Goin’ to Carolina
in My Mind

From today’s New York Times:

“Bobby Frank Cherry, the former Klansman whose conviction two years ago
for the church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham,
Ala., in 1963 resolved one of the most shocking cases of the civil
rights era, died yesterday at the Kilby Correctional Facility near
Montgomery, Ala., a prison spokesman said. He was 74.”

“The western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas, the northern
portions of Georgia and Alabama, and most of Tennessee, were settled by
the hardy race of Scotch-Irish, in whose veins the Scotch blood was
warm.”

“Born in Charlotte, N.C., Graham grew up in a family of Scottish
Presbyterians…. Since 1950,  [he has] lived in an Appalachian log
home… near Asheville, N.C.”

Graham in 1972	Methodist Flag

“The
Cross and Flame is a registered trademark and the use is
supervised by the General Council on Finance and Administration
of The United Methodist Church. Permission to use the Cross
and Flame must be obtained from the General Council on Finance
and Administration of The United Methodist Church – Legal
Department, 1200 Davis Street, Evanston, IL 60201.”  — www.bobmay.info

Last Crusade?

From the Los Angeles Times:

Evangelist Billy Graham is scheduled to preach a four-day Crusade at the Pasadena Rose Bowl, beginning tonight.

I do not agree with Graham’s beliefs, but respect his sincerity.

As for the “moral values” that have caused such political confusion
recently, some  Crusaders and I might agree on the importance of the
following book:

Click on picture for details.

Geometry, continued

Added a long footnote on symplectic properties of the 4×4 array to “Geometry of the 4×4 Square.”

Dark Zen

The above link is in memory of
Iris Chang,
who ended her life at 36
on Nov. 9, 2004.

A central concept of Zen
is satori, or “awakening.”
For a rude awakening, see
Satori at Pearl Harbor.

11/11 11:11:11

Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce:

“Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the significance
of numbers. The death of Beatrice inspired nothing less than a highly
complicated poem dealing with the importance of the number 3 in her
life. Dante never ceased to be obsessed by this number. Thus the poem
is divided into three Cantiche, each composed of 33 Canti….
Why, Mr. Joyce seems to say, should…. the Armistice be celebrated at
the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month? He cannot
tell you because he is not God Almighty, but in a thousand years he
will tell you… He is conscious that things with a common numerical
characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelationship. This
preoccupation is freely translated in his present work….”

– “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” in James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A Symposium (1929), New Directions paperback, 1972

See also my entry from five years ago on this date:

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

Updike on God

“In Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks God his name, the answer in Hebrew, ’Ehyeh-’Asher-’Ehyeh, has been commonly rendered I AM THAT I AM but could be, Alter reports, simply I AM, I AM. 
An impression grew upon me, as I made my way through these obdurate old
texts, that to the ancient Hebrews God was simply a word for what was:
a universe often beautiful and gracious but also implacable and
unfathomable.”

– John Updike, review of Robert Alter’s translation of The Five Books of Moses, in The New Yorker, issue dated Nov. 1, 2004, posted online Oct. 25, 2004

The Nine
(Readings for
Weyl’s birthday)

“The grid is a staircase
to the Universal….
We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who,
despite his repeated insistence
that
‘Art is art,’
ended up by painting a series of…
nine-square grids in
which the motif
that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.

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.”

– Rosalind Krauss,
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern
Art and Theory
at Columbia University
(Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969),
in “Grids”

Krauss

“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”

– Katherine Neville, author of The Eight,

in The Magic Circle,
Ballantine paperback,
1999, p. 339

Neville

“To live is to defend a form.”

(“Leben, das heisst eine Form verteidigen“)
– attributed to Hölderlin

For details on the above picture,
which deals with properties of the
nine-square grid, see

Translation Plane.

For more on the defense
of this form,

see the Log24.net entry of
June 5, 2004, A Form,
and the Art Wars entries
for St. Peter’s Day, 2004.

In memory of
“an ardent anti-Communist,”
Harry Fleischman,

dead at 90 on

All Saints’ Day:

The Hunt for
Red November

From USA Today

On November 1917:

“Lenin may have controlled Petrograd,
[but] Russia was a vast
country
and he did not control vast areas.
These areas were openly hostile
to
the Bolsheviks.”

A Harvard Education
in a Sentence

Harvard alumnus Norman Mailer:

“At times, bullshit can only be countered with superior bullshit.“

For Harvard bullshit, see
The Crimson Passion.

For superior bullshit, see
Shrine of the Holy Whapping.