From Fitzgerald's The Diamond as Big as the Ritz:

    "Now," said John eagerly, "turn out your pocket and let's
see what jewels you brought along. If you made a good selection
we three ought to live comfortably all the rest of our lives."
     Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and tossed two
handfuls of glittering stones before him.
    "Not so bad," cried John, enthusiastically. "They aren't
very big, but-- Hello!" His expression changed as he held one of
them up to the declining sun. "Why, these aren't diamonds!
There's something the matter!"
    "By golly!" exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look. "What
an idiot I am!"
    "Why, these are rhinestones!" cried John.

From The Hawkline Monster, by Richard Brautigan:
 
    "What are we going to do now?" Susan Hawkline said, surveying the lake that had once been their house.
    Cameron counted the diamonds in his hand. 
There were thirty-five diamonds and they were all that was left of the
Hawkline Monster.
    "We'll think of something," Cameron said.

"A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short
story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of
images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This
grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of
implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists,
Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative
continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in
order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences
among eras, ideas and forces."

-- When Novelists Become Cubists:
    The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport,
    by Andre Furlani

"T.S. Eliot's experiments in
ideogrammatic method are equally germane to Davenport, who shares with
the poet an avant-garde aesthetic and a conservative temperament.  Davenport's text reverberates with echoes of Four Quartets."

-- Andre Furlani

"At the still point,
  there the dance is."

--  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,
quoted in the epigraph to
the chapter on automorphism groups
in Parallelisms of Complete Designs,
by Peter J. Cameron,
published when Cameron was at
Merton College, Oxford.

"As Gatsby closed the door of
'the Merton College Library'
I could have sworn I
heard
the owl-eyed man
break into ghostly laughter."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Heaven-- Where Is It?
  How Do We Get There?"

To air on ABC
Tuesday, Dec. 20
(John Spencer's birthday)

Fred Stein, 1945

"And we may see
the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline."

"There's a place for us...."

"The authors of the etiquette book The Art of Civilized Conversation
say that conversation's versatility makes it 'the Swiss Army knife of
social skills.'"

Today is the birthday of Helmut Wielandt (Dec. 19, 1910 - Feb. 14, 2001).

From MacTutor:

"In his speech accepting membership of the Heidelberg Academy in 1960 he said:-

It is to one of Schur's seminars that I owe the stimulus to work with permutation groups,
my first research area. At that time the theory had nearly died out. It
had developed last century, but at about the turn of the century had
been so completely superseded by the more generally applicable theory
of abstract groups that by 1930 even important results were practically forgotten - to my mind unjustly."

Permutation groups are still not without interest.  See today's updates (Notes [01] and [02]) to Pattern Groups.

The Meadow

"Heaven-- Where Is It?
  How Do We Get There?"

To air on ABC
Tuesday, Dec. 20
(John Spencer's birthday)

By Trevanian, who died on
Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005:

"And we may see
the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline."