From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane...
2008 May 16-31
Saturday, May 31, 2008 9:00 PM
Mathematics and Narrative, continued:
A short story
for the conclusion of
Mental Health Month, 2008:
752, 753, 286.
(Numbers courtesy of the
Pennsylvania Lottery,
evening of May 30-
evening of May 31)
Commentary on the
meaning of this
short story:
Countdown
Thursday, May 29, 2008 1:14 AM
Indiana Jones and...
The Diadem
of Death
Washington Post Death Notices:
Dead on
St. Sarah's Day,
May 24 --
|
Sophie B. Altman |
Mother-in-law of
Wonder Woman
Lynda
Carter
and founder and
producer of TV's
" It's Academic"
In Memoriam:
LOS TRES REYES MAGOS
Rubén Darío
—Yo soy Gaspar. Aquí traigo el incienso.
Vengo a decir: La vida es pura y bella.
Existe Dios. El amor es inmenso.
¡Todo lo sé por la divina Estrella!
—Yo soy Melchor. Mi mirra aroma todo.
Existe Dios. El es la luz del día.
¡La blanca flor tiene sus pies en lodo
y en el placer hay la melancolía!
—Soy Baltasar. Traigo el oro. Aseguro
que existe Dios. El es el grande y fuerte.
Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
—Gaspar, Melchor y Baltasar, callaos.
Triunfa el amor, ya su fiesta os convida.
¡Cristo resurge, hace la luz del caos
y tiene la corona de la Vida!
THE THREE KINGS
I am Caspar. I bring with me the myrrh,
And have this to say: Life is pure and beautiful.
There is a God. His love is immense.
I can see all by the divine Star!
I am Melchior. My frankincense perfumes the air.
There is a God. He is the light of day.
The whitest flower has its stem in the mire
And in joy is also found sorrow!
I am Balthasar. I bring the gold. And I
Assure you: There is a God, great and mighty.
And I know this from the pure light
That radiates from the Diadem of Death.
Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar — say no more.
Love is triumphant, and beckons you to His feast:
Christ is born! The Chaos He has turned to light,
And he wears the crown of Life!
Midrash:
|
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 12:00 PM
Party Girl Turns 40:
Tequila
Mockingbird
(November 5, 2002):
CelebritySexNews.com
on Kylie Minogue:
"Turns out she's a party girl
who loves Tequila:
'Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.'"
From a web page on
Malcolm Lowry's classic novel
Under the Volcano:
The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella
Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar
voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of
the Mexican railway that requires that "A corpse will be
transported by express!" (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).
|
Kylie
|
Finney
|
Well if you want to ride
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
-- Lonnie Donegan (d. Nov. 3)
and others
The
Rock Island Line's namesake depot
in Rock Island, Illinois
|
Related material:
Twenty-First Century Fox
(10/6/02)
Back to You, Kylie
(11/5/02)
Time, Eternity, and Grace
(11/22/02)
That
Old Devil Moon
(1/1/03) and
The
Shanghai Gesture
(1/3/03)
Whirligig
(1/5/03)
Harrowing
(4/19/03)
Temptation
(4/22/03)
Temptation
(4/9/04)
Tribute,
Train
of Thought,
Drunk
Bird, and
From
Here to Eternity
(8/17/04-8/18/04)
Heaven
and Earth
(9/2/04)
Habeas Corpus
(11/24/04)
X, continued
(12/4/04)
Birth
and Death
(5/28/05)
Time
Travel
(5/28/06)
Timeagain and
Two-Bar Hook
(8/9/06)
Echoes
(8/11/06)
Phantasmagoria
and
Tequila!
(9/23/06)
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 7:00 PM
Husbands and Wives, continued:
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 2:02 PM
Husbands and Wives:
For Sydney Pollack
(See
last night's entry.)
"Now, gentlemen,
I give you
our latest acquisition
from the enemy."
--
Paths of Glory
Note the number, 701,
on the colonel's collar.
Adapted from Log24,
February 19-22, 2008:
"'This is the last call for Jaunt-701,'
the pleasant female voice echoed
through the Blue Concourse
of New York's
Port Authority Terminal....
See 2/22/08,
4/19/08,
and 5/22/08.
....'What happened?'
one of the scientists shouted....
'It's eternity in there,' he said,
and dropped dead...."
-- Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
Die Liebe nahm kein Ende mehr.
Monday, May 26, 2008 10:00 PM
Memorial Day Endgame:
From Bloomberg.com:
Great Directors
"After his return to acting in 'Tootsie,' Pollack took
movie roles under directors Robert Altman in 'The Player' (1992), Woody
Allen in 'Husbands and Wives' (1992) and Stanley
Kubrick in 'Eyes Wide Shut' (1999). He said he chose roles in part
to study other great directors."
Monday, May 26, 2008 11:07 AM
ART WARS: The Craft--
Sunday, May 25, 2008 10:30 PM
Time After Time:
Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:30 PM
ART WARS continued:
Hall of Mirrors
Epigraph to
"
Deploying the Glass Bead Game, Part II,"
by Robert de Marrais:
“For a
complete logical argument,”
Arthur began
with admirable solemnity,
“we need two prim Misses –”
“Of course!” she interrupted.
“I remember that word now.
And they produce -- ?”
“A Delusion,” said Arthur.
-- Lewis Carroll,
Sylvie
and Bruno
Prim Miss 1:
Erin O'Connor's weblog "Critical Mass" on May 24:
Roger Rosenblatt's Beet [Ecco hardcover, Jan. 29, 2008] is the latest
addition to the noble sub-genre of campus fiction....
Curricular questions and the behavior of committees are at once dry
as dust subjects and areas ripe for sarcastic send-up-- not least
because, as dull as they are, they are really both quite vital to the
credibility and viability of higher education.
Here's an excerpt from the first meeting, in which committee members
propose their personal plans for a new, improved curriculum:
"... Once the students really got into playing with toy soldiers,
they would understand history with hands-on excitement."
To demonstrate his idea, he'd brought along a shoe box full of toy
doughboys and grenadiers, and was about to reenact the Battle of Verdun
on the committee table when Heilbrun stayed his hand. "We get it," he
said.
"That's quite interesting, Molton," said Booth [a chemist]. "But
is it rigorous enough?"
At the mention of the word, everyone, save Peace, sat up straight.
"Rigor is so important," said Kettlegorf.
"We must have rigor," said Booth.
"You may be sure," said the offended Kramer. "I never would
propose anything lacking rigor."
Smythe inhaled and looked at the ceiling. "I think I may have
something of interest," he said, as if he were at a poker game and was
about to disclose a royal flush. "My proposal is called 'Icons of
Taste.' It would consist of a galaxy of courses affixed to several
departments consisting of lectures on examples of music, art,
architecture, literature, and other cultural areas a student needed to
indicate that he or she was sophisticated."
"Why would a student want to do that?" asked Booth.
"Perhaps sophistication is not a problem for chemists," said
Smythe. Lipman tittered.
"What's the subject matter?" asked Heilbrun. "Would it have rigor?"
"Of course it would have rigor. Yet it would also attract those
additional students Bollovate is talking about." Smythe inhaled again.
"The material would be carefully selected," he said. "One would need to
pick out cultural icons the students were likely to bring up in
conversation for the rest of their lives, so that when they spoke,
others would recognize their taste as being exquisite yet eclectic and
unpredictable."
"You mean Rembrandt?" said Kramer.
Smythe smiled with weary contempt. "No, I do not mean Rembrandt. I
don't mean Beethoven or Shakespeare, either, unless something iconic
has emerged about them to justify their more general appeal."
"You mean, if they appeared on posters," said Lipman.
"That's it, precisely."
Lipman blushed with pride.
"The subject matter would be fairly easy to amass," Smythe said.
"We could all make up a list off the top of our heads. Einstein--who
does have a poster." He nodded to the ecstatic Lipman. "Auden, for the
same reason. Students would need to be able to quote 'September 1939[
or at least the last lines. And it would be good to teach 'Musee des
Beaux Arts' as well, which is off the beaten path, but not garishly.
Mahler certainly. But Cole Porter too. And Sondheim, I think. Goya.
Warhol, it goes without saying, Stephen Hawking, Kurosawa, Bergman,
Bette Davis. They'd have to come up with some lines from Dark
Victory, or better still, Jezebel. La Dolce Vita.
Casablanca. King of Hearts. And Orson, naturally. Citizen Kane,
I suppose, though personally I prefer F for Fake."
"Judy!" cried Heilbrun.
"Yes, Judy too. But not 'Over the Rainbow.' It would be more
impressive for them to do 'The Trolley Song,' don't you think?"
Kettlegorf hummed the intro.
"Guernica," said Kramer. "Robert Capa." 
"Edward R. Murrow," said Lipman.
"No! Don't be ridiculous!" said Smythe, ending Lipman's brief
foray into the world of respectable thought.
"Marilyn Monroe!" said Kettlegorf.
"Absolutely!" said Smythe, clapping to indicate his approval.
"And the Brooklyn Bridge," said Booth, catching on. "And the
Chrysler Building."
"Maybe," said Smythe. "But I wonder if the Chrysler Building isn't
becoming something of a cliche."
Peace had had enough. "And you want students to nail this stuff so
they'll do well at cocktail parties?"
Smythe sniffed criticism, always a tetchy moment for him. "You
make it sound so superficial," he said.
Prim Miss 2:
Siri
Hustvedt speaks at Adelaide Writers' Week-- a story dated March 24,
2008 †--
"I have come to think of my books as echo chambers or halls of mirrors
in which themes, ideas, associations continually reflect and
reverberate inside a text. There is always point and counterpoint, to
use a musical illustration. There is always repetition with
difference."
A Delusion:
Exercise -- Identify in the following article the sentence that one
might (by unfairly taking it out of context) argue is a delusion.
(Hint: See Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry.)
Why Borovik's Figure 4
is included above:
Sunday, May 25, 2008 9:00 AM
Today's Sermon:
Wechsler Cubes
"Confusion is nothing new."
-- Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Part I:
Magister Ludi
Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec.
6, 2002, pp. 139-140)--
"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal
he had received from an organist-- one of the innumerable proposals
which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually
these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the
Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the
history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style
a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so
that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had
examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered
the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of
the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more
unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the
fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from
abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding
conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and
Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening
geometric drawings in several colors."
Part II:
A Bulky Memorandum
From Siri
Hustvedt, author of Mysteries
of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural
Press, 2005)-- What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback,
March 1, 2004, page 168)--
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers.
Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but
these were twice as large-- about two feet square. He drew his
inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball
box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted,
distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became
unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and
always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick
with allusion-- to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the
individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three
fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the
seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles
of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular
references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner
Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both
cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six
Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six.
Puns appeared, usually well disguised-- one, won; two, too, and
Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as
well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for
a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man
wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg
iron has
-- End of page 168 --
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking
closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme
in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one
glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny
black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to
Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of
associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that
ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although
dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each
object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its
rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad,
logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection-- and the colors
of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue.
Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's
use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had
assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white,
although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were
white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed
colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in
eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and
omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad
shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An
organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of
symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more
the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from
internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs
through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself--
that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes,
lines, and loops on a page."
Part III:
Wechsler Cubes
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) --
Part IV:
A Magic Gallery
|
ZZ
WW
Figures from the
Kaleidoscope
Puzzle
of Steven H. Cullinane:
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Zahlen und Zeichen,
Wörter und Worte
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
vermessen wir Himmel und Erde
schwarz
auf weiss
schaffen wir neue Welten
oder gar Universen
Numbers
and Names,
Wording and Words
With numbers and names
we measure heaven and earth
black
on white
we create new worlds
and universes
English translation
by Catherine Schelbert
A related poem:
Alphabets
by Hermann Hesse
From time to time
we take our pen in hand
and scribble symbols
on a blank white sheet
Their meaning is
at everyone's command;
it is a game whose rules
are nice and neat.
But if a savage
or a moon-man came
and found a page,
a furrowed runic field,
and curiously studied
lines and frame:
How strange would be
the world that they revealed.
a magic gallery of oddities.
He would see A and B
as man and beast,
as moving tongues or
arms or legs or eyes,
now slow, now rushing,
all constraint released,
like prints of ravens'
feet upon the snow.
He'd hop about with them,
fly to and fro,
and see a thousand worlds
of might-have-been
hidden within the black
and frozen symbols,
beneath the ornate strokes,
the thick and thin.
He'd see the way love burns
and anguish trembles,
He'd wonder, laugh,
shake with fear and weep
because beyond this cipher's
cross-barred keep
he'd see the world
in all its aimless passion,
diminished, dwarfed, and
spellbound in the symbols,
and rigorously marching
prisoner-fashion.
He'd think: each sign
all others so resembles
that love of life and death,
or lust and anguish,
are simply twins whom
no one can distinguish...
until at last the savage
with a sound
of mortal terror
lights and stirs a fire,
chants and beats his brow
against the ground
and consecrates the writing
to his pyre.
Perhaps before his
consciousness is drowned
in slumber there will come
to him some sense
of how this world
of magic fraudulence,
this horror utterly
behind endurance,
has vanished as if
it had never been.
He'll sigh, and smile,
and feel all right again.
-- Hermann Hesse (1943),
"Buchstaben," from
Das Glasperlenspiel,
translated by
Richard and Clara Winston
|
Sunday, May 25, 2008 8:28 AM
Alethiometer:
"Caught up
in circles..."
-- Song lyric,
Cyndi Lauper
Alethiometer from
"The Golden Compass"
The
I Ching
as Alethiometer
Update:
See also this morning's
later entry, illustrating
the next line of Cyndi
Lauper's classic lyric
"Time After Time" --
"... Confusion is
nothing new."
Saturday, May 24, 2008 8:48 AM
Memorial:
Time After Time
From
the five entries ending
on St. Bridget's Day, 2008:
Dana R. Wright on James Edwin Loder, Jr.--
"At his memorial service his daughter Tami told the story of
'little Jimmy,' whose kindergarten teacher recognized a special quality
of mind that set him apart. 'Every day we read a story, and after the
story is over, Jimmy gets up and wants to tell us what the story
means.'"
"I confess I do not
believe in time."
--
Nabokov, Speak, Memory
From May 20:
"Welcome to the
Garden Club, Pilgrim."
Related material:
Primitive Roots
and a video from
Perth, Australia:
"The drum beats out of time"
-- Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Friday, May 23, 2008 11:07 PM
Saints in Australia:
Happy St. Sarah's
Day
(May 24)
"...something I once heard
Charles M. Schulz say,
'Don't worry about the world
coming to an end today.
It's already tomorrow
in Australia.'"
-- William F. House,
quoted here on Australia's
St.
Bridget's Day, 2003
Click on image to view video.
Friday, May 23, 2008 11:28 AM
Annals of Philosophy, continued:
Thursday, May 22, 2008 10:07 PM
Mathematics and Narrative, continued:
Thursday, May 22, 2008 9:00 AM
ART WARS continued--
The Undertaking:
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art
Hexagram 54:
THE JUDGMENT
Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.
"
Brian O'Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* 'Patrick Ireland'
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art."
--
New York Times, May 22, 2008
THE IMAGE
Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.
Another version of
the image:
See 2/22/08
and 4/19/08.
Related material:
Michael Kimmelman
in today's New York Times--
"An essay from the '70s by Mr. O'Doherty, 'Inside the White Cube,'
became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted
with the gallery spaces in which it was shown."
Brian O'Doherty, "
Inside the White Cube," 1976
Artforum essays
on the gallery space and 20th-century art:
"The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather
the history of modern art can be correlated with
changes
in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point
where we see not the art but the space first.... An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the
archetypal image of 20th-century art."
An archetypal image
THE SPACE:
A non-archetypal image
THE ART:
Natasha Wescoat, 2004
See also
Epiphany 2008:
"Nothing that would further."
-- Hexagram 54
|
Lear's fool:
.... Now thou art an 0
without a figure. I am better
than thou art, now. I am a fool;
thou art nothing....
|
".... in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is
called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun,
and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which
has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly
till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is
nothing then man was born dead."
--
The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14
Tuesday, May 20, 2008 10:00 PM
Mathematics and Narrative, continued:
The China Candidate
In honor of the 100th
birthday of actor
James Stewart,
Turner Classic Movies
is now showing
The
Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance.
In light of an
ABC News
story tonight,
Report: U.S. Soldiers
Did 'Dirty Work' for
Chinese Interrogators,
the following film
seems more relevant:
Welcome to the
Garden Club, Pilgrim
Related material:
The Dictatorship of Talent,
by David Brooks in
The New York Times
of December 4, 2007:
"When you talk to Americans, you find
that they have all these weird
notions about Chinese communism. You try to tell them that China isn’t
a communist country anymore. It’s got a different system: meritocratic
paternalism. You joke: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of
the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the
Harvard Alumni Association with an army."
and Harvard mathematician
See also Sylvia Nasar's 2006
New Yorker
article on Yau
and
the
screenplay of
The Manchurian Candidate:
A long pause.
Finally, Yen Lo laughs.
YEN LO
With humor, my dear Zilkov.
Always with a little humor.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008 1:06 PM
Annals of Ecstasy, Part II:
The Unembarrassed Peddler
(For readers of
the previous entry
who would like to
know more about
purchasing the
Brooklyn Bridge)
From yesterday's
New York
Times, in an obituary of
a teacher of reporters:
"He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately
compose dictated sentences, like this one: 'Outside a cemetery sat a
harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated
potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady's ankle with unparalleled
ecstasy.'"
Spelling Your Way
To Success
Chapter
I:
"gnawing on a
desiccated potato"
| How the ancient crystal skull Synergy came to the Western
World...
This skull first came to light when it was acquired about two
and a half decades ago by a European businessman and avid hiker, as he
traveled around Central and South America. He acquired the skull
from a very old native man, in a tiny village in the Andes, near the
borders of Peru, Bolivia and Chile. He was just passing through, and
had come upon the small settlement while looking for a place to stay
for the night. He wandered into the village and was greeted with
smiles and an invitation to share a meal.
This gentleman, George, speaks several languages, and he
usually has at least a few words in common with most of the people he
meets in his travels-- enough to get by, anyway. Although he
didn't speak the same language as most of the people in this isolated
village, there was an instant connection between them, and they managed
with the smattering of Spanish and Portuguese that a few of them knew.
In need of shelter for the night, George was offered a spot for his
sleeping bag, near the fire, in the dwelling of an elderly man.
After a peaceful evening in the old man's company, George
gratefully accepted a simple breakfast and got ready to take his
leave. As he thanked the man for his generous hospitality, the
elder led George to an old chest. Opening the crumbling wooden lid, he
took out the crystal skull, touched it reverently, and handed it to
George. Awed by an artifact of such obvious antiquity, beauty and
value, yet uncertain what he was expected to do with it, George tried
to hand it back. But the old man urged it upon him, making it
clear that he was to take it with him.
Curious about the history of such a thing, George tried to
find out what the villagers knew about it. One young fellow explained
in halting Spanish that the skull had come into the possession of
a much loved Catholic nun, in Peru. She was quite old when she
died in the early 1800's, and she had given it to the old man’s
"Grandfather" when he was just a boy. (Note: It's hard to say if
this was really the man's grandfather, or just the honorary title that
many natives use to designate an ancestor or revered relative.)
The nun told the boy and his father that the skull was "an inheritance
from a lost civilization" and, like the Christian cross, it was a
symbol of the transcendence of Soul over death. She said that it
carried the message of immortal life and the illumination that we may
discover when we lose our fear of death. She gave it to the boy
and his father, asking them to safeguard it until the "right" person
came to get it-- and share its message with the world. It had
been brought to that land from "somewhere else" and needed to wait
until the right person could help it to continue its journey.
"Your heart will know the person," she said.
"What a strange story," thought George.
|
From elespectador.com:
"... 'Supercholita' tiene sobre todo una clara vocación
divulgadora de la cultura andina. No en vano Valdez recibió su
primer premio por explicar mediante este personaje cómo se
cocina el 'chuño,' una típica patata deshidratada muy
consumida en el altiplano boliviano."
Chapter
II:
"gazing on the symmetry
of a lady's ankle"
From "Sinatra: A Man
and His Music, Part II"
(reshown. prior to
"It Happened in Brooklyn,"
by Turner Classic Movies
on Sunday, May 11, 2008):
"Luck, be a lady tonight."
From wordinfo.info:
astragalo-, astragal-
(Greek: anklebone, talus ball of ankle joint; dice, die [the Greeks
made these from ankle bones])
astragalomancy, astragyromancy
Divination with dice, knuckle bones, stones, small
pieces of wood, or ankle bones which were marked with letters, symbols,
or dots. Using dice for divination is a form of
astragalomancy.
Related
material:
The New York Lottery
mid-day number yesterday--
719-- and
7/19.
Monday, May 19, 2008 9:49 AM
Annals of Ecstasy:
Special to
The Brooklyn Eagle--
The Cobbler, the Peddler,
and the Cemetery
Today's
New York Times, in an
obituary of
a teacher of reporters:
"He was a stickler for spelling, insisting that students accurately
compose dictated sentences, like this one: 'Outside a cemetery sat a
harassed cobbler and an embarrassed peddler, gnawing on a desiccated
potato and gazing on the symmetry of a lady's ankle with unparalleled
ecstasy.'"
Sunday, May 18, 2008 8:48 PM
An Academy Award:
"Well now what can I say
at the end of the day?"
-- Country song lyric
Und was für
ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?
_______________________________
"How'd yuh know deh was
such a place," I says, "if yuh neveh
been deh befoeh?"
"Oh," he says, "I got a map."
"A
map?"
I says.
"Sure," he says, "I got a map
dat tells me about all dese places.
I take it wit me every time
I come out heah," he says.
And Jesus! Wit dat, he pulls it out
of his pocket, an' so help me,
but he's
got it--
he's tellin'
duh troot-- a big map of
duh whole f_____ place...."
--
Thomas
Wolfe of
Asheville, North Carolina
Sunday, May 18, 2008 2:02 PM
Religion at Princeton continued:
From the Grave
"From the grave, Albert Einstein
poured gasoline on the culture wars
between science and religion this week...."
An announcement of a
colloquium at Princeton:
Above: a cartoon,
"Coxeter exhuming Geometry,"
with the latter's tombstone inscribed
"GEOMETRY
600 B.C.
- 1900 A.D.
R.I.P."
The above is from
The Paradise of Childhood,
a work first published in 1869.
"I need a photo-opportunity,
I want
a
shot at redemption.
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard."
-- Paul Simon
Albert Einstein,
1879-1955:
"It is quite clear to me that the
religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt
to free myself from the chains of the 'merely-personal,' from an
existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive
feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists
independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a
great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our
inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned
like a liberation...."
-- Autobiographical Notes,
1949
Related material:
A commentary on Tom Wolfe's
"Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died"--
"The Neural Buddhists," by David Brooks,
in the May 13 New York Times:
"The mind seems to have
the ability to transcend itself
and merge with a larger
presence that feels more real."
A New Yorker
commentary on
a new translation of the Psalms:
"Suddenly, in a world without
Heaven, Hell, the soul, and
eternal salvation or redemption,
the theological stakes seem
more local and temporal:
'So teach us to number our days.'"
Friday, May 16, 2008 11:22 PM
Annals of Religion at Princeton:
"From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture
wars between science and religion this week.
A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric
Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as 'pretty childish' and
scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a 'chosen people,' sold
for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale
estimate."
A less controversial Einstein-related remark:
"The relativity problem is one of central
significance throughout geometry and algebra and has been recognized as
such by the mathematicians at an early time."
-- Hermann Weyl, "Relativity Theory as a Stimulus in Mathematical Research,"
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol.
93, No. 7, Theory of Relativity in Contemporary Science: Papers
Read at the Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday of Professor Albert
Einstein in Princeton, March 19, 1949 (Dec. 30, 1949), pp. 535-541
