Log24

(Continued)

Remarks by an ignorant professor quoted here
yesterday suggest a Log24 search for "Lost in Translation."
That search yields instances of the following figure: 

See also the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012).

Somewhere Over the Rainbow …

"What I'm aiming for are moments of strong sensation —
moments of total physical experience of the landscape,
when weather just reaches out and sucks you in."
— The late Jane Wilson —

See also the previous post and, from the date of Wilson's death,

Geometry for Jews (Continued) —

Continued from March 10, 2011 — A post that says

"If Galois geometry is thought of as a paradigm shift
from Euclidean geometry, both… the Kuhn cover
and the nine-point affine plane may be viewed…
as illustrating the shift."

Yesterday's posts The Fano Entity and Theology for Antichristmas,
together with this morning's New York Times  obituaries (below)—

—suggest a Sunday School review from last year's
    Devil's Night (October 30-31, 2010)—

See also Ash Wednesday Surprise and Geometry for Jews.

From Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a fictional Communist on propaganda:

“It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch.”

Thanks for this quotation to Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, paperback edition Nov. 6, 2007). One of Marton’s nine was Koestler.

From another book related to this exodus:

“Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces– an analysis which is geometrical in nature.”

— Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

And from Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend of Ulam:

“Riesz’s example is well worth following today.”

Related material: Misunderstanding in the Theory of Design and Geometry for Jews.

For a different approach to ethnicity and the number nine that is also “geometrical in nature,” see The Pope in Plato’s Cave and the four entries preceding it, as well as A Study in Art Education.

Twisted Honeycomb

From a review in today’s New York Times by Janet Maslin of Norman Mailer’s new novel, The Castle in the Forest:

“The wise beekeeper does not wear dark clothing, lest it pick up light-colored pollen. Italian bees are gentler and more chic than the Austrian variety. The mating box, capping fork and spur-wheel embedder are essential tools for apiculture. And all power in the beehive rests with a treacherous but fragrant bitch.

All this bee talk crops up in ‘The Castle in the Forest,’ Norman Mailer’s zzzzz-filled new novel about Adolf Hitler’s tender, metaphor-fraught and (in this book’s view) literally bedeviled boyhood. So it is not a stretch for the book’s jacket copy to insist that ‘now, on the eve of his 84th birthday, Norman Mailer may well be saying more than he ever has before.’ More about beekeeping– absolutely.”

ART WARS
Continued from
Nov. 25, 2005

From today’s New York Times:

A review of a current Manhattan art exhibition—

“It begins with a juxtaposition of early body-oriented videos by Mr. Nauman and Paul McCarthy, who, quickly following Mr. Nauman’s lead, was in his studio in Los Angeles videotaping home-alone performance pieces by 1970. The contrast is pure Apollo-versus-Dionysus.”

More on Paul McCarthy from artandculture.com:

“If you walk into a room and find everything you held dear in childhood degraded, chances are it’s a Paul McCarthy installation. McCarthy is known for shocking, sexually charged pieces that feature benign cartoon and pop-culture characters — Olive Oyl and Santa Claus, among others — in a bacchanalia of blood and feces.

The 1974 video ‘Hot Dog’ shoots to the heart of the adolescent ‘gross-out’ as McCarthy tapes his penis into a hot dog bun, then packs his pie hole full of franks and wraps himself in gauze. Another piece from the 70s called ‘Sailor’s Meat’ finds the artist dressed as a blonde hooker smeared with blood and ‘knowing’ a pile of raw meat….

Critics often compare his work with that of the Viennese Actionists whose performances were also characterized by gore, raw sexuality, and abused food.”

Related material:
The Wiener Kreis in
yesterday’s 1:06 PM entry
and the five entries
ending the afternoon of
Nov. 25, 2005.

For an approach to art
more in the spirit of Apollo
than of Dionysus, see
Geometry for Jews.

Wednesday’s entry The Turning discussed a work by Roger Cooke.  Cooke presents a

“fanciful story (based on Plato’s dialogue Meno).”

The History of Mathematics is the title of the Cooke book.

Associated Press thought for today:

“History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.”
 — Henry Kissinger (whose birthday is today)

This figure in turn, together with Cipra’s reference to Sartre, suggests the following excerpts (via Amazon.com)–

From Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1993 Washington Square Press reprint edition:

For more on the horizon, being, and nothingness, see

• The Giant of Nothingness and
• Midsummer Eve’s Dream.

Four Quartets

Skewed Mirrors

Readings on Aesthetics for the
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross

Part I —

Bill Moyers and Julie Taymor

Director Taymor on her own passion play (see previous entry), “Frida“: 

“We always write stories of tragedies because that’s how we reach our human depth. How we get to the other side of it. We look at the cruelty, the darkness and horrific events that happened in our life whether it be a miscarriage or a husband who is not faithful. Then you find this ability to transcend. And that is called the passion, like the passion of Christ. You could call this the passion of Frida Kahlo, in a way.”

— 10/25/02 interview with Bill Moyers

Part II —

 Inside and Outside: Transformation

(Research note, July 11, 1986)

Click on the above typewritten note to enlarge.

Summary of
Parts I and II:

See also
Geometry for Jews.

“We’re not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We’re here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That’s what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you’re not painting an exact reproduction.”

— Julie Taymor on “Frida” (AP, 10/22/02)

“She made ‘real’ an oxymoron, 
         she made mirrors, she made smoke.
She had a curve ball
          that wouldn’t quit,
                              a girlfriend for a joke.”

— “Arizona Star,” Guy Clark / Rich Alves

ART WARS:

Graphical Password

From a summary of “The Design and Analysis of Graphical Passwords“:

“Results from cognitive science show that people can remember pictures much better than words….

The 5×5 grid creates a good balance between security and memorability.”

— Ian Jermyn, New York University; Alain Mayer, Fabian Monrose, Michael K. Reiter, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies; Aviel Rubin, AT&T Labs — Research

Illustration — Warren Beatty as
a graphical password:

“Town & Country,”
released April 27, 2001

Those who prefer the simplicity of a 3×3 grid are referred to my entry of Jan. 9, 2003, Balanchine’s Birthday.  For material related to the “Town & Country” theme and to Balanchine, see Leadbelly Under the Volcano (Jan. 27, 2003). (“Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in town…” – Huddie Ledbetter).  Those with more sophisticated tastes may prefer the work of Stephen Ledbetter on Gershwin’s piano preludes or, in view of Warren Beatty’s architectural work in “Town & Country,” the work of Stephen R. Ledbetter on window architecture.

As noted in Balanchine’s Birthday, Apollo (of the Balanchine ballet) has been associated by an architect with the 3×3, or “ninefold” grid.  The reader who wishes a deeper meditation on the number nine, related to the “Town & Country” theme and more suited to the fact that April is Poetry Month, is referred to my note of April 27 two years ago, Nine Gates to the Temple of Poetry.

Intermediate between the simplicity of the 3×3 square and the (apparent) complexity of the 5×5 square, the 4×4 square offers an introduction to geometrical concepts that appears deceptively simple, but is in reality fiendishly complex.  See Geometry for Jews.  The moral of this megilla?

3² + 4² = 5².

But that is another story.

Aptheker

A Look at the Rat

In memory of Herbert Aptheker, theoretician of the American Communist Party, who died on St. Patrick’s Day, 2003 —

From The New Yorker, issue dated March 24, 2003, Louis Menand on Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station:

“Wilson did know what was going on in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties, as his pages on Stalin in To the Finland Station make clear. The problem wasn’t with Stalin; the problem was with Lenin, the book’s ideal type of the intellectual as man of action. Wilson admitted that he had relied on publications controlled by the Party for his portrait of Lenin. (Critical accounts were available; for example, the English translation of the émigré Mark Landau-Aldanov’s Lenin was published, by Dutton, in 1922.) Lenin could create an impression of selfless humanitarianism; he was also a savage and ruthless politician—a ‘pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom,’ as Vladimir Nabokov put it to Wilson in 1940, after reading To the Finland Station.  In the introduction to the 1972 edition, Wilson provided a look at the rat. He did not go on to explain in that introduction that the most notorious features of Stalin’s regime—the use of terror, the show trials, and the concentration camps—had all been inaugurated by Lenin. To the Finland Station begins with Napoleon’s betrayal of the principles of the French Revolution; it should have ended with Lenin’s betrayal of European socialism.” 

From Herbert Aptheker, “More Comments on Howard Fast“:

“We observe that in the list of teachers whom Howard Fast names as most influential in his own life there occur the names of fourteen individuals from Jefferson to Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair to Marx, Douglass to Engels, but there is no room for Lenin.
   He is, I think, an important teacher, too; indeed, in my view, Lenin is the greatest figure in the whole galaxy of world revolutionary leaders. He is, certainly, the greatest analyzer of and fighter against imperialism.”

For more on Howard Fast, see my entry
“Death Knell” of March 13, 2003. 

For a look at the pail of milk, see
the New Yorker cover in Geometry for Jews.

For a more cheerful look at geometry
on this St. Joseph’s Day, see
Harry J. Smith’s

Tesseract Site.

“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”
— A Wrinkle in Time

Birthday Song

Today is the birthday of the late Jewish media magnate and art collector Walter H. Annenberg, whose name appears on a website that includes the following text:

Shape and Space in Geometry “Making quilt blocks is an excellent way to explore symmetry. A quilt block is made of 16 smaller squares. Each small square consists of two triangles. Study this example of a quilt block: This block has a certain symmetry. The right half is a mirror image of the left, and the top half is a mirror of the bottom.” © 1997-2003 Annenberg/CPB. All rights reserved. Legal Policy

Symmetries of patterns such as the above are the subject of my 1976 monograph “ Diamond Theory,” which also deals with “shape and space in geometry,” but in a much more sophisticated way.  For more on Annenberg, see my previous entry, “Daimon Theory.”  For more on the historical significance of March 13, see Neil Sedaka, who also has a birthday today, in “ Jews in the News.”

Sedaka is, of course, noted for the hit tune “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen,” our site music for today.

See also Geometry for Jews and related entries.

For the phrase “diamond theory” in a religious and philosophical context, see

Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth.

“It’s quarter to three….” — Frank Sinatra

Symbols —

Broadway:
The Sound of Silence

See also the footnote on the Halmos “tombstone” symbol in the previous entry, the entry “Dustin in Wonderland” of Feb. 24, the film “Marathon Man,” and the entry “Geometry for Jews” of March 6.