Click on picture
for further details.
Click on picture
for further details.
Month: December 2006
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Christmas Eve Story, Part II:
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Christmas Eve Story, Part I:
The Edge of Eternity
(in memory of George Latshaw,
who died on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006)
Brightness Doubled
Seven is Heaven
“Love is the shadow
that ripens the vine.Set the controls for
the heart of the Sun.Witness the man who
raves at the wall
Making the shape of his
questions to Heaven.
Knowing the sun will fall
in the evening,
Will he remember the
lessons of giving?
Set the controls for
the heart of the Sun.
Set the controls for
the heart of the Sun.”– Roger Waters, quoted in
“At Home in Landscape:
Mannheim’s Chiliastic Mentality
“
in ‘Tintern Abbey’Garrett comments on Wordsworth’s approach to landscape, citing Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, translated by Louis Wirth and Edward
Shils (page numbers below refer to the 1998 Routledge edition):“… ‘the present becomes the breach through which what was previously
inward, bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms
it’ [p. 193]. This breaking through into ecstasy can only be brought about through
‘Kairos‘ or ‘fulfilled time’”….See translators’ note, p. 198: “In Greek mythology Kairos
is the God of Opportunity– the genius of the decisive moment. The
Christianized notion of this is given thus in Paul Tillich‘s The
Religious Situation [1925, translation by H. Richard Niebuhr, New York, Holt, 1932, pp.
138-139]: ‘Kairos is fulfilled time, the moment of time which is invaded by eternity. But Kairos is not perfection or completion in time.’”Garrett quotes Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue … (12.208-210)“And in book 14 Wordsworth…. symbolizes
how man can find transcendent unity with the universe through the image of
himself leading his group to the peak of Mt. Snowdon. Climbing at night in
thick fog, he almost steps off a cliff, but at the last instant, he steps
out of the mist, the moon appears, and his location on the brink is revealed.
Walking in the darkness of reason, his imagination illumed the night, revealed
the invisible world, and spared him his life.”See also Charles Frazier on the edge of eternity:
“They climbed to a bend and from there they
walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the
lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable
height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness….
Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the
lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He
was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back….”
Part II — 7/15
Christopher Fry’s obituary
in The New York Times–“His
plays radiated
an optimistic faith in God
and humanity, evoking,
in his
words, ‘a world
in which we are poised
on the edge of eternity,
a world
which has
deeps and shadows
of mystery,
and God is anything but
a
sleeping partner.’”
Accompanying illustration:
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain
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Meet Max Black, continued
Black MarkBernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:
“Philosophers
ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on
Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”Log24 on Monday,
Dec. 18, 2006:“I did a column in
Scientific American
on minimal art, and
I reproduced one of
Ed Rinehart’s [sic]
black paintings.”– Martin Gardner (pdf)
“… the entire profession
has received a very
public
and very bad black mark.”— Joan S. Birman (pdf)
Lottery on Friday,
Dec. 22, 2006:
5/04, 2005:
Analysis of the structure
of a 2x2x2 cube
via trinities of
projective points
in a Fano plane.7/15, 2005:“Art history was very personal
through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt.”– Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives
of American ArtAlso on 7/15, 2005,
a quotation on Usenet:“A set having three members is a
single thing wholly constituted by
its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine
of the Trinity as ‘three in one’
should be child’s play.”– Max Black,
Caveats and Critiques:
Philosophical Essays in
Language, Logic, and Art -
2001 Revisited:
Strings AttachedFrom a New York Times review on Monday, Dec. 18, 2006, of the play “Strings”–
The three main characters “spend much of the play discussing quantum
mechanics, string theory and Schrödinger’s Cat experiment….Ms. Buggé’s frequently clever script makes the audience feel smart
by offering up fairly recognizable literary references (from, among
other things, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and
William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’). But the play suffers from
abrupt, sometimes motivation-free exits and entrances.”As does life itself.
The Conjecture:
Preludes to
Last Summer’s
String Theory
Conference
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?“
Let us go and make our visit. On Tuesday evening, the schedule says “Prof. Yau present his new
research result,” which presumably will be about the proof of the
Poincare conjecture.Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter
with a smile,To have squeezed the universe
into a ballTo roll it toward some
overwhelming question….Yau rated the conjecture as one of the major mathematical puzzles of the 20th Century.
Five years have passed;
five summers, with the length
Of five long winters!Five years ago
on this date:There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling….
– Robert Graves,
“To Juan at the Winter Solstice”Exits and Entrances:
Halmos exited on Yom Kippur.
He may or may not achieve
re-entry. For details, see
Log24 entries of Oct. 1-15:Ticket Home
Related material:
The Unity of Mathematics,
Heisenberg on Beauty, and
Theme and Variations. -
Continued from previous entry…
Spike“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
– Thomas Pynchon
“Also on the card is Adrien Brody (‘The Thin Red Line’) as a poseur
proto-punk who lives in his parents’ converted garage and strips at an
underground gay club. He takes heat from his former friends– the
aforementioned neighborhood toughs– for affecting an English accent
and wearing a mohawk….”– Rob Blackwelder review of Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” (1999)
“With its white community focus, Summer of Sam is something of
a departure for Lee. But with its immaculate script, faultless
acting and Lee’s own cameo performance, it is a typical Spike
Lee film. Plenty of rapid-fire, wise-cracking dialogue and hectic
crowd scenes make it fraught with tension from beginning to end.
Hectic, inventive, gritty, witty, edgy and provocative, no detail
is too small to escape Lee’s attention and no issue too large
as the film’s perceptive dissection of human nature moves effortlessly
between humour and horror.”
“At another end of the sexual confusion spectrum, there’s Vinny’s
childhood friend, now turned spiky-haired punk rocker, Ritchie
(Adrien Brody). Recently he’s started dating Ruby (Jennifer
Esposito), erstwhile neighborhood tramp. They are both redeemed
by their relationship, which at least at first, involves no sex,
technically. Where Vinny struggles with his culturally instilled
madonna-whore complex, Ritchie’s just back from a stint living in
the Village, looking for an identity that’s distinct from his
Italian gotta-be-macho upbringing. Eventually, he gets a gig at
CBGB’s (‘How do you spell that?’ wonders Vinny), but in order to
make ends meet (and pay for his new guitar), he’s dancing and
turning tricks at Male World, a decrepit gay club where he
performs fellatio with a life-sized dummy on stage, and, you
assume, with clients offscreen.”– Cynthia Fuchs revew (title: “Sex and the City”)
“I watched Halle Berry wipe her mouth off after Adrien Brody, in the
heat of his excitement, laid the lip-lock on her for five full
excruciating seconds. She was stunned, and seemed to have no idea what
had happened to her. I’ll tell you what happened, Halle: it’s called
sexual assault.”
The Kiss…
Where’s the Oscar
for the mouth-wipe? -
Cartoon Graveyard
Joseph Barbera
at the Apollo
Click on picture
for related symbolism.“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architectI need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
– Paul Simon
In memory of Joseph Barbera–
co-creator ot the Flintstones–
from today’s Washington Post:
Playing the role of
recording angel –
Halle Berry as
Rosetta Stone:
Related material:
and
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ART WARS continued
Citizen StoneAllan Stone,
art dealer and collector,
died at 74 on Friday,
Dec. 15, 2006.From his obituary in
yesterday’s
New York Times:“Sometimes jokingly referred to as ‘Citizen Stone’ after Orson Welles’s
outsize film character, Mr. Stone was attracted to formal density and
flamboyance. He was associated with the rise of the junk aesthetic and
with realist painters whose canvases bristled with paint and details.” –Roberta SmithThe Log24 entry for the date of Stone’s death, titled “Putting the X in Xmas,” suggests the following picture as a memorial:
Though not bristling
with paint, the picture
is, in a sense, realistic.It should be noted of the
obituary by Roberta Smith
that
“This is the exact oppositeof what echthroi do in
their X-ing or un-naming.”
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For Spielberg’s Birthday
Fade to Black:Mathematics and Narrative
continuedMartin Gardner in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, June/July 2005 (pdf):
“I did a column in Scientific American on minimal art, and I reproduced one of Ed Rinehart’s [sic] black paintings. Of course, it was just a solid square of pure black.”
Click on picture
for details.The Notices of the American Mathematical Society, January 2007 (pdf):
“This
was just one of the many moments in this sad tale when there were no
whistle-blowers. As a result the entire profession has received a very
public and very bad black mark.”– Joan S. Birman
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Barnard College and
Columbia University -
Wake Speech
Cubism1 as Multispeech2
– From Pedagogy, Praxis, Ulysses
A quotation omitted from the above excerpt:
In Ulysses, there is “… the same quality of simultaneity as in cubist collage. Thus, for
example, Bloom surveys the tombstones at Paddy Dignam’s funeral and, in
the midst of platitudinous and humorous thoughts, remembers Molly
‘wanting to do it at the window’….”Related material from quotations at the poetry journal
eratio:“The
guiding law of the great variations in painting is one of disturbing
simplicity. First things are painted; then, sensations; finally,
ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist’s attention
was fixed on external reality; then, on the subjective; finally, on
the intrasubjective. These three stages are three points on a
straight line.”– Jose
Ortega y Gasset (“On Point of View in the Arts,” an essay on the development of cubism)Related material on
tombstones and windows:Geometry’s Tombstones,
Galois’s Window, and
Architecture of Eternity.
See also the following part
of the eratio quotations:
Quotations arranged by
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino1 Or hypercubism: See 10/31/06.2 Or “Wake” speech: See 10/31/05.
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Hamlet Meets Young Frankenstein:
Putting the
X
in Xmas– C. S. Lewis
Apparently they teach them nihilism, empty rhetoric, and despair,
as reflected in Borges, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, according to the art review below from today’s New York Times. Let us hope
that the late Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday, Dec. 12, has moved
beyond these now– singing “Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” rather than
“Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
“In
one of Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known short stories, ‘Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote,’ a 20th-century French writer sets out to
compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes’s 17th-century masterpiece simply
because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it’s
cracked up to be.He
manages two chapters word for word, a spontaneous duplicate that
Borges’s narrator finds to be ‘infinitely richer’ than the original
because it contains all manner of new meanings and inflections,
wrenched as it is from its proper time and context….”[An artist's version of a newspaper is]….
“a
drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to
nature with a refraction or two in between. In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas….”The Work:
Pennsylvania Lottery
December 2006
Daily Number (Day):Borges,
Menard’s Quixote, and
The Harvard CrimsonMon., Dec. 11:
133Baudrillard
(via a white Matrix)Sun., Dec. 10:
569Benjamin and
a black view of life in
“The Garden of Allah”Sat., Dec. 9:
602Click on numbers
for commentary.Borges and Benjamin are
referenced directly in the
commentary. For Baudrillard,
see Richard Hanley on
Baudrillard and The Matrix:“There
is nothing new under the sun. With the death of the real, or rather
with its (re)surrection, hyperreality both emerges and is already
always reproducing itself.” –Jean BaudrillardRelated material:
