Log24

For the feast of
St. Ignatius Loyola…

Final Arrangements,
continued:

“Now you has jazz.”
– High Society, 1956 

— Today’s online New York Times

Also from today’s New York Times: Kurt Kreuger in the 1945 film “Paris Underground.”   Kurt Kreuger, a German-born actor who reluctantly played Nazi soldiers in many films about World War II, died July 12 in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 89.

Log24, Wednesday, July 12, 2006: Band Numbers “Some friends  of mine  are in  this band…” — David    Auburn,    Proof Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate, Nine is a Vine. — The Prime Powers

Related material:

A Log24 entry commemorating
the murder of six Jesuits
in El Salvador.

Campaign Song

“All things return to the One.
 What does the One return to?”

— Zen koan, epigraph to
   The Footprints of God,
by Greg Iles of
Natchez, Mississippi

“Literature begins with geography.”

— attributed to Robert Frost

History

From “Today in History,” by The Associated Press–

On this date (July 30):

“In 1864, during the Civil War, Union forces tried to take Petersburg, Va., by exploding a mine under Confederate defense lines; the attack failed.”

“A nightmare” — Ulysses

11:11

Jung’s Birthday, 4 AM:

Jung on the Trinity
and Quaternity

Jung’s Birthday, 3 AM:

The Shape of God:
Deepening the Mystery
of the Trinity

Discourse Analysis

Edward Rothstein in today’s New York Times, reviewing Evil Incarnate (Princeton University Press):

“… the most decisive aspect of the myth is that it is, literally, a myth. Every single example of evil he gives turns out to be evil imagined: there is, he says, no evidence for any of it. Evil, he argues, is not something real, it is a ‘discourse,’ a ‘way of representing things and shaping our experience, not some force in itself.'”

Related material:

A review (pdf) by Steven G. Krantz of Charles Wells’s A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, September 2004):

“Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a remarkable and compelling piece of writing because of its searing wit and sardonic take on life. Bierce does not define any new words. He instead gives deadly interpretations of very familiar words. Wells’s book does not fit into the same category of literary effort.”

For literary efforts perhaps more closely related to Bierce’s, see Mathematics and Narrative and the five Log24 entries ending on this date last year.

For Hemingway’s birthday:

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

“We know many little things about the relation between mathematics and narrative, but lack one big comprehensive insight.”

— John Allen Paulos (pdf)

“On Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2002– 9/11/02– the New York State lottery numbers were 911, an eerie coincidence that set many people to thinking or, perhaps more accurately, to not thinking.”

—  John Allen Paulos

“Time and chance happeneth to them all.”

— Ecclesiastes 9:11

Today is the feast of
St. James McNeill Whistler.

“Nature contains the elements of color and form of all pictures– as the keyboard contains the notes of all music– but the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful–  as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos, glorious harmony.”

— Whistler, “The Ten O’Clock“

Mathematics and Narrative
continued…

“Now, at the urging of the UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, liberal America’s guru of the moment, progressive Democrats are practicing to get their own reluctant mouths around some magical new vocabulary, in the hope of surviving and eventually overcoming the age of Bush.”

“… the right’s language is now the default language for everyone.
     On the way to proposing a counterstrategy (it never really arrives), Nunberg pauses to engage in a polite disagreement with his fellow linguist George Lakoff, who has provided a rival account of the conservative ascendancy. Lakoff argues that Republicans have articulated– first for themselves and then for others– a conceptual framework that allows them to unite apparently disparate issues in a single coherent worldview …  woven together not in a philosophically consistent framework but in a narrative ‘that creates an illusion of coherence.’
     Once again, the Republicans have such a narrative– ‘declining patriotism and moral standards, the out-of-touch media and the self-righteous liberal elite … minorities demanding special privileges … disrespect for religious faith, a swollen government’– but ‘Democrats and liberals have not offered compelling narratives that could compete’ with it. Eighty pages later he is still saying the same thing. ‘The Democrats need a compelling narrative of their own.'”

Lakoff is the co-author of a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.  From Wikipedia’s article on Lakoff:

“According to Lakoff, even mathematics itself is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus ‘any question of math’s being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is.’ Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than ‘meat.'”

For a long list of related leftist philosophy, see The Thinking Meat Project.

Democrats seeking narratives may also consult The Carlin Code and The Prime Cut Gospel.
 

Today’s birthday:
Linda Ronstadt is 60.

“Elegant as a slow blues.”
— Review of a writer
    by Rolling Stone

Just send me black roses
White rhythm and blues
And somebody who cares when you lose
Black roses, white rhythm and blues
Black roses, white rhythm and blues

— Linda Ronstadt song
   by J. D. Souther, from
   Living in the USA, 1978

Chapter 24

By Syd Barrett,
Dead Poet

A movement is accomplished in six stages
And the seventh brings return.
The seven is the number of the young light
It forms when darkness is increased by one.
Change returns success
Going and coming without error.
Action brings good fortune.
Sunset.

— From the 1967 album
   “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn“

Longest Day’s Journey

BY BOB THOMAS, LOS ANGELES
July 13, 2006 (AP)– Red Buttons, the carrot-topped burlesque comedian who became a top star in early television and then in a dramatic role won the 1957 Oscar as supporting actor in “Sayonara,” died Thursday [July 13, 2006]. He was 87. —San Francisco Chronicle

Sayonara.

Three Worlds,
1955