"Don’t be distracted by the numbers of people who
haven’t heard of ChatGPT yet—the real bellwethers,
particularly among well-educated or younger people,
are in those business numbers. The recent leap in
work use might indicate that those who are already
augmenting their work with the brainy verbosity of LLMs
are advocating it to colleagues."
— Steven Levy at Wired.com today
From a post on "Matrix Bingo" —
From a Log24 search for "Women's Night" —
The Mackey material, from St. Patrick's Day 2006, suggests a look
at the angels of Noah Jacobs' 1958 classic Naming Day in Eden —
Jacobs on angels —
"Their sensuous functions have been extinguished so that they
have no idea of sensible images, metaphor, tones or gestures.
They have no need in their noumenal sphere of these seductive
and puzzling artifices. Their penchant for unashamed abstraction
is the deepest strain in their make-up."
Compare and contrast —
Quilts (for instance) as "seductive and puzzling artifices"
that embody symmetry.
Quilt geometry as the exploitation of symmetry.
A search in this journal for "Verbo" yields a song lyric . . .
"First we'll show and tell
'Til I reach your pony tail"
— Song lyric
See also related choreography for a "Danny Zuko" in my hometown.
Related reading: "Ominous" in this journal.
Image from Matrix.Bingo —
Commentary added on June 8, 2022 —
"First we'll show and tell
'Till I reach your pony tail"
— Song lyric
Another image from Matrix.Bingo —
From a more recent Sandra Bullock film —
The times are still a-changin'.
(Remark adapted from a webpage of Halloween 2020.)
From that opening date — June 25, 2021 — in this journal:
|
"We have much to discover." — Saying attributed to Midrash for Doctorow —
|
The Fraction 25/24 —
Numbers Revisualized —
25
24
"To dream the impossible dream…"
— Song lyric made famous by Richard Kylie.
See also Kylie in Proprietary Code.
I prefer the Spanish film Verbo to Broadway productions.
See as well this journal on the above FlixLatino date: Dec. 3, 2015.
From a Log24 post of September 4, 2018, "Identity Crisis" —
From the 2011 Spanish film "Verbo" — (Click to enlarge) —
From a Blackline Master —
Obituary for Wilford Stanton Miller, author in 1926
of the Miller Analogies Test —
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable
to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this.
America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had
chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy—
the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD.
It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still
verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all
human thought for the U.S.A.
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists.
Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and
the arts can’t exist in America."
A line for W. S. Miller, taken from "Annie Hall" —
"You know nothing of my work."
According to McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable
to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this.
America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had
chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy—
the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD.
It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still
verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all
human thought for the U.S.A.
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists.
Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and
the arts can’t exist in America."
For context, see Cameron McEwen,
"Marshall McLuhan, John Pick, and Gerard Manley Hopkins."
(Renascence , Fall 2011, Vol. 64 Issue 1, 55-76)
A relation in four terms —
A : B :: C : D as Model : Crutch :: Metaphor : Ornament —
See also Dueling Formulas and Symmetry.
Halloween meditation on the Tummelplatz at Innsbruck —
"Die Ritter und Knappen des nahegelegenen Ambras
pflegten hier ihre Rosse zu tummeln, woher sich auch
der Name Tummelplatz schreibt."
"The knights and squires of nearby Ambras used to let their
steeds romp here, whence came the name Tummelplatz ."
— Quelle: Ludwig von Hörmann, "Der Tummelplatz bei Amras,"
in: Der Alpenfreund , 1. Band, Gera 1870, S. 72 – 73.
See as well Sigmund Freud, Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten
(1914) —
"Wir eröffnen ihm die Übertragung als den Tummelplatz ,
auf dem ihm gestattet wird, sich in fast völliger Freiheit
zu entfalten, und auferlegt ist, uns alles vorzuführen,
was sich an pathogenen Trieben im Seelenleben des
Analysierten verborgen hat."
"We admit it into the transference as a playground
in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom
and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the
way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind."
This passage has been discussed by later psychotherapists,
notably Russell Meares. Dr. Meares, working from a translation
that has "playground" for Freud's Tummelplatz , uses Spielraum
in place of Freud's own word.
For related material in this journal, see Expanding the Spielraum.
An illustration from that search —
Here's your ticket, pack your bags,
time for jumpin' overboard
Transportation is here
Occultation according to McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America."
For context, see Cameron McEwen, "Marshall McLuhan, John Pick, and Gerard Manley Hopkins." (Renascence , Fall 2011, Vol. 64 Issue 1, 55-76)
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America."
"Time for you to see the field." —Bagger Vance
The field — See June 2010.
| From BBC News:
Is it me or have we all been locked in a Monty Python sketch this week? … Dutch Voter: Hello, I wish to complain about this treaty what I voted for not half an hour ago. Eurocrat: Oh yes, the EU Constitution. What, uh… what’s wrong with it? DV: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. Its dead, that’s what’s wrong with it! E: No, no, uh… what we need now is a period of reflection. DV: Look matey, I know a dead treaty when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now. E: No, no it’s not dead, it’s being ratified. Remarkable treaty, the EU Constitution, innit, eh? 300 pages! DV: The verbosity don’t enter into it, my lad. It’s stone dead. It’s passed on! This treaty is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If the senior politicians hadn’t been ramming it down our throats, it’d be pushing up daisies! It’s off the table. It’s kicked the waste paper basket. It’s in the shredder. It’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible! THIS IS AN EX-TREATY! E: Well, I’d better replace it then. [takes a quick peek around Brussels] E: Sorry squire, I’ve had a look around Brussels, and uh, we’re right out of treaties. DV: I see. I see, I get the picture. E: I’ve got a Charter of Fundamental Rights. DV: Pray, does it lead us to an increasingly united federation of nation states? E: Not really. DV: WELL IT’S HARDLY A BLOODY REPLACEMENT THEN, IS IT? — Jonathan Rowles, Fleet |
Mies van der Rohe:
Mies in Berlin
Winner of
The Society of Architectural Historians
2002 Philip Johnson Award
for Excellence
Exhibition Catalog
"It would have been wiser for the new MoMA catalog… to have addressed the issue of his politics…. By ignoring such a central subject… the show gives off a mild stench of cover-up…. Only the German-born Rosemarie Haag Bletter (full disclosure: she is my wife) alludes to the verboten topic in her [catalog] essay on Mies's flirtation with crystal imagery, drawing a sharp parallel between the architect's extensive use of Kristallglas (plate glass) and the ensuing devastation of Kristallnacht, which erupted just three months after he left for the States."
"Mies's rigorously simplified structures, typified by grids of steel and glass and an absence of applied ornament, represented the Platonic ideal of modernism for many people."
and Version B,
from the date of Johnson's death
at his "famous crystalline box."
Was less more?
Minimalism
"It's become our form of modern classicism."
— Nancy Spector in
the New York Times of April 23, 2004
Part I: Aesthetics
In honor of the current Guggenheim exhibition, "Singular Forms" — A quotation from the Guggenheim's own website:
"Minimalism refers to painting or sculpture
Discuss these seven points
in relation to the following:
Form,
by S. H. Cullinane
Mark Rothko's reference
to geometry as a "swamp"
and his talk of "the idea" in art
Michael Kimmelman's
remarks on ideas in art
ART WARS:
Judgment Day
(2003, 10/07)
Part II: Theology
Today's previous entry, "Skylark," concluded with an invocation of the Lord. Of course, the Lord one expects may not be the Lord that appears.
"… the idea that, in art at least, less is more.
It is an idea surely as old, as enduringly attractive and as ubiquitous as its opposite. In the beginning was the Word: only later came the Bible, not to mention the three-decker Victorian novel. The oracle at Delphi did not say, 'Exhaustive analysis and comprehension of one's own psyche may be prerequisite to an understanding of one's behavior and of the world at large'; it said, 'Know thyself.' Such inherently minimalist genres as oracles (from the Delphic shrine of Apollo to the modern fortune cookie), proverbs, maxims, aphorisms, epigrams, pensees, mottoes, slogans and quips are popular in every human century and culture–especially in oral cultures and subcultures, where mnemonic staying power has high priority–and many specimens of them are self-reflexive or self-demonstrative: minimalism about minimalism. 'Brevity is the soul of wit.' "
Another form of the oracle at Delphi, in minimalist prose that might make Hemingway proud:
"He would think about Bert. Bert was an interesting man. Bert had said something about the way a gambler wants to lose. That did not make sense. Anyway, he did not want to think about it. It was dark now, but the air was still hot. He realized that he was sweating, forced himself to slow down the walking. Some children were playing a game with a ball, in the street, hitting it against the side of a building. He wanted to see Sarah.
When he came in, she was reading a book, a tumbler of dark whiskey beside her on the end table. She did not seem to see him and he sat down before he spoke, looking at her and, at first, hardly seeing her. The room was hot; she had opened the windows, but the air was still. The street noises from outside seemed almost to be in the room with them, as if the shifting of gears were being done in the closet, the children playing in the bathroom. The only light in the room was from the lamp over the couch where she was reading.
He looked at her face. She was very drunk. Her eyes were swollen, pink at the corners. 'What's the book,' he said, trying to make his voice conversational. But it sounded loud in the room, and hard.
She blinked up at him, smiled sleepily, and said nothing.
'What's the book?' His voice had an edge now.
'Oh,' she said. 'It's Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard.' She pushed her legs out straight on the couch, stretching her feet. Her skirt fell back a few inches from her knees. He looked away.
'What's that?' he said.
'Well, I don't exactly know, myself." Her voice was soft and thick.
He turned his face away from her again, not knowing what he was angry with. 'What does that mean, you don't know, yourself?'
She blinked at him. 'It means, Eddie, that I don't exactly know what the book is about. Somebody told me to read it once, and that's what I'm doing. Reading it.'
He looked at her, tried to grin at her — the old, meaningless, automatic grin, the grin that made everbody like him — but he could not. 'That's great,' he said, and it came out with more irritation than he had intended.
She closed the book, tucked it beside her on the couch. She folded her arms around her, hugging herself, smiling at him. 'I guess this isn't your night, Eddie. Why don't we have a drink?'
'No.' He did not like that, did not want her being nice to him, forgiving. Nor did he want a drink.
Her smile, her drunk, amused smile, did not change. 'Then let's talk about something else,' she said. 'What about that case you have? What's in it?' Her voice was not prying, only friendly, 'Pencils?'
'That's it,' he said. 'Pencils.'
She raised her eyebrows slightly. Her voice seemed thick. 'What's in it, Eddie?'
'Figure it out yourself.' He tossed the case on the couch."
— Walter Tevis, The Hustler, 1959,
Chapter 11
See, too, the invocation of Apollo in
A Mass for Lucero, as well as
GENERAL AUDIENCE OF JOHN PAUL II
Wednesday 15 January 2003:
"The invocation of the Lord is relentless…."
and
JOURNAL ENTRY OF S. H. CULLINANE
Wednesday 15 January 2003:
Karl Cullinane —
"I will fear no evil, for I am the
meanest son of a bitch in the valley."
Fat Man and Dancing Girl
|
Dance of |
Paul Newman as |
Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed in the film "Fat Man and Little Boy," died on this date in 1967.
He is sometimes called the "father of the A-bomb." He said that at the time of the first nuclear test he thought of a line from the Sanskrit holy book, the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." The following gives more details.
Oppenheimer had learned Sanskrit at Berkeley so as to read the Gita in the original; he always kept a worn pink copy on the bookshelf closest to his desk. It is therefore likely that he may have actually thought of the original, Sanskrit, verse rather than the English translation. The closest that fits this meaning is in the 32nd verse from the 11th chapter of the Gita.
kalosmi lokaksaya krt pravrddho
This literally means: I am kAla, the great destroyer of Worlds. What is intriguing about this verse, then, is the interpretation of kAla by Jungk and others to mean death. While death is technically one of the meanings of kAla, a more common one is time.
Indeed, the translations of the Gita by S. Radhakrishnan, A. C. Bhaktivedanta, Nataraja Guru and Eliot Deutsch say precisely that. One exception to this, however, is the 1929 translation by Arthur Ryder. And, indeed, in a 1933 letter to his brother, Robert Oppenheimer does mention that he has "been reading the Bhagavad Gita with Ryder and two other Sanskritists." The misinterpretation, therefore, may not have been the fault of Oppenheimer or Jungk. Nevertheless, the verse does not have anything to do with an apocalyptic or catastrophic destruction, as most people have interpreted it in connection with nuclear weapons. When kAla is understood as time, the meaning is drastically changed to being a reminder of our mortality and finite lifetimes as also the lifetimes of everything else in this world (including plutonium and uranium, despite their long, long, half-lives!). It then becomes more akin to western notions of the "slow march of time" and thus having little to do with the immense destruction caused by a nuclear explosion. While the very first images that arose in the father of the atomic bomb are a somewhat wrong application of Hindu mythology, his recollection of the Bhagavad Gita may have been quite pertinent. As is well known, the Bhagavad Gita was supposedly intended to persuade Arjuna to participate in the Kurukshetra battle that resulted in the killing of thousands. Thus, Oppenheimer may well have been trying to rationalize his involvement in the development of a terrible weapon.
Source: Google cache of
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/5409/samar_bluegod.pdf
See also
http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=36.
"KAla" (in the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme) is more familiar to the West in the related form of Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla, time, according to one website, as "the force which governs and stops time." See also the novel The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker.
The fact that Oppenheimer thought of Chapter 11, verse 32, of the Gita may, as a mnemonic device, be associated with the use of the number 1132 in Finnegans Wake.
See 1132 A. D. & Saint Brighid, and my weblog entries of January 5 (Twelfth Night and the whirligig of time), January 31 (St. Bridget's Eve), and February 1 (St. Bridget's Day), 2003.
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