See also Red and Gray in this journal.
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Red and Gray
Oh, the red leaf looks to the hard gray stone
To each other, they know what they mean
— Suzanne Vega, “Songs in Red and Gray“
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Thursday, June 15, 2023
Study in Red and Grey*
For the blue-black frame, a hat tip to Willard Motley.
See also the above date — 6 Nov 2021 — in this journal.
* See as well a Log24 search for Red and Gray .
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Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Arrangement in Gray and Black
See also The Spelman Trick.
The image above, from an Oct. 15 Harvard Crimson article, is not credited.
But see the Crimson’s “Code Girl” page and the website of Margot Shang.
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Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Death in Mathmagic Land
"It was our old friend Pythagoras who discovered
that the pentagram was full of mathematics."
— Narrator, "Donald in Mathmagic Land," Disney, 1959
… and it was Peter J. Cameron who discovered that
mathematics was full of pentagrams.
From Log24 on May 3: Gray Space —
Robert J. Stewart (left) and a pentagram photo posted May 2
by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche. See also Lyche in this journal.
From Log24 on May 13: An Artist's Memorial —
The death mentioned in the above May 13 post occurred on
May 12, the date of a scheduled Black Mass at Harvard.
Related material:
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Sunday, April 20, 2014
Gray Space
(Continued from Palm Sunday)
From Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” —
Try to remember this: what you project
Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
With any passion, be it love or terror,
May take on whims and powers of its own.
Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection
Will serve you best, unless you overdo it,
Watching your step too narrowly, refusing
To specify a world, shrinking your purview
To a tight vision of your inching shoes—
Which may, as soon you come to think, be crossing
An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.
What you must manage is to bring to mind
A landscape not worth looking at, some bleak
Champaign at dead November’s end, its grass
As dry as lichen, and its lichens grey….
See also —
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Sunday, April 13, 2014
Gray Space
Art Wars view —
image from a post at noon on Saturday, April 12:
Kansas City view:
Review of Seeing Gray , a book by pastor Adam Hamilton
of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection
in Leawood, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City—
“Adam Hamilton invites us to soulful gray space
between polarities, glorious gray space that is holy,
mysterious, complex, and true. Let us find within
our spirits the courage and humility to live and learn
in this faithful space, to see gray, to discern a more
excellent way.”
—Review by United Methodist Bishop Hope Morgan Ward
The above quotation was suggested by the following from today’s
online Kansas City Star :
“Two of the victims were 14-year-old Reat Griffin Underwood
and his grandfather, William Lewis Corporon, who attended the
United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood.
The Rev. Adam Hamilton, the church’s senior pastor, shared
the news with church members at the beginning of the evening
Palm Sunday service.”
Update of 10:48 PM — A related photo:
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Saturday, February 25, 2012
The Rock
(Continued. See previous post and Red and Gray in this journal.)
“Give faith a fighting chance.” —Country song
From a post of June 3, 2007—
Related illustration relevant to theology—
For some background, see Cube Trinity in this journal.
For greater depth, see Levering’s Scripture and Metaphysics:
Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology ,
Blackwell, 2004, page 150.
Comments Off on The Rock
Saturday, March 12, 2011
A Songwriter’s Apology
From this evening's online New York Times , a death from yesterday—
Mr. Hardy’s song “St. Clare” was covered by Ms. Vega
and appears on her 2001 album “Songs in Red and Gray.”
[Lyrics here.]
See also "red and gray" and "The Eye" in this journal.
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Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Women’s History Month
Susanne for Suzanne
From pages 7-8 of William York Tindall's Literary Symbolism (Columbia U. Press, 1955)—
... According to Cassirer's Essay
on Man, as we have seen, art is a symbolic form, parallel in respect
of this to religion or science. Each of these forms builds up a universe
that enables man to interpret and organize his experience; and each
is a discovery, because a creation, of reality. Although similar in func-
tion, the forms differ in the kind of reality built. Whereas science
builds it of facts, art builds it of feelings, intuitions of quality, and
the other distractions of our inner life— and in their degrees so do
myth and religion. What art, myth, and religion are, Cassirer con-
fesses, cannot be expressed by a logical definition.
Nevertheless, let us see what Clive Bell says about art. He calls
it "significant form," but what that is he is unable to say. Having
no quarrel with art as form, we may, however, question its signifi-
cance. By significant he cannot mean important in the sense of
having import, nor can he mean having the function of a sign;
for to him art, lacking reference to nature, is insignificant. Since,
however, he tells us that a work of art "expresses" the emotion of
its creator and "provokes" an emotion in its contemplator,he seems
to imply that his significant means expressive and provocative. The
emotion expressed and provoked is an "aesthetic emotion," contem-
plative, detached from all concerns of utility and from all reference.
Attempting to explain Bell's significant form, Roger Fry, equally
devoted to Whistler and art for art's sake, says that Flaubert's "ex-
pression of the idea" is as near as he can get to it, but neither Flaubert
nor Fry tells what is meant by idea. To "evoke" it, however, the artist
creates an "expressive design" or "symbolic form," by which the
spirit "communicates its most secret and indefinable impulses."
Susanne Langer,who occupies a place somewhere between Fry
and Cassirer, though nearer the latter, once said in a seminar that a
work of art is an "unassigned syntactical symbol." Since this defini-
End of page 7
tion does not appear in her latest book, she may have rejected it, but
it seems far more precise than Fry's attempt. By unassigned she prob-
ably intends insignificant in the sense of lacking sign value or fixed
reference; syntactical implies a form composed of parts in relation-
ship to one another; and a symbol, according to Feeling and Form,
is "any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction." Too
austere for my taste, this account of symbol seems to need elaboration,
which, to be sure, her book provides. For the present, however, taking
symbol to mean an outward device for presenting an inward state,
and taking unassigned and syntactical as I think she uses them, let
us tentatively admire her definition of the work of art.
Oh, the red leaf looks to the hard gray stone
To each other, they know what they mean
— Suzanne Vega, "Song in Red and Gray"
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Saturday, July 11, 2009
Saturday July 11, 2009
“Mercilessly Tasteful“
Related material:
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|
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Related material:
The Literary Symbol
by William York Tindall
(Columbia University Press,
Epiphany 1955)
Comments Off on Saturday July 11, 2009
Friday, May 18, 2007
Friday May 18, 2007
Devil in the Details
“Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that ‘the devil is in the details’….”
From the weblog of Peter Woit:
“The New Yorker keeps its physics theme going this week with cover art that includes a blackboard full of basic equations from quantum mechanics.”
May 21, 2007
New Yorker cover
Detail
The detail suggests
the following
religious images from
Twelfth Night 2003:
|
Devil’s Claws, or |
Yankee Puzzle, or |
“Mercilessly tasteful”
— Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega’s
“Songs in Red and Gray“
Comments Off on Friday May 18, 2007
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Sunday December 11, 2005
Classic Sixties
“And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked
upon the water…”
— Leonard Cohen
meets the timeless
Satori at Pearl Harbor:
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|
|
“Mercilessly tasteful.”
— Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega’s
“Songs in Red and Gray“
Related material:
Comments Off on Sunday December 11, 2005
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Sunday December 19, 2004
Sunday Sermon
on Saturday’s Numbers
on Saturday’s Numbers
Today’s New York Times on a rabbi who died in Jerusalem on Sunday, Dec. 5:
“In the 1950’s, he was a vocal advocate for the relaxation of New York City’s blue laws, which forbade many kinds of commerce on Sundays but not on Saturdays. The laws were repealed in the 1970’s. Solomon Joseph Sharfman was born on Nov. 1, 1915, in Treblinka, Poland; his family immigrated to the United States five years later. His father, Rabbi Label Sharfman, worked as a shochet, or ritual slaughterer….”
Saturday’s lottery numbers from Pennsylvania, the State of Grace:
Saturday Midday: 144
Saturday Evening: 360
Saturday Evening: 360
A Sunday Sermon:
“Once upon a time there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love with a beautiful dot. But the dot, though perfect in every way, only had eyes for a wild and unkempt squiggle. All of the line’s romantic dreams were in vain, until he discovered . . . angles! Now, with newfound self-expression, he can be anything he wants to be–a square….”
Related material:
(See Song in Red and Gray
and The Dot and the Line.)
Friday, December 17, 2004
Friday December 17, 2004
From today's New York Times:
Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92
Background: entry of 7 PM Wednesday.
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Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Wednesday December 15, 2004
Judeo-Christian Heritage:
The Wiener Kreis
The meditation below was suggested by this passage:
“… the belief that any sensible discourse had to be formulated within the rules of the scientific language, avoiding the non sense of the ordinary language. This belief, initially expressed by Wittgenstein as aphorisms, was later formalized by the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] as a ‘logical construction of the world’….”
“Deeply Vulgar”
— Epithet applied in 2003 to
Harvard President Lawrence Summers.
“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
|
In today’s Crimson:
Only moderately vulgar, with its sniggering pop-culture reference. But it should be
Frankfurter Professor of Law.
|
|
Those seeking relief from
Judeo-Christian vulgarity may enjoy
the Buddhist Suzanne Vega’s
|
|
|
“Mercilessly tasteful”
— Andrew Mueller
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Sunday, January 5, 2003
Sunday January 5, 2003
Whirligig
Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
Twelfth Night. Act v. Sc. 1.
Twelfth night is the night of January 5-6.
Tonight is twelfth night in Australia; 4 AM Jan. 5
in New York City is 8 PM Jan. 5 in Sydney.
An October 6 entry:
Twenty-first Century Fox
On Sunday, October 6, 1889, the Moulin Rouge music hall opened in Paris, an event that to some extent foreshadowed the opening of Fox Studios Australia in Sydney on November 7, 1999. The Fox ceremonies included, notably, Kylie Minogue singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend."
|
Red Windmill
|
Kylie Minogue
|
For the mathematical properties of the red windmill (moulin rouge) figure at left, see Diamond Theory.
An October 5 entry:
The Message from Vega
|
|
|
"Mercilessly tasteful"
— Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega's
"Songs in Red and Gray"
In accordance with the twelfth-night
"whirligig of time" theme,
here are two enigmatic quilt blocks:
|
Devil's Claws, or |
Yankee Puzzle, or |
One can approach these symbols in either a literary or a mathematical fashion. For a purely mathematical discussion of the differences in the two symbols' structure, see Diamond Theory. Those who prefer literary discussions may make up their own stories.
"Plato is wary of all forms of rapture other than reason's. He is most deeply leery of, because himself so susceptible to, the literary imagination. He speaks of it as a kind of holy madness or intoxication and goes on to link it to Eros, another derangement that joins us, but very dangerously, with the gods."
— Rebecca Goldstein in The New York Times,
December 16, 2002
December 16, 2002
"It's all in Plato, all in Plato; bless me,
what do they teach them at these schools?"
what do they teach them at these schools?"
— C. S. Lewis in the Narnia Chronicles
Saturday, December 7, 2002
Saturday December 7, 2002
Satori at Pearl Harbor
The following old weblog entry seems
relevant both to the Zen concept of satori,
or “awakening,” and to Pearl Harbor Day.
Saturday, October 5, 2002… 11:30 PMThe Message from Vega
“Mercilessly tasteful” |
The appropriate response to Vega’s Buddhism today seems to be the following classic by James Taylor:
“Won’t you look down upon me, Jesus?
You’ve got to help me make a stand…”
This is today’s new site background music.
For more log entries relevant to today, see
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Saturday, October 5, 2002
Saturday October 5, 2002
The Message from Vega
|
|
|
“Mercilessly tasteful”
— Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega’s
“Songs in Red and Gray“
Comments Off on Saturday October 5, 2002
Friday, November 17, 2023
Classicism Continued: An Apotheosis of Modernity
|
From Chapter 23, "Poetry," by Adam Parkes, in Writing in 1910–11, the English poet and critic T. E. Hulme claimed that the two major traditions in poetry, romanticism and classicism, were as different as a well and a bucket. According to the romantic party, Hulme explained, humankind is “intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance”; that is, our nature is “a well, a reservoir full of possibilities.” For the classical party, however, human nature is “like a bucket”; it is “intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent” (Hulme 1987: 117). But it was not only that romanticism and classicism were as dissimilar as a well and a bucket; their contents were different, too. To draw water from the well of romanticism was, in effect, to pour a “pot of treacle over the dinner table,” while the classical bucket was more likely to be full of little stones – or jewels, perhaps. Romanticism, in Hulme’s view, was the result of displaced religious fervor; it represented the return of religious instincts that the “perverted rhetoric of Rationalism” had suppressed, so that “concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience” (Hulme 1987: 118). Classicism, by contrast, traded in dry goods – dry, hard goods, to be precise. Hulme left little doubt as to which side he was on. “It is essential to prove,” he argued, “that beauty may be in small, dry things. The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. . . . I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming” (Hulme 1987: 131–3). If by “dry, hard, classical verse” Hulme meant poems looking like the fragments of Sappho, he didn’t have to wait long to see his prophecy fulfilled.
The hard sand breaks,
Far off over the leagues of it, 228
playing on the wide shore, So wrote Hilda Doolittle in “Hermes of the Ways,” the first poem that she signed “H. D., Imagiste” at the behest of her fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. From Pound’s perspective, the Imagist movement that he co-founded in 1912 with H. D. and the English poet Richard Aldington was finished well before the First World War began in August 1914; throughout this war-torn decade, however, Imagism continued to spawn the poetry of “small, dry things” whose coming Hulme had predicted a few years before. Indeed, modernist poets weren’t content merely to break down the extended heroic narratives – the “spilt religion,” as Hulme put it – of their treacly nineteenthcentury predecessors; they insisted on breaking down small things into ever-smaller particles and subparticles. This logic of disintegration is clearly at work in poems like “Hermes of the Ways,” where each line is metrically unique, creating a sense of perpetual freshness – an apotheosis of modernity, as it were. REFERENCE Hulme, T. E. (1987). Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published 1924. |
Compare and contrast:
Jeremy Gray,
Plato's Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics,
Princeton University Press, first edition Sept. 22, 2008 —
"Here, modernism is defined as an autonomous body of ideas,
having little or no outward reference, placing considerable emphasis
on formal aspects of the work and maintaining a complicated—
indeed, anxious— rather than a naïve relationship with the
day-to-day world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group
of people, such as a professional or discipline-based group
that has a high sense of the seriousness and value of what it is
trying to achieve. This brisk definition…."
(Quoted at the webpage Solomon's Cube.)
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Sunday, February 5, 2023
Dimensions
A Logo for Riri —
The above Nick Romano passage is from Knock on Any Door,
a 1947 novel by Willard Motley. Another Motley novel about
Chicago, from 1958 . . .
|
Page 41 The city was a blue-black panther that slunk along beside them. The tall, skyscraper night-grass hemmed them in. The thousand neon animal eyes watched their going. Page 67 The blue-black panther of a city watched their going. The un- blinking neon animal eyes watched their going. Thousands of neon signs lit their way. In an alley behind West Madison Street half an Page 68 hour before, a bum, drunk, had frozen to death lying in the back doorway of a pawnshop. The blue-black panther crouched over him. Page 70 First the creak of ice as an automobile goes by. Then the frown into your room of the red brick building across the street, its windows frosted over like cold, unfriendly eyes. Then a bum stumbling along trying to keep warm. Now a drunk, unevenly. And the wind like the howling voice of the blue-black panther, hunting, finding. And the clanging of impersonal streetcars. And each bar of neon, cold, dead. No message. The clown takes his bow and it is Christmas Day. Page 79 The blue-black panther followed them, sniffing at their heels. Page 106 Above them the blue-black panther lay on the roof of a tenement house, its feline chin on the cornice, its yellow-green eyes staring down onto the black night street of Maxwell. Its tail, wagging slowly back and forth, was like a lasso, a noose, sending little shivers of pebbles rolling loosely across the roof. Page 154 Then he went down to the Shillelagh Club. Through the pane, in the crowded, noisy place, he saw her. She was sitting at a table near the back, alone. Her cigarette had fallen from her lips and rolled away from her on the table top. It had burned itself to a long gray ash. Her head hung loosely on her neck as if she was asleep. A half-empty glass of beer was in front of her. Please, Mother, please come out, he prayed to her. And he stood next door to the tavern, waiting, his small shoulders drawn in, his head down in shame. And often he walked to the window and stood on tiptoe. She was still there. In the same position. He waited. He would be late to school tomorrow. He waited, keeping the long vigil. He waited. Twelve years old. And the thousand neon-animal eyes stared at him savagely. He waited. The blue-black panther lashed out its tail, flicking its furry tip against his ankles. He waited. Page 250 Alongside the blue-black patrol wagon the blue-black panther walks majestically. Page 262 Outside the door the blue-black panther rubs its back like a house cat. Page 409 Nick held the cigarette listlessly. The smoke curled up his wrist and arm like a snake. The blue-black panther licked his hand. |
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Monday, August 30, 2021
Down, or: A Black Box for Didion
From "Why I Write," by Joan Didion —
|
"I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word 'intellectual' I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the Bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the Bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact. I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas—I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in The Portrait of a Lady as well as the next person, 'imagery' being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention—but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost , to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost , the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was." |
"I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas."
— Joan Didion, December 5, 1976
"In the 1988 interview with Scripps Howard, Mr. Poynter mused
about the device he wanted to invent for his own tombstone.
'When you walked up to it,' he said, 'you’d activate
an electronic voice. And it would say, "Come on down."’”
— New York Times obituary yesterday
And add, "We all float down here"?
For other, better, remarks about ideas by Didion
see "Freeze the shifting phantasmagoria," a phrase
from her 1979 book The White Album.
Comments Off on Down, or: A Black Box for Didion
Sunday, January 3, 2021
Grey Advertising
Clay Risen memorializes an advertising executive —
“Ms. Young rose to prominence as an executive with Grey Advertising,
where she began in 1959, standing out as one of the few women and
one of the few Asian-Americans at the firm, which was then a power
in its field.”
Related art from Log24 on the date of Ms. Young’s death —
“A colour is eternal.
It haunts time like a spirit.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
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Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Death Warmed Over
In memory of the author of My Time in Space * —
Tim Robinson, who reportedly died on April 3 —
See also an image from a Log24 post, Gray Space —
Related material from Robinson’s reported date of death —
* First edition, hardcover, Lilliput Press, Ireland, April 1, 2001.
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Monday, December 30, 2019
Death on Becket’s Day
Author Alasdair Gray reportedly died yesterday,
on the feast of St. Thomas à Becket.
"His Collected Verse (2010) was followed by
Every Short Story 1951-2012 . Hell and Purgatory ,
the first two parts of his version of Dante’s
Divine Comedy , “decorated and Englished in
prosaic verse”, appeared in 2018 and 2019.
In November Gray received the inaugural
Saltire Society Scottish Lifetime Achievement award."
— https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/29/
alasdair-gray-obituary
See some related remarks from May 15, 1998.
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Wednesday, November 20, 2019
After Rothko
RED
_____________________________________________________________________________
GRAY
______________________
Arya on Rothko
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Sunday, May 19, 2019
The Building Blocks of Geometry
From "On the life and scientific work of Gino Fano"
by Alberto Collino, Alberto Conte, and Alessandro Verra,
ICCM Notices , July 2014, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 43-57 —
|
" Indeed, about the Italian debate on foundations of Geometry, it is not rare to read comments in the same spirit of the following one, due to Jeremy Gray13. He is essentially reporting Hans Freudenthal’s point of view: ' When the distinguished mathematician and historian of mathematics Hans Freudenthal analysed Hilbert’s Grundlagen he argued that the link between reality and geometry appears to be severed for the first time in Hilbert’s work. However, he discovered that Hilbert had been preceded by the Italian mathematician Gino Fano in 1892. . . .' " 13 J. Gray, "The Foundations of Projective Geometry in Italy," Chapter 24 (pp. 269–279) in his book Worlds Out of Nothing , Springer (2010). |
Restoring the severed link —
See also Espacement and The Thing and I.
Related material —
Comments Off on The Building Blocks of Geometry
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Stories
"We tell ourselves stories . . . ." — Joan Didion
New York Times Wire, 6:40 PM ET Thursday, March 8, 2018
3h ago
GRAY MATTER
How Lies Spread Online
They diffuse farther, faster and more broadly than the truth does.
4h ago
It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider.
And Humans Are to Blame.
False claims posted on Twitter were 70 percent more likely
to be shared than the truth, researchers at M.I.T. found.
And people appear to prefer false news.
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Monday, July 3, 2017
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Stark to Parker in New Trailer
"Don't do anything I would do.
And definitely don't do anything I wouldn't do.
There's a little gray area in there
and that's where you operate."
See as well "Spirit and Space" (Nov. 25, 2016) —
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Saturday, July 2, 2016
Not Even
|
"At CERN the LHC has reached design luminosity,
— Peter Woit, Thursday, June 30, 2016, |
See as well The Onion yesterday (Friday, July 1) —
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Sunday, September 14, 2014
Sensibility
Structured gray matter:
Graphic symmetries of Galois space:
The reason for these graphic symmetries in affine Galois space —
symmetries of the underlying projective Galois space:
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Monday, June 23, 2014
Dream Palace
Or: Mathematics and Narrative, Continued
In memory of a Stanford Arabist who reportedly died yesterday:
Another dream palace, from science fiction:
From Catherine Asaro’s The Spacetime Pool :
|
She couldn’t believe him. That he sounded sane made none of this more plausible. “And you have no idea how this gate works?” she challenged. His gaze flashed. “Of course I do. It’s a branch. From here to your mountains.” “A tree, you mean?” “No. A branch cut to another page. Your universe is one sheet, mine is another.” She gaped at him. “Do you mean a Riemann sheet? A branch cut from one Riemann sheet to another?” “That’s right.” He hesitated. “You know these words?” She laughed unsteadily. “It’s nonsense. Not the sheets, I mean, but they’re just mathematical constructs! They don’t actually exist. You can’t physically go through a branch cut any more than you could step into a square root sign.” He was watching her with an expression that mirrored how she had felt when he told her about his prophecy. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Complex variable analysis.” She felt as if she were in a play where she only knew part of the script. “A branch cut is like a slit in a sheet of paper. It opens onto another sheet. I suppose you could say the sheets are alternate universes. But they aren’t real.” “They seem quite real,” he said. |
Related material: From Sunday, the day of the Stanford Arabist’s death,
a quotation from a 2013 book on “the rise of complex function theory.”
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Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Spectral Theory
Peter J. Cameron attributes failure of his usual
link to the NASA "Astronomy Picture of the Day"
(APOD) to the US government shutdown, and
gives a substitute link.
Here is yet another substitute link, this one
specifically to today's picture —
Related literary remarks by Nabokov —
Among the many exhilarating things Lake taught
was that the order of the solar spectrum is not
a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium
red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a
pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets,
at which point the sequence does not grade into
red again but passes into another spiral, which
starts with a kind of lavender gray and goes on to
Cinderella shades transcending human perception.
— Pnin
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Canticle for O’Connor
University Diaries today has a meditation on
nothingness and the University of North Carolina.
She includes a picture by John Picacio that was done as a
cover illustration for the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz .
Related material:
A June 10 obituary for Msgr. Tim O'Connor, former rector
of Sacred Heart Cathedral in Raleigh, NC.
"To those who knew him, O’Connor’s aesthetic sense
was a defining quality. As rector at Sacred Heart Cathedral—
the seat of the bishop of Raleigh— he led a $500,000
renovation project in the late ’90s that refurbished the floors
and pews and installed art, such as painting the ceiling blue
with 14-karat gold leaf stars."
— Julian Spector — jspector@newsobserver.com
Some context:
Sermon in this journal last Sunday, June 9, which
was the reported date of Msgr. O'Connor's death.
Mary Chapin Carpenter in this journal on July 6, 2008:
Related art:
Ceiling of Raleigh's Sacred Heart Cathedral—
Some context for this art:
- Mary Chapin Carpenter's song "Grand Central Station,"
- a Log24 post, Instantia Crucis (Aug. 19, 2004), and
- the following introduction to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon :
From "Spider Robinson: The SF Writer as Empath"
by Ben Bova —
When Analog magazine was housed over at Graybar Building
on Lexington Avenue, our offices were far from plush. In fact,
they were grimy. Years worth of Manhattan soot clung to the
walls. The windows were opaque with grime. (What has this
to do with Spider Robinson? Patience, friend.)
Many times young science fiction fans would come to Manhattan
and phone me from Grand Central Station, which connected
underground with the good old Graybar. "I've just come to New
York and I read every issue of Analog and I'd like to come up and
see what a science fiction magazine office looks like," they would
invariably say.
I'd tell them to come on up, but not to expect too much. My advice
was always ignored. The poor kid would come in and gape at the
piles of manuscripts, the battered old metal desks, and mountains
of magazines and stacks of artwork, the ramshackle filing cabinets
and bookshelves. His eyes would fill with tears. His mouth would
sag open.
He had, of course, expected whirring computers, telephones with
TV attachments, smoothly efficient robots humming away,
ultramodern furniture, and a general appearance reminiscent of a
NASA clean room. (Our present offices, in the spanking new Condé
Nast Building on Madison Avenue, are a little closer to that dream.)
The kid would shamble away, heartsick, the beautiful rainbow-hued
bubble of his imagination burst by the sharp prick of reality.
"Funny how annoying a little prick can be." — Garry Shandling as Senator Stern
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Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Raven Light
"…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
…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.
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Thursday, April 5, 2012
Leap Day of Faith
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday, April 2, 2012—
"I think there is in this country a war on religion.
I think there is a desire to establish a religion
in America known as secularism."
Nancy Haught of The Oregonian on Leap Day, Feb. 29, 2012—
|
William Hamilton, the retired theologian who declared in the 1960s that God was dead, died Tuesday [Feb. 28, 2012] in his downtown Portland apartment at 87. Hamilton said he'd been haunted by questions about God since he was a teenager. Years later, when his conclusion was published in the April 8, 1966, edition of Time Magazine, he found himself in a hornet's nest. Time christened the new movement "radical theology" and Hamilton, one of its key figures, received death threats and inspired angry letters to the editor in newspapers that carried the story. He encountered hostility at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, where he had been teaching theology, and lost his endowed chair in 1967. Hamilton moved on to teach religion at New College in Sarasota, Fla. |
(See also this journal on Leap Day.)
From New College: The Honors College of Florida—
|
Oct. 11, 1960: New College is founded as a private college 1961: Trustees obtain options to purchase the former Charles Ringling estate on Sarasota Bay and 12 acres of airport land facing U.S. 41 held by private interests. The two pieces form the heart of the campus Nov. 18, 1962: the campus is dedicated. Earth from Harvard is mixed with soil from New College as a symbol of the shared lofty ideals of the two institutions. |
See also, in this journal, "Greatest Show on Earth" and The Harvard Crimson—
| The Harvard Crimson, Online Edition |
Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006 |
|
POMP AND
Friday, Oct. 6:
The Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus has come to town, and yesterday the animals were disembarked near MIT and paraded to their temporary home at the Banknorth Garden. |
OPINION At Last, a By THE CRIMSON STAFF The Trouble By SAHIL K. MAHTANI |
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Thursday, August 4, 2011
Midnight in Oslo
For Norway's Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829)
on his birthday, August Fifth
(6 PM Aug. 4, Eastern Time, is 12 AM Aug. 5 in Oslo.)
Plato's Diamond
The above version by Peter Pesic is from Chapter I of his book Abel's Proof , titled "The Scandal of the Irrational." Plato's diamond also occurs in a much later mathematical story that might be called "The Scandal of the Noncontinuous." The story—
Paradigms"These passages suggest that the Form is a character or set of characters common to a number of things, i.e. the feature in reality which corresponds to a general word. But Plato also uses language which suggests not only that the forms exist separately (χωριστά ) from all the particulars, but also that each form is a peculiarly accurate or good particular of its own kind, i.e. the standard particular of the kind in question or the model (παράδειγμα ) [i.e. paradigm ] to which other particulars approximate…. … Both in the Republic and in the Sophist there is a strong suggestion that correct thinking is following out the connexions between Forms. The model is mathematical thinking, e.g. the proof given in the Meno that the square on the diagonal is double the original square in area." – William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic , Oxford University Press paperback, 1985 Plato's paradigm in the Meno—
Changed paradigm in the diamond theorem (2×2 case) —
Aspects of the paradigm change— Monochrome figures to Areas to Continuous transformations to Euclidean geometry to Euclidean quantities to The 24 patterns resulting from the paradigm change—
Each pattern has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry. This is the 2×2 case of a more general result. The patterns become more interesting in the 4×4 case. For their relationship to finite geometry and finite fields, see the diamond theorem. |
Related material: Plato's Diamond by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche.
“Plato’s Ghost evokes Yeats’s lament that any claim to worldly perfection inevitably is proven wrong by the philosopher’s ghost….”
— Princeton University Press on Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (by Jeremy Gray, September 2008)
"Remember me to her."
— Closing words of the Algis Budrys novel Rogue Moon .
Background— Some posts in this journal related to Abel or to random thoughts from his birthday.
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Sunday, March 6, 2011
The Eye
In memory of a Brazilian writer who died at 73 on Oscar day— three symbols and a link.
 |
|
|
|
Related material—
"I really have nothing to add," "Ojo de Dios," and "Red on Gray."
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Friday, October 29, 2010
Word Study
Commentary on Revelation 6:8—
And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him.
| Vincent's Word Studies
Pale (χλωρὸς) Only in Revelation, except Mark 6:39. Properly, greenish-yellow, like young grass or unripe wheat. Homer applies it to honey, and Sophocles to the sand. Generally, pale, pallid. Used of a mist, of sea-water, of a pale or bilious complexion. Thucydides uses it of the appearance of persons stricken with the plague (ii., 49). In Homer it is used of the paleness of the face from fear, and so as directly descriptive of fear ("Iliad," x., 376; xv., 4). Of olive wood ("Odyssey," ix., 320, 379) of which the bark is gray. Gladstone says that in Homer it indicates rather the absence than the presence of definite color. In the New Testament, always rendered green, except here. See Mark 6:39; Revelation 8:7; Revelation 9:4. Hell Properly, Hades. The realm of the dead personified. See on Matthew 16:18. |
Related material:
Death toll climbs to 394 in Indonesian tsunami
See also, in this journal, Pale Rider and Hereafter.
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Friday, June 4, 2010
A Better Story
Continued from May 8
(Feast of Saint Robert Heinlein)
“Wells and trees were dedicated to saints. But the offerings at many wells and trees were to something other than the saint; had it not been so they would not have been, as we find they often were, forbidden. Within this double and intertwined life existed those other capacities, of which we know more now, but of which we still know little– clairvoyance, clairaudience, foresight, telepathy.”
— Charles Williams, Witchcraft, Faber and Faber, London, 1941
Why "Saint" Robert? See his accurate depiction of evil– the Eater of Souls in Glory Road.
For more on Williams's "other capacities," see Heinlein's story "Lost Legacy."
A related story– Fritz Leiber's "The Mind Spider." An excerpt:
The conference—it was much more a hyper-intimate
gabfest—proceeded.
"My static box bugged out for a few ticks this morning,"
Evelyn remarked in the course of talking over the
trivia of the past twenty-four hours.
The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather
Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain
waves. Without such individual thought-screens, there was
too much danger of complete loss of individual personality
—once Grandfather Horn had "become" his infant daughter
as well as himself for several hours and the unfledged
mind had come close to being permanently lost in its own
subconscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall be-
– hind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar
to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently
always enclosed.
In spite of the boxes, the Horns shared thoughts and
emotions to an amazing degree. Their mental togetherness
was as real and as mysterious—and as incredible—as
thought itself . . . and thought is the original angel-cloud
dancing on the head of a pin. Their present conference
was as warm and intimate and tart as any actual family
gathering in one actual room around one actual table.
Five minds, joined together in the vast mental darkness
that shrouds all minds. Five minds hugged together for
comfort and safety in the infinite mental loneliness that
pervades the cosmos.
Evelyn continued, "Your boxes were all working, of
course, so I couldn't get your thoughts—just the blurs of
your boxes like little old dark grey stars. But this time
if gave me a funny uncomfortable feeling, like a spider
Crawling down my—Grayl! Don't feel so wildly! What
Is it?”
Then… just as Grayl started to think her answer…
something crept from the vast mental darkness and infinite
cosmic loneliness surrounding the five minds of the
Horns.
Grayl was the first to notice. Her panicky thought had
ttie curling too-keen edge of hysteria. "There are six of
us now! There should only be five, but there are six.
Count! Count, I tell you! Six!"
To Mort it seemed that a gigantic spider was racing
across the web of their thoughts….
See also this journal on May 30– "720 in the Book"– and on May 31– "Memorial for Galois."
("Obnoxious nerds"— a phrase Martin Gardner recently applied to Galois— will note that 720
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Monday, December 7, 2009
Something Eternal…
Battleship Gray
“A colour is eternal.
It haunts time like a spirit.
It comes and it goes.
But where it comes it is the same colour.
It neither survives nor does it live.
It appears when it is wanted.”
– Alfred North Whitehead,
Science and the Modern World, 1925
Another Opening of Another Show
"What we've got now isn't really healthcare reform, it's a reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic as far as our patients are concerned, and we're going to make sure that we … have universal healthcare that is truly universal and has eliminated the insurance companies," she told Reuters.
— Deborah Burger, president-elect of the new 150,000-member National Nurses United, comprising union locals from Maine to Hawaii
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Monday, August 10, 2009
Monday August 10, 2009
For Maine Preacher
Stephen King
Stephen King
Union colonel Joshua Chamberlain, on the way to the battle at Gettysburg, remembers his boyhood.
"Maine… is silent and cold.
Maine in the winter: air is darker, the sky is a deeper dark. A darkness comes with winter that these Southern people don't know. Snow falls so much earlier and in the winter you can walk in a snowfield among bushes, and visitors don't know that the bushes are the tops of tall pines, and you're standing in thirty feet of snow. Visitors. Once long ago visitors in the dead of winter: a preacher preaching hell-fire. Scared the fool out of me. And I resented it and Pa said I was right.
Pa.
When he thought of the old man he could see him suddenly in a field in the spring, trying to move a gray boulder. He always knew instinctively the ones you could move, even though the greater part was buried in the earth, and he expected you to move the rock and not discuss it. A hard and silent man, an honest man, a noble man. Little humor but sometimes the door opened and you saw the warmth within a long way off, a certain sadness, a slow, remote, unfathomable quality as if the man wanted to be closer to the world but did not know how. Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still: 'What a piece of work is man… in action how like an angel!' And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.' And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel. And when the old man heard about it he was very proud, and Chamberlain felt very good remembering it."
— Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War
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Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Wednesday April 8, 2009
Where Entertainment
Is God
Is God
“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
— Thomas Pynchon in
Gravity’s Rainbow
“Since 1963, when Pynchon’s first novel, V., came out, the writer– widely considered America’s most important novelist since World War II– has become an almost mythical figure,
— Nancy Jo Sales in the November 11, 1996, issue of New York Magazine
A Cross Between
(Click on images for their
source in past entries.)
In a Nutshell:
“Plato’s Ghost evokes Yeats’s lament that any claim to worldly perfection inevitably is proven wrong by the philosopher’s ghost….”
— Princeton University Press on Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (by Jeremy Gray, September 2008)
|
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Tuesday February 24, 2009
Hollywood Nihilism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism
Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
to hear about our religion
… that we made up."
|
From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:
… in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer… A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. |
Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"– noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."
As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.
Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.
"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections."
I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."
|
A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:
For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:
The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...
The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,
Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.
The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
(Collected Poems, 528)
|
Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:
B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens— On the poem "The Rock":
"… the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'…. Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."
This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world's leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.
More positively…
Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics…
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space (or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)
over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."
Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed "some way to project six dimensions into three." While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.
Cara:
Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Tuesday February 17, 2009
Diamond-Faceted:
Transformations
of the Rock
|
A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:
For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:
The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...
The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,
Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.
The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
(Collected Poems, 528)
|
A mathematical version of
this poetic concept appears
in a rather cryptic note
from 1981 written with
Stevens's poem in mind:
For some explanation of the
groups of 8 and 24
motions referred to in the note,
see an earlier note from 1981.
For the Perlis "diamond facets,"
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle.
For a much larger group
of motions, see
Solomon's Cube.
As for "the mind itself"
and "possibilities for
human thought," see
Geometry of the I Ching.
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Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Tuesday October 7, 2008
The Color Grey
The previous two entries mention,
and illustrate, the color grey.
Another illustration, on the cover
of one of my favorite books:
"A colour is eternal.
It haunts time like a spirit."
— Alfred North Whitehead
From John Lahr's
winter 2002 review
of "Our Town"–
"We all know that something is eternal," the Stage Manager says. "And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even stars– everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings."
The Stage Manager was played by Paul Newman. The review was subtitled "Getting the Spirit Onstage."
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Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
Wechsler Cubes
"Confusion is nothing new."
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Part I:
Magister Ludi
Magister Ludi
Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–
"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors."
Part II:
A Bulky Memorandum
A Bulky Memorandum
From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has
— End of page 168 —
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."
Part III:
Wechsler Cubes
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
|
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. |
Part IV:
A Magic Gallery
A Magic Gallery
|
ZZ
Figures from the
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
Numbers and Names,
With numbers and names English translation A related poem:
Alphabets
From time to time
But if a savage
— Hermann Hesse (1943), |
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Sunday, June 3, 2007
Sunday June 3, 2007
Haunting Time
"Macquarrie remains one of the most
important commentators [on] …
Heidegger's work. His co-translation
of Being and Time into English is
considered the canonical version."
— Wikipedia
The Rev. Macquarrie died on
May 28. The Log24 entry
for that date contains the
following illustration:
The part of the illustration
relevant to the death of
Macquarrie is the color.
From my reply to
a comment on the
May 28 entry:
"I checked out [Terence] McKenna and found this site on the aging druggie. I didn't like the hippie scene in the sixties and I don't like it now. Booze was always my drug of choice. Still, checking further, I found that McKenna's afterword to Dick's In Pursuit of Valis was well written."
From McKenna's afterword:
"Schizophrenia is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of radical understanding that haunts time. It haunts time in the same way that Alfred North Whitehead said that the color dove grey 'haunts time like a ghost.'"
I can find no source for
any remarks of Whitehead
on the color "dove grey"
(or "gray") but Whitehead
did say that
any remarks of Whitehead
on the color "dove grey"
(or "gray") but Whitehead
did say that
"A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted." —Science and the Modern World, 1925
The poetic remark of
McKenna on the color
"dove grey" may be
taken, in a schizophrenic
(or, similarly, a Christian) way,
as a reference to the Holy Spirit.
McKenna on the color
"dove grey" may be
taken, in a schizophrenic
(or, similarly, a Christian) way,
as a reference to the Holy Spirit.
My own remarks on the hippie
scene seem appropriate as a
response to media celebration
of today's 40th anniversary of
the beginning of the 1967
"summer of love."
Comments Off on Sunday June 3, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Sunday May 27, 2007
Random Number
The previous entry links back to May 18’s “Devil in the Details,” an entry quoting Peter Woit. Yesterday afternoon Woit, who sometimes writes on pure mathematics as well as physics, posted an entry on a talk said to be related to something called “the ABC-conjecture,” which has been called “the most important unsolved problem in diophantine analysis.” (Dorian Goldfeld, “Beyond the Last Theorem,” The Sciences, March/April 1996, 34-40)
On the ABC-conjecture in number theory:
“We hope to elucidate the beautiful connections between elliptic curves, modular forms and the ABC–conjecture.” —Dorian Goldfeld (pdf)
An Edinburgh postgraduate student on the conjecture:
“… abc brings us full circle to Fermat’s Last Theorem….” —Graeme Taylor at Everything2.com
I regret I can add nothing to Taylor’s admirable exposition and to Goldfeld’s “beautiful connections” except the following observation of a rather ugly connection.
The previous Log24 entry, from yesterday afternoon, related the May 18 “details” entry to Friday’s PA evening lottery number, 005. A followup seems (if only to honor the madcap tradition of John Nash) to be called for. The PA evening number yesterday evening, Saturday, was 443. Nash, in his younger days, might have been pleased to note that this number is associated (if only by coincidence) with a topic Woit mentioned earlier yesterday– Fermat’s famed conjecture:
— Page 443
in The Annals of Mathematics,
2nd Ser., Vol. 141, No. 3 (May, 1995)
This is the first page of a rather
famous paper by Andrew Wiles.
Such coincidences are, of course, anathema to believers in the religion of Scientism. But one such believer, Natalie Angier (yesterday morning’s entry), at least acknowledges the charm of “the atheist’s favorite Christmas movie, ‘Coincidence on 34th Street.'” (pdf)
Related material:
Comments Off on Sunday May 27, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Saturday May 26, 2007
A Baffled Reader
A reader this morning commented on my first Xanga entry (July 20, 2002):
“To set one up (which I have not done because I don’t want anyone to know what I think),” … William Safire regarding “blogs”.
I still don’t know what you think. Yet … I try, try, try.
Here’s one thing that I think– today– based on my “Hate Speech for Harvard,” on “Devil in the Details” (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on
- last evening’s PA lottery number 005,
- the I Ching hexagram of the same number, and
- the New Yorker issue linked to at the end of the previous entry:
Revised version of the
New Yorker cover of 5/21/07
Commentary on the cover
by the PA lottery
on 5/25/07
in the form of the
evening number, 005.
In the I Ching, this
is the number of
by the PA lottery
on 5/25/07
in the form of the
evening number, 005.
In the I Ching, this
is the number of
HSU:
WAITING
(NOURISHMENT)
See also the previous entry
and Natalie Angier’s sneer
at a politician’s call for
prayer, which, she
said, involved the
“assumption that prayer is
some sort of miracle
Vicks VapoRub.”
Detail from the
5/21/07 New Yorker:
THE IMAGE
Clouds rise up to heaven:
The image of WAITING.
Thus the superior man
eats and drinks,
Is joyous and
of good cheer.
AMEN.
Comments Off on Saturday May 26, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Saturday March 10, 2007
The Logic of Dreams
From A Beautiful Mind–
“How could you,” began Mackey, “how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof…how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you…?”
Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. “Because,” Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”
Ideas:
These numbers may, in the mad way so well portrayed by Sylvia Nasar in the above book, be regarded as telling a story… a story that should, of course, not be taken too seriously.
Friday’s New York numbers (midday 214, evening 711) suggest the dates 2/14 and 7/11. Clicking on these dates will lead the reader to Log24 entries featuring, among others, T. S. Eliot and Stephen King– two authors not unacquainted with the bizarre logic of dreams.
A link in the 7/11 entry leads to a remark of Noel Gray on Plato’s Meno and “graphic austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave.”
Also Friday: an example of graphic austerity– indeed, Gray graphic austerity– in Log24:
This illustration refers to chess rather than to geometry, and to the mind of an addict rather than to that of a slave, but chess and geometry, like addiction and slavery, are not unrelated.
Friday’s Pennsylvania numbers, midday 429 and evening 038, suggest that the story includes, appropriately enough in view of the above Beautiful Mind excerpt, Mackey himself. The midday number suggests the date 4/29, which at Log24 leads to an entry in memory of Mackey.
(Related material: the Harvard Gazette of April 6, 2006, “Mathematician George W. Mackey, 90: Obituary“– “A memorial service will be held at Harvard’s Memorial Church on April 29 at 2 p.m.“)
Friday’s Pennsylvania evening number 038 tells two other parts of the story involving Mackey…
As Mackey himself might hope, the number may be regarded as a reference to the 38 impressive pages of Varadarajan’s “Mackey Memorial Lecture” (pdf).
More in the spirit of Nash, 38 may also be taken as a reference to Harvard’s old postal address, Cambridge 38, and to the year, 1938, that Mackey entered graduate study at Harvard, having completed his undergraduate studies at what is now Rice University.
Returning to the concept of graphic austerity, we may further simplify the already abstract chessboard figure above to obtain an illustration that has been called both “the field of reason” and “the Garden of Apollo” by an architect, John Outram, discussing his work at Mackey’s undergraduate alma mater:
Let us hope that Mackey,
a devotee of reason,
is now enjoying the company
of Apollo rather than that of
Tom O’Bedlam:
For John Nash on his birthday:
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
Comments Off on Saturday March 10, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Tuesday February 20, 2007
Symmetry
Today is the 21st birthday of my note “The Relativity Problem in Finite Geometry.”
Some relevant quotations:
“This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them.”
— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups, Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16
Describing the branch of mathematics known as Galois theory, Weyl says that it
“… is nothing else but the relativity theory for the set Sigma, a set which, by its discrete and finite character, is conceptually so much simpler than the infinite set of points in space or space-time dealt with by ordinary relativity theory.”
— Weyl, Symmetry, Princeton University Press, 1952, p. 138
Weyl’s set Sigma is a finite set of complex numbers. Some other sets with “discrete and finite character” are those of 4, 8, 16, or 64 points, arranged in squares and cubes. For illustrations, see Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube. What Weyl calls “the relativity problem” for these sets involves fixing “objectively” a class of equivalent coordinatizations. For what Weyl’s “objectively” means, see the article “Symmetry and Symmetry Breaking,” by Katherine Brading and Elena Castellani, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“The old and natural idea that what is objective should not depend upon the particular perspective under which it is taken into consideration is thus reformulated in the following group-theoretical terms: what is objective is what is invariant with respect to the transformation group of reference frames, or, quoting Hermann Weyl (1952, p. 132), ‘objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms [of space-time].‘[22]
22. The significance of the notion of invariance and its group-theoretic treatment for the issue of objectivity is explored in Born (1953), for example. For more recent discussions see Kosso (2003) and Earman (2002, Sections 6 and 7).
References:
Born, M., 1953, “Physical Reality,” Philosophical Quarterly, 3, 139-149. Reprinted in E. Castellani (ed.), Interpreting Bodies: Classical and Quantum Objects in Modern Physics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 155-167.
Earman, J., 2002, “Laws, Symmetry, and Symmetry Breaking; Invariance, Conservation Principles, and Objectivity,’ PSA 2002, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002, forthcoming [Abstract/Preprint available online]
Kosso, P., 2003, “Symmetry, objectivity, and design,” in K. Brading and E. Castellani (eds.), Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 410-421.
Weyl, H., 1952, Symmetry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
See also
Archives Henri Poincaré (research unit UMR 7117, at Université Nancy 2, of the CNRS)–
“Minkowski, Mathematicians, and the Mathematical Theory of Relativity,” by Scott Walter, in The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, volume 7), H. Goenner, J. Renn, J. Ritter and T. Sauer, editors, Boston/Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999, pp. 45-86–
“Developing his ideas before Göttingen mathematicians in April 1909, Klein pointed out that the new theory based on the Lorentz group (which he preferred to call ‘Invariantentheorie’) could have come from pure mathematics (1910: 19). He felt that the new theory was anticipated by the ideas on geometry and groups that he had introduced in 1872, otherwise known as the Erlangen program (see Gray 1989: 229).”
References:
Gray, Jeremy J. (1989). Ideas of Space. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Klein, Felix. (1910). “Über die geometrischen Grundlagen der Lorentzgruppe.” Jahresbericht der deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 19: 281-300. [Reprinted: Physikalische Zeitschrift 12 (1911): 17-27].
Related material: A pathetically garbled version of the above concepts was published in 2001 by Harvard University Press. See Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, by Robert Nozick.
Comments Off on Tuesday February 20, 2007
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Thursday February 1, 2007
Change
The above is from
Feb. 15, 2006.
Commencement Address (doc)
to Computer Science Division,
College of Letters and Science,
University of California, Berkeley,
by Jim Gray,
May 25, 2003:
"I was part of Berkeley's class of 1965. Things have changed a lot since then….
So, what's that got to do with you? Well, there is going to be MORE change…. Indeed, change is accelerating– Vernor Vinge suggests we are approaching singularities when social, scientific and economic change are so rapid that we cannot imagine what will happen next. These futurists predict humanity will become post-human. Now, THAT! is change– a lot more than I have seen.
If it happens, the singularity will happen in your lifetime– and indeed, you are likely to make it happen."
For other singular
sci-fi tales, click on
the above hexagram.
sci-fi tales, click on
the above hexagram.
More from Gray's speech:
"I am an optimist. Science is a Faustian bargain– and I am betting on mankind muddling through. I grew up under the threat of atomic war; we've avoided that so far. Information Technology is a Faustian bargain. I am optimistic that we can have the good parts and protect ourselves from the worst part– but I am counting on your help in that."
Comments Off on Thursday February 1, 2007
Sunday, October 8, 2006
Sunday October 8, 2006
Today’s Birthday:
Matt Damon
Matt Damon
“The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.”
— G. K. Chesterton
 Natasha Wescoat, 2004 Shakespearean Fool |
|
| Not to mention Euclid and Picasso | |
 |
 |
(Click on pictures for details. Euclid is represented by Alexander Bogomolny, Picasso by Robert Foote.)
|
|
See also works by the late Arthur Loeb of Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
“I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” — Frank Costello in The Departed
For more on the Harvard environment,
see today’s online Crimson:
| The Harvard Crimson, Online Edition |
Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006 |
|
POMP AND
Friday, Oct. 6: The Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus has come to town, and yesterday the animals were disembarked near MIT and paraded to their temporary home at the Banknorth Garden. |
OPINION At Last, a By THE CRIMSON STAFF The Trouble By SAHIL K. MAHTANI |
Comments Off on Sunday October 8, 2006
Friday, September 29, 2006
Friday September 29, 2006
Values
for the High Holy Days
for the High Holy Days
(Rosh Hashanah began at sundown September 22; Yom Kippur begins at sundown October 1. —holidays.net)
"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.
Comments Off on Friday September 29, 2006
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Wednesday August 2, 2006
The Crimson Passion
continues.
The Harvard Jesus:
Crimson/Nancy K. Dutton
Monday, Feb. 23, 2004
"If Jesus does come back, he will likely be wearing a tie-dyed shirt, smoking a joint, flashing the peace sign and rocking rose-tinted glasses….
Gibson never wants people to forget that we are ultimately responsible for his Lord's crucifixion. And by 'people' I mean 'the
— Harvard Crimson,
Monday, Feb. 23, 2004,
opinion column
by Erol N. Gulay
And now…
From the Harvard Crimson
on the 2006 feast of
St. Ignatius Loyola:
| WEB UPDATE
Billionaire Harvard Donor By KATHERINE M. GRAY |
Related illustrations
from Dec. 15, 2004:
|
Judeo-Christian Heritage: The meditation below was suggested by this passage: "… the belief that any sensible discourse had to be formulated within the rules of the scientific language, avoiding the non sense of the ordinary language. This belief, initially expressed by Wittgenstein as aphorisms, was later formalized by the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] as a 'logical construction of the world'…." "Deeply Vulgar" — Epithet applied in 2003 to "Examples are the stained-glass
|
Today's birthday:
Peter O'Toole.
Comments Off on Wednesday August 2, 2006
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Tuesday July 11, 2006
Not Crazy Enough?
Some children of the sixties may feel that today's previous two entries, on Syd Barrett, the Crazy Diamond, are not crazy enough. Let them consult the times of those entries– 2:11 and 8:15– and interpret those times, crazily, as dates: 2/11 and 8/15.
This brings us to Stephen King territory– apparently the natural habitat of Syd Barrett.
See Log24 on a 2/11, Along Came a Dreamcatcher, and Log24 on an 8/15, The Line.
From 8/15, a remark of Plato:
"There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on…"
(Compare with the remarks by Abraham Cowley for Tom Stoppard's recent birthday.)
From 2/11, two links: Halloween Meditations and We Are the Key.
From Dreamcatcher (the film and the book):
For Syd Barrett as Duddits,
see Terry Kirby on Syd Barrett
(edited– as in Stephen King
and the New Testament—
for narrative effect):
"He appeared as the Floyd performed the song 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond.' It contains the words: 'Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond. Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.'
At first, they didn't recognise the man, whose head and eyebrows were shaved….
But this was the 'crazy diamond' himself: Syd Barrett, the subject of the song….
When Roger Waters saw his old friend, he broke down….
Rick Wright, the keyboards player, later told an interviewer:
… 'Roger [Waters] was in tears, I think I was; we were both in tears. It was very shocking… seven years of no contact and then to walk in while we're actually doing that particular track. I don't know – coincidence, karma, fate, who knows? But it was very, very, very powerful.'"
Remarks suitable for Duddits's opponent, Mister Gray, may be found in the 1994 Ph.D. thesis of Noel Gray.
"I refer here to Plato's utilisation in the Meno of graphic austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave."
Shine on, gentle Duddits.
Comments Off on Tuesday July 11, 2006
Sunday, June 4, 2006
Sunday June 4, 2006
Death on Gypsy Day
Jeremy Pearce in this morning's New York Times:
"Dr. Fritz Klein, a psychiatrist and sex researcher who studied bisexuals and their relationships and later helped start a foundation for promoting bisexual culture, died on May 24 at his home in San Diego. He was 73. The cause was a heart attack, said his companion, Tom Reise."
(Click to see the larger original,
a photo by Michael Trezzi)
|
"The Waste Land," |
|
|
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded |
420 |
| Gaily, when invited, beating obedient | |
| To controlling hands | |
| I sat upon the shore | |
| Fishing, with the arid plain behind me | |
| Shall I at least set my lands in order? | 425 |
|
Eliot's note on line 424: |
|
|
"The Fisher King,"
"Did you lose your mind
"Well, I'm a singer by trade.
Then one night, in the What does all this mean?
I mean, that, |
"[Screenwriter Richard] LaGravenese, speaking of the experience of making this special film, says: 'At times it appeared that for some people working on the movie, individual journeys were being made towards their own particular Grails. This was certainly true for me. I hear it is common; that a movie you're working on can begin to reflect the life you're having around it.'"
— Dreams: The Fisher King,
edited by Phil Stubbs
edited by Phil Stubbs
Comments Off on Sunday June 4, 2006
Monday, November 7, 2005
Monday November 7, 2005
But seriously…
“Sir Frederick Gray, Minister of Defence, is a dignified, upper-class gentleman who is well respected in intelligence circles. However for most of his appearances, Gray is a strict by-the-book person who plays it seriously at all times. Consequently he despises Bond’s playful attitude towards life and his disregard to take his missions seriously.”
Geoffrey Keen, who played Sir Frederick Gray in six James Bond films, died on November 3, 2005.
Related material:
The Log24 entry of 11:07 AM on the date of Keen’s death, and the five Log24 entries ending on January 20, 2005.
Comments Off on Monday November 7, 2005
Friday, April 29, 2005
Friday April 29, 2005
Midrash Jazz Quartet
Harvard's Barry Mazur likes to quote Aristotle's Metaphysics. See 1, 2, 3.
Here, with an introductory remark by Martha Cooley, is more from the Metaphysics:
The central aim of Western religion —
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
masculine and feminine,
life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)
The central aim of Western philosophy —
Dualities of Pythagoras
as reconstructed by Aristotle:
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Male Female
Light Dark
Straight Curved
... and so on ....
"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)
Harvard University, Department of English:
|
• |
Today's birthday: Jerry Seinfeld.
Related material:
Is Nothing Sacred? and Symmetries.
Comments Off on Friday April 29, 2005
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Thursday December 16, 2004
Nothing Nothings
(Again)
Background: recent Log24 entries (beginning with Chorus from the Rock on Dec. 5, 2004) and Is Nothing Sacred? (quotations compiled on March 9, 2000).
From an obituary of Paul Edwards, a writer on philosophy, in this morning's New York Times:
"Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus."
Edwards, born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, died on December 9.
Some sites I visited earlier this evening, before reading of Edwards's death:
-
" 'Nothingness itself nothings' — with these words, uttered by Martin Heidegger in the early 1930s, the incipient (and now-familiar) split between analytic and continental philosophy began tearing open. For Rudolf Carnap, a leader of the Vienna Circle [Wiener Kreis] of logical empiricists and a strident advocate of a new, scientific approach to philosophy, this Heideggerian proposition exemplified 'a metaphysical pseudo-sentence,' meaningless and unable to withstand any logical analysis. Heidegger countered that Carnap’s misplaced obsession with logic missed the point entirely."
— Review of A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
- Carnap's Criticism of Heidegger, by Abraham D. Stone (dated, for what it's worth, June 16, 2004… the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday.)
- "Death and Metaphysics," by Peter Kraus, pp. 98-111 in Death and Philosophy, ed. by Jeff Malpas and Robert Solomon. Heidegger's famous phrase (misquoted by Quine in Gray Particular in Hartford) "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" is discussed on page 102.
Comments Off on Thursday December 16, 2004
Friday, December 10, 2004
Friday December 10, 2004
Gray Particular
in Hartford
From Wallace Stevens,
"The Rock, Part III:
Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn" —
The rock is
the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which
he rises, up–and–ho,
The step to
the bleaker depths of his descents…
From this morning's
New York Times obituaries—
leve Gray, a painter admired for his large-scale, vividly colorful and lyrically gestural abstract compositions, died on Wednesday in Hartford. He was 86.
The cause was a massive subdural hematoma suffered after he fell on ice and hit his head on Tuesday outside his home in Warren, Conn., said his wife, the writer Francine du Plessix Gray.
*******************************
Jackson Mac Low, a poet, composer and performance artist whose work reveled in what happens when the process of composition is left to carefully calibrated chance, died on Wednesday….
… in 1999 [he] received the Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a $100,000 prize, from the Academy of American Poets.
A Wallace Stevens Award,
in Seven Parts:
I. From a page linked to in
Tuesday's entry White Christmas:
"A bemused Plato reasoned that nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? In our own day Martin Heidegger ventured that das Nichts nichtet — 'the nothing nothings' — evidently still sensing a problem."
— W. V. Quine in Quiddities
II. "As if nothingness
contained a métier…"
— Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
III. "Massive subdural hematoma"
— Three-word poem
performed on Tuesday
in Connecticut
IV. mé·tier n.
- An occupation, a trade, or a profession.
- Work or activity for which a person is particularly suited; one's specialty.
[French, from Old French mestier, from Vulgar Latin misterium, from Latin ministerium. See ministry.]
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
V. "ho"
— Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
VI. Francine du Plessix Gray…
From the
Archives of the
New York Review of Books:
July 16, 1992: Splendor and Miseries, review of
Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 by Alain Corbin, translated by Alan Sheridan
La Vie quotidienne dans les maisons closes, 1830–1930 by Laure Adler
Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France by Charles Bernheimer
Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era by Hollis Clayson
VII. From an entry of April 29, 2004:
"… a 'dead shepherd who brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse' "
— Wallace Stevens
as quoted by Michael Bryson
as quoted by Michael Bryson
(p. 227, The Palm
at the End of the Mind:
Selected Poems and a Play.
Ed. Holly Stevens.
New York: Vintage Books, 1990)
Comments Off on Friday December 10, 2004
Saturday, August 23, 2003
Saturday August 23, 2003
Pictures of Nothing
‘”The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world… All is without forms and void. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing, and very like.”
— William Hazlitt, 1816, on J. M. W. Turner
“William Hazlett [sic] once described Turner’s painting as ‘pictures of the elements of air, earth, and water. The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world…All is without form and void. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.‘ This description could equally well be applied to a Pollock, Newman, or Rothko.”
— Sonja J. Klein, thesis, The Nature of the Sublime, September 2000
The fifty-second A. W. Mellon series of Lectures in the Fine Arts was given last spring at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., by Kirk Varnedoe, art historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
Pictures of Nothing:
The lectures, 2003: Survivals and Fresh Starts … April 6 |
Varnedoe died on Thursday, August 14, 2003,
the day of the Great Blackout.
Pictures of Nothing:
“Record-breaking crowds turned up at the National Gallery for Kirk’s Mellon Lectures….
… the content of Kirk’s talk was miraculously subtle, as he insisted that there could be no single explanation for how abstraction works, that each piece had to be understood on its own terms — how it came to be made, what it meant then and what it has gone on to mean to viewers since.
Dour works like
Frank Stella’s early
gray-on-black canvases …
“Die Fahne Hoch,”
Frank Stella,
1959
“Gray on Black,”
or “Date of Death”
seemed to open up under Kirk’s touch to reveal a delicacy and complexity lost in less textured explanations.”
— Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post,
Aug. 15, 2003
For another memorial to Varnedoe, see
A May 18 Washington Post article skillfully summarized Varnedoe’s Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery:
Closing the Circle on Abstract Art.
For more on art and nihilism, see
Comments Off on Saturday August 23, 2003
Wednesday, April 2, 2003
Wednesday April 2, 2003
Symmetries…. May 15, 1998
The following journal note, from the day after Sinatra died, was written before I heard of his death. Note particularly the quote from Rilke. Other material was suggested, in part, by Alasdair Gray's Glasgow novel 1982 Janine. The "Sein Feld" heading is a reference to the Seinfeld final episode, which aired May 14, 1998. The first column contains a reference to angels — apparently Hell's Angels — and the second column provides a somewhat more serious look at this theological topic.
|
Sein Feld
1984 Janine
"But Angels love their own
"Logos means above all relation."
"Gesang ist Dasein…. |
Geometry and Theology
PA lottery May 14, 1998: |
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Tape purchased 12/23/97:
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"In the middle of 1982 Janine there are pages in which Jock McLeish is fighting with drugs and alcohol, attempting to either die or come through and get free of his fantasies. In his delirium, he hears the voice of God, which enters in small print, pushing against the larger type of his ravings. Something God says is repeated on the first and last pages of Unlikely Stories, Mostly, complete with illustration and the words 'Scotland 1984' beside it. God's statement is 'Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.' It is the inherent optimism in that statement that perhaps best captures the strength of Aladair Gray's fiction, its straightforwardness and exuberance." |
The group of all projectivities and correlations of 
For another look at angels, see "Winging It," by Christopher R. Miller, The New York Times Book Review Bookend page for Sunday, May 24, 1998. May 24 is the feast day of Sara (also known by the Hindu name Kali), patron saint of Gypsies.
For another, later (July 16, 1998) reply to Dyson, from a source better known than myself, see Why Religion Matters, by Huston Smith, Harper Collins, 2001, page 66.
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