Log24

Friday, June 25, 2021

Queens Gambit

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am

Note of 10:44 AM ET, Friday, June 25, 2021 —

"Stephen Elliot Dunn was born on June 24,
1939, in Forest Hills, Queens . . . ."

— https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/
books/stephen-dunn-poet-dead.html

Update of 11:07 AM ET the same day —

From Dunn's obituary —

Whether writing about matters small or large,
Mr. Dunn said in a 2010 episode of
The Cortland Review ’s video series “Poets in Person,” 
the key was to find the meaning beneath the experience.

“Even your most serious problem,” he said,
“very few people are going to be interested in
unless you yourself, in the act of writing the poem,
make some discoveries about it.”

—  By Neil Genzlinger, New York Times ,
     June 25, 2021, 10:23 a.m. ET

"We have much to discover." — Saying attributed to 
Christopher Marlowe in a TV series.  See posts now tagged 4X.

Midrash for Doctorow —

Scholium for Pullman —

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Ellery Queen’s Gambit

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:57 pm

In memory of a mystery writer who reportedly died on Dec. 27, 2020 —

Posts tagged "Logo Animation" from around that date in this  journal,
along with yesterday's post "Enchantments," suggest… a link.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Queen’s Gambit*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

From March 9 four years ago—

Chessboard (Detail)

* See this journal and the novel.

Update of 10 AM May 9—

Midrash for Gnostics —

A post linked to under "this journal" (above) has a brief discussion of theology and Wallace Stevens—

"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself '…."

I have more confidence that God is to be found in the Ping Pong balls of the New York Lottery.

This suggests a check of yesterday's NY numbers. They were… Midday 780, Evening 302.

A search for 780 in this journal yields a post quoting The Scotsman 's reporter Rhiannon Edward.

Related material:

Rhiannon's Scotsman  story of May 6—

Rapist gets 20 years after justice system finally believes his victims

Published Date: 06 May 2011
By Rhiannon Edward
 
A SCOTTISH care home worker who groomed and raped teenage girls for more than a decade has been jailed for 20 years.
 
James Boyes abused a string of underage girls at Frant Court care home in Frant, East Sussex, during the 1980s and 1990s, leaving one so traumatised she is still being treated in a secure mental hospital….

See also this  journal on May 7 —

Stranger Than Fiction

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110507-StrangerThanFiction.jpg

For yesterday's NY evening 302, see the "780" post involving Rhiannon—

Glenn Ford as a playboy from Argentina —

The 4 Horsemen, Ingrid Thulin, Glenn Ford

— and "302" interpreted as "3/02," which yields…

"Yo sé de un laberinto griego que es una línea única, recta."
 —Borges, "La Muerte y la Brújula"

"I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line."
—Borges, "Death and the Compass"

For some background music, click here.

Sunday, November 6, 2022

The ’64-’65 Gambit

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:43 pm

NYT on chess venues

"… the 1964-65 competition was not even held."

— Dylan Loeb McClain in The New York Times , Nov. 3, 2020.

But in other  games . . .

"The metaphor for metamorphosis no keys unlock."

Steven H. Cullinane, November Seventh, 1986

 

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Thomas Mann of Zurich vs. Walter Tevis of Lexington

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:41 am

Mann on Freud, Schopenhauer, and 'the Will'

"Denn um zu wiederholen, was ich anfangs sagte:
in dem Geheimnis der Einheit von Ich und Welt,
Sein und Geschehen, in der Durchschauung des
scheinbar Objectiven und Akzidentellen als
Veranstaltung der Seele glaube ich den innersten Kern
der analytischen Lehre zu erkennen." (GW IX 488)

Thomas Mann died in Zurich on 12 Aug., 1955.

"The author left his works in his will
to the Thomas Mann archive at the ETH Zurich.
"

Related meditation from Lexington, Kentucky, on
the date of Mann's death —

 

Or not.

Related literature —

The Queen's Gambit 
by Walter Tevis

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Actual Data

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:23 pm

From the above image: "/gds_rip/" —

Related geek lore:

Monday, February 27, 2023

For Gen Z: The Mark of Zorro

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:50 pm

Galois space of six dimensions represented in Euclidean spaces of three and of two dimensions

Monday, February 13, 2023

The Adelson Shadow

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:45 am

Related search results —

From a different Adelson, in a Log24 post from 2003

Related geometric entertainment —

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Story Dice

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:13 am

From The Queen's Gambit  by Walter Tevis —

The Saturday afternoon movie in the library was The Robe . It had Victor Mature in it and was spiritual; all the staff was there, sitting attentive in a special row of chairs at the back, near the shuddering projector. Beth kept her eyes nearly shut during the first half-hour; they were red and sore. She had not slept at all on Thursday night and had dozed off for only an hour or so Friday. Her stomach was knotted, and there was the vinegar taste in her throat. She slouched in her folding chair with her hand in her skirt pocket, feeling the screwdriver she had put there in the morning. Walking into the boys’ woodworking shop after breakfast, she took it from a bench. No one saw her do it. Now she squeezed it in her hand until her fingers hurt, took a deep breath, stood up and edged her way to the door. Mr. Fergussen was sitting there, proctoring.

“Bathroom,” Beth whispered.

Mr. Fergussen nodded, his eyes on Victor Mature, bare-chested in the arena.

She walked purposively down the narrow hallway, over the wavy places in the faded linoleum, past the girls’ room and down to the Multi-Purpose Room, with its Christian Endeavour  magazines and Reader’s Digest  Condensed Books and, against the far wall, the padlocked window that said PHARMACY.

A related Log24 post

Story dice and 'The Robe'

"Discuss." — Coffee Talk

Sunday, July 17, 2022

In Memory of “the Gilded Lily”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:46 am

For the Lily of the title, see The New York Times  online tonight
on the life of a socialite-philanthropist who reportedly died on
July 9, 2022.

Related art

 

Saturday, January 8, 2022

The 64   (A sequel to The Eight)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:29 pm

For a rather different approach to 64, see Geometry of the I Ching .

Monday, November 29, 2021

Apophenia for Woit

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:11 pm

Peter Woit is quoted in the previous post as saying that
"Deluding oneself by seeing deep connections
in unrelated events is a common human problem."

Namely . . .

The term occurred in a recent miniseries, "The Queen's Gambit,"
in dialogue by screenwriter Scott Frank.  "Apophenia" is not  in the
book  of the same title, by the much better writer Walter Tevis.

The original version of the fictional LIFE Magazine interview —

The version by Scott Frank —

        

As for the phrase "an entire world of just 64 squares," also  not in the book,
some mathematicians may recall the definition of impolite numbers .
The reader may supply his or her own impolite commentary.

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

“Goddess on a Mountain Top”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:57 am

See as well "Red Mountain," "Green Mountain," "Black Mountain,"
and of course "Cold Mountain."

Thursday, September 9, 2021

Enlarging the Spielraum… Continues.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:30 pm

Click the chessboard for some Chinese hermeneutics.

Thursday, June 24, 2021

The Rock and the Serpent

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:23 pm

Thursday, May 20, 2021

Outside the Box

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:56 pm

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Cock Tale for Rikki

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:50 pm

With apologies to those readers unable to follow knight moves .

The Queen's Gambit , by Walter Tevis,
published Feb. 1983

“Would you care for a cocktail?” he asked pleasantly.
She looked around her at 
the quiet restaurant,
at the people eating lunch, at the 
table with desserts
near the velvet rope at the entrance to 
the dining room.
“A Gibson,” she said. “On the rocks.”

Omni  July 1982

"A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision
as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard,
infinite and perfectly transparent."

Steely Dan, 1974 —

"'Rikki Don't Lose That Number' is a single
released in 1974 by rock/jazz rock group Steely Dan
and the opening track of their third album Pretzel Logic .
It was the most successful single of the group's career,
peaking at number 4 on the Billboard  Hot 100 in
the summer of 1974." — Wikipedia

Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves , 1931—

The key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings.”

See as well my post "Introduction to Cyberspace" (May 26, 2020).

 

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Promising

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:57 pm

A dance that reminds me strongly of the young Jill O’Hara —

Sunday, January 17, 2021

The Janine Corner

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:28 pm

— “The squares have names?”
— “And sometimes the corners too.”

Saturday, January 16, 2021

Nashville Death

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:40 pm

” ‘Across the street was the New York Doll Hospital,
a toy repair shop,’ he told Lenny Kaye in an interview
for the Bob Gruen photo book New York Dolls  (2008).”

See as well other  posts now tagged Smiley’s Neighborhood
in honor of the novelist known as John le Carré.

The novelist’s nom de plume  suggests another tourist’s tale —

“Before 1788, the French Quarter encompassed the entirety
of New Orleans. Today the ‘old square’  (Vieux Carré ), a
six by twelve block parcel of land set on the inside of a bend
in the Mississippi River, remains New Orleans’ most definitive
area.” — https://www.frenchquarter.com/sightseeing-in-the-old-square/

Friday, January 15, 2021

The Lush Life

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:09 am

Lush Cosmetics in the previous post suggests . . .

Thursday, January 14, 2021

Dial 6 for MNO

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:38 am

Rotary telephone dial illustrating Nabokov's 'Signs and Symbols'

Image from a post of January 2, 2009

A sentence by Walter Tevis in his 1983 novel
The Queen's Gambit

"She picked up the phone and dialed six."

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Hint

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:48 am

From The Queen’s Gambit , by Walter Tevis (1983) —

“She stopped and turned to Beth. ‘There is no hint of a
Protestant ethic in Mexico. They are all Latin Catholics,
and they all live in the here and now.’ Mrs. Wheatley
had been reading Alan Watts. ‘I think I’ll have just one
margarita before I go out. Would you call for one, honey?’

Back in Lexington, Mrs. Wheatley’s voice would sometimes
have a distance to it, as though she were speaking from
some lonely reach of an interior childhood. Here in Mexico City
the voice was distant but the tone was theatrically gay, as though
Alma Wheatley were savoring an incommunicable private mirth.
It made Beth uneasy. For a moment she wanted to say something
about the expensiveness of room service, even measured in pesos,
but she didn’t. She picked up the phone and dialed six. The man
answered in English. She told him to send a margarita and a large
Coke to 713.”

Mirror, Mirror

Monday, January 11, 2021

Sein Feld  Continues.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:08 am

Dialogue from the recent Netflix series “Queen’s Gambit” —

Miss Jean Blake, interviewer from LIFE  — “The board?”

Beth Harmon — “Yes. It’s an entire world
of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it.
I can dominate it. And it’s predictable, so if I get hurt,
I only have myself to blame.”

This passage, and other psychological claptrap in the Netflix version,
does not occur in the original 1983 novel by Walter Tevis.

Related material — Sein Feld  in this journal.

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Epigraphy

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:36 am

The professor, Joshua Whatmough, in the previous post
taught, I later learned, something called epigraphy  at Harvard.

An instance of the derived term "epigraph" —

The Shop on the Corner

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:38 am

George Steiner on chess —

"… the common bond between chess, music, and mathematics
may, finally, be the absence of language."

— George Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik ,
Viking hardcover, June 1974.

In memory of George Steiner, of Walter Tevis, and of B&B Smoke Shop,
corner of Third Ave. and Liberty St., Warren, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s,
where I purchased . . .

At that point in my life, language interested me more than chess.
But I can identify with the protagonist of Walter Tevis's  Queen's Gambit ,
(the book, not the film) who visited a similar smoke shop in 1960 —

… There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she
got the cigarettes, she turned 
and began looking.  Senator
Kennedy’s picture was on the 
cover of Time  and Newsweek :
he was running for Pres
ident . . . . 

. . . Walking home with the folded [chess] magazine tucked
securely against her flat belly she thought again about that
rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said
Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the
history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven,
and Black had better not take it with his knight because…
She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking
somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed
lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After  the
second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining
rook could slide over, and if the black player took
the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…

      She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy
could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing
itself with a check. If he did  take it, the white pawn
moved again, and then the bishop went the other way
and there was nothing Black could do. There it was.  One
of the little boys across the street began crying. There was
nothing Black could do.  The game would be over in
twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it
had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He
hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had. 

      Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog
continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly
home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a
perfect, stunning diamond.

***

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Thursday June 28, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm
Real Numbers:
An Object Lesson

(continued from
AntiChristmas)

A Cornell professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:

"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'…."

— Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:
Modernism and the Test
of Production,
Princeton University Press,
1998, p. 242
 
"God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the
artifact pictured on the
cover of Mao's book:
 
Solid Objects by Douglas Mao
 
I have more confidence
that God is to be found
in the Ping Pong balls
of the New York Lottery.
 
NY Lottery June 28, 2007: Mid-day 309, Evening 514

 

These objects may be
regarded as supplying
a parlance that is, if not
paradisal, at least
intelligible– if only in
the context of my own
personal experience:

Journal entry dated 5/14:

The Pope asks 'What is real?'
 
Journal entries dated 3/09:

Queen's Gambit,
Symbols, and
Is Nothing Sacred?

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Saturday March 24, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:09 pm
Gambit

Chess game in The Thomas Crown Affair

For Steve McQueen’s
birthday, three chess links:

A Game of Chess,

Queen’s Gambit,

Starflight.

Friday, March 9, 2007

Friday March 9, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

Queen's Gambit

Chessboard (Detail)

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

W. B. Yeats, "Long-Legged Fly"

This is the epigraph to
the Walter Tevis novel
The Queen's Gambit.
 

Powered by WordPress