Month: February 2009

  • Mathematics and Narrative:

    Time and Chance
    continued

    Today’s Pennsylvania lottery numbers suggest the following meditations…

    Midday:  Lot 497, Bloomsbury Auctions May 15, 2008– Raum und Zeit (Space and Time), by Minkowski, 1909. Background: Minkowski Space and “100 Years of Space-Time.”*

    Evening: 5/07, 2008, in this journal– “Forms of the Rock.”

    Related material:

    A current competition at Harvard Graduate School of Design, “The Space of Representation,” has a deadline of 8 PM tonight, February 27, 2009.

    The announcement of the competition quotes the Marxist Henri Lefebvre on “the social production of space.”

    A related quotation by Lefebvre (cf. 2/22 2009):

    “… an epoch-making event so generally ignored that we have to be reminded of it at every moment. The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered… the space… of classical perspective and geometry….”

    – Page 25 of The Production of Space (Blackwell Publishing, 1991)

    This suggests, for those who prefer Harvard’s past glories to its current state, a different Raum from the Zeit 1910.

    In January 1910 Annals of Mathematics, then edited at Harvard, published George M. Conwell’s “The 3-space PG(3, 2) and Its Group.” This paper, while perhaps neither epoch-making nor shattering, has a certain beauty. For some background, see this journal on February 24, 2009.†

        * Ending on Stephen King’s birthday, 2008
         † Mardi Gras

  • Annals of Philosophy:

    Lasting Significance


    Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance    , edited by Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss, published by Routledge, 2004–

    Page 168:

    “Wittgenstein told Norman Malcolm that ‘a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious)’ (Malcolm 1999: 64).”

    Malcolm, N. (1999) “Wittgenstein: A Memoir,” in F.A. Flowers (ed.) Portraits of Wittgenstein, vol. 3, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, pp. 60-112

    The lasting significance here is perhaps in the page numbers.

    Or perhaps in a name…
    Roger Cohen, Ash Wednesday, 2009
     

  • Sticks Nix, continued:

    If you liked Badiou
    (previous 5 entries),
    you’ll love Zizek!

  • Ash Wednesday continued…

    Truth and
    Consequences:

    From Roger Cohen
    to Alain Badiou
    to Wallace Stevens

    “That summer of ’68, I was in a vast crowd in London’s sunlit Hyde Park listening to Pink Floyd’s free concert:

    One inch of love is one inch of shadow
    Love is the shadow that ripens the wine
    Set the controls for the heart of the sun!

    Right on! Anything seemed possible….”

    – Roger Cohen, May 28, 2008, on 1968,
       “The Year That Changed the World“

    “Much of Badiou’s life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris.”

    – European Graduate School biography

    “The Event of Truth,”
    European Graduate School video:

    Video, Badiou on Truth

    Quoted by Badiou at
    European Graduate School,
    August 2002:

    We live in a constellation
    Of patches and of pitches,
    Not in a single world,
    In things said well in music,
    On the piano and in speech,
    As in a page of poetry—
    Thinkers without final thoughts
    In an always incipient cosmos.
    The way, when we climb a mountain,
    Vermont throws itself together.

    – Wallace Stevens,
        from “July Mountain”

    Or Pennsylvania:

    http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090226-View.jpg

    'One inch of love, one inch of ashes'-- Li Shangyin
     

  • Dead Time, Part III:

  • Dead Time, Part II:

    Midnight

    “Dead time lasts for one hour– from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin’ good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin’ evil….”

    – Glenna Whitley, “Voodoo Justice“

    Cover of 'Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou,' by Patrick McGee (2009)

    From the Curriculum Vitae
    of Patrick McGee:

    “Theory and the Common
     from Marx to Badiou
        (Palgrave 2009, scheduled for
       March 31 publication)”

    Thanks for the warning.

    From the publisher:

    Using a method that combines analysis, memoir, and polemic, McGee writes experimentally about a series of thinkers who ruptured linguistic and social hierarchies, from Marx, to Gramsci, to Badiou.

    About the Author

    Patrick McGee is McElveen Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. 

    Table of Contents

    Related Categories

    Found in: Cultural Theory, Literary Theory & Criticism, Ethics

  • Dead Time, Part I:

    STICKS NIX HICK PIX

    in the Garden
    of Good and Evil


    “Dead time lasts for one hour– from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin’ good.”

    – Glenna Whitley, “Voodoo Justice,” The New York Times, March 20, 1994


  • Mardi Gras Numbers and…

    Ideas of Reference
    for Ash Wednesday

    Happy trails to you…

    http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090225-Trails.jpg
     
    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090224-PAlotteryMardiGras.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    These numbers from yesterday
    (Mardi Gras, 2009) are random,
    yet have a particular
    meaning for me and
    perhaps one other person.

    http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090225-VachelLindsay.jpg
                         – Google Book Search

  • Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

    Hollywood Nihilism
    Meets
    Pantheistic Solipsism

    Tina Fey to Steve Martin
    at the Oscars:
     “Oh, Steve, no one wants
     to hear about our religion
    … that we made up.”

    Tina Fey and Steve Martin at the 2009 Oscars



    From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:

    … in ‘The Pediment of Appearance,’ a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer…

     A group of young men enter some woods ‘Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.’ Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the ‘savage transparence,’ the rude source of human life. In Stevens’s world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men’s search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that ‘they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,’ believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens’s principles of the imagination.

    Superficially the young men’s philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls “pantheistic solipsism”– noting, however, that “This article has multiple issues.“

    As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called “eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism“) devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.

    Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.

    Heinlein:

    “Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections.”
        I closed my eyes and thought hard. “Zebbie, I don’t think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it.”

    Stevens:

    A discussion of Stevens’s late poem “The Rock” (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:

    For Stevens, the poem “makes meanings of the rock.” In the mind, “its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more.” In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens’s particular notion of the imagination’s function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought: 

    The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
    The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
    The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...

    The rock is the stern particular of the air,
    The mirror of the planets, one by one,
    But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,

    Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
    With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
    The difficult rightness of half-risen day.

    The rock is the habitation of the whole,
    Its strength and measure, that which is near,
         point A
    In a perspective that begins again

    At B: the origin of the mango's rind.

                        (Collected Poems, 528)

    Stevens’s rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests “nothingness” to one literary critic:
    B. J. Leggett, “Stevens’s Late Poetry” in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens– On the poem “The Rock”:

    “… the barren rock of the title is Stevens’s symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, ‘That in which space itself is contained’….  Its subject is its speaker’s sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it.”

    This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world’s leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.

    More positively…

    Space is, of course, also a topic
    in pure mathematics…
    For instance, the 6-dimensional
    affine space     (or the corresponding
    5-dimensional projective space)

    The 4x4x4 cube

    over the two-element Galois field
    can be viewed as an illustration of
    Stevens’s metaphor in “The Rock.”

    Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed “some way to project six dimensions into three.” While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.


    Cara:

    Philippe Cara on the Klein correspondence
    Here the 6-dimensional affine
    space contains the 63 points
    of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
    the 3-dimensional affine
    space contains as its 8 points
    Conwell’s eight “heptads,” as in
    Generating the Octad Generator.

  • To Thank the Academy:

    Another Manic Monday–
    McGee and Smee 


    Project MUSE –

    …     and interpretations, “any of the
    Zingari shoolerim [gypsy schoolchildren]
    may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the
    sack of auld hensyne” (FW 112.4-8). …

    – Patrick McGee, “Reading Authority:
    Feminism and Joyce,” MFS: Modern
    Fiction Studies    – Volume 35, Number 3,
    Fall 1989, pp. 421-436, The Johns Hopkins
    University Press

    McGee Thanks the Academy:

    “The ulterior motive behind this essay ["Reading Authority," above], the purpose for which I seize this occasion, concerns the question or problem of authority. I stress at the outset my understanding of authority as the constructed repository of value or foundation of a system of values, the final effect of fetishism– in this case, literary fetishism. [Cf. Marx, Das Kapital] Reading– as in the phrase ‘reading authority’– should be grasped as the institutionally determined act of constructing authority….”

    Wikipedia:

    “[In Peter Pan] Smee is Captain Hook’s right-hand man… Barrie describes him as ‘Irish’ and ‘a man who stabbed without offence‘….”

    Background: In yesterday’s morning entry, James Joyce as Jesuit, with “Dagger Definitions.”

    A different Smee appears as an art critic in yesterday’s afternoon entry “Design Theory.”–

    Smee Stabs Without Offence:

    “Brock, who has a brisk mind, is a man on a mission. He read mathematical economics and political philosophy at Princeton (he has five degrees in all) and is the founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions Inc., a think tank specializing in applying the economics of uncertainty to forecasting and risk assessment.

    But phooey to all that; Brock has deeper things to think about. He believes he has cracked the secret of beautiful design. He even has equations and graphs to prove it.”

    A Jesuit in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

    “When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question?”

    Beckett Bethicketted:

    “Our entanglement in the wilderness of Finnegans Wake is exemplified by the neologism ‘Bethicket.’ This word condenses a range of possible meanings and reinforces a diversity of possible syntactic interpretations. Joyce seems to allude to Beckett, creating a portmanteau word that melds ‘Beckett’ with ‘thicket’ (continuing the undergrowth metaphor), ‘thick’ (adding mental density to floral density)…. As a single word ‘Bethicket’ contains the confusion that its context suggests. On the one hand, ‘Bethicket me for a stump of a beech’ has the sound of a proverbial expletive that might mean something like ‘I’ll be damned’ or ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun.’….”

    – Stephen Dilks

    Winslet, Penn, and Cruz at the Oscars, 2009

    At the Oscars, 2009

    Related material:

    Frame Tales and Dickung