"This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level."
— "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" by John Ashbery,
quoted here in the post Take Your Pick of Dec. 16, 2011.
"The problem is a paradox of the veridical type,
because the correct result (you should switch doors)
is so counterintuitive it can seem absurd,
but is nevertheless demonstrably true."
— Wikipedia on the Monty Hall problem.
Related material —
From the online New York Times this morning —
"Origin is Mr. Brown’s eighth novel. It finds his familiar protagonist,
the brilliant Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconography
Robert Langdon, embroiled once more in an intellectually challenging,
life-threatening adventure involving murderous zealots, shadowy fringe
organizations, paradigm-shifting secrets with implications for the future
of humanity, symbols within puzzles and puzzles within symbols and
a female companion who is super-smart and super-hot.
As do all of Mr. Brown’s works, the new novel does not shy away from
the big questions, but rather rushes headlong into them."
— Profile of Dan Brown by Sarah Lyall
See also yesterday's Log24 post on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels.
From the New York Times Wire last night —
"Mr. Hefner … styled himself as an emblem
of the sexual revolution."
From a Log24 post on September 23 —
A different emblem related to other remarks in the above Sept. 23 post —
(On the wall — a Galois-geometry inscape .)
Remarks suggested by the previous post —
|
From Jeremy Biles, "Introduction: The Sacred Monster," in (Fordham University Press, 2007, page 3) — Bataille’s insistent conjunction of the monstrous and the sacred is the subject of this book. Regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of our time, and acknowledged as an important influence by such intellectuals as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, Bataille produced a corpus of wide-ranging writings bearing the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he also sought to produce in his readers. In the following chapters, I will specify some of the ways in which Bataille evokes monstrosity to elicit in himself and his audience an experience of simultaneous anguish and joy—an experience that he calls sacred. In particular, Bataille is fascinated with the ‘‘left-hand’’ sacred. In contradistinction to its lucent and form-conferring ‘‘right-hand’’ counterpart, the left-hand sacred is obscure and formless—not transcendent, pure, and beneficent, but dangerous, filthy, and morbid. This sinister, deadly aspect of the sacred is at once embodied in, and communicated by, the monster. As we will see, it is in beholding the monster that one might experience the combination of ecstasy and horror that characterizes Bataille ’s notion of the sacred. The dual etymology of ‘‘monster’’ reveals that aspect of the sacred that enticed Bataille. According to one vein of etymological study, the Latin monstrum derives from monstrare (to show or display). The monster is that which appears before our eyes as a sign of sorts; it is a demonstration. But another tradition emphasizes a more ominous point. Deriving from monere (to warn), the monster is a divine omen, a portent; it heralds something that yet remains unexpected, unforeseeable—as a sudden reversal of fortune. In the writings of Bataille, the monster functions as a monstrance, putting on display the sinister aspect of the sacred that Bataille sees as the key to a ‘‘sovereign’’ existence. But in doing so the monster presents us with a portent of something that we cannot precisely foresee, but something that, Bataille claims, can be paradoxically experienced in moments of simultaneous anguish and ecstasy: death. |
See as well …
(Order of news items transposed for aesthetic effect.)
The title is that of an exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts
that opened on Sunday, September 24.
See the previous post and some Chinese background
from The Cornell Daily Sun today —
"John W. Lewis, the University’s first professor of Chinese government
and one of the first major China specialists who came out against the
Vietnam War, died on Sept. 4 in Stanford, California. He was 86."
Still enough for you?
" . . . Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
— Four Quartets
See posts now tagged Myspace China.
Related story —
MSU to award honorary doctorate to
Harvard professor Diana Eck
March 8, 2013 — MSU News Service
"On April 23, 2009 ….
'I’m reminded of the character in "The Silence of the Lambs,"
Hannibal Lecter, a very brilliant man,' the prosecutor said,
recognizing 'his ability to intelligently and articulately discuss
things occurring in society.'
'But at his core, as with Mr. Lecter at his core, he is a sociopath,'
the prosecutor said."
— David Stout in an obituary from this evening's online
New York Times
See also this journal on April 23, 2009, and
a figure from this morning's link Cantina —
.
"With respect to the story's content, the frame thus acts
both as an inclusion of the exterior and as an exclusion
of the interior: it is a perturbation of the outside at the
very core of the story's inside, and as such, it is a blurring
of the very difference between inside and outside."
— Shoshana Felman on a Henry James story, p. 123 in
"Turning the Screw of Interpretation,"
Yale French Studies No. 55/56 (1977), pp. 94-207.
Published by Yale University Press.
See also the previous post and The Galois Tesseract.
"The story’s origin is therefore situated, it would seem, in
a forgetting of its origin: to tell the story’s origin is to tell
the story of that origin’s obliteration."
— Shoshana Felman, p. 122 in
"Turning the Screw of Interpretation,"
Yale French Studies No. 55/56 (1977), pp. 94-207.
Published by Yale University Press.
The Preface
For Valéry's phrase "an extreme depth, a torment of thought," see
(via a link from the reported date of the above publisher's death, Aug. 31)
a post of July 15, 2004.
In memory of Lillian Ross, who reportedly died early today —
* As opposed to The Imaginary Professor.
- I was a teacher. - You're being modest, aren't you? You were a professor at Boston University... Isn't that right? - Yes, well, assistant professor. - And what'd you teach? - Philosophy. Truth and logic. That sort of thing. Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/ movie_script.php?movie=gifted
Compare and contrast with a real Boston University professor,
John Stachel, quoted here on Sept. 5, 2017.
Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, "the man who saved the world," reportedly died
at 77 in a town near Moscow on May 19, 2017.
A figure from last night's post appeared in this journal on that date.
… who reportedly died at 62 late on Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011.
Related material — The "What As Is" link above, and a Sept. 14 post
quoting art critic Roberta Smith on a current exhibition —
"You grab your experiential richness where you find it."
— Roberta Smith, "Postwar Art Gets a Nervy Makeover"
in the online New York Times
For the other two brothers, see Feininger in this journal.
"My guess is you're looking for
the least, little entity."
— Subtitle in "The Zero Theorem"
from the previous post.
Related material —
See as well some purely mathematical properties of a byte
discussed here on July 7, 2011.
| T. Lux Feininger (June 11, 1910 Berlin, Germany – July 7, 2011 Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a German-American painter, avant-garde photographer, author, and art teacher who was born in Berlin to Julia Berg and Lyonel Feininger, an American living in Germany from the age of sixteen. His father was appointed as the Master of the Printing Workingshop at the newly formed Bauhaus art school in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919.[1] He had two older full brothers, including Andreas Feininger . . . . — Wikipedia |
The above passage was suggested by an IMDb release date —
— and by a Log24 post, Lux, of the same date: 19 August, 2014.
See also photos by a big brother of Lux Feininger in this journal
on Wednesday, August 30, 2017.
From "The Metaphysics of Entities," a post of Sept. 20, 2014 —
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker on a 2013 film —
"The hero of 'The Zero Theorem' is a computer genius
called Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz)…. He is the sole
resident of a derelict church, where, on a crucifix in front
of the altar, the head of Christ has been replaced by a
security camera. No prayers are ever said, and none are
answered."
Related dialogue from a 2008 film —
Another view of the Zero Theorem derelict church —
Silas in "Equals" (2015) —
Ever since we were kids it's been drilled into us that …
Our purpose is to explore the universe, you know.
Outer space is where we'll find …
… the answers to why we're here and …
… and where we come from.
Related material —
See also Galois Space in this journal.
( A sequel to the previous post, Lost )
From a link, "A Little Boy and a Little Girl," found in a Log24
search for Andersen + Atlantic —
"A few flakes of snow were falling, and one of them, rather larger
than the rest, alighted on the edge of one of the flower boxes.
This snow-flake grew larger and larger, till at last it became
the figure of a woman, dressed in garments of white gauze,
which looked like millions of starry snow-flakes linked together.
She was fair and beautiful, but made of ice—
shining and glittering ice." — "The Snow Queen"
Related material —
Analogue of the little boy from "The Snow Queen" in "Equals" (2015) —
"Nice piece of ice." — Brendan Fraser in
"The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" (2008).
See also the concept that everything adds up to nothing in
"The Zero Theorem" (2013) …
… and the Conway-Norton-Ryba theorem (2017).
"You grab your experiential richness where you find it."
— Roberta Smith, "Postwar Art Gets a Nervy Makeover"
in the online New York Times today
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