From Prof. Dr. Koen Thas at the University of Ghent on 13 Dec. 2017 —
From this journal on that same date — 13 Dec. 2017 —
Related material for fans of synchronology — both from Nov. 3, 2009 —
Nightlight and Summa Mythologica .
Wednesday, December 27, 2023
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Portland News
An obituary from this afternoon suggests a review of
a Log24 post from last year —
See also today's earlier post Once in a Lullaby and yesterday's
London Daily Mail — "Kristen Stewart Cuts a Cool Figure" —
.
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Trends
"The philosopher Jerry Fodor was important for the same reason
you’ve probably never heard of him: he was unimpressed,
to put it politely, by the intellectual trends of the day."
— Stephen Metcalf in The New Yorker , Dec. 12, 2017
See also "The French Invasion," a Dec. 11 Quarterly Conversation
essay about Derrida in Baltimore in 1966, and the Dec. 10 posts
in this journal tagged Interlacing Derrida. (The deplorable Derrida
trend is apparently still alive in Buffalo.)
According to Metcalf, Fodor's "occasional review-essays in the L.R.B.
were masterpieces of a plainspoken and withering sarcasm. To Steven
Pinker’s suggestion that we read fiction because ' it supplies us with a
mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday,' for
instance, Fodor replied, ' What if it turns out that, having just used the ring
that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my
new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to
continue to be immortal and rule the world? ' "
In the Fodor-Pinker dispute, my sympathies are with Pinker.
Related material — Google Sutra (the previous Log24 post) and earlier posts
found in a Log24 search for Ring + Bear + Jung —
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Sunday, May 15, 2016
Fake Eliot
The New Yorker
Poems | September 3, 2012 issue
. . . .
“I remember everything.
I remember nothing.
I remember ancient Greek sparkles like a diamond ring.”
. . . .
See also posts now tagged “One Ring”
and a search in this journal for “Glitter.”
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Quarter to Three
|
|
The "O.C.D." does not refer to obsessive-
compulsive disorder, but to "Our Class, Dear."
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Aesthetics
A college girl's remarks in the previous post suggested
a search in this journal for "vulgar and stupid."
That search yielded a date — March 2, 2014.
In the spirit of the Church of Synchronology, a further search —
for that date — yielded, in a March 2, 2014, post, the following —
Square Dance
|
And no fact of Alain Resnais’s life seemed to strike a stranger note than his assertion that the films which first inspired his ambition to become a film director were those in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced. Or was it Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler? He could never be sure. “I wondered if I could find the equivalent of that exhilaration,” he recalled. If he never did it was perhaps because of his highly cultivated attitude to serious cinema. His character and temperament were more attuned to the theory of film and a kind of intellectual square dance* which was far harder to bring to the screen with “exhilaration” than the art of Astaire and Rogers. *See today's 11 AM ET Sermon. |
The college girl, who reportedly died at 70 on May 11, was
Katherine Dunn, author of the book One Ring Circus quoted
above. She apparently improved with age.
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Saturday, May 14, 2016
Yeah, Art, Beauty
From a New York Times obituary this evening —
"She entered Reed College in Portland as a philosophy major.
'I enjoyed it until I ran aground in an aesthetics class,'
Ms. Dunn told Wired magazine. 'I went in thinking, yeah,
art, beauty — my meat, drink and air. But on the first day,
I didn’t understand a word that was said in class, so I
marched out and changed my major to psychology.' "
Could have marched out and bought a dictionary .
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Friday, May 13, 2016
Geometry and Kinematics
"Just as both tragedy and comedy can be written
by using the same letters of the alphabet, the vast
variety of events in this world can be realized by
the same atoms through their different arrangements
and movements. Geometry and kinematics, which
were made possible by the void, proved to be still
more important in some way than pure being."
— Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy
For more about geometry and kinematics, see (for instance)
"An introduction to line geometry with applications,"
by Helmut Pottmann, Martin Peternell, and Bahram Ravani,
Computer-Aided Design 31 (1999), 3-16.
The concepts of line geometry (null point, null plane, null polarity,
linear complex, Klein quadric, etc.) are also of interest in finite geometry.
Some small finite spaces have as their natural models arrays of cubes .
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Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Null Point
This evening's previous post links to an earlier post
on a book by DeLillo. This suggests a review
of DeLillo's most recent book, Zero K .
A title I prefer: that of this post, Null Point. *
For related mathematics, see Zero System .
* Wikipedia —
The Kelvin scale is an absolute,
thermodynamic temperature scale
using as its null point absolute zero,
the temperature at which
all thermal motion ceases in the
classical description of thermodynamics.
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By Diction Possessed
Continued from Saturday, May 7, 2016 .
From an obituary in yesterday evening's online New York Times —
"I was writing plays, one-acters, about musicians
who were speakers of the idiom I loved most:
black American male speech, full of curse words,"
he wrote in an autobiographical essay. . . .
The obituary is for a poet who reportedly died on Saturday, May 7.
This journal on that day ("By Diction Possessed") recalled the death
(on Valentine's Day 2015) of an English actor who was the voice of
the Ring in two of the "Lord of the Rings" films —
Backstory from Wikipedia — See Black Speech —
"The only example of 'pure' Black Speech is
the inscription upon the One Ring . . .
-
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them. "
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Sunday, May 8, 2016
Gesamtkunstwerke
„Ich begriff plötzlich, daß in der Sprache oder doch
mindestens im Geist des Glasperlenspiels tatsächlich
alles allbedeutend sei, daß jedes Symbol und jede
Kombination von Symbolen nicht hierhin oder dorthin,
nicht zu einzelnen Beispielen, Experimenten und
Beweisen führe, sondern ins Zentrum, ins Geheimnis
und Innerste der Welt, in das Urwissen. Jeder Übergang
von Dur zu Moll in einer Sonate, jede Wandlung eines
Mythos oder eines Kultes, jede klassische, künstlerische
Formulierung sei, so erkannte ich im Blitz jenes
Augenblicks, bei echter meditativer Betrachtung,
nichts andres als ein unmittelbarer Weg ins Innere
des Weltgeheimnisses, wo im Hin und Wider zwischen
Ein- und Ausatmen, zwischen Himmel und Erde,
zwischen Yin und Yang sich ewig das Heilige vollzieht.“
— Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel .
Berlin: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2012, p. 172,
as quoted in a weblog.
"Only connect." — Howards End
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Saturday, May 7, 2016
By Diction Possessed
Mr. Howard reportedly died on Valentine's Day, 2015.
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Monday, February 23, 2015
For Katy Perry
See also this journal on the date of Mr. Howard's death:
"Mark my words
This love will make you levitate
Like a bird"
— Katy Perry, "Dark Horse"
“It’s the Super Bowl, I guess,”
Michael Keaton said in the first minutes
of ABC’s official Oscar red-carpet special."
— Hallie Cantor in the online New Yorker today
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