In memory of
journalist Oriana Fallaci,
who died last night:
Thursday, September 14, 2006 7:11 PM
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 9:28 PM
The Krauss Cross
"If we open any tract-- Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance-- we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.
Or, to take a more up-to-date example, we could think about Ad Reinhardt who, despite his repeated insistence that 'Art is art,' ended up by painting a series of black nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. 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."
Rebecca Goldstein on
Mathematics and Narrative:
"I don't write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters. My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors, contained nine pieces, five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer) to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer."
Jacques Maritain,
October 1941:
"The passion of Israel
today is taking on
more and more distinctly
the form of the Cross."
E. L. Doctorow,
City of God:
"In the Garden of Adding
live Even and Odd."
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 2:56 AM
Octobers for Fest
In memory of Joachim Fest, a noted biographer of Hitler who died on 9/11 at age 79--
A link from 5/27, 2005 (a date mentioned in Monday's Log24 9/11 entry):
A search on this inelegant phrase from Sartre's Being and Nothingness leads, surprisingly, to remarks by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain said to have been published in the month of October in the fateful year 1941.
According to Telegraph.co.uk today, Fest was "the most celebrated historian and the most distinguished journalist of the post-war generation in Germany."
The Telegraph says he
"aroused the envy of professorial rivals, none of whom could match the incisive elegance of his writing. Equally important was his flair for controversy. He was determined to prevent the wrong lessons being drawn from the past by the Left-wing establishment that had dominated German intellectual life since the 1960s.
Conservative in politics and Catholic by upbringing, Fest stood out among his contemporaries for his rejection of the influence of the Marxist sociologists of the Frankfurt school on the historiography of the Third Reich. Fest saw the Nazi phenomenon not as a product of capitalism, but as a moral catastrophe, made possible by the abdication of responsibility on the part of educated Germans."
For a view of Christian politics closer to that of the Frankfurt school, see a review by Charles Isherwood in the 9/11 New York Times of a play, "The Man Himself."
Related material:
A Log24 entry
from October 29, 2002:
Our Judeo-Christian Heritage: Two Sides of the Same Coin
|
and Echoes
(August 11, 2006).
Monday, September 11, 2006 11:00 PM
A Sermon for Sartre
A sequel to
Les Mots:
Les Nombres
"Words and numbers
are of equal value,
for, in the
cloak of knowledge,
one is warp
and the other woof."
-- The princesses
Rhyme and Reason
in The Phantom Tollbooth,
by Norton Juster, 1961
| Lotteries 9/11/06 |
Midday |
Evening |
| NY | 394 | 628 |
| PA | 527 | 916 |
"Time and chance
happeneth to them all."
-- Ecclesiastes 9:11
Hermeneutics:
The numbers may be regarded
as coordinates in a map
of one spatial dimension
(a road dimension:
394 - Chautauqua, NY)
and of three
temporal dimensions
(birthday dimension 6/28,
Sartre dimension 5/27,
religious dimension 9/16).
This interpretation is of course
rather arbitrary, but so are most
interpretations.
Related material:
Sontag and Sartre this morning
and Sontag on Sunday.
Update of 1:29 AM 9/12:
"HASS-D"-- Click here.
Monday, September 11, 2006 6:00 AM
Sontag's Sermon
continued from yesterday
"My image of myself since age 3 or 4-- the genius-schmuck. I allow one to pay off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one or the other....
Sartre (cf. 'Les Mots') the only other person I know of who had this 'certainty' of genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood of a famous man.)
A kind of
Sartre was very ugly-- and knew it. So he didn't have to develop 'the schmuck' to pay off the others for being 'the genius.' Nature had taken care of the problem for him. He didn't have to invent a cause of failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself 'stupid' in personal relations. (For 'stupid,' also read 'blind.')"
-- Susan Sontag in The New York Times Magazine yesterday
Meanwhile, back at MIT:
Doonesbury 9/11
Related material
from MIT's School of
Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences
(SHASS),
"'For the modern post-religious man,' Susan Sontag wrote in a 1961 essay, 'the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.'"
-- "The Moralist," by Scott McLemee, The Boston Globe, July 16, 2006
The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were 'I love you.' Over and over again, the message was the same, 'I love you.' .... Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock: we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death."
Sunday, September 10, 2006 2:56 PM
ART WARS
continued:
Sources:
This morning's Log24 entry,
today's New York Times Magazine,
and today's Doonesbury.
Related material:
My Life among the Deathworks:
Illustrations of the
Aesthetics of Authority,
by Philip Rieff,
Sontag's ex-husband.
See also Nicole Kidman in
the 2004 remake of
The Stepford Wives.
Sunday, September 10, 2006 4:00 AM
And the
"Meet Max Black"
Award goes to...
"For the Aeron and other designs,
Mr. Stumpf won this year’s
National Design Award
in Product Design,
which is to be presented
posthumously on Oct. 18
by the Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum
in Manhattan."
-- Today's New York Times
Stumpf died on August 30,
the date of the Log24 entry
"The Seventh Symbol."
Related material:
From
Geometry of the I Ching,
a chessboard:
From the
National Design Museum:
From Log24 on the
date of Stumpf's death,
The Seventh Symbol:
Pictorial version of
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)
See also
Fearful Symmetry
and
Symmetry Framed.
Saturday, September 9, 2006 4:07 PM
The Board
"As Boileau-Narcejac* admirably said: 'The creator invents the chessboard, the serial writer invents the moves.'" --Moez Lahmedi
* Quoted by Marc Lits in Pour lire le roman policier, Bruxelles-Paris, De Boeck-Duculot, 1989, p. 7.
The Moves
"Problems are the poetry of chess.
They demand from the composer
the same virtues that characterize
all worthwhile art:
originality, invention,
harmony, conciseness,
complexity, and
splendid insincerity."
-- Vladimir Nabokov
Friday, September 8, 2006 7:20 AM
In his honor, a small correction will be made this morning to the Wikipedia article on Harvard University. The date of the founding of Harvard will be changed from today, September 8, to the apparently more correct date October 28 (1636).
"... the Massachusetts
Great and General Court...
on Oct. 28, 1636, set aside
400 pounds for that
'schoale or colledge....'"
-- TIME, Sept. 28, 1936
"Only through time
time is conquered."
-- T. S. Eliot
Update of 7:14 PM Sept. 8:
Democracy has prevailed, and my correction has now been made politically correct.
Here is my comment at Wikipedia:
I see that Daniel P. B. Smith has changed the article in accordance with his earlier suggestion. This is at least an improvement. Enemies of Harvard's political correctness may be amused by the fact that in the summary box, the college motto Veritas (Truth) is followed immediately by a Harvard lie.
Thursday, September 7, 2006 2:56 PM
"What, nephew," said the king,
"is the wind in that door?"
SIR THOMAS MALORY
Le Morte d'Arthur
-- Epigraph to
A Wind in the Door,
by Madeleine L'Engle
Vaine the ambition of Kings,
Who seeke by trophies and dead things,
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
-- John Webster,
The Devil's Law Case
From Eliot's
The Waste Land,
Part II, "A Game of Chess":
I think we are in rats' alley
115
Where the dead men
lost their bones 116
"What is that noise?"
117
The wind under the door.
118
"What is that noise now?
What is the wind doing?" 119
Nothing again nothing.
120
Eliot's note:
118. Cf. Webster: "Is the wind
in that door still?"
The line cited in Eliot's note
is from John Webster's
The Devil's Law Case,
3.2.162.
Thursday, September 7, 2006 4:04 AM
for Isak Dinesen,
who died in 1962
on this date
Meanwhile...
Click on pictures for details.
Wednesday, September 6, 2006 5:26 PM
"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams."
-- Hamlet
Background:
"... Something have you heard
Of Hamlet's transformation; so call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was...."
The transformation:
Click on picture for details.
Related material:
Figures of Speech (June 7, 2006) and
Ursprache Revisited (June 9, 2006).
Wednesday, September 6, 2006 4:00 AM
Happy birthday, Robert M. Pirsig.
Readings for the hour of the wolf:
Yesterday was Arthur Koestler's birthday.
"By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us."
-- Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
Tuesday, September 5, 2006 1:00 AM
Click on picture for details.
Monday, September 4, 2006 7:20 PM
Monday, September 4, 2006 1:00 PM
Click on picture
for details.
See also Saturday's entry
and Sunday's Pennsylvania
mid-day lottery:
666.
Related material:
Bright Star
(Monday, March 28, 2005),
the Log24 entries
for the following Friday
(April 1, 2005), and
the Pennsylvania lottery
evening number for that
Friday, April Fools' Day:
666.
Today's birthday:
the late Joan Aiken,
author of
The Shadow Guests.
(See Devil's Night, 2005.)
Sunday, September 3, 2006 1:00 PM
The following figure from a June 11, 1986, note illustrates Sylvester's "duads" and "synthemes" using the concept of an "inscape" (part B of the figure). As R. T. Curtis and Noam Elkies have explained, the duads and synthemes lead to constructions of many of the sporadic simple groups.
Saturday, September 2, 2006 7:31 AM
Salma Hayek
("Frida")
"Shinin' like a diamond
she had tombstones
in her eyes."
(For the above figures,
see Log24, 5/17/06,
"Tombstone," and
Log24, 9/13/03,
"For the Man in Black.")
and Keanu Reeves
("Constantine")
(For the above figure,
see Log24, 2/18/05,
"In Hoc Signo.")
Related material:
"Un cofre de gran riqueza
Hallaron dentro un pilar,
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar."
"A coffer of great richness
In a pillar's heart they found,
Within it lay new banners,
With figures to astound."
For some further details, see
the brief Log24 narrative
"Indiana Jones and
the Hidden Coffer" as well as
Symmetry Framed and
the design of the doors
to Rick's Cafe Americain:
Friday, September 1, 2006 7:59 AM
"Some friends of mine
are in this band."
-- David Auburn, Proof
"And if the band you're in
starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on
the dark side of the moon."
-- Quoted in Log24 on the
July 20, 2005, anniversary
of the 1969 Apollo 11
"one small step" moon landing
Last night's entry on Glenn Ford, freemasonry, and the business of narrative leads to the following meditation.
This morning's New York Times obituary of the Apollo 11 launch director brings back memories of Dean Martin's classic refrain "when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie...." This in turn is a reminder of one of the great subtitles-- Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (by Nick Tosches, published by Secker & Warburg on November 9, 1992). I respect the launch director, Rocco A. Petrone, who later headed the successful recovery of Apollo 13 (and also headed the entire Apollo program), but I also greatly respect Nick Tosches as a guide to the dark side of humanity. Secular humanism and the religion of scientism are all very well as cheerleaders for physics, but Tosches and the Roman Catholic Church have a much better understanding of human nature and original sin.
