Saturday, April 27, 2019
Friday, July 30, 2021
The Secret Subterranean River
The "secret, subterranean river" of Shulevitz is
a flow of thought favorable to the cause of feminism,
but not necessarily to other "revolutionary" ideas.
Compare and contrast:
"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran"
— Coleridge, Kubla Khan
"Where Aleph the sacred symbol ran"
— Cullinane, "The Coxeter Aleph"
For group discussion:
How (if at all) is the "finitude" of Heidegger related to
mathematical finitude and The King of Infinite Space ?
Comments Off on The Secret Subterranean River
Thursday, July 29, 2021
Castling, or: A Dark Corner* for Cara
Comments Off on Castling, or: A Dark Corner* for Cara
Monday, April 29, 2019
The Hustvedt Array
For Harlan Kane
"This time-defying preservation of selves,
this dream of plenitude without loss,
is like a snow globe from heaven,
a vision of Eden before the expulsion."
— Judith Shulevitz on Siri Hustvedt in
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
of March 31, 2019, under the headline
"The Time of Her Life."
Edenic-plenitude-related material —
"Self-Blazon… of Edenic Plenitude"
(The Issuu text is taken from Speaking about Godard , by Kaja Silverman
and Harun Farocki, New York University Press, 1998, page 34.)
Preservation-of-selves-related material —
Other Latin squares (from October 2018) —
Comments Off on The Hustvedt Array
Sunday, April 28, 2019
Bauble
"This time-defying preservation of selves,
this dream of plenitude without loss,
is like a snow globe from heaven,
a vision of Eden before the expulsion.
Mathematically demonstrable
but emotionally impossible,
it’s dangled just in front of us
like a bauble we can’t have
but can’t stop reaching for."
— Judith Shulevitz on Siri Hustvedt in
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
of March 31, 2019, under the headline
"The Time of Her Life."
A different self-symbolizing bauble appeared in this journal on that Sunday.
A line for Letterman — "Bauble, Babel. Babel, Bauble."
Comments Off on Bauble
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Dream of Plenitude
"This time-defying preservation of selves,
this dream of plenitude without loss, is like
a snow globe from heaven, a vision of Eden
before the expulsion."
— Judith Shulevitz on Siri Hustvedt in
The New York Times online, March 26.
See also, in this journal, the dream of Edenic plenitude
in the March 20 post "Secret Characters."
Comments Off on Dream of Plenitude
Sunday, March 3, 2019
Requiem for an Architect
A story from the NY Times Sunday morning print edition —
"A version of this article appears in print on ,
on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Kevin Roche, 96, Is Dead; Famed Modernist Architect."
" When Mr. Roche received the Pritzker in 1982, he delivered
an acceptance speech that displayed both his capacity for
self-deprecating humor and his belief that architecture was
a noble pursuit. He quoted from a letter he had received
complaining that his work was 'moribund' and that the Pritzker
jury 'must be out of their minds' to have given him the prize.
He could only respond, he said, by asking: 'Is not the act of building
an act of faith in the future, and of hope? Hope that the testimony of
our civilization will be passed on to others, hope that what we are doing
is not only sane and useful and beautiful, but a clear and true reflection
of our own aspirations. And hope that it is an art, which will communicate
with the future and touch those generations as we ourselves have been
touched and moved by the past.' "
— Paul Goldberger
Goldberger on Roche's earlier career —
". . . He continued to finish projects Saarinen had started, including
the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, designed
in collaboration with Charles Eames . . . ."
Illustration —
The IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair
See also the film "Tomorrowland."
"Bad news on the doorstep…." — American Pie
Comments Off on Requiem for an Architect
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Artifacts
The word "artifacts" in the above obituary summary
suggests three Log24 posts now tagged with that word.
See as well . . .
"Bad news on the doorstep…." — American Pie
Comments Off on Artifacts
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Sunday Appetizer from 1984
Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010
(quoted here Aug. 15, 2010) —
“What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?”
The 2015 German edition of Beautiful Mathematics ,
a 2011 Mathematical Association of America (MAA) book,
was retitled Mathematische Appetithäppchen —
Mathematical Appetizers . The German edition mentions
the author's source, omitted in the original American edition,
for his section 5.17, "A Group of Operations" (in German,
5.17, "Eine Gruppe von Operationen") —
|
Mathematische Appetithäppchen: Autor: Erickson, Martin —
"Weitere Informationen zu diesem Themenkreis finden sich |
That source was a document that has been on the Web
since 2002. The document was submitted to the MAA
in 1984 but was rejected. The German edition omits the
document's title, and describes it as merely a source for
"further information on this subject area."
The title of the document, "Binary Coordinate Systems,"
is highly relevant to figure 11.16c on page 312 of a book
published four years after the document was written: the
1988 first edition of Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups ,
by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane —
A passage from the 1984 document —
Comments Off on Sunday Appetizer from 1984
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Sunday Dinner (continued)
Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010
(quoted here Aug. 15, 2010) —
“What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?”
See also The Pride of Lowell (Oct. 3, 2012)
and, a year later, The Hunt for Green October .
Comments Off on Sunday Dinner (continued)
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Dueling Menus
From Sunday Dinner in this journal—
|
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times "What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?" |
Menu: Sardi's, not Sardis.
Comments Off on Dueling Menus
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Sunday Dinner
From "Sunday Dinner" in this journal—
"'If Jesus were to visit us, it would have been
the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on
being a part of, not the worship service at the church.'"
—Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010
Some table topics—
Today's midday New York Lottery numbers were 027 and 7002.
The former suggests a Galois cube, the latter a course syllabus—
CSC 7002
Graduate Computer Security (Spring 2011)
University of Colorado at Denver
Department of Computer Science
An item from that syllabus:
| Six | 22 February 2011 | DES | History of DES; Encryption process; Decryption; Expander function; S-boxes and their output; Key; the function f that takes the modified key and part of the text as input; mulitple Rounds of DES; Present-day lack of Security in DES, which led to the new Encryption Standard, namely AES. Warmup for AES: the mathematics of Fields: Galois Fields, particularly the one of order 256 and its relation to the irreducible polynomial x^8 + x^4 + x^3 + x + 1 with coefficients from the field Z_2. |
Related material: A novel, PopCo , was required reading for the course.
Discuss a different novel by the same author—
Discuss the author herself, Scarlett Thomas.
Background for the discussion—
Derrida in this journal versus Charles Williams in this journal.
Related topics from the above syllabus date—
Metaphor and Gestell and Quadrat.
Some context— Midsummer Eve's Dream.
Comments Off on Sunday Dinner
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Sunday Dinner
Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010 —
"What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?
For James Carroll, an ex-priest and dissenting Catholic
in Boston (he is the author of Practicing Catholic ,
published in 2009), it would look like the Sunday dinners
of his childhood. These were big formal meals,
held at 2 p.m. every Sunday….
'If Jesus were to visit us, it would have been
the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on
being a part of, not the worship service at the church.'"
Possible Table Topics
|
Arts & Letters Daily (20 Feb 2011) Sat Feb 19, 2011 23:00
Nobody likes a grammar scold, but it must be said:
How did the armies of Mordor cope with defeat?
Is philosophy of science an obsolete |
Some background for the discussion —
A book said to have received 15,480 reviews—
Comments Off on Sunday Dinner
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Java Jive continued…
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010 —
"What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?
For James Carroll, an ex-priest and dissenting Catholic
in Boston (he is the author of Practicing Catholic ,
published in 2009), it would look like the Sunday dinners
of his childhood. These were big formal meals,
held at 2 p.m. every Sunday….
'If Jesus were to visit us, it would have been
the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on
being a part of, not the worship service at the church.'"
The Usual Suspects —
For some background, see Java Jive and Today's Theology.
See also the java jive in this journal on Sunday, July 18—
A Tale of Two Cities, Du Sucre , Sermon, and Darkness at Noon.
Comments Off on Java Jive continued…
Monday, March 10, 2003
Monday March 10, 2003
ART WARS:
Art at the Vanishing Point
Two readings from The New York Times Book Review of Sunday,
2003 are relevant to our recurring "art wars" theme. The essay on Dante by Judith Shulevitz on page 31 recalls his "point at which all times are present." (See my March 7 entry.) On page 12 there is a review of a novel about the alleged "high culture" of the New York art world. The novel is centered on Leo Hertzberg, a fictional Columbia University art historian. From Janet Burroway's review of What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt:
"…the 'zeros' who inhabit the book… dramatize its speculations about the self…. the spectator who is 'the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas.'''
Here is a canvas by Richard McGuire for April Fools' Day 1995, illustrating such a spectator.
For more on the "vanishing point," or "point at infinity," see
Connoisseurs of ArtSpeak may appreciate Burroway's summary of Hustvedt's prose: "…her real canvas is philosophical, and here she explores the nature of identity in a structure of crystalline complexity."
For another "structure of crystalline
complexity," see my March 6 entry,
For a more honest account of the
New York art scene, see Tom Wolfe's
The Painted Word.
Comments Off on Monday March 10, 2003