Log24

(Continued)

The New York Lottery numbers yesterday evening:
897 and 3454. See the corresponding Log24 posts.

Related material: Moloney (op. cit.), pp. 91 and 92.

(Continued)

An interpretation—

Posts 953 and 2341 in this journal.

Backstory— St. Patrick's Day, 2010.

New York Lottery today—

Without imagination, these digits are a meaningless jumble.

With  imagination…

608 might refer to June 8, the Saint's Day  of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
        (See the date July 29, 2002, that appeared in an earlier post today
         as the publication date of Geometrical Landscapes . In this
         journal, a post on that date, "At Random," referred to Hopkins.)

8516 might refer to 8/5/1916. A check of a hometown newspaper
         on that date yields…
         "St. Joseph's Garden Party and Bazaar 22, 23, 24.
          Pictures. Everybody Welcome. Admission to Garden Ten Cents"

And in the evening…

937 might refer to a post on the nihilistic philosophy of Joan Didion, and

7609 might refer to an occurrence of these digits in a link 
          to "7/11" in a post from the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola last year.

For a more cynical view of lottery hermeneutics, see
"High on RAM (overload)," by Jo Lyxe.

Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks.

Mormon Mitt Romney at the Baptist school Liberty University today:

"The task set before you four years ago
  is now completed in full."

I do not know what that task was. In this journal four years ago,
the task was lottery hermeneutics… a subject I doubt is taught
at Liberty University.

The New York lottery numbers from Sunday, May 11, 2008,
in a May 12 post four years ago could be interpreted as
pointing to the date 3/13— 

Say, 3/13, 2006— a date on which this journal quoted some
remarks on the biblical phrase "the fullness of time."

Those remarks were neither Baptist nor
Mormon, but rather Presbyterian.

Last evening's New York Lottery numbers were 123 and 5597.

The 123 suggests page  123 of DeLillo's Underworld .

(For some context, see searches in this journal for Los Muertos  and for Pearly Gates of Cyberspace .)

The 5597 suggests the birth date of literary theorist Kenneth Burke— May 5, 1897.

These two topics—

• the afterlife (in the Latin-American rhythms context of yesterday's Shine On, Edmundo)
• and Kenneth Burke

are combined in Heaven's Gate, a post from April 11, 2003—

Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”

The above observations on lottery hermeneutics, on a ridiculously bad translation, and on Latin rhythms did not seem worth recording until…

The New York Times Book Review  for Sunday, October 30, arrived this morning.

From page 22, an extract from the opening paragraph of a review titled…

Making Sense of It

David Bellos offers a new approach to translation.

BY ADAM THIRLWELL

The theory of translation is very rarely— how to put this?— comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment…. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language…. And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world's multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind's punishment—  condemned to the howlers, the faux amis , the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.

See also Saturday's Edenville.

From post 4017 in this journal (do not click links)—

"Thanks to University Diaries  for an entry on Clancy Martin,
a philosophy professor in the 'show me' state, and his experiences with AA."

Neither link in this quote works anymore.
See instead Martin in the London Review of Books .

Lottery hermeneutics, however, still seems usable.

Today's midday NY lottery "163" may be taken as a sequel
to both the page number "162" in today's noon post—

— Humboldt's Gift , page 163 (Penguin Classics, 1996)

— and a sequel to University Diaries ' meditation today on the Nobel literature prize,
which includes a quote from the winner:

"At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel.
Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows…. It is I! It is I!"

— Tomas Tranströmer, "The Name"

As for the evening NY numbers 014 and 5785, see Hexagram 14,
Not Even Wrong , and 5/7/85.

University Diaries  today—

"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."

This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .

Today's New York Lottery—

A quote suggested by the UD  post—

"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté  (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."

— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut

Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut  and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—

(Click images to enlarge.)

Cool Mystery:

Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."

As for the midday numbers—

For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).

For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.

Lottery hermeneutics for Michaelmas—

New York Lottery the evening of Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011—

499 and 6985.

For 499, see post  499 in this journal ("Angel Night," Sept. 29, 2002).

For 6985, see a Sunday, 6/9/85, review of Amy's Eyes , a children's book by Richard Kennedy.

"Especially for the adult reader, the narrator's musings comprise many of the book's great pleasures. He discusses the seductiveness of numerology, the 'Wayward Daughter of Mathematics'….''

— Edwin J. Kenney Jr.

NY Lottery this evening—

Continued from Themes of Sept. 17—

"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."

Lottery hermeneutics for this evening—

747 — Source of the sound effect in a post of April 28, 2009:

"And Kali, ‘The Dark One,’ addressed him with the voice of a cloud of thunder…"
— The King and the Corpse , by Heinrich Zimmer

3695 — Number of a post on Steps Toward Salvation  (Dec. 14, 2008)

This morning's exercise in lottery hermeneutics is unusually difficult.

Yesterday was Bloomsday (the date described in
James Joyce's Ulysses ) and the New York Lottery numbers were…

Midday  numbers:  3-digit 181, 4-digit 9219.

Evening numbers: 3-digit 478, 4-digit 6449.

For 181 and 9219, see the following—

"With respect to every event, we must ask
 which element has been subjected directly to change."
— Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
   (New York, The Philosophical Library, Inc., 1959), page 181

That Saussure page number was referenced in the following thesis
on James Joyce's other major novel, Finnegans Wake—

The thesis is from the University of Vienna (Universität Wien ).

The word Wien , in the derived form denoting an inhabitant of that city,
figured prominently in yesterday's news.

As for the evening numbers—

478 perhaps signifies the year 478 BC,
cited in Lawrence Durrell's Sicilian Carousel  as the year
the ruler Gelon died.

For the evening 6449, note that the poem by Wallace Stevens quoted
here on June 15 in A for Anastasios deals with "the river of rivers"…
perhaps signifying time.

Interpreting 6449 chronologically yields 6/4/49.

The film artist  John Huston, discussed in an essay from that date,
might appreciate the representation of the ancient Sicilian
river god Gelas as a man-headed bull on a coin from
around the year 478 BC.

For some perceptive remarks about Durrell, see the
article by Nigel Dennis in LIFE magazine's Nov. 21, 1960
issue (with cover noting Kennedy's victory in that year's
presidential election).

All of the above may be viewed as an approach to the aesthetic
problem posed by Dennis in yesterday's Bloomsday post—

"The problem that arises with this sort of writing is
one of form, i.e. , how to make one strong parcel
out of so many differently shaped commodities,
how to impose method on what would otherwise
be madness."

"The world has gone mad today…." — Cole Porter

For some related remarks, see page 161 of
Joyce's Catholic Comedy of Language *
by Beryl Schlossman (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1985)
and James Joyce in the final pages of The Left Hand of God
by Adolf Holl.

* Update of July 6, 2011—
This title is a correction from the previous title
given here, Moral Language  by Mary Gore Forrester.
Google Books had Schlossman's content previewed
under Forrester's title.

See today's NY lottery numbers* and Gravity's Rainbow , pp. 656-657.
(Penguin Classics paperback, June 1, 1995.)

"Show me all  the blueprints."
— Howard Hughes, according to Hollywood

* Readers new to lottery hermeneutics may consult
  some remarks by Stuart Moulthrop.

Lottery hermeneutics for yesterday's numbers—

PA— Midday 711, Evening 039.

NY— Midday 440, Evening 704.

Simple interpretive methods— numbers as dates and as hexagram numbers— yield 7/11, hexagram 39, and 7/04.

The reader may supply his own interpretations of 7/11 and 7/04; for hexagram 39, see Wilhelm's commentary—

"The hexagram pictures a dangerous abyss lying before us
  and a steep, inaccessible mountain rising behind us."

— and the cover of Cold Mountain—

Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain

This suggests revisiting The Edge of Eternity (July 5, 2005).

The hermeneutics of the NY midday 440 is more difficult. A Google search suggests that a Log24 post for Epiphany 2004, "720 in the Book," might yield a clue to the 440 riddle.

By all means, let us 440.