752, 753, 286.
(Numbers courtesy of the
Pennsylvania Lottery,
evening of May 30-
evening of May 31)
Commentary on the
meaning of this
short story:
Countdown
| The Diadem of Death Washington Post Death Notices: Dead on |
||
| Sophie B. Altman | ||
Mother-in-law of In Memoriam: LOS TRES REYES MAGOS —Yo soy Gaspar. Aquí traigo el incienso. —Yo soy Melchor. Mi mirra aroma todo. —Soy Baltasar. Traigo el oro. Aseguro —Gaspar, Melchor y Baltasar, callaos. THE THREE KINGS I am Caspar. I bring with me the myrrh, I am Melchior. My frankincense perfumes the air. I am Balthasar. I bring the gold. And I Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar — say no more.
|
||
|
CelebritySexNews.com
on Kylie Minogue:
From a web page on
you gotta ride it like you find it. Get your ticket at the station of the Rock Island Line.  in Rock Island, Illinois |
Related material:
Twenty-First Century Fox
(10/6/02)
Back to You, Kylie
(11/5/02)
Time, Eternity, and Grace
(11/22/02)
That Old Devil Moon
(1/1/03) and
The Shanghai Gesture
(1/3/03)
Whirligig
(1/5/03)
Harrowing
(4/19/03)
Temptation
(4/22/03)
Temptation
(4/9/04)
Tribute,
Train of Thought,
Drunk Bird, and
From Here to Eternity
(8/17/04-8/18/04)
Heaven and Earth
(9/2/04)
Habeas Corpus
(11/24/04)
X, continued
(12/4/04)
Birth and Death
(5/28/05)
Time Travel
(5/28/06)
Timeagain and
Two-Bar Hook
(8/9/06)
Echoes
(8/11/06)
Phantasmagoria
and Tequila!
(9/23/06)
The above is from
The Paradise of Childhood,
a work first published in 1869.
For the late Thelma Keane,
wife of “Family Circus“
cartoonist Bil Keane of
Paradise Valley, Arizona:
I want a shot at redemption.*
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard.”
— Paul Simon
* 
Mrs. Keane died May 23
(St. Sarah’s Eve)
according to
The Washington Post.
Related material:
Log24 on May 23,
Saints in Australia.
Note the number, 701,
on the colonel’s collar.
Adapted from Log24,
February 19-22, 2008:
See 2/22/08,
4/19/08,
and 5/22/08.
Die Liebe nahm kein Ende mehr.
Great Directors
“After his return to acting in ‘Tootsie,’ Pollack took movie roles under directors Robert Altman in ‘The Player’ (1992), Woody Allen in ‘Husbands and Wives’ (1992) and Stanley Kubrick in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999). He said he chose roles in part to study other great directors.”
Stevie Nicks
is 60 today.
On the author discussed
here yesterday,
Siri Hustvedt:
“… she explores
the nature of identity
in a structure* of
crystalline complexity.”
— Janet Burroway,
quoted in
ART WARS
“Is it safe?”
— Annals of Art Education:
Geometry and Death
* Related material:
the life and work of
Felix Christian Klein
and
Report to the Joint
Mathematics Meetings
continued from 9 AM —
Pennsylvania Lottery today:
Mid-day 105,
Evening 304
Related material:
1/05, 2003,
3/04, 2004
“Bill laid bare the arbitrary
roots of meaning itself….”
— Siri Hustvedt,
quoted here this morning
“A poem should not mean
But be”
— Archibald MacLeish,
quoted here May 23
Epigraph to
“Deploying the Glass Bead Game, Part II,”
by Robert de Marrais:
“For a complete logical argument,”
Arthur began
with admirable solemnity,
“we need two prim Misses –”
“Of course!” she interrupted.
“I remember that word now.
And they produce — ?”
“A Delusion,” said Arthur.
— Lewis Carroll,
Sylvie and Bruno
Roger Rosenblatt’s Beet [Ecco hardcover, Jan. 29, 2008] is the latest addition to the noble sub-genre of campus fiction….
Curricular questions and the behavior of committees are at once dry as dust subjects and areas ripe for sarcastic send-up– not least because, as dull as they are, they are really both quite vital to the credibility and viability of higher education.
Here’s an excerpt from the first meeting, in which committee members propose their personal plans for a new, improved curriculum:
“… Once the students really got into playing with toy soldiers, they would understand history with hands-on excitement.”
To demonstrate his idea, he’d brought along a shoe box full of toy doughboys and grenadiers, and was about to reenact the Battle of Verdun on the committee table when Heilbrun stayed his hand. “We get it,” he said.
“That’s quite interesting, Molton,” said Booth [a chemist]. “But is it rigorous enough?”
At the mention of the word, everyone, save Peace, sat up straight.
“Rigor is so important,” said Kettlegorf.
“We must have rigor,” said Booth.
“You may be sure,” said the offended Kramer. “I never would propose anything lacking rigor.”
Smythe inhaled and looked at the ceiling. “I think I may have something of interest,” he said, as if he were at a poker game and was about to disclose a royal flush. “My proposal is called ‘Icons of Taste.’ It would consist of a galaxy of courses affixed to several departments consisting of lectures on examples of music, art, architecture, literature, and other cultural areas a student needed to indicate that he or she was sophisticated.”
“Why would a student want to do that?” asked Booth.
“Perhaps sophistication is not a problem for chemists,” said Smythe. Lipman tittered.
“What’s the subject matter?” asked Heilbrun. “Would it have rigor?”
“Of course it would have rigor. Yet it would also attract those additional students Bollovate is talking about.” Smythe inhaled again. “The material would be carefully selected,” he said. “One would need to pick out cultural icons the students were likely to bring up in conversation for the rest of their lives, so that when they spoke, others would recognize their taste as being exquisite yet eclectic and unpredictable.”
“You mean Rembrandt?” said Kramer.
Smythe smiled with weary contempt. “No, I do not mean Rembrandt. I don’t mean Beethoven or Shakespeare, either, unless something iconic has emerged about them to justify their more general appeal.”
“You mean, if they appeared on posters,” said Lipman.
“That’s it, precisely.”
Lipman blushed with pride.
“The subject matter would be fairly easy to amass,” Smythe said. “We could all make up a list off the top of our heads. Einstein–who does have a poster.” He nodded to the ecstatic Lipman. “Auden, for the same reason. Students would need to be able to quote ‘September 1939[ or at least the last lines. And it would be good to teach ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ as well, which is off the beaten path, but not garishly. Mahler certainly. But Cole Porter too. And Sondheim, I think. Goya. Warhol, it goes without saying, Stephen Hawking, Kurosawa, Bergman, Bette Davis. They’d have to come up with some lines from Dark Victory, or better still, Jezebel. La Dolce Vita. Casablanca. King of Hearts. And Orson, naturally. Citizen Kane, I suppose, though personally I prefer F for Fake.”
“Judy!” cried Heilbrun.
“Yes, Judy too. But not ‘Over the Rainbow.’ It would be more impressive for them to do ‘The Trolley Song,’ don’t you think?” Kettlegorf hummed the intro.
“Guernica,” said Kramer. “Robert
Capa.” “Edward R. Murrow,” said Lipman.
“No! Don’t be ridiculous!” said Smythe, ending Lipman’s brief foray into the world of respectable thought.
“Marilyn Monroe!” said Kettlegorf.
“Absolutely!” said Smythe, clapping to indicate his approval.
“And the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Booth, catching on. “And the Chrysler Building.”
“Maybe,” said Smythe. “But I wonder if the Chrysler Building isn’t becoming something of a cliche.”
Peace had had enough. “And you want students to nail this stuff so they’ll do well at cocktail parties?”
Smythe sniffed criticism, always a tetchy moment for him. “You make it sound so superficial,” he said.
Prim Miss 2:
Siri Hustvedt speaks at Adelaide Writers’ Week– a story dated March 24,
“I have come to think of my books as echo chambers or halls of mirrors in which themes, ideas, associations continually reflect and reverberate inside a text. There is always point and counterpoint, to use a musical illustration. There is always repetition with difference.”
A Delusion:
Exercise — Identify in the following article the sentence that one might (by unfairly taking it out of context) argue is a delusion.
(Hint: See Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry.)
Why Borovik’s Figure 4
is included above:
For more on Prim Miss 2
and deploying
the Glass Bead Game,
see the previous entry.
And now, perhaps, his brother Cornell Capa, who died Friday.Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–
"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors."
From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has
— End of page 168 —
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."
|
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. |
|
ZZ
Figures from the
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
Numbers and Names,
With numbers and names
English translation A related poem:
Alphabets
From time to time
But if a savage
— Hermann Hesse (1943), |
— Song lyric,
Cyndi Lauper
Alethiometer from
"The Golden Compass"
Update:
See also this morning's
later entry, illustrating
the next line of Cyndi
Lauper's classic lyric
"Time After Time" —
"… Confusion is
nothing new."
From the five entries ending
on St. Bridget's Day, 2008:
"At his memorial service his daughter Tami told the story of 'little Jimmy,' whose kindergarten teacher recognized a special quality of mind that set him apart. 'Every day we read a story, and after the story is over, Jimmy gets up and wants to tell us what the story means.'"
"I confess I do not believe in time."
— Nabokov, Speak, Memory
From May 20:
"Welcome to the
Garden Club, Pilgrim."
"The drum beats out of time"
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Happy St. Sarah‘s Day
(May 24)
“…something I once heard
Charles M. Schulz say,
‘Don’t worry about the world
coming to an end today.
It’s already tomorrow
in Australia.'”
— William F. House,
quoted here on Australia’s
St. Bridget’s Day, 2003
Click on image to view video.
"Philosophers ponder the idea
of identity: what it is to give
something a name on Monday
and have it respond to
that name on Friday…."
Conclusion of "Analyze That" —
"There's a place for us…."
New York Times
on Friday, May 23:
"A poem should not mean
But be"
— Archibald MacLeish,
quoted in a Friday comment
on a Thursday night column
by Rosanne Cash
Thursday evening photo
by Josh Haner for Friday's
online New York Times:
(See also Hamlet’s Transformation.)
The moral of this story,
it’s simple but it’s true:
Hey, the stars might lie,
but the numbers never do.
Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.
“Brian O’Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* ‘Patrick Ireland’
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art.”
— New York Times, May 22, 2008
THE IMAGE
Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.
Another version of
the image:
See 2/22/08
and 4/19/08.
Michael Kimmelman in today’s New York Times—
“An essay from the ’70s by Mr. O’Doherty, ‘Inside the White Cube,’ became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown.”
Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube,” 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art:
“The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first…. An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art.”
“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54
|
…. Now thou art an 0 |
“…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”
— The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14
The China Candidate
In honor of the 100th birthday of actor James Stewart,
Turner Classic Movies is now showing
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
In light of an ABC News story tonight,
Report: U.S. Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators,
the following film seems more relevant:
Welcome to the Garden Club, Pilgrim
Related material:
The Dictatorship of Talent, by David Brooks
in The New York Times of December 4, 2007—
"When you talk to Americans, you find that they have all these weird notions about Chinese communism. You try to tell them that China isn’t a communist country anymore. It’s got a different system: meritocratic paternalism. You joke: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army."
— and Harvard mathematician
See also Sylvia Nasar's 2006 New Yorker article on Yau
and the screenplay of The Manchurian Candidate:
A long pause. Finally, Yen Lo laughs. YEN LO With humor, my dear Zilkov. Always with a little humor.
(For readers of
the previous entry
who would like to
know more about
purchasing the
Brooklyn Bridge)
“He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately compose dictated sentences, like this one: ‘Outside a cemetery sat a harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady’s ankle with unparalleled ecstasy.'”
| How the ancient crystal skull Synergy came to the Western World…
This skull first came to light when it was acquired about two and a half decades ago by a European businessman and avid hiker, as he traveled around Central and South America. He acquired the skull from a very old native man, in a tiny village in the Andes, near the borders of Peru, Bolivia and Chile. He was just passing through, and had come upon the small settlement while looking for a place to stay for the night. He wandered into the village and was greeted with smiles and an invitation to share a meal. This gentleman, George, speaks several languages, and he usually has at least a few words in common with most of the people he meets in his travels– enough to get by, anyway. Although he didn’t speak the same language as most of the people in this isolated village, there was an instant connection between them, and they managed with the smattering of Spanish and Portuguese that a few of them knew. In need of shelter for the night, George was offered a spot for his sleeping bag, near the fire, in the dwelling of an elderly man. After a peaceful evening in the old man’s company, George gratefully accepted a simple breakfast and got ready to take his leave. As he thanked the man for his generous hospitality, the elder led George to an old chest. Opening the crumbling wooden lid, he took out the crystal skull, touched it reverently, and handed it to George. Awed by an artifact of such obvious antiquity, beauty and value, yet uncertain what he was expected to do with it, George tried to hand it back. But the old man urged it upon him, making it clear that he was to take it with him. Curious about the history of such a thing, George tried to find out what the villagers knew about it. One young fellow explained in halting Spanish that the skull had come into the possession of a much loved Catholic nun, in Peru. She was quite old when she died in the early 1800’s, and she had given it to the old man’s “Grandfather” when he was just a boy. (Note: It’s hard to say if this was really the man’s grandfather, or just the honorary title that many natives use to designate an ancestor or revered relative.) The nun told the boy and his father that the skull was “an inheritance from a lost civilization” and, like the Christian cross, it was a symbol of the transcendence of Soul over death. She said that it carried the message of immortal life and the illumination that we may discover when we lose our fear of death. She gave it to the boy and his father, asking them to safeguard it until the “right” person came to get it– and share its message with the world. It had been brought to that land from “somewhere else” and needed to wait until the right person could help it to continue its journey. “Your heart will know the person,” she said. “What a strange story,” thought George. |
“… ‘Supercholita’ tiene sobre todo una clara vocación divulgadora de la cultura andina. No en vano Valdez recibió su primer premio por explicar mediante este personaje cómo se cocina el ‘chuño,’ una típica patata deshidratada muy consumida en el altiplano boliviano.”
astragalo-, astragal-
(Greek: anklebone, talus ball of ankle joint; dice, die [the Greeks made these from ankle bones])
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte
— Rubén Darío
Image adapted from
Blue Star Traders
The New York Lottery
mid-day number yesterday–
719– and 7/19.
Today's New York Times, in an obituary of a teacher of reporters:
"He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately compose dictated sentences, like this one: 'Outside a cemetery sat a harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady's ankle with unparalleled ecstasy.'"
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