Log24

The following passage appeared in this journal
on the night of May 23-24, 2015.

The afternoon  of May 23, 2015, was significant
for devotees of mathematics and narrative.

On the artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944):

"She belonged to a group called 'The Five'…."

Related material — Real Life (Log24, May 20, 2015).

From that post:

From Amazon.com —

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  Tuesday afternoon —

A 46-year-old Jesuit priest who was a Marquette University
assistant professor of theology collapsed on campus
Tuesday morning and died, President Michael Lovell
announced to the campus community in an email….

"Rev. Lúcás (Yiu Sing Luke) Chan, S.J., died after
collapsing this morning in Marquette Hall. Just last Sunday,
Father Chan offered the invocation at the Klingler College
of Arts and Sciences graduation ceremony…."

Synchronicity check…

From this journal on the above publication date of
Chan's book — Sept. 20, 2012 —

From a Log24 post on the preceding day, Sept. 19, 2012 —

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job,
a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary,
it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game,
we call the Game Dhum Welur , the Mind of God."

 — The Gameplayers of Zan

"We are not isolated free chosers,
monarchs of all we survey, but
benighted creatures sunk in a reality
whose nature we are constantly and
overwhelmingly tempted to deform
by fantasy."

—Iris Murdoch, "Against Dryness"
in Encounter , p. 20 of issue 88 
(vol. 16 no. 1, January 1961, pp. 16-20)

"We need to turn our attention away from the consoling
dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry
symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards
the real impenetrable human person."

— Iris Murdoch, 1961

"Impenetrability!  That's what I  say!"

— Humpty Dumpty, 1871

For mathematician Julia Robinson, who died on this date
in 1985, and her sister Constance Reid, who died on
October 14, 2010—

A search suggested by the "cosmic dippiness" of
a 1998 science fiction novel and by the non-dippiness of
a much better novel with closely related themes from 1977—

(Click to enlarge.)

(The use of "recursive" here is of course rather poetic, not to be
construed as meaningful in the strictly mathematical sense.
See also the term's etymology, and Working Backwards.)

"When you come to 
a fork in the road, take it."
— Yogi Berra

See also Deconstructing Alice.

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job,
a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary,
it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game,
we call the Game Dhum Welur , the Mind of God."

 — The Gameplayers of Zan

"When Death tells a story, 
 you really have to listen."

— The Book Thief , cover

Margalit Fox in this evening's online New York Times—

Joanna Russ, Who Drew Women to Sci-Fi, Dies at 74

"Ms. Russ was best known for her novel 'The Female Man,' published in 1975 and considered a landmark. With that book, which told the intertwined stories of four women at different moments in history, she helped inaugurate the now flourishing tradition of feminist science fiction."

See also Gameplayers of Zan in this journal.

“Multispeech is… like a kind of multidimensional speech…."

— langmaker.com on The Gameplayers of Zan

The Hunt for Blue August concludes…

As quoted today in The New York Times—

“We only have so much time to leave a mark.”
— Carl Paladino

"Now, it’s time to turn the page."
— President Obama

A search in this journal for the President's phrase yields…

For Jenny

Quality

Click on the mark for some context.

For Desconvencida

See also Wallace Stevens,
"The Relations between Poetry and Painting"

Today's previous entry was "Gameplayers of the Academy."

More on this theme–

David Corfield in the March 2010
European Mathematical Society newsletter—

    "Staying on the theme of games, the mathematician
Alexandre Borovik* once told me he thinks of mathematics
as a Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. If
so, it would show up very clearly the difference between
internal and external viewpoints. Inside the game people
are asking each other whether they were right about
something they encountered in it– 'When you entered
the dungeon did you see that dragon in the fireplace or
did I imagine it?' But someone observing them from the
outside wants to shout: 'You’re not dealing with anything
real. You’ve just got a silly virtual reality helmet on.' External
nominalists say the same thing, if more politely, to
mathematical practitioners. But in an important way the
analogy breaks down. Even if the players interact with
the game to change its functioning in unforeseen ways,
there were the original programmers who set the bounds
for what is possible by the choices they made. When they
release the next version of the game they will have made
changes to allow new things to happen. In the case of
mathematics, it’s the players themselves who make these
choices. There’s no further layer outside.
    What can we do then instead to pin down internal reality?"

*See previous references to Borovik in this journal.

Related material:

The Diamond Theory vs. the Story Theory of Truth,

Infantilizing the Audience, and

It's Still the Same Old Story…God of War III

Remember the Sabbath Day

Wikipedia states that painter R.B. Kitaj (see previous references) was the model for the protagonist of the Philip Roth novel Sabbath's Theater.

A Google search shows that the article (no longer online) on Kitaj cited as a source by Wikipedia does indeed make this claim– 

In-Your-Face Outsider | Jerusalem Report | Jerusalem Post
By MATT NESVISKY … not least, Philip Roth, who modeled
the protagonist of the 1995 novel "Sabbath's Theater" largely after Kitaj. …
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1192380767901…

The rest of Nesvisky's article may or may not support his claim. It is available by subscribing to HighBeam.

Related material–

The New York Times on Oct. 24, 2007–

"Sonnabend" means "Saturday" in German.

Some say the Sabbath is Saturday, others say Sunday.

Here is the Log24 entry for the day that
Kitaj and Sonnabend died– a Sunday—

The New York Times on Sonnabend:

… Also talked about was the Sonnabend 1991 show of Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series of paintings and sculptures that showed the artist engaged in sexual acts with his wife, Ilona Staller.

Mrs. Sonnabend was variously described as “an iron marshmallow” and “a cross between Buddha and Machiavelli.” Short and plump, she was grandmotherly in appearance from a relatively early age due in part to an illness that necessitated a wig.

Her genteel, old Europe manner belied an often imperious yet bohemian and self-deprecating personality. Her soft, fluty voice often left a listener unprepared for the force of her comments, which she could deliver in at least five languages.

Happy Women's History Month.