Log24

The title is that of an essay by Rebecca Goldstein
in Tikkun  (Nov.-Dec. 1997).  An excerpt:

"… And so it was that I became an analytic philosopher.
If my story ended there, it would make sense.
But against logic, I also became a writer of fiction.
My hopeless passion for fiction had seemed to me,
in the days when I hung exclusively with philosophers,
a rather shameful little aberration. Plato had planned to
rid his utopia of the epic poets, who were the novelists
of his day. Fiction writers are enchanters, those who
spread their dreams abroad; and Plato— whom I still revere—
thoroughly disapproved of enchantment."

See also the previous post.

* For the title, see Sunday morning.

In memory of a reported long-ago date —

Or:  Deep  Link

Thanks to The New York Times  for the "Love" title above —
the subtitle of today's Maureen Dowd column.

Dowd quotes a memorable phrase by another writer,
Lloyd Grove —

“King Lear meets Rodney Dangerfield.”

I prefer Rodney Crowell.

Click on Crowell for another old link, to remarks on
the poet Anne Sexton.

"Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" — Bat Out of Hell  album, Oct. 1977

See also Kostant in this  journal and a link in a 
Log24 post Friday on another mathematical death —

Hollywood Easter Egg (Groundhog Day, 2017).

Groundhog Day was the day Kostant reportedly died.

"The deepest strain in a religion is
the particular and particularistic doctrine
it asserts at its heart,
in the company of such pronouncements as
‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’
Take the deepest strain of religion away…
and what remains are the surface pieties — 
abstractions without substantive bite — 
to which everyone will assent
because they are empty, insipid, and safe."

— Stanley Fish, quoted here on July 3, 2007…
The opening date of the film "Transformers."

The opening pronouncement of "Transformers" —

"Before time began, there was the Cube."

Those who prefer Fish's abstractions  may consult 
the previous post.

"What Yokoyama does in Six Four  evokes — improbably —
the fastidious ethical parsings of a novel by Henry James,
all qualms and calibrations, and while that might not sound
like a good idea, he makes it work. He writes, fortunately,
in plain, declarative prose (ably translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies),
and because Mikami is such an ordinary man the mental gymnastics
he puts himself through are moving and sometimes deeply funny.
A Jamesian police procedural — 'The Wings of the Perp,' maybe?
Not exactly. But this novel is a real, out-of-the-blue original.*
I’ve never read anything like it."

 — Terrence Rafferty in the online New York Times 
      on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2017

Illustration from this journal on that date —

See also the previous post, "Six Four."
 

Update of 10 PM ET Feb. 23, 2017 —

A pathetic asterisk for, and by, Rafferty —

* A passage from Rafferty's essay
in The New York Times  on July 27, 2003:

"…  the message is clear: screenwriters are pathetic.
You can hear, clearly, the voice of Joe Gillis,
describing himself from beyond his watery grave:
'Nobody important, really. Just a movie writer with
a couple of B pictures to his credit. The poor dope.' "
 

See as well  this  journal on July 27, 2003.

Key sentence meets key title …

The title, Six Four , of the book under review is more interesting than
either of the headlines assigned by the Times to the review itself.

For another mystery related to the numbers six and four, see
this  journal on Feb. 21.

Click to enlarge:

See also, in this  journal, "Go Set a Structure,"
"Interior/Exterior," and "Midnight Special."

A memorable phrase —

"the transcendental horizon of the ‘I’."

For some backstory, see a Google search for

Marion + transcendental + horizon.

For a perhaps more intelligible horizon, see

Line at Infinity  in this journal.

"According to Thelemic legend, in 1918 Aleister Crowley
came into contact with a interdimensional entity
named Lam, who by the way is a dead ringer for
the popular conception of the 'alien grey '
depicted on the cover of Whitley Strieber's Communion ."

Related material —

"Robert Langdon stood mesmerized at the glass portal,
absorbing the power of the landscape below him."

Also …

"Ting-a-ling." — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

* See the film "The End of the Tour."

Broken Symmetries  in  Diamond Space  —

"… a pathetic asterisk of condescension" — Steven Goldstein

See also the Vonnegut asterisk in this journal.

From today's print version of the New York Times —

“He eliminates anything that’s not essential
from the face of this little rabbit until it’s really
reduced to the absolute minimum,”
Mr. Dibbits said. “And he does the same for
the text of his children’s books. He uses a
language that’s not simple or stupid, but he
reduces to the bare essentials.”

About his own work, Mr. Bruna once said,
“I spend a long time making my drawings
as simple as possible, throwing lots away,
before I reach that moment of recognition.”
He added, “I leave plenty of space for children’s
imagination.”

The result is a series of “Zen-like” tales,
Ms. Vogt said, “and that’s also part of the
universal appeal.”

The passage above is from an obituary for an artist who
reportedly died on Feb. 16.

See also, in this journal, "How deep the rabbit hole goes."