But seriously . . .
Thursday, February 29, 2024
February Poetics
Friday, February 9, 2024
Desperately Seeking Sequences and Patterns
(The above title was suggested by the previous post.)
The New York Times today reports a Jan. 24* death —
Related material — This journal on January 24 and a post from
last year's New Year's Eve —
* According to The Washington Post , the death was on Jan. 23.
Let me say this about that . . . There were also color-related posts
in this journal on that date.
Sacerdotal Jargon
“Isn’t your work—our work—all about accessing and deploying underlying sequences and patterns? Mapping particulars on to great universals? Isn’t that the art to which, in one way or another, we’ve both devoted our best years?”
— McCarthy, Tom. The Making of Incarnation: A Novel
The hardcover first edition was published by Knopf |
"It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound problem of philosophy. It structures Plato's (realist) reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called 'postmodernism' is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to reason and truth."
— Simon Blackburn, Think, |
Thursday, January 25, 2024
For Hallucination Fans: The Color Out of FUBAR*
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
For Wednesday: Local Color in Old New England
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Barron’s Educational Series… Continues.*
From the author of today's New York Times obituary for Charles Osgood —
The Enormous Theorem
The previous post's reference to colors suggests a review . . .
A test of OpenAI on the above DevDay date —
This ridiculous hallucination was obviously suggested by what
has been called "the enormous theorem" on the classification
of finite simple groups. That theorem was never known as the
(or "a") diamond theorem.
On the bright side, the four colors beside Microsoft's Nadella in the
photo above may, if you like, be regarded as those of my own
non-enormous "four-color decomposition theorem" that is used in
the proof of my own result called "the diamond theorem."
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Fresh-Cull Vermilion
"It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground."
— "The Rock," a poem by Wallace Stevens from
a section with the same title in the Collected Poems .
The red of the watermelon eaten on the cover of the
August 28, 2023, New Yorker is RGB (240, 57, 53) —
Cinnabar Red, also known as Vermilion.
For related poetic remarks, see a post of Leap Day 2004 .
Color Space
Arriving in today's mail: The New Yorker.
Online context for the cover art —
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Beginning My 81st Year . . . Exploring Color Space
From the 12 AM Aug. 23, 2023, film at TCM …
See also Chaplin-related remarks in the previous post.
A related scene from April 1, 2023 . . .
Friday, March 24, 2023
For the Latin Club Gang*
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Exploring Color Space
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Orange Mass
"Blue Eyes took his Sunday painting seriously."
In memory of Jackie Collins, a post on Sinatra's favorite color.
Monday, May 23, 2005
Monday May 23, 2005
"I've recently had it brought to my attention that the current accepted primary colors are magenta, cyan, and yellow. I teach elementary art and I'm wondering if I really need to point out that fact or if I should continue referring to the primary colors the way I always have — red, yellow, and blue! Anyone have an opinion?"
("CMYK" at Whatis.com):
"There is a fundamental difference between color and pigment. Color represents energy radiated…. Pigments, as opposed to colors, represent energy that is not absorbed…."
Color Box Applet:
for elementary color education:Colored Shadow Explorations.A good starting point for
non-elementary education:
The "Color" category in Wikipedia.Further background:
From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:
"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."
From Bester's The Deceivers (1981):
He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk's cell,
p a t t e r n s |