Evelyn Keyes in 99 River Street
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 10:10 PM
Elliptic comment:
My comment on a discussion of elliptic curves and modular forms at Secret Blogging Seminar, about 10 PM tonight:I don’t think anyone doubted that there is a connection between elliptic curves and modular forms on the level I described above. However, the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture refers to a more advanced idea about a deeper connection.
Carnahan then gives a one-paragraph summary, definitely not popularized, of the deeper connection.Sunday, July 13, 2008 12:24 PM
Star Quality:
Sunday, July 13, 2008 12:06 PM
Annals of Philosophy:
Footprint| Sweden 608410039/philosophy-w... 7/13/2008 11:55 AM |
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sunday, July 13, 2008 11:00 AM
Today's Sermon:
Saturday, July 12, 2008 10:31 AM
In the Details:
Friday, July 11, 2008 9:11 PM
The Lottery Theater presents:
Friday, July 11, 2008 7:11 PM
The 7/11 Alignment:
| Saturday,
May 24th, 2008 9:15 pm What
I Can See from Here
I face east toward the western wall Of a tall many-windowed building Some distance off. I don't see the sunset Directly, only as it is reflected From the facade of that building. Those familiar with Manhattan know How the evening sun appears to slide Into the slot of any east/west street, And so its beams are channeled Along those canyon streets to strike Large objects like that wall And scrawl their anti-shadows there, A Tau of twilight luminescence At close of day. I've seen this For some forty years and only tonight Did I realize what I had been looking at: The way god tries to say good-bye. -- Tom Disch |
Friday, July 11, 2008 1:00 PM
Serious Numbers, continued:
|
The HSBC Logo Designer -- Henry Steiner
Born in Austria and raised in New York, Steiner was educated at Yale under Paul Rand and attended the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Fellow. He is a past President of Alliance Graphique Internationale. Other professional affiliations include the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Chartered Society of Designers, Design Austria, and the New York Art Directors' Club. His Cross-Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global Marketplace was published by Thames and Hudson (1995). -- Yaneff.com |
 Fly from Fly Bottle:  Charles Taylor, "Epiphanies of Modernism," Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self (Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) -- "... the object sets up a kind of frame or space or field within which there can be epiphany." See also Talking of Michelangelo.
|
Friday, July 11, 2008 9:00 AM
Annals of Philosophy:
Thursday, July 10, 2008 12:00 PM
His and Hers:
Wednesday, July 9, 2008 8:00 PM
Translation, continued:
Ah! Bright WingsWednesday, July 9, 2008 8:28 AM
Review:
"... he glanced up at the clock
of the Ballast Office and smiled:
-- It has not epiphanised yet,
he said."
Ezra Pound (from a page
linked to yesterday morning):
"It seems quite natural to me
that an artist should have
just as much pleasure in an
arrangement of planes
or in a pattern of figures,
as in painting portraits...."
From Epiphany 2008:
An arrangement of planes:
From May 10, 2008:
A pattern of figures:
 |
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 9:34 PM
The Final Hit:
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 3:17 PM
Final Arrangements, continued:
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 1:14 PM
The Holy Spook continued:
New York Lottery mid-day today: 672Tuesday, July 8, 2008 3:33 AM
Annals of Poetry continued:
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. [....]
The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --
"The apparition of these
faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a
wet, black bough."I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant† when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.
Part II:
Eleanor Goodman on translation (in a July 7, 2008, weblog entry, "Pound and Process: An Introduction"):
"... all translations exist on an axis. Indeed, they exist in a manifold of many axes intersecting. One axis is that of foreignness and familiarity. One axis is that of structural mimicry, another of melodic mimicry. And one axis is that of semantic fidelity."Goodman's use of the word "manifold" here is of course poetic, not mathematical.
Part III:
New York Lottery, mid-day on July 7, 2008: 771.
Long version of
a
one-image poem --
"Random apparition:
manifold translated."
This poem summarizes the
relationship (See Part IV above) of
the (apparently) random number 771
to the rather non-random concept of
a linear manifold:
[Such lines and planes have not
been, in mathematical language,
"translated."]
-- Paul R. Halmos,
Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces,
Princeton University Press, 1948
Short version of
the
above one-image poem --
771:
* Gaudier-Brzeska created the artifact shown of the cover of Solid Objects, a work of literary theory by Douglas Mao. For more on that artifact and on the New York Lottery, see Sermon for St. Peter's Day. "It is not in the premise that reality/ Is a solid...." --Wallace Stevens
† "I was like, Oh My God."
--Poet Billy Collins at
Chautauqua Institution, morning of July 7, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008 7:00 AM
On Dryness, continued:
"There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People say: 'But how can you have verse without sentiment?' You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry is utterly inconceivable to them."Related philosophy from Hollywood:
Sunday, July 6, 2008 9:00 PM
On Dryness:
|
New York Lottery
Sunday, July 6, 2008: Mid-day 307
Evening 921 |
|
Symbols:
 |
|
"The consolations of form,
the clean crystalline work" -- Iris Murdoch,
"Against Dryness" |
"A devoted father, Smith passes on his philosophy of life to his children through chess, among other things.
'My father taught me how to play chess at seven and introduced beautiful concepts that I try to pass on to my kids. The elements and concepts of life are so perfectly illustrated on a chess board. The ability to accurately assess your position is the key to chess, which I also think is the key to life.'
He pauses, searching for an example. 'Everything you do in your life is a move. You wake up in the morning, you strap on a gun, and you walk out on the street-- that's a move. You've made a move and the universe is going to respond with its move.
'Whatever move you're going to make in your life to be successful, you have to accurately access the next couple of moves-- like what's going to happen if you do this? Because once you've made your move, you can't take it back. The universe is going to respond.'
Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: 'It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I'm teaching my kids.'"
Sunday, July 6, 2008 9:00 AM
Today's Sermon:
Saturday, July 5, 2008 8:00 AM
The Lottery Theater presents...
Messenger:
[677] Our feeding herds of cattle were just climbing
[678] above the treeline when the sun
[679] sent forth its rays to warm the earth.
"A god deserves a great entrance. And Dionysus, the god of wine and party boy of Mount Olympus, whose celebratory rituals got the whole drama thing rolling in the first place, surely merits a spectacular one...."Line 506 of The Bacchae --
Friday, July 4, 2008 11:30 AM
For the Fourth of July...
In memory ofFriday, July 4, 2008 8:00 AM
ART WARS continued:
Thursday, July 3, 2008 7:11 PM
ART WARS continued:
Thursday, July 3, 2008 11:00 AM
For Champlain at Cap Diamant:
This week, we the people of North America are staging two celebrations. The Fourth of July is the 232nd birthday of the United States....
In Canada, today, another ceremony will mark the 400th anniversary of Quebec City, the first permanent settlement in New France.
The cast of "Some Girls,"
a film set in Quebec City:
Thursday, July 3, 2008 7:59 AM
Catholic Koan:
Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have approved of on a first date.
"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?" she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
"We will go to Asgard... now," he said.
At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple, but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
-- The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 12:00 PM
Review:
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 8:28 AM
The Last Target:
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 3:33 AM
Annals of Religion:
|
Wallace Stevens, from
"Credences of Summer" in Transport to Summer (1947): self takes hold, three times The thrice concentred self, having possessed The object, grips it in savage scrutiny...." In memory of the former first lady of Brazil, who died on June 24 -- Emily Dickinson: Till Summer folds her miracle -- As Women -- do -- their Gown -- Or Priests -- adjust the Symbols -- When Sacrament -- is done -- |
Tuesday, July 1, 2008 3:33 AM
Annals of Poetry:
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