Saturday, January 29, 2005  12:06 PM

Da Capo, Part II:

The Elegant Window

From a review of
The Nick Tosches Reader,
published by Da Capo Press:

"Elegant as a slow blues."

-- Rolling Stone
 
"Examples are the
stained-glass windows of knowledge."

-- Vladimir Nabokov

And so....

RealOne Player

Windows Media.

See also

Architecture of Eternity.

Thursday, January 27, 2005  8:00 PM

Symbols A Game of Chess Geometry for Jews Geometry of Quartets

Thursday, January 27, 2005  3:33 PM

"I don’t know how you expiate guilt."

-- Philip Johnson, Vanity Fair, May 1993



Ask Robert Shaw.

Thursday, January 27, 2005  12:00 PM

From today's San Diego Union-Tribune:



Is it safe?

Thursday, January 27, 2005  2:29 AM

Crystal Night

From artbook.com:

Mies van der Rohe:
Mies in Berlin



Winner of
The Society of Architectural Historians
2002 Philip Johnson Award
for Excellence

Exhibition Catalog

"Published to accompany
a groundbreaking 2001 exhibition at
The Museum of Modern Art, New York."

From Mies and the Mastodon,
by Martin Filler, The New Republic,
issue dated Aug. 6, 2001:

"It would have been wiser for the new MoMA catalog... to have addressed the issue of his politics.... By ignoring such a central subject... the show gives off a mild stench of cover-up.... Only the German-born Rosemarie Haag Bletter (full disclosure: she is my wife) alludes to the verboten topic in her [catalog] essay on Mies's flirtation with crystal imagery, drawing a sharp parallel between the architect's extensive use of Kristallglas (plate glass) and the ensuing devastation of Kristallnacht, which erupted just three months after he left for the States."

Also from Filler's essay:

"Mies's rigorously simplified structures, typified by grids of steel and glass and an absence of applied ornament, represented the Platonic ideal of modernism for many people."

For more on history, politics, and
Mies's disciple Philip Johnson,
who died Tuesday evening, see

"We Cannot Not Know History."

For more on aesthetics, see the
Log24.net entry of Tuesday noon,

Diamonds Are Forever.

For more on a Platonic ideal of sorts,
see the following figure in two versions:

Version A, from Plato's Meno and
Diamond Theory,



and Version B,



from the date of Johnson's death
at his "famous crystalline box."

Was less more?

Wednesday, January 26, 2005  1:26 PM

For the mad musicians
of Princeton

To hear the music, click on the notes:

Tuesday, January 25, 2005  12:00 PM

Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise:

" 'That old Jew gave me this here.'  Egan looked at the diamond.  'I ain't giving this to you, understand?  The old man gave it to me for my boy.  It's worth a whole lot of money-- you can tell that just by looking-- but it means something, I think.  It's got a meaning, like.'

'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?'  He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it.  '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means.  The eternal in the temporal.  The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion.   Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh?  That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.'

Pablo's eyes glazed over.  'Holy shit,' he said.  'Santa Maria.'  He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion.

'Hey,' he said to the priest, 'diamonds are forever!  You heard of that, right?  That means something, don't it?'

'I have heard it,' Egan said.  'Perhaps it has a religious meaning.' "

---

"We symbolize logical necessity
with the box ()
and logical possibility
with the diamond ()."

-- Keith Allen Korcz

---

From

DIALECTIC AND EXISTENCE
IN KIERKEGAARD AND KANT

Nythamar Fernandes de Oliveira

Pontifical Catholic University
at Porto Alegre, Brazil

"Such is the paradoxical 'encounter' of the eternal with the temporal. Just like the Moment of the Incarnation, when the Eternal entered the temporal, Kierkegaard refers to the category of the Instant (Danish Ojeblikket, 'a glance of the eye, eyeblink,' German Augenblick) as the dialectical kernel of our existential consciousness:

If the instant is posited, so is the eternal --but also the future, which comes again like the past ... The concept around which everything turns in Christianity, the concept which makes all things new, is the fullness of time, is the instant as eternity, and yet this eternity is at once the future and the past.

Although I cannot examine here the Kierkegaardian conception of time, the dialectical articulation of time and existence, as can be seen, underlies his entire philosophy of existence, just as the opposition between 'eternity' and 'temporality': the instant, as 'an atom of eternity,' serves to restructure the whole synthesis of selfhood into a spiritual one, in man’s 'ascent' toward its Other and the Unknown. In the last analysis, the Eternal transcends every synthesis between eternity and time, infinity and finiteness, preserving not only the Absolute Paradox in itself but above all the wholly otherness of God. It is only because of the Eternal, therefore, that humans can still hope to attain their ultimate vocation of becoming a Chistian. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love (1847),

The possibility of the good is more than possibility, for it is the eternal. This is the basis of the fact that one who hopes can never be deceived, for to hope is to expect the possibility of the good; but the possibility of the good is eternal. ...But if there is less love in him, there is also less of the eternal in him; but if there is less of the eternal in him, there is also less possibility, less awareness of possibility (for possibility appears through the temporal movement of the eternal within the eternal in a human being)."

Monday, January 24, 2005  10:23 PM

The Diamond
of Possibility

by  Keith Allen Korcz

"We symbolize logical necessity with the box () and logical possibility with the diamond ().  I first discuss combining negations with the box and diamond, noting that logical possibility and logical necessity are inter-definable with the help of negation: p = ~~p and p = ~~p. Thus, possibility and necessity are two sides of the same coin."

And what do we           
 symbolize by  ?

Monday, January 24, 2005  2:45 PM

Old School Tie

See also
Galois Correspondence



Evariste Galois

and Log24.net, May 20, 2004:

"Perhaps every science must
start with metaphor
and end with algebra;
and perhaps without metaphor
there would never have been
any algebra."

-- attributed, in varying forms
(1, 2, 3), to Max Black,
Models and Metaphors, 1962

For metaphor and
algebra combined, see

"Symmetry invariance
in a diamond ring,"

A.M.S. abstract 79T-A37,
Notices of the Amer. Math. Soc.,
February 1979, pages A-193, 194 —
the original version of the 4x4 case
of the diamond theorem.

Sunday, January 23, 2005  6:06 PM

Death and the Spirit,
Part IV

From Tuesday:

Seriously.

See also

Death and the Spirit, Part I,

Death and the Spirit, Part II, and

Death and the Spirit, Part III.

Saturday, January 22, 2005  9:00 AM

Thursday, January 20, 2005  10:00 AM

"The Comedians is about three men, Smith, Jones and Brown...."

"Again I was aware of the three names, interchangeable like comic masks in a farce."

-- Graham Greene, The Comedians, Penguin paperback, 1991, p. 23

Pico Iyer on Graham Greene in the current New York Review of Books:

"To play out the full logic...."

Brown, Jones, and Smith are suspected of a crime. They testify as follows: Brown: Jones is guilty and Smith is innocent. Jones: If Brown is guilty then so is Smith. Smith: I’m innocent, but at least one of the others is guilty. Assuming all testimony is true, who is innocent and who is guilty? Assuming that the innocent told the truth and the guilty told lies, who is innocent and who is guilty? -- Mathematical logic     homework problem (pdf)

Wednesday, January 19, 2005  3:00 PM

But seriously...

A follow-up to the previous "tiger" entry (which was about an old but good dirty joke).

I just subscribed to The New York Review of Books online for another year, prompted by my desire to read Roger Shattuck on Rimbaud, a tiger of another sort:

"How did this poetic sensibility come to burn so bright?"

The Shattuck piece is from 1967, the year of The Doors' first album.  (See Sunday's Death and the Spirit, Part II.)

Tuesday, January 18, 2005  1:44 PM

Related material:

•  Finnegans Wake, II.2, p. 293,

•  The Valley Spirit, and

•  The Agony and the Ya-Ya

Tuesday, January 18, 2005  12:00 PM

Globe Song

Are you a lucky little lady
in The City of Light
Or just another lost angel...
City of Night

-- Jim Morrison, L.A. Woman

(See Sunday's noon entry.)

Of course, it's the lost angels
that really get to us: 

Sunday, January 16, 2005  8:00 PM

Four Quartets

Sunday, January 16, 2005  12:00 PM

Death and the
Spirit, Part II

In memory of Danny Sugerman,
late manager of The Doors:

Danny Sugerman
Photo by
Frank Alan Bella, 2002

"Mr Mojo Risin" = "Jim Morrison."
"Audible Era" = "Baudelaire."
"Bad Rumi" = "Rimbaud."

From the dark jungle
as a tiger bright,
Form from the viewless Spirit
leaps to light.

-- Rumi,  "Reality and Appearance,"
translated by R. A. Nicholson

(See also Death and the Spirit
from Twelfth Night, 2005, the date
of Danny Sugerman's death.)

Friday, January 14, 2005  2:56 PM

Geometry Download

There is a new web page offering my notes on finite geometry in a very large (about 7 MB) zipped folder for downloading.  (Individual notes may be previewed without downloading the folder.)

Thursday, January 13, 2005  12:00 PM

State of Grace

Thursday, January 13, 2005  9:57 AM

Hope of Heaven

"Heaven is a state,
a sort of metaphysical state."
-- John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938

"The old men know
when an old man dies."
-- Ogden Nash

See also the five Log24 entries
ending with the 9 PM entry of
Tuesday, December 10, 2002.

From today's New York Times:

"Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, whose memoir, Passages to Freedom, chronicled his escape from a prison camp in Italy during World War II, died on Saturday in Morristown, N.J. He was 92."

A web page on the Indiantown Gap army camp quotes Frelinghuysen's Passages to Freedom... He is describing July 1942, just before Frelinghuysen's unit was sent overseas:

"In the last week of July, his wife Emily came to Indiantown to stay at the old Hershey Hotel so they could steal a few of the remaining hours together. He explained, 'On my last night with Emily, she wore an evening dress with a full green and rose colored skirt, and I put on my best garrison uniform .... we had California champagne, lobster, and flaming crepes with ice cream. We danced to some old tunes; Cole Porter's 'Night and Day' and Irving Berlin's tunes from 'Top Hat.' Then they played a new one slowly, and a young girl sang the lyrics to 'The White Cliffs of Dover.' Noting that England had been at war for three years, he reminisced that it was a song that speaks of 'love and laughter' and 'peace ever after.' Nostalgically, he said, 'We finished the dance in an embrace. She took my hand and we walked out through the lobby onto the terrace for a last look at the gardens in the pale light of a quarter moon.' "

Monday, January 10, 2005  11:00 AM

Sunday, January 9, 2005  5:00 PM

Another Death

"I should be glad of another death," wrote T. S. Eliot in "Journey of the Magi."

But not Humphrey Carpenter's.  Carpenter, like Eliot and Guy Davenport (see last two days' entries) died on a January 4th.  He will be missed.

Sunday, January 9, 2005  3:10 PM

Light at Bologna

Eclogues: Eight Stories

by Guy Davenport

The Discovery of Luminescence:

The Bolognian Stone

Bologna, 16th Century

"For the University of Bologna hosting an International Conference on Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence has a very special significance. Indeed, it is in our fair City that modern scientific research on these phenomena has its earliest roots....

'After submitting the stone
to much preparation, it was not
the Pluto of Aristophanes
that resulted; instead, it was
the Luciferous Stone' "

From one of the best books of the 20th century: The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan "The Chemicals that resided in the jar were a combination of hundreds of things from all over the world.  Some of The Chemicals were ancient and very difficult to obtain.  There were a few drops of something from an Egyptian pyramid dating from the year 3000 B.C. There were distillates from the jungles of South America and drops of things from plants that grew near the snowline in the Himalayas. Ancient China, Rome and Greece had contributed things, too, that had found their way into the jar.  Witchcraft and modern science, the latest of discoveries, had also contributed to the contents of the jar.  There was even something that was reputed to have come all the way from Atlantis.... ... they did not know that the monster was an illusion created by a mutated light in The Chemicals. a light that had the power to work its will upon mind and matter and change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind."

Saturday, January 8, 2005  7:26 PM

Saturday, January 8, 2005  8:00 AM

24

The Star
of Venus

"He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here, or perhaps this star is
Mercury, the messenger of Olympus,
the bringer of hope."

-- Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra

Related material:

The Devil and Wallace Stevens,

Journey of the Magi,

and

Hexagram 24:

"The time of darkness is past.
The winter solstice brings
the victory of light."

Saturday, January 8, 2005  5:48 AM

Remembrance

"Great is your love,  Prince Ombra answered finally, and eternal is its mystery to me.  Yet honor was not denied me in the fire of Creation.  Ombra, lord vanquisher of heroes, pledges this, O brother of David, Arthur the King, and Susano-- the child will speak even as you fall before me.  You will be remembered."

--  Prince Ombra, by Roderick MacLeish

"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance."

-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Friday, January 7, 2005  9:35 AM

"A corpse will be
transported by express!"

(Ideograms for Guy Davenport;
see also previous entry.)

"At the still point,
there the dance is."
-- T. S. Eliot

Illustration from
Tuesday, April 22, 2003:

Temptation

Locomotive

The Star of Venus

Locomotion

Related material:
The Devil and Wallace Stevens

Friday, January 7, 2005  7:59 AM

In Memory of
Guy Davenport

From the day Davenport died:

"At Merton College, Oxford,
he wrote the first thesis on Joyce
to be accepted by the university."

-- Today's New York Times

From a very informative essay
on Davenport's aesthetics:

"T.S. Eliot's experiments
in ideogrammatic method
are equally germane to Davenport,
who shares with the poet
an avant-garde aesthetic and
a conservative temperament.
Davenport's text reverberates
with echoes of Four Quartets."

-- Andre Furlani

"At the still point, there the dance is."

--  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,
quoted in the epigraph to
the chapter on automorphism groups
in Parallelisms of Complete Designs,
by Peter J. Cameron,
published when Cameron was at
Merton College, Oxford.

See also
Elegance.

Thursday, January 6, 2005  3:00 PM

Epiphany Gift:

A new download page
for the Diamond 16 Puzzle.

Wednesday, January 5, 2005  7:11 AM

Death and the Spirit

• Frank Kelly Freas, who created, among other works, 400 portraits of saints for the Franciscans and the covers of Mad Magazine from 1958 through 1962. "I found it difficult to shift my artistic gears from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again," he said of his departure from Mad.
  
  
• Will Eisner, "an innovative comic-book artist who created the Spirit, a hero without superpowers, and the first modern graphic novel."

Yesterday's entry provided an approach to The Dark Lady, Kali, that was, in Freas's apt word, "ridiculous."  The illustration below, "Mate," is an attempt to balance yesterday's entry with an approach that is, if not sublime, at least more serious.  It is based on a similar illustration from Jan. 31, 2003, with actress Judy Davis playing The Dark Lady.  Today it seems appropriate to replace Davis with another actress (anonymous here, though some may recognize her).  I once knew her (unlike Davis) personally.  One of my fondest memories of high school is reading Mad Magazine with her in the school lunch room.  Our lives diverged after high school, but I could happily have spent my life in her company.

A diamond and its dual "whirl" figure—
or a "jewel-box and its mate"

Tuesday, January 4, 2005  7:00 AM

Related material:

From Endgame:

Black the knight upon that ocean,
Bright the sun upon the king.
Dark the queen that stands beside him,
White his castle, threatening.

In the shadows' see a bishop
Guards his queen of love and hate.
Another move, the game will be up;
Take the queen, her knight will mate.

The knight said "Move, be done.  It's over."
"Love and resign," the bishop cried.
"When it's done you'll stand forever
By the darkest beauty's side."

From Log24.net, Feb. 18, 2003:



Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted
as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla,
time, according to one website,  as
"the force which governs and stops time."
See also the novel The Fermata,
by Nicholson Baker.



From an entry of Sunday, Jan. 2,
the day Denker died:

"Time had been canceled."    
-- Stephen King, The Shining

From Truth and Style, a tribute
to the late Amy Spindler, style editor
of the New York Times Magazine:

"I don't believe in truth. I believe in style."
-- Hugh Grant in Vogue magazine, July 1995

From a related page,
The Crimson Passion:

"He takes us to the central activity
of mathematics—which is imagining...."

-- Harvard Magazine on
Harvard mathematician
and author Barry Mazur.

For related material on Mazur, see

A Mathematical Lie.

"The teenagers aren't all bad.
I love 'em if nobody else does.
There ain't nothing wrong
with young people.
Jus' quit lyin' to 'em."

-- Jackie "Moms" Mabley

Sunday, January 2, 2005  7:20 AM

"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

From today's New York Times:



"What's funny, honey?"
-- The Shining

Truth and Style and Always in Style.

Saturday, January 1, 2005  8:08 AM

Metamorphosis

This illustration was added yesterday
to Geometry of the 4x4 Square.