Log24

Sunday, September 19, 2021

Risen

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:26 pm

Last Sunday:

A week later:

From a recent Instagram story —

A related ghost writer —

Update of 11:22 PM ET the same day (Sept. 19, 2021) —

"The metaphor for metamorphosis no keys unlock." — Cullinane, 1986

See as well a different  Franz.

Saturday, September 18, 2021

A Tombstone* for Sinclair

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:47 pm

Not  at Rosslyn Chapel. )

* See Halmos + Tombstone in this journal.

In memory of Sir Clive Sinclair…

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:36 pm

… who reportedly "died at home in London on Thursday morning" —

From a Log24 post of May 25, 2005

"We will go to Asgard...now," he said.

Friday, January 3, 2020

Valhalla Requiem

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:59 pm


See also this  journal on Monday, the day of Kupfer's reported death

 

Spectral Woo

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:14 pm

 " during that spell between the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany
when ghosts and specters are supposed to be abroad . . . ."

Heinrich Zimmer on  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Times Literary Supplement , January 3, 2020

Sciences | Book Review

The world is not enough:
Guessing at the game God is playing

By Samuel Graydon

See as well

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

What Seems Insanity

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 pm

On a way of seeingsuperimposition
that "seems insanity" (cf. C. S. Lewis's remarks below)

Combining last night's post Spectrum with
the August 14 post Valhalla Is Down

From An Experiment in Criticism 
by C.S. Lewis, 1961–

"If we go steadily through all the myths of any people
we shall be appalled by much of what we read.
Most of them, whatever they may have meant to
ancient or savage man, are to us meaningless and
shocking; shocking not only by their cruelty and
obscenity but by their apparent silliness— almost
what seems insanity. Out of this rank and squalid
undergrowth the great myths— Orpheus, Demeter
and Persephone, the Hesperides, Balder, Ragnarok,
or Ilmarinen's forging of the Sampo– rise like elms."

Voilà —

The Aug. 14 post Valhalla Is Down referred to a New York Times  blackout.
(Jill Abramson, on earlier being named executive editor at the Times, had
said it was like "ascending into Valhalla.")

Another Times blackout occurred today.

Lewis's term Ragnarok refers to the twilight of the gods of Valhalla.

A more conventional illustration from the gamer website Ragnarok/Valhalla Wiki —

Monday, August 26, 2013

Spectrum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 pm

From the weblog of Dr. David Justice today :

C.S. Lewis somewhere (in time, in retirement, I might recover
the passage) surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines, and notes
that that of Orpheus retains its power to spellbind, even in a
bare-bones form, whereas that of almost all worthy modern novels,
become as dust upon such summary.

We venture now  upon that territory where words fail ….

Related material :

C. S. Lewis on Orpheus (click to enlarge) —

Lewis, according to Justice, "surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines."

A related image (see, too, today's previous post) —

C. S. Lewis on myth —

"The stories I am thinking of always have a very simple narrative shape—
a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip."

Conceptual Art

For concepts of prism, spectrum, and tulip combined, see Sicilian Reflections.

"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
Gravity's Rainbow

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Wednesday May 25, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:22 pm

The Turning

Readers who have an Amazon.com account may view book pages relevant to the previous entry.  See page 77 of The Way We Think, by Fauconnier and Turner (Amazon search term = Meno).  This page discusses both the Pythagorean theorem and Plato's diamond figure in the Meno, but fails to "blend" these two topics.  See also page 53 of The History of Mathematics, by Roger Cooke (first edition), where these two topics are in fact blended (Amazon search term = Pythagorean).  The illustration below is drawn from the Cooke book.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050525-Figs.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Cooke demonstrates how the Pythagorean theorem might have been derived by "blending" Plato's diamond (left) with the idea of moving the diamond's corners (right).

The previous entry dealt with a conference on mathematics and narrative.  Above is an example I like of mathematics…. Here is an example I like of narrative:

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.

— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

And here is a blend of the concepts "Asgard" and "conference":

"Asgard
    During the Interuniverse Society conference,
    a bridge was opened to Valhalla…."

  Bifrost
     In Norse myth, the rainbow bridge
     that connected Earth to Asgard,
     home of the gods.  It was extended
     to Tellus Tertius during the
     Interuniverse Society conference"

— From A Heinlein Concordance

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050525-Rainbow.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

— Front page picture from a
local morning newspaper published
today, Wednesday, May 25, 2005

 

As George Balanchine once asked,
"How much story do you want?"

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