The “greatest generation” theme from Art Wars– April 7, 2003 continues in two obituaries from this morning’s New York Times:

The first obituary says that Goldberg

“saw abstract painting… as ‘still the primary visual challenge of our time. It might get harder and harder to make an abstract image that’s believable, but I think that just makes the challenge greater.'”  The Times says that Goldberg was a veteran of Merrill’s Marauders in World War II (as well as of the last century’s art wars).

The second obituary notes that Astor’s books include A Blood-Dimmed Tide (a phrase from Yeats)– an account of the Battle of the Bulge– and a biography of Dr. Josef Mengele.

Both men died on Sunday, December 30, 2007. From Log24 on that date, an abstract image and a cinematic portrait of Dr. Mengele:

Yesterday evening was, according to today’s Harvard Crimson, “the opening night of three usually neglected works by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. The three plays, originally produced in April 2006 to commemorate what would have been Beckett’s 100th birthday, were part of the inaugural series for the New College Theatre. Robert Scanlan, a professor of theater who knew Beckett personally, directed the plays…. He said that performing Beckett as part of the New College Theatre’s inaugural series represents an auspicious beginning. ‘I personally think it sacralizes the place to perform Beckett here,’ he said.”

“The first play, ‘Words and Music,’ displayed the frustrations of the creative process: a writer, Joe, and Bob, a character personified by [a] musical trio, worked with and against each other to create art.

The duo first tried to capture love through words, but Joe’s attempts quickly descended into clichés.

Then, Joe and Bob tried to capture age, but they failed there too.

Finally, they tried to capture ‘the face’– a vision of a lost love. While they were able to achieve some meaning, this soon came to an abrupt end when the elderly man who’d been leading their creative endeavor simply stood up and walked away.”

— BONNIE J. KAVOUSSI

Ceremonies marking the installation of Drew Gilpin Faust as the President of Hogwarts will begin in Hogwarts Yard at 2 PM ET today.

Faust has actually been Hogwarts’s president since July 1. Last month she welcomed the Class of 2011:

Faust “encouraged the incoming class to explore [the school’s] many opportunities. ‘Think of it as a treasure room of hidden objects Harry discovers at Hogwarts,’ Faust said.”

— The Hogwarts Crimson, Sept. 10, 2007 

From Faust’s website today:

“As a historian, I am proud to lead an institution with such a rich and storied past. Hogwarts began in colonial days with a handful of students, little property and limited power and prestige, but a determined mission: ‘To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity,’ as a 1643 brochure put it.  That bold vision has guided Hogwarts for the past four centuries….”

The rest of the story —

From The Hogwarts Guide:

“An early brochure, published in 1643, justified the College’s existence: ‘To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches.'”

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games“
and “Is Nothing Sacred?“

Film Review

“No offense to either of them, but ‘Georgia Rule’ suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone’s going to be hit with a pie.” –John Anderson at Variety.com, May 8, 2007

Sounds perfect to me.

Also in today’s online Times:

“Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and conductor who was renowned not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century, but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in Russia during the final decades of the Cold War, died in Moscow today. He was 80 and lived in Paris, with homes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London and Lausanne, Switzerland….

Mr. Rostropovich… was widely known by his diminutive, Slava (which means glory in Russian)….”

Related material:

I. “Established on 8 November 1943, the Order of Glory (Orden Slavy – Орден Славы) was an Order (decoration) of the Soviet Union…. The Order of Glory… was modelled closely upon the Tsarist Cross of St. George….” —Wikipedia

II. Also on the 8th of November, in 2006 and 2002: Grave Matters and Religious Symbolism at Princeton.

III. “Mr. Rostropovich will be buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery, where on Wednesday his friend, Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president, was laid to rest.” —New York Times

IV. “A graveyard smash.” –Bobby (Boris) Pickett, who died Wednesday.

The headline for Edward Rothstein’s “Connections” column in The New York Times of Monday, March 26, 2007, was “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic.”

Continuing yesterday’s lottery meditation, let us examine today’s New York results in the light of Rothstein’s essay.  The literary “ring” structure he describes is not immediately apparent in Friday’s numbers, although the mid-day number, 002– which in the I Ching signifies yin, the feminine, receptive principle– might be interpreted as referring to a ring of sorts.

Illustration from
an entry of
March 2, 2004

For the evening number, 085, see the list of page numbers in last year’s Log24 entry (cited here last night) for today’s date, March 30.  Page 85, in the source cited here a year ago, begins…

“A random selection from Hopkins’s journal shows how the sun acts as a focus….”

See also last night’s picture:

 

Queen's Gambit

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

— W. B. Yeats, "Long-Legged Fly"

This is the epigraph to
the Walter Tevis novel
The Queen's Gambit.
 

“‘The architectonics of a narrative,’ Davenport says, ‘are emphasized and given a role to play in dramatic effect when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in.’….

In his study of The Cantos, Davenport defines the Poundian ideogram as ‘a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols, rather than a grammar of logical sequence…. An idea unifies, dominates, and controls the particulars that make the ideogram’…. He insists on the intelligibility of this method: ‘The components of an ideogram cohere as particles in a magnetic field, independent of each other but not of the pattern in which they figure.'”

— Andre Furlani, “‘When Novelists Become Cubists’: The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport“

In Twelfth Night, the character Feste

“.. seems to be the wisest person within all the characters in the comedy. Viola remarks this by saying ‘This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool’…. Since Feste is a licensed fool, his main role in Twelfth Night is to speak the truth. This is where the humor lies….”

— Field-of-Themes.com

 Putting the
X
in Xmas

— C. S. Lewis

Apparently they teach them nihilism, empty rhetoric, and despair, as reflected in Borges, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, according to the art review below from today’s New York Times.  Let us hope that the late Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday, Dec. 12, has moved beyond these now– singing “Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” rather than “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Black, White, and Read All Over by Randy Kennedy in The New York Times Friday, Dec. 15, 2006 “In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known short stories, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ a 20th-century French writer sets out to compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes’s 17th-century masterpiece simply because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it’s cracked up to be. He manages two chapters word for word, a spontaneous duplicate that Borges’s narrator finds to be ‘infinitely richer’ than the original because it contains all manner of new meanings and inflections, wrenched as it is from its proper time and context….” [An artist’s version of a newspaper is]…. “a drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to nature with a refraction or two in between.  In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas….”

The Work:

Pennsylvania Lottery
December 2006
Daily Number (Day):

Click on numbers
for commentary.

“There is nothing new under the sun. With the death of the real, or rather with its (re)surrection, hyperreality both emerges and is already always reproducing itself.”  –Jean Baudrillard

Livingstone

On this date:

In 1871, journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley found Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who had not been heard from for years, near Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.

— AP “Today in History,” Nov. 10

Shem the Penman

Excerpt from Harvard Magazine:

“The people who intermediate between lunatics and the world used to be called alienists; the go-betweens for mathematicians are called teachers. Many a student may rightly have wondered if the terms shouldn’t be reversed.”

— Review of The Magic of Numbers, a book by Benedict H. Gross, Leverett Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Harvard College

For the full review, see

On Mathematical Imagination–
Harvard Magazine
(January-February 2004):

… part of a New Instauration
that will bring mathematics, at last, …
Wednesday, December 31, 2003,
7:00pm EST •  26.1k •
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/
on-line/010442.html

To a
Dark Lady*

“Something inside
is telling me that
I’ve got your secret.
Are you still listening?
Fear is the lock, and laughter
the key to your heart….

… you are what you are.
And you make it hard,
and you make it hard….”

— Stephen Stills Songbook

* Suggested by…

  (1) A Harvard Crimson opinion piece
       of Oct. 12, “A Psychosexual Sham”
  (2) Remarks on the sin of masturbation
        (Ask Father Hardon)
  (3) Shem was a sham…. (FW I.7, 170).

  See also the Crimson on Jack Nicholson
  and Log24 on a food joke.

  “Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane.”
    — The Source, by James A. Michener
  
   Tell it to James Joyce.

(Rosh Hashanah began at sundown September 22; Yom Kippur begins at sundown October 1.  —holidays.net)

Mark Finkelstein today:
 

"Today comes more evidence of the left's painful struggle to deal with its diminished standing and repeated rejection at the polls. In the subscription-required Why Voters Like Values, [New York] Times columnist Judith Warner claims that "the Christian right's ability to stir voter passions is based not on values, but on psychology." Warner describes having bravely gone inside the belly of the conservative beast, recently attending a Values Voters Summit in DC, and declaring it "imbued with so much intolerance and hate." This is presumably in contrast with liberal love-ins, where Bush & Co. are regularly depicted as liars, murderers, Hitlers, etc.

She later describes a schadenfreude-provoking scene of the day after Kerry's 2004 defeat, picking through the rubble with Harvard psychology professor emeritus, Jerome Kagan, who tried to console Warner and presumably himself. As she describes it:

"Our conversation drifted to the Republicans' 'values' [note scare quotes] agenda, and Kagan's belief that values sell because they're an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.

"'Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,' he said. 'You've got to believe that the track you've taken is the right track. You get depressed if you're not certain as to what it is you're supposed to be doing or what's right and wrong in the world."

"People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise– to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray– is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it's also, psychically, a recipe for disaster."

Got it? Liberalism is "more honest, rational and decent" than conservativism, but that's just not what the benighted public wants. They're looking for political Prozac, a Manichean worldview they can cling to, and that's what conservatism cunningly offers.

Less controversial values are provided by yesterday evening's Pennsylvania lottery— namely, the values 4, 5, and 6.

For a discussion of these values under the guise of musical intervals, see Professor Kagan again, in a paper (pdf) he wrote with Marcel R. Zentner, "Infants' Perception of Consonance and Dissonance in Music" (Infant Behavior & Development, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1998):

Adults judge as most consonant either the octave (difference of 12 semitones) [or the unison, difference of 0 semitones], the fifth (7 semitones), or the major third (4 semitones).

Illustration (see also yesterday evening):

Notes and frequency ratios

The paper discusses consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
"perceptual universals."

Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:

Shining Forth and
Midsummer Eve's Dream.

The material in Shining Forth
is also related, tangentially, to the
following presentation of the
Warner "values" essay
in today's online New York Times:

The above three Times items,
taken together, suggest that
those in search of "values"
should consult Betty Suarez:

Click on picture for further details.

The Presbyterian Exorcist

In memory of

Charles W. Dunn, Harvard Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures Emeritus, who died July 24, 2006, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston at the age of 90.  Dunn was master of Quincy House from 1966 to 1981.

“‘He brought a taste of Scotland to the House, initiating an annual rite of exorcism in September to cleanse the place of evil spirits, during which a Scots bagpiper led a march of residents around the courtyard and Charles intoned an incantation while waving a large baton, banishing ghosts and other harbingers of ill will. His leadership was at its best during magnificent evenings in the Master’s lodging when he taught guests Scottish country dances. Students were fond of him, and he of them.’

Born in Arbuthnott, Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Dunn began his schooling in Aberdeen and Edinburgh….”

— Harvard University Gazette online, Aug. 2, 2006

Related material:

In Memory of Wallace Stevens,
Presbyterian Saint
(also from Aug. 2, 2006),
and Deaconess.

“Wind over Water” in the I Ching,
the Classic of Transformations,
signifies huan, “dissolving.”

Dissolving:

From May 15 through May 26, there is a women-only meeting on zeta functions at the  Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.  Today’s activities:

Department of Defense

(Found in Translation continued,
 Lust und Freud continued, and
 Here’s Donny continued)

“When a person has uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, they may project these onto other people, assigning the thoughts or feelings that they need to repress to a convenient alternative target….

Projection is one of Freud’s original defense mechanisms.”

— ChangingMinds.org

The portrait at right is from
“Donny’s Ramblings:
Diary of a Pornographer.”

Also from that diary —

“This is the evening when 
yours truly, your friendly
neighborhood pornographer,
becomes your next hope
     for American Idol success….”

Women’s History Month continues…

Dreaming Game

A phrase from yesterday’s entry:

Lust und Freud.

This phrase, together with the concluding song from the recent film “Good Night and Good Luck,” suggests the following links (the first two from Sinatra’s birthday, 2004):

One For His Baby,
One More for the Road,
and LIFE in Camelot: The Kennedy Years.

In this morning’s New York Times obituaries: 

Philip B.Kunhardt Jr., editor of “LIFE in Camelot: The Kennedy Years.”  Kunhardt was also the author of memoirs about his parents, My Father’s House and The Dreaming Game— the latter about his mother, herself the author of the classic Pat the Bunny.  Kunhardt died on Tuesday.

Related material:

Tuesday’s Log24 entry The Kennedy School and yesterday’s entry Welcome to the Hotel Hassler.

“There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say…”

Google’s “sunlit paradigm” and

my own “Lost in Translation.”

In memory of Akira Ifukube (pdf), composer of music for “Godzilla,” who died on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006… birthday of John “Star Wars” Williams–

Mozart, 2006

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

— Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936)

From the center:

“‘Mozart, 1935’ immediately discloses a will to counter complaints of pure poetry, to refute that charge heard regularly from Stevens’s critics, to find ‘his particular celebration out of tune today’ on his own if necessary; and, in short, to meet the communist [poet and critic Willard] Maas’s ‘respect for his magnificent rhetoric’ at least halfway across from right to left.”

— Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211

From the left:

Norman Lebrecht on this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth (January 27, 1756):

   “… Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward….
   … Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak….
   …  He lacked the rage of justice that pushed Beethoven into isolation, or any urge to change the world. Mozart wrote a little night music for the ancien regime. He was not so much reactionary as regressive….
   … Little in such a mediocre life gives cause for celebration….
   … The bandwaggon of Mozart commemorations was invented by the Nazis in 1941….
   …  In this orgy of simple-mindedness, the concurrent centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich– a composer of true courage and historical significance– is being shunted to the sidelines, celebrated by the few.
    Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony. Listen to music that matters.”
     
The left seems little changed since 1935.