"Vast realm . . . enchanting . . . capturing the imagination . . .
profound elegance . . . deep connections . . . ."
— Jarod Alper in the December 2025
Notices of the American Mathematical Society,
discussing a topic illustrated on the Notices cover.
Sounds to me like he's channeling SID 6.7 (or Mark Helprin).
Related reading — "Diamonds and Dogs" and "Wag the Tag."
From yesterday morning's viewing . . .
From this morning's viewing . . .
Yesterday morning's viewing, continued last night . . .
* Title suggested by my viewing last night "Revenge of the Fallen,"
no. 2 in the Transformers series. That film reportedly opened
on this date eight years ago.
ART WARS:
Dark City
Jennifer Connelly at
premiere of “Cinderella Man” —
In memory of Martin Buber,
author of Good and Evil,
who died on June 13, 1965:
“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
|
Woe unto Isaiah 5:20
|
As she spoke |
The world
|
Jennifer Connelly in “Dark City”
(from journal note of June 19, 2002) —
And, one might add for Flag Day,
“you sons of bitches.”
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.”
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:
|
Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?” Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question. The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent. … “Here is how it stacks up: You’ve bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent….” “It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me. “Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.” “I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.” “Which is?” I asked. “The Spiders,” she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me—something like that. She watched me. “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.” — Fritz Leiber, |
From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:
|
From Borges’s “The Aleph“:
From The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
Lena Olin and Harrison Ford |
Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:
|
When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime. — “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage” (1984) from Travels in Hyperreality |
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."
Mean Streets
The title of tonight’s “The West Wing” episode, “The Long Goodbye,” refers to a phrase that the sentimental do-gooders of the Democratic party apparently now use to refer to senility. I find the phrase of more interest as it is used in the work of Raymond Chandler, where it has more to do with alcoholism than with Alzheimer’s.
Another memorable phrase from Chandler is found in his essay, “The Simple Art of Murder“:
“…down these mean streets a man must go
who is not himself mean….”
The phrase also occurs in the works of C. S. Lewis in an extended parable about Heaven and Hell:
The Great Divorce, Chapter One:
“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue by the side of a long, mean street. Evening was just closing in and it was raining. I had been wandering for hours in similar mean streets, always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering. And just as the evening never advanced to night, so my walking had never brought me to the better parts of the town.”
The most interesting part of this very interesting tale is summarized in an article on the work of Lewis:
“In the last chapter, Lewis sees a great assembly of motionless figures standing… around a silver table, watching the actvities of little figures that resembled chessmen:
‘And these chessman are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of these same men and women.'”
It is perhaps not completely irrelevant that Humphrey Bogart, who played Chandler’s detective “who is not himself mean,” loved chess and was born on Christmas Day.
A related religious meditation:
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.”
in The Silver Crown, by Joel Rosenberg
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