Log24

On The Blazing World , a new novel —

“Hustvedt uses fragment-stories, frame narratives, and unreliable
narrators to talk about the ways in which brilliant women across
history have been silenced, forgotten, and appropriated by men.
This is a narrative suspicious of narratives, a story that
demonstrates how damaging stories can be.”

— Review by Amal El-Mohtar

The protagonist of Hustvedt’s novel is named Harriet Burden.

A midrash for Darren Aronofsky, director of The Fountain*  and Noah—

Part I: The Burden of Proof —

Part II: The Story of Noam —

* See The Fountain  in “The Story Theory of Truth,” Columbus Day, 2013

Two timely images for Oslo artist Josefine Lyche —

Backstory:  Searches for “Blazing World” and for “Josefine + Lyche + Pink”
in this journal.

The image above is by a man, Brian Stauffer. Related material:

An image from today’s NY Times Sunday Book Review —

This  image is by a non-man, Kelsey Dake.

The first image above, since it combines Lyche’s enthusiasm for the color
pink and (apparently) for fishnet stockings, seems to me the better picture,
despite its prurient nature.

(Updated through 10 AM ET)

Click the above for further details.

An elegy adapted from “Sequence,” by Theodore Roethke —

“She listened when light sang.”

Perhaps such a song was sung
on Shakespeare’s (and Nabokov’s) birthday, 2009.

Friday evening’s post Musement dealt with Iris Murdoch’s
phrase “the clean crystalline work.”

For dirty bloody work see the life of Don Reitz, who
reportedly died at 84 on March 19.

“For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.” — Gravity’s Rainbow

“I don’t write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters.
My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors , contained nine pieces,
five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me
with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer)
to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer.”

— Rebecca Goldstein, “Against Logic”

Related material:  The cross of five ninths, from Epiphany 2006.

The following is from a web page by
Andreas Schöter, developer of  The Symbol Game.

Building the Narrative

The game can simply be played as a competitive board game,
simply trying to accumulate the most points. However,
to play this way is to miss the main purpose of the Symbol Game.

The author’s page on the game itself —

(This post was suggested by this afternoon’s post  Diamond Space.)

(Continued)

The front page of The New York Times Book Review 
for next Sunday (March 30, 2014) is devoted to a
review of Siri Hustvedt’s new novel  The Blazing World .
See two posts from St. Patrick’s day:  Her and Narratives.

The review’s author is Fernanda Eberstadt.

The review is titled “Outsider Art.”
See also that phrase in this journal.

Yakov G. Sinai today won the 2014 Abel Prize.
Earlier, he won the Wolf Prize.

Wolf Foundation press release quoted in the March 1997
Notices of the American Mathematical Society —

On Sinai —

“He is generally recognized as the world leader
in the mathematics of statistical physics.”

This afternoon’s New York Lottery:  813 and 1857.

Unrelated remarks:  813 and  1857.

For some context, see Holy Field
and Krauss Grid.

In memory of a Spanish statesman
who died today at 81… Santiago.