"You ain't been blue, no, no, no . . ."
"You ain't been blue, no no no, 'til you've had that mood indigo."
* See "Miller's Girl."
Financial Times today informs us that the new 48-page novel by
Nobel Lit Prize winner Jon Fosse, with title translated as
"A Shining," will be published not on Halloween, as previously
reported here, but instead on the next day, All Hallows. Good.
The novel's original title, in Norwegian, is Kvitleik .
The Web indicates that this means "White Game."
See as well yesterday's post "Void Game." A relevant quote —
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy ,
Random House, 1973, page 118
Tom McCarthy today on a new novel about von Neumann at Los Alamos:
"Beyond its mid-20th-century viewfinder, though, it quickly becomes clear that what The Maniac is really trying to get a lock on is our current age of digital-informational mastery and subjection." "Amid — or, more aptly, beneath — the panoply of brilliant men in The Maniac , women function as bit players. At Los Alamos they’re even called 'computers,' since they carry out the secondary, workaday calculations that are then fed upward for male geniuses to work their magic on. But does von Neumann really deserve the title 'Father of Computers,' granted him here by his first wife, Mariette Kovesi? Doesn’t Ada Lovelace have a prior claim as their mother?" |
If you liked this one, see more in Blanche Knott's Truly Tasteless Jokes.
"Birthday, death-day — what day is not both?" — Updike
The actor who played "Illya Kuryakin" reportedly died yesterday —
" David Keith McCallum Jr. was born on Sept. 19, 1933, into
a musical family in Glasgow. His father was the first violinist
for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London; his mother,
Dorothy Dorman, was a cellist. He would later tell interviewers
that his Scotch Presbyterian upbringing had left him emotionally
circumscribed.
'We Scots, we tend to be awfully tight inside,' he told TV Guide
in 1965. 'It has hurt me as an actor to be so — so naturally restricted.' "
— Leslie Kaufman in The New York Times
This journal on McCallum's 90th birthday — Sept. 19, 2023 —
"You take the high road and . . . ."
This journal on the above color-field date . . .
* I prefer the art-history term "color field"
to the pandering term "psychedelic."
"Jurassic World: Maisie Lockwood Adventures 2: The Yosemite Six
will be released on September 27, 2022."
Thanks for the warning.
Of greater interest to some: The Number Six.
A phrase from the above scene: "the metaphysics of identity."
I prefer a May 1986 looking-glass from pure mathermatics.
"“Quantity has a quality all its own.”
— James Stavridis, quoted on Aug. 5, 2022.
In order, approximately, of increasing popularity:
Sean Scully, artist, whose work is the subject of
the recent book and exhibition, "The Shape of Ideas."
Vincent Scully, architectural historian at Yale.
Vincent Edward ("Vin") Scully, "Voice of the Dodgers"
"Oldenburg … died on Monday at his home and studio in
the Soho section of Manhattan." — Martha Schwendener, NYT
Some may prefer other concepts of shape. For instance …
… and, from Log24 on the above Yalebooks date —
Related material:
From "Higman- Sims Graph," a webpage by A. E. Brouwer — "Similar to the 15+35 construction of the Hoffman-Singleton graph is the 30+70 construction of the Higman-Sims graph. In the former the starting point was that the lines of PG(3,2) can be labeled with the triples in a 7-set such that lines meet when the corresponding triples have 1 element in common. This time we label the lines of PG(3,2) with the 4+4 splits of an 8-set, where intersecting lines correspond to splits with common refinement 2+2+2+2. Clearly, both descriptions of the lines of PG(3,2) are isomorphic. Take as vertices of the Higman-Sims graph the 15 points and 15 planes of PG(3,2) together with the 70 4-subsets of an 8-set. Join two 4-sets when they have 1 element in common. A 4-set determines a 4+4 split and hence a line in PG(3,2), and is adjacent to the points and planes incident with that line. A plane is adjacent to the nonincident points. This yields the Higman-Sims graph." |
See also PG(3,2) in this journal.
On the director of the six-episode Disney series Obi-Wan Kenobi —
"She received her undergraduate degree, major of cultural theory
and minor in art history, from McGill University in Montreal …. "
— Wikipedia article: Deborah Chow
Emre is the author of “Two Paths for the Personal Essay," |
"When you come to a fork in the road . . ."
— Yogi Berra
In a 1999 Yale doctoral dissertation,
"Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol,"
the term "antilogos" occurs 70 times.
Students of poetic structures may compare and contrast . . .
Logos
Antilogos
Some formal symmetry —
"… each 2×4 "brick" in the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator
Folding a 2×4 Curtis array yet again yields — Steven H. Cullinane on April 19, 2016 — The Folding. |
Related art-historical remarks:
The Shape of Time (Kubler, Yale U.P., 1962).
See yesterday's post The Thing .
Or: Dreaming of Dinner-Party-Gate
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, XXII
Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search
For an interior made exterior
With the Inhalations of original cold
Not the predicate of bright origin.
The cold and earliness and bright origin
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines — Wallace Stevens |
For those who prefer not-so-sleepy bosoms, here are two
interior/exterior design notes suggested by the previous post —
Interior:
Exterior:
The title was suggested by a New Yorker photo caption
about Yale on June 19, 2021 —
"Amy Chua, a celebrity professor at the top-ranked
law school in the country, is at the center of a
campus-wide fracas known as 'Dinner Party-gate.' "
Other recent Yale material —
Remarks related to New Haven and geometry —
See other posts now tagged Yale Weekend.
That weekend, Sat. Nov. 23 — Sun. Nov. 24, 2013,
saw the death of Yale professor Sam See
in a New Haven Jail.
Related literary remarks:
Search "Merve Emre" + "Sam See."
* Vide Log24 references.
“That really is, really, I think, the Island of the Misfit Toys at that point.
You have crossed the Rubicon, you jumped on the crazy train and
you’re headed into the cliffs that guard the flat earth at that time, brother,”
said Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican congressman from Virginia,
in an interview."
— Jon Ward, political correspondent, Yahoo News , Nov. 12, 2020
The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:
The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,
The gay tournamonde as of a single world
In which he is and as and is are one.
— Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
Related material for comedians —
See as well Sallows in this journal.
“There exists a considerable literature
devoted to the Lo shu , much of it infected
with the kind of crypto-mystic twaddle
met with in Feng Shui.”
— Lee C. F. Sallows, Geometric Magic Squares ,
Dover Publications, 2013, page 121
Flashback to Sept. 7, 2008 —
Change for Washington:
For the details, see yale.edu/lawweb:
“As important to Chinese civilization as the Bible is to Western culture,
the I Ching or Book of Changes is one of the oldest treasures of
world literature. Yet despite many commentaries written over the years,
it is still not well understood in the English-speaking world. In this
masterful [sic ] new interpretation, Jack Balkin returns the I Ching to
its rightful place….
Jack M. Balkin
Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law
and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, and
the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project.
His books and articles range over many different fields….”
Charles Taylor,
“Epiphanies of Modernism,”
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) —
“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
See also Talking of Michelangelo.
Related material for comedians —
Literature ad absurdum —
See the title phrase, by Delmore Schwartz, in this journal.
See also . . .
From Daniel Rockmore's CV — BOOKS, FILMS, EXHIBITS . . . . Concinnitas , a fine art print project with Parasol Press, Yale Art Gallery, and Bernard Jacobson Galleries. Openings at AnneMarie Verna Gallery (Zurich, SZ, Dec. 2014), Elizabeth Leach Gallery (Portland, OR, Jan. 2015), Greg Kucera Gallery (Seattle, WA, Jan. 2015), Yale Art Gallery (New Haven, CT, Jan. 2015). . . . . |
. . . and Concinnitas in this journal … as well as — related to a formula
from the Concinnitas project — "Thirteen??" by David Mumford.
This journal on the date of Coe's death —
Related material: Today's noon post and a post from August 7, 2006.
Wikipedia — "Tamagawa's doctoral students included
Doris Schattschneider and Audrey Terras."
See also Schattschneider and Terras in this journal.
Two Students of Structure
A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times philosophy series The Stone —
Diana Senechal's 1999 doctoral thesis at Yale was titled
"Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol."
Her mother, Marjorie Senechal, has written extensively on symmetry
and served as editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer .
From a 2013 memoir by Marjorie Senechal —
"While I was in Holland my enterprising student assistant at Smith had found, in Soviet Physics – Crystallography, an article by N. N. Sheftal' on tetrahedral penetration twins. She gave it to me on my return. It was just what I was looking for. The twins Sheftal' described had evidently begun as (111) contact twins, with the two crystallites rotated 60o with respect to one another. As they grew, he suggested, each crystal overgrew the edges of the other and proceeded to spread across the adjacent facet. When all was said and done, they looked like they'd grown through each other, but the reality was over-and-around. Brilliant! I thought. Could I apply this to cubes? No, evidently not. Cube facets are all (100) planes. But . . . these crystals might not have been cubes in their earliest stages, when twinning occurred! I wrote a paper on "The mechanism of certain growth twins of the penetration type" and sent it to Martin Buerger, editor of Neues Jarbuch für Mineralogie. This was before the Wrinch symposium; I had never met him. Buerger rejected it by return mail, mostly on the grounds that I hadn't quoted any of Buerger's many papers on twinning. And so I learned about turf wars in twin domains. In fact I hadn't read his papers but I quickly did. I added a reference to one of them, the paper was published, and we became friends.[5]
After reading Professor Sheftal's paper I wrote to him in Moscow; a warm and encouraging correspondence ensued, and we wrote a paper together long distance.[6] Then I heard about the scientific exchanges between the Academies of Science of the USSR and USA. I applied to spend a year at the Shubnikov Institute for Crystallography, where Sheftal' worked. I would, I proposed, study crystal growth with him, and color symmetry with Koptsik. To my delight, I was accepted for an 11-month stay. Of course the children, now 11 and 14, would come too and attend Russian schools and learn Russian; they'd managed in Holland, hadn't they? Diana, my older daughter, was as delighted as I was. We had gone to Holland on a Russian boat, and she had fallen in love with the language. (Today she holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Yale.) . . . . |
Philosophy professors and those whose only interest in mathematics
is as a path to the occult may consult the Log24 posts tagged Tsimtsum.
In memory of Yale art historian Vincent Scully, who reportedly
died at 97 last night at his home in Lynchburg, Va., some remarks
from the firm of architect John Outram and from Scully —
Update from the morning of December 2 —
The above 3×3 figure is of course not unrelated to
the 4×4 figure in The Matrix for Quantum Mystics:
.
See as well Tsimtsum in this journal.
From the New York Times Wire last night —
"Mr. Hefner … styled himself as an emblem
of the sexual revolution."
From a Log24 post on September 23 —
A different emblem related to other remarks in the above Sept. 23 post —
(On the wall — a Galois-geometry inscape .)
"With respect to the story's content, the frame thus acts
both as an inclusion of the exterior and as an exclusion
of the interior: it is a perturbation of the outside at the
very core of the story's inside, and as such, it is a blurring
of the very difference between inside and outside."
— Shoshana Felman on a Henry James story, p. 123 in
"Turning the Screw of Interpretation,"
Yale French Studies No. 55/56 (1977), pp. 94-207.
Published by Yale University Press.
See also the previous post and The Galois Tesseract.
"Neil Gordon, whose cerebral novels about radical politics,
most famously 'The Company You Keep,' challenged readers
with biblical parables and ethical dilemmas, died on May 19
in Manhattan. He was 59. . . . .
. . . he earned . . . . a doctorate from Yale, where his dissertation
was titled** 'Stranger Than Fiction: The Occult Short Stories of
Hawthorne and Balzac.'"
— Sam Roberts in The New York Times
* For the title (suggested by the date May 19), see posts tagged Y for Yale.
** Actually (and more sensibly) titled "Stranger than Fiction:
The Status of Truth in the Occult Short Stories of Hawthorne and Balzac."
Detail of an image in the previous post —
This suggests a review of a post on a work of art by fashion photographer
Peter Lindbergh, made when he was younger and known as "Sultan."
The balls in the foreground relate Sultan's work to my own.
Linguistic backstory —
The art space where the pieces by Talman and by Lindbergh
were displayed is Museum Tinguely in Basel.
As the previous post notes, the etymology of "glamour" (as in
fashion photography) has been linked to "grammar" (as in
George Steiner's Grammars of Creation ). A sculpture by
Tinguely (fancifully representing Heidegger) adorns one edition
of Grammars .
A swimmer who won Olympic gold in 1936 reportedly died today.
Related material from August 4, 2008 —
Jodie Foster and the
opening of the 1936 Olympics
“Heraclitus…. says: ‘The ruler
— An Introduction to Metaphysics, |
Posts tagged Swimmer may or may not be relevant.
* See …
… Continued from April 11, 2016, and from …
A tribute to Rothko suggested by the previous post —
For the idea of Rothko's obstacles, see Hexagram 39 in this journal.
"The transformed urban interior is the spatial organisation of
an achiever, one who has crossed the class divide and who uses
space to express his membership of, not aspirations towards,
an ascendant class in our society: the class of those people who
earn their living by transformation— as opposed to the mere
reproduction— of symbols, such as writers, designers, and
academics"
— The Social Logic of Space ,
by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson,
Cambridge University Press, 1984
For another perspective on the achievers, see The Deceivers .
Related material —
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
See also Log24 posts related to "Go Set a Structure"
as well as "New Haven" + Grid.
Tinguely, "Martin Heidegger,
Philosopher," sculpture, 1988
See also Talman in this journal.
A detail from this morning's 6 AM post —
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, XXII
Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search
For an interior made exterior
With the Inhalations of original cold
Not the predicate of bright origin.
The cold and earliness and bright origin
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines — Wallace Stevens |
See also Bloomsday 2007, "Obituaries in the News."
This morning's 6 AM post linked to a more recent obituary in the news —
"… while Jules and Judy were still living in Brooklyn Heights …
Jules collaborated with his former roommate, Norton Juster,
by illustrating what was to become the children’s classic
The Phantom Tollbooth . Neither author or illustrator had
a clue as to how to get this unlikely work published, and it
was Judy’s idea to take it to a mutual friend . . . ."
Earlier posts have dealt with Solomon Marcus and Solomon Golomb,
both of whom died this year — Marcus on Saint Patrick's Day, and
Golomb on Orthodox Easter Sunday. This suggests a review of
Solomon LeWitt, who died on Catholic Easter Sunday, 2007.
A quote from LeWitt indicates the depth of the word "conceptual"
in his approach to "conceptual art."
From Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective , edited by Gary Garrels, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 376:
THE SQUARE AND THE CUBE "The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. Being basic representations of two- and three-dimensional form, they lack the expressive force of other more interesting forms and shapes. They are standard and universally recognized, no initiation being required of the viewer; it is immediately evident that a square is a square and a cube a cube. Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed." "Reprinted from Lucy R. Lippard et al ., “Homage to the Square,” Art in America 55, No. 4 (July-August 1967): 54. (LeWitt’s contribution was originally untitled.)" |
See also the Cullinane models of some small Galois spaces —
From the 1984 New Orleans film Tightrope—
This post was suggested by the late Yale literary critic
Geoffrey Hartman, who reportedly died on March 14.
" 'Interpretation is like a football game,' Professor Hartman
wrote in 'The Voice of the Shuttle,' a 1969 essay."
— A 2016 obituary by Margalit Fox
Click the above image for a web page on the question
"Why was New Haven divided into nine squares?".
From an essay by Mark Edmundson,
University Professor at the University of Virginia,
who was granted a Ph.D. by Yale in 1985 —
The American Scholar The Roman Catholic Church may forgive us our sins—but can it be forgiven for its own?
By Mark Edmundson “Aren’t you a Catholic?” People often ask me that question in a gotcha tone. It’s as though they’re saying: I see through you. You pretend to be an intellectual, a more or less secular guy who can maybe lay claim to some sophistication. You want to pass as someone (here’s the rub) who has grown up and is not a child anymore. But I see through all that, the questioner implies. I can tell that you live under the old dispensation. You’re a creature not of light and intellect, light and truth, but of guilt and fear. Light and truth, lux et veritas , was the motto of the university where I went to graduate school. It signifies the power of enlightened intellect to remake the world—or at least to transform and elevate the individual. Religions don’t generally have mottoes, and it is probably not a good idea when they do. But if the Roman Catholic Church had a motto, it surely would not be light and truth. I spent 12 years, give or take, in the faith, the most influential years of my life. And I was surely a Catholic. But what if anything remains of that immersion? What value does it have here and now? |
An example of vincible ignorance:
Edmundson's remarks above, in light of …
From a New York Post review of "Clouds of Sils Maria,"
a film that opened yesterday —
"Assayas [the writer-director] evidently thinks he’s
being daring and original and avant-garde in leaving
so much open-ended. But you can tell what really
interests him isn’t doing the work of a serious artist
but the comfy trappings of one — the swank dining
rooms, the posh cars with drivers always at the ready.
What’s French for bourgeois? Never mind.
'Clouds' isn’t a film but an idea for a film —
unfinished, unsatisfying, undergraduate."
From this date last year:
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
Continued from yesterday evening
Today's mathematical birthday —
Claude Chevalley, 11 Feb. 1909 – 28 June 1984.
Chevalley's daughter, Catherine Chevalley, wrote about For him it was important to see questions as a whole, to see the necessity of a proof, its global implications. As to rigour, all the members of Bourbaki cared about it: the Bourbaki movement was started essentially because rigour was lacking among French mathematicians, by comparison with the Germans, that is the Hilbertians. Rigour consisted in getting rid of an accretion of superfluous details. Conversely, lack of rigour gave my father an impression of a proof where one was walking in mud, where one had to pick up some sort of filth in order to get ahead. Once that filth was taken away, one could get at the mathematical object, a sort of crystallized body whose essence is its structure. When that structure had been constructed, he would say it was an object which interested him, something to look at, to admire, perhaps to turn around, but certainly not to transform. For him, rigour in mathematics consisted in making a new object which could thereafter remain unchanged. The way my father worked, it seems that this was what counted most, this production of an object which then became inert— dead, really. It was no longer to be altered or transformed. Not that there was any negative connotation to this. But I must add that my father was probably the only member of Bourbaki who thought of mathematics as a way to put objects to death for aesthetic reasons. |
Recent scholarly news suggests a search for Chapel Hill
in this journal. That search leads to Transformative Hermeneutics.
Those who, like Professor Eucalyptus of Wallace Stevens's
New Haven, seek God "in the object itself" may contemplate
yesterday's afternoon post on Eightfold Design in light of the
Transformative post and of yesterday's New Haven remarks and
Chapel Hill events.
Yale Daily News staff columnist Scott Greenberg today,
in a piece titled "Filling Religion's Void" —
"The secularization of college students in America
has seemed a foregone conclusion for some time,
yet it represents a momentous shift for our university
and society at large that we have not yet
come to grips with….
Is the solution for our society and our University
to return to religion en masse?"
So to speak.
A Midrash for Greenberg:
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
Meets an Evening in the Garden of Allah —
From "Why Was New Haven Divided into Nine Squares?"
"Of note on the Wadsworth Map of 1748 are…
the Grammar School, the 'Goal' or jail…."
Related material: Puritan in this journal.
Non-Puritans may prefer the following image—
Source: Yale English Department banner
Big Rock
"I'm going to hit this problem
with a big rock."
A professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:
"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'…."
– Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:Modernism and the Test of Production, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 242
"God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the artifact pictured on the cover of Mao's book:
I have more confidence
These objects may be |
June 28, 2008:
These numbers can, of course,
be interpreted as symbols of
the dates 6/29 and 5/30.
The last Log24 entry of
6/29 (St. Peter's Day):
"The rock cannot be broken.
It is the truth."
– Wallace Stevens,
"Credences of Summer"
A Cornell professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:
"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'…."
These objects may be
regarded as supplying
a parlance that is, if not
paradisal, at least
intelligible– if only in
the context of my own
personal experience:
Journal entry dated 5/14:
In the Details
Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:
XXII
Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for God." It is the philosopher's search
For an interior made exterior
And the poet's search for the same exterior made
Interior….
… Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.
Julie Taymor, "Skewed Mirrors" interview:
"… they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail….
They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was…it was the most important thing that I ever experienced."
The above may be of interest to students
of iconology — what Dan Brown in
The Da Vinci Code calls "symbology" —
and of redheads.
The artist of Details,
"Brenda Starr" creator
Dale Messick, died on Tuesday,
April 5, 2005, at 98.
For further details on
April 5, see
Art History:
The Pope of Hope
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