From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane...
2005 July 1-15
Friday, July 15, 2005
6:00 PM
Feast of St. Bonaventure
From Darkness Visible:
"Ed Rinehart [sic]
made a fortune painting canvases that were just one solid color. He
had his black period in which the canvas was totally black. And then
he had a blue period in which he was painting the canvas blue."
-- Martin Gardner interview in AMS Notices, June/July 2005
From Art History:
"Art history was very personal through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt."
-- Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives of American Art
From The Edge of Eternity:
Christopher Fry's obituary
in The New York Times--
"His plays radiated an optimistic faith in God and humanity, evoking,
in his words, 'a world in which we are poised on the edge of eternity,
a world which has deeps and shadows of mystery, and God is anything but
a sleeping partner.' He said he wrote his plays in poetry because that
was 'the language in which man expresses his own amazement' at the
complexity both of himself and of a reality which, beneath the surface,
was 'wildly, perilously, inexplicably fantastic.'"
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
1:00 PM
Today's birthday: Harrison Ford
Location, Location, Location
Wikipedia on Temple of Doom:
"Most of the filming was done
on location in Sri Lanka."
Recent Messages:
1. Re: Steven Cullinane is a Crank
Jul 12, 2005
2. Re: Steven Cullinane is a Crank
Jul 12, 2005
3. Re: Steven Cullinane is a Crank
Jul 12, 2005
4. Re: Steven Cullinane's "Diamond Theory"
Jul 8, 2005
5. Steven Cullinane's "Diamond Theory"
Jul 7, 2005
6. Re: Steven Cullinane is a Crank
Jul 7, 2005
7. Re: Steven Cullinane is a Crank
Jul 5, 2005
8. Re: Steven Cullinane is a Crank
Jul 5, 2005
9. Steven Cullinane is a Crank
Jul 5, 2005
10. Steven Cullinane is a Crank
Jul 5, 2005
Google Groups view of
the main thread (at sci.math)
to which crankbuster has posted
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
2:08 AM
Reply to my fan mail
Discussions in Internet forums indicate that at least three people seem deeply interested in my work in finite geometry:
- Someone falsely using the name of R. T. Curtis, a U. of Birmingham group theorist,
- Someone falsely using the name of George Polya, a deceased mathematician, and
- Someone using the nickname crankbuster.
Unfortunately, remarks posted under these names are all extremely
negative. This is understandable, given that the author or authors
have completely failed to comprehend what I was getting at. Actually,
I suspect that all three authors are the same person, who was inspired
to bitter hatred by my negative review
of an attempted proof of the four-color theorem. I do not suspect the
author of that attempted proof, but rather one of his countrymen;
attacks posted using the forged name "R. T. Curtis" were posted from an
address somewhere in Bombay, and "crankbuster" claims to be posting
from Sri Lanka.
As the real R. T. Curtis has noted,
"If someone is deliberately using my name to attack Steven Cullinane
anonymously, it shows malice and cowardice unusual in the mathematical
world." At least my anonymous fan has, it seems, stopped using other
people's names to hide behind... although the latest attacks, under the
name "crankbuster," seem to be trying to imply, falsely, a connection
with the Crank Dot Net website.
Monday, July 11, 2005
12:00 AM
Logos
for St. Benedict's Day
Click
on either of the logos below for religious meditations -- on the left,
a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the
right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.
Both logos represent different embodiments of the "story theory" of truth, as opposed to the "diamond theory" of truth. Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion. I personally prefer the "diamond theory" of truth, represented by the logo below.
See also the previous entry
and the entries of 7/11, 2003.
Sunday, July 10, 2005
6:00 PM
| From Artemiadis's website: |
| 1986: | Elected Regular Member
of the Academy of Athens |
| 1999: | Vice President
of the Academy of Athens |
| 2000: | President
of the Academy of Athens |
"First of all, I'd like to
thank the Academy..."
-- remark attributed to Plato
Saturday, July 9, 2005
6:06 PM
Today's birthday: Tom Hanks
Christendom
Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908:
"In
its wider sense this term is used to describe the part of the world
which is inhabited by Christians.... But there is a narrower sense in
which Christendom stands for a polity as well as a religion, for a
nation as well as for a people. Christendom in this sense was an ideal
which inspired and dignified many centuries of history and which has
not yet altogether lost its power over the minds of men."
Illustrations -- from
Saving Private Ryan
and from this week's G8 meeting:
Friday, July 8, 2005
4:00 AM
Wednesday, July 6, 2005
4:00 PM
Red and Blue
On the June 28 mock naval battle between "red" and "blue" fleets to mark the bicentenary year of the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar:
A spokeswoman for the Royal Navy said --
"Nelson is featured, but we are not billing it as Britain versus France... This will not be a French-bashing opportunity."
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
5:14 AM
For Christopher Fry
and the White Goddess:
The Edge of Eternity
Christian humanist playwright Christopher Fry, author of The Lady's Not for Burning, died at 97 on June 30, 2005.
From Log24 on June 30:
Robert Graves, author of
The White Goddess:
A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth--
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.
Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights...
From Cold Mountain:
"He sat awhile on a rock, and then got up and walked all morning
through the dim woods. The track was ill used, so coiled and knotted he
could not say what its general tendency was. It aimed nowhere certain
but up. The brush and bracken grew thick in the footway, and the ground
seemed to be healing over, so that in some near future the way would
not even remain as scar. For several miles it mostly wound its way
through a forest of immense hemlocks, and the fog lay among them so
thick that their green boughs were hidden. Only the black trunks were
visible, rising into the low sky like old menhirs stood up by a
forgotten race to memorialize the darkest events of their history....
They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of
rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the
smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog
closed off all visual check of loftiness....
Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world
was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He was indeed at the lip
of a cliff, and he took one step back.... The country around was high,
broken. Inman looked about and was startled to see a great knobby
mountain forming up out of the fog to the west, looming into the sky.
The sun broke through a slot in the clouds, and a great band of Jacob's
ladder suddenly hung in the air like a gauze curtain between Inman and
the blue mountain....
Inman looked at
the big grandfather mountain and then he looked beyond it to the lesser
mountains as they faded off into the southwest horizon, bathed in faint
smoky haze. Waves of mountains. For all the evidence the eye told, they
were endless. The grey overlapping humps of the farthest peaks
distinguished themselves only as slightly darker values of the pale
grey air. The shapes and their ghostly appearance spoke to Inman in a
way he could not clearly interpret. They graded off like the tapering
of pain from the neck wound as it healed."
See also the entries of July 3.
The crone figure in this section of Cold Mountain is not entirely unrelated to the girl accused of being a witch in Fry's play and to Graves's White Goddess.
From Fry's obituary in The Guardian:
"Though
less of a public theorist than Eliot, Fry still believed passionately
in the validity of poetic drama. As he wrote in the magazine Adam:
'In prose, we convey the eccentricity of things, in poetry their
concentricity, the sense of relationship between them: a belief that
all things express the same identity and are all contained in one
discipline of revelation.'"
From Fry's obituary in today's New York Times:
"His
plays radiated an optimistic faith in God and humanity, evoking, in his
words, 'a world in which we are poised on the edge of eternity, a world
which has deeps and shadows of mystery, and God is anything but a
sleeping partner.' He said he wrote his plays in poetry because that
was 'the language in which man expresses his own amazement' at the
complexity both of himself and of a reality which, beneath the surface,
was 'wildly, perilously, inexplicably fantastic.'"
Sunday, July 3, 2005
6:26 PM
Arrangement in
Black and Blue
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain
Epigraph to Cold Mountain,
by Charles Frazier --
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
-- Han-shan
Sunday, July 3, 2005
2:28 PM
Intersections
1. Blue Ridge meets Black Mountain,
2. Vertical meets horizontal in music,
3. The timeless meets time in religion.
Details:
1. Blue Ridge, Black Mountain
"Montreat College is located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.... The Black Mountain Campus is... three miles from the main campus in the historic town of Black Mountain."
Black Mountain College was "established on the Blue Ridge Assembly grounds outside the town of Black Mountain in North Carolina in the fall of 1933."
USA Today, May 15, 2005, on Billy Graham:
"MONTREAT, N.C. -- ... It's here at his... homestead, where the Blue
Ridge meets the Black Mountain range east of Asheville, that Graham
gave a rare personal interview."
See also the following from June 24:
"No bridge reaches God, except one...
God's Bridge: The Cross."
-- Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
according to messiahpage.com
For some remarks more in the spirit of Black Mountain than of the Blue
Ridge, see today's earlier entry on pianist Grete Sultan and composer
Tui St. George Tucker.
2. Vertical, Horizontal in Music
Richard Neuhaus on George Steiner's
Grammars of Creation:
"...
the facts of the world are not and will never be 'the end of the
matter.' Music joins grammar in pointing to the possibility, the
reality, of more. He thinks Schopenhauer was on to something when he
said music will continue after the world ends.
'The
capacity of music to operate simultaneously along horizontal and
vertical axes, to proceed simultaneously in opposite directions (as in inverse canons),
may well constitute the nearest that men and women can come to absolute
freedom. Music does "keep time" for itself and for us.'"
3. Timeless, Time
A Trinity Sunday sermon quotes T. S. Eliot:
"... to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint."
See also The Diamond Project.
Sunday, July 3, 2005
3:00 AM
Requiem
Some links for Grete Sultan, 1906-2005, a pianist who died at 99 on Sunday morning a week ago-- June 26, 2005:
Album with sound clips -- The Legacy, Vol. 1
Album with Tantum Ergo -- The Legacy, Vol. 2
Tantum ergo
sacramentum
Veneremur cernui;
Et antiquum
documentum
Novo cedat ritui;
Praestet fides
supplementum
Sensuum defectui.
Genitori genitoque
Laus et jubilatio,
Salus, honor,
virtus quoque,
Sit et benedictio;
Procedenti ab
utroque
Compar sit laudatio.
Amen.
-- St. Thomas Aquinas
| Faith for all
defects supplying,
Down in adoration falling,
Lo! The Sacred Host
we hail;
Lo! o'er ancient forms
departing,
Newer rites of Grace prevail:
Where the feeble senses fail.
To The Everlasting Father
And The Son Who reigns
on high,
With The Spirit blessed
proceeding
Forth, from Each eternally,
Be salvation, honor, blessing,
Might and endless majesty.
Amen.
|
The musical version of Tantum Ergo on the second Sultan album is by composer
Tui St. George Tucker,
1924-2004. Her Requiem apparently premiered
at Appalachian State University on April 30, 2005.
For other material on theology and Appalachian State University, see
that day's Log24 entries
and also the April 25 entry,
Mathematical Style.
For more on music, theology, and Appalachia, see
the entries of Sunday, July 25, 2004.
Friday, July 1, 2005
8:00 PM
Big Dreams
"For
more than a century, Los Angeles has been synonymous with big dreams.
The Australian writer and critic Clive James said it this way. 'Call
Los Angeles any dirty name you like… The fact remains that you are
already living in it before you get there.'"
-- Today's inaugural address by Mayor Villaraigosa
See also the previous entry.
Update of 2:24 PM July 2:
Yesterday afternoon I picked up a copy of George Steiner's Grammars of Creation I had ordered. A check of Amazon.com to see what others had to say about this book yielded the following:
"Steiner's account of Hope as something exclusively transcendental and
relative to the future is poor and superficial: the person who hopes is
not only walking 'towards' Eternal Life, but is already walking 'in'
Eternal Life, walking the Kingdom."
-- Matías Cordero, Santiago, Chile
See also an entry of April 7, 2005, Nine is a Vine.
Friday, July 1, 2005
12:00 AM
Shining Through
From Dogma --
"You see, Malloy, I'm writing a novel about Los Angeles.... It's a fantastic place, you know, Malloy.... It has a Spanish name, with religious Roman Catholic connotations...."
From timesonline.co.uk, quotes of the day on May 19, 2005:
"My granddaughter once said I have a big imagination. And I said, 'What’s a big imagination?,' and she said, 'You remember what never happened.'"
-- Isabel Allende, novelist, whose new book is based on the life of Zorro
"You all know I love LA, but tonight I really love LA."
-- Antonio Villaraigosa, voted in as the city’s first Hispanic mayor in more than a century, thanks voters
See also
Log24 entries ending at midnight
August 28, 2003, and
Log24 entries ending at midnight
May 19, 2005,
as well as the following illustrations
from a Monday entry and
from the entry it links to:
Dream of Heaven
(See also 3/3/04 and
10/27/03.)
