Sunday, August 15, 2004  3:17 PM

The Line

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 6 (italics are mine):

"A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance."

The Sophist, by Plato:

STRANGER - We are far from having exhausted the more exact thinkers who treat of being and not-being. But let us be content to leave them, and proceed to view those who speak less precisely; and we shall find as the result of all, that the nature of being is quite as difficult to comprehend as that of not-being.

THEAETETUS - Then now we will go to the others.

STRANGER - There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence.

THEAETETUS - How is that?

STRANGER - Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body.

THEAETETUS - I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are.

STRANGER - And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.

THEAETETUS - True.

-- Translated by Benjamin Jowett

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 18:

"The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two...

The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane

hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic...and the split is clean. There's no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret."

What Pirsig means by "quality" is close to what Yagoda means, in the previous entry, by "style."

Sunday, August 15, 2004  2:29 AM

In memory of Julia Child,
born on this date:

Elements of Style 

"Born Julia McWilliams in 1912, she was the product of the best American genetic engineering, bouncing out of an old-money, privileged Pasadena childhood like a kind of WASP merry prankster...."

-- Dorothy Kalins in Newsweek, issue dated Aug. 23, 2004

When I read this, admiring the style of both Julia Child and Dorothy Kalins, I thought of a  blurb I'd seen yesterday in aldaily.com:

"If only academics had the wit and nerve to honor style... more»"

I didn't click on the blurb then, but the spirit of Julia prompted me to click just now.  This is what I found, in an essay written while Child was still alive, as examples of style:

"Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a 20-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster playing a chorus of 'All the Things You Are,' of Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme fixing a duck à l'orange, or of Pieter Brueghel and Vincent van Gogh painting the same farmhouse."

-- Ben Yagoda in Chronicle of Higher Education, issue dated Aug. 13, 2004

Thursday, August 12, 2004  7:26 AM

Battle of Gods and Giants,
Part III:

The Invisible Made Visible

From today's New York Times:

"Leon Golub, an American painter of expressionistic, heroic-scale figures that reflect dire modern political conditions, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 82....

In the 1960's he produced a series, called 'Gigantomachies,' of battling, wrestling figures. They were based on classical models, including the Hellenistic Altar of Pergamon. But there was nothing idealized about them."

The Hellenistic Altar of Pergamon,
from  Battle of Gods and Giants:

Golub's New York Times obituary concludes with a quote from a 1991 interview:

"Asked about his continuing and future goal he said, 'To head into real!'"

From Tuesday's Battle of Gods and Giants:

This sort of mathematics illustrates the invisible "form" or "idea" behind the visible two-color pattern.  Hence it exemplifies, in a way, the conflict described by Plato between those who say that "real existence belongs only to that which can be handled" and those who say that "true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms."

Perhaps, if Golub is fortunate enough to escape from the afterlife version of Plato's Cave, he will also be fortunate enough to enter Purgatory, where there awaits a course in reality, in the form of...

Geometry for Jews.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004  5:35 AM

Battle of Gods and Giants,
Part II:

Wonders of the Invisible World

Yesterday at about 5 PM I added a section titled "Invariants" to the 3:01 PM entry Battle of Gods and Giants.  Within this added section was the sentence

"This sort of mathematics illustrates the invisible 'form' or 'idea' behind the visible two-color pattern."

Now, at about 5 AM, I see in today's New York Times a review of a book titled The Invisible Century, by Richard Panek.  The reviewer, David Gelernter, says the "invisible" of the title refers to

"science that is done not by studying what you can see.... but by repairing instead to the privacy of your own mind, with the shades drawn and the lights off: the inner sanctum of intellectual history."

The book concerns the research of Einstein and Freud.  Gelernter says

"As Mr. Panek usefully notes, Einstein himself first called his work an 'invariant theory,' not a 'relativity theory.' Einstein does not say 'everything is relative,' or anything remotely like it."

The reader who clicks on the word "invariants" in Battle of Gods and Giants will receive the same information.

Gelernter's conclusion:

"The Invisible Century is a complex book about a complex topic. Mr. Panek's own topic is not so much invisibility, it seems to me, as a different kind of visibility, centering on mind-pictures revealed by introspection, which are just as sharp and clear as (for example) the mind-music Beethoven heard when he was deaf.

Inner visibility is a fascinating topic...."

As is synchronicity, a topic in the work of a greater man than Freud-- Carl Jung.  The above remarks may be viewed as "synchronicity made visible."

All of this was, of course, foreshadowed in my web page "A Mathematician's Aesthetics" of August 2000:

Tuesday, August 10, 2004  3:01 PM

Battle of Gods and Giants

In checking the quotations from Dante in the previous entry, I came across the intriguing site Gigantomachia:

"A gigantomachia or primordial battle between the gods has been retold in myth, cult, art and theory for thousands of years, from the Egyptians to Heidegger. This site will present the history of the theme. But it will do so in an attempt to raise the question of the contemporary relevance of it. Does the gigantomachia take place today? Where? When? In what relation to you and me?"

Perhaps atop the Empire State Building?

(See An Affair to Remember and  Empire State Building to Honor Fay Wray.)

Perhaps in relation to what the late poet Donald Justice called "the wood within"?

Perhaps in relation to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and the Feast of the Metamorphosis?

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps at Pergamon:

Perhaps at Pergamon Press:

Invariants 

"What modern painters are trying to do,
if they only knew it, is paint invariants."

-- James J. Gibson in Leonardo
(Vol. 11, pp. 227-235.
Pergamon Press Ltd., 1978)

An example of invariant structure:

The three line diagrams above result from the three partitions, into pairs of 2-element sets, of the 4-element set from which the entries of the bottom colored figure are drawn.  Taken as a set, these three line diagrams describe the structure of the bottom colored figure.  After coordinatizing the figure in a suitable manner, we find that this set of three line diagrams is invariant under the group of 16 binary translations acting on the colored figure.

A more remarkable invariance -- that of symmetry itself -- is observed if we arbitrarily and repeatedly permute rows and/or columns and/or 2x2 quadrants of the colored figure above. Each resulting figure has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry.

This sort of mathematics illustrates the invisible "form" or "idea" behind the visible two-color pattern.  Hence it exemplifies, in a way, the conflict described by Plato between those who say that "real existence belongs only to that which can be handled" and those who say that "true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms."

For further details, see a section on Plato in the Gigantomachia site.

Tuesday, August 10, 2004  5:24 AM

The Day Justice Died

But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
    lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
    singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
    turning and turning back
   With the same terror,
                into the deep thicket
   Beside the highway,
                at home in the dark thicket.

I say the wood within is the dark wood....

-- Donald Justice, "Sadness"

In memory of Justice,
Dante excerpts:

Canto I

Midway in the journey of our life
 I found myself in a dark wood,
 for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell what that
 wood was, wild, rugged, harsh;
 the very thought of it renews the fear!

Canto III

-- Translation by Charles S. Singleton,
selection by Paul J. Viscuso

Justice moved my high maker...

From the day Justice died,
Friday, August 6, 2004,
The Feast of the Metamorphosis:

Monday, August 9, 2004  10:00 PM

Quilt Geometry

Monday, August 9, 2004  5:45 PM

Hollywood Ending

"... they will meet at the top of
the Empire State Building at 5 PM...
'It's the closest thing to Heaven
we have in New York City!' "

Monday, August 9, 2004  4:00 AM

Shape Note

A variation on the theme of the previous entry, Quartet.

As in the previous entry, the illustration on the left is from a Log24 entry on the date of death of the person on the right.

Relevant quotations:

"It was rather like solving a crossword puzzle."

-- Derek Taunt, on breaking the Enigma Code

Four Quartets:

"... history is a pattern
Of timeless moments."

Cambridge News obituary:

"He [Dr. Taunt] and Angela [his wife] founded the Friends of Kettle's Yard when the Arts Council cut its grant in 1984 and together organised countless fundraising activities for the museum and gallery."

"How do we relate to the past? How are our memories affected by the cultural context that shapes our present? How many, and what kind of narratives compete in the representation of a historical moment? Rear View Mirror sets out to explore these questions and examine the devices we use to reconstruct events and people through different lenses...."

-- On a future Kettle's Yard exhibition

Time past and time future
What might have been
      and what has been
Point to one end,
      which is always present.

-- Four Quartets

 "The diamonds will be shining,
no longer in the rough."

-- Diamonds in the Rough

See the Log24 remarks on Jesus College-- Taunt's college-- in a web page for June Carter Cash, The Circle is Unbroken.

Sunday, August 8, 2004  6:08 AM

Quartet

An illustration from July 26,
Jung's birthday and the date
of Alexander Hammid's death:  

Jung's Model of the Self:   Four Quartets: "... history is a pattern Of timeless moments."

Gerard Malanga, 2003 Alexander Hammid

From today's New York Times: Alexander Hammid, 96, Filmmaker Known for Many Styles, Dies By KATHRYN L. SHATTUCK Published: August 8, 2004 lexander Hammid, a filmmaker whose body of work spanned the genesis of the experimental movement in Czechoslovakia, early anti-Nazi documentaries and soaring modern Imax spectacles, died on July 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 96. His work in the 1950's and early 60's involved his passion for the arts,  [including] ... a collaboration on Gian Carlo Menotti's opera "The Medium" and a documentary series of master classes by the cellist Pablo Casals....

"... legend has it, supported by Casals himself, that he was conceived when Brahms began his B-flat Major Quartet, of which Casals owned the original manuscript, and that he was born when Brahms completed its composition."

-- http://www.bach-cantatas.com/
Bio/Casals-Pablo.htm

Sunday, August 8, 2004  4:01 AM

Consacré

François Furet:

Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur

"Il a consacré l'essentiel de ses travaux à l'histoire de la Révolution française."

-- academie-francaise.fr/immortels

"St. Pierre-Toirac, in the Lot valley, has only minor entries in the Guide vert and the Guide bleu; because it has no hotel it is not in the red Michelin guide. The sole monument is a Romanesque church, a hybrid between a village church and the fortified churches of the region. It was, when we first visited, in very bad shape. François said he would see that it was restored, and so it eventually was."

-- David P. Jordan, François Furet: A Personal Reminiscence

See also an entry for Aug. 6,
Feast of the Metamorphosis:

In memory of Rick James

Incense, Wine, Candles

Three's Not a Crowd

"Mr. James's wild rise came to an ignominious halt in 1993, when he was convicted of assaulting two women. The first attack occurred in 1991, when he and girlfriend Tanya Anne Hijazi restrained and burned a young woman with a hot crack pipe during a week-long cocaine binge at his house in West Hollywood.

He was free on bail when the second assault occurred in 1992, in his West Hollywood hotel room. A music executive, Mary Sauger, testified that she had gone to his room for a business meeting with Mr. James and Hijazi and that the couple beat her and held her prisoner for 20 hours. Mr. James could have been sentenced to life in prison had he been convicted of a torture charge."

Incense, wine, candles...

Some would say
bell, book, and candle
would be more appropriate.

Saturday, August 7, 2004  3:00 PM

Playing God:

The Color of
Collateral

John Lahr (Log24 on 1/26 2003):

"The play's narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase 'deus ex machina' a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role."

"It's not easy being green."
-- Jill O'Hara    

Saturday, August 7, 2004  4:07 AM

Communion

Ian Lee on the communion of saints and the association of ideas (in The Third Word War, 1978) 

"The association is the idea"

Herman Melville on the association of ideas:

"In me, many worthies recline, and converse."

Stephen Hunter yesterday on the protagonist of the new film Collateral:

"He dresses Italian, shoots German (suits by Versace, pistol by Heckler & Koch), talks like Norman Mailer's White Negro and improvises brilliantly."  

Anagram by Dante (Filipponi, that is) on the name of Gianni Versace:

Can Give a Siren

Sirens, true sirens verily be,
Sirens, waylayers in the sea.

-- Herman Melville, quoted
early yesterday by stephenhoy

Siren and White Negro:

See Gates's essay on
Anatole Broyard and
the log24 Bastille Day
entry on Mr. Motley's
neighborhood.

"... there are many associations of ideas which do not correspond to any actual connection of cause and effect in the world of phenomena...."

-- John Fiske, "The Primeval Ghost-World," quoted in the Heckler & Coch weblog

And, finally, brilliance:

Friday, August 6, 2004  10:01 PM

Really Advanced French --

In memory of Rick James

"Three's not a crowd to her.    She says, 'Room 714, I'll be waiting.' When I get there she's got    incense, wine and candles. It's such a freaky scene." -- Rick James, "Super Freak"

From Google:

FAZED - Slorum
... Date: 5/28/04 @ 11:34 AM, 560. "Room 714, I'll be waiting". does anyone know what the room # signifies? From: tigeropie, Date: 5/28/04 @ 11:42 AM, 561. Bastille Day? ...
www.fazed.net/forum/?p=slorum&id=12191&page=12 - 51k - Cached - Similar pages

From Jill O'Hara and Company:

Dead End

From Room 714 and Bastille Day:

"This conference is dedicated to the memory of François Furet....  The conference will take place at Hunter College, City University of New York, Hunter College West, Room 714."

-- Conference for the Study of Political Thought, 1999 program note

From The Society for
French Historical Studies: 

François Furet:
A Personal Reminiscence

From Room 714, Hunter College:

Life and Death in the Brain,
Jan. 16, 2004

From Log24, Jan. 16, 2004:

Forum

The annual World Social Forum started Jan. 16 in Bombay ("Mumbai"), India.

From "Dead End":

Dead end
No joking
Dead end
My friend

--  Hair - Les chansons

Friday, August 6, 2004  6:29 PM

Epistle and Hymns

In the spirit of Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs, we conclude our Hiroshima Day service with a link to The Epistle of Jeremiah and a deadly trinity of singers:

Friday, August 6, 2004  5:01 PM

Sermon for Hiroshima Day

In a comment, a Xangan recently made a pun on the name "Gennifer" (as in Flowers)... "geno-pher."  I am still not sure what he meant, but I appreciate his prompting me to look up the etymology of gen words, one of which is...

genesis - O.E., from L. genesis, adopted as title of first book of Old Testament in Vulgate, from Gk. genesis "origin, creation, generation," from gignesthai "to be born," related to genos "race, birth, descent" (see genus). As such, it translated Heb. bereshith, lit. "in the beginning," which was the first word of the text, taken in error as its title. Extended sense of "origin, creation" first recorded in Eng. 1604.

This ties in with the end of the previous entry, which recommended that the reader consult Log24 entries of Aug. 6, 2002.  Taking my own advice, I did so, and found that the current pope on Aug. 6, 1993, cited Genesis 1:26 --

And God said, Let us
make man in our image,
after our likeness....

Taking the chapter and verse numbers as also having deep religious significance, let us  consult the Log24 entries for 1/26 2003 and 1/26 2004.

In Our Image  

We find that 1/26 2003, and the entries on earlier days that lead up to it, deals with Paul Newman, Our Town, The Hustler, Super Bowl Sunday, and God.

After Our Likeness

We find that 1/26 2004 deals with God's self-definition on Mount Sinai.  Lucifer also appears.  Karol Wojtyla would do well to click on the following link for an expert characterization of Lucifer:

hypocrite lecteur!
mon semblable, mon frère.

Friday, August 6, 2004  2:29 AM

See, too, the Log24 entries
for August 6, 2002.

Thursday, August 5, 2004  4:06 PM

In the beginning
was...
the recursion?

"Words are events."
-- The Walter J. Ong Project,
    quoted in Log24 on Aug. 25, 2003 

"Words are events."
-- The Walter J. Ong Project,
    quoted in the Heckler & Coch weblog
    on July 17, 2004 as part of a section
    titled "Recursive, Wide, and Loopy"

Walter J. Ong was a Jesuit.  The Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, is celebrated on July 31 each year.

"Recursive, Wide, and Loopy 2", a Heckler & Coch entry dated July 31, 2004, leads to the following:

"The grammar or syntax of human language is certainly unique. Like an onion or Russian doll, it is recursive: One instance of an item is embedded in another instance of the same item. Recursion makes it possible for the words in a sentence to be widely separated and yet dependent on one another. 'If-then' is a classic example.... Are animals capable of such recursion? Fitch and Hauser have reported that tamarin monkeys are not capable of recursion. Although the monkeys learned a nonrecursive grammar, they failed to learn a grammar that is recursive. Humans readily learn both."

-- David Premack (Science 2004 303:318, quoted in ScienceWeek)

These citations by Heckler & Coch show that inability to understand complex language is not limited to monkeys.

The examples given by Wren in the audio samples are of alternating female (Hi) and male (Lo) voices, thus --

FSG:  Hi Lo Hi Lo Hi Lo

PSG:  Hi Hi Hi Lo Lo Lo

As these examples show, neither monkeys nor humans heard the sound of parentheses (or square brackets) as Wren describes them:

"structures like [female [female, male] male]."

There of course is, in ordinary language (which does not include the monologues of Victor Borge), no such thing as the sound of parentheses.

Thus the research of Hauser and Fitch is not only invalid, but ridiculous.

This point is driven strongly home by the following two articles:

Greg Kochanski, Research Fellow,
 Oxford University Phonetics Lab:

Is a Phrase Structure Grammar
the Important Difference
between Humans and Monkeys?,

and

Mark Liberman, Professor,
University of Pennsylvania
Departments of Linguistics
and of Computer Science,
and co-director of the
Institute for Research
in Cognitive Science,
in his

Language Log,
January 17, 2004:

Hi Lo Hi Lo,
it's off to
formal language theory
we go.

Wednesday, August 4, 2004  8:04 PM

Summering Forth

Everything that ever summered forth starts
in identical springs, or four-note variations
on that repeated theme: four seasons,
four winds, four corners, four-chambered heart...

-- Richard Powers, "The Perpetual Calendar,"
    from The Gold Bug Variations, 1991

Wednesday, August 4, 2004  12:29 AM

Shell Beach

"It was a dark and stormy night...."

-- Opening of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic novel by Madeleine L'Engle.

For those who seek religious significance in the name of Hurricane Alex:

"Alex Proyas directs this futuristic thriller about a man waking up to find he is wanted for brutal murders he doesn't remember. Haunted by mysterious beings who stop time and alter reality, he seeks to unravel the riddle of his identity."

-- Description of the 1998 film Dark City

See also ART WARS of June 19, 2002.

Tuesday, August 3, 2004  7:59 PM

Science and Fiction:

Attica to GATTACA

 "There is no gene for fate."
-- Vincent, a character in
   the 1997 film GATTACA

The film GATTACA was discussed in a Log24 entry for Saturday, July 31, 2004-- the date of death of Frank Smith, also known as Big Black, a prominent figure in the events at Attica in 1971.  He died in Kinston, North Carolina, a town of about 24,000 about halfway between Raleigh and the Atlantic Ocean.

See today's 6:01 AM entry for some details of Mr. Smith's life.  In his memory, here are three links.

The first is to

Screening DNA:
Exploring the
Cinema-Genetics Interface,

by Stephen Nottingham

This online book, from which the above GATTACA quote was taken, discusses genetics in film more generally... Specifically, from Part 7 of Screening DNA:

In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace--

"Midi-chlorians are essentially genes for the force, which determine whether one will become either a Jedi or else a dark shadow of one. In particular, they evoke mitochondrian genes, as mitochondria once lived symbiotically in human cells. Mitochondria are a cell's energy-producing 'power plant,' in which a positive mutation could lead to an individual having greater strength and stamina. Mitochondrial genes are also now known to control many critical stages in human development."

The second link in memory of Mr. Smith, one he would probably prefer, is to another book, less academic in nature, that also deals with mitochondria:

The third link is to the aforementioned

Wind.

Tuesday, August 3, 2004  7:00 PM

Southern Strategy, Da Capo

From July 31:

"Why are you based in North Carolina?"

-- The Footprints of God

Tuesday, August 3, 2004  6:01 AM

Death of Big Black

(Sequel to yesterday's entry and to
the entries of Saturday, July 31,
feast day of St. Ignatius Loyola)

Monday, August 2, 2004  12:48 AM

Politics and Truth

Bob Herbert, in today's New York Times, on the central problem of democracy:

"It may well be that candidates can't tell voters the truth and still win."

Just figure that out, did you, Bob?

Sunday, August 1, 2004  2:22 PM

From USA Today
8/1/2004 1:20-1:30 PM

Bush 50%, Kerry 46%,

in a Friday-Saturday
USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup
poll of likely voters.

Before the Democratic convention, which ended Thursday night, Bush and Kerry were essentially tied.

From a July 12 Log24 entry:

"It was... a stunning result, the first time in the Gallup Poll since the 1972 Democratic convention that a candidate seemed to lose ground at his convention."

-- Susan Page, USA TODAY

---

Added at 10 PM ET Aug. 1:

The Susan Page story has been altered since 1:30 PM, and no longer calls the above "a stunning result."  For the original story, see this Google Groups search.

---