The Cinematic
Imagination,
or
"Frida" meets
"Under the Volcano"
A scene from "Frida"
and a scene from the
Day of the Dead festival,
Cuernavaca, 10/30/04
Related material:
For the Man in Black
(Log 24, 9/13/03)
and
For a Man in Black
(Log 24, 11/17/05).
"Mahlburg likens his approach to an analogous one for deciding whether a dance party has an even or odd number of attendees. Instead of counting all the participants, a quicker method is to see whether everyone has a partner—in effect making groups that are divisible by 2.
In Mahlburg's work, the partition numbers play the role of the dance participants, and the crank splits them not into couples but into groups of a size divisible by the prime number in question. The total number of partitions is, therefore, also divisible by that prime.
Mahlburg's work 'has effectively written the final chapter on Ramanujan congruences,' Ono says.
'Each step in the story is a work of art,' Dyson says, 'and the
story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama
built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.'"
-- Erica Klarreich in Science News Online, week of June 18, 2005
This would seem to meet the criteria set by Fritz
Leiber for "a story that works." (See previous entry.) Whether
the muse of dance (played in "Xanadu" by a granddaughter of physicist Max Born-- see recent entries) has a role in the Dyson story is debatable.
| Born Dec. 11, 1882, Breslau, Germany. Died Jan. 5, 1970, Göttingen, |  Max Born |
Those who prefer less abstract stories may enjoy a mythic tale by Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise, or a Christian tale by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.
Related material:
"The valley spirit never dies. It's named the mystic woman."
-- Tao Te Ching
For an image of a particular
incarnation of the mystic woman
(whether as muse, as goddess,
or as the White Witch of Narnia,
I do not know) see Julie Taymor.
"Down in the valley,
valley so low,
hang your head over,
hear the wind blow."
-- Folk song
"Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in
the same bare place
For the listener,
who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there
and the nothing that is."
-- Wallace Stevens
| Los Angeles Times Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005 OBITUARIES  LOOMIS DEAN After many years at Life magazine, he continued to find steady work as a freelancer and as a still photographer on film sets. (Dean Family) Loomis Dean, 88; By Jon Thurber, Times Staff Writer
Loomis Dean, a Life magazine photographer who made memorable pictures
of the royalty of both Europe and Hollywood, has died. He was 88. Dean died Wednesday [December 7, 2005] at Sonoma Valley Hospital in Sonoma, Calif., of complications from a stroke, according to his son, Christopher. In a photographic career spanning six decades, Dean's leading images included shirtless Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck trying a one-handed chin-up on a trapeze bar, the ocean liner Andrea Doria listing in the Atlantic and writer Ernest Hemingway in Spain the year before he committed suicide. One of his most memorable photographs for Life was of cosmopolitan British playwright and composer Noel Coward in the unlikely setting of the Nevada desert. Dean shot 52 covers for Life, either as a freelance photographer or during his two stretches as a staffer with the magazine, 1947-61 and 1966-69. After leaving the magazine, Dean found steady freelance work in magazines and as a still photographer on film sets, including several of the early James Bond movies starring Sean Connery. Born in Monticello, Fla., Dean was the son of a grocer and a schoolteacher. When the Dean family's business failed during the Depression, they moved to Sarasota, Fla., where Dean's father worked as a curator and guide at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Dean studied engineering at the University of Florida but became fascinated with photography after watching a friend develop film in a darkroom. He went off to what is now the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was known for its photography school. After earning his degree, Dean went to work for the Ringling circus as a junior press agent and, according to his son, cultivated a side job photographing Ringling's vast array of performers and workers. He worked briefly as one of Parade magazine's first photographers but left after receiving an Army Air Forces commission during World War II. During the war, he worked in aerial reconnaissance in the Pacific and was along on a number of air raids over Japan. His first assignment for Life in 1946 took him back to the circus: His photograph of clown Lou Jacobs with a giraffe looking over his shoulder made the magazine's cover and earned Dean a staff job. In the era before television, Life magazine photographers had some of the most glamorous work in journalism. Life assigned him to cover Hollywood. In 1954, the magazine published one of his most memorable photos, the shot of Coward dressed for a night on the town in New York but standing alone in the stark Nevada desert. Dean had the idea of asking Coward, who was then doing a summer engagement at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, to pose in the desert to illustrate his song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun." As Dean recalled in an interview with John Loengard for the book "Life Photographers: What They Saw," Coward wasn't about to partake of the midday sun. "Oh, dear boy, I don't get up until 4 o'clock in the afternoon," Dean recalled him saying. But Dean pressed on anyway. As he related to Loengard, he rented a Cadillac limousine and filled the back seat with a tub loaded with liquor, tonic and ice cubes — and Coward. The temperature that day reached 119 as Coward relaxed in his underwear during the drive to a spot about 15 miles from Las Vegas. According to Dean, Coward's dresser helped him into his tuxedo, resulting in the image of the elegant Coward with a cigarette holder in his mouth against his shadow on the dry lake bed. "Splendid! Splendid! What an idea! If we only had a piano," Coward said of the shoot before hopping back in the car and stripping down to his underwear for the ride back to Las Vegas. In 1956, Life assigned Dean to Paris. While sailing to Europe on the Ile de France, he was awakened with the news that the Andrea Doria had collided with another liner, the Stockholm. The accident occurred close enough to Dean's liner that survivors were being brought aboard. His photographs of the shaken voyagers and the sinking Andrea Doria were some of the first on the accident published in a U.S. magazine. During his years in Europe, Dean photographed communist riots and fashion shows in Paris, royal weddings throughout Europe and noted authors including James Jones and William S. Burroughs. He spent three weeks with Hemingway in Spain in 1960 for an assignment on bullfighting. In 1989, Dean published "Hemingway's Spain," about his experiences with the great writer. In 1965, Dean won first prize in a Vatican photography contest for a picture of Pope Paul VI. The prize included an audience with the pope and $750. According to his son, it was Dean's favorite honor. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Deborah, and two grandsons. Instead of flowers, donations may be made to the American Child Photographer's Charity Guild (www.acpcg.com) or the Make-A-Wish Foundation. |
Related material:
The Big Time
(Log 24, July 29, 2003):
 A Story That Works
|
Tuesday, December 13, 2005 3:15 AM
Adam Gopnik on Narnia in The New Yorker:
"Everything began with images," Lewis wrote.
"We're not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We're here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That's what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you're not painting an exact reproduction."
Images for Julie Taymor:
Today's New York Times on Debora Arango, an artist who died at 98 on Dec. 4 at her home near Medellin, Colombia:
"She made dramatic paintings of prostitutes, which shocked midcentury sensibilities...."
"Ms. Arango always pushed boundaries, even as a young girl. In a favorite story, she talked about how she wore pants to ride horses...."
Related material: Yesterday's entry "Modestly Yours" and entries on Johnny Cash, horses, and Julie Taymor of September 12-14, 2003.
"Words are events."
-- Walter J. Ong, Society of Jesus
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
at noon on St. Lucy's Day:
"They are the horses of a dream.
They are not what they seem."
-- The Hex Witch of Seldom, page 16
Monday, December 12, 2005 12:06 PM
Monday, December 12, 2005 12:00 AM
Sunday, December 11, 2005 10:00 PM
.
.
.
Sunday, December 11, 2005 6:00 PM
Classic Sixties
"And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked
upon the water..."
-- Leonard Cohen
meets the timeless
Satori at Pearl Harbor:
|
|
|
"Mercilessly tasteful."
-- Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega's
"Songs in Red and Gray"
Related material:
Sunday, December 11, 2005 2:02 PM
"From
a screenplay by 'Forrest Gump' screenwriter Eric Roth, 'The Good
Shepherd' tells the mostly true story of James Wilson (a character
reported to be based on legendary CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton,
and played in the film by Matt Damon), one of the founding members of
the Central Intelligence Agency. Beginning as an scholar at Yale, the
film follows Wilson as he is recruited to join the secret Skull and
Bones fraternity, a brotherhood and breeding ground for future world
leaders, where his acute mind, spotless reputation and sincere belief
in the American way of life render him a prime candidate for a career
in intelligence."
-- Edward Havens, FilmJerk.com, 8/30/2005
The Forrest Gump Award goes to Good Will Hunting* for this choice of roles.
Counterintelligence
illustrated:
Sunday, December 11, 2005 12:00 AM
Midnight Blue
Stanley Kubrick's
"Eyes Wide Shut"
"Midnight Blue's your online source
for top quality BDSM Gear,
Bondage Gear, BDSM Toys...."
Related material:
Roger Shattuck's
Forbidden Knowledge:
From Prometheus to
Pornography,
and from Log24 --
Roger Shattuck, Scholar,
is Dead at 82, and
Recommended Reading
for Hogwarts Students
on Devil's Night.
Saturday, December 10, 2005 3:00 PM
Prequel on
Saint Cecilia's Day
"Death itself would start
working backward."
-- Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia
Celebrity Obits, Nov. 22, 2005 --
Intelligence and
Counterintelligence
(continued):
| Aldous Huxley & C.S. Lewis both died on Nov.22, 1963. For some reason, their deaths went largely unnoticed... | The doors of perception lead to Narnia | November 22, 08:51:20am |
| Shemp Howard died 50 years ago today | Moe | November 22, 09:17:18am |
See also the previous entry, and this follow-up:
"Shattuck's death on Thursday... was reported by his nephew, John Shattuck, head of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, The Boston Globe reported Saturday."
Related material:
"The White Witch rules Narnia,
and has brought to it
the Hundred Years of Winter."
-- The Narnia Academy
and the foundation of the
David Morrell Counterintelligence Library:
Shemp
Saturday, December 10, 2005 5:24 AM
Wednesday, January 19, 2005 --
I just subscribed to The New York Review of Books online for another year, prompted by my desire to read Roger Shattuck on Rimbaud....
"How did this poetic sensibility come to burn so bright?"
 |
The photo of Nicole Kidman
is from Globe Song
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2005).
The Times says Shattuck died
on Thursday (Dec. 8, 2005).
Here, from 4:00 AM on the
morning of Shattuck's death,
is a brief companion-piece
to Eight is a Gate:
Tanner may have stated it best: “V. is whatever lights you to (Tony Tanner, page 36, She's a mystery -- Foreigner 4
the end of the street:
she is also the dark annihilation
waiting at the end of the street.”
"V. and V-2," in
Pynchon: A Collection
of Critical Essays.
Ed. Edward Mendelson.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55).
She's everything
a woman should be
Woman in black
got a hold on me
She's in midnight blue,
still the words ring true;
woman in blue
got a hold on you.
Saturday, December 10, 2005 3:00 AM
| "This world is not conclusion; | |
| A sequel stands beyond, | |
| Invisible, as music, | |
| But positive, as sound. | |
| It beckons and it baffles; | 5 |
| Philosophies don’t know, | |
| And through a riddle, at the last, | |
| Sagacity must go. | |
| To guess it puzzles scholars; | |
| To gain it, men have shown | 10 |
| Contempt of generations, | |
| And crucifixion known." |
Friday, December 9, 2005 11:00 PM
Intelligence
and
Counterintelligence
A film by Robert De Niro,
now in production:
"Will follow James Wilson, a Yale graduate recruited as one of the
founders of the CIA. The character is said to be based on the
legendarily shrewd but paranoid counterintelligence chief James Jesus
Angleton."
Recommended
reading:
Friday, December 9, 2005 5:01 PM
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
From The Circle is Unbroken,
a web page in memory of
June Carter Cash:
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), quoting Socrates--
"By Hera," says Socrates, "a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to Acheloüs and the Nymphs."
See, too, Q's quoting of Socrates's prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker:
Friday, December 9, 2005 3:14 PM
Thursday, December 8, 2005 2:56 PM
"The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a stable quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force.... The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self...."
"The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity.
What the formula can only hint at, however, is the higher plane that is reached through the process of transformation and integration. The 'sublimation' or progress or qualitative change consists in an unfolding of totality into four parts four times, which means nothing less than its becoming conscious. When psychic contents are split up into four aspects, it means that they have been subjected to discrimination by the four orienting functions of consciousness. Only the production of these four aspects makes a total description possible. The process depicted by our formula changes the originally unconscious totality into a conscious one."
-- Jung, Collected Works,
Vol. 9, Part 2, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)
Related material:
"Although
'wholeness' seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea
(like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it
is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous
symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not
only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but
are widely disseminated in the historical recods of many peoples and
many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality
is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. What
at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something
that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori
presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that
confronts the subject independently of him... Unity and totality stand
at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their
symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality."
-- Jung, Aion, as quoted in
Carl Jung and Thomas Merton
Thursday, December 8, 2005 4:00 AM
"'Memory is non-narrative
and non-linear,'
Lin said of the work....
'People say,
"How do you read this?"
Any way you want.'"
"Work as if you were in the
early days of a better nation."
Tanner may have stated it best: “V. is whatever lights you to (Tony Tanner, page 36, She's a mystery -- Foreigner 4
the end of the street:
she is also the dark annihilation
waiting at the end of the street.”
"V. and V-2," in
Pynchon: A Collection
of Critical Essays.
Ed. Edward Mendelson.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1978. 16-55).
She's everything
a woman should be
Woman in black
got a hold on me
Thursday, December 8, 2005 2:02 AM
Wednesday, December 7, 2005 1:00 PM
| "What does this have to do with why we're here?" "I saw it in a chess book Mordecai showed me. The most ancient chess service ever discovered was found at the palace of King Minos on Crete-- the place where the famous Labyrinth was built, named after this sacred axe. The chess service dates to 2000 B.C. It was made of gold and silver and jewels.... And in the center was carved a labrys." ... "But I thought chess wasn't even invented until six or seven hundred A.D.," I added. "They always say it came from Persia or India. How could this Minoan chess service be so old?" "Mordecai's written a lot himself on the history of chess," said Lily.... "He thinks that chess set in Crete was designed by the same guy who built the Labyrinth-- the sculptor Daedalus...." Now things were beginning to click into place.... "Why was this axe carved on the chessboard?" I asked Lily, knowing the answer in my heart before she spoke. "What did Mordecai say was the connection?".... "That's what it's all about," she said quietly. "To kill the King." The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn't I recognized it before? |
"But what does it all mean?" asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. "It
means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there
is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back
only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further
back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would
have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when
a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a
traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start
working backward." |
Tuesday, December 6, 2005 1:00 PM
Tuesday, December 6, 2005 3:33 AM
| Today's Harvard Crimson-- "Pudding Show Features From yesterday's entry, "At the still point,
Xanadu (1980) For related material, see |
Monday, December 5, 2005 1:00 PM
"Dancer Suzanne Farrell
was feted by her former colleague at the New York City Ballet, Jacques
d'Amboise. The company, led by George Balanchine, 'was the center of
American ballet and she was the diamond in its crown,' d'Amboise said."
Sunday, December 4, 2005 1:06 PM
On December 3...
In 1947,
"A Streetcar Named Desire"
opened on Broadway.
In 1953,
the musical "Kismet"
opened on Broadway.
In 1960,
the musical "Camelot"
opened on Broadway.
| See also a review of recent poetry by Paul Mariani-- "Vivid images sometimes shine and Epiphany 2005. |
Saturday, December 3, 2005 3:00 PM
Works and Days
Hesiod, Works and Days:
"So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two.... For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due."
On this date in 1944, "A bitter civil war broke out in Athens...."
"Cambridge was colder and darker and offered even fewer distractions than before the war. By June, 1943, Minakis had done the maths tripos with honors.... He read Cavafy and Seferis and T.S. Eliot:
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate...
Minakis was happy for his colleagues when the war ended but felt little on his own account or that of the country he had left; the Greek government was a British prop that could not feed its people, the Communists and the Monarchists were at one another's throats like savage dogs, and civil war was inevitable.
Better to return to grim Cambridge...."
"There will be time, there will be time"--
Friday, December 2, 2005 8:05 PM
"... a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough.... Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was 'the God' and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as 'the truly divine' is absolutely no longer sufficient."
Friday, December 2, 2005 5:55 AM
Proof 101"This module aims to introduce the student to rigorous university level mathematics....
Syllabus: The idea of and need for mathematical statements and proofs.... proof by contradiction... proof by induction.... the infinite number of primes...."
In the December Notices of the American Mathematical Society,
Brian (E. B.) Davies, a professor of mathematics at King's College
London, questions the consistency of Peano Arithmetic (PA), which has
the following axioms:
Axiom 1. 0 is a number.
Axiom 2. The successor of any number is a number.
Axiom 3. If a and b are numbers and if their successors are equal, then a and b are equal.
Axiom 4. 0 is not the successor of any number.
Axiom 5. If S is a set of numbers containing 0 and if the successor of any number in S is also in S, then S contains all the numbers.
It should be noted that the word "number" as used in the Peano axioms means "non-negative integer." The fifth axiom deserves special comment. It is the first formal statement of what we now call the "induction axiom" or "the principle of mathematical induction."
Peano's fifth axiom particularly troubles Davies, who writes elsewhere:
I contend that our understanding of number should be placed in an historical context, and that the number system is a human invention. Elementary arithmetic enables one to determine the number of primes less than twenty as certainly as anything we know. On the other hand Peano arithmetic is a formal system, and its internal consistency is not provable, except within set-theoretic contexts which essentially already assume it, in which case their consistency is also not provable. The proof that there exists an infinite number of primes does not depend upon counting, but upon the law of induction, which is an abstraction from our everyday experience....
... Geometry was a well developed mathematical discipline based upon explicit axioms over one and a half millennia before the law of induction was first formulated. Even today many university students who have been taught the principle of induction prefer to avoid its use, because they do not feel that it is as natural or as certain as a purely algebraic or geometric proof, if they can find one. The feelings of university students may not settle questions about what is truly fundamental, but they do give some insight into our native intuitions.
-- E. B. Davies in
"Counting in the real world,"
March 2003 (word format),
To appear in revised form in
Brit. J. Phil. Sci. as
"Some remarks on
the foundations
of quantum mechanics"
Exercise:
The proof that there exists an infinite number of primes does not depend upon counting, but upon the law of induction.
Cite the following passage in your discussion.
It will be clear by now that, if we are to have any chance of making progress, I must produce examples of "real" mathematical theorems, theorems which every mathematician will admit to be first-rate.
... I can hardly do better than go back to the Greeks. I will state and prove two of the famous theorems of Greek mathematics. They are "simple" theorems, simple both in idea and in execution, but there is no doubt at all about their being theorems of the highest class. Each is as fresh and significant as when it was discovered-- two thousand years have not written a wrinkle on either of them. Finally, both the statements and the proofs can be mastered in an hour by any intelligent reader, however slender his mathematical equipment.
I. The first is Euclid's proof of the existence of an infinity of prime numbers.
The prime numbers or primes are the numbers
(A) 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, ...
which cannot be resolved into smaller factors. Thus 37 and 317 are prime. The primes are the material out of which all numbers are built up by multiplication: thus
666 = 2 . 3 . 3 . 37.
Every number which is not prime itself is divisible by at least one prime (usually, of course, by several). We have to prove that there are infinitely many primes, i.e. that the series (A) never comes to an end.
Let us suppose that it does, and that
2, 3, 5, . . . , P
is the complete series (so that P is the largest prime); and let us, on this hypothesis, consider the number
Q = (2 . 3 . 5 . . . . . P) + 1.
It is plain that Q is not divisible by any of
2, 3, 5, ..., P;
for it leaves the remainder 1 when divided by any one of these numbers. But, if not itself prime, it is divisible by some prime, and therefore there is a prime (which may be Q itself) greater than any of them. This contradicts our hypothesis, that there is no prime greater than P; and therefore this hypothesis is false.
The proof is by reductio ad absurdum, and reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.
-- G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician's Apology,
quoted in the online guide for
Clear and Simple as the Truth:
Writing Classic Prose, by
Francis-Noël Thomas
and Mark Turner,
Princeton University Press
In discussing Davies's claim that the above proof is by induction, you may want to refer to Davies's statement that
Geometry was a well developed mathematical discipline based upon explicit axioms over one and a half millennia before the law of induction was first formulated
and to Hardy's statement that the above proof is due to Euclid.
Thursday, December 1, 2005 9:00 AM
Campion's Day
