Katherine Neville, author of perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, The Eight, has now graced a new century with her sequel, titled The Fire. An excerpt:

“Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior
century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a
pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree
trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like
an octagon– patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge– with many-paned
windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural
compass rose.
……..
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado
Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high
mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like
this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus– which the Diné call
Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created
by First Man and First Woman.

Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east;
Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid,
yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked
out the four corners of Dinétah– ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call
themselves.

And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was
standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four
states– Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona– come together at right
angles to form a cross.”

The New York Times Book Review online today has a review by Sam Tanenhaus of a new John Updike book.

The title of the review (not the book) is “Mr. Wizard.”

“John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters. His output alone (60
books, almost 40 of them novels or story collections) has been
supernatural. More wizardly still is the ingenuity of his prose. He has
now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles
of transubstantiation whereby some hitherto overlooked datum of the
human or natural world– from the anatomical to the zoological, the
socio-economic to the spiritual– emerges, as if for the first time, in
the complete­ness of its actual being.”

Rolling Stone interview with Sting, February 7, 1991:

“‘I was brought up in a very strong Catholic community,’ Sting says. ‘My
parents were Catholic, and in the Fifties and Sixties, Catholicism was
very strong. You know, they say, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”
In a way I’m grateful for that background. There’s a very rich imagery
in Catholicism: blood, guilt, death, all that stuff.’ He laughs.”

RS 597, Feb. 7, 1991

Last night’s 12:00 AM
Log24 entry:

Midnight Bingo From this date six years ago:

From this morning’s newspaper,
a religious meditation I had not
seen last night:

Related material:

Juneteenth through
Midsummer Night, 2007

and

Church of the Forbidden Planet

On May 4, 2005, I wrote a note about how to visualize the 7-point Fano plane within a cube.

Last month, John Baez showed slides that touched on the same topic. This note is to clear up possible confusion between our two approaches.

From Baez’s Rankin Lectures at the University of Glasgow:

Note that Baez’s statement (pdf) “Lines in the Fano plane correspond to planes through the origin [the vertex labeled '1'] in this cube” is, if taken (wrongly) as a statement about a cube in Euclidean 3-space, false.

The statement is, however, true of the eightfold cube, whose eight subcubes correspond to points of the linear 3-space over the two-element field, if “planes through the origin” is interpreted as planes within that linear 3-space, as in Galois geometry, rather than within the Euclidean cube that Baez’s slides seem to picture.

This Galois-geometry interpretation is, as an article of his from 2001 shows, actually what Baez was driving at. His remarks, however, both in 2001 and 2008, on the plane-cube relationship are both somewhat trivial– since “planes through the origin” is a standard definition of lines in projective geometry– and also unrelated– apart from the possibility of confusion– to my own efforts in this area. For further details, see The Eightfold Cube.

Thoughts suggested by Saturday’s entry–

“… with primitives the beginnings
of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of
the magical mentality….”

– Carl G. Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.

For a video of such undifferentiated chaos, see the Four Tops’ “Loco in Acapulco.”

“Yes, you’ll be goin’ loco
  down in Acapulco,
  the magic down there
  is so strong.”

This song is from the 1988 film “Buster.”

(For a related religious use of that name– “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”– see Fritz Leiber’s “Damnation Morning,” quoted here on Sept. 28.)

Art, science, and religion are not apparent within the undifferentiated chaos of the Four Tops’ Acapulco video, which appears to incorporate time travel in its cross-cutting of scenes that seem to be from the Mexican revolution with contemporary pool-party scenes. Art, science, and religion do, however, appear within my own memories of Acapulco. While staying at a small thatched-roof hostel on a beach at Acapulco in the early 1960′s, I read a paperback edition of Three Philosophical Poets, a book by George Santayana on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Here we may regard art as represented by Goethe, science by Lucretius, and religion by Dante. For a more recent and personal combination of these topics, see Juneteenth through Midsummer Night, 2007, which also has references to the “primitives” and “magical mentality” discussed by Jung.

“The major
structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of
the persona and the shadow. The persona is the ‘mask’ which the person
presents [to] the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which
the person feels ashamed and guilty about.”

– Brent Dean Robbins, Jung page at Mythos & Logos

As for shame and guilt, see Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano, a novel dealing not with Acapulco but with a part of Mexico where in my youth I spent much more time– Cuernavaca.

Lest Lowry’s reflections prove too depressing, I recommend as background music the jazz piano of the late Dave McKenna… in particular, “Me and My Shadow.”

McKenna died on Saturday, the date of the entry that included “Loco in Acapulco.” Saturday was also the Feast of Saint Luke.