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Steven H. Cullinane |
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Some Recent Entries(These may not be the most recent entries. If there are more recent entries, they may be found here or here.)Thursday, May 8, 2008 4:48 PM ART WARS continued: Synchronicity,
Part Deux  From "On the Holy Trinity," the entry in the 3:20 PM French footprint: "...while the scientist sees "Angel in the Details," the entry in the 3:59 PM French footprint: "I dwell in Possibility - A fairer House than Prose" -- Emily Dickinson These, along with this afternoon's earlier entry, suggest a review of a third Log24 item, Windmills, with an actress from France as...
"When life itself seems lunatic, -- For the source, see Thursday, May 8, 2008 1:00 PM Annals of Religion, continued: Synchronicity
Today is the feast of Saint Robert A. Heinlein. Time of the above: 1:00 PM. Update of 2:07 PM -- On the local Charlie Rose broadcast today at about 1:48 PM, Paola Antonelli, the organizer of an exhibit at MoMA, "Design and the Elastic Mind," talked about science fiction's influence (or non-influence) on the exhibit. She used the metaphor "the day after tomorrow." As I had just written a link relating design, science fiction, and May 10 (the date of the literal day after tomorrow-- click on "feast" above), I found her remarks of interest. Here is a related passage from a web page.  Paola Antonelli Photo Credit: Andrea Ciotti Antonelli on scientists as designers who do not call themselves designers: "So they all try to reach out. They have that in common. Then what they have in common is this attempt to... propose something for the real future. I don't really like science fiction, but I like to think of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow." Amen. Thursday, May 8, 2008 12:00 PM Annals of Religion: Star Wars "JERUSALEM, May 7 (Reuters) -
Fireworks and military fanfare launched Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations on Wednesday..." Related material from Tuesday:  "... someone was down sixty, someone was up...." -- Play It As It Lays Wednesday, May 7, 2008 7:00 AM Review: Forms of the Rock "point A / In a perspective -- Wallace Stevens, See also December 10, 2004January 11, 2006 April 30, 2006 August 25, 2006 August 26, 2006 February 6, 2007 July 23, 2007 July 24, 2007 September 30, 2007 April 14, 2008 Christmas Eve, 1981 Tuesday, May 6, 2008 11:07 AM Mailer's Wake: In the Dreamtime
the Point Was Ten From Play It As It Lays,
For further details see yesterday's entries. "In her half sleep the point was ten...." -- Play It As It Lays The Random House  signed first edition of Norman Mailer's The Time of Our Time (4 pounds, 1286 pages) was published ten years ago yesterday -- May 5, 1998: Fireworks starburst on the cover of The Time of Our Time Also from May 5, 1998: File Photo in Mailer's obituary -- (Photo by Bebeto Matthews with Mailer obituary in Toronto Globe and Mail) with excerpt from the obituary, by Richard Pyle (Associated Press Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007 at 8:20 AM EDT)  Related material: Yesterday's entries and the time of this entry: 11:07:51 AM ET   51 THE JUDGMENTin light of...
Monday, May 5, 2008 11:07 PM Short Story: Time and the River "At the edge of the meadow flowed the river. Nick was glad to get to the river. He walked upstream through the meadow." Pennsylvania Lottery May 5, 2008:  Related material: 2/16, 7/25 "In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today." Monday, May 5, 2008 9:00 PM Annals of Fear and Loathing: New York Lottery May 5, 2008:  The evening number, 411, may be interpreted as 4/11. From Log24 on that date: As for the mid-day number 098, a Google search (with the aid of, in retrospect, the above family tribute) on "98 'Norman Mailer'" yields
From an unattributed "editorial review" of The Time of Our Time at Amazon.com: "Surely this sense of himself as the republic's recording angel accounts for the structure of Mailer's anthology...." Related material: From Play It As It Lays,
The number 411 from this evening's New York Lottery may thus be regarded as naming the "exact point in space and time" sought in the above passage. For a related midrash on the meaning of the passage's page number, see the previous entry. For a more plausible recording angel, see Sinatra's birthday, December 12, 2002. Monday, May 5, 2008 11:07 AM Mathematics and Narrative, continued: Lottery Sermon
"And take upon's the mystery of things as if we were God's spies" -- King Lear  From Log24 on Aug. 19, 2003 and on Ash Wednesday, 2004: a reviewer on An Instance of the Fingerpost:: "Perhaps we are meant to see the story as a cubist retelling of the crucifixion." From Log24 on Michaelmas 2007:  Google searches suggested by Sunday's PA lottery numbers (mid-day 170, evening 144) and by the above figure of Kate Beckinsale pointing to an instance of the number 144 -- Click to enlarge:  Related material: Beckinsale in another film (See At the Crossroads, Log24, Dec. 8, 2006): "For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross." -- Gravity's Rainbow  There is such a thing as a tesseract. "It was only in retrospect that the silliness became profound." -- Review of Faust in Copenhagen From the conclusion of
"I know what 'nothing' means, From Play It As It Lays,
"The page numbers are generally reliable." -- Michaelmas 2007 Sunday, May 4, 2008 10:12 AM A Diploma for Frank from... The Old School
These little town blues... "... all good things -- trout as well as eternal salvation -- come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy." -- A River Runs Through It Saturday, May 3, 2008 11:07 PM Annals of Theology, continued: "Teach us to
number our days." -- Psalm 90, verse 12 The New Yorker, issue dated Oct. 1, 2007 -- James Wood on Robert Alter's new translation of the Psalms: "At any time, God can cancel a life. 'So teach us to number our days,' as the King James Version has it, 'that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.'.... The ancient Hebrew word for the shadowy underworld where the dead go, Sheol, was Christianized as 'Hell,' even though there is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible. Alter prefers the words 'victory' and 'rescue' as translations of yeshu'ah, and eschews the Christian version, which is the heavily loaded 'salvation.' And so on. Stripping his English of these artificial cleansers, Alter takes us back to the essence of the meaning. Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: 'So teach us to number our days.'" Today's numbers from the Pennsylvania Lottery:  which, being interpreted, is 5/10 and 7/24. Selah. Friday, May 2, 2008 12:00 PM Mr. Holland's Week, continued: A Balliol Star In memory of mathematician Graham Higman of Balliol College and Magdalen College, Oxford, Jan. 19, 1917 - April 8, 2008 From a biography of an earlier Balliol student, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): "In 1867 he won First-Class degrees in Classics and 'Greats' (a rare 'double-first') and was considered by Jowett to be the star of Balliol."  Hopkins, a poet who coined the term "inscape," was a member of the Society of Jesus. From a publication of that society, The Invariant, Issue 15-- undated but (according to Issue 16, of 2005) from 1996 (pdf):
Another approach to the expression f(f(x)), by myself in 1982:  For further details, see Inscapes. For more about Higman, see an interview in the September 2001 newsletter of the European Mathematical Society (pdf). "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...." -- Bernard Holland Thursday, May 1, 2008 12:00 PM For the First of May: Back from the Shadows 
Today's Doonesbury (a flashback) --  "Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake." -- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast  Wednesday, April 30, 2008 11:07 PM Happy Walpurgisnacht, continued: And an especially Faustian
Walpurgis Night to Harvard University, home of Robert Langdon, fictional professor of Religious Symbology --  "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?" -- T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" From Log24 last September:  A man returns a crucifix to a Huichol village chapel. Photo by Rachel Cobb for National Geographic Wednesday, April 30, 2008 10:30 AM Happy Walpurgisnacht, Julie: Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds and Sacred Heart
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 9:00 AM Annals of Philosophy, continued: Calendar Catechism Q: If the opposite of Christmas (December 25) is Anti-Christmas (June 25), and the opposite of Halloween (October 31) is May Day (May 1), then what is the opposite of April 30? A: October 30... Devil's Night! Tuesday, April 29, 2008 11:09 AM Religious Art, continued... Sacerdotal Jargon at Harvard:  Thomas Wolfe (Harvard M.A., 1922) versus  Rosalind Krauss (Harvard M.A., 1964, Ph.D., 1969) on The Kernel of Eternity "No culture has a pact with eternity." -- George Steiner, interview in The Guardian of "At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction.... the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity." -- Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005 From today's online Harvard Crimson: "... under the leadership of Faust, Harvard students should look forward to an ever-growing opportunity for international experience and artistic endeavor."
in a 1932 parody of Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen From a recent book on Wolfgang Pauli, The Innermost Kernel:
A belated happy birthday  Another Harvard figure quoted here on Dec. 5, 2002: "The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color.... The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space-- which he calls the mind or heart of creation-- determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."From a review of Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press hardcover, 1993): Krauss is concerned to present Modernism less in terms of its history than its structure, which she seeks to represent by means of a kind of diagram: "It is more interesting to think of modernism as a graph or table than a history." The "table" is a square with diagonally connected corners, of the kind most likely to be familiar to readers as the Square of Opposition, found in elementary logic texts since the mid-19th century. The square, as Krauss sees it, defines a kind of idealized space "within which to work out unbearable contradictions produced within the real field of history." This she calls, using the inevitable gallicism, "the site of Jameson's Political Unconscious" and then, in art, the optical unconscious, which consists of what Utopian Modernism had to kick downstairs, to repress, to "evacuate... from its field."Rosalind Kraus in The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press paperback, 1994): For a presentation of the Klein Group, see Marc Barbut, "On the Meaning of the Word 'Structure' in Mathematics," in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the Klein group in his analysis of the relation between Kwakiutl and Salish masks in The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 125; and in relation to the Oedipus myth in "The Structural Analysis of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jackobson [sic] and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). In a transformation of the Klein Group, A. J. Greimas has developed the semiotic square, which he describes as giving "a slightly different formulation to the same structure," in "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," On Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 50. Jameson uses the semiotic square in The Political Unconscious (see pp. 167, 254, 256, 277) [Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)], as does Louis Marin in "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia," Glyph, no. 1 (1977), p. 64. For related non-sacerdotal jargon, see... Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A4 (and also the symmetric group S4) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S4 to S3. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals. For radicals of another sort, see A Logocentric Meditation, A Mass for Lucero, and [update of 7 PM] Steven Erlanger in today's New York Times-- "France Still Divided Over Lessons of 1968 Unrest." For material related to Klee's phrase mentioned above by Stevens, "the organic center of all movement in time and space," see the following Google search: Monday, April 28, 2008 7:00 AM Annals of Aesthetics, continued: Religious Art
The black monolith of Kubrick's 2001 is, in its way, an example of religious art.  One artistic shortcoming (or strength-- it is, after all, monolithic) of that artifact is its resistance to being analyzed as a whole consisting of parts, as in a Joycean epiphany. The following figure does allow such an epiphany.  One approach to the epiphany: "Transformations play a major role in modern mathematics." - A biography of Felix Christian Klein The above 2x4 array (2 columns, 4 rows) furnishes an example of a transformation acting on the parts of an organized whole:  For other transformations acting on the eight parts, hence on the 35 partitions, see "Geometry of the 4x4 Square," as well as Peter J. Cameron's "The Klein Quadric and Triality" (pdf), and (for added context) "The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model." For a related structure-- not rectangle but cube-- see Epiphany 2008. Sunday, April 27, 2008 8:28 AM Annals of Aesthetics, continued: Happy Birthday
to the late Gian-Carlo Rota, mathematician and scholar of philosophy Rota* on his favorite philosopher: "I believe Husserl to be the greatest philosopher of all times.... Intellectual honesty is the striking quality of Husserl's writings. He wrote what he honestly believed to be true, neither more nor less. However, honesty is not clarity; as a matter of fact, honesty and clarity are at opposite ends. Husserl proudly refused to stoop to the demands of showmanship that are indispensable in effective communication."  Related material: The Diamond Theorem * Gian-Carlo Rota, "Ten Remarks on Husserl and Phenomenology," in O.K. Wiegand et al. (eds.), Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic, pp. 89-97, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000 |
