Illustration by Sophy Hollington
Sunday, December 24, 2023
Sunday, August 27, 2023
Sacred Texts: Warp and Woof
Monday, December 12, 2022
Bullshit Studies
From Peter Woit's weblog today —
The New Yorker and the Publicity Stunt
Posted on December 12, 2022 by woit
The wormhole publicity stunt story just keeps going.
Today an article about the Google Santa Barbara lab
and quantum computer used in the publicity stunt
appeared in the New Yorker.
From The New Yorker itself —
See also a very different take from another New Yorker author —
(Cf. Log24, Plan 9 at Yale, Nov. 13, 2017).
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Dancing in the Moonlight
Instagram screenshot with added note.
Easy E for an Accountant:
Not So Easy: E-Operators
"A great many other properties of E-operators
have been found, which I have not space
to examine in detail."
— Sir Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science ,
Cambridge University Press, 1935, page 271.
(This book also presents Eddington's unfortunate
speculations on the fine-structure constant.)
Update of 4:04 AM ET:
Here is the not-so-tiny-dancer in
the above Instagram screenshot.
Friday, November 6, 2020
Monday, May 25, 2020
Cyberface
(A sequel to D8ing the Joystick)
Adam Gopnik today in The New Yorker —
“In remote therapy sessions, with the loss of familiarly structured
therapeutic spaces, a kind of staring contest takes place.”
This journal on the above YouTube date — May 28, 2011 —
“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.”
— Wallace Stevens,
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,”
Canto IV of “It Must Change”
Update of 5:45 PM ET —
The above May 28, 2011, Stevens quotation is from a post
titled “Savage Detectives.” A related image starring Sean Young —
Saturday, May 23, 2020
Deep Dogma
“Far from making us revise our fundamentals and reform our thoughts,
major historical crises almost invariably reinforce our previous beliefs,
and make us entrench deeper into our dogma. ”
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , May 1, 2020
See also Geometric Theology.
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Morning of the Iguana
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker this morning —
" … mysteriously durable manner of mythical depiction,
which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and,
for that matter, to modern animation. Therianthropes,
it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to
humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite
that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is,
for the first time, a startup.
… one of the human figures, we’re told, has
'a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base
of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out
to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles
the lower half of a lizard or crocodile. …' "
Related art —
Logo by Saul Bass.
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Horizon
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker today, quoting
the late Clive James's description of …
" … an adaptation of 'War and Peace': 'Dead ground is
the territory you can’t judge the extent of until you approach it:
seen from a distance, it is unseen. Almost uniquely amongst
imagined countries, Tolstoy’s psychological landscape is
without dead ground— the entire vista of human experience is
lit up with an equal, shadowless intensity, so that separateness
and clarity continue even to the horizon.' "
Friday, November 15, 2019
Operators
Easy E
Not So Easy: E-Operators
"A great many other properties of E-operators
have been found, which I have not space
to examine in detail."
— Sir Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science ,
Cambridge University Press, 1935, page 271.
(This book also presents Eddington's unfortunate
speculations on the fine-structure constant.)
Friday, September 20, 2019
Garbage-Pail Kid
In the spirit of the Linz website in the previous post,
the title refers to New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik:
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
|
See also a search in this journal for Polarity + Correlation.
Monday, July 9, 2018
Beaty Confidential
Friday, December 8, 2017
Mythos and Logos
Part I: Black Magician
"Schools of criticism create their own canons, elevating certain texts,
discarding others. Yet some works – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
is one of them – lend themselves readily to all critical approaches."
— Joan Givner, review of
A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century
by Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen, eds.
The Asals-Tiessen book (U. of Toronto Press, 2000) was cited today
by Margaret Soltan (in the link below) as the source of this quotation —
"When one thinks of the general sort of snacky
under-earnest writers whose works like wind-chimes
rattle in our heads now, it is easier to forgive Lowry
his pretentious seriousness, his old-fashioned ambitions,
his Proustian plans, [his efforts] to replace the reader’s
consciousness wholly with a black magician’s."
A possible source, Perle Epstein, for the view of Lowry as black magician —
Part II: Mythos and Logos
Part I above suggests a review of Adam Gopnik as black magician
(a figure from Mythos ) —
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
|
— and of an opposing figure from Logos ,
Paul B. Yale, in the references below:
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Upper West Side Story:
The Linotype Fixer
( Sequel to "The Typewriter Fixer" * )
From The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017 —
* "The Typewriter Fixer" refers to a typewriter repair shop
on New York's Upper West Side —
The Hollywood Reporter 's promotional piece above is from
Tuesday, November 7, 2017. For another meditation suited to
the Upper West Side, see this journal on that date —
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
|
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Night at the Museum
The previous post suggests a review of remarks by Adam Gopnik
in The New Yorker on February 27, 2017 on "The Matrix" hypothesis—
"The thesis that we are in a simulation is, as people who
track such things know—my own college-age son has
explained it to me—far from a joke, or a mere conceit.
The argument, actually debated at length at the
American Museum of Natural History just last year, is that
the odds are overwhelming that ours is a simulated universe.
The argument is elegant."
No, it is not.
See as well my own remarks on the date of the above museum debate —
Tuesday, April 5, 2016.
From those remarks, a Halloween 2014 image that provides a
companion-piece to the "Easy E" of today's previous post —
E-Elements
German mathematician Wolf Barth reportedly died
on December 30, 2016.
Flashback to this journal on that date * —
From "The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic" —
"The following June, 1945, von Neumann penned Image from von Neumann's report —
Version converted to text —
|
* And, of course, to the later post Easy E for Cullinan (Feb. 28, 2017).
Cullinan, second from left below, is the now-famous Oscars accountant.
Monday, November 13, 2017
Plan 9 at Yale
Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum Computer
"So, after summer, in the autumn air,
Comes the cold volume* of forgotten ghosts,
But soothingly, with pleasant instruments,
So that this cold, a children's tale of ice,
Seems like a sheen of heat romanticized."
— Wallace Stevens,
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
* Update of 10:20 the same evening:
An alternative to The Snow Queen On The King in the Window , by Adam Gopnik —
"The book is dedicated to Adam Gopnik's son,
'A fantasy that is as ambitious in theme,
The unlikely eponymous hero is Oliver Parker,
His enemy is the dreaded Master of Mirrors,
Oliver's mission is to defeat the Master of Mirrors — Description at https://biblio.co.nz/. . . . |
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Polarities and Correlation
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
The Matrix Hypothesis
"And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of
a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix,
and something has gone wrong with the controllers. . . .
The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be
running our lives are having some kind of breakdown.
There’s a glitch, and we are in it.
Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else
begins to fall in order."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , Feb. 27, 2017
More recently …
Sunday, March 5, 2017
Monday, February 27, 2017
Logic for Jews
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker today reacts to the startling
outcomes of three recent contests: the presidential election,
the Super Bowl, and the Oscar for Best Picture —
"The implicit dread logic is plain."
Related material —
Transformers in this journal and …
“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be
purely logical. Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense,
were the rules of its pure logic?”
—Many Dimensions (1931), by Charles Williams
See also …
The above figure is from Ian Stewart's 1996 revision of a 1941 classic,
What Is Mathematics? , by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins.
One wonders how the confused slave boy of Plato's Meno would react
to Stewart's remark that
"The number of copies required to double an
object's size depends on its dimension."
Friday, February 17, 2017
Fear and Loathing at The New Yorker
See also Gopnik in this journal.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Charm School
"When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997,
it was just a year before the universal search engine
Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger,
that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library
and spends hours and hours working her way through
the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to
make a love potion."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker issue dated
St. Valentine's Day, 2011
More recently, Gopnik writes that …
"Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this
account, almost the way 'Rock Around the Clock'
displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker issue dated
St. Andrew's Day, 2015
This journal on Valentine's Day, 2011 —
"One heart will wear a valentine." — Sinatra
"… she has written a love letter to Plato, whom
she regards as having given us philosophy.
He is, in her view, as relevant today as he ever
was — which is to say, very."
— New York Times review of a book by
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, April 18, 2014
Thursday, November 12, 2015
The Unbaked, the Baked, and the Half-Baked
Consider the trichotomy of the title as applied to the paragraph
by Adam Gopnik in the previous post (The Raw, the Cooked,
and the Spoiled).
The following quotation seems to place Gopnik's words
among the half -baked.
"L'axe qui relie le cru et le cuit est caractéristique du passage
à la culture; celui qui relie le cru et le pourri, du retour à la nature,
puisque la cuisson accomplit la transformation culturelle du cru
comme la putréfaction en achève la transformation naturelle."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paroles données, p.54, Plon, 1984,
as quoted in a weblog.
See also Lévi-Strauss's bizarre triangle culinaire (French Wikipedia) —
The source of this structuralist nonsense —
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. “Le triangle culinaire.”
L’Arc no. 26: 19-29.
The Raw, the Cooked, and the Spoiled
On the late French philosopher André Glucksmann,
a paragraph from The New Yorker —
The style could be overwhelming at times, and was
often a more effective instrument of intellectual
pleasure than political persuasion. But, in return,
it produced a thousand small epiphanies—
for instance, his lovely mordant point, made at length
in one of his books, that between the “raw” and the
“cooked”—the simple binary beloved of structuralism—
there was always the “pourri,” the rotting, the rotten.
Our refusal to take in the rotting as a category of its own
was, he suggested, with a delighted literary grimace,
a kind of moral blindness, part of a fake dialectic that
blinded us to the muddled, rotting truth of the world.
The real world was not composed of oscillating
dialectical forces; it was composed of actual suffering
people crushed between those forces. — Adam Gopnik
See also …
Click the above image for some backstory.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Epiphany in Paris
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Salvation for Gopnik
Yesterday afternoon's post Universals Revisited linked
(indirectly) to an article in the current New Yorker on
the Book of Revelation —
"The Big Reveal: Why Does the Bible End That Way?"
The connection in that post between universals and Revelation
may have eluded readers unfamiliar with a novel by
Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion (London, Gollancz, 1931).
The article's author, Adam Gopnik, appears in the following
Google Book Search, which may or may not help such readers.
Should Gopnik desire further information on Williams and salvation,
he may consult Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of Coinherence
and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams ,
by Dennis L. Weeks (American University Studies: Series 4, English
Language and Literature. Vol. 125), XV + 117 pp., Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.
The ninth item in the above search refers to a boxed set
of the seven novels themselves—
.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Annals of Religion
"Allegorical pictures of contemporary events
have a way of weaving in and out
between the symbolic and the semi-psychotic."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , issue dated March 5, 2012
See also Venue and Weaveworld .
Friday, November 25, 2011
Windows Programming
This afternoon's post Window Actions suggests the following.
Synchronistic Reviewing
From a review at bibliphage.blogspot.com on March 24, 2009—
The weblog containing the review is named "Outside of a Dog." Its motto—
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." —Groucho Marx
See also the dog in the update of today's noon entry.
For a synchronistic review, see this weblog on March 24, 2009.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Through the Blackboard
Or: "Gopnik Meets Oppenheimer in Heaven"
(Or, for those less philosophically minded, "Raiders of the Lost Pussy")
Midrash on "A Serious Man" "A Serious Man kicks off with a Yiddish-language frame story that takes place in a 19th-century Eastern European shtetl, where a married couple has an enigmatic encounter with an old acquaintance who may be a dybbuk," recounts Dana Stevens . "The import of this parable is cryptic to the point of inscrutability." It seems to me that the Coen Brothers’ dybbuk is the Jewish folkloric equivalent of Schrodinger’s Cat . When we first meet the main character, a physics professor named Larry Gopnik, he’s writing equations on the board: "So if that’s that, then we can do this, right? Is that right? Isn’t that right? And that’s Schrodinger’s paradox, right? Is the cat dead or is the cat not dead?" Likewise, we can’t know whether Fyvush Finkel [the aforementioned old acquaintance] is alive or a dybbuk. We can only evaluate probabilities. When a Korean student named Clive Park complains to Larry that he shouldn’t have failed the Physics midterm because "I understand the physics. I understand the dead cat," Larry says: You can’t really understand the physics without understanding the math. The math tells how it really works. That’s the real thing; the stories I give you in class are just illustrative; they’re like, fables, say, to help give you a picture. An imperfect model. I mean— even I don’t understand the dead cat. The math is how it really works. But the fable actually tells us that the math doesn’t capture reality. |
The story in images below summarizes a meditation suggested by this parable and by
- Tuesday's post "Fish Story"
- Today's AP thought:
"Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness." –John Dewey
- "Zen mind, empty mind."
- Today's NY Times obituary for Selma G. Hirsh,
author of The Fears Men Live By (Harper, 1955).
Hirsh died on St. Bridget's Day.
- A search for the Hirsh book that led to a web page
with a 1955 review of J. Robert Oppenheimer's book The Open Mind
- A search for the Oppenheimer book that led to
LIFE magazine's issue of Oct. 10, 1949
- "Satori means 'awakening.'" — TIME magazine, Nov. 21, 1960
Blackboard in "A Serious Man"–
Blackboard at the Institute for Advanced Study–
"Daddy's home! Daddy's home!"
Related material–
A Zen meditation from Robert Pirsig
is suggested by the time on the above
alarm clock– 8:20– interpreted,
surrealistically, as a date — 8/20.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Monday July 6, 2009
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Harvest Books paperback, 1950, pp. 248-249:
“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points; who whispers as he whispered to me that summer morning in the house where the corn comes up to the window, ‘The willow grows on the turf by the river. The gardeners sweep with great brooms and the lady sits writing.’ Thus he directed me to that which is beyond and outside our own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent, if there is any permanence in our sleeping, eating, breathing, so animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives.”
Up to the first semicolon, this is the Associated Press thought for today.
Related aesthetic philosophy from The Washington Post:
“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself, a church of American pragmatism that deals with the material stuff of experience in the history of art. To understand these lectures, which began promising an argument about how abstraction works and ended with an almost medieval allegory of how man confronts the void, one has to understand that Varnedoe views the history of abstraction as a pastor surveys the flock.”
|
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Thursday July 3, 2008
about Thor
Commonweal on Gopnik on Chesterton:
"Gopnik thinks Chesterton’s aphorisms are better than any but Oscar Wilde’s, and he describes some of them as 'genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and profound.' For example: 'Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.'"
Douglas Adams on Thor
Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have approved of on a first date.
"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?" she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
"We will go to Asgard… now," he said.
At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple, but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
— The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
The Turning:
"A theorem proposed betwen the two–"
— Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
From The History of Mathematics,
by Roger Cooke
"… point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B…."
— Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Wednesday December 12, 2007
Words and Images
“Thomas P. Whitney, a former diplomat and writer on Russian affairs who was best known for translating the work of the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into English, died on [Sunday] Dec. 2 in Manhattan. He was 90….
During World War II, he was an analyst in Washington with the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency….
In the late 1960s and afterward, he bred thoroughbred horses….
On one occasion, Mr. Whitney took Mr. Solzhenitsyn to Saratoga Racetrack….”
Related material:
a number of haunted images….”
“The best of the books are the ones…
where the allegory is at a minimum
and the images just flow.”
“‘Everything began with images,’
Lewis wrote….”
Yesterday’s entry on
Solzhenitsyn and The Golden Compass
and the following illustrations…
from Sunday in the Park with Death,
a Log24 entry commemorating
Trotsky’s birthday–
–and from Log24 on the date
of Whitney’s death,
Sunday, Dec. 2, 2007—
Personal Emblem
of psychiatrist
Harry Stack Sullivan
The horses may refer to
the Phaedrus of Plato.
See also Art Wars.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Tuesday August 14, 2007
1928 – 1982
on the cover of
a 1987 edition of
his 1959 novel
Time Out of Joint:
Cover art by Barclay Shaw reprinted
from an earlier (1984) edition
Philip K. Dick as a
window wraith (see below)
"… the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe."
— as well as by the illustrations of Gopnik's characterization in Kernel of Eternity, and by the following passage from Gopnik's 2005 novel The King in the Window:
"What's a window wraith?"
"It's someone who once lived in the ordinary world who lives now in a window, and makes reflections of the people who pass by and look in."
"You mean you are a ghost?!" Oliver asked, suddenly feeling a little terrified.
"Just the opposite, actually. You see, ghosts come from another world and haunt you, but window wraiths are the world. We're the memory of the world. We're here for good. You're the ones who come and go like ghosts. You haunt us."
Related material: As noted, Kernel of Eternity, and also John Tierney's piece on simulated reality in last night's online New York Times. Whether our everyday reality is merely a simulation has long been a theme (as in Dick's novel above) of speculative fiction. Interest in this theme is widespread, perhaps partly because we do exist as simulations– in the minds of other people. These simulations may be accurate or may be– as is perhaps Gopnik's characterization of Philip K. Dick– inaccurate. The accuracy of the simulations is seldom of interest to the simulator, but often of considerable interest to the simulatee.
The cover of the Aug. 20 New Yorker in which the Adam Gopnik essay appears may also be of interest, in view of the material on diagonals in the Log24 entries of Aug. 1 linked to in yesterday's entry:
"Summer Reading,"
by Joost Swarte
Monday, August 13, 2007
Monday August 13, 2007
Adam Gopnik in
The New Yorker of
August 20, 2007–
"… the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe."
Modernity: A Film by
Alfred Hitchcock:
"… the most thoroughgoing modernist design element in Hitchcock's films arises out of geometry, as Francois Regnault has argued, identifying 'a global movement for each one, or a "principal geometric or dynamic form," which can appear in the pure state in the credits….'" –Peter J. Hutchings (my italics)
Epilogue:
Adam Gopnik is also the author
of The King in the Window, a tale
of the Christian feast of Epiphany
and a sinister quantum computer.
For more on Epiphany, see
the Log24 entries of August 1.
For more on quantum computing,
see What is Quantum Computation?.
See also
the previous entry.
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
Wednesday January 4, 2006
In memory of Humphrey Carpenter, author of The Inklings, who attended The Dragon School. Carpenter died a year ago today.
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images…."
"The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."
"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote…."
From Paul Preuss,
Broken Symmetries
(see previous entry):
From
Verbum Sat Sapienti?
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Tuesday December 13, 2005
Adam Gopnik on Narnia in The New Yorker:
“Everything began with images,” Lewis wrote.
“We’re not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We’re here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That’s what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you’re not painting an exact reproduction.”
Images for Julie Taymor:
Today’s New York Times on Debora Arango, an artist who died at 98 on Dec. 4 at her home near Medellin, Colombia:
“She made dramatic paintings of prostitutes, which shocked midcentury sensibilities….”
“Ms. Arango always pushed boundaries, even as a young girl. In a favorite story, she talked about how she wore pants to ride horses….”
Related material: Yesterday’s entry “Modestly Yours” and entries on Johnny Cash, horses, and Julie Taymor of September 12-14, 2003.
“Words are events.”
— Walter J. Ong, Society of Jesus
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
at noon on St. Lucy’s Day:
“They are the horses of a dream.
They are not what they seem.”
— The Hex Witch of Seldom, page 16
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Wednesday November 16, 2005
"The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."
"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote…."
"We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery…."
"The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images– the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse– are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew."
Click on pictures for details.
See also Windmills and
Verbum sat sapienti?
as well as
at Calvin College
on Simone Weil,
Charles Williams,
Dante, and
"the way of images."
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Sunday September 12, 2004
Dark Lady
“Each time we come closer to Shakespeare’s life, we escape from the aridity of formal criticism or the cheap generalities of social history into a recognizable world of real experience. When A. L. Rowse insists that Emilia Bassano Lanier, the tempestuous, adulterous, musical, poetic wife of a court musician, was the original ‘Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets, we can buy it or not, as we please. But the very existence of a woman like Emilia demonstrates that the clichéd images of Elizabethan women, as subservient wives or unruly whores, are too grossly tuned to capture the reality of Shakespeare’s world. Whether she is the Dark Lady or not, Emilia is a dark lady. Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms, and replaces them not with gossipy puzzle-solution certainties but with glimpses of life as it is lived, and art as it is made.”
— Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, issue dated Sept. 13, 2004
“En librairie depuis le 12 septembre 2003, ce livre correspond au désir du mouvement ‘ni putes ni soumises’ de briser l’omerta et de poursuivre les débats engagés depuis la marche des femmes. À travers ce récit, ce sont les voix de milliers de jeunes femmes qui se font entendre, exprimant leurs interrogations et leur révolte.”
On Samira Bellil, who died on Sept. 3:
“Bellil was considered the ‘godmother’ of the womens’ rights group ‘Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ (Neither Whores Nor Submissive.)”
Saturday, August 23, 2003
Saturday August 23, 2003
Pictures of Nothing
‘”The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world… All is without forms and void. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing, and very like.”
— William Hazlitt, 1816, on J. M. W. Turner
“William Hazlett [sic] once described Turner’s painting as ‘pictures of the elements of air, earth, and water. The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world…All is without form and void. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.‘ This description could equally well be applied to a Pollock, Newman, or Rothko.”
— Sonja J. Klein, thesis, The Nature of the Sublime, September 2000
The fifty-second A. W. Mellon series of Lectures in the Fine Arts was given last spring at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., by Kirk Varnedoe, art historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
Pictures of Nothing:
The lectures, 2003: Survivals and Fresh Starts … April 6 |
Varnedoe died on Thursday, August 14, 2003,
the day of the Great Blackout.
Pictures of Nothing:
“Record-breaking crowds turned up at the National Gallery for Kirk’s Mellon Lectures….
… the content of Kirk’s talk was miraculously subtle, as he insisted that there could be no single explanation for how abstraction works, that each piece had to be understood on its own terms — how it came to be made, what it meant then and what it has gone on to mean to viewers since.
Dour works like
Frank Stella’s early
gray-on-black canvases …
“Die Fahne Hoch,”
Frank Stella,
1959
“Gray on Black,”
or “Date of Death”
seemed to open up under Kirk’s touch to reveal a delicacy and complexity lost in less textured explanations.”
— Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post,
Aug. 15, 2003
For another memorial to Varnedoe, see
A May 18 Washington Post article skillfully summarized Varnedoe’s Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery:
Closing the Circle on Abstract Art.
For more on art and nihilism, see
Monday, August 18, 2003
Monday August 18, 2003
Entries since Xanga’s
August 10 Failure:
Sunday, August 17, 2003 2:00 PM
A Thorny Crown of…
From the first episode of
the television series
“The West Wing“:
Original airdate: Sept. 22, 1999 MARY MARSH CALDWELL MARY MARSH JOSH TOBY [A stunned silence. Everyone stares at Toby.] TOBY (CONT.) JOSH |
Going There, Part I
Crown of Ideas Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003. From his New York Times obituary: ” ‘He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,’ said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe’s first big show at the Modern, ‘High & Low.’ ‘Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.’ ” For a mini-exhibit of ideas in honor of Varnedoe, see Verlyn Klinkenborg on Varnedoe: “I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used…. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist’s studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.” Perhaps even a “thorny crown of ideas“? “Crown of Thorns” Varnedoe’s death coincided with “To what extent does this idea of a civic life produced by sense of adversity correspond to actual life in Brasília? I wonder if it is something which the city actually cultivates. Consider, for example the cathedral, on the monumental axis, a circular, concrete framed building whose sixteen ribs are both structural and symbolic, making a structure that reads unambiguously as a crown of thorns; other symbolic elements include the subterranean entrance, the visitor passing through a subterranean passage before emerging in the light of the body of the cathedral. And it is light, shockingly so….” — Modernist Civic Space: The Case of Brasilia, by Richard J. Williams, Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland |
Going There, Part II
Simple, Bold, Clear Art historian Kirk Varnedoe was, of course, not the only one to die on the day of the Great Blackout. Claude Martel, 34, a senior art director of The New York Times Magazine, also died on Thursday, August 14, 2003. Janet Froelich, the magazine’s art director, describes below a sample of work that she and Martel did together: “A new world of ideas” Froelich notes that “the elements are simple, bold, and clear.” For another example of elements with these qualities, see my journal entry The flag design in that entry
Note that the elements of the flag design have the qualities described so aptly by Froelich– simplicity, boldness, clarity: They share these qualities with the Elements of Euclid, a treatise on geometrical ideas. For the manner in which such concepts might serve as, in Gopnik’s memorable phrase, a “thorny crown of ideas,” see “Geometry for Jews” in ART WARS: Geometry as Conceptual Art. See also the discussion of ideas in my journal entry on theology and art titled Understanding: On Death and Truth and the discussion of the word “idea” (as well as the word, and the concept, “Aryan”) in the following classic (introduced by poet W. H. Auden):
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Saturday, August 16, 2003 6:00 AM
Varnedoe’s Crown
Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003.
From his New York Times obituary:
” ‘He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,’ said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe’s first big show at the Modern, ‘High & Low.’ ‘Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.’ “
For a mini-exhibit of ideas in honor of Varnedoe, see
Verlyn Klinkenborg on Varnedoe:
“I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used…. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist’s studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.”
Perhaps even a “thorny crown of ideas”?
“Crown of Thorns”
Cathedral, Brasilia
Varnedoe’s death coincided with
the Great Blackout of 2003.
“To what extent does this idea of a civic life produced by sense of adversity correspond to actual life in Brasília? I wonder if it is something which the city actually cultivates. Consider, for example the cathedral, on the monumental axis, a circular, concrete framed building whose sixteen ribs are both structural and symbolic, making a structure that reads unambiguously as a crown of thorns; other symbolic elements include the subterranean entrance, the visitor passing through a subterranean passage before emerging in the light of the body of the cathedral. And it is light, shockingly so….”
— Modernist Civic Space: The Case of Brasilia, by Richard J. Williams, Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Friday, August 15, 2003 3:30 PM
ART WARS:
The Boys from Brazil
It turns out that the elementary half-square designs used in Diamond Theory
also appear in the work of artist Nicole Sigaud.
Sigaud’s website The ANACOM Project has a page that leads to the artist Athos Bulcão, famous for his work in Brasilia.
From the document
Conceptual Art in an
Authoritarian Political Context:
Brasilia, Brazil,
by Angélica Madeira:
“Athos created unique visual plans, tiles of high poetic significance, icons inseparable from the city.”
As Sigaud notes, two-color diagonally-divided squares play a large part in the art of Bulcão.
The title of Madeira’s article, and the remarks of Anna Chave on the relationship of conceptual/minimalist art to fascist rhetoric (see my May 9, 2003, entries), suggest possible illustrations for a more politicized version of Diamond Theory:
Fahne, |
Dr. Mengele, |
Is it safe?
These illustrations were suggested in part by the fact that today is the anniversary of the death of Macbeth, King of Scotland, and in part by the following illustrations from my journal entries of July 13, 2003 comparing a MOMA curator to Lady Macbeth:
Die Fahne Hoch, |
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Thursday, August 14, 2003 3:45 AM
Famous Last Words
The ending of an Aug. 14 Salon.com article on Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Passion”:
” ‘The Passion’ will most likely offer up the familiar puerile, stereotypical view of the evil Jew calling for Jesus’ blood and the clueless Pilate begging him to reconsider. It is a view guaranteed to stir anew the passions of the rabid Christian, and one that will send the Jews scurrying back to the dark corners of history.”
— Christopher Orlet
“Scurrying”?! The ghost of Joseph Goebbels, who famously portrayed Jews as sewer rats doing just that, must be laughing — perhaps along with the ghost of Lady Diana Mosley (née Mitford), who died Monday.
This goes well with a story that Orlet tells at his website:
“… to me, the most genuine last words are those that arise naturally from the moment, such as
Joseph Goebbels |
Voltaire’s response to a request that he foreswear Satan: ‘This is no time to make new enemies.’ ”
For a view of Satan as an old, familiar, acquaintance, see the link to Prince Ombra in my entry last October 29 for Goebbels’s birthday.
Wednesday, August 13, 2003 3:00 PM
Best Picture
For some reflections inspired in part by
- Today’s anniversary of a
1727 Moravian Pentecost, - An April 7, 2003,
lecture at Moravian College, and - St. Bonaventure’s 1259
remarks on the Trinity,
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 4:44 PM
Atonement:
A sequel to my entry “Catholic Tastes” of July 27, 2003.
Some remarks of Wallace Stevens that seem appropriate on this date:
“It may be that one life is a punishment
For another, as the son’s life for the father’s.”
— Esthétique du Mal, Wallace Stevens
“Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? ….
Devise, devise, and make him of winter’s
Iciest core, a north star, central
In our oblivion, of summer’s
Imagination, the golden rescue:
The bread and wine of the mind….”
— Examination of the Hero in a Time of War, Wallace Stevens
Etymology of “Atonement”:
“Middle English atonen, to be reconciled, from at one, in agreement“
At One
“… We found,
If we found the central evil, the central good….
… we and the diamond globe at last were one.”
— Asides on the Oboe, Wallace Stevens
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 1:52 PM
Franken & ‘Stein,
Attorneys at Law
“Tue August 12, 2003 04:10 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fox News Network is suing humor writer Al Franken for trademark infringement over the phrase ‘fair and balanced’ on the cover of his upcoming book, saying it has been ‘a signature slogan’ of the network since 1996.”
Franken: |
‘Stein: |
For answers, click on the pictures
of Franken and ‘Stein.
Saturday, August 16, 2003
Saturday August 16, 2003
My Personal Thorny Crown
Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003.
From his New York Times obituary:
" 'He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,' said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe's first big show at the Modern, 'High & Low.' 'Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.' "
For some background on the phrase "thorny crown of ideas," see the web page
The phrase "thorny crown of ideas" is also of interest in the light of recent controversy over Mel Gibson's new film, "The Passion."
For details of the controversy, see Christopher Orlet's Aug. 14 essay at Salon.com,
For a real "thorny crown of ideas," consider the following remarks by another art historian:
"Whether or not we can follow the theorist in his demonstrations, there is one misunderstanding we must avoid at all cost. We must not confuse the analyses of geometrical symmetries with the mathematics of combination and permutation….
The earliest (and perhaps the rarest) treatise on the theory of design drives home this insight with marvellous precision."
— E. H. Gombrich, 1979, in
The Sense of Order
This is perhaps the most stupid remark I have ever read. The "treatise on the theory of design" that Gombrich refers to is
- Dominique Douat, Methode pour faire une infinité de desseins differents avec des carreaux mipartis de deux couleurs par une ligne diagonale : ou observations du Pere Dominique Douat Religieux Carmes de la Province de Toulouse sur un memoire inséré dans l'Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris l'année 1704, présenté par le Reverend Sebastien Truchet religieux du même ordre, Academicien honoraire, imprimé chez Jacques Quillau, Imprimeur Juré de l'Université, Paris 1722.
This is the title given at the web page
Truchet & Types:
Tiling Systems and Ornaments,
which gives some background.
Certain of the Truchet/Douat patterns have rather intriguing mathematical properties, sketched in my website Diamond Theory. These properties become clear if and only we we do what Gombrich moronically declares that we must not do: "confuse the analyses of geometrical symmetries with the mathematics of combination and permutation." (The verb "confuse" should, of course, be replaced by the verb "combine.")
What does all this have to do with
As jesting Pilate seems to have realized, whenever Jews (or, for that matter, Christians) tell stories, issues of truth may arise. Such issues, as shown by current events in that damned Semitic Hell-on-Earth that used to be referred to as "the Holy Land," can be of life-and-death importance.
Scene from
The Passion
The Roman soldiers may have fashioned a physical crown of thorns, but the Jews are quite capable of fashioning a very uncomfortable crown of, as Gopnik says, "ideas."
Here is an example.
"Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, who as an author went by the name E. H. Gombrich, was born in Vienna in 1909….
The Gombrich family was Jewish, but his parents felt this had no particular relevance. In later years Mr. Gombrich said that whether someone was Jewish or not was a preoccupation for the Gestapo."
— Michael Kimmelman's obituary for Gombrich in the New York Times. Kimmelman is chief art critic for the New York Times and author of the Times's Aug. 15 Varnedoe obituary.
The web page Understanding cited above contains a link to
Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth,
a page combining some religious remarks with a quotation of an extremely patronizing and superficial reference to my own work (and, in passing, to Truchet/Douat patterns).
This reference, and the above-quoted remark by Gombrich, constitute my own modest claim to what the Jew Gopnik jokingly calls a "thorny crown of ideas."
To me it is no joke.
This partly accounts for the rather strained quality of the attempt at humor in a web page I put together yesterday in response to Varnedoe's obituary:
Another reason for the strained quality is my being struck by the synchronicity of reading Varnedoe's obituary shortly after I had done a journal entry related to the death in July of an earlier Museum of Modern Art curator. Like Robert A. Heinlein, I think the God of the Jews is a lousy deity and an even worse father figure. I do, however, believe in synchronicity.