Monday, August 14, 2006  5:30 PM

Under God
continued from Friday



Above left: Lieutenant Dan
from "Forrest Gump"

Above right: This week's TIME
asks, "Who needs Harvard?"

Well, maybe Lieutenant Dan.

Perhaps he should heed
the words of of Harvard student
April H. N. Yee in Friday's Crimson:

"Shrimping is a
notoriously dangerous job."

Related material:
the previous entry.

Monday, August 14, 2006  3:17 AM

Cleavage Term "... a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes." -- Robert Pirsig For such building blocks, see A Trinity for Rebecca (4/25/06) and yesterday's lottery in Pennsylvania: mid-day 713, evening 526. These numbers prompt the following meditation on the square and the hip:

In memory of Kermit Hall, college president, who died Sunday, August 13, 2006: Square 7/13: Carpe Diem President Hall (SUNY Albany) meets with Wenzhou University* delegation, 4/25/06.

In memory of Duke Jordan, jazz pianist, who died Tuesday, August 8, 2006: Hip 5/26: A Living Church Jazz clubs on 52nd Street on a summer night in 1948, pictured in Log24 on 4/25/06.

David Frankfurter, author of Evil Incarnate (Princeton Univ. Press)

Via dell'Inferno "Most modern men  do not believe in hell  because they have  not been there." -- Review of    Malcolm Lowry's    Under the Volcano The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil -- Title of book by     Andrew Delbanco Song based on Delbanco's book: "The serpent's eyes shine  as he wraps    around the vine  in the Garden of Allah." -- Don Henley

Happy Six

(continued from
New Year's Day, 2006)

See David P. Roberts (1998)
on Twin Sextic Algebras
for a discussion of
sextic twinning as an
analogue of duality
in vector spaces:



Related material:

R.T. Curtis, 2001:

"A Fresh Approach
to the Exceptional Automorphism
and Covers of the Symmetric Groups"
in
The Arabian Journal
for Science and Engineering.

Friday, August 11, 2006  11:07 PM

Under God

Adapted from August 7:

"Saomai, the Vietnamese name
for the planet Venus, was the
eighth major storm to hit China
during an unusually violent
typhoon season."

-- AP online tonight 

 Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
Thus the superior man:
If he sees good,
he imitates it;
If he has faults,
he rids himself of them.

-- Hexagram 42 

For further details,
see recent entries
(August 7-11)
and also

Symmetry and Change
In the Dreamtime.

Update of 1:06 AM ET from KHYI: Mercy Now  Written by Mary Gauthier My father could use a little mercy now The fruits of his labor Fall and rot slowly on the ground His work is almost over It won't be long and he won't be around I love my father, and he could use some mercy now My brother could use a little mercy now He's a stranger to freedom He's shackled to his fears and doubts The pain that he lives in is Almost more than living will allow I love my brother, and he could use some mercy now My church and my country could use a little mercy now As they sink into a poisoned pit That's going to take forever to climb out They carry the weight of the faithful Who follow them down I love my church and country, and they could use some mercy now Every living thing could use a little mercy now Only the hand of grace can end the race Towards another mushroom cloud People in power, well They'll do anything to keep their crown I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now I know we don't deserve it But we need it anyhow We hang in the balance Dangle 'tween hell and hallowed ground Every single one of us could use some mercy now Every single one of us could use some mercy now Every single one of us could use some mercy now

Friday, August 11, 2006  7:00 PM

Friday, August 11, 2006  2:16 PM

Echoes

Log24 on Wednesday, 8/9/06: Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder... Log24 8/9/06: "Time disappears with Tequila. It goes elastic, then vanishes." -- Kylie Minogue Log 24 and  New York Times on 8/9/06: Log24 on 8/8/06:

New York Times today, 8/11/06: Wikipedia on Mel Gibson: "The arrest was supported by... an open container... 75% full, labeled 'Cazador [sic] tequila'" Related material: "Not the sound but the echo of a sound. Not the prophecy from God in its purest way, but in a less pure way." -- Abraham Mezrich, quoted in Log24 June 6, 2003: Beware of Jews Telling Stories See also... For further details, click on Jesus.

Wednesday, August 9, 2006  10:00 PM

Wednesday, August 9, 2006  7:20 PM

Timeagain:
 
3:57 Revisited
 
Question

(NBC Nightly News
this evening)

Who is minding the
Internet liquor store?

Answer

The Green Fairy:



Kylie Minogue
in "Moulin Rouge"

Online news today at 3:57 PM:

Robin Williams in Rehab

Williams's most recent
film is "The Night Listener."

Related material --

For Your Listening Pleasure

(Log24, 9/2/05 at 3:57 PM),

and today's previous entry:

"Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes."

-- Kylie Minogue

Wednesday, August 9, 2006  2:02 PM

Two-Bar Hook
 
Wikipedia on Mel Gibson:

"The arrest was supported by...
an open container... 75% full,
labeled 'Cazador [sic] tequila'
(a strong type of mezcal)."

Today's New York Times:

Refined Tequilas,
Meant to be Savored:


 
Photo by Lars Klove for
The New York Times

-- Essay by Eric Asimov,
  "Spirits of the Times"


"Remember that we deal with
Herb Alpert--


First album, 1962

cunning, baffling, and powerful."

(Adapted from Chapter 5
of Alcoholics Anonymous)

Related Material:

"Tequila,"
by The Champs
(1958)

The Spirituality of
Addiction and Recovery

Kylie on Tequila:

"Turns out she's a party girl
who loves Tequila:
'Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.'"

Yvonne returns to the Bella Vista
in Under the Volcano:

"... a glass partition
that divided the room
(from yet another bar,
she remembered now,
giving on a side street)"

David Sanborn
(a reply to Alpert's
Lonely Bull ):

"Just listen to how he attacks the two-bar hook of  'Tequila.' After planting it firmly in our brains, he finds new ending notes for each measure; then he drops half a bar by an octave; then he substitutes a new melodic detour for the first bar, retaining the second; then he inverts that approach. He keeps twisting the phrase into new melodic shapes, but he never obscures the original motif and he never loses the beat."

-- Review of Sanborn's album "Timeagain"
    by Geoffrey Himes in Jazz Times,
    June 2003

Update of 3:57 PM:
Robin Williams in Rehab

"It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist...
with a 357."

-- Symmetry and Change

Tuesday, August 8, 2006  8:00 PM

The Crimson Passion
continues...

From The Harvard Crimson today:

Ned Lamont '76 faces voters
today in Connecticut's primary

"Lamont was a fourth generation legacy student whose great-grandfather-- Thomas W. Lamont, class of 1892-- was a partner at J.P. Morgan and the donor who gave Lamont Library its name."

There was an article on
that center of learning
in The Harvard Crimson
on May 18, 2006:

Lamont Pick-up Lines

That article suggests a caption
for this excerpt from
The Crimson Passion,
Mardi Gras, 2004:

"What are you looking at, sugar tits?"

(Courtesy of Mel Gibson,
Malibu bon-vivant)

Tuesday, August 8, 2006  12:00 AM

Monday, August 7, 2006  12:00 PM

Adapted from Rick McKee,
Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 2, 2006

Click on picture for details.

Script:

"David Stuart, a University of Texas master of Maya writing, stopped by and tried to be helpful....

'There's a playfulness to the script,' Dr. Stuart said. 'It was not a writing system that was necessarily there to be as clear as it could be. It was communicating language, but it was doing it as art.'"

-- My Maya Crash Course
in The New York Times
of May 16, 2006

"... apocalypto means to open up
and to show the truth...."

-- UCLA's Anthropoetics

Log24, May 16, 2006

Sunday, August 6, 2006  7:00 PM

http://www.dict.cc/?s=Einsatz:
to put one's back into something	bei etwas Einsatz zeigen
to up the ante	den Einsatz erhöhen
to debrief	den Einsatz nachher besprechen
to be on duty	im Einsatz sein
mil.to be in action	im Einsatz sein
to play for high stakes	mit hohem Einsatz spielen

Score:

"His music had of course come from Russian folk sources and from Rimsky-Korsakov and from other predecessors, in the way that all radical art has roots. But to be a true modernist, a cosmopolitan in the twentieth century, it was necessary to seem to disdain nationalism, to be perpetually, heroically novel-- the more aloof, the better. 'Cold and transparent, like an "extra dry" champagne, which gives no sensation of sweetness, and does not enervate, like other varieties of that drink, but burns,' Stravinsky said about his own Octet, Piano Concerto, and Piano Sonata. The description might be applied to works by Picasso or Duchamp."

-- Michael Kimmelman in
  The New York Review of Books,
issue dated Aug. 10, 2006

Perhaps.
But the description
certainly applies to
Bridget Moynahan:

"... like an 'extra dry' champagne,
which gives no sensation of
sweetness, and does not enervate."

For more on the
"Ice 9" figure, see
Balanchine's Birthday.

Sunday, August 6, 2006  2:14 PM

"One [feature of goodness] is that a player interacting with good persons are assessed by what he does. Cooperation with good individuals should be good and defection against good ones should be bad. The second feature should we consider with much emphasis: a good player who refused to help a bad person must be labeled good. This enables players facing cheaters to refuse help without worrying about the influence of the action on their own good reputation."

In other words,

"... a person in good standing falls into bad if and only if he fails to cooperate with an opponent in good standing. Even if he refuses to help an individual in bad standing, he does not lose his good standing. This is because the refusal is interpreted as punishment against a selfish individual (for studies on punishment, see Brandt and Sigmund (2003), Fehr and Gachter (2000), Fehr and Rockenbach (2003), and Henrich and Boyd (2001))."

See also Harry Truman and Hiroshima, on this date in 1945.

Related material:

Hitler's Still Point:
A Hate Speech for Harvard

The 5 Log24 entries ending
with "Three in One" on
December 20, 2002

Satori at Pearl Harbor

Saturday, August 5, 2006  2:00 PM

John Huston
was born
100 years ago
 on this date.

Huston directed
the film versions of

The Night of the Iguana
and
Under the Volcano.







"Borges' seminal short story
El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan
(The Garden of Forking Paths)
is an early example of
many worlds in fiction."

"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
-- Voltaire 

Saturday, August 5, 2006  2:20 AM

Friday, August 4, 2006  9:00 PM

Quad
by
Samuel Beckett:


Click on the
figure for details.

"I am always about
in the Quad" --God

(Rhyme attributed to
Monsignor Ronald
Arbuthnott Knox)

Related material:
the previous entry,
an article subtitled
"Beckett's Private Purgatories"
in this week's New Yorker,
Quine in Purgatory,
and Logos and Logic.

Friday, August 4, 2006  2:00 PM

The Double Cross

The following symbol
has been associated
with the date
December 1:



Click on the symbol
for details.

That date is connected
to today's date since
Dec. 1 is the feast--
i.e., the deathday-- of
a saint of mathematics:
G. H. Hardy, author of
the classic
A Mathematician's Apology
(online, pdf, 52 pp. ),
while today is the birthday
of three less saintly
mathematical figures:
Sir William Rowan Hamilton,

John Venn,
and Saunders Mac Lane.

For these birthdays, here is
a more cheerful version of
the above symbol:



For the significance of
this version, see
Chinese Jar Revisited
(Log24, June 27, 2006),
a memorial to mathematician
Irving Kaplansky
(student of Mac Lane).

This version may be regarded
as a box containing the
cross of St. Andrew.
If we add a Greek cross
(equal-armed) to the box,
we obtain the "spider,"
or "double cross," figure



of my favorite mythology:
Fritz Leiber's Changewar.

Friday, August 4, 2006  4:01 AM

The Presbyterian Exorcist

In memory of

Charles W. Dunn, Harvard Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures Emeritus, who died July 24, 2006, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston at the age of 90.  Dunn was master of Quincy House from 1966 to 1981.

"'He brought a taste of Scotland to the House, initiating an annual rite of exorcism in September to cleanse the place of evil spirits, during which a Scots bagpiper led a march of residents around the courtyard and Charles intoned an incantation while waving a large baton, banishing ghosts and other harbingers of ill will. His leadership was at its best during magnificent evenings in the Master's lodging when he taught guests Scottish country dances. Students were fond of him, and he of them.'

Born in Arbuthnott, Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Dunn began his schooling in Aberdeen and Edinburgh...."

-- Harvard University Gazette online, Aug. 2, 2006

Related material:

In Memory of Wallace Stevens,
Presbyterian Saint
(also from Aug. 2, 2006),
and Deaconess.

Friday, August 4, 2006  2:56 AM

ART WARS
continued from
previous entry

In memory of
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf:

well be posed by...



Rosalind Krauss,

"The grid is a staircase to the Universal....
We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who,
despite his repeated insistence that
'Art is art,'
ended up by painting a series of...
nine-square grids in which the motif
that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.


Adapted from
Ad Reinhardt

There is no painter in the West
who can be unaware of
the symbolic power
of the cruciform shape and the
Pandora's box of spiritual reference
that is opened once one uses it."

-- Rosalind Krauss in "Grids"

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
-- Katherine Neville, author of The Eight

Related material:

Balanchine's Birthday,

Apollo and Christ.

Friday, August 4, 2006  2:12 AM

ART WARS
Continued from
Nov. 25, 2005

The 1974 video 'Hot Dog' shoots to the heart of the adolescent 'gross-out' as McCarthy tapes his penis into a hot dog bun, then packs his pie hole full of franks and wraps himself in gauze. Another piece from the 70s called 'Sailor's Meat' finds the artist dressed as a blonde hooker smeared with blood and 'knowing' a pile of raw meat....

Critics often compare his work with that of the Viennese Actionists whose performances were also characterized by gore, raw sexuality, and abused food."

Related material:
The Wiener Kreis in
yesterday's 1:06 PM entry
and the five entries
ending the afternoon of
Nov. 25, 2005.

For an approach to art
more in the spirit of Apollo
than of Dionysus, see
Geometry for Jews.

Thursday, August 3, 2006  12:00 PM

"De veras! It's so romantic!"

-- Let Noon Be Fair, by Willard Motley

Related material:

1. The closing entries for Log24
   in 2002 (Dec. 28-31),
   
   
2. Log24, May 18-19, 2006, and
   
   
3. last night's performance of
   Mozart's K. 265 ("Twinkle, Twinkle")
   on Live from Lincoln Center.
   
   

Wednesday, August 2, 2006  6:23 PM

Wednesday, August 2, 2006  1:06 PM

The Crimson Passion
continues.

The Harvard Jesus:

Crimson/Nancy K. Dutton
Monday, Feb. 23, 2004

"If Jesus does come back, he will likely be wearing a tie-dyed shirt, smoking a joint, flashing the peace sign and rocking rose-tinted glasses....

Gibson never wants people to forget that we are ultimately responsible for his Lord's crucifixion.  And by 'people' I mean 'the Jews.'"

-- Harvard Crimson,
Monday, Feb. 23, 2004,
opinion column
by Erol N. Gulay

And now...

From the Harvard Crimson
on the 2006 feast of
St. Ignatius Loyola:

WEB UPDATE Billionaire Harvard Donor Arrested For Soliciting Prostitutes Epstein donated $30 million to Harvard in 2003; Law professor Alan Dershowitz has been hired to defend Epstein. By KATHERINE M. GRAY Monday, July 31, 2006 7:46 PM   Billionaire money manager Jeffrey Epstein, who donated $30 million to Harvard in 2003, has been charged with soliciting sex from prostitutes in his Palm Beach, Florida mansion-- and has hired Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz to serve in his defense.

Related illustrations
from Dec. 15, 2004:

Judeo-Christian Heritage: The Wiener Kreis The meditation below was suggested by this passage: "... the belief that any sensible discourse had to be formulated within the rules of the scientific language, avoiding the non sense of the ordinary language. This belief, initially expressed by Wittgenstein as aphorisms, was later formalized by the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] as a 'logical construction of the world'...." "Deeply Vulgar" -- Epithet applied in 2003 to Harvard President Lawrence Summers. "Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge." -- Vladimir Nabokov   In today's Crimson:   Only moderately vulgar, with its sniggering pop-culture reference. But it  should be Frankfurter Professor of Law.         Deeply vulgar.

Today's birthday:
Peter O'Toole.

Wednesday, August 2, 2006  2:00 AM

correspondences between concepts."

Online New York Times today



"With a little effort,

-- Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley's The Archivist

"Frere Jacques, Cuernavaca,
ach du lieber August."

-- John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938

Tuesday, August 1, 2006  2:56 PM

This meditation is prompted by memories of suicidal alcoholics Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway, as well as by the title of Mel Gibson's latest project, "Apocalypto."

A search on Gibson's film title leads to this quotation:

"And what does apocalypse mean? It means revelation: apocalypto means to open up and to show the truth. But it also means absolute violence, so the apocalypse is a violent revelation and a revelation of violence and immediately you see the relevance of this."

-- Interview with Rene Girard in the June 1996 issue of UCLA's Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology

It is by no means clear that "apocalypse" means "violence," let alone "absolute violence," except in the Christian tradition.

For apocalyptic Christian violence, see "Apocalypse and Violence: The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation" (pdf), by Christopher Rowland of Oxford University.

As for "the relevance of this," see the definition of "generative anthropology" (GA) at

anthropoetics.ucla.edu/purpose.htm:

"The originary hypothesis of GA is that human language begins as an aborted gesture of appropriation representing--and thereby renouncing as sacred-- an object of potential mimetic rivalry. The strength of our mimetic intelligence makes us the only creatures for whom intraspecific violence is a greater threat to survival than the external forces of nature. Human language defers potential conflict by permitting each to possess the sign of the unpossessable object of desire-- the deferral of violence through representation."

Compare with the remarks of Jung on Transformation Symbolism in the Mass:

Antecedents and parallels are found for the ritual of the Christian religious Mass in Aztec, Mithraic and pagan religious practices. "The Aztecs make a dough figure of the god Huitzilopochtli, which is then symbolically killed, divided and consumed...."

Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1969. (pp. 222-225)

Mel Gibson's interest in religion and violence is well known.  His film "Apocalypto," scheduled for release on Dec. 8, 2006, deals with human sacrifice among the Maya, rather than the Aztecs or Jews.  (Cf. Abraham and "Highway 61 Revisited.")