Tuesday, June 29, 2004  11:22 PM

ART WARS
for St. Peter's Day

Compare and contrast:


Pigi Cipelli for The New York Times

The Pantheon, Rome

Institute of Contemporary Art,
Philadelphia

Tuesday, June 29, 2004  2:22 PM

When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where? -- Ulysses, conclusion of Ch. 17

For further details on this structure, see

Magic Squares, Finite Planes,
and Points of Inflection
on Elliptic Curves,
by Ezra Brown, and

Visualizing GL(2, p)
by Steven H. Cullinane.

For a more literary approach
to this structure, see

Balanchine's Birthday (Jan. 9, 2003),
Art Theory for Yom Kippur (Oct. 5, 2003),
A Form (May 22, 2004),
Ineluctable (May 27, 2004),
A Form, continued (June 5, 2004),
Parallelisms (June 6, 2004),
Deep Game (June 26, 2004), and
Gameplayers of Zen (June 27, 2004).

To appreciate fully this last entry
on Gameplayers,
one must understand
the concept of "suicide"
in the game of Go
and be reminded
by the fatuous phrase of the
Institute of Contemporary Art
quoted in Gameplayers --
"encompassed by 'nothing' " --
of John 1:5.

Sunday, June 27, 2004  7:11 PM

"The void, the ineffable, the sublime,
nonsense, nihilism, zero—
all are encompassed by 'nothing.' "

-- Institute of Contemporary Art,
Philadelphia

"The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless."

-- Yasunari Kawabata, Nobel lecture, 1968

Saturday, June 26, 2004  12:00 PM

Advanced Study



Herman Goldstine (left), shown in 1952
at the Institute for Advanced Study
with J. Robert Oppenheimer (center)
and John von Neumann (right).

Click on the picture above
for an obituary in today's New York Times
of Goldstine, who died on June 16, 2004.

Click on the picture below
for an event appropriate to
the date of Goldstine's death.

The event, a talk on black holes,
took place at the American
Philosophical Society
in Philadelphia.
Goldstine was
executive
director
of the Society
from 1984 to 1997.

Saturday, June 26, 2004  3:03 AM

Gedächtniskunst:



Figure A

Neighborhood in a
Cellular Automaton
by Adam Campbell

For more of the Gedächtnis
in this Kunst, see the following
Google search on shc759:



Figure B

Note that the reference to "forerunners" in fig. B occurs in a journal entry of June 12, 2002. See also the reference to a journal entry of the following day, June 13, 2002, in last Tuesday's Dirty Trick.

Those who have viewed Campbell's applet (see  fig. A) may appreciate the following observation of poet and Dante translator Robert Pinsky:

"... a grid, and a flow--
that is the essence of terza rima...."

-- Poetry, Computers, and Dante's Inferno

For some related remarks
on the muses and epic poetry,
see a paper on Walter Benjamin:

"Here the memory (Gedächtnis) means
'the epic faculty par excellence.' "
(Benjamin, Der Erzähler, 1936: in
Gesammelte Schriften, 1991, II.2, 453)

-- Benjamin on Experience,
Narrative, and History (pdf)

One possible connection to the muses is, as noted in a link in yesterday's Ado, via George Balanchine.

An apt link to epic poetry (aside from the reference to Dante above) is, via the June 12, 2002, entry, to the epic The Gameplayers of Zan (the third reference in fig. B above).

The applet linked below fig. A very nicely illustrates the "structured chaos" of a space described by automata theory.  For a literary approach to such a space, see the Gameplayers entry.

For the benefit of art critic Robert Hughes, who recently made a distinction between "fast art" and "slow art," the Campbell applet has a convenient speed control.

Friday, June 25, 2004  2:00 PM

Ado



Click on picture
for some background.

Related material:
A Form (May 22, 2004),
A Form, continued (June 5, 2004),
Balanchine's Birthday (Jan. 9, 2003),
Pictures of Nothing (Aug. 23, 2003)

Tuesday, June 22, 2004  9:00 AM

Dirty Trick

Some quotations in memory of philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who died on June 13, 2004.

From the Hampshire obituary in The Guardian:

I He frequently told the story of how, towards the end of the war, he had to interrogate a French traitor (imprisoned by the Free French), who refused to cooperate unless he was allowed to live. Should Hampshire, knowing the man was condemned to die, promise him a reprieve, which he was in no position to give, or truthfully refuse it, thereby jeopardising the lives of Resistance fighters? "If you're in a war," said Hampshire, "you can't start thinking, 'Well I can't lie to a man who's going to be shot tomorrow and tell him that he isn't.' " But what the whole anecdote, and its incessant retelling, revealed was that Hampshire had, in fact, thought precisely what he said was unthinkable, and that whichever of the two decisions he finally took lay heavy on his conscience ever afterwards. Indicatively, too, it was especially loathsome to him because, although he did not say this in so many words, the traitor was almost a mirror image of himself - a cultivated young intellectual, looking like a film star, much influenced by elegant literary stylists - except that, in the traitor's case, his literary mentors were fascist. II It is hard to know how Hampshire's academic career was vitiated by the scandal over his affair with Ayer's wife Renee, whom he married in 1961 after a divorce in which he was named as co-respondent. Even if less a matter of the dons' moral conviction than their concern over how All Souls would appear, the affair caused a massive furore....

From a log24 entry on the day before Hampshire's death:

I "Hemingway called it a dirty trick.  It might even be an ancient Ordeal laid down on us by an evil Inquisitor in Space.... the dirty Ordeal by Death...." -- Jack Kerouac in Desolation Angels II The New Yorker of June 14  & 21, 2004: ...in 'The Devil's Eye,' Bergman's little-known comedy of 1960. Pablo seduces the wife of a minister, and then, sorrowful and sated, falling to his knees, he addresses her thus: 'First, I'll finish off that half-dug vegetable patch I saw. Then I'll sit and let the rain fall on me. I shall feel wonderfully cool. And I'll breakfast on one of those sour apples down by the gate. After that, I shall go back to Hell.' "

Whether Hampshire is now in Hell, the reader may surmise.  Some evidence in Hampshire's  favor:

His review of On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry, in The New York Review of Books of November 18, 1999.  Note particularly his remarks on Fred Astaire, and the links to Astaire and the Four Last Things in an earlier entry of June 12, which was, as noted above, the day before Hampshire's death.

As for the day of death itself, consider the  following  remark with which Hampshire concludes his review of Scarry's  book:

"But one must occasionally fly the flag, and the flag, incorrigibly, is beauty."

In this connection, see the entry of the Sunday Hampshire died, Spider Web, as well as entries on the harrowing of hell -- Holy Saturday, 2004 -- and on beauty --  Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday and A Mass for Lucero (written, as it happens, on June 13, 2002).

Thursday, June 17, 2004  11:00 PM