Cullinane Journal 2009 March 01-15

Philosophy and Poetry:

The Origin of Change

A note on the figure
from this morning's sermon:

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."

-- Wallace Stevens,
  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
   Canto IV of "It Must Change"

Sunday, March 15, 2009 11:00 AM

Ides of March Sermon:

Angels, Demons,
"Symbology"

L'Osservatore Romano:

"On Monday morning, 9 March, after visiting the Mayor of Rome and the Municipal Council on the Capitoline Hill, the Holy Father spoke to the Romans who gathered in the square outside the Senatorial Palace....

'... a verse by Ovid, the great Latin poet, springs to mind. In one of his elegies he encouraged the Romans of his time with these words:

"Perfer et obdura: multo graviora tulisti."

"Hold out and persist:
you have got through
far more difficult situations."

(Tristia, Liber V, Elegia XI, verse 7).'"

This journal
on 9 March:

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

Note the color-interchange
symmetry of each symbol
under 180-degree rotation.

Related material:
The Illuminati Diamond:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090302-Brown360.jpg

Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons introduced in the year 2000 the fictional academic discipline of "symbology" and a fictional Harvard professor of that discipline, Robert Langdon (named after ambigram* artist John Langdon).

Fictional Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon, as portrayed by Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon

A possible source for Brown's term "symbology" is a 1995 web page, "The Rotation of the Elements," by one "John Opsopaus." (Cf. Art History Club.)

"The four qualities are the key to understanding the rotation of the elements and many other applications of the symbology of the four elements." --John Opsopaus

* "...ambigrams were common in symbology...." --Angels & Demons

Saturday, March 14, 2009 2:02 PM

Annals of Scholarship:

Flowers for Barry

Rat in Maze, image from 'Marine Rat' at http://troops.americandaughter.org/?p=35

On Time
(in Mathematics and Literature)

"... I want to spend these twenty minutes savoring, and working up, the real complexity of the metaphorical relationship of time and distance-- to defamiliarize it for us. And then I will give a few examples of how imaginative literature makes use of the inherent strangeness in this relationship:

Time ↔ Distance.

And finally I will offer my opinion (which I think must be everyone’s opinion) about why we derive significant-- but not total-- comfort from this equation."

-- Barry Mazur, March 8, 2009, draft (pdf) of talk for conference on comparative literature*

Another version of
Mazur's metaphor
Time ↔ Distance:

Equivalence of Walsh functions with hyperplanes in a finite geometry

-- Steven H. Cullinane,
October 8, 2003

For some context in
comparative literature,
see Time Fold
(Oct. 10, 2003)
and A Hanukkah Tale
(Dec. 22, 2008).

Related material:
Rat Psychology
yesterday.

* American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting, March 26-29, 2009, at Harvard. Mazur's talk is scheduled for March 28.

Saturday, March 14, 2009 11:07 AM

Notes on Literature:

A Dante
for Our Times

"This could be Heaven
or this could be Hell."
-- "Hotel California"

Heaven --

Eugene Burdick, 'The Blue of Capricorn'

or --

Hell --

Eugene Burdick, 'The Ninth Wave'

Apparently from the back cover of The Ninth Wave:

"Fear + hate = power was Mike Freesmith's formula for success. He first tested it in high school when he seduced his English teacher and drove a harmless drunk to suicide. He used it on the woman who paid his way through college. He used it to put his candidate in the governor's chair, and to make himself the most ruthless, powerful kingmaker in American politics."

Don't forget greed. See yesterday's Friday the 13th entries.

Friday, March 13, 2009 11:30 PM

ART WARS continued:

Rat Psychology

Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, home of the rat psychology of Skinner and Quine, today offered a lesson in behavioral economics.

From a transcript of Summers's remarks (for a video, see the previous entry)--

"An abundance of greed and an absence of fear on Wall Street led some to make purchases - not based on the real value of assets, but on the faith that there would be another who would pay more for those assets. At the same time, the government turned a blind eye to these practices and their potential consequences for the economy as a whole. This is how a bubble is born. And in these moments, greed begets greed. The bubble grows.

Eventually, however, this process stops - and reverses. Prices fall. People sell. Instead of an expectation of new buyers, there is an expectation of new sellers. Greed gives way to fear. And this fear begets fear.

This is the paradox at the heart of the financial crisis. In the past few years, we've seen too much greed and too little fear; too much spending and not enough saving; too much borrowing and not enough worrying. Today, however, our problem is exactly the opposite.

It is this transition from an excess of greed to an excess of fear that President Roosevelt had in mind when he famously observed that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. It is this transition that has happened in the United States today."

Related material

Spatial Practice,
Harvard-Style:

Spatial Practice,
Paris-Style:

"Voids, a Retrospective,"
an exhibit of empty rooms
that runs through March 23
at the Centre Pompidou

See also "Art Humor"
and "Conceptual Art."

Friday, March 13, 2009 7:20 PM

Annals of Finance:

Twisterooni
continued from
March 26, 2006

"When did Wharton School take over?"
-- Chris Matthews tonight on "Hardball"

Good question.

Related material
from the
Harvard school:

Washington Post video of Lawrence Summers on emotion and finance

Friday, March 13, 2009 12:15 PM

Philosophy News:

Radical Emptiness

Tom Conoboy on James Purdy's novel Malcolm:

"Life, Purdy is telling us, is meaningless. Existence is absurd. It consists of events and happenings, all unavoidable, all simultaneously significant and meaningless. They touch you, wound even, ultimately kill, yet somehow existence appears to obtain in a bubble outside of the self. As Thomas M. Lorch describes it, 'the novel portays humanity revolving about an abyss.'[1] What is real is not real, and what is not real becomes real. Malcolm describes himself as a 'cypher' and, in the end, his death affects no-one, least of all him.

Yet, through this, Purdy presents us with the final, and greatest, paradox. In presenting us with nothingness, and in deliberately describing the action in such bland and emotionless language, Purdy actually creates a sense of loss: there is nothing to lose, he is telling us, and yet we feel the loss greatly. What he does is to create a world of genuine nihilism, where nobody communicates, nobody connects, so that we can, in negative, imagine what a world in harmony might be like."

[1] Thomas M. Lorch, "Purdy's Malcolm: A Unique Vision of Radical Emptiness." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1965), p. 212.

Today in The New York Times:

See you in the
funny papers, Purdy.

Dagwood on Friday the 13th: Sadness of the echo from an empty refrigerator

Friday, March 13, 2009 12:00 AM

Friday the 13th, continued:

Midnight in the Garden

From 12:00 AM on last month's
Friday the 13th:

'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' and 'I Put a Spell on You'

From the soundtrack CD of
"Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil"--

"Accentuate the positive."
-- Clint Eastwood

MODE online:

My advice for this month is to learn the lesson from the young and innocent. Embrace optimism and go forward with life, hoping only for the best.... Accentuate your positives and don’t worry about your negatives.... Because when you smile, others smile back.

Wilhelmina Slater

Thursday, March 12, 2009 8:30 PM

Conceptual Art:

Aesthetics
of Matter,
continued

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in 'Lost in Translation'

International

Klein

Blue

Related material:

Aspects of Symmetry,
from the day that
Scarlett Johansson
turned 23, and...

"...A foyer of the spirit in a landscape
Of the mind, in which we sit
And wear humanity's bleak crown;

In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique...."

-- "Crude Foyer," by Wallace Stevens

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 7:00 PM

Politics, Religion, Scarlett:

Found (sort of)
in translation

The Associated Press, "Today in History" March 11-- On this date...

"In 1959, the Lorraine Hansberry drama 'A Raisin in the Sun' opened at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater."

Flashback to Feb. 28, 2008--

Miles to Go...

For Scarlett:

Scarlett Johansson singing 'Yes We Can'

A campaign song
in memory of
Buddy Miles:

The California Raisins sing 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine'

Click on image for details.

With a wink to Lois Wyse
and a nod to Woody Allen --

"Listen, I tell you a mystery...."

-- and to January 23, 2009:

Le coeur a ses raisons...

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 9:00 AM

Art Humor:

Sein Feld
in Translation
(continued from
May 15, 1998)

The New York Times March 10--
"Paris | A Show About Nothing"--

'Voids, a Retrospective,' at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Photo from NY Times.

'Voids, a Retrospective,' at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Photo from NY Times.

The Times describes one of the empty rooms on exhibit as...

"... Yves Klein’s 'La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide' ('The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State Into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, the Void')"

This is a mistranslation. See "An Aesthetics of Matter" (pdf), by Kiyohiko Kitamura and Tomoyuki Kitamura, pp. 85-101 in International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Volume 6, 2002--

"The exhibition «La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière-première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée», better known as «Le Vide» (The Void) was held at the Gallery Iris Clert in Paris from April 28th till May 5th, 1955." --p. 94

"... «Sensibility in the state of prime matter»... filled the emptiness." --p. 95

Kitamura and Kitamura translate matière première correctly as "prime matter" (the prima materia of the scholastic philosophers) rather than "raw material." (The phrase in French can mean either.)

Related material:
The Diamond Archetype and
The Illuminati Diamond.

The link above to
prima materia
is to an 1876 review
by Cardinal Manning of
a work on philosophy
by T. P. Kirkman, whose
"schoolgirls problem" is
closely related to the
finite space of the
diamond theorem.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 7:11 PM

Poetry and Religion--

Immortal Diamond
continued:

"That flower unseen, that gem of purest ray,
Bright thoughts uncut by men:
Strange that you need but speak them, Thomas Gray,
And the mind skips and dives beyond its ken,

Finding at once the wild supposed bloom,
Or in the imagined cave
Some pulse of crystal staving off the gloom
As covertly as phosphorus in a grave."

-- From "In a Churchyard," by Richard Wilbur

"A metaphysical assertion of this kind is the idea of the 'diamond body,' the indestructible breath-body which develops in the Golden Flower, or in the square inch space."

-- The Secret of the Golden Flower, by Richard Wilhelm, Carl Gustav Jung, and Hua-Yang Liu, second rev. ed., publ. by Routledge, 1999, pp. 130-131

For more about these concepts, see the work cited.

See also
Diamond, Flower, Space.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 9:26 AM

ART WARS, continued:

Language Game

"Music, mathematics, and chess are in vital respects dynamic acts of location. Symbolic counters are arranged in significant rows. Solutions, be they of a discord, of an algebraic equation, or of a positional impasse, are achieved by a regrouping, by a sequential reordering of individual units and unit-clusters (notes, integers, rooks or pawns). The child-master, like his adult counterpart, is able to visualize in an instantaneous yet preternaturally confident way how the thing should look several moves hence. He sees the logical, the necessary harmonic and melodic argument as it arises out of an initial key relation or the preliminary fragments of a theme. He knows the order, the appropriate dimension, of the sum or geometric figure before he has performed the intervening steps. He announces mate in six because the victorious end position, the maximally efficient configuration of his pieces on the board, lies somehow 'out there' in graphic, inexplicably clear sight of his mind...."

"... in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach's inverted canons or Euler's formula for polyhedra."

-- George Steiner, "A Death of Kings," in The New Yorker, issue dated Sept. 7, 1968

Related material:

"Classrooms are filled with discussions not of the Bible and Jesus but of 10 'core values'-- perseverance and curiosity, for instance-- that are woven into the curriculum."

-- "Secular Education, Catholic Values," by Javier C. Hernandez, The New York Times, Sunday, March 8, 2009

"... There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight.... I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights."

-- Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

The Chandler quotation appears in "Language Game," an entry in this journal on April 7, 2008.

Some say the "Language Game" date, April 7, is the true date (fixed, permanent) of the Crucifixion-- by analogy, Eliot's "still point" and Jung's "centre." (See yesterday, noon.)

Monday, March 9, 2009 5:24 PM

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

First and Last Things

Next Sunday's New York Times Book Review arrived in today's mail. On the inside of the first page is a full-page ad for a course of 24 lectures on DVD's called "Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond." On the inside of the last page is "Our Steiner Problem-- and Mine," a full-page essay by Lee Siegel on polymath George Steiner.

Related material:

The five Log24 entries ending Jan. 19, 2008
"The End of Endings," by Richard John Neuhaus

Happy birthday to the late Bobby Fischer.

"For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings"
-- Richard II, Act III, Scene ii

Portrayal of John Nash sitting upon the ground

Russell Crowe as game theorist
John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind"

Monday, March 9, 2009 12:00 PM

Annals of Psychology:

Humorism

'The Manchurian Candidate' campaign button

"Always with a
little humor."
-- Dr. Yen Lo

Diamond diagram of the four humors, the four qualities, the four elements, the four seasons, and four colors

From Temperament: A Brief Survey

For other interpretations
of the above shape, see
The Illuminati Diamond.

More psychological background,
from Jung's Aion:

"From the circle and quaternity motif is derived the symbol of the geometrically formed crystal and the wonder-working stone. From here analogy formation leads on to the city, castle, church, house, room, and vessel. Another variant is the wheel. The former motif emphasizes the ego’s containment in the greater dimension of the self; the latter emphasizes the rotation which also appears as a ritual circumambulation. Psychologically, it denotes concentration on and preoccupation with a centre...." --Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II, paragraph 352

As for rotation, see the ambigrams in Dan Brown's Angels & Demons (to appear as a film May 15) and the following figures:

Click on image
for a related puzzle.
For a solution, see
The Diamond Theorem.

A related note on
"Angels & Demons"
director Ron Howard:

Director Ron Howard with illustration of the fictional discipline 'symbology'

Click image for details.

Sunday, March 8, 2009 4:07 PM

Annals of Philosophy:

Transit Authority

In memory of
Stanley Kubrick
(overlooked in
yesterday's memorial)

"For believers the day of death, and even more the day of martyrdom, is not the end of all; rather, it is the 'transit' towards immortal life. It is the day of definitive birth, in Latin, dies natalis."

-- Pope Benedict XVI

"'Wherever you come near
the human race, there's layers
and layers of nonsense,'
says the Stage Manager in
Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town.'"

-- Today's sermon
from Frank Rich

The Eye in the Pyramid

For more layers, see
James A. Michener's
The Source.

Saturday, March 7, 2009 12:00 PM

ART WARS, continued:

One or Two Ideas

Today's birthday: Piet Mondrian

From James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

--When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

--From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

--These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

--If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws.

--Ha!

--For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas.

--I see. I quite see your point.

Besides being Mondrian's birthday, today is also the dies natalis (in the birth-into-heaven sense) of St. Thomas Aquinas and, for those who believe worthy pre-Christians also enter heaven, possibly of Aristotle.

Pope Benedict XVI explained the dies natalis concept on Dec. 26, 2006:

"For believers the day of death, and even more the day of martyrdom, is not the end of all; rather, it is the 'transit' towards immortal life. It is the day of definitive birth, in Latin, dies natalis."

The Pope's remarks on that date
were in St. Peter's Square.

From this journal on that date,
a different square --

The Seventh Symbol:

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

The square may be regarded as
symbolizing art itself.
(See Nov.30 - Dec.1, 2008.)

In honor of
Aristotle and Aquinas,
here is a new web site,
illuminati-diamond.com,
with versions of the diamond shape
made famous by Mondrian --

Cover of Mondrian: The Diamond Compositions

-- a shape symbolizing
possibility within modal logic
as well as the potentiality of
Aristotle's prima materia.

Friday, March 6, 2009 7:30 PM

Where Entertainment is God, continued:

The Illuminati Stone

TV listing for this evening --
Family Channel, 7:30 PM:

"Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer's Stone"

In other entertainment news --
Scheduled to open May 15:

Illuminati Diamond, pages 359-360 of 'Angels & Demons,' Simon and Schuster, 2000, ISBN-10 0743412397

"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"
(Faust, Part Two)

-- Carl Gustav Jung

Related material:

"For just about half a century, E.J. Holmyard's concisely-titled Alchemy has served as a literate, well-informed, and charming introduction to the history and literature of Western alchemy." --Ian Myles Slater

From 'Alchemy,' by Holmyard, the diamond of Aristotle's 4 elements and 4 qualities

For more about this
"prime matter" (prima materia)
see The Diamond Archetype

The Diamond Cross

and Holy the Firm.

Background:

Holmyard --

'Alchemy,' by Holmyard, back cover of Dover edition

-- and Aristotle's
On Generation and Corruption.

Thursday, March 5, 2009 9:20 PM

Annals of Finance:

Here's hoping this president knows how to read the newspaper.

Thursday, March 5, 2009 7:20 PM

Annals of Storytelling:

De Angelis*

* continued from yesterday

Wednesday, March 4, 2009 10:07 PM

Annals of Religion:

Cover Art

Cover of 'Angels & Demons,' paperback ISBN-10 0671027360

As religious fictions go,
I prefer...

De Angelis

"Richardson leaned forward and picked up from the table a very old bound book and a very fat exercise book. He again settled himself in his chair, and said, looking firmly at Anthony-- 'This is the De Angelis of Marcellus Victorinus of Bologna, published in the year 1514 at Paris, and dedicated to Leo X.'

'Is it?' Anthony said uncertainly."

-- Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion, 1931

Cover by Jim Lamb for 'The Place of the Lion,' Eerdmans 1979 paperback, ISBN-10 0802812228

For more about the artist,
see an entry at the weblog
"Through the Wardrobe"
on Aug. 18, 2008.

Related material:
previous entry.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009 5:24 PM

Annals of Philosophy:

The Straight Story

Horton Foote Has Died-- NY Times March 4, 2009

Stanley Fish in
Sunday's New York Times
on "Redemption,"
by George Herbert:

"... the final line provides an answer with a compact swiftness that is literally breathtaking: 'Who straight, "Your suit is granted," said, and died.' ('Straight' here means 'immediately and without detour' and describes the movement and pace of the line it introduces.)"

"Selah."
-- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

"I'm a rolling stone from Texas"
-- Theme song in
"Secondhand Lions"
(starring Robert Duvall, 2003)

Foote was not associated with
"Secondhand Lions" (which I
saw for the first time last night)
but has worked many times
with Duvall.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009 9:00 AM

Time and Chance, continued:

Markoff Process

"So fearsome was Dr. Schwartz's early reputation as a mathematician that when John Forbes Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize winning mathematician and economist, learned that he was attempting to solve an extremely challenging mathematical problem.... he became agitated, apparently fearing Dr. Schwartz might beat him to a solution, said Sylvia Nasar, author of 'A Beautiful Mind,' a biography of Nash."

-- New York Times obituary of Jacob T. Schwartz dated Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Author of the obituary:
John Markoff.

New York Lottery
March 3, 2009:

NY Lottery March 3, 2009-- Midday 491, Evening 116

"His background in mathematical algorithms led Dr. Schwartz to develop an early programming language.... The language would later influence the designer of the Python programming language, widely used by programmers today." --NY Times

"Treatment of Autistic Schizophrenic Children with LSD-25 and UML-491"--

"Autistic schizophrenic children present challenging and baffling problems in treatment.... Many of the children have been followed subsequently into later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.... Meanwhile, a new group of young autistic children are always available for new treatment endeavors as the new modes become available."*

Dr. Schwartz died on Monday,
birthday of Tom Wolfe --
who wrote
The Painted Word.

1/16: "It’s all there, hiding behind the realistic side." --Andrew Wyeth

Related material: The previous five entries.

* by Lauretta Bender, M.D., Lothar Goldschmidt, M.D., and D.V. Siva Sankar, Ph.D., in Recent Advances in Biological Psychiatry, 1962, 4, 170-177.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009 11:32 AM

Playing it...

Straight

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."

-- Thomas Pynchon in
Gravity's Rainbow

This entry is continued
from yesterday evening,
from midnight last night,
and from an entry of
February 20 (the date
four years ago of
Hunter Thompson's death)--
"Emblematizing the Modern"--

Emblematizing the Modern

The Cross of Descartes

Note that in applications, the vertical axis of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes the timeless (money, temperature, etc.) while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time.

T.S. Eliot:

"Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint...."

"I played 'Deathmaster' straight....
The best villains are the ones who are
both protagonist and antagonist."
-- The late Robert Quarry

"Selah."
-- The late Hunter Thompson

'Deathmaster' Robert Quarry and gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, who both died on a February 20

'Deathmaster' Robert Quarry and gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, who both died on a February 20

Yesterday afternoon's online
New York Times:

NY Times online front page, 5 PM March 2, 2009-- graph of stock market plunge

Today's online New York Times:

Footnote

Descending financial graph's arrow strikes man's pants cuff, immobilizing him

Tuesday, March 3, 2009 12:00 AM

Where Entertainment is God:

Midnight
in the Garden
continues

Poster for Robert Quarry's 'The Deathmaster'

Click poster for details.

Robert Quarry obituary, LA Times of March 2, 2009

Click image for details.

Related material:

The three entries here on
the date of Quarry's death:

Emblematizing the Modern,

A Kind of Cross, and

The Cross of Constantine.

Monday, March 2, 2009 7:00 PM

Fish Story, continued:

Straight

From this journal's Sunday sermon:

"Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown,
with affectionate pity, as he
drinks port and eats walnuts
for the first time in
Senior Combination Room."

-- G. H. Hardy recounting the plot
of A Fellow of Trinity

A Glossary of Cambridge:

Combination Room
Attached to the High Table end of the largely unheated medieval college halls, this was a warm place for Fellows to gather before and after meals. Now known as the Senior Combination Room to distinguish it from the Junior and Middle combination rooms.

From Stanley Fish's weblog
in The New York Times
(Sunday, March 1, 2009, 10 PM):

George Herbert's "Redemption" --

"'I resolved to be bold,/And make a suit unto him, to afford/A new small-rented lease and cancel th'old.'

But first he has to find him.... Either he's just left or he hasn't been seen, but then, unexpectedly and in the most unlikely circumstances, he turns up:

'At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth/Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied.'

Before he or his reader can ask 'what on earth are you doing here?,' the final line provides an answer with a compact swiftness that is literally breathtaking:

'Who straight, "Your suit is granted," said, and died.'"

For Senior Combination Room as
a den of thieves and murderers,
see That Hideous Strength.

Related material:

"The Painted Word"

G. H. Hardy died at 70
on December 1, 1947.
That date is now observed as
"Day Without Art."

Click on image
for further details.

Monday, March 2, 2009 11:30 AM

ART WARS:

Joyce's Nightmare
continues

Today in History - March 2

By The Associated Press

Today is Monday, March 2, the 61st day of 2009. There are 304 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On March 2, 1939, Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope on his 63rd birthday; he took the name Pius XII.

Angels and Demons, Illuminati Diamond, pages 359-360

Log24 on June 9, 2008--

From Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), page 563:

"He brings out the mandala he found.
'What's it mean?'
[....]

Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere... a spell [...]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night...."

In lieu of Slothrop's mandala, here is another...

Christ and the Four Elements

This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton's Thought,
by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge University Press,
2002, p. 85

Related mandalas:

Diamond arrangement of the four elements

and

For further details,
click on any of the
three mandalas above.

Happy birthday to
Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.

Sunday, March 1, 2009 11:00 AM

Today's Sermon:

Solomon's Cube
continued

"There is a book... called A Fellow of Trinity, one of series dealing with what is supposed to be Cambridge college life.... There are two heroes, a primary hero called Flowers, who is almost wholly good, and a secondary hero, a much weaker vessel, called Brown. Flowers and Brown find many dangers in university life, but the worst is a gambling saloon in Chesterton run by the Misses Bellenden, two fascinating but extremely wicked young ladies. Flowers survives all these troubles, is Second Wrangler and Senior Classic, and succeeds automatically to a Fellowship (as I suppose he would have done then). Brown succumbs, ruins his parents, takes to drink, is saved from delirium tremens during a thunderstorm only by the prayers of the Junior Dean, has much difficulty in obtaining even an Ordinary Degree, and ultimately becomes a missionary. The friendship is not shattered by these unhappy events, and Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown, with affectionate pity, as he drinks port and eats walnuts for the first time in Senior Combination Room."

-- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

"The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon, of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003)." --Wikipedia

"One has O⁺(6) ≅ S₈, the symmetric group of order 8! ...."

-- "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups," by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint.

"The complete projective group of collineations and dualities of the [projective] 3-space is shown to be of order [in modern notation] 8! .... To every transformation of the 3-space there corresponds a transformation of the [projective] 5-space. In the 5-space, there are determined 8 sets of 7 points each, 'heptads' ...."

-- George M. Conwell, "The 3-space PG(3, 2) and Its Group," The Annals of Mathematics, Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910), pp. 60-76

"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof...."

-- Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A₈," in Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference (July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis, James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97