A Look magazine article of July 18, 1950,
"Working Debutante," had photos of
Betsy von Furstenberg by Stanley Kubrick.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Shining Through
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Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Scenes from…
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Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Monday, April 27, 2015
Cross of Five Ninths
See Five Ninths in this journal and Colorful Tale.
Cross of Black and Gray
See also "Why do Muslims pray five times daily?".
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The Beast from Hell’s Kitchen
A comment on the Scholarly Kitchen piece from
this morning's previous post —
This suggests …
The Beast from Hell's Kitchen
For some thoughts on mapping trees into
linear arrays, see The Forking (March 20, 2015).
See also Pitchfork in this journal.
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Hell’s Kitchen
A heavenly image from yesterday's
Sunday Dinner link "milestone award"—
An Oprah-related quote from the Tuesday, April 7,
ceremonial dedication of the Maya Angelou stamp—
“They say Easter was Sunday, but we are still
having church,” promised MSNBC talk show
host Melissa Harris-Perry, the ceremony’s emcee…."
In that spirit … a different sort of kitchen —
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Sunday, April 26, 2015
Sunday Dinner:
A Search for The One.
"It was a bright cold day in April,
and the clocks were striking thirteen."
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Norwegian Woods
The title appears as a joint heading for three reviews
of Norway-related books on the front page of the print
version of today's New York Times Sunday Book Review .
See as well Josefine Lyche in this journal.
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Saturday, April 25, 2015
Faustian Merry-Go-Round
Thanks to David Lavery for the following:
|
"Voilà! Stevens has managed to create out of nothing a palpable imaginative space, an interiority without material dimensions, replete with its own achieved and accomplished music. And in truth, in a world of Heisenbergian uncertainties and shifting star masses, it may be enough for the dizzying, ever-shifting merry-go-round of the Faustian mind simply to slow down and let itself come to rest, at least for the moment." — Paul Mariani, "God and the Imagination," Aug. 10, 1996 |
http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/articles/issue-18/mariani-essays
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Ghosts and Shadows
For Poetry Month
From the home page of Alexandre Borovik:
Book in progress: Shadows of the Truth
This book (to be published soon) can be viewed
as a sequel to Mathematics under the Microscope ,
but with focus shifted on mathematics as it was
experienced by children (well, by children who
became mathematicians). The cover is designed
by Edmund Harriss.
See also Harriss's weblog post of Dec. 27, 2008, on the death
of Harold Pinter: "The Search for the Truth Can Never Stop."
This suggests a review of my own post of Dec. 3, 2012,
"The Revisiting." A figure from that post:
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A Matrix for Corliss
See Richard Corliss's 1999 review of "The Matrix," "Popular Metaphysics."
See as well the previous Log 24 post and the following publisher's
book description —
Harvard Heart of Gold by Dustin Aguilar
You may be a storybook character after all!!!
This philosophic, fantastical journey is a new-fangled fairy-tale
where fun and unusual happenings are all too common, and
you—the reader—become a character just like Harvard or Kansas
and are subject to the all-knowing, all-powerful, author of the story.
This daring piece tests the bounds of reality and subtly suggests
that you should question everything you know —
While most people in this story believe they are real-life, walking
talking humans, a small, somewhat violent sect of society has
realized they are actually part of a book. They lash out and
demand that the story have a happy ending, and they'll whomever
they have to. [Sic] An enormous battle erupts catching Harvard
and Kansas trapped in the middle forced to rely on their cunning
and a little help from an extra-large talking tarantula to save the day.
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Friday, April 24, 2015
For Hughes and Crombie*
Recommended —
Links to the poems: "Storm Beach" and "For You."
* See "The Space of Horizons" and A Search for Crombie.
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Love and Darkness, 2003
The previous post mentions an Amos Oz
novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness
(Sipour Al Ahava Vehoshekh, סיפור על אהבה וחושך),
apparently first published in Hebrew in 2002.
“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
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Harvard Class Day Speaker
This year's Class Day speaker at Harvard
will be Natalie Portman.
Related material:
See also the link to Preoccupied from Sunday—
"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."
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Thursday, April 23, 2015
The Good
"… they didn't really know
what was good
and was not good…."
— The late Bernard Stollman,
who reportedly died at 85
on Monday, April 20, 2015
"And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance
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Colorful Tale
(A sequel to yesterday's ART WARS and this
morning's De Colores )
“Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature
of modern science is the emergence of abstract
symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity
behind– as Eddington puts it– the colorful tale
of the subjective storyteller mind.” — Hermann Weyl
(Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science ,
Princeton, 1949, p. 237)
See also Deathly Hallows.
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De Colores
See orange, black, green at The Daily Princetonian
and in this journal.
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Wednesday, April 22, 2015
ART WARS continued
The previous post mentioned a new mobile, "Triangle Constellation,"
commissioned for the Harvard Art Museums.
Related material (click to enlarge) —
The above review is of an exhibition by the "Constellation" artist,
Carlos Amorales, that opened on Sept. 26, 2008 — "just in time for
Halloween and the Day of the Dead."
See also this journal on that date.
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Purely Aesthetic
G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology —
|
What ‘purely aesthetic’ qualities can we distinguish in such theorems as Euclid’s or Pythagoras’s? I will not risk more than a few disjointed remarks. In both theorems (and in the theorems, of course, I include the proofs) there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy. The arguments take so odd and surprising a form; the weapons used seem so childishly simple when compared with the far-reaching results; but there is no escape from the conclusions. There are no complications of detail—one line of attack is enough in each case; and this is true too of the proofs of many much more difficult theorems, the full appreciation of which demands quite a high degree of technical proficiency. We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases’, indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument. A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way. |
Related material:
-
A post at noon on Sunday, April 19, 2015, with a link,
"Ageometretos medeis eisito," to an image search
for "large Desargues configuration" that includes …
-
A review, dated April 20, 2015, of "After Hours at the
Harvard Art Museums" in The Harvard Crimson -
An article, also dated April 20, 2015, in Harvard Magazine
titled "Harvard Installs 'Triangle Constellation'"
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Tales of Money and Power:
A companion-piece to Sunday's Sermon for the Cruelest Month —
Click the above paragraph for further details.
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Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Jamaica Beach
Update of 11:45 PM ET the same day —
See also remarks by Freeman Dyson on the novel
A High Wind in Jamaica quoted here Sunday morning.
From an introduction to the novel by Francine Prose:
"In the end, everything in this luminous, extraordinary novel
is so much the reverse of what we think it should be, or what
we would expect, that we are left entirely disoriented—
unsure of what anything is, or should be. The effect is
disturbing and yet beautiful, fantastic but also frighteningly
true to life."
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Minimum Lovable Ishtar
See also Little Mermaid in this journal.
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