Also on Saint Cecilia's Day
(Release date: 11/22/2005)...
Illustrated
For Reba,
a very bright star,
the symbol of Venus
always shines:
For St. Cecilia's Day--
A flashback to June 8, 2004:
Critics in Mozart’s age
threw up their hands
at the dark Don Giovanni,
calling it perverse, amoral.
These days, such qualities
turn us on... more»
Paul Klee,
The Bavarian Don Giovanni,
1919, watercolor and ink
on paper
There's a little black spot
on the sun today....
By LARRY CELONA, JOHN MAZOR and DAN MANGAN
November 21, 2005 --
The former tour manager for superstars Paul Simon
and Billy Joel was stabbed to death yesterday by his prostitute
girlfriend on his 57th birthday less than a block from Gracie Mansion,
cops said.
"It looked like a horror movie in there," said an NYPD detective
after seeing the blood-drenched bed in the couple's sixth-floor studio
at 530 East 89th St., where cops say music producer Danny Harrison was
stabbed twice in the chest with a long butcher knife by his live-in
lover just before 1 p.m.
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
Below: cartoonist Lou Myers,
who also died on Sunday, Nov. 20,
with a horse from yesterday's entry.
"... and behold: a pale horse.
And his name, that sat on him,
was Death.
And Hell
followed with him."
-- Johnny Cash
Related material:
Log24 entries of
Sept. 15, 2003.
Detail by
Lou Myers,
Myers died yesterday,
the 30th anniversary
of the death of
Francisco Franco.
For the source of
the above picture,
see ZAKS illustrators.
Original caption of cartoon
from which the above picture
was excerpted:
"Picasso's tragedy was that
he was an artist who
ran out of new things
to paint."
"... behold: a pale horse.
And his name,
that sat on him,
was Death.
And Hell
followed with him."
-- Johnny Cash
"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question 'What is truth?'"
-- H. S. M. Coxeter,
1987, introduction to Richard J. Trudeau's remarks on the "Story
Theory" of truth as opposed to the "Diamond Theory" of truth in The Non-Euclidean Revolution
"A new epistemology is emerging to replace the Diamond Theory of truth.
I will call it the 'Story Theory' of truth: There are no diamonds.
People make up stories about what they experience. Stories that catch
on are called 'true.' The Story Theory of truth is itself a story that
is catching on. It is being told and retold, with increasing frequency,
by thinkers of many stripes*...."
-- Richard J. Trudeau in
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
"'Deniers' of truth... insist that each of us is trapped in his own
point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise
of power, try to impose them on others."
-- Jim Holt in The New Yorker.
Exercise of Power:
Show that a white horse--
a figure not unlike the
symbol of the mathematics
publisher Springer--
is traced, within a naturally
arranged rectangular array of
polynomials, by the powers of x
modulo a polynomial
irreducible over a Galois field.
This horse, or chess knight--
"Springer," in German--
plays a role in "Diamond Theory"
(a phrase used in finite geometry
in 1976, some years before its use
by Trudeau in the above book).
Related material
On this date:
In 1490, The White Knight
(Tirant lo Blanc 
)--
a major influence on Cervantes--
was published, and in 1910
the Mexican Revolution began.
Illustration:
Zapata by Diego Rivera,
Museum of Modern Art,
New York
"First published in the Catalan language in Valencia in 1490.... Reviewing the first modern Spanish translation in 1969
(Franco had ruthlessly suppressed the Catalan language and literature),
Mario Vargas Llosa hailed the epic's author as 'the first of that
lineage of God-supplanters-- Fielding, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert,
Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner-- who try to create in their novels an
all-encompassing reality.'"
Wikipedia on the tesseract:
Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road:
And opened it again.
And kept on opening it--
And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the
durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more
packed....
... Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does
not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory.... Rufo's
baggage just carried the principle further."
Johnny Cash: "And behold, a white horse."
On The Last Battle, a book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis:
Lewis said in "The Weight of Glory"--
On enchantments that need to be broken:
See the description of the Eater of Souls in Glory Road and of Scientism in
One night in Bangkok
and the world's your oyster...
Tonight's Bangkok Post
on a new $100 laptop
from an MIT designer:
Details from Wired News
Kevin Poulsen, 12:58 PM Nov. 17, 2005 PT:
TUNIS, Tunisia -- If tech luminary Nicholas Negroponte has his way, the
pale light from rugged, hand-cranked $100 laptops will illuminate homes
in villages and townships throughout the developing world, and give
every child on the planet a computer of their own by 2010.
The MIT Media Lab and Wired magazine founder stood
shoulder to shoulder with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to unveil
the first working prototype of the "$100 laptop" -- currently more like
$110 -- at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society here
Wednesday. The Linux-based machine instantly became the hit of the
show, and Thursday saw diplomats and dignitaries, reporters and TV
cameras perpetually crowded around the booth of One Laptop Per Child --
Negroponte's nonprofit -- craning for a glimpse of the toy-like tote.
With its cheery green coloring and Tonka-tough shell, the laptop
certainly looks cool. It boasts a 7-inch screen that swivels like a
tablet PC, and an electricity-generating crank that provides 40 minutes
of power from a minute of grinding.
(See also Time and
All the King's Horses.)
LEAR:
Now you better do some thinkin'
then you'll find
You
got the only daddy
that'll walk the line.
FOOL:
I've always been different
with one foot over the
line....
I've always been crazy
but it's kept me
from going insane.
For related material, see
and last night's winner of
the National Book Award
for nonfiction, i.e.,
"all hard facts, all reality, with
no illusions and no fantasy."
|
A Story That Works
|
"The best of the books are the ones... where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."
"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote...."
"We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for
stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in
confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above
all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward.
We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery...."
"The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world
of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened
and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is,
like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images-- the street
lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse-- are as
much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist,
and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the
demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for
faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments,
as the old apostles always knew."
Click on pictures for details.
See also Windmills and
Verbum sat sapienti?
as well as
at Calvin College
on Simone Weil,
Charles Williams,
Dante, and
"the way of images."
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