From May 19, 2010 —
Meanwhile . . .
NY Times columnist's advice to the recent Harvard donor of $300 million —
"At least make them build you some weird pharaonic monument."
For the descendants of Leonard Shlain and Harry "Parkyakarkus" Einstein —
"Watch your parking meters." — Bob Dylan
This post was suggested by the 2019 film “Synchronic,”
by Google News this morning . . .
. . . and by posts tagged Crux in this journal.
“Where there is meat, there are flies.”
— John Archibald Wheeler
“ Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. ‘What are you doing out here all alone? Simon shook. ‘There isn’t anyone to help you. — William Golding |
From a New York Times book review of a new novel about
Timothy Leary that was in the Times online on April 10 —
"Most of the novel resides in the perspective
of Fitzhugh Loney, one of Leary’s graduate students."
"A version of this article appears in print on ,
on Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline:
Strange Days."
For material about one of Leary's non -fictional grad students,
Ralph Metzner, see posts now tagged Metzner's Pi Day.
Related material —
The reported publication date of Searching for the Philosophers' Stone
was January 1, 2019.
A related search published here on that date:
* Title suggested by two of Ralph Metzner's titles,
The Expansion of Consciousness and The Unfolding Self .
Ben Brantley's review tonight of an Irish Repertory Theater
production of "The Seafarer" suggests a look at an
earlier New York Times article on the same play.
From that article (Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007) —
The target of a link in this journal on the above 2007 date —
"You've got to pick up every stitch . . . ." — Donovan
The Hamilton watch from "Interstellar" (2014) —
On the above date — Nov. 17, 2016 —
* See posts tagged Broomsday 2014.
"When Death tells a story…"
— Cover of The Book Thief
"Finnegan's waterlogged epiphany"
— Phrase by John Lancaster in a Washington Post review of an
autobiography by William Finnegan, a book that today won a Pulitzer Prize.
The review is dated August 7, 2015. This journal on that date —
… is a novel by James Morrow reviewed in The New York Times
on March 23, 2008:
"Morrow’s inventiveness is beguiling, as are his delight
in Western philosophy and his concern for the sorry state
of the world. Yet there’s also something comic-bookish
about his novel…."
"Something comic-bookish"
in memory of Albert Einstein,
who reportedly died on this date
in 1955 —
(Continued, in memory of the late meteorologist William Gray,
from August 10, 2010, and from April 16, 2016.)
For some backstory, see Huàn, the Flood and Impact Award.
"… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public
it is a black art, more akin to magic and mystery."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics"
in the AMS Notices , January 2010, quoted in
Log24 on April 4, 2016.
Related material: Gray Space and …
'Green Gables' star Jonathan Crombie dies at 48
Update of 8:19 PM ET —
Trailer for a recent Crombie documentary, "Waiting for Ishtar,"
that has not yet been released:
See also Lucero + Ishtar and Lucero + Muerte .
Midrash:
See also today's previous post and the new film "Beyond the Reach,"
filmed in northwest New Mexico —
Kyle Smith on April 15 in the New York Post —
"The ludicrous action thriller 'Beyond the Reach'
fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency
of 'No Country for Old Men,' but there’s no denying
it brings to mind another Southwestern classic
about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons."
Related material:
Welcome to ACME lab!
Yes, the name is both confusing and has
We call it ACME Creativity Machine Environment – We like recursive ideas. |
“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high,
and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western
summit is called the Masai ‘Ngàje Ngài,’ the House of God.
Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcass
of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking
at that altitude.” — Ernest Hemingway, epigraph to a story
Some background —
Kristen Wiig and a mountain in the recent film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
and Wiig in a Log24 post of Sunday, March 6, 2011.
…. and John Golding, an authority on Cubism who "courted abstraction"—
"Adam in Eden was the father of Descartes." — Wallace Stevens
Fictional symbologist Robert Langdon and a cube—
From a Log24 post, "Eightfold Cube Revisited,"
on the date of Golding's death—
A related quotation—
"… quaternions provide a useful paradigm
for studying the phenomenon of 'triality.'"
— David A. Richter's webpage Zometool Triality
See also quaternions in another Log24 post
from the date of Golding's death— Easter Act.
From Thomas Pynchon's 1997 Introduction to Stone Junction—
"He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. For it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel's life's tale an account of the incarnation of a god, not the usual sort that ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly powers, but that favorite of writers, the incorruptible wiseguy known to anthropologists as the Trickster, to working alchemists as Hermes, to card-players everywhere as the Joker. We don't learn this till the end of the story, by which point, knowing Daniel as we've come to, we are free to take it literally as a real transfiguration, or as a metaphor of spiritual enlightenment, or as a description of Daniel's unusually exalted state of mind as he prepares to cross, forever, the stone junction between Above and Below— by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally true, for we have been along on one of those indispensable literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel— though it is for him to slip along across the last borderline, into what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us— after 'To know, to will, to dare' as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic— we must keep silent."
"The devil likes metamorphoses." —The Club Dumas
Where Entertainment Is God
(continued)
Google News at about 7:37 PM —
The Eiger Sanction, by Trevanian –
"Because CII men worked in foreign countries without invitation, and often to the detriment of the established governments, they had no recourse to official protection. Organization men to the core, the CII heads decided that another Division must be established to combat the problem. They relied on their computers to find the ideal man to head the new arm, and the card that survived the final sorting bore the name Yurasis Dragon. In order to bring Mr. Dragon to the United States, it was necessary to absolve him of accusations lodged at the War Crimes Tribunal concerning certain genocidal peccadillos, but CII considered him worth the effort." |
"Numbers go to heaven
who know no more
of God on earth than,
as it were,
of sun in forest gloom."
— Meister Eckhart,
In Principio Erat Verbum
Related material:
yesterday's entry, and
Andrew Russell, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech,
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Virginia Lottery, Tuesday, April 17, 2007
“I love those Bavarians… so meticulous.”
Click on images to enlarge.
Headline in tonight's
online New York Times:
Here's Donny!
In His Defense,
a Show Is Born
1. Log24 entries of Good Friday
through Easter Monday,
especially this link
"Tonight is Karaoke night at one of our local sports bars. This is the evening when yours truly, your friendly neighborhood pornographer, becomes your next hope for American Idol success…."
"Little Red Ridin' Hood,
You sure are lookin' good…"
Piedra y Luz
This morning's New York Times tells of Philip J. Hyde, wilderness photographer, who died on March 30. The following, taken from the website Sister Earth, is in his honor.
Cierra los ojos y oye cantar la luz:
El mediodía anida en tu tímpanoCierra los ojos y ábrelos:
No hay nadie ni siquiera tú mismo
Lo que no es piedra es luz
Close your eyes and hear
the song of the light:
Noon takes shelter in your inner earClose your eyes and open them:
There is nobody not even yourself
Whatever is not stone is light
(From "Piedra Nativa," by Octavio Paz, quoted in the Sierra Club book Baja California and the Geography of Hope, by Joseph Wood Krutch and Eliot Porter.)
Related material:
"Last Words," from the
date of Hyde's death, and
"Arrow in the Blue,"
from Sept. 5, 2002.
Dream of Youth Revisited
For some material related to the entry Dream of Youth of last Dec. 8 (the feast day of St. Hermann Weyl), see the recently updated A Mathematical Lie.
See, too, a "comedy of errors" from
7 rue René Descartes in Strasbourg (pdf)
on what Hilbert reportedly called "the most beautiful part of mathematics."
A Red Mass
For G. H. Hardy, who, although he kept a portrait of Lenin in his rooms, knew more of truth than most Christians ever know.
"317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way."
— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology, 1940
To the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuits):
Have a Good Friday, Traitors
†
Prompted by Pilate’s question “What is truth?” and by my March 24 attack on Noam Chomsky, I decided this afternoon to further investigate what various people have written about Chomsky’s posing of what he calls “Plato’s problem” and “Orwell’s problem.” The former concerns linguistics, the latter, politics. As my March 24 entry indicates, I have nothing but contempt for both Chomsky’s linguistics and Chomsky’s politics. What I discovered this afternoon is that Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, in 2001 appointed a Chomskyite, David W. Lightfoot, as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
“Why do we know so much more than we have evidence for in certain areas, and so much less in others? In tackling these questions — Plato’s and Orwell’s problem — Chomsky again demonstrates his unequalled capacity to integrate vast amounts of material.” — David W. Lightfoot, review of Chomsky’s Knowledge of Language
What, indeed, is truth? I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown. For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma.
See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum, which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.”
Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day. See
“Examples are the stained glass windows of knowledge.” — Vladimir Nabokov
Motto of Plato’s Academy
† The Exorcist, 1973
Powered by WordPress