Monday, December 29, 2008  12:21 PM

Return of...

Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise: "'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money-- you can tell that just by looking-- but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.' 'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.' Pablo's eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion." For further details, click on the diamond.

 

Related narratives:

Today's online Times on
the Saturday, Dec. 27,
death of an artist:

From the Times on the day
of Mr. Graham's death:

"Dale Wasserman... the playwright responsible for two Broadway hits of the 1960s, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest' and 'Man of La Mancha,' died on Sunday [December 21, 2008] at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., near Phoenix....

Mr. Wasserman wrote more than 75 scripts for television, the stage and the movies, including screenplays for 'The Vikings' (1958), a seafaring epic with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, and 'A Walk With Love and Death' (1969), a John Huston film set in 14th-century Europe....

He feuded with... John Huston, who gave the lead female role in 'Walk' to his teenage daughter, Anjelica, against Mr. Wasserman's wishes. And he never attended ceremonies to receive the awards he won."

Accepting for Mr. Wasserman:
Mr. Graham's widow,
Anjelica Huston --



"Well..."

Monday, December 29, 2008  2:45 AM

Religion and Narrative:

Friday, December 26, 2008  4:07 PM

ART WARS and...

Narrative

"Wayne C. Booth's lifelong
study of the art of rhetoric
 illuminated the means
 by which authors seduce,
 cajole and lie to their readers
 in the service of narrative."

-- New York Times, Oct. 11, 2005

Roberta Smith in a New York Times Christmas Day review of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art:

"He ends the show with Ed Ruscha's painting 'The End.' But if you consult the brochure, you'll see that it also lists one final object up above, near the ceiling. This is the green LED exit sign that directs you out of the gallery. The sign, designed by Mark Wamble, Dawn Finley and Ben Thorne of Interloop Architecture, is, like everything else here, in the Modern's collection. Here, of course, it is also just doing its job."

Other Christmas Day endings --

Those of W.C. Fields-- see Cafe Society (April 14, 2007)-- and, this year, of Eartha Kitt:

From April 12 last year:



This Way to
the Egress

Thursday, December 25, 2008  12:00 PM

Annals of Religion:

Christmas Card



Commentary

Oct. 11-14, 2005:




Click to enlarge.

"My card."

Tuesday, December 23, 2008  12:00 PM

Mathematics and Narrative:

Tuesday, December 23, 2008  12:20 AM

A Quest for Sontag:

Mulligan received a best director Oscar nomination in 1963 for "[To Kill a] Mockingbird"....

While some debated whether he had a discernible personal vision in his films, Mulligan was known for his casting and direction of children, including "[Up the Down] Staircase," where he personally interviewed more than 500 New York high school students.

Sensing a kindred spirit, Francois Truffaut was a vocal champion, particularly cognizant of what he perceived as undue criticism of Mulligan's work for lacking a particular "style." Mulligan himself was dismissive of critics/cineaste talk: "I don't know anything about 'the Mulligan style,' " he told the Village Voice in 1978. "If you can find it, well, that's your job."

-- Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter

Monday, December 22, 2008  9:00 PM

A Hanukkah Tale:

The Folding

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5 --

Ghost:

"I could a tale unfold
   whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul,
   freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars,
   start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined
   locks to part
And each particular hair
   to stand on end,
Like quills upon
   the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon
   must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.
   List, list, O, list!"

This recalls the title of a piece in this week's New Yorker:

"The Book of Lists:
Susan Sontag’s early journals"

(See Log24 on Thursday, Dec. 18.)

In the rather grim holiday spirit of that piece, here are some journal notes for Sontag, whom we may imagine as the ghost of Hanukkah past.

There are at least two ways of folding a list (or tale) to fit a rectangular frame.

The normal way, used in typesetting English prose and poetry, starts at the top, runs from left to right, jumps down a line, then again runs left to right, and so on until the passage is done or the bottom right corner of the frame is reached.

The boustrophedonic way again goes from top to bottom, with the first line running from left to right, the next from right to left, the next from left to right, and so on, with the lines' directions alternating.

The word "boustrophedon" is from the Greek words describing the turning, at the end of each row, of an ox plowing (or "harrowing") a field.

The Tale of
the Eternal Blazon
by Washington Irving

"Blazon meant originally a shield, and then the heraldic bearings on a shield. Later it was applied to the art of describing or depicting heraldic bearings in the proper manner; and finally the term came to signify ostentatious display and also description or record by words or other means. In Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 5, the Ghost, while talking with Prince Hamlet, says:

    'But this eternal blazon
        must not be
    To ears of flesh and blood.'

Eternal blazon signifies revelation or description of things pertaining to eternity."

-- Irving's Sketch Book, p. 461

   By Washington Irving and
   Mary Elizabeth Litchfield,

   Ginn & Company, 1901

Related material:

Folding (and harrowing up)
some eternal blazons --

These are the foldings
described above.

They are two of the 322,560
natural ways to fit
the list (or tale)
"1, 2, 3, ... 15, 16"
into a 4x4 frame.

For further details, see
The Diamond 16 Puzzle.

Moral of the tale:

Cynthia Zarin in The New Yorker, issue dated April 12, 2004--

"Time, for L'Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated, 'When you bring a sheet off the line, you can't handle it until it's folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can't exist until it's folded-- or it's a story without a book.'"

Monday, December 22, 2008  11:07 AM

Snows of Yesteryear:

Fides et Ratio

Part I:
Ratio

Continued from...

December 20, 2003 -- White, Geometric,    and Eternal -- Makin' the Changes (From "Flag Matroids," by Borovik, Gelfand, and White) Edward Rothstein, New York Times, 12/20/03: White and Geometric,  but not Eternal.

Part II:
Fides



For more information,
click on the cocktail.

Sunday, December 21, 2008  4:23 PM

Mathematics and Narrative:

Prominent literary intellectuals often like to make familiar reference to the technical terminology of mathematical logic or philosophy of language. A friend of mine overheard the following conversation in Cambridge during l'affaire Derrida, when the proposal to grant an honorary degree to that gentleman met serious academic opposition in the university. A journalist covering the fracas asked a Prominent Literary Intellectual what he took to be Derrida's importance in the scheme of things. 'Well,' the PLI confided graciously, unblushingly, 'Gödel showed that every theory is inconsistent unless it is supported from outside. Derrida showed that there is no outside.'

Now, there are at least three remarkable things about this. First, the thing that Gödel was supposed to show could not possibly be shown, since there are many demonstrably consistent theories. Second, therefore, Gödel indeed did not show it, and neither did he purport to do so. Third, it makes no sense to say that an inconsistent theory could become consistent by being 'supported from outside', whatever that might mean (inconsistency sticks; you cannot get rid of it by addition, only by subtraction). So what Derrida is said to have done is just as impossible as what Gödel was said to have done.

These mistakes should fail you in an undergraduate logic or math or philosophy course. But they are minor considerations in the world of the PLI. The point is that the mere mention of Gödel (like the common invocation of 'hierarchies' and 'metalanguages') gives a specious impression of something thrillingly deep and thrillingly mathematical and scientific (theory! dazzling! Einstein!) And, not coincidentally, it gives the PLI a flattering image of being something of a hand at these things, an impresario of the thrills. I expect the journalist swooned.

Sunday, December 21, 2008  1:06 PM

ART WARS continued:

Interpretive Grids

The 15 grids in the picture at right above may be regarded as interpreting the structure of the space at left above.

This pair of pictures was suggested by yesterday's entry at Ars Mathematica containing the phrase "a dramatic extension of the notion of points."

For other uses of the phrase "interpretive grid," see today's previous entry.

Sunday, December 21, 2008  11:00 AM

Philosophy and Law:

Saturday, December 20, 2008  11:11 AM

Annals of Religion:

for the Church of
the Forbidden Planet

From 9/18:

O the mind, mind has mountains,
   cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.
   Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

From 4/14:

"minds blazing, to the barricades"

-- The New York Times
    on the Wheeler effect

See also
Bloomsday for Nash:
The Revelation Game --

     

For details,
click on the
black hole.

Friday, December 19, 2008  1:06 PM

Art and Religion:

Inside the
White Cube

Part I: The White Cube




Part II: Inside
 


Part III: Outside



Click to enlarge.

Mark Tansey, The Key (1984)

For remarks on religion
related to the above, see
Log24 on the Garden of Eden
and also Mark C. Taylor,
"What Derrida Really Meant"
(New York Times, Oct. 14, 2004).

For some background on Taylor,
see Wikipedia. Taylor, Chairman
of the Department of Religion at
Columbia University, has a
1973 doctorate in religion from
Harvard University. His opinion
of Derrida indicates that his
sympathies lie more with
the serpent than with the angel
in the Tansey picture above.

For some remarks by Taylor on
the art of Tansey relevant to the
structure of the white cube
(Part I above), see Taylor's
The Picture in Question:
Mark Tansey and the
Ends of Representation
(U. of Chicago Press, 1999):

From Chapter 3, "Sutures* of Structures," p. 58: "What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work? This question is deceptive in its simplicity. A frame is, of course, 'a basic skeletal structure designed to give shape or support' (American Heritage Dictionary).... when the frame is in question, it is difficult to determine what is inside and what is outside. Rather than being on one side or the other, the frame is neither inside nor outside. Where, then, Derrida queries, 'does the frame take place....'" * P. 61: "... the frame forms the suture of structure. A suture is 'a seamless [sic**] joint or line of articulation,' which, while joining two surfaces, leaves the trace of their separation."  ** A dictionary says "a seamlike joint or line of articulation," with no mention of "trace," a term from Derrida's jargon.

Thursday, December 18, 2008  1:00 PM

A Mamet Yule:

Polar Opposites

Susan Sontag in
this week's New Yorker:
"The mind is a whore."

Embedded in the Sontag
article is the following:





Act One

South Pole:





Shi Ho

Act Two

North Pole:





Kun

"If baby I'm the bottom,
you're the top."
-- Cole Porter   

Happy birthday,
Steven Spielberg.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008  12:00 AM

At the still point...

Tuesday, December 16, 2008  8:00 PM

A Problematic Phenomenon:

Wolfram's Theory of Everything
and the Gameplayers of Zan.

Related pictures--

From Wolfram:



A Square

From me:



A Wheel