Related narrative: Bosch by Snaith . See also . . .
Neil Welliver, great American painter, father of Titus Welliver
Titus Welliver Says "Losing His Way" Led Him Back to Painting
The following image was suggested by today’s
New York Times obituary of Joanna Harcourt-Smith
and by earlier Log24 posts now also tagged Grossinger.
For some background, see a book that reportedly
was published on Devil’s Night (October 30) 1997 —
The interview date above suggests some related material
for students of bullshit and for the Church of Synchronology —
Image credit: The singer of "Deep Blue," Sara Arlene,
in a Facebook story of November 12, 2024.
"Swirls of red radiate a symphony of joy, love, and passion,
inviting observers to delve into the depth of human emotions."
— Marcela Nowak at Medium.com, August 12, 2023.
See Blue-Green lyrics.
Related material . . .
"…we could go back to my hotel in Beverly Hills, order some room service…."
— August Moon singer in "The Idea of You"
Image linked to in the post "Hotel Art ," August 14, 2024.
|
A brief excerpt from a 2018 book about the woman who inspired Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . . . "There is a passage in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), which exemplifies much about what Quality means . . . . … the narrator, Marlow … is … in an environment he finds malign, sinister, macabre, chaotic, indifferently cruel, and nightmarishly meaningless. What saves him is his accidental discovery of a dry old seamanship manual . . . ." Conrad, as quoted in the book cited below: It was an extraordinary find. Its title was An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship, by a man Towser, Towson – some such name – Master in his Majesty’s Navy. The matter looked dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking strain of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real. — From pp. 36-37 of James Essinger and Henry Gurr's
A Woman of Quality: |
See also earlier posts tagged Weir'd.
Other entertainment news . . .
I look forward to a University Diaries "Burning Man" joke.
"And so I had an idea, which turned out to be
related to that question, and so it was a little theorem
that I proved and I showed it to my thesis advisor, and
then he said, 'Oh, that could maybe help with this question.'
And he told me the question. And I said, 'Oh that's right,
maybe it could.' But he said, 'But don't work on that.'
He says, 'Borel has worked on that, Singer has worked
on that, a lot of people have tried to do this without success.'
But that has just got me fired up. And so I solved that problem…."
— The late James H. Simons, on his thesis advisor Bertram Kostant.
The thesis advisor reportedly died on Groundhog Day, 2017.
See as well, in this journal, Facets for Snorri.
In memory of the lead singer of the Shangri-Las,
who reportedly died at 75 on January 19 . . .
Related reading: Tonight's previous post and A Turner Classic.
See as well Raiders of the Lost Horizon.
— Niall Ferguson, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist
From this journal on Guy Fawkes Day, 2011—
Shadows
|
"Time is a weapon, it's cold and it's cruel"
— Lyrics: Max D. Barnes. Singer: Ray Price.
The New York Times in September 1949 —
CANNES, France, Sept. 17 (AP) — A. British-made film
with two American stars won the Grand Prize of the
Cannes Film Festival, judges announced today.
The film was "The Third Man," starring Joseph Cotten,
Valli, Orson Welles and Siegfried Breuer.
VIEW FULL ARTICLE IN TIMESMACHINE »
"Hey now, you're an all star
Get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star
Get the show on, get paid"
— Lyrics from . . .
And for the Church of Synchronology … Log24 on
the above YouTube date — Dec. 25, 2009.
See posts tagged "The Next Level."
Perhaps Isadore Singer now has a clue . . .
See his phrases "manic as hell" and "pregnant as hell."
See also Illinois Beltane.
Or: The Sontag Puzzlement
Wikipedia on "Heavenly Creatures" —
"Juliet introduces Pauline to the idea of 'the Fourth World',
a Heaven without Christians where music and art are
celebrated. Juliet believes she will go there when she dies.
Certain actors and musicians have the status of saints in
this afterlife, such as singer Mario Lanza, with whom
both girls are obsessed."
Related material — Sontag + Camp .
Alternate Title —
Types of Ambiguity:
The Circle in the Triangle,
the Singer in the Song.
From an excellent June 17 Wall Street Journal review of a new
Isaac Bashevis Singer book from Princeton University Press —
" 'Old Truths and New Clichés,' a collection of 19
prose articles, most appearing in English for the
first time, reveals that Singer was as consummate
an essayist as he was a teller of tales." — Benjamin Balint
From a search in this journal for Singer —
Related material —
From a post of June 2, "Self-Enclosing" —
|
"… the self-enclosing processes by which late 20th-century
— Colin Burrow in the June 9, 2022 issue |
From the December 14, 2021, post Notes on Lines —
The triangle, a percussion instrument that was
featured prominently in the Tom Stoppard play
"Every Good Boy Deserves Favour."
O Merlin in your crystal cave
Deep in the diamond of the day,
Will there ever be a singer
Whose music will smooth away
The furrow drawn by Adam's finger
Across the memory and the wave?
Or a runner who'll outrun
Man's long shadow driving on,
Break through the gate of memory
And hang the apple on the tree?
Will your magic ever show
The sleeping bride shut in her bower,
The day wreathed in its mound of snow
and Time locked in his tower?
A play by George Bernard Shaw is the source of the book title at
the end of the previous post — "Music is the brandy of the damned ."
This suggests a corresponding song title . . .
From the album "The Time of the Assassins."
The above image is not of the singer's own background.
Actually, Dirac “bridged math and physics” much earlier —
“Spinors, which are a kind of square root of vectors, had been introduced
in algebra and also in physics as part of Paul Dirac’s theory of the electron.
A spin structure on a manifold allows such square roots to exist.”
— Quanta Magazine today, article by Daniel S. Freed
See The Eddington Song and . . .
Poetic paraphrase —
“How can we tell the singer from the song?”
From a post of August 30, 2015 —
“… recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
‘At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit.’ “
And at times, non-bullshit is required.
BS from The New York Times Friday on the mathematical fields
known as topology and analysis in the 1960s —
“The two fields seemed to be nearly irremediably divided,
because topology twists objects around, and analysis
needs them to be rigid.”
Some less ignorant remarks from 1986:
The above Gauss-Bonnet theorem (ca. 1848) is explained in a talk titled
“Analysis Meets Topology” labeled with the above Emma Stone date —
Background reading — Math’s Big Lies and, more generally, Mazur.
Related news for fans of Language Games —
The title is adapted from a recent book by Joan Didion.
That book now appears among others in my Kindle library —
A Midrash for Singer
Vide "Bereshit" in Wikipedia and in this journal.
Related material —
Midrash for leftists —
The time of this journal’s previous post was 9:56
(AM, ET, Sunday, Nov. 8, 2020).
“All time is local time” — Richard Grossinger,
The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos
“You can’t fool me, i’m stickin’ to the union”
— Adapted song lyric
“On second thought, maybe you can fool me.”
See Richard Grossinger in Wikipedia.
“Mr. Lowery’s view that news organizations’ ‘core value
needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity,’
as he told me, has been winning in a series of battles,
many around how to cover race.”
— Ben Smith in the print New York Times this morning
“Christ is truth.” — St. Gerard Manley Hopkins
See also The Diamond Chariot in posts tagged September Samurai.
This post was suggested by a May 28 death —
Photo caption for the obituary below —
"Michael Atiyah, center, and Isadore M. Singer receive the Abel Award
from Norway’s King Harald in Oslo in 2004…" Credit: Knut Falch,
SCANPIX/Associated Press
A search this morning for articles mentioning the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis within the last year yielded an abstract for two talks given
at Hiroshima on March 8 and 9, 2018 —
|
http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ branched/files/2018/abstract/Aitchison.txt
Iain AITCHISON Title: Construction of highly symmetric Riemann surfaces, related manifolds, and some exceptional objects, I, II Abstract: Since antiquity, some mathematical objects have played a special role, underpinning new mathematics as understanding deepened. Perhaps archetypal are the Platonic polyhedra, subsequently related to Platonic idealism, and the contentious notion of existence of mathematical reality independent of human consciousness. Exceptional or unique objects are often associated with symmetry – manifest or hidden. In topology and geometry, we have natural base points for the moduli spaces of closed genus 2 and 3 surfaces (arising from the 2-fold branched cover of the sphere over the 6 vertices of the octahedron, and Klein's quartic curve, respectively), and Bring's genus 4 curve arises in Klein's description of the solution of polynomial equations of degree greater than 4, as well as in the construction of the Horrocks-Mumford bundle. Poincare's homology 3-sphere, and Kummer's surface in real dimension 4 also play special roles. In other areas: we have the exceptional Lie algebras such as E8; the sporadic finite simple groups; the division algebras: Golay's binary and ternary codes; the Steiner triple systems S(5,6,12) and S(5,8,24); the Leech lattice; the outer automorphisms of the symmetric group S6; the triality map in dimension 8; and so on. We also note such as: the 27 lines on a cubic, the 28 bitangents of a quartic curve, the 120 tritangents of a sextic curve, and so on, related to Galois' exceptional finite groups PSL2(p) (for p= 5,7,11), and various other so-called `Arnol'd Trinities'. Motivated originally by the `Eightfold Way' sculpture at MSRI in Berkeley, we discuss inter-relationships between a selection of these objects, illustrating connections arising via highly symmetric Riemann surface patterns. These are constructed starting with a labeled polygon and an involution on its label set. Necessarily, in two lectures, we will neither delve deeply into, nor describe in full, contexts within which exceptional objects arise. We will, however, give sufficient definition and detail to illustrate essential inter-connectedness of those exceptional objects considered. Our starting point will be simplistic, arising from ancient Greek ideas underlying atomism, and Plato's concepts of space. There will be some overlap with a previous talk on this material, but we will illustrate with some different examples, and from a different philosophical perspective. Some new results arising from this work will also be given, such as an alternative graphic-illustrated MOG (Miracle Octad Generator) for the Steiner system S(5,8,24), and an alternative to Singerman – Jones' genus 70 Riemann surface previously proposed as a completion of an Arnol'd Trinity. Our alternative candidate also completes a Trinity whose two other elements are Thurston's highly symmetric 6- and 8-component links, the latter related by Thurston to Klein's quartic curve. |
See also yesterday morning's post, "Character."
Update: For a followup, see the next Log24 post.
The title was suggested by Ellmann's roulette-wheel analogy
in the previous post, "The Perception of Coincidence."
"Vinnie Paul of the band Hellyeah performs in concert
during Day 2 of the Rock Allegiance Festival at
Talen Energy Stadium on Sunday, Sept. 18, 2016, in
Chester, Pa. (Photo by Owen Sweeney/Invision/AP)"
"Former SKID ROW singer Sebastian Bach played
a cover version of the PANTERA classic
"Cemetery Gates" as a tribute to Vinnie Paul Abbott
during his June 24 concert at The Pyramid Cabaret in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada."
The title was suggested by the name "ARTI" of an artificial
intelligence in the new film 2036: Origin Unknown.
The Eye of ARTI —
See also a post of May 19, "Uh-Oh" —
— and a post of June 6, "Geometry for Goyim" —
Mystery box merchandise from the 2011 J. J. Abrams film Super 8
An arty fact I prefer, suggested by the triangular computer-eye forms above —
This is from the July 29, 2012, post The Galois Tesseract.
See as well . . .
From the linked website —
The circle-in-a-triangle symbol is known as "the triangle of art" —
See as well a post of Feb. 27, 2018: Raiders of the Lost Images.
The title of the previous post, "Church and Temple," together
with today's online New York Times obituaries for singer
Lara Saint Paul (d. May 8) and playwright Leah Rose Napolin
(d. May 13), suggests a review…
See as well a Log24 search for Isaac Singer.
From a Log24 post of March 4, 2008 —
|
SINGER, ISAAC:
"Sets forth his own aims in writing for children and laments
— An Annotated Listing of Criticism
"She returned the smile, then looked across the room to
— A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
For "the dimension of time," see A Fold in Time, Time Fold,
A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children |
Ibid. —
The pen's point:
John Trever, Albuquerque Journal, 2/29/08
Note the figure on the cover of National Review above —
A related figure from Pentagram Design —
See, more generally, Isaac Singer in this journal.
The previous post suggests a review of
the philosophical concept of universals —
A part of the above-mentioned 2011 "Saturday evening's post" that is
relevant to the illustration at the end of today's previous post —
Note the whatness of Singer's dagger definitions —
Suggested by the previous post …
" 'Dark Horse' is a song recorded by American singer
Katy Perry featuring rapper Juicy J. It was originally
released on September 17, 2013, by Capitol Records
as the first promotional single from Perry's fourth
studio album, Prism (2013)."
See also a link from the above date in this journal —
"In the Neighborhood of Mathematical Space,"
by Karen Shenfeld (1993).
Figures from a search in this journal for Springer Knight
and from the All Souls' Day post The Trojan Pony —
For those who prefer pure abstraction to the quasi-figurative
1985 seven-cycle above, a different 7-cycle for M24 , from 1998 —
Compare and contrast with my own "knight" labeling
of a 4-row 2-column array (an M24 octad, in the system
of R. T. Curtis) by the 8 points of the projective line
over GF(7), from 2008 —
From a search in this journal for Springer Knight —
Related material from Academia —
See also Log24 posts from the above "magic" date,
December 4, 2014, now tagged The Pony Argument.
In memory of Marian Cannon Schlesinger,
who reportedly died on Saturday, October 14, 2017
University Diaries on December 25, 2016 —
"You could say UD currently sits (she’s in the library
at five AM) at the pinnacle of elitism; you could say
she ain’t climbing any higher than atop this soft
leather chair resting on one of the gargantuan rugs
Galbraith or Galbraith junior brought back from India
or Afghanistan. But it’s only the trappings. What’s
been able to be held in amber. This place is the
genuine Henry James (Harvard Law, 1872):
The affluent society, expansive, sedate; and
the cry of pain almost out of earshot."
Presumably UD means the noted author Henry James.
A fact check does not bear out her "Harvard Law, 1872" remark.
For this Halloween season, a creepy passage from James —
"The record, released on the Diamond label,
became a big hit, rising to no. 4 on the
Billboard Hot 100 in early 1963." — Wikipedia
… Songwriter Leonard Cohen, who reportedly
died on November 7, 2016.
Adam Bernstein on the late singer Kay Starr:
"She also was widely considered a master of the blues,
drawing praise for her authenticity from Billie Holiday,
Dinah Washington, Lester Young and Basie singer
Jimmy Rushing, who once exclaimed that she had
'so much soul!' Along with Peggy Lee, she was one of
the few non-black vocalists who emphasized a blues
repertoire at the time. (Ms. Starr was three-quarters
American Indian and one-quarter Irish.)"
Commentary —
The Washington Post yesterday evening —
|
Kay Starr, ferociously expressive singer By Adam Bernstein November 3 at 8:01 PM Kay Starr, a ferociously expressive singer whose ability to infuse swing, pop and country songs with her own indelible, bluesy stamp made her one of the most admired recording artists of her generation, died Nov. 3 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94. … |
Midrash —
Yesterday afternoon's post "Triple Cross" and …
An image from last night's post Brand Name —
"Squared into a matrix of four"
YouTube data suggested by the above passage —
Related literary remarks —
— A Heart for the Gods of Mexico , Conrad Aiken, 1939
"Pinpoint high note"
— Phrase by Margalit Fox in yesterday
morning's online NY Times
For a pinpoint low note, see …
"And I know that she's capable of anything, it's riveting
But when you wake up she's always gone, gone, gone"
A midrash for Rosenberg from 7/21 (2015) —
"The definition of easy to learn, hard to master"
— Alex Hern in The Guardian today on the game of Go
Not unlike music, mathematics, and chess.
For illustrations based on the above equations, see
Coxeter and the Relativity Problem and Singer 7-Cycles .
( A sequel to Friday’s post O Seven, O Eight )
In memory of opera singer Jon Vickers, who reportedly
died Friday at 88 —
“His deep faith — he was once dubbed ‘God’s voice’ —
saw him refuse to perform some roles on moral grounds,
specifically, Tannhäuser.” — BBC News
From Wolfram’s song to the evening star in Tannhäuser —
The soul, that longs for the highest grounds,
is fearful of the darkness before it takes flight.
There you are, oh loveliest star,
your soft light you send into the distance.
Der Seele, die nach jenen Höhn verlangt,
vor ihrem Flug durch Nacht und Grausen bangt.
Da scheinest du, o lieblichster der Sterne,
dein Sanftes Licht entsendest du der Ferne.
See as well a related meditation:
From The Harvard Crimson , April 19, 2015 —
1. Serenade them with an Acapella Group
Nothing is more romantic than a group of students
showing up at your door and singing to you
for three minutes. The gesture is simple enough
to pull off. Ask one of your friends in an acapella
group for a quick favor. With so many acapella
groups on campus, you’re bound to find someone
to help you woo your potential date with the hot fire
of four part harmonies.
This suggests …
A Song for Kristen
Click image for the song.
The New York Times tonight on the late
cabaret singer Julie Wilson, who reportedly
died at 90 in Manhattan on Easter Sunday —
"In 1988 she was nominated for a Tony Award
for best featured actress in a Broadway musical
for her role as the owner of a speakeasy in
Peter Allen’s 'Legs Diamond.'"
The church connection —
"The reviews were unanimously negative,
with particular disbelief at Peter Allen's
attempts to play so totally against type
as a suave lothario. Frank Rich
commented that the evening's most
compelling drama was watching Allen
figure out 'what to do with his hands.'
The failure of the musical was so total
that it compelled the Nederlander
Organization to finally sell the beloved
but flop-prone Mark Hellinger Theatre to
the Times Square Church, which still
owns it." — Wikipedia
See also Times Square Church in this journal.
In memory of singer-songwriter Lesley Gore,
May 2, 1946 – February 16, 2015
“Her wall is filled with pictures…”
— Sweet Little Sixteen
Two posts from Gore’s birthday last year:
“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.” — Lesley Gore
(The title is from a post of July 8, 2010.)
“What is important is the ability to tell stories through character.”
— Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series of novels
An image from the bottom line of images in the previous post:
In memory of Scottish folk singer Jean Redpath,
who reportedly died on Thursday, August 21:
See also this journal on August 21.
Some illustrations:
Chess Knight
(in German, Springer)
See also…
More technically (click image for details):
The title is a reference to a post of a year ago today.
From a page linked to in that post—
"It was a time when American celebrities
still resembled girls and boys next door
and when chart-toppers were manufactured
to appeal to listeners of all ages."
See also a Saturday Evening Post —
“Let’s give ‘em somethin’ to talk about,
A little mystery to figure out”
– Scarlett Johansson singing on
Saturday Night Live, April 21, 2007
Continued from Deo Gratias , a post at noon last Saturday
that featured blues singer R. L. Burnside.
"It is a fresh spiritual that he defines"
— "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
A related scene, in memory of a jingle singer who died Sunday at 97:
Click for the Heavenly Coffee song.
Profile picture of "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo—
Compare to an image of Vril muse Maria Orsitsch.
From the catalog of a current art exhibition
(25 May – 31 August, 2013) in Norway,
I DE LANGE NÆTTER —
|
Josefine Lyche
Keywords (to help place my artwork in the (See also the original catalog page.) |
Clearly most of this (the non-highlighted parts) was taken
from my webpage Diamond Theory. I suppose I should be
flattered, but I am not thrilled to be associated with the
(apparently fictional) Vril Society.
For some background, see (for instance)
Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies for Dummies .
From Jim Holt’s Aug. 29, 2008, review of
The Same Man:
George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War
by David Lebedoff
“Orwell thought ‘good prose is like a window pane,’
forceful and direct. Waugh was an elaborate stylist
whose prose ranged from the dryly ironical to the
richly ornamented and rhetorical. Orwell was solitary
and fiercely earnest. Waugh was convivial and
brutally funny. And, perhaps most important, Orwell
was a secularist whose greatest fear was the
emergence of Big Brother in this world. Waugh was
a Roman Catholic convert whose greatest hope lay
with God in the next.”
The Orwell quote is from “Why I Write.”
A search for the original yields…
Detail:
Synchronicity:
See, too, in this journal the
Chinese character for “field”—
Today's online Telegraph has an obituary of The Troggs'
lead singer Reg Presley, who died yesterday at 71.
The unusually brilliant style of of the unsigned obituary
suggests a review of the life of a fellow Briton—
F. L. Lucas (1894-1967), author of Style .
According to Wikipedia, Virginia Woolf described Lucas as
"pure Cambridge: clean as a breadknife, and as sharp."
Lucas's acerbic 1923 review of The Waste Land suggests,
in the context of Woolf's remark and of the Blade and Chalice
link at the end of today's previous post, a search for a grail.
Voilà.
From an obituary of singer Patti Page, who died on New Year's Day—
"Clara Ann Fowler was born Nov. 8, 1927, in Claremore, Okla., and grew up in Tulsa. She was one of 11 children and was raised during the Great Depression by a father who worked for the railroad.
She told the Times that her family often did not have enough money to buy shoes. To save on electricity bills, the Fowlers listened to only a few select radio programs. Among them was 'Grand Ole Opry.'"
See also two poems by Wallace Stevens and some images related to yesterday's Log24 post.
Four southern authors—
Of particular interest in light of previous posts on singer Alicia Keys and on
author Octavia Butler — author Charles G. Bell, second from left above.
See videos of Bell's Symbolic History series.
Related material:
Frank J. Prial on the late singer Tony Martin—
— and, on Jan. 1, 2005, on beverage marketing:
Happy birthday to Hilary Swank.
A Necessary Truth—
James Singer, "A Theorem in Finite Projective Geometry
and Some Applications to Number Theory," Transactions
of the American Mathematical Society 43 (1938), 377-385.
A Contingent Truth—
Singer Tony Martin reportedly died Friday evening, July 27, 2012.
In his memory, some references to a "Singer 7-Cycle."
See also this journal 7 years prior to Martin's death.
The New York Times this morning reports the death
last Tuesday (June 19, 2012) in Boston
of Gerhard Kallman, a Brutalist architect
born in Berlin in 1915.
Some Log24 images from the date of his death—
The above view shows the south side of Kirkland Street (at Quincy).
A more appealing architectural image, from the other side
of Kirkland Street—
(Mythopoetic continued)
Voice of America today—
Thousands of Norwegians Defy Confessed Killer Breivik in Song
"The demonstrators waved roses and flags
Thursday as they and Norwegian folk singer
Lillebjoern Nilsen sang an adaptation
of the children's song, 'My Rainbow Race,'
which Breivik in court last week called
an example of Marxist brainwashing."
[See also PETE SEEGER AND LILLEBJØRN NILSEN.
Click on the image below for Seeger's original version.]
Liberia Reacts to Taylor Conviction With Mixed Emotions
"As the verdict was read out, a rainbow was seen
in the sky, encircling the sun. For many Liberians,
superstition is a part of life. The rainbow heralded
a new era, they said, beginning with the verdict of Taylor."
["You're not the only one… with mixed emotions."]
Yesterday's post in memory of Octavio Paz—
|
… the free-standing, two-sided “Life-Death Figure,” |
An earlier post yesterday, Fashion Notes, linked to a Sting video—
|
From "Loo Ree," by Zenna Henderson "It's so hard to explain–" "Oh, foof!" I cried defiantly, taking off my glasses and, smearing the tears across both lenses with a tattered Kleenex. "So I'm a dope, a moron! If I can explain protective coloration to my six-year-olds and the interdependence of man and animals, you can tell me something of what the score is!" I scrubbed the back of my hand across my blurry eyes. "If you have to, start out 'Once upon a time."' I sat down– hard. Loo Ree smiled and sat down, too. "Don't cry, teacher. Teachers aren't supposed to have tears." "I know it," I sniffed. "A little less than human-that's us." "A little more than human, sometimes." Loo Ree corrected gently. "Well then, you must understand that I'll have to simplify. You will have to dress the bare bones of the explanation according to your capabilities. "Once upon a time there was a classroom. Oh, cosmic in size, but so like yours that you would smile in recognition if you could see it all. And somewhere in the classroom something was wrong. Not the whispering and murmuring– that's usual. Not the pinching and poking and tattling that goes on until you get so you don't even hear it." I nodded. How well I knew. "It wasn't even the sudden blow across the aisle or the unexpected wrestling match in the back of the room. That happens often, too. But something else was wrong. It was an undercurrent, a stealthy, sly sort of thing that has to be caught early or it disrupts the whole classroom and tarnishes the children with a darkness that will never quite rub off. "The teacher could feel it –as all good teachers can– and she spoke to the principal. He, being a good principal, immediately saw the urgency of the matter and also saw that it was beyond him, so he called in an Expert." "You?" I asked, feeling quite bright because I had followed the analogy so far. Loo Ree smiled. "Well, I'm part of the Expert." |
"If you have to, start out 'Once upon a time.'"
Yesterday's Paz post was at 6:48 PM EDT.
For the autistic, here is some related mathematics.
Yesterday's Fashion Notes post was at 1:06 PM EDT.
A related chronological note from Rolling Stone yesterday—
"Levon Helm, singer and drummer for the Band,
died on April 19th in New York of throat cancer.
He was 71.
"He passed away peacefully at 1:30 this afternoon…."
Helm and The Band performing "The Weight"—
"I pulled into Nazareth, I was a-feelin' 'bout half past dead…"
Suggested by a USA Today story on last night's Grammy ratings,
by the showmanship of Nicki Minaj, and by…
"Lincoln was one of many singers influenced by Billie Holiday." —Wikipedia
Related material—
"Apart from that, Ms. Lincoln…"
| Saturday, November 12, 2005
— m759 @ 8:00 PM (continued)
“… problems are the poetry of chess. |
(Continued from Tuesday's "A Story")
Tuesday's story, a collection of four random posts, was
suggested by Tuesday's NY lottery numbers.
That story leads, by association, to Frame Tale in
a post of 2:02 AM on Sunday, May 23, 2010. For related
material, see Death Story, a post of 9:40 PM that same Sunday.
Wednesday's numbers—
—suggest a counter-story…
Escape to Pine Mountain
A website on films about Latter-Day Saints (i.e., Mormons) asks
Was "Escape to Witch Mountain"
based on Zenna Henderson's "People" stories?
The lottery numbers above suggest the names of three women—
none, as far as I know, with any Mormon background—
who might rightly be called, without capital letters,
"latter-day saints"…
These three lives, taken together, may serve as
an antidote to the Death Story mentioned above.
"We tell ourselves stories…" — Joan Didion
"Therefore choose life." —God
Dreamtime
"…we're presented with the dream within the dream within the dream…."
— Remark on "Inception" in a review of Malick's "The Tree of Life"
The Way of Nature
Singer/songwriter/musician Andrew Gold died on Friday, June 3, reportedly in the early morning.
The Way of Grace
"They've heard lonely songs they thought were the livin' end."
— Reviewer's parody of James Taylor's "Fire and Rain"
printed in the Spokane Chronicle on May 28, 1991—
the Feast of St. Germain—
See also First Class, from the day of Gold's death, as well as the later
Midnight and Paris and Mystery.
Background— The above 1991 story about Taylor mentions his interpretation of
"Getting to Know You," from "The King and I." Gold's mother, Marni Nixon, was
the singing voice of Deborah Kerr in the film of that musical.
“It's a very ancient saying, but a true and honest thought…."
Continued from Good Friday —
The New Yorker , in the above excerpt, says of David Deutsch that
"his books have titles of colossal confidence
('The Fabric of Reality,' 'The Beginning of Infinity')."
The Fabric of Reality — A post from Good Friday —
| Friday, April 22, 2011
In memory of Hazel Dickens, two links — Weepin' like a willow, mournin' like a dove |
The Beginning of Infinity — Another Good Friday death—
Sidney Michaels, adapter of the 1962 play "Tchin-Tchin."
"At play's end they are Chaplinesque waifs living in the charmed circle
of innocents that includes saints, children, drunkards and madmen.
Subliminally, Tchin-Tchin is a Christian existential fable." — TIME
In memory of Hazel Dickens, two links — Unique Figure and Hello Stranger .
Weepin' like a willow, mournin' like a dove
Weepin' like a willow, mournin' like a dove
There's a girl of the country
That I really love
"When Death tells a story,
you really have to listen."
— Cover, The Book Thief
An image from a post linked to in Tuesday's Koan for Larsson—
An image from today's New York Times obituaries—
Wikipedia on singer Loleatta Holloway, who died Monday—
[Her] "Like a Prayer," a Madonna cover, was a track on the Madonna tribute album Virgin Voices.
New York Times on actress Helen Stenborg, who died Tuesday—
A Minnesotan of Swedish descent, she naturally brought to all her roles the kind of reserve that reflected her upbringing.
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.
Quotation from an obituary on page A24 of the New York edition of today's New York TImes—
“Even Gods Must Die.”
Related material from Log24 on the day this classical singer of India died
and on the following day—
Monday, January 24, 2011A Reappearing Number, continued"In the work of Ramanujan, the number 24 appears repeatedly. This is an example of what mathematicians call magic numbers, which continually appear, where we least expect them, for reasons that no one understands." – Michio Kaku, Hyperspace, Oxford U. Press, 1994, p. 173 See also "A Reappearing Number," this journal, July 4, 2010. Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Related material— a video of the song— See also this journal's Twelfth Night posts. (Note particularly the 4/01 link.) |
Today's funeral Mass for Sargent Shriver,
tonight's review in the New York TImes of a singer
from the Kollege of Musical Knowledge,
and today's New York lottery numbers suggest the following links—
A search in memory of Gerry Rafferty,
a talented singer-songwriter who died today at 63.
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
"Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences."
— A character clearly talking nonsense, from the National Library section of James Joyce's Ulysses
"Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse."
— A thought of Stephen Dedalus in the same Ulysses section
For a representation of horseness related to Singer's dagger definitions in Saturday evening's post, see Generating the Octad Generator and Art Wars: Geometry as Conceptual Art.
More seriously, Joyce's "horseness" is related to the problem of universals. For an illuminating approach to universals from a psychological point of view, see James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology (Harper Collins, 1977). (See particularly pages 154-157.)
Dagger Definitions
Part I —
Part II —
Update of Jan. 2, 2011 —
Singer goes on to say that "A finite projective plane, PG (2, pn ), defined in this way is Pascalian and Desarguesian ; it exists for every prime p and positive integer n , and there is only one such PG (2, pn ) for a given p and n …."
His definitions therefore deliberately exclude non -Desarguesian finite projective planes, which were known to exist at the time he wrote.
“… this gentle little movie… is, after all, a character study– and in an alcoholic country singer named Bad Blake, we’ve got one hell of a character.”
And then there’s Baaad Blake–
Related material:
This journal on the president of
London’s Blake Society and
Wikipedia on the founder of
Pergamon Press
From today's NY Times—
Obituaries for mystery authors
Ralph McInerny and Dick Francis
From the date (Jan. 29) of McInerny's death–
"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.'"
– Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (Walpurgisnacht, 2008), by Barbara Johnson
From the date (Feb. 14) of Francis's death–
The EIghtfold Cube
The "something missing" in the above figure is an eighth cube, hidden behind the others pictured.
This eighth cube is not, as Johnson would have it, a void and "vanishing point," but is instead the "still point" of T.S. Eliot. (See the epigraph to the chapter on automorphism groups in Parallelisms of Complete Designs, by Peter J. Cameron. See also related material in this journal.) The automorphism group here is of course the order-168 simple group of Felix Christian Klein.
For a connection to horses, see
a March 31, 2004, post
commemorating the birth of Descartes
and the death of Coxeter–
Putting Descartes Before Dehors
For a more Protestant meditation,
see The Cross of Descartes—
"I've been the front end of a horse
and the rear end. The front end is better."
— Old vaudeville joke
For further details, click on
the image below–
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
More Than Matter
| Wheel in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913
(f) Poetry The burden or refrain of a song. ⇒ “This meaning has a low degree of authority, but is supposed from the context in the few cases where the word is found.” Nares. You must sing a-down a-down, An you call him a-down-a. O, how the wheel becomes it! Shak. |
“In one or other of G. F. H. Shadbold’s two published notebooks, Beyond Narcissus and Reticences of Thersites, a short entry appears as to the likelihood of Ophelia’s enigmatic cry: ‘Oh, how the wheel becomes it!’ referring to the chorus or burden ‘a-down, a-down’ in the ballad quoted by her a moment before, the aptness she sees in the refrain.”
— First words of Anthony Powell’s novel “O, How the Wheel Becomes It!” (See Library Thing.)
Related material:
Photo uploaded on January 14, 2009
with caption “This nothing’s more than matter”
and the following nothings from this journal
on the same date– Jan. 14, 2009—
Singer 7-Cycles
Click on images for details.
The 1985 Cullinane version gives some algebraic background for the 1987 Curtis version.
The Singer referred to above is James Singer. See his "A Theorem in Finite Projective Geometry and Some Applications to Number Theory," Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 43 (1938), 377-385.For other singers, see Art Wars and today's obituaries.
Some background: the Log24 entry of this date seven years ago, and the entries preceding it on Las Vegas and painted ponies.
The New York Times
on June 17, 2007:
Design Meets Dance,
and Rules Are Broken
Yesterday's evening entry was
on the fictional sins of a fictional
mathematician and also (via a link
to St. Augustine's Day, 2006), on
the geometry of the I Ching* —
The eternal
combined with
the temporal:
The fictional mathematician's
name, noted here (with the Augustine-
I Ching link as a gloss) in yesterday's
evening entry, was Summerfield.
From the above Times article–
"Summerspace," a work by
choreographer Merce Cunningham
and artist Robert Rauschenberg
that offers a competing
vision of summer:
From left, composer John Cage,
choreographer Merce Cunningham,
and artist Robert Rauschenberg
in the 1960's
"When shall we three meet again?"
On Chris Hipp, who died of an apparent heart attack at 47 on July 14 (Bastille Day), 2009:
“‘He was the father of blade technology when he was with RLX,’ Jim Hall, president of the Blade System Alliance, said in an interview. ‘He invented the blade server.'”
“Hall said Hipp was a natural inventor who wanted to be on the cutting edge.”
— Jeffrey Burt at eWeek.com
Epitaph by a friend:
“He was known as a determined, fearsome and fair competitor.”
Hipp’s motto was “pounding idiots.”*
From a website celebrating the life and family (cf. previous two entries) of Leonard Shlain, author of Art & Physics and pioneering surgeon:
“Shlain n: unique last name of Russian origins. Possible meanings: 1: Sound sword makes as it’s pulled from sheath” —Shlain.com
A more authentic sound:
“The blade actually does sing. When it is withdrawn from the sheath it makes a ‘Tshuiiing’ sound as one hears in the movies. It rings like a bell.”
Steel Addiction, Custom Knives
A less authentic sound:
* The residents of Id (as in the above cartoon) are known, affectionately, as Idiots.
Other knight figures:
Click on the SpringerLink
knight for a free copy
(pdf, 1.2 mb) of
the following paper
dealing with the geometry
underlying the R.T. Curtis
knight figures above:
Context:
Literature and Chess and
Sporadic Group References
Details:
| Adapted (for HTML) from the opening paragraphs of the above paper, W. Jonsson's 1970 "On the Mathieu Groups M22, M23, M24…"–
"[A]… uniqueness proof is offered here based upon a detailed knowledge of the geometric aspects of the elementary abelian group of order 16 together with a knowledge of the geometries associated with certain subgroups of its automorphism group. This construction was motivated by a question posed by D.R. Hughes and by the discussion Edge [5] (see also Conwell [4]) gives of certain isomorphisms between classical groups, namely
where A8 is the alternating group on eight symbols, S6 the symmetric group on six symbols, Sp(4,2) and PSp(4,2) the symplectic and projective symplectic groups in four variables over the field GF(2) of two elements, [and] PGL, PSL and SL are the projective linear, projective special linear and special linear groups (see for example [7], Kapitel II). The symplectic group PSp(4,2) is the group of collineations of the three dimensional projective space PG(3,2) over GF(2) which commute with a fixed null polarity tau…." References 4. Conwell, George M.: The three space PG(3,2) and its group. Ann. of Math. (2) 11, 60-76 (1910). 5. Edge, W.L.: The geometry of the linear fractional group LF(4,2). Proc. London Math. Soc. (3) 4, 317-342 (1954). 7. Huppert, B.: Endliche Gruppen I. Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer 1967. |
Eight is a Gate
From the most highly
rated negative review:
“I never did figure out
what ‘The Eight’ was.”
Various approaches
to this concept
(click images for details):
Susan Sontag in
this week's New Yorker:
"The mind is a whore."
Embedded in the Sontag
article is the following:
Act One
South Pole:
Shi Ho
Act Two
North Pole:
Kun
"If baby I'm the bottom,
you're the top."
— Cole Porter
Happy birthday,
Steven Spielberg.
On author Madeleine L’Engle:
“Madeleine’s adult books– including the autobiographical titles that eventually would be grouped together as the Crosswicks Journals– A Circle of Quiet (1971), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), The Irrational Season (1976), and Two-Part Invention (1988)– were edited by Robert Giroux. If Roger Straus was FSG’s [Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s] worldly sophisticate presiding over editorial meetings, Bob Giroux was the white-haired, rosy-cheeked favorite uncle (if you happened to have an erudite uncle who had edited T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Isaac Bashevitz Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy).”
On Robert Giroux, who died early this morning:
For a less demanding standard, see today’s previous entry.
The concluding paragraph of Erich Heller's 1953 essay, "The Hazard of Modern Poetry"–
"'The poetry does not matter.' These words from Mr. T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets acquire an all but revolutionary significance if we understand them not only in their particular context but also in the context of a period of poetry in which nothing mattered except poetry. Against this background the Four Quartets themselves appear, in all their complexity, as the poetry of simple civic virtue– the poetry of a poet trying to read the writing of the law that has become all but illegible. This, you may say, has nothing to do with poetry. On the contrary, it is one of the few truly hopeful signs that this civic virtue could once more be realized poetically. For in speaking to the hazard of modern poetry I did not wish to suggest that the end had come for singers and skylarks. There will always be skylarks; perhaps even a few nightingales. But poetry is not only the human equivalent of the song of singing birds. It is also Virgil, Dante, and Hölderlin. It is also, in its own terms, the definition of the state of man."
A poem by the late Thomas Disch:
Sundays at the Colosseum
I think you always had to be a little juiced
to enjoy the show. Or Jewish!
I never attended
without a flask of red, and would salute
the dying singers–
martyrs they called themselves–
when the lions drew first blood.
The songs
went on until either terror or death
had silenced the last of them. I doubt
we would have gone so religiously
if it weren't for the singing.
Sometimes we'd even sing along.
Circuses aren't the same these days.
Pity.
— From Disch's weblog on Friday,
May 23, 2008, at 8:26 AM
Related material on a novel by Disch:
"On Wings of Song, published in 1979, tells the story of a repressive Amesville, Iowa, in the 21st century. The main character, Daniel Weinreb, tries to master the art of song and flight, 'driven by the knowledge that some have attained flight, their spirits separated from their physical bodies and propelled on the waves of their own singing voices– literally born on wings of song.'"
— Jocelyn Y. Stewart in a Los Angeles Times obituary of July 8, 2008
— Song lyric,
Cyndi Lauper
Alethiometer from
"The Golden Compass"
Update:
See also this morning's
later entry, illustrating
the next line of Cyndi
Lauper's classic lyric
"Time After Time" —
"… Confusion is
nothing new."
For CENTRAL
Central Intelligence:
"God does not play dice."
— Paraphrase of a remark
by Albert Einstein
Another Nobel Prize winner,
Isaac Bashevis Singer—
"a God who speaks in deeds,
not in words, and whose
vocabulary is the Cosmos"
From "The Escapist:
The Reality of Fantasy Games"–
From today's New York Times:
A Kaddish for Gygax:
| "I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)" |
Related material:
For more on the word
"phantasmagoria," see
Log24 on Dec. 12, 2004
and on Sept. 23, 2006.
For phantasmagoria in action,
see Dungeons & Dragons
and Singer's (and others')
Jewish fiction.
For non-phantasmagoria,
see (for instance) the Elements
of Euclid, which culminates
in the construction of the
Platonic solids illustrated above.
See also Geometry for Jews.
John Trever, Albuquerque Journal, 2/29/08
The pen's point:
|
Log24, Dec. 11, 2006
SINGER, ISAAC:
"Sets forth his own aims in writing for children and laments 'slice of life' and chaos in children's literature. Maintains that children like good plots, logic, and clarity, and that they have a concern for 'so-called eternal questions.'"
— An Annotated Listing
"She returned the smile, then looked across the room to her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, and to their father, who were deep in concentration, bent over the model they were building of a tesseract: the square squared, and squared again: a construction of the dimension of time."
— A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.
|
"An acute study of the links
between word and fact"
— Nina daVinci Nichols
| Virginia | /391062427/item.html? | 2/22/2008 7:37 PM |
Johnny Cash:
"And behold,
a white horse."
Chess Knight
(in German, Springer)
"Liebe Frau vBayern,
mich würde interessieren wie man
mit diesem Hintergrund
(vonbayern.de/german/anna.html)
zu Springer kommt?"
Background of "Frau vBayern" from thePeerage.com:
Anna-Natascha Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg
F, #64640, b. 15 March 1978Last Edited=20 Oct 2005
Anna-Natascha Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg was born on 15 March 1978. She is the daughter of Ludwig Ferdinand Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg and Countess Yvonne Wachtmeister af Johannishus. She married Manuel Maria Alexander Leopold Jerg Prinz von Bayern, son of Leopold Prinz von Bayern and Ursula Mohlenkamp, on 6 August 2005 at Nykøping, Södermanland, Sweden.
The date of the above "Liebe Frau vBayern" inquiry, Feb. 1, 2007, suggests the following:
From Log24 on
St. Bridget's Day, 2007:
The quotation
"Science is a Faustian bargain"
and the following figure–
Change
From a short story by
the above Princess:
"'I don't even think she would have wanted to change you. But she for sure did not want to change herself. And her values were simply a part of her.' It was true, too. I would even go so far as to say that they were her basis, if you think about her as a geometrical body. That's what they couldn't understand, because in this age of the full understanding for stretches of values in favor of self-realization of any kind, it was a completely foreign concept."
To make this excellent metaphor mathematically correct,
change "geometrical body" to "space"… as in
"For Princeton's Class of 2007"—
Review of a 2004 production of a 1972 Tom Stoppard play, "Jumpers"–
Related material:
Knight Moves (Log24, Jan. 16),
Kindergarten Theology (St. Bridget's Day, 2008),
and
(Click on image for details.)
Cullen's statement
in picture form:
E is for Everlast
Scene from "Million Dollar Baby"
Jazz singer, raconteur,
imitator of Bessie Smith,
he apparently named
his daughter Pandora.
|
GEORGE MELLY
1926 – 2007 WHAT AFTERLIFE
|
M. Scott Peck,
People of the Lie
|
"Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs, Secure. It was difficult to sing in face Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves Or else avert the object."
— Wallace Stevens, |
Today is June 25,
anniversary of the
birth in 1908 of
Willard Van Orman Quine.
Quine died on
Christmas Day, 2000.
Today, Quine's birthday, is,
as has been noted by
Quine's son, the point of the
calendar opposite Christmas–
i.e., "AntiChristmas."
If the Anti-Christ is,
as M. Scott Peck claims,
a spirit of unreality, it seems
fitting today to invoke
Quine, a student of reality,
and to borrow the title of
Quine's Word and Object…
Word:
An excerpt from
"Credences of Summer"
by Wallace Stevens:
|
"Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times The thrice concentred self, having possessed
The object, grips it
— "Credences of Summer," VII, |
Object:
From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:
From Christmas 2005:
Click on the images
for further details.
For a larger and
more sophisticaled
relative of this object,
see yesterday's entry
At Midsummer Noon.
The object is real,
not as a particular
physical object, but
in the way that a
mathematical object
is real — as a
pure Platonic form.
"It's all in Plato…."
— C. S. Lewis
From the May 18 Harvard Crimson:
“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’….”
Related material:
“In philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things.” —Wikipedia
“In the 1920’s… the discovery of quantum mechanics went a very long way toward reducing chemistry to the solution of well-defined mathematical problems. Indeed, only the extreme difficulty of many of these problems prevents the present day theoretical chemist from being able to predict the outcome of every laboratory experiment by making suitable calculations. More recently the molecular biologists have made startling progress in reducing the study of life back to the study of chemistry. The living cell is a miniature but extremely active and elaborate chemical factory and many, if not most, biologists today are confident that there is no mysterious ‘vital principle,’ but that life is just very complicated chemistry. With biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry to mathematics, the measurable aspects of the world become quite pervasive.” –Harvard mathematician George Mackey, “What Do Mathematicians Do?“
Opposed to reductionism are “emergence” and “strong emergence“–
“Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic.” —Mark A. Bedau
Or comfortably.
Senior Honors
From the obituary in today's New York Times of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.–
"Mr. Schlesinger, partly through his appreciation of history, fully realized his good fortune. 'I have lived through interesting times and had the luck of knowing some interesting people,' he wrote.
A huge part of his luck was his father, who guided much of his early research, and even suggested the topic for his [Harvard] senior honors: Orestes A. Brownson, a 19th-century journalist, novelist and theologian. It was published by Little, Brown in 1938 as 'Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress.'"
From The Catholic Encyclopedia:
"It is sufficient for true knowledge that it affirm as real that which is truly real."
From The Diamond Theory of Truth:
"Was there really a cherubim waiting at the star-watching rock…?
Was he real?
What is real?— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973, conclusion of Chapter Three, "The Man in the Night"
"Oh, Euclid, I suppose."
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962, conclusion of Chapter Five, "The Tesseract"
Related material: Yesterday's first annual "Tell Your Story Day" at Harvard and yesterday's entry on Euclid.
"Modern Times, his first album since Love and Theft, debuted at No. 1
on the US pop charts last September. At 65, Dylan became the oldest
living person to achieve this feat." –New Zealand Herald, Feb. 12
|
"Each epoch has its singer."
"Anything but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination, to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a compromise with the 'mystery tramp,' as Bob Dylan put it…."
"You said you'd never compromise |
In today's meditation for
the Church of Peter Gabriel,
Dennis Overbye plays
the role of Jack Horner.
(See Overbye on Sagan in today's
New York Times, Sagan on Pi,
and Pi Day at Harvard.)
For more on Jack Horner, see
The Rise and Fall
of Popular Music,
by Donald Clarke,
Chapter One.
For two contrasting approaches
to popular music, see two artists
whose birthdays are today:
In other Grammy news–
At the end of Sunday's awards,
"Scarlett Johansson and Don Henley
put themselves in the pole position
to star in a remake of 'Adam's Rib'
with the following exchange:
Henley: So you're recording
your first album?
Johansson: Yeah. Do you
have any advice for me?
Henley: No."
"Her wall is filled with pictures,
she gets 'em one by one…."
J. G. Ballard on “the architecture of death“:
“… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”
— The Guardian, March 20, 2006
“For him, writing is a struggle both with geometry and death.”
— “The Duende,” American Poetry Review, July/August 1999
— Harper’s Magazine review
quoted on back cover of
Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,
by Robert Rosenblum
(Abrams paperback, 2001)
— An Annotated Listing of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson
“She returned the smile, then looked
across the room to her youngest brother,
Charles Wallace, and to their father,
who were deep in concentration, bent
over the model they were building
of a tesseract: the square squared,
and squared again: a construction
of the dimension of time.”
— A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L’Engle
For “the dimension of time,”
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937.
For a more adult audience —
In memory of General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday in Santiago, Chile, a quotation from Federico Garcia Lorca‘s lecture on “the Duende” (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933):
Serious
"I don't think the 'diamond theorem' is anything serious, so I started with blitzing that."
— Charles Matthews at Wikipedia, Oct. 2, 2006
"The 'seriousness' of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is 'significant' if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas."
— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
Matthews yesterday deleted references to the diamond theorem and related material in the following Wikipedia articles:
Affine group
Reflection group
Symmetry in mathematics
Incidence structure
Invariant (mathematics)
Symmetry
Finite geometry
Group action
History of geometry
This would appear to be a fairly large complex of mathematical ideas.
See also the following "large complex" cited, following the above words of Hardy, in Diamond Theory:
Affine geometry, affine planes, affine spaces, automorphisms, binary codes, block designs, classical groups, codes, coding theory, collineations, combinatorial, combinatorics, conjugacy classes, the Conwell correspondence, correlations, design theory, duads, duality, error correcting codes, exceptional groups, finite fields, finite geometry, finite groups, finite rings, Galois fields, generalized quadrangles, generators, geometry, GF(2), GF(4), the (24,12) Golay code, group actions, group theory, Hadamard matrices, hypercube, hyperplanes, hyperspace, incidence structures, invariance, Karnaugh maps, Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, Latin squares, Leech lattice, linear groups, linear spaces, linear transformations, Mathieu groups, matrix theory, Meno, Miracle Octad Generator, MOG, multiply transitive groups, octads, the octahedral group, orthogonal arrays, outer automorphisms, parallelisms, partial geometries, permutation groups, PG(3,2), polarities, Polya-Burnside theorem, projective geometry, projective planes, projective spaces, projectivities, Reed-Muller codes, the relativity problem, Singer cycle, skew lines, sporadic simple groups, Steiner systems, symmetric, symmetry, symplectic, synthemes, synthematic, tesseract, transvections, Walsh functions, Witt designs.
Tequila!
"Time disappears
with tequila.
It goes elastic,
then vanishes."
From today's AP
"Obituaries in the News"–
|
Danny Flores HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Danny Flores, who played the saxophone and shouted the word ''tequila!'' in the 1950s hit song ''Tequila!'', died Tuesday [Sept. 19, 2006]. He was 77. Flores, who lived in Westminster, died at Huntington Beach Hospital, said hospital spokeswoman Kathleen Curran. He died of complications from pneumonia, the Long Beach Press-Telegram reported. The man sometimes called the ''godfather of Latin rock'' was born in Santa Paula but grew up in Long Beach. By age 5, he was playing guitar in church and at 14 he was a member of a trio that performed Mexican music. In 1957, Flores was in a group that recorded some work with rockabilly singer Dave Burgess. One of the songs was based on a nameless riff Flores had written. He played the ''dirty'' saxophone part and repeatedly growled the single-word lyric: ''Tequila!'' ''Tequila!'' went to No. 1 on the Billboard chart and won a Grammy in 1959 for best rhythm and blues performance. Flores continued to play it for the next 40 years. |
Related material:
"Echoes (Aug. 11)" —
— and
Two-Bar Hook
Augustine of Hippo, who is said to
have died on this date in 430 A.D.
"He is, after all, not merely taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Augustine
Here is a rather different attempt
to combine the eternal with the temporal:
|
The Eternal
Symbol of necessity,
For details, see |
The Temporal
Symbol of the
For details, see |
|
The eternal
combined with the temporal:
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Related material:
Today’s online New York Times:
“On Highway 61 outside of
Natchez, Mississippi, stands
Campaign Song
“All things return to the One.
What does the One return to?”
— Zen koan, epigraph to
The Footprints of God,
by Greg Iles of
Natchez, Mississippi
“Literature begins with geography.”
— attributed to Robert Frost
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— Robert Frost |
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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)
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"The Waste Land," |
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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 |
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Eliot's note on line 424: |
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"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, |
By GREG RISLING
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES — Singer Buck Owens, the flashy rhinestone cowboy who shaped the sound of country music… died Saturday. He was 76.
From Log24, Feb. 2, 2003:
Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:
“In the last two weeks, I’ve been returning to Hopkins. Even in the ‘world’s wildfire,’ he asserts that ‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.’ A comfort.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162
Related material:
See the five Log24 entries ending with The Diamond as Big as the Monster (Dec. 21, 2005).
Note particularly the following:
From Fitzgerald’s
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz:
“Now,” said John eagerly, “turn out your pocket and let’s see what jewels you brought along. If you made a good selection we three ought to live comfortably all the rest of our lives.”
Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and tossed two handfuls of glittering stones before him.
“Not so bad,” cried John, enthusiastically. “They aren’t very big, but– Hello!” His expression changed as he held one of them up to the declining sun. “Why, these aren’t diamonds! There’s something the matter!”
“By golly!” exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look. “What an idiot I am!”
“Why, these are rhinestones!” cried John.
CUERNAVACA, Mexico – Spanish singer Gloria Lasso, who made her name recording romantic ballads in Latin America and Paris, died in her sleep on Sunday at her home in Cuernavaca. She was 83.
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Today's Harvard Crimson–
"Pudding Show Features
From yesterday's entry,
"At the still point,
Xanadu (1980) For related material, see
Balanchine's Birthday (1/9/03)
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For more Harvard humor,
see The Crimson Passion.
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