Edward Rothstein reviewing The Red Book of Jung in today's New York Times—
"The temptation, after numbingly turning these pages, is to react finally like the psychiatrist Spielvogel at the end of Philip Roth’s 'Portnoy’s Complaint,' and say: 'So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?'"
Free association via Google Image Search on Spielvogel + Portnoy:
Click for further details.
See also Jews Telling Stories.
The previous post suggests . . .
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Jim Holt reviewing Edward Rothstein's Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics in The New Yorker of June 5, 1995: "The fugues of Bach, the symphonies of Haydn, the sonatas of Mozart: these were explorations of ideal form, unprofaned by extramusical associations. Such 'absolute music,' as it came to be called, had sloughed off its motley cultural trappings. It had got in touch with its essence. Which is why, as Walter Pater famously put it, 'all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.' The only art that can rival music for sheer etheriality is mathematics. A century or so after the advent of absolute music, mathematics also succeeded in detaching itself from the world. The decisive event was the invention of strange, non-Euclidean geometries, which put paid to the notion that the mathematician was exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with the scientific universe. 'Pure' mathematics came to be seen by those who practiced it as a free invention of the imagination, gloriously indifferent to practical affairs– a quest for beauty as well as truth." [Links added.] |
A line for James McAvoy —
"Pardon me boy, is this the Transylvania Station?"
See as well Worlds Out of Nothing , by Jeremy Gray.
Cover illustration— Arithmetic and Music,
Borgia Apartments, the Vatican.
See also Rothstein in this journal.
Related posts: The Eightfold Hijacking.
(Continued from yesterday afternoon)
This journal on December 12th, 2009—
Cover illustration— Arithmetic and Music,
Borgia Apartments, The Vatican
Compare and contrast with Frenkel at the Fields Institute—
A meditation, while watching the Country Music Television
CMT Awards, on today's evening NY lottery number 469.
For Reese Witherspoon* and Dionysus, not Apollo—
A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Edifice
— Page 469 of Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems
See also page 469 of Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics 1995 paperback)—
* Not the Witherspoon Church of this evening's 6 PM entry.
Reese won Sunday's 2011 MTV Movie Awards' Generation Award .
Both the MTV Movie Awards and the CMT Awards are productions
of MTV Networks, a subsidiary of Viacom Inc. For some background,
see Sumner Redstone (formerly Rothstein).
Today's previous entry quoted a review by Edward Rothstein of Jung's The Red Book. The entry you are now reading quotes a review by Jim Holt of a notable book by Rothstein:
The Golden Book—
Cover illustration— Arithmetic and Music,
Borgia Apartments, The Vatican
Jim Holt reviewing Edward Rothstein's Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics in The New Yorker of June 5, 1995:
Advent
"The fugues of Bach, the symphonies of Haydn, the sonatas of Mozart: these were explorations of ideal form, unprofaned by extramusical associations. Such 'absolute music,' as it came to be called, had sloughed off its motley cultural trappings. It had got in touch with its essence. Which is why, as Walter Pater famously put it, 'all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.'
The only art that can rival music for sheer etheriality is mathematics. A century or so after the advent of absolute music, mathematics also succeeded in detaching itself from the world. The decisive event was the invention of strange, non-Euclidean geometries, which put paid to the notion that the mathematician was exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with the scientific universe. 'Pure' mathematics came to be seen by those who practiced it as a free invention of the imagination, gloriously indifferent to practical affairs– a quest for beauty as well as truth."
Related material: Hardy's Apology, Non-Euclidean Blocks, and The Story Theory of Truth.
See also Holt on music and emotion:
"Music does model… our emotional life… although
the methods by which it does so are 'puzzling.'"
Also puzzling: 2010 AMS Notices.
Part I:
Ratio
Continued from…
|
White and Geometric,
but not Eternal. |
Part II:
Fides
For more information,
click on the cocktail.
Edward Rothstein last Monday:
"What is being said?
What does it mean?
Where does it come from
and where else is it used?"
A partial answer:
today's previous entry,
"For Philip Rieff,"
and an midrash on
the word "Pahuk"
(as in "Pahuk Pride,"
the name of this week's
Boy Scout gathering
in Iowa at which
a tornado killed four) —
Click on image for further details.
Rieff was the author of
Sacred Order/Social Order,
Volume 1–
My Life among the Deathworks:
Illustrations of the
Aesthetics of Authority
(University of Virginia Press, 2006)
Rieff's concept of sacred order
was Jewish rather than Pawnee,
but his writings still seem relevant.
Return to Paradise
Edward Rothstein's review in yesterday's New York Times–
Museum’s Vision:
West Coast Paradise —
seems to me more a description of Hell.
My own concept of paradise is closer to the Gary Cooper film "Return to Paradise," which impressed me greatly when I saw it on TV when I was in 10th grade.
A related vision: two frames from the Jodie Foster film "Contact"–
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See Storyline and Time Fold.
See also another Michener-based
production, the current
Lincoln Center "South Pacific."
Readers of the previous entry
who wish to practice their pardes
may contemplate the following:
Christ and the Four Elements
This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton’s Thought,
by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge University Press,
2002, p. 85
Related mandalas:
and
For further details,
click on any of the
three mandalas above.
“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
— Thomas Pynchon, quoted
here on 9/13, 2007
Time of entry: 10:20:55 PM
Interpret This
"With respect, you only interpret."
"Countries have gone to war
after misinterpreting one another."
— Susan Sontag,
"Against Interpretation"
"An introductory wall panel tells us that in the Jewish mystical tradition the four letters [in Hebrew] of pardes each stand for a level of biblical interpretation: very roughly, the literal, the allusive, the allegorical and the hidden. Pardes, we are told, became the museum’s symbol because it reflected the museum’s intention to cultivate different levels of interpretation: 'to create an environment for exploring multiple perspectives, encouraging open-mindedness' and 'acknowledging diverse backgrounds.' Pardes is treated as a form of mystical multiculturalism.
But even the most elaborate interpretations of a text or tradition require more rigor and must begin with the literal. What is being said? What does it mean? Where does it come from and where else is it used? Yet those are the types of questions– fundamental ones– that are not being asked or examined […].
How can multiple perspectives and open-mindedness and diverse backgrounds be celebrated without a grounding in knowledge, without history, detail, object and belief?"
"Examples are the stained-
glass windows of knowledge."
Click on image to enlarge.
Edward Rothstein has a piece on Bobby Fischer in today’s New York Times. The Rothstein opening:
“There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and chess.”
This echoes the opening of a classic George Steiner essay (The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 1968):
“There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”
— “A Death of Kings,” reprinted in George Steiner: A Reader, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 171-178.
Despite its promising (if unoriginal) opening, the New York Times piece is mainly an attack on Fischer’s anti-Jewish stance. Rothstein actually has little of interest to say about what he calls the “glass-bead games” of music, mathematics, and chess. For a better-written piece on chess and madness, see Charles Krauthammer’s 2005 essay in TIME. The feuilletons of Rothstein and Krauthammer do not, of course, come close to the genuinely bead-game-like writing of Steiner.
Related material on
chess and religion:
Magical Thinking
(December 7th, 2005)
— Bernard Holland in
The New York Times
Monday, May 20, 1996
The headline for Edward Rothstein’s “Connections” column in The New York Times of Monday, March 26, 2007, was “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic.”
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The New York Lottery,
Friday, March 30, 2007: Mid-day 002 Evening 085 |
Continuing yesterday’s lottery meditation, let us examine today’s New York results in the light of Rothstein’s essay. The literary “ring” structure he describes is not immediately apparent in Friday’s numbers, although the mid-day number, 002– which in the I Ching signifies yin, the feminine, receptive principle– might be interpreted as referring to a ring of sorts.
Illustration from
an entry of
March 2, 2004
“A random selection from Hopkins’s journal shows how the sun acts as a focus….”
Today’s New York evening number,
85, reinforces this “ring” reference.
For related material, see
an entry for Reba McEntire’s
birthday four years ago.
Peter Woit’s latest weblog entry links to a discussion of Plato’s cave and the modular group, which in turn suggests a second look at an entry linked to, indirectly, at the end of Saturday’s Log24 entry: Natasha’s Dance. This leads to the following:
“To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.”
— Freeman Dyson, “Science & Religion: No Ends in Sight,” The New York Review of Books, issue dated five years ago today– March 28, 2002.
If Dyson’s “recognition” is correct, why should mind and intelligence not be woven into the fabric of the Pennsylvania Lottery?
Those more interested in the writing than the story may consult Edward Rothstein’s piece in the March 26 New York Times, “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic.” There they will find a brief discussion of, appropriately, the Bible’s Book of Numbers.
Washington hosts Hollywood elite for Kennedy Honors
By Joel Rothstein
Reuters
Sunday, December 3, 2006; 12:12 AM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – "Washington's elite mingled with artistic icons at the Kennedy Center Honors on Saturday….
The Kennedy Center Honors weekend was to conclude on Sunday with Bush hosting an afternoon reception at the White House followed by an evening performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The show will be broadcast on the CBS television network on December 26."
From "Today in History,"
by The Associated Press:
On this date (Dec. 3):
In 1925,
"Concerto in F,"
by George Gershwin,
had its world premiere
at New York's Carnegie Hall,
with Gershwin himself
at the piano.
In 1947,
the Tennessee Williams play
"A Streetcar Named Desire"
opened on Broadway.
In 1953,
the musical "Kismet"
opened on Broadway.
In 1960,
the musical "Camelot"
opened on Broadway.
Related material:
Yesterday's entries–
Monroe and the Kennedys,
Part II.
Click on the picture
for further details.
In memory of Wallace Stevens,
Presbyterian saint,
whose feast is today
The following are extracts from recent reviews of On Late Style, a book by Edward Said.
John Updike on Adorno and Said:
“‘The Tempest,’ like Beethoven’s late compositions, refuses, in Adorno’s phrase, to ‘reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled.’ Said wrote, ‘What I find valuable in Adorno is this notion of tension, of highlighting and dramatizing what I call irreconcilabilities.'”
Edward Rothstein on late style:
“Late style, Said suggests, expresses a sense of being out of place and time: it is a rejection of what is being offered. But listen to Beethoven or Strauss or Gould: the music is more like a discovery of place. That place is different from where one started; it may not even be what was once expected or desired. But it is there, in resignation and fulfillment, that late works take their stand, where even exile meets its end.”
The Jew wins.
Edward Rothstein in today’s New York Times, reviewing Evil Incarnate (Princeton University Press):
“… the most decisive aspect of the myth is that it is, literally, a myth. Every single example of evil he gives turns out to be evil imagined: there is, he says, no evidence for any of it. Evil, he argues, is not something real, it is a ‘discourse,’ a ‘way of representing things and shaping our experience, not some force in itself.'”
Related material:
A review (pdf) by Steven G. Krantz of Charles Wells’s A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, September 2004):
“Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a remarkable and compelling piece of writing because of its searing wit and sardonic take on life. Bierce does not define any new words. He instead gives deadly interpretations of very familiar words. Wells’s book does not fit into the same category of literary effort.”
For literary efforts perhaps more closely related to Bierce’s, see Mathematics and Narrative and the five Log24 entries ending on this date last year.
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Representing truth:
Rebecca Goldstein |
Representing bullshit:
Apostolos Doxiadis |
| Goldstein’s truth:
Gödel was a Platonist who believed in objective truth. See Rothstein’s review of Goldstein’s new book Incompleteness. |
Doxiadis’s bullshit:
Gödel, along with Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and Heisenberg, destroyed a tradition of certainty that began with Plato and Euclid. |
“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.” — Nabokov
White, Geometric, and Eternal
This afternoon's surfing:
Prompted by Edward Rothstein's own Fides et Ratio encyclical in today's NY Times, I googled him.
At the New York Review of Books, I came across the following by Rothstein:
"… statements about TNT can be represented within TNT: the formal system can, in a precise way, 'talk' about itself."
This naturally prompted me to check what is on TNT on this, the feast day of St. Emil Artin. At 5 PM this afternoon, we have Al Pacino in "The Devil's Advocate" — a perfect choice for the festival of an alleged saint.
Preparing for Al, I meditated on the mystical significance of the number 373, as explained in Zen and Language Games: the page number 373 in Robert Stone's theological classic A Flag for Sunrise conveys the metaphysical significance of the phrase "diamonds are forever" — "the eternal in the temporal," according to Stone's Catholic priest. This suggests a check of another theological classic, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Page 373 there begins with the following description of prewar Berlin:
"white and geometric."
This suggests the following illustration of a white and geometric object related to yesterday's entry on Helmut Wielandt:
Figure 1
(This object, which illustrates the phrase "makin' the changes," also occurs in this morning's entry on the death of a jazz musician.)
A further search for books containing "white" and "geometric" at Amazon.com yields the following:
Figure 2
From Mosaics, by
Fassett, Bahouth, and Patterson:
"A risco fountain in Mexico city, begun circa 1740 and made up of Mexican pottery and Chinese porcelain, including Ming.
The delicate oriental patterns on so many different-sized plates and saucers [are] underlined by the bold blue and white geometric tiles at the base."
Note that the tiles are those of Diamond Theory; the geometric object in figure 1 above illustrates a group that plays a central role in that theory.
Finally, the word "risco" (from Casa del Risco) associated with figure 2 above leads us to a rather significant theological site associated with the holy city of Santiago de Compostela:
Figure 3
Vicente Risco's
Dedalus in Compostela.
Figure 3 shows James Joyce (alias Dedalus), whose daughter Lucia inspired the recent entry Jazz on St. Lucia's Day — which in turn is related, by last night's 2:45 entry and by Figure 1, to the mathematics of group theory so well expounded by the putative saint Emil Artin.
"His lectures are best described as
polished diamonds."
— Fine Hall in its Golden Age,
by Gian-Carlo Rota
If Pynchon plays the role of devil's advocate suggested by his creation, in Gravity's Rainbow, of the character Emil Bummer, we may hope that Rota, no longer in time but now in eternity, can be persuaded to play the important role of saint's advocate for his Emil.
Update of 6:30 PM 12/20/03:
Riddled:
The Absolutist Faith
of The New York Times
White and Geometric, but not Eternal.
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