* In honor of Sondheim, recent posts are now
  tagged with a phrase from a different show — 
  Send in the Clowns.

  Speaking of which . . .

Mental Health Month:
The Lottery Covenant

Here are the evening lottery numbers for Pennsylvania, the Keystone state, drawn on Monday, May 19, 2003:

401 and 1993.

This, by the sort of logic beloved of theologians, suggests we find out the significance of the divine date 4/01/1993.

It turns out that April 1, 1993, was the date of the New York opening of the Stephen Sondheim retrospective “Putting It Together.”

For material related to puzzles, games, Sondheim, and Mental Health Month, see

Notes on
Literary and Philosophical Puzzles. 

The figures below illustrate some recurrent themes in these notes.

“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.”

— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff,
    “Deconstructing Sondheim,” 
    The New Yorker, March 8, 1993, p. 76
 

Art isn't Easy

In honor of Georges Seurat, whose birthday is today, this site's music is now "Putting It Together," by Stephen Sondheim.

For a relevant quote by Sondheim and some related material, see

• The Diamond 16 Puzzle and
• Notes on Literary and Philosophical Puzzles,
  as well as
• Logos and Logic.

The Artist’s Signature

This title is taken from the final chapter of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact.

“There might be a game in which paper figures were put together to form a story, or at any rate were somehow assembled. The materials might be collected and stored in a scrap-book, full of pictures and anecdotes. The child might then take various bits from the scrap-book to put into the construction; and he might take a considerable picture because it had something in it which he wanted and he might just include the rest because it was there.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief

“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.”

— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff, Deconstructing Sondheim,” The New Yorker, March 8, 1993, p. 76

This passage from Weil is quoted in
Gateway to God,
p. 42, paperback, fourth impression,
printed in Glasgow in 1982 by
Fontana Books

“He would leave enigmatic messages on blackboards,
signed Ya Ya Fontana.”

— Brian Hayes on John Nash,
The Sciences magazine, Sept.-Oct., 1998

“I have a friend who is a Chief of the Aniunkwia (Cherokee) people and I asked him the name of the Creator in which
he replied… Ya Ho Wah. This is also how it is spoken in Hebrew. In my native language it is spoken
Ya Ya*,
which is also what Moses was told
at the ‘Burning Bush’ incident.”

— “Tank” (of Taino ancestry), Bronx, NY, Wednesday, April 17, 2002

From a website reviewing books published by
 Fontana:

1/17/02: NEW YORK (Variety) – Russell Crowe is negotiating to star in 20th Century Fox’s “Master and Commander,” the Peter Weir-directed adaptation of the Patrick O’Brian book series.

Hmmm.

*For another religious interpretation of this phrase, see my note of October 4, 2002, “The Agony and the Ya-Ya.”