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Saturday, December 14, 2002 |
Back to Bach Our site music now moves from the romantic longing of "Skylark" to a classical theme: what might be called "the spirit of eight," by Bach: Canon 14 Fourteen Canons on the First Eight Notes For more details, click here. For a different set of variations on the theme Generating the Octad Generator. For more details, click here.
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Saturday, December 14, 2002 |
Don Juan vs. San Juan On this midnight in the garden of good and evil, we compare two ways of praising feminine beauty... a skill that seems sorely lacking in the priesthood of the Catholic Church. The following is adapted from a paper journal note of November 12, 1997. |
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Friday, December 13, 2002 |
ART WARS: Two stories related to my recent entries on the death of Stan Rice (Sequel, 12/11/02) and the career of Jodie Foster (Rhyme Scheme, 12/13/02) —
See also my entry of December 5, 2002,Key (for Joan Didion's birthday): I faced myself that day — Joan Didion, "On Self-Respect," Divine Comedy Didion and her husand John Gregory Dunne If the incomparable Max Bialystock
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Friday, December 13, 2002 |
Rhyme Scheme "The introduction of Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs) "They should have sent a poet."
On the question of what reality is: — Erving Goffman,
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Friday, December 13, 2002 |
Rhyme Scheme |
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Friday, December 13, 2002 |
Dead Poets Society Man's spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best, — The Caged Skylark, In accordance with this sentiment, |
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Thursday, December 12, 2002 |
Play It From a Kol Nidre sermon: "...in every generation 36 righteous A scene at the Sands in Las Vegas, "What do you think," "Thirty-six," the girl said. For the rest of the time Maria was in Las Vegas Today's site music, in honor of |
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Wednesday, December 11, 2002 |
Sequel
"This world is not conclusion; — Emily Dickinson (See yesterday's notes.) And the hair of my flesh stood up (Job 4:15). — Stan Rice, "Doing Being" (See yesterday's notes.) Stan Rice died on Monday.
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Wednesday, December 11, 2002 |
Culture Clash at Midnight From the Catholic Church: From Paris, Texas: In a future life, if not in this one, Dante might assign these two theologians to Purgatory, where they could teach one another. Both might benefit if Shepard took Apczynski's course "The Intellectual Journey" and if Apczynski read Shepard's new book of short stories, Great Dream of Heaven. Background music might consist of Sinatra singing "Three Coins in the Fountain" (for Shepard -- See my journal notes of December 10, 2002) alternating with the Dixie Chicks singing "Cowboy, Take Me Away" (for Apczynski, who is perhaps unfamiliar with life on the range). Today's site music is this fervent prayer by the Dixie Chicks to a cowboy-theologian like Shepard. |
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Tuesday, December 10, 2002 |
Point of No Return From Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar for December 10: An album recorded in September 1961: Songs in the above list: September Song * When the World was Young Not in the list, but in the album: As Time Goes By The Savannah Connection: Augustus Saint-Gaudens From by Wallace Stevens "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...." Part of a journal entry for
Point of No Return was Sinatra's Note the strategic placement |
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Tuesday, December 10, 2002 |
Great Dream of Heaven The title is that of Sam Shepard's new book of short stories. It is relevant to several of my recent journal entries. This author's own title also seems relevant. Here is an excerpt from a web page on The Church of the Good Shepherd: "This is the oldest church in Beverly Hills, and over the years, this small house of worship has been the local parish church for most of the Catholic movie stars who live in Beverly Hills.... It has seen numerous celebrity weddings and funerals. Although the church's interior is modest (it seats just 600), and its decor surprisingly simple, the Church of the Good Shepherd has been featured in several Hollywood films: most notably, it was the location for the funeral scene in the 1954 version of 'A Star is Born.'" Today's Birthday: Emily Dickinson Complete Poems, 1924 Part Four: Time and Eternity This world is not conclusion; Born Yesterday: Kirk Douglas From Douglas's Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning (Simon & Schuster, 1997) — "Selling artwork, devoting time to charitable causes, writing novels, are all worthwhile means of occupying your time when good scripts aren't coming your way. But then, in the spring of 1993, one did. It was called Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, a story of a growing friendship betwen two old men dealing with the twilight of their lives.... It was brilliant.... I called my agent... "So make the deal." A long pause. "But the director wants to meet you." .... .... My agent called the next day. "She really likes you, Kirk... but... ah," he started to stutter. "What?" "She wants Richard Harris." In the film of Dead on October 25, 2002, Actor Richard Harris A journal entry of October 25, 2002: Wrestling Pablo Picasso Aster on a Picasso by Karsh Wrestling Ernest The old men know when an old man dies. A description of the title story "Two old men who share a house are as close as a married couple until a competition to wake up first in the morning and a mutual fascination with a Denny's waitress drive them apart." |
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Tuesday, December 10, 2002 |
Three Coins in the Fountain
The reverse of three bronze coins "Constantine like many of his predecessors had worshipped the Greek and Roman gods, particularly Apollo, Mars and Victory. This fact is evident in the portrayal of these gods on the earliest of Constantine’s coins. Yet surprisingly, even after his dream experience, and subsequent victory over Maxentius, it is recorded that he continued to worship these gods. Although the images of Apollo, Mars and Victory quickly disappeared from his coinage, later coins minted under Constantine shows that he likely continued to worship the sol invicta [sic] or ‘Unconquered Sun’ for 10 years or more after his dream experience. Yet, over a period of years, the experience of the sign, and the victory at the Milvian bridge, eventually led Constantine to favour and later to convert to the Christian faith." — Ross Nightingale, "The 'Sign' that Changed the Course of History," in Ancient Coin Forum "Three coins in the fountain, -- Sinatra's version of the 1954 song Which one will the fountain bless? In order to answer this theological conundrum, we need to know more about the unfamiliar god Sol Invictus. A quick web search reveals that some fanatical Protestants believe that the Roman deities Sol Invictus and Mithra were virtually the same. Of course, it is unwise to take the paranoid ravings of Protestants too seriously, but in this case they may be on to something. The Catholic Church itself seems to identify Sol Invictus with Mithra: "Sunday was kept holy in honour of Mithra.... The 25 December was observed as his birthday, the natalis invicti, the rebirth of the winter-sun, unconquered by the rigours of the season. A Mithraic community was not merely a religious congregation..." — The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911 edition. Nihil Obstat, October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor It would seem, therefore, that as December 25 approaches we are preparing to celebrate the festival of Sol Invictus. This perhaps answers the theological riddle posed by Sammy Cahn. From "Things Change," starring Don Ameche: Today's site music celebrates |
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Monday, December 09, 2002 |
ART WARS: A Metaphysical State Diane Keaton Frank Sinatra "Heaven is a state, a sort of metaphysical state." — John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938 "I've always been enthralled by the notion that Time is an illusion, a trick our minds play in an attempt to keep things separate, without any reality of its own. My experience suggests that this is literally true, but not the kind of truth that can be acted upon.... I'm always sad and always happy. As someone says in Diane Keaton's film 'Heaven,' 'It's kind of a lost cause, but it's a great experience.'" — Charles Small, Harvard '64 25th Anniv. Report, 1989 "As a child she would wait out her naptime like a prison sentence. She would lie in bed and stare at the wallpaper pattern and wonder what would happen if there were no heaven. She thought the universe would probably go on and on, spilling all over everything. Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe, a lid that kept everything underneath it where it belonged." — Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge, 1987 Today's site music illustrates
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Sunday, December 08, 2002 |
 in the New York Times of December 5. The photo, from a different website, is of a room by the architect Luis Barragán. From the Nobel Prize lecture of Octavio Paz on December 8, 1990 — twelve years ago today: "Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sindbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present." Today's site music is courtesy of the Sinatra MIDI Files.
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Saturday, December 07, 2002 |
This space reserved for a glass slipper. |
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Saturday, December 07, 2002 |
ART WARS: Shall we read? From Contact, by Carl Sagan: "You mean you could decode a picture hiding in pi From The Nation - Thailand New Jataka books Published on Dec 8, 2002 "The Ten Jataka, or 10 incarnations of the Lord Buddha before his enlightenment, are among the most fascinating religious stories....
His Majesty the King wrote a marvellous book on the second incarnation of the Lord Buddha.... It has become a classic, with the underlying aim of encouraging Thais to pursue the virtue of perseverance.
For her master's degree at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Arts, Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn wrote a dissertation related to the Ten Jataka of the Buddha. Now with the 4th Cycle Birthday of Princess Sirindhorn approaching on April 2, 2003, a group of artists, led by prominent painter Theeraphan Lorpaiboon, has produced a 10-volume set, the "Ten Jataka of Virtues", as a gift to the Princess.
Once launched on December 25, the "Ten Jataka of Virtues" will rival any masterpiece produced in book form...." "How much story do you want?"
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Saturday, December 07, 2002 |
Satori at Pearl HarborThe following old weblog entry seems
The appropriate response to Vega's Buddhism today seems to be the following classic by James Taylor: "Won't you look down upon me, Jesus? This is today's new site background music. For more log entries relevant to today, see |
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Friday, December 06, 2002 |
Great Simplicity
according to the Zen Calendar. "Daisetsu" is said to mean "Great Simplicity." For those who prefer Harry Potter and
To Have and Have Not Those who prefer traditional Western religions may like a site on the Trinity that contains this: "Zen metaphysics is perhaps most succinctly set forth in the words 'not-two." But even when he uses this expression, Suzuki is quick to assert that it implies no monism. Not-two, it is claimed, is not the same as one.* But when Suzuki discusses the relationship of Zen with Western mysticism, it is more difficult to escape the obvious monistic implications of his thinking. Consider the following:
*See: Daisetz T. Suzuki, 'Basic Thoughts Underlying Eastern Ethical and Social Practice' in Philosophy and Culture — East and West: East-West Philosophy in Practical Perspective, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), p. 429 ** Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Mysticism Christian and Buddhist (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957, Unwin paperback, 1979), p. 57. Personally, I am reminded by Suzuki's satori on this date that today is the eve of the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. I am also reminded by the rather intolerant tract on the Trinity quoted above that the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert at a test site named Trinity. Of course, sometimes intolerance is justified. Concluding unscientific postscript: On the same day in 1896 that D. T. Suzuki attained satori, Dies irae, dies illa. 1:06 pm |
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Friday, December 06, 2002 |
St. Nicholas versus Mt. Doom Today is the feast day of St. Nicholas, who is thought to have died on December 6. For some meditations on time, click here. For a perhaps more pleasant meditation — on eternity — listen to this site's background music, which has been changed in honor of the birth, on December 6, 1896, of lyricist Ira Gershwin. |
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Friday, December 06, 2002 |
Mount Doom Just the facts: Today, December 6, is the feast of Saint Nicholas. Saints are generally commemorated on the date of their death. On this date in 1949, Huddy Ledbetter ("Leadbelly") died. On this date in 1989, forty years later, actor John Payne ("Miracle on 34th Street") died. The facts with some trimmings: Yesterday's web entry "Key" was based on a page in the web site of Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church. This suggests the following illustration: Picture from a "Lord of the Rings" website
An earlier log24.net entry: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 Kylie on Tequila From a web page on Kylie Minogue: Turns out she's a party girl who loves Tequila: From a web page on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that "A corpse will be transported by express!" (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).
you gotta ride it like you find it. Get your ticket at the station of the Rock Island Line.  in Rock Island, Illinois |
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Thursday, December 05, 2002 |
For Otto Preminger's birthday: Lichtung! Today's symbol-mongering (see my Sept. 7, 2002, note The Boys from Uruguay) involves two illustrations from the website of the Deutsche Schule Montevideo, in Uruguay. The first, a follow-up to Wallace Stevens's remarks on poetry and painting in my note "Sacerdotal Jargon" of earlier today, is a poem, "Lichtung," by Ernst Jandl, with an illustration by Lucia Spangenberg.
manche meinen by Ernst Jandl The second, from the same school, illustrates the meaning of "Lichtung" explained in my note The Shining of May 29:
From the Deutsche Schule Montevideo mathematics page, an illustration of the Pythagorean theorem:
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Thursday, December 05, 2002 |
Key Today is Joan Didion's birthday. It is also the date that the first Phi Beta Kappa chapter was formed, at the College of William and Mary. A reading for today, from a web page called Respect: "In her book Slouching Toward Bethlehem Didion writes about being a student in college. She says she expected to be voted into Phi Beta Kappa but discovered she didn't have the grades for it. She says: 'I had somehow thought myself [as being] exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others.' But, Didion continues: Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man. I lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix in hand. What Joan Didion discovered in the wake of this incident was that self-respect, although it was of importance, had to come from something inside her, rather than from the approval of others. She says she learned that self-respect has to do with 'a separate peace, a private reconciliation,' and at the heart of it is a willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life, whatever its rewards or lack of them. Didion says: ... people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.... People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. — Comments by David Sammons For more of Didion's essay, click here. |
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Thursday, December 05, 2002 |
Sacerdotal Jargon From the website Abstracts and Preprints in Clifford Algebra [1996, Oct 8]: Paper: clf-alg/good9601 The following is a picture of K6, the complete graph on six points. It may be used to illustrate various concepts in finite geometry as well as the properties of Dirac matrices described above. From "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." 3:17 am |
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Wednesday, December 04, 2002 |
Symmetry and a Trinity From a web page titled Spectra: "What we learn from our whole discussion and what has indeed become a guiding principle in modern mathematics is this lesson: Whenever you have to do with a structure-endowed entity S try to determine its group of automorphisms, the group of those element-wise transformations which leave all structural relations undisturbed. You can expect to gain a deep insight into the constitution of S in this way. After that you may start to investigate symmetric configurations of elements, i.e., configurations which are invariant under a certain subgroup of the group of all automorphisms . . ." — Hermann Weyl in Symmetry, Princeton University Press, 1952, page 144
"... any color at all can be made from three different colors, in our case, red, green, and blue lights. By suitably mixing the three together we can make anything at all, as we demonstrated . . .
Further, these laws are very interesting mathematically. For those who are interested in the mathematics of the thing, it turns out as follows. Suppose that we take our three colors, which were red, green, and blue, but label them A, B, and C, and call them our primary colors. Then any color could be made by certain amounts of these three: say an amount a of color A, an amount b of color B, and an amount c of color C makes X: Now suppose another color Y is made from the same three colors: Then it turns out that the mixture of the two lights (it is one of the consequences of the laws that we have already mentioned) is obtained by taking the sum of the components of X and Y: It is just like the mathematics of the addition of vectors, where (a, b, c ) are the components of one vector, and (a', b', c' ) are those of another vector, and the new light Z is then the "sum" of the vectors. This subject has always appealed to physicists and mathematicians." — According to the author of the Spectra site, this is Richard Feynman in Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics, The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures, by Feynman and Steven Weinberg, Cambridge University Press, 1989. These two concepts -- symmetry as invariance under a group of transformations, and complicated things as linear combinations (the technical name for Feynman's sums) of simpler things -- underlie much of modern mathematics, both pure and applied. 11:22 pm |
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Tuesday, December 03, 2002 |
From the Erlangen Program See the following, apparently all by Jean-Pierre Marquis, Département de Philosophie, Université de Montréal: See also the following by Marquis: |
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Tuesday, December 03, 2002 |
Symmetry, Invariance, and Objectivity The book Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, by Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, was reviewed in the New York Review of Books issue dated June 27, 2002. On page 76 of this book, published by Harvard University Press in 2001, Nozick writes: "An objective fact is invariant under various transformations. It is this invariance that constitutes something as an objective truth...." Compare this with Hermann Weyl's definition in his classic Symmetry (Princeton University Press, 1952, page 132): "Objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms." It has finally been pointed out in the Review, by a professor at Göttingen, that Nozick's book should have included Weyl's definition. I pointed this out on June 10, 2002. For a survey of material on this topic, see this Google search on "nozick invariances weyl" (without the quotes). Nozick's omitting Weyl's definition amounts to blatant plagiarism of an idea. Of course, including Weyl's definition would have required Nozick to discuss seriously the concept of groups of automorphisms. Such a discussion would not have been compatible with the current level of philosophical discussion at Harvard, which apparently seldom rises above the level of cocktail-party chatter. A similarly low level of discourse is found in the essay "Geometrical Creatures," by Jim Holt, also in the issue of the New York Review of Books dated December 19, 2002. Holt at least writes well, and includes (if only in parentheses) a remark that is highly relevant to the Nozick-vs.-Weyl discussion of invariance elsewhere in the Review: "All the geometries ever imagined turn out to be variations on a single theme: how certain properties of a space remain unchanged when its points get rearranged." (p. 69) This is perhaps suitable for intelligent but ignorant adolescents; even they, however, should be given some historical background. Holt is talking here about the Erlangen program of Felix Christian Klein, and should say so. For a more sophisticated and nuanced discussion, see this web page on Klein's Erlangen Program, apparently by Jean-Pierre Marquis, Département de Philosophie, Université de Montréal. For more by Marquis, see my later entry for today, "From the Erlangen Program to Category Theory."
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Monday, December 02, 2002 |
Art isn't Easy In honor of Georges Seurat, whose birthday is today, this site's music is now "Putting It Together," by Stephen Sondheim. For a relevant quote by Sondheim and some related material, see
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Monday, December 02, 2002 |
Art Isn't Easy In honor of Georges Seurat, whose birthday is today, this site's music is now "Putting It Together," by Stephen Sondheim. For a relevant quote by Sondheim and some related material, see The Diamond 16 Puzzle and Notes on Literary and Philosophical Puzzles, as well as Logos and Logic. |
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Sunday, December 01, 2002 |
Milestones in Catholic History From Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar:  Shamrock Bingo Angel "It never hurts to have an Irish angel on your team! This adorable red-headed fabric cherub, complete with sparkling golden wings and a shamrock necklace, just may be someone’s lucky charm." For a Jewish approach to this milestone of theology, see my note commemorating the death, on Christmas Day, 2000, of one of the twentieth century's great Scrooge figures, Willard van Orman Quine:
As that note observes, we may imagine Quine to have escaped the torments of Hell. For some further adventures, see my note Quine in Purgatory. 12:25 pm |
