Related examinations: Space Cross and Wittgenstein’s Picture.

(Continued)

See also

• Summerisle Cross
• Jerusalem Cross
• Space Cross.

This post was suggested by Log24 remarks on May 4, 2014,
the date of Garrett Lisi's Twitter post announcing the opening
of his Pacific Science Institute (see previous post).

Click image for a midrash.

* See previous post.

(Continued from Palm Sunday)

From Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” —

Try to remember this: what you project
Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
With any passion, be it love or terror,
May take on whims and powers of its own.
Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection
Will serve you best, unless you overdo it,
Watching your step too narrowly, refusing
To specify a world, shrinking your purview
To a tight vision of your inching shoes—
Which may, as soon you come to think, be crossing
An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.
What you must manage is to bring to mind
A landscape not worth looking at, some bleak
Champaign at dead November’s end, its grass
As dry as lichen, and its lichens grey….

See also —

This morning's previous post, on sacred space,
linked to "Positively White Cube Revisited,"
an article by one Simon Sheikh.

Sheikh writes well, but he seems to be a disciple
of the damned Marxist lunatic Louis Althusser.

As Pynchon put it in Gravity's Rainbow ,
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."

In this case, a video starring Sheikh on the exhibition "All That Fits"
suggests, by its filming date (May 27, 2011),  a Maltese  cross.

"The stuff that dreams are made of." — Bogart

(See also Oct. 25, 2012.)

(Continued from Seize the Dia,  April 6)

Two chess games by Fischer, against two brothers—

1956: "In this game, Fischer (playing Black) demonstrates
noteworthy innovation and improvisation." — Wikipedia

1963: "Fischer [playing Black] had engineered a brilliantly
disguised trap for him and … he had fallen into it." — NY Times

See also this evening's Times  obituaries and The Unfolding.

Some context:  The Crosswicks Curse.

See as well, in this journal, Deathly Hallows, Relativity Problem, and Space Cross.

A related quote:  "This is not mathematics; this is theology."

(Continued)

Orwell Meets Waugh

This post was suggested by a Google search today.

From mathematician Izabella Laba today —

From Harry T. Antrim’s 1967 thesis on Eliot —

“That words can be made to reach across the void
left by the disappearance of God (and hence of all
Absolutes) and thereby reestablish some basis of
relation with forms existing outside the subjective
and ego-centered self has been one of the chief
concerns of the first half of the twentieth century.”

… And then there is the Snow White void  —

A logo that may be interpreted as one-eighth of a 2x2x2 array
of cubes —

The figure in white above may be viewed as a subcube representing,
when the eight-cube array is coordinatized, the identity (i.e., (0, 0, 0)).

"Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie." — Pascal

(Quoted here in The Search for Finite Space on Mon., Feb. 8, 2016.)

From phys.org today —

( Iron Cross, continued )

"… and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Arthur C. Clarke—

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"The HP/Autonomy  Debacle," by John C. Dvorak at pcmag.com on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012—

"The whole Autonomy  thing was weird since the company seemed to be performing magic. On co-founder Michael Richard Lynch's Wikipedia page, the company is described as 'a leader in the area of computer understanding of unstructured information, an area which is becoming known as meaning-based computing .'

I do not know how gullible HP's board of directors is, but when I see the sudden emergence of something called 'meaning-based computing,' the alarms sound and the bullcrap meter begins to tag the red line."

A story by Terence K. Huwe in Online  magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2011, defines meaning-based computing (MBC), discusses Autonomy , and llnks to…

John Markoff in The New York Times , March 4, 2011— 

"Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people— who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing 'digital anomalies' that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds 'call me' moments— those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter."

For example…

Joke

From July 28:

The Guardian, July 26,
on a work by the
late playwright
 George Tabori:

“… inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. ‘Just two,’ says Jay. ‘The boy is bringing his own.’ Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form.”

“When may we expect to have
something from you on the
  esthetic question? he asked.”

— A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man

 July 11, 2003
New York State Lottery

7-11 Evening Number: 000.

Mozart, 2006

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

— Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936)

From the center:

“‘Mozart, 1935’ immediately discloses a will to counter complaints of pure poetry, to refute that charge heard regularly from Stevens’s critics, to find ‘his particular celebration out of tune today’ on his own if necessary; and, in short, to meet the communist [poet and critic Willard] Maas’s ‘respect for his magnificent rhetoric’ at least halfway across from right to left.”

— Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211

From the left:

Norman Lebrecht on this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth (January 27, 1756):

   “… Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward….
   … Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak….
   …  He lacked the rage of justice that pushed Beethoven into isolation, or any urge to change the world. Mozart wrote a little night music for the ancien regime. He was not so much reactionary as regressive….
   … Little in such a mediocre life gives cause for celebration….
   … The bandwaggon of Mozart commemorations was invented by the Nazis in 1941….
   …  In this orgy of simple-mindedness, the concurrent centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich– a composer of true courage and historical significance– is being shunted to the sidelines, celebrated by the few.
    Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony. Listen to music that matters.”
     
The left seems little changed since 1935.

Cross-Referenced

From today’s New York Times,
a review of a Werner Herzog film,
“Wheel of Time,” that opens
today in Manhattan:

These images suggest
a Google search on the phrase
“crucified on the wheel of time,”

DARK CITY (1998) Crucified on the Wheel Of Time. A visual feast.

From Dark City: A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review —

“There is something mesmerizing about this important film. It flows in the same vein as The Truman Show, The Game, and Pleasantville.  Something isn’t real with the world around John Murdoch. Some group is trying to control things and it isn’t God.”

Amen.

Related material:
Skewed Mirrors and
The Graces of Paranoia

Subject and Predicates

“A Chu space is a set X of subjects and a set A of predicates on those subjects. These stand in a symbiotic relationship in which the nature of each is determined by the other. Each subject is characterized by the values the predicates take on it, while each predicate is characterized by its values on subjects.”

— Vaughan Pratt, Chu Spaces

Click here for Sambin’s paper (ps).

It would seem that Pratt and Sambin need to reconcile their similar predicates for the same subject.

For some background on Sambin’s approach to the subject, see

Symmetry and Change
in the Dreamtime

Notes from the Journal
of Steven H. Cullinane

Summary:

Aug 31 2004  07:31:01 PM	Early Evening, Shining Star
Sep 01 2004 09:00:35 AM	Words and Images
Sep 01 2004 12:07:28 PM	Whale Rider
Sep 02 2004 11:11:42 AM	Heaven and Earth
Sep 02 2004 07:00:23 PM	Whale Road
Sep 03 2004 12:00:54 AM	Cinderella’s Slipper
Sep 03 2004 10:01:56 AM	Another September Morn
Sep 03 2004 12:00:25 PM	Noon
Sep 03 2004 01:13:49 PM	De Nada
Sep 03 2004 03:17:13 PM	Ite, Missa Est

Symmetry and Change, Part 1…

Early Evening,
Shining Star

7:31:01 PM ET

Hexagram 01
The Creative:

The Image

The movement of heaven
is full of power.

Click on picture
for details.

The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 2…

Words and Images

9:00:35 AM ET

Hexagram 35
Progress:

The Image

The sun rises over the earth.

For
James Whale
and
William French Anderson —

Words
In the Spirit of
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs:

Stay for just a while…
Stay, and let me look at you.
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you.
Standing in the door…
Stay with me a while.
I only want to talk to you.
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again.

Look at what you’ve done…
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl…

— Neil Diamond

Images
In the Spirit of
September Morn:

The Last Day of Summer:
Photographs by Jock Sturges

“In 1990, the FBI entered Sturges’s studio and seized his work, claiming violation of child pornography laws.”

Related material:

Bill’s Diamond Theory

and

Log24 entries of
Aug. 15, 2004.

Those interested in the political implications of Diamond’s songs may enjoy Neil Performs at Kerry Fundraiser.

I personally enjoyed this site’s description of Billy Crystal’s remarks, which included “a joke about former President Clinton’s forthcoming children’s book — ‘It’s called The Little Engine That Could Because It Could.'”

“Puff, puff, woo, woo, off we go!” 

Symmetry and Change, Part 3…

Whale Rider

12:07:28 PM

Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:

The Image

The lake rises
above the trees.

Cullinane College News:

“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”

For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and

Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004) 

Thursday, September 2, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 4…

Heaven and Earth

11:11:42 AM ET

Hexagram 42
Increase:

The Image

Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.

“This time resembles that of
the marriage of heaven and earth”

“What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever… You just couldn’t march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn’t even hear it… It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be.”

— The Grifters, Ch. 10, 1963, by
James Myers Thompson

“The Old Man’s still an artist
with a Thompson.”
— Terry in “Miller’s Crossing”

For some of “the music which
each person had inside,”
click on the picture
with the Thompson.

It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357:

(Hits counter at
The Quality of Diamond
as of 11:05 AM Sept. 2, 2004)

For more on
“the marriage of heaven and earth,”
see
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star. 

Thursday, September 2, 2004

Symmetry and Change, Part 5…

Whale Road

7:00:23 PM

Hexagram 23
Splitting Apart:

The Image

The mountain rests
on the earth.

“… the plot is different but the monsters, names, and manner of speaking will ring a bell.”

— Frank Pinto, Jr., review of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf 

Other recommended reading, found during a search for the implications of today’s previous entry, “Hexagram 42”:

Water Wings.

This excellent meditation
on symmetry and change
comes from a site whose
home page
has the following image:

Friday, September 3, 2004

 Symmetry and Change, Part 6…

Cinderella’s Slipper

12:00:54 AM ET

Hexagram 54
The Marrying Maiden:

The Image

Friday, September 3, 2004  

A Cross Between

Grace

“The only way to describe her voice is a cross between Harriet Wheeler of The Sundays & Alanis Morissette.”

— Review of Jen Slocumb of Martha’s Trouble by Diane Matay

“Apostrophe Theory is a cross between.”

— Ian Lee, The Third Word War

Star Wars

In memory of Melvin J. Lasky, editor, 1958-1990, of the CIA-funded journal Encounter:

“Once called as lively, and as bitchy, as a literary cocktail party, Encounter published articles of unrivalled authority on politics, history and literature.”

— Obituary in the Telegraph 

Lasky died on Wednesday, May 19, 2004.  From a journal entry of my own on that date:

This newly-digitized diagram is from a
paper journal note of October 21, 1999.

Note that the diagram’s overall form is that of an eight-point star.  Here is an excerpt from a Fritz Leiber story dealing with such a star, the symbol of a fictional organization:

From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:

Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:

Affirmation of Place and Time:
East Coker and Grand Rapids

This morning’s meditation:

“Let us talk together with the courage, humor, and ardor of Socrates.

In that long conversation, we may find ourselves considering something Plato’s follower Plotinus said long ago about ‘a principle which transcends being,’ in whose domain one can ‘assert identity without the affirmation of being.’  There, ‘everything has taken its stand forever, an identity well pleased, we might say, to be as it is…. Its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has ever ceased to be.’  Individuality and existence in space and time may be masks that our sensibilities impose on the far different face of quantum reality.”

— Peter Pesic, Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature, MIT Press paperback, 2003, p. 145

A search for more on Plotinus led to sites on the Trinity, which in turn led to the excellent archives at Calvin College in Grand Rapids.

A search for the theological underpinnings of Calvin College led to the Christian Reformed church:

“Our emblem is
the cross in a triangle.”

The triangle, as a symbol of “the delta factor,” also plays an important role in the semiotic theory of Walker Percy.  A search for current material on Percy led back to one of my favorite websites, that of Percy expert Karey Perkins, and thus to the following paper:

The “East Coker” Dance
in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
An Affirmation of Place and Time
by Karey Perkins

For a rather different, but excellent, literary affirmation of place and time — in Grand Rapids, rather than East Coker — see, for instance, Michigan Roll, a novel by Tom Kakonis.

We may, for the purposes of this trinitarian meditation, regard Percy and Kakonis as speaking for the Son and Karey Perkins as a spokesperson for the Holy Spirit.  As often in my meditations, I choose to regard the poet Wallace Stevens as speaking perceptively about (if not for, or as) the Father.  A search for related material leads to a 1948 comment by Thomas McGreevy, who

“… wrote of Stevens’ ‘Credences of Summer’ (Collected Poems 376),

On every page I find things that content me, as ‘The trumpet of the morning blows in the clouds and through / The sky.’

A devout Roman Catholic, he added, ‘And I think my delight in it is of the Holy Spirit.’ (26 May 1948).”

An ensuing search for material on “Credences of Summer” led back, surprisingly, to an essay — not very scholarly, but interesting — on Stevens, Plotinus, and neoplatonism.

Thus the circle closed.

As previous entries have indicated, I have little respect for Christianity as a religion, since Christians are, in my experience, for the most part, damned liars.  The Trinity as philosophical poetry, is, however, another matter.  I respect Pesic’s speculations on identity, but wish he had a firmer grasp of his subject’s roots in trinitarian thought.  For Stevens, Percy, and Perkins, I have more than respect.

Happy Rohatsu

“The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus.”

— Shodo Harada Roshi, Dharma Talk

A poem for Rohatsu:

On the one-ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still.

~by Taniguchi Buson
(translated by X.J. Kennedy)

Commentary on poetry of Buson:

Poetry as an open space
 for lightening of Being

“… a cleft of existence from where the time is to extend to eternity. It is a place where ‘nothing’ crosses with ‘being’ or the ‘clearing’ in Heidegger’s term, the only light place in the dark forest.”

— Hiroo Saga

In other words,
From Here to Eternity.

For more on Zen, see the
entry of May 2, 2003.

For more on a Temple Bell, see the
entry of May 1, 2003.

For more on Venus, see the
entry of March 28, 2003.

For more on the morning star, see the
entry of December 8, 2002.

Cross-Referenced

†

Shortly after midnight on the night of April 22-23, I updated my entry for Shakespeare's birthday with the following quotation: 

"With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced."

— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley's The Archivist

About 24 hours later, I came across the following obituary in The New York Times: 

"Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases, the standard method by which information is organized in and retrieved from computers, died on Friday…. He was 79."

The Times does not mention that the Friday it refers to is Good  Friday.  God will  have his little jokes.

From Computerworld.com:
1969: Edgar F. "Ted" Codd invents the relational database.	1969: Edgar F. “Ted” Codd invents the relational database. 1973: Cullinane, led by John J. Cullinane, ships IDMS, a network-model database for IBM mainframes. 1976: Honeywell ships Multics Relational Data Store, the first commercial relational database.

For a better (and earlier) obituary than the Times's, see The San Jose Mercury News of Easter Sunday.  For some thoughts on death and the afterlife appropriate to last weekend, see The Matthias Defense.

† The Exorcist, 1973
 

A Darker Side of C. S. Lewis

Known for his fairy-story series “The Chronicles of Narnia,” C. S. Lewis had a more serious — some might say darker — side.

His portrayals of science and scientists in That Hideous Strength  give an accurate picture of moral degeneracy in that subculture.  The hero of Lewis’s “space trilogy,” of which That Hideous Strength is the conclusion, is a philologist  — a student of language.  In keeping with Lewis’s interest in philology and in fairy stories, and with the fact that today is Jacob Grimm‘s birthday, here are some philological observations related to the word “middle” — as in the “middle earth” of Lewis’s friend Tolkien, or in “middle kingdom,” the Chinese name for China.

From a page on a pilot of the USAF China National Aviation Corp. (CNAC) Air Transport Command Group:

The significance of the chung on the plane is explained here.  Suggested as an insignia by General Claire Chennault in 1942, it may be imagined to have signified — as on the mah jong tile — success or achievement in this area as well.

Let us hope that philologists and fairy-tale students like Grimm and Lewis — rather than followers of the religion of scientism — continue to inspire and guide those who must fight for our values.

New from Miracle Pictures
– IF IT’S A HIT, IT’S A MIRACLE! –

Pi in the Sky
for Michaelmas 2002

“Fear not, maiden, your prayer is heard.
Michael am I, guardian of the highest Word.”

— A Michaelmas Play

Contact, by Carl Sagan:

Chapter 1 – Transcendental Numbers

  In the seventh grade they were studying “pi.” It was a Greek letter that looked like the architecture at Stonehenge, in England: two vertical pillars with a crossbar at the top. If you measured the circumference of a circle and then divided it by the diameter of the circle, that was pi. At home, Ellie took the top of a mayonnaise jar, wrapped a string around it, straightened the string out, and with a ruler measured the circle’s circumference. She did the same with the diameter, and by long division divided the one number by the other. She got 3.21. That seemed simple enough.

  No one had ever called Ellie stupid before and she found herself bursting into tears….

  After school she bicycled to the library at the nearby college to look through books on mathematics. As nearly as she could figure out from what she read, her question wasn’t all that stupid. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that pi was exactly equal to three. The Greeks and Romans, who knew lots of things about mathematics, had no idea that the digits in pi went on forever without repeating. It was a fact that had been discovered only about 250 years ago. How was she expected to know if she couldn’t ask questions? But Mr. Weisbrod had been right about the first few digits. Pi wasn’t 3.21. Maybe the mayonnaise lid had been a little squashed, not a perfect circle. Or maybe she’d been sloppy in measuring the string. Even if she’d been much more careful, though, they couldn’t expect her to measure an infinite number of decimals.

  There was another possibility, though. You could calculate pi as accurately as you wanted. If you knew something called calculus, you could prove formulas for pi that would let you calculate it to as many decimals as you had time for. The book listed formulas for pi divided by four. Some of them she couldn’t understand at all. But there were some that dazzled her: pi/4, the book said, was the same as 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …, with the fractions continuing on forever. Quickly she tried to work it out, adding and subtracting the fractions alternately. The sum would bounce from being bigger than pi/4 to being smaller than pi/4, but after a while you could see that this series of numbers was on a beeline for the right answer. You could never get there exactly, but you could get as close as you wanted if you were very patient. It seemed to her

a miracle

 Cartoon by S.Harris

that the shape of every circle in the world was connected with this series of fractions. How could circles know about fractions? She was determined to learn

calculus.

  She had caught a glimpse of something majestic.

Chapter 24 – The Artist’s Signature

  The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 2 arithmetic, where it could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Her program reassembled the digits into a square raster, an equal number across and down. Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.

  The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover

a miracle

— another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn’t matter what you look like, or what you’re made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons… there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for.

Song lyric not in Sagan’s book:

Will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by?
Is a better home a-waitin’
in the sky, Lord, in the sky?

“Contact,” the film: 

The Boys from Uruguay

If one were to write a “secret history” of the twentieth century, one possible organizing theme might be the religious struggle between worshippers of the Semitic deity (variously known as Yahweh, God, and Allah) and worshippers of the Aryan deities… notably, the Aryan god of music, light, and reason, Apollo.

(See my jounal notes of Monday, Sept. 2, 2002, below.)

In perhaps the best academic website I have ever seen, Karey L. Perkins quotes Walker Percy:

“The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is…intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness…”

The greatest symbol-monger of the twentieth century was, of course, Adolf Hitler. His use of the Aryan sun-wheel symbol rose to the level of genius. Of course, it ultimately failed to win the approval of the sun god himself, Apollo, who is also the god of reason.

Since symbol-mongering cannot be avoided, let us hope that it can be done in a somewhat more reasonable way than that of the National Socialist movement. Two examples suggest themselves.

1. From Peggy Noonan’s column of Friday, Sept. 6:

   The cross, the heart, and the flag.

2. From Karey Perkins’s website:

   A brain, a heart, and courage. 

On this Rosh Hashanah, the cross as a symbol of intelligence may be offensive to some worshippers of Yahweh. Let them read The Archivist, a novel by Martha Cooley, and then my journal note The Matthias Defense.

They might also contemplate the biblical quotation in the musical “Contact” broadcast from Lincoln Center on September 1, 2002: “Let there be light!”

Three Jews named Paul have been associated with light…

1. Saul of Tarsus, who later assumed an alias.

2. Paul Newman, whose performance in “The Verdict” continues, indirectly, to trouble Cardinal Law of Boston.

3. Paul R. Halmos, a personal hero of mine ever since I saw his Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces and Measure Theory as an ignorant young undergraduate browsing the bookstores of Harvard Square.

In accordance with the “secret history” theme mentioned above, the struggle between Aryan and Semitic religions may also be viewed in the light of the struggle between Christianity and Communism. Hitler exploited this viewpoint very successfully, pretending to be the champion of the Christians against the godless Reds. Peggy Noonan also successfully uses this strategy. Both Hitler and Noonan manage to ignore the fact that Christianity is itself one of the Semitic religions, and that at least two of its three deities are Jewish.

As for me, I rather identify with the young Hitler clone at the end of the film “The Boys from Brazil.” Forced to decide between Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier, he sides with Olivier. His reason? Peck lied.

In a similar situation, forced to decide between Peggy Noonan and the Jew Halmos, I would probably side with Halmos. Halmos, who should, if not a saint, be at least dubbed a knight, does not, unlike the great majority of the damned human race, lie.

See Halmos’s memoir, I Want to Be a Mathematician. In particular, see the single index entry “communist by allegation” and the 29 entries under “Uruguay.”

Happy birthday to Elia Kazan and Peggy Noonan, and a happy and prosperous New Year to should-be-Sir Paul R. Halmos. 

The Toys Left to right: June Montiero, Barbara Parritt, and Barbara Harris

From the website http://www.history-of-rock.com/toys.htm —

In 1964 they were signed by the Publishing firm Genius, Inc., which teamed them with the songwriting duo Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell…. The writers took a classical finger exercise from Bach and put a Motown bassline to it and “A Lover’s Concerto” was born.

September 1965: “A Lover’s Concerto” on the Dynavoice label went #4 R&B, crossed over to pop charts #2, and also became a #5 hit in England. In 1965 the song sold over a million copies. The Toys began appearing on television shows such as “Shindig!,” “Hullabullo,” and “American Bandstand,”  toured with Gene Pitney, and appeared in the film It’s a Bikini World.

Other sites giving further details on Bach’s Minuet in G:

Search for the sheet music and a rendition of the work at codamusic.com’s Finale Showcase Search Page.

Seeing and hearing the music on this site requires that you download  Coda’s SmartMusic Viewer, and possibly requires that you adjust your browser settings, depending on the operating system you use.

For another look at Bach’s music, along with a midi rendition, you can download Music MasterWorks composing software from the Aspire Software site…

http://www.musicmasterworks.com/.

Then download the midi file of the Minuet in G itself,  “Minuet in G,  BWV841” (M.Lombardi), from the website

http://www.classicalarchives.com/bach.html.

(To do this, right-click on the minuet link and use the “Save Target As” option, if you, like me, are using Internet Explorer with Windows.)

After you have downloaded the midi file of the minuet, use the “File” and “Open” options in Music MasterWorks to display and play the music.

A comparison of these two versions of Bach is instructive for anyone planning to purchase music composition software.   The MasterWorks creates sheet music from its midi file that is quite sophisticated and rather hard to follow, but this music accurately reflects the superior musical performance in the downloaded midi file versus the rendition in the online Finale Showcase file.   The Showcase file is much simpler and easier to read, as the rendition it describes is also quite simple.

The Gentle Rain

For an even simpler version, those of us who were in our salad days in 1965 can consult our memories of The Toys:

How gentle is the rain
That falls softly on the meadow.
Birds high up in the trees
Serenade the clouds with their melodies.

Oh, see there beyond the hill,
The bright colors of the rainbow.
Some magic from above
Made this day for us just to fall in love.

Those of the younger generation with neither the patience nor the taste to seek out the original by Bach may be content with the following site —

A Lover’s Concerto in Venice

To a more mature audience, the picture of a Venetian sunset at the above site (similar to the photo below, from Shunya’s Italy)

will, together with the lyrics of The Toys, suggest that

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven….

This line, addressed to Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” contradicts, to some extent, the statement by Igor Stravinsky in The Poetics of Music (1942, English version 1947) that music does not express anything at all. Stravinsky is buried in Venice.

From  Famous Graves:

Igor Stravinsky,

Venice