joke.”

For Kramer in greater depth, see an online biography.

Friday, April 27, 2018

Elegy for Missoula

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Part I — From 1:30 AM Tuesday

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word   (1975) 

“I am willing (now that so much has been revealed!)
to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan
or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great
retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75,
the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal
figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de Kooning, and
Johns-but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg.
Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half
by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of
the period … a little ‘fuliginous flatness’ here … a little
‘action painting’ there … and some of that ‘all great art
is about art’ just beyond. Beside them will be small
reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of
the Word from that period….”

Part II — Hollywood Moment

Part III — The Kreisberg Syllabus

Part IV — Montana Sunset

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Conceptual Art

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:17 am

Related conceptual  art —

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word :

Click the automat image above to enlarge.

See as well a new retrospective at Facebook.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Report from Red Mountain

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

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word  (1975):

“It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde  understood, they
were not only theories but … hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene.”

Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker  (click to enlarge)

See also Interality  and the Eightfold Cube .

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Horn and Hard Art

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:17 pm

Or:   Bee Season  Continues

Click the automat image above to enlarge.
Click the Horn & Hardart image below for the source.

Andreas Feininger, LIFE magazine photos, 1946

See as well Catskills Heaven (Log24 on August 20, 2017) —

The Coen brothers, 2007 screenplay —

(From a novel by Cormac McCarthy)

Whose Name Was Writ* in Water

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:40 pm

( Not  the name of  Willem de Kooning. )

Click to enlarge.

* See as well some related posts.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Colorful Tale

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:45 am

Continued.

"Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature
of modern science is the emergence of abstract
symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity
behind— as Eddington puts it— the colorful tale
of the subjective storyteller mind."

— Hermann Weyl in Philosophy of Mathematics
     and Natural Science
 , Princeton, 1949, p. 237

Tom Wolfe on art theorists in The Painted Word  (1975) :

"It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde  understood, they
were not only theories but … hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene."

The Weyl quote is a continuing theme in this journal.
The Wolfe quote appeared here on Nov. 18, 2014,
the reported date of death of Yale graduate student 
Natasha Chichilnisky-Heal.

Directions to her burial (see yesterday evening) include
a mention of "Paul Robson Street" (actually Paul
Robeson Place) near "the historic Princeton Cemetery."

This, together with the remarks by Tom Wolfe posted
here on the reported day of her death, suggests a search
for "red green black" —

The late Chichilnisky-Heal was a student of political economy.

The search colors may be interpreted, if one likes, as referring
to politics (red), economics (green), and Robeson (black).

See also Robeson in this journal.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

For the Green Mountain Girls

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:13 am

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word  (1975):

“It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde  understood, they
were not only theories but … hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene.”

“Parable of American Painting,” 1954 — From The Tradition of the New by Harold Rosenberg

In this essay Rosenberg set out to explain what he believed to be definitively American about Abstract Expressionism. He did so by drawing on the American Revolutionary War for his metaphors, likening the new Americans to the coonskin trappers whose knowledge of their terrain enabled them to pick off the British soldiers (Redcoats), who followed the dictates of their military training. The professionally- trained soldiers were defeated because, as Rosenberg states, ‘They were such extreme European professionals … they did not even see  the American trees.’ ‘Redcoatism’ was, Rosenberg argued, a symptom of the old European world’s stubborn rejection of the new. It did at one time also ‘[dominate] the history of American art,’ he wrote, but with the advent of Abstract Expressionism, times had changed. And just as the Coonskins were victorious because they stood apart from the professional military, so the new American art was triumphant because, as Rosenberg saw it, it marked a profound break with the traditions of European art.”

— TheArtStory.org

Lectures at Bennington, 1971

For example:

Art adapted today from the Google search screen. Discuss.

Monday, November 3, 2014

The Rhetoric of Abstract Concepts

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:48 pm

From a post of June 3, 2013:

New Yorker  editor David Remnick at Princeton today
(from a copy of his prepared remarks):

“Finally, speaking of fabric design….”

I prefer Tom and Harold:

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word 

“I am willing (now that so much has been revealed!)
to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan
or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great
retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75,
the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal
figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de Kooning, and
Johns-but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg.
Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half
by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of
the period … a little ‘fuliginous flatness’ here … a little
‘action painting’ there … and some of that ‘all great art
is about art’ just beyond. Beside them will be small
reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of
the Word from that period….”

Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker  (click to enlarge)

From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”

Symplectic :

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

— Steven H. Cullinane,
diamond theorem illustration

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Verhexung

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:15 pm

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung ]
of our intelligence by means of our language."

— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , Section 109

"The philosophy of logic speaks of sentences and words
in exactly the sense in which we speak of them in ordinary life
when we say e.g. 'Here is a Chinese sentence,' or 'No, that only
looks like writing; it is actually just an ornament' and so on."

— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , Section 108

Monday, June 30, 2014

High Concept

Tags:  — m759 @ 5:24 PM

For the title, see a post of Nov. 4, 2007.

Related material:

Hexagram 29, Water, and a pattern resembling
the symbol for Aquarius:

http://www.log24.com/images/IChing/hexagram29.gif          .

For some backstory about the former,
see the June 21 post Hallmark.

For some backstory about the latter,
see today’s post Toward Evening.

Tom Wolfe has supplied some scaffolding*
to support the concept.

* A reference to Grossman and Descartes.

Monday, June 30, 2014

High Concept

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:24 pm

For the title, see a post of Nov. 4, 2007.

Related material:

Hexagram 29, Water, and a pattern resembling
the symbol for Aquarius:

http://www.log24.com/images/IChing/hexagram29.gif          .

For some backstory about the former,
see the June 21 post Hallmark.

For some backstory about the latter,
see today’s post Toward Evening.

Tom Wolfe has supplied some scaffolding*
to support the concept.

* A reference to Grossman and Descartes.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Night’s Hymn of the Rock

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:33 am

One way of interpreting the symbol  IMAGE- Modal Diamond in a square 
at the end of yesterday's post is via
the phrase "necessary possibility."

See that phrase in (for instance) a post
of July 24, 2013, The Broken Tablet .

The Tablet  post may be viewed in light
of a Tom Wolfe passage quoted here on
the preceding day, July 23, 2013—

IMAGE- Tom Wolfe in 'The Painted Word' on conceptual art

On that  day (July 23) another weblog had
a post titled

Wallace Stevens: Night's Hymn of the Rock.

Some related narrative —

IMAGE- The 2001 film 'The Discovery of Heaven'

I prefer the following narrative —

Part I:  Stevens's verse from "The Rock" (1954) —
"That in which space itself is contained"

Part II:  Mystery Box III: Inside, Outside (2014)

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Entertainment Theory

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

From "Entertainment," a 1981 story by M. A. Foster—

"For some time, Cormen had enjoyed a peculiar suspicion, which he had learned from his wanderings around the city, and cultivated with a little notebook, in which he had made a detailed series of notes and jottings, as well as crude, but effective, charts and maps of certain districts. 'Cormen's Problem,' as it was known, was familiar to the members of the circle in which he moved; in fact, if he had not been so effective with his productions and so engaging in his personality, they might have considered him a bore.

It seemed, so the suspicion went, that the city was slowly shrinking, as evidenced by abandoned districts along the city edges. Beyond the empty houses were ruins, and beyond that, traces of foundations and street lines. Moreover, it had recently dawned on him that there were no roads out of the city, although there were no restraints. One hardly noticed this—it was the norm. But like many an easy assumption, once broken it became increasingly obvious.

Cormen's acquaintances were tolerant of his aberration, but generally unsympathetic. What he needed was proof, something he could demonstrate in black and white—and color if required. But the city was reluctant, so it appeared, to give up its realities so easily. The Master Entertainment Center, MEC, would not answer direct queries about this, even though it would obediently show him presentations, pictorial or symbolic as he required, of the areas in question. But it was tiresome detail work, in which he had to proceed completely on his own."

Lily Collins in City of Bones  (2013)—

American Folk Art (see August 23, 2011) —

IMAGE- Four Winds quilt block

Art Theory —

IMAGE- The eight Galois quaternions

See as well Ballet Blanc .

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Conceptual Coffee

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

A related scene, in memory of a jingle singer who died Sunday at 97:

Click for the Heavenly Coffee song.

See also Bleu  and Kiss Club.

They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.

Monday, June 3, 2013

New Yorker Art

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 pm

New Yorker  editor David Remnick at Princeton today
(from a copy of his prepared remarks):

"Finally, speaking of fabric design…."

I prefer Tom and Harold:

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word 

"I am willing (now that so much has been revealed!)
to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan
or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great
retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75,
the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal
figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de Kooning, and
Johns-but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg.
Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half
by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of
the period … a little 'fuliginous flatness' here … a little
'action painting' there … and some of that 'all great art
is about art' just beyond. Beside them will be small
reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of
the Word from that period…."

Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker 

(Click to enlarge.)

Tom's book seems to be repeating, in 1975, what Harold said better in 1969.

"Finally, speaking of fabric design…."

Note "fabric design" in Rosenberg's words on philistine views of the art of Noland.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Immerse Yourself

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:01 pm

(Continued)

From the Wikipedia article (with links altered) on Mormon baptism of the dead

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe that baptism is a prerequisite for entry into the kingdom of God as stated by Jesus in John 3:5: "Except that a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (KJV).

From The Painted Word  (with link added), by Tom Wolfe—

PEOPLE DON’T READ THE MORNING NEWSPAPER, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times . Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing, in Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened:

I noticed something!

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Program

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am
  • Helen Frankenthaler's obituary in yesterday's online New York Times
  • A 1975 review of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word
  • In memory of the reviewer, a post from the date of her death

See also yesterday morning's Getting with the Program.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Ockham’s Bubbles–

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:30 am

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

"… a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls"

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word , 1975, quoted here on October 30th

"… our laughable abstractions, our wryly ironic po-mo angels dancing on the heads of so many mis-imagined quantum pins."

— Dan Conover on September 1st, 2011

"Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: 'When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other.'

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God."

— Tom Wolfe, "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Forbes , 1996

"… Ockham's idea implies that we probably have the ability to do something now such that if we were to do it, then the past would have been different…"

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Today is February 28, 2008, and we are privileged to begin a conversation with Mr. Tom Wolfe."

— Interviewer for the National Association of Scholars

From that conversation—

Wolfe : "People in academia should start insisting on objective scholarship, insisting  on it, relentlessly, driving the point home, ramming it down the gullets of the politically correct, making noise! naming names! citing egregious examples! showing contempt to the brink of brutality!"

As for "mis-imagined quantum pins"…
This 
journal on the date of the above interview— February 28, 2008

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080228-Wooters2.jpg

Illustration from a Perimeter Institute talk given on July 20, 2005

The date of Conover's "quantum pins" remark above (together with Ockham's remark above and the above image) suggests a story by  Conover, "The Last Epiphany," and four posts from September 1st, 2011—

BoundaryHow It WorksFor Thor's Day,  and The Galois Tesseract.

Those four posts may be viewed as either an exploration or a parody of the boundary between mathematics and narrative.

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract." —A Wrinkle in Time

Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Idea Idea

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

For the late philosopher Peter Goldie, who died on October 22nd—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111029-Goldie33.jpg

Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word — "And there, at last, it was!"—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111030-MarkHelprin_WintersTale.jpg

See also Whiteness and Horseness.

Friday, October 8, 2010

Starting Out in the Evening

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

… and Finishing Up at Noon

This post was suggested by last evening’s post on mathematics and narrative
and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning’s New York Times.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101008-StartingOut.jpg

Above: Frank Langella in
Starting Out in the Evening

Right: Johnny Depp in
The Ninth Gate

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101008-NinthGate.jpg

“One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage.”

— “Is Fiction the Art of Lying?”* by Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984

My own adventures in that realm— as reader, not author— may illustrate Llosa’s remark.

A nearby stack of paperbacks I haven’t touched for some months (in order from bottom to top)—

  1. Pale Rider by Alan Dean Foster
  2. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
  3. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
  4. Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
  5. Literary Reflections by James A. Michener
  6. The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty
  7. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
  8. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
  9. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
  10. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
  11. Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
  12. What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson
  13. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
  14. A Gathering of Spies by John Altman
  15. Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers
  16. Hook— Tinkerbell’s Challenge by Tristar Pictures
  17. Rising Sun by Michael Crichton
  18. Changewar by Fritz Leiber
  19. The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe
  20. The Hustler by Walter Tevis
  21. The Natural by Bernard Malamud
  22. Truly Tasteless Jokes by Blanche Knott
  23. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
  24. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

What moral Vargas Llosa might draw from the above stack I do not know.

Generally, I prefer the sorts of books in a different nearby stack. See Sisteen, from May 25. That post the fanciful reader may view as related to number 16 in the above list. The reader may also relate numbers 24 and 22 above (an odd couple) to By Chance, from Thursday, July 22.

* The Web version’s title has a misprint— “living” instead of “lying.”

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Bright Star (continued)

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

From Epiphany 2010

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato's cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word."

– Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Pennsylvania Lottery yesterday—

Saturday, June 26, 2010: Midday 846, Evening 106

Interpretation—

Context:
Yesterday's morning post, Plato's Logos
Yesterday's evening post, Bold and Brilliant Emergence

Poem 846, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1919:
"bird-song at morning and star-shine at night"

Poem 106, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1919:
" All labourers draw home at even"

The number 106 may also be read as 1/06, the date of Epiphany.

Posts on Epiphany 2010—

9:00 AM    Epiphany Revisited
12:00 PM  Brightness at Noon
9:00 PM    The Difference

Related material—

Plato's
Tombstone

Star and Diamond: A Tombstone for Plato

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Epiphany Revisited

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

January 06, 2007
ART WARS: Epiphany

Picture of Nothing
On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
Pictures of Nothing“–

“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself….”

Related material:

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Log24, Aug. 23, 2005:

“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–  theological analogy of Son’s procession  as Verbum Patris, 111-12″ — Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S.J., Yale University Press 1957,  second printing 1963, page 162

“So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil’s Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: ‘In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, from Slate‘s “High Concept” department

'In the beginning' according to Jim Holt

“Bang.”

“…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….”

For properties of the “nothing” represented by the 3×3 grid, see The Field of Reason. For religious material related to the above and to Epiphany, a holy day observed by some, see Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star and Shining Forth.


Some Context:

Quaternions in Finite Geometry

Click to enlarge.

See also Nativity.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Wednesday March 4, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am
Markoff Process

“So fearsome was Dr. Schwartz’s early reputation as a mathematician that when John Forbes Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize winning mathematician and economist, learned that he was attempting to solve an extremely challenging mathematical problem…. he became agitated, apparently fearing Dr. Schwartz might beat him to a solution, said Sylvia Nasar, author of ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ a biography of Nash.”

New York Times obituary of Jacob T. Schwartz dated Tuesday, March 3, 2009

 Author of the obituary:
John Markoff.

New York Lottery
March 3, 2009:

NY Lottery March 3, 2009-- Midday 491, Evening 116

“His background in mathematical algorithms led Dr. Schwartz to develop an early programming language…. The language would later influence the designer of the Python programming language, widely used by programmers today.” —NY Times

“Treatment of Autistic Schizophrenic Children with LSD-25 and UML-491“–

“Autistic schizophrenic children present challenging and baffling problems in treatment…. Many of the children have been followed subsequently into later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood…. Meanwhile, a new group of young autistic children are always available for new treatment endeavors as the new modes become available.”*

Monty Python - Bright Side of Life

Dr. Schwartz died on Monday,
birthday of Tom Wolfe —
who wrote
The Painted Word.

1/16: “It’s all there, hiding behind the realistic side.” –Andrew Wyeth

Related material: The previous five entries.

* by Lauretta Bender, M.D., Lothar Goldschmidt, M.D., and D.V. Siva Sankar, Ph.D., in Recent Advances in Biological Psychiatry, 1962, 4, 170-177
.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Monday March 2, 2009

Joyce's Nightmare
continues

Today in History – March 2

Today is Monday, March 2, the 61st day of 2009. There are 304 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On March 2, 1939, Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope on his 63rd birthday; he took the name Pius XII.

Angels and Demons, Illuminati Diamond, pages 359-360

Log24 on June 9, 2008

From Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), page 563:

"He brings out the mandala he found.
'What's it mean?'
[….]

Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere… a spell […]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night…."

 

 

In lieu of Slothrop's mandala, here is another…

Christ and the four elements, 1495
 

 

Christ and the Four Elements

This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton's Thought,
by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge University Press,
2002, p. 85

 

 

Related mandalas:Diamond arrangement of the four elements
and

Logo by Steven H. Cullinane for website on finite geometry

 

 

For further details,
click on any of the
three mandalas above.

Angels and Demons cross within a diamond (page 306), and Finite Geometry logo

Happy birthday to
Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.

Friday, March 2, 2007

Friday March 2, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 am
Today's birthdays:

Jennifer Jones,
film star and arts patron;

Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.

"Hunt for the best."
Norton Simon 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/angel_angel_down_we_go2A.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Cover detail,
soundtrack recording
of the Jennifer Jones film
"Angel, Angel, Down We Go"

The girl's left eye in the above
portrait illustrates a remark
  in yesterday's New York Times
on a figure in a painting:

"His head recedes into shadow, so you barely see his face. But a tiny fleck of white in his eye, a light that kindles his reawakening, brings him to life. It’s what Roland Barthes, the French critic, liked to call a punctum, the spot, marking time, that burns an image into memory."

 (This remark, by Michael Kimmelman,
comes with a headline–

Lights! Darks! Action! Cut!  
Maestro of Mise-en-Scène
  

— that seems to have been inspired
by Tom Wolfe's prose style.)

For further details, see
Barthes's Punctum,
by Michael Fried.

Saturday, January 6, 2007

Saturday January 6, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm


Picture of Nothing

On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
Pictures of Nothing“–

“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately
about faith, about his faith in
the power of abstraction,
and abstraction as a kind of
anti-religious faith in itself….”

The Washington Post

Related material:

The more industrious scholars
will derive considerable pleasure
from describing how the art-history
professors and journalists of the period
1945-75, along with so many students,
intellectuals, and art tourists of every
sort, actually struggled to see the
paintings directly, in the old
pre-World War II way,
like Plato’s cave dwellers
watching the shadows, without
knowing what had projected them,
which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Log24, Aug. 23, 2005:

“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son’s procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12″

— Index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162

“So did God cause the big bang?
Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil’s Bible.
Turning to Genesis I read:
‘In the beginning
there was nothing.
And God said,
‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.'”

— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” department

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070106-Bang.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.


“Bang.”

“…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….”

Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”

For properties of the
“nothing” represented
by the 3×3 grid, see
The Field of Reason.

For religious material related
to the above and to Epiphany,
a holy day observed by some,
see Plato, Pegasus, and the
Evening Star
and Shining Forth.

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Wednesday December 6, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:15 am
Mathematical Imagery

From the current
American Mathematical Society
“Mathematical Imagery” page:

AMS Mathematical Imagery

From today’s New York Times:

Rosie Lee Tompkins obituary

“Rosie Lee Tompkins, a renowned African-American quiltmaker whose use of dazzling color and vivid geometric forms made her work internationally acclaimed despite her vehement efforts to remain completely unknown, was found dead on Friday at her home in Richmond, Calif. She was 70.” —Margalit Fox, NY Times 12/6/06
Tompkins was found dead
on December 1, 2006.
 From Log24 on that date:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061201-DayWithout.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

That entry contained an excerpt from
Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word

“What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial….”

Related material:

Diamond Theory
 
and a politically correct
1995 feminist detective novel
about quilts,

A Piece of Justice.

From a summary of the novel:

The story deals with “one Gideon Summerfield, deceased.” Summerfield, a former tutor at (the fictional) St. Agatha’s College, Cambridge University, “is about to become the recipient of the Waymark prize. This prize is awarded in Mathematics and has the same prestige as the Nobel. Summerfield had a rather lackluster career at St. Agatha’s, with the exception of one remarkable result that he obtained. It is for this result that he is being awarded the prize, albeit posthumously.”  Someone is apparently trying to prevent a biography of Summerfield from being published.

The following page contains
a critical part of the solution
to the mystery:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/PieceOfJustice138.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Meanwhile, back in real life…

It is said that the late Ms. Tompkins
liked to work while listening to the
soundtrack of “Saturday Night Fever.”

“It’s just your jive talkin’
you’re telling me lies, yeah
Jive talkin’
you wear a disguise
Jive talkin’
so misunderstood, yeah
Jive talkin’
You really no good”

These lyrics may also serve
to summarize reviews
of Diamond Theory written
in the summer of 2005.

For further details, see
Mathematics and Narrative.

 

Friday, December 1, 2006

Friday December 1, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:07 am

Day Without Art

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

crucial – 1706, from Fr. crucial… from L. crux (gen. crucis) “cross.” The meaning “decisive, critical” is extended from a logical term, Instantias Crucis, adopted by Francis Bacon (1620); the notion is of cross fingerboard signposts* at forking roads, thus a requirement to choose.

“… given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial— the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

Hilton Kramer in The New York Times, April 28, 1974

“I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial….

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

For some related material from the next 30 years, 1976-2006, see Art Wars.

* “Note that in the original Latin, the term is not by any means ‘fingerpost’ but simply ‘cross’ (Latin Crux, crucis) – a root term giving deeper meaning to the ‘crucial’ decision as to which if any of the narratives are ‘true,’ and echoing the decisive ‘crucifixion’ revealed in the story.”

Wikipedia on An Instance of the Fingerpost.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Thursday February 23, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:06 pm
Cubist Epiphany

4x4x4 cube

“In The Painted Word, a rumination on the state of American painting in the 1970s, Tom Wolfe described an epiphany….”

Peter Berkowitz, “Literature in Theory”

“I had an epiphany.”

— Apostolos Doxiadis, organizer of last summer’s conference on mathematics and narrative.  See the Log24 entry of 1:06 PM last August 23 and the four entries that preceded it.

“… das Durchleuchten des ewigen Glanzes des ‘Einen’ durch die materielle Erscheinung

A definition of beauty from Plotinus, via Werner Heisenberg

“By groping toward the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us.”

— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy, Random House, 1973, page 118, quoted in The Shining of May 29

“Perhaps we are meant to see the story as a cubist retelling of the crucifixion….”

— Adam White Scoville, quoted in Cubist Crucifixion, on Iain Pears’s novel, An Instance of the Fingerpost

Related material:

Log24 entries of
Feb. 20, 21, and 22.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Tuesday February 21, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm
Conceptual Lens

"Contemporary literary theory did not emerge in an intellectual and cultural vacuum. The subordination of art to argument and ideas has been a long time in the works. In The Painted Word, a rumination on the state of American painting in the 1970s, Tom Wolfe described an epiphany he had one Sunday morning while reading an article in the New York Times on an exhibit at Yale University. To appreciate contemporary art– the paintings of Jackson Pollock and still more so his followers– which to the naked eye appeared indistinguishable from kindergarten splatterings and which provided little immediate pleasure or illumination, it was 'crucial,' Wolfe realized, to have a 'persuasive theory,' a prefabricated conceptual lens to make sense of the work and bring into focus the artist's point. From there it was just a short step to the belief that the critic who supplies the theories is the equal, if not the superior, of the artist who creates the painting."

Peter Berkowitz, "Literature in Theory"


The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060221-Tilley.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Cover art by Rea Irvin

On this date in 1925,
The New Yorker
first appeared.

Related material:

Aldous Huxley on
The Perennial Philosophy
(ART WARS, March 13, 2003)
and William James on religion:

"James points out that… a mystical experience displays the world through a different lens than is present in ordinary experience. The experience, in his words, is 'ineffable'…."

For an experience that is
perhaps more effable,
see the oeuvre of
 Jill St. John.

Related material:

A drama for Mardi Gras,
The Crimson Passion,
and (postscript of 2:56 PM)
today's Harvard Crimson
(pdf, 843k)

Wednesday, February 8, 2006

Wednesday February 8, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Iconography
(continued)

“… iconography,
the concept and image
of the bride of Christ–
the sponsa Christi
assumed particular relevance in
the definition of women’s identity.”

Silvia Evangelisti in
Historiographical Reviews

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060208-Sponsa.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

 Arts & Letters Daily
(Feb. 8, 2006) annotated:

Dan Brown is not the first to have suggested that Jesus had a sex life– even Martin Luther said it. So what about the lady, Mary Magdalene?… more

“In ‘The Little Mermaid,’ Ariel’s true identity is the ‘Lost Bride,’ the Magdalene.”
Joan Acocella on pop religion in this week’s New Yorker

For literature profs of today, Theory is what the Dialectic was to Marxist intellectuals of the past: the key to almost everything… more

“Contemporary literary theory did not emerge in an intellectual and cultural vacuum. The subordination of art to argument and ideas has been a long time in the works. In The Painted Word, a rumination on the state of American painting in the 1970s, Tom Wolfe described an epiphany he had one Sunday morning while reading an article in the New York Times on an exhibit at Yale University. To appreciate contemporary art– the paintings of Jackson Pollack and still more so his followers– which to the naked eye appeared indistinguishable from kindergarten splatterings and which provided little immediate pleasure or illumination, it was ‘crucial,’ Wolfe realized, to have a ‘persuasive theory,’ a prefabricated conceptual lens to make sense of the work and bring into focus the artist’s point. From there it was just a short step to the belief that the critic who supplies the theories is the equal, if not the superior, of the artist who creates the painting.”
Peter Berkowitz, “Literature in Theory”

The idea that anyone, regardless of learning or class, could “come to Christ” went along with the idea of equal rights in America. William Jennings Bryan… more

“… evangelical Protestantism has always been an integral part of American political history.”
Michael Kazin, Dissent Magazine, Winter 2006

And from non-Protestantism, for the birthday of John “Star Wars” Williams, we have…

Sanctus from Missa “Veni Sponsa Christi” (pdf), by Manuel Cardoso (1566-1650).

Related material: Catholic Tastes and
                           A Mass for Lucero.

Thursday, June 9, 2005

Thursday June 9, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:45 pm
Kernel of Eternity

continued

"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential pattern
whence all other things proceed,
the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe,
Of Time and the River

From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety…. It was from the point of view of… [such a] subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

As yesterday's entry "Kernel of Eternity" indicated, the word "kernel" has a definite meaning in mathematics.  The Klein four-group, beloved of structural anthropologists and art theorists, is a particularly apt example of a kernel. (See PlanetMath for details.)

Diagrams of this group may have influenced Giovanni Sambin, professor of mathematical logic at the University of Padua; the following impressive-looking diagram is from Sambin's

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/SambinBP1Pic2A.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sambin argues that this diagram reflects some of the basic structures of thought itself… making it perhaps one way to describe what  Klee called the "mind or heart of creation." 

But this verges on what Stevens called the sacerdotal.  It seems that a simple picture of the "kernel of eternity" as the four-group, a picture without reference to logic or philosophy, and without distracting letters and labels, is required.  The following is my attempt to supply such a picture:

Klein four-group

This is a picture of the four-group
as a permutation group on four points.
Pairs of colored arrows indicate the three
transformations other than the identity,
which may be regarded either as
invisible or as rendered by
the four black points themselves.

Update of 7:45 PM Thursday:

Review of the above (see comments)
by a typical Xanga reader:

"Ur a FUCKIN' LOSER!!!!!  LMFAO!!!!"

For more merriment, see
The Optical Unconscious
and
The Painted Word.

A recent Xangan movie review:

"Annakin's an idiot, but he's not an idiot because that's the way the character works, he's an idiot because George Lucas was too lazy to make him anything else. He has to descend to the Daaaahk Side, but the dark side never really seems all that dark. He kills children, but offscreen. We never get to see the transformation. One minute he cares about the republic, the next he's killing his friends, and then for some reason he's duelling with Obi Wan on a lava flow. Who cares? Not me….

So a big ol' fuck you to George Lucas. Fuck you, George!"

Both Xangans seem to be fluent in what Tom Wolfe has called the "fuck patois."

A related suggestion from Google:

Give Dad a photo gift

These remarks from Xangans and Google
 suggest the following photo gift,
based on a 2003 journal entry:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050609-Fahne.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Monday, March 10, 2003

Monday March 10, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:45 am

ART WARS:

Art at the Vanishing Point

Two readings from The New York Times Book Review of Sunday,

March 9,

2003 are relevant to our recurring "art wars" theme.  The essay on Dante by Judith Shulevitz on page 31 recalls his "point at which all times are present."  (See my March 7 entry.)  On page 12 there is a review of a novel about the alleged "high culture" of the New York art world.  The novel is centered on Leo Hertzberg, a fictional Columbia University art historian.  From Janet Burroway's review of What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt:

"…the 'zeros' who inhabit the book… dramatize its speculations about the self…. the spectator who is 'the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas.'''

Here is a canvas by Richard McGuire for April Fools' Day 1995, illustrating such a spectator.

For more on the "vanishing point," or "point at infinity," see

"Midsummer Eve's Dream."

Connoisseurs of ArtSpeak may appreciate Burroway's summary of Hustvedt's prose: "…her real canvas is philosophical, and here she explores the nature of identity in a structure of crystalline complexity."

For another "structure of crystalline
complexity," see my March 6 entry,

"Geometry for Jews."

For a more honest account of the
New York art scene, see Tom Wolfe's
 
The Painted Word.
 

Thursday, March 6, 2003

Thursday March 6, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:35 am

ART WARS:

Geometry for Jews

Today is Michelangelo's birthday.

Those who prefer the Sistine Chapel to the Rothko Chapel may invite their Jewish friends to answer the following essay question:

Discuss the geometry underlying the above picture.  How is this geometry related to the work of Jewish artist Sol LeWitt? How is it related to the work of Aryan artist Ernst Witt?  How is it related to the Griess "Monster" sporadic simple group whose elements number 

808 017 424 794 512 875 886 459 904 961 710 757 005 754 368 000 000 000?

Some background:

Sunday, March 2, 2003

Sunday March 2, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:20 pm

7:20 PM CALI Time

The Bus and the Bead Game:
 
The Communion of Saints as
 the Association of Ideas

On this date in 1955, “Bus Stop,” a play by William Inge, opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City.

“I seemed to be standing in a bus queue by the side of a long, mean street.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, opening sentence

Today’s birthdays:

Sam Houston
Dr. Seuss
Kurt Weill
Mikhail Gorbachev
Tom Wolfe
Desi Arnaz
Jennifer Jones
Karen Carpenter

and many others.

Today is the feast day of  

St. Randolph Scott
St. Sandy Dennis
St. D. H. Lawrence, and
St. Charlie Christian.

“Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear…”

— Karen Carpenter singing “Superstar

“And if I find me a good man,
 I won’t be back at all.”

C. C. Rider lyrics

See (and hear) also “Seven Come Eleven,” played by St. Charlie Christian.

One might (disregarding separation in time and space — never major hindrances to the saints) imagine C. S. Lewis in Heaven listening to a conversation among the four saints listed above.  For more on the communion of saints, see my entry “State of the Communion” of Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2003.  This entry, quoting an old spiritual, concluded with “Now hear the word of the Lord”  — followed by this notation: 

 7:11 PM.

See also the N.Y. Times obituary of John P. Thompson of Dallas, former 7-Eleven chairman, who died, as it happened, on that very day (Jan. 28).  See also Karen Carpenter’s “first take luck.”

The sort of association of ideas described in the “Communion” entry is not unrelated to the Glasperlenspiel, or Glass Bead Game, of Hermann Hesse.  For a somewhat different approach to the Game, see

The Glass Bead Game,”

by John S. Wilson, group theorist and head of the Pure Mathematics Group at the University of Birmingham in England. Wilson is “not convinced that Hesse’s… game is only a metaphor.” Neither am I.

For the association-of-ideas approach, see the page cited in my “Communion” entry,

A Game Designer’s Holy Grail,”

and (if you can find a copy) one of the greatest forgotten books of the twentieth century,

The Third Word War,

by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978).  As Lee remarks concerning the communion of saints and the association of ideas,

“The association is the idea.”
 

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