On 37

Today's a big day. Later this evening, in just a few hours, Papa and I will hop down to the local courier concern and send my boxes off their way. Today's the day where we must be absolutely certain: if it doesn't go today and it can't fit into the luggage than it's not going. I think it's all in order. Thanks to the kind Party the Third the luggage recently got bigger. I think that's set my mind easier, but I'm still highly anxious about things I know not what.

I'm packing my speakers off, too, so I thought I'd take today to transfer all the data I need to the shiny new laptop. While this transfer proceeds, I thought I'd take a moment out to tell you about 37.

37 is a remarkable integer, and my favourite one. It's prime, of course. Other than that it doesn't seem on the face any more or less remarkable than, say, 47. Another principal candidate for Favourite Integer is 26, which besides figuring in my birth date is the only number between a square (25) and a cube (27), (a proposition dating to Fermat).

You may think that there are so many integers it would be impossible to have a favourite one. This is not so. First, the Law of Small Numbers suggests that small numbers are the really staggeringly remarkable ones; they just get more boring as they get bigger. Paradoxically, of course, this makes it all the more interesting when the smallest example of something turns out to be 37; but 78,557 being the smallest Sierpinski number doesn't really make it more endearing. It's a delicate balance. Someone who thinks Graham's number or Skewe's number or something like that is the best integer is, I'm sorry to say, lacking in taste.

Yesterday I happened to mention over dinner somewhat provocatively that 37 is my favourite integer, which I shouldn't have done, because it was not a good time to explain why, since it's a rather long story that will require a detour through a lot of elementary algebraic number theory. But having stepped in it, I had to say why; and it's an interesting story, to me, anyway; so here we are. Don't let the words distract you from the music. If it gets too bad, just imagine Kosh is saying it. (This works especially well if you have questions. Query: What does this mean? Answer: Yes.) For the mathematicians in the audience, I will beg your forbearance with the simplifications, beginning with my second definition.

A (rational) integer is a counting number, 0, 1, 2, ..., or the negative of one. The set of such is labelled Z (for zahlen, German "number"). Prime integers, as we learn in grade school, are those which are divided only by themselves and 1. Otherwise a number is called composite. Every composite number can be expressed as a product of prime numbers. In fact this prime factorisation is unique.

There are other kinds of numbers, which are not integers, like the square root of two, say. We can do a kind of generalised arithmetic with these numbers, too. The set ("ring") Z[α] consists of all the things that look like a + bα + ... + cαⁿ, where a, b, ..., c, n are some integers. We can ask about what sorts of properties of integer arithmetic carry over to these new kinds of arithmetic. One question is: is there also unique factorisation into primes in a ring Z[α]?

It turns out that the answer is usually no. An easy example is to take α equal to the square root of -5. Now we can write 6 = 2*3 = (1 + α)*(1 - α), and it turns out that all of 2, 3, 1 + α, and 1 - α are irreducible in this ring, so that these factorisations are "essentially different." (Irreducible is related to but not quite the same as prime in a way which I will not say.)

However, there is a very deep theorem due to Dedekind on this subject. The first idea is to introduce so-called ideal numbers, not all of which exist in the ring Z[α], but which are related to the numbers in this ring. With these numbers, unique factorisation can be restored. This is an excellent achievement because unique factorisation is a very strong property and a lot of consequences follow from it purely formally. It turns out, to give you an idea that this is not so strange, that the only ideal numbers you need can be denoted (a), which kind we identify with just a, or (a, b), which we can think of as the greatest common divisor of a and b, for a, b elements of Z[α]. (All of this is true only for certain α. I won't say which, but all the α I mention in this post are of this kind. An example of something that doesn't work is π. Another example is the square root of 5. It's tricky.) There is an object called the class group which one can define from these ideal numbers. Very roughly speaking, it tells us how many essentially different kinds of factorisations (into non-ideal numbers) there are in the given ring. The very deep theorem of Dedekind which I mentioned is the statement that the class group is a finite set. Its size is usually denoted h (and depends on α, of course). We have unique factorisation if and only if h = 1.

With this behind us, we are going to specialise to the case where α = ζ_p is a (primitive, complex) p^th root of unity. This means that α^p = 1, but α is not equal to one. For example, the number i which solves the equation x² = -1 is a fourth root of unity. Now let h be the class number of the ring Z[ζ_p]. We say that the prime p is regular if p does not divide h, and irregular otherwise.

37 is the smallest irregular prime.

You may wonder why anyone would be so daft as to make this definition in the first place: why is this property of any interest at all? The answer, as it is with so many things in elementary algebraic number theory, is Fermat's Last Theorem. It is possible to give an "elementary" proof of FLT for the case where the exponent is a regular prime.

(For the math guys who haven't read it. The idea is to start with x^p + y^p = z^p and factor the LHS into a product of terms looking like x + ζ^ky where ζ = ζ_p is as before. Now if we had unique factorisation in Z[ζ], a product of relatively prime factors being a p^th power means that each factor is itself a p^th power, a very strong condition, which we can get our hands on by passing to ideals. For the other case we note that the gcd of two of those factors divides also their sum and difference. In any case, there is a long and difficult calculation ahead, which takes a few pages after the preparatory lemmas are stated. At a critical juncture we have some ideal I whose p^th power is principal. If p is regular, then it is coprime to h, and this implies from the definition of the class group as fractional ideals modulo principal ideals that I itself is principal. That's the only place where it matters that p is regular. I think there is also some assumption that p doesn't divide xyz in the argument I remember.)

Frankly, I find it remarkable enough that there are any irregular primes at all. There are three less than 100. It turns out that there are even infinitely many irregular primes. I guess when I understand this fact I won't find it so astonishing that there are any at all. But the other surprising thing is that we don't even know if there are infinitely many regular primes, although it's conjectured (and there seem to be more regular than irregular in the ranges where we know). You can take a look around some of the links on the right column to read some strange facts and more technical descriptions if you like.

Postscript, immediately after. That ζ looks really ugly in this font. Shame, it was a favourite Greek letter of mine. Also, tthere's a post from "last night" [early this morning] just below here, too.

Stellar core: "my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth"

Saw a play this night, Hamlet at Bard on the Beach, with Party the First and guest. This is my second-favourite of Shakespeare's plays, behind (in particular Kenneth Branagh's definitive edition of) Henry V. There was a lot to enjoy; our man Hamlet got to exercise much of his histrionic range and the rest of the cast generally turned in adequate performances with a few glimmers of more. They cut the text so that it finished by 11 after starting at 8. This is pretty short for Hamlet (Branagh's film is five hours), but it seems pretty long, since after Polonius dies (the gentleman playing Polonius seemed to have much fun with the role) with the cuts to the text it's more or less a very long funereal dive to the end of the story. They had a lot of energy in the first half, but some of this seemed to wane (or maybe I did) in the second.

After the play finished there was a talkback session (Bard's regular Tuesday feature) with some of the actors (but not production people). You can imagine that the questions varied from the dull to the plodding ("I noticed that the costumes dated to the 1960s, specifically to 1964" -- here I am paraphrasing, not inventing).The answers to such unprovocative questions were slightly more illuminating than the source material. One answer in particular interested me very much. The actor who played Hamlet said that when he spoke with other actors who had played the character in previous engagements they were reluctant or unable to speak about this, to vocalise their feelings about Hamlet and what he does.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Hamlet is a tremendous canvas awaiting projection by audience, cast, and commentator; it is Hamlet's personal power that makes us want to identify with him, and that makes it a personal identification, indeed.

For my part, I think of Hamlet as largely a fine specimen of humanity who suffers yet from allzumenschlich syndrome. (Lit.: "all too human.") He spends an eternity in desperation, oscillating between the existential ("what dreams may come") and the more raw ontological ("what is Hecuba to he") with raw wounds ("get thee to a nunnery!") displayed between. The madness that he pretends to is pretended only insofar as it is exaggerated: the core of it is real. His clever by-play ("you are a fishmonger"; "if like a crab I could go backwards") is an attempt to escape from this by confusing his interlocuters with equivocation and thus preventing the dangerous questions he has already realised he cannot answer, even attempting to deny that they are valid questions by denying them voice. But, he is still too clever by far to escape self-conscious reflection ("nothing I would more willingly part with, except my life") and he is unwilling to just surrender to nihilistic impulses (evidenced in the haunting repetition: "except my life, except my life, except my life"). Hence the extended conflict. Since all this is obviously an intensely private matter, in what sense can it be brought out? For this Shakespeare gives us some artillery in the play's set-up: a father murdered, supernatural circumstances, a mother's betrayal (Hamlet has obvious Oedipal feelings), estrangement from all his friends (save Horatio). To bring it all together, we rely on Hamlet's interactions with his numerous foils: Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude, and most importantly Claudius. I save Claudius a special place because he is the only one who Hamlet cannot and should not forgive; moreover he is the only one who really is in opposition to Hamlet in spirit, besides happening to be the cause of the circumstantial ills Hamlet experiences. Therefore Claudius' strength underlies Hamlet's powerlessness and inability to resolve his internal turmoil and exacerbates the cracks along these fault lines.

That, in a paragraph, is why I still think Derek Jacobi has given us the "best Hamlet yet performed" (to borrow a catchphrase from Amadeus) in his 1970's BBC tape -- owing no small debt to Patrick Stewart's Claudius, because Patrick Stewart is the only man who could play Claudius as the titan he needs to be to make the fragmenting of Sir Derek's Hamlet credible, and tragic.

On a completely different note, I wish to register my extreme distaste for the frequency with which I am accosted while waiting for the bus late at night. I have had it with pathetically manufactured sob stories, Tourettes-induced blather, jocular threats, direct requests, star-crossed lovers, and invitations to join the Watchtower Society ("thousand years of peace!"). I don't want to have anything to do with you people. I just want to spend a little time with my friends on the town without remembering why I worry about stepping outside of my house in the first place. I forgive you everything but this. Beggars! It is annoying to give to them and it is annoying not to give to them. That is all.

"Tomorrow" I have to fulfill a promise to tell you about my favourite integer, 37, which is a truly remarkable integer, but I definitely need to sleep between now and then. With the planned cutbacks to the existential meanderings we jumped at the opportunity to just throw in mathematical content. In the meantime you can enjoy the radiant glow of the stellar puns that just burst from me at 0130. (Obviously that doesn't excuse the last post that had a pun on 'stellar'.)

Redemption: "I want to climb a high mountain today"

It's a happy, reflective melancholy.

I've had a lot of time to think thoughts this summer. Some thoughts I meant to think were thought; others not meant to think, too; some got lost, some couldn't keep up, some became nauseous, some just called for the sherpas and kept climbing. Some we didn't get to -- surprise; summertime is bountiful and sparkling but finite. I don't lack imagination, I wonder if one will ever run out of thoughts to think, or if they keep getting generated, saplings planted in the cracks of fertile minds, faster than one can think them.

Sometimes I just want to take a rest. "Why are my hobbies so demanding?" I ask myself, but I don't bother answering. I could look over and read the titles on the stack of books by my bed, but they've been packed. Asceticism is demanding, asceticism is commanding, but I wouldn't change it. And if a giddy madness falls sharply, at least it passes just as quickly: it is too superfluous to survive an ascetic. I'm not talking about monks' half-starvation diets, I still eat cookies.

I suppose I've been thinking a little about Vancouver recently, the places, the peoples. Last time I left Vancouver, in March, it was only for a few days -- a few hectic and harrowing days -- but, how happy I was to see from the plane the glittering lights in familiar shapes on the ground. Sitting in my fortress, which others might mistake for my bedroom, sometimes it might seem a little distant, but it's about to get more distant, and more thoughts will get more demanding. "Vital energy," my maternal grandfather once told me, "is the sine qua non of a successful career." -- well then! If I understood what he meant, how can things go badly? (Variation on the Socratic paradox: ultimate Platonic prejudice.) And if the name Princeton has cachet born of past success, then it creates its own future success when the next generation wants to earn and be worthy of that cachet, too: so how can one fail with so many good people around? Perhaps I am like Goethe, too conciliatory for real tragedy -- during the day, at least, when the sun shines; but when I'm on the East Coast, the sun keeps shining for three hours more after it sets.

So! "Was Das - das Lieben?" will ich zum Tode sprechen. "Wohlan! Noch Ein Mal!" ("Was that life?" I want to say to death. "Well then! Once more!") Take stock and then -- En avante! Up the Republic! That's my war cry.

So I sit here telling myself my past. And I bake cookies. Let me tell you how: some secrets shouldn't vanish altogether with the comings and goings of aircraft. I thought I might conjure a fanciful name for these, something like "Aztec Ambrosia," or maybe "It Didn't Make Me Stronger," but that's maybe a bit much, fusing mythologies willy-nilly, so let's stick with:

Double Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 1 1/4 c. margarine
  
• 2 c. sugar, or a little less
  
• 2 eggs ("large")
  
• 3 tsp. vanilla (15 ml)
  
• 2 c. flour
  
• 1 tsp. baking soda (5 ml)
  
• 3/4 c. cocoa
  
• semi-sweet chocolate chips (200-250 grams)

Add ingredients in this order in a bowl. Mix at each stage. I do it manually with a fork (which demands some rigour with the wrist), in which case it is helpful to add the dry ingredients piecemeal and mix in between, but you can find your prefered method. Drop by teaspoons onto ungreased cookie sheets. (One teaspoon in each hand is very convenient.) Bake at 350 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course) for about 12 minutes. Good the first day, excellent the second and beyond. Makes 32 cookies. Store in glazed ceramic Austrian snowman.

I'm kidding about the 32 cookies thing. I just can't remember the last time it didn't come out to 32 cookies. (About the snowman thing, too.) Probably I'm unconsciously acting to keep it that way, by now. Put on a CD you wanted to listen to while baking; from start to last-tray-out is about an hour. My father's first piece of cooking advice to his children was: Pay attention! But this is pretty fool-proof, unless you put the cookies in the oven and then go to write something for a while and lose track of time.

I think I have to go now.



Postscript, that night.

Here you can see the Austrian snowmen: the jolly, fat one on the right holds cookies and the equally jolly, slightly less fat one on the left just dangles his legs and enjoys his hot cocoa. Before you make fun of them, as so many cads have been wont to do, you should know that my mother brought these back from a Christmas village in Austria.

You might justly wonder how it is that suddenly I have so little to do that I'm posting pictures of my cookie jar on the Internet. If someone said this to me, I might quibble that it is only one picture. What can I say? The walls are getting bare here. The last books are packed; I kept only three to take with me for the crossing: an anthology of science fiction, Kaufmann's Portable Nietzsche, and Šafarevic's Basic Algebraic Geometry. The problem is that I can't do math late at night. I'll never be able to get to sleep with ghosts of quasiprojective varieties floating and flickering in twisted knots through my brain. (No, knot theory doesn't come in here, that was just descriptive prose.) Fortunately, I seem to have the next week just about booked up.

Inaugural Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award

We should be able to do sums, Donald Knuth writes in his parvum opus Concrete Mathematics, even on our less creative days. (That book has two co-authors, too, Graham and Patashnik. Somehow I keep calling it Knuth's book.) What he's extolling his students to is a level of technique that obviates the need for divination in finding a path to the problem's solution. This is a fundamental step to mastering anything, because creative expression always hinges on an excellent grasp of the technique of the medium.

To this end, I shall indulge in a Regular Feature, Sun-Drunken's first, (although I threatened one earlier, if you're keeping score, which I've not yet had occasion to revisit). Shame, by the way, to you if you thought I was going to say I was going to learn how to write properly. The famous physicist Lord Kelvin (yes, that Kelvin) wrote:

Quaternions came from Hamilton... and have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way. Vector is a useless survival... and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.

In honour of his getting one out of two, and being hilariously mistaken on count of the one he missed, I'd like to establish the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award, given to "those entities that in the estimation of the award committee have never been of the slightest use to any creature."

Today's recipient gets my mountain goat, and they'd take my other goats, too, if they knew how. No doubt this problem will continue to hold their attention for years yet to come. But don't think they're getting this prestigious inaugural award just for future anxiety, they've already caused much. In recognition of their undying capacity to create labyrinthine obfuscation, I'd like to award the first KUCA to the united bureaucrats of New Jersey. The award citation makes note of, inter alia, their request that international students fill out tax documents with deadlines set before said students can acquire an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number), their refusal to acknowledge the utility of MMR immunization that occurs before the age of one year (contrary to, for example, medical practice in British Columbia), and their inability to promptly send letters threatening fines and other action against people who fail to comply with their artificial deadlines. That, of course, is just the stuff that happened today.

Congratulations, guys.

On a lighter, fluffier, even, note, I note that no one's even noted the fluffiness of the light atop the page. (Before you ask, I'm not eligible for a KUCA.) The background is from the galleries of the Cloud Appreciation Society, the existence of which I think you'll agree is just reasonable enough that I don't have to remind you that I'm not making this stuff up. It's a striking shot of the rooftops of the world. Their manifesto, (nevermind the cloud-inspired poetry), is even more striking.

Redemption: "for that I must descend to the depths"

I think I have made an error.

What kind of fool tells his audience that they should go away and return in two weeks or so because in the meantime things are going to be very, very boring? Zarathustra tells his disciples to leave and denounce him, but he's a mighty philosopher-poet. I'm just a hack job going out with an accidental whimper.

Clearly I need to rectify this blunder. Rectifying blunders is a slippery proposition, mostly because "rectify" is a worse idea than "ameliorate." In chess it is well-known that the most dangerous time, psychologically speaking, is just after you realise you've made the mistake. The impulse is to correct it by lashing out, with brutal violence hatched from desperation and chagrin, but the patient man knows that a minor misstep is not enough to ruin the position and that this is the moment to pull it together, man! and settle in for the long haul, play it stingy, rather than risk everything on a shoddy throw of the dice -- a dice-throw likely to fail, since the blunder has already put the gambler at a disadvantage.

I always say: "I'm a patient man." In as Croat-like an accent as I can muster, "I'mma pay-shyunt mann," I tell them.

Still, I have just the thing -- So: "as close to the gutter as I'm likely to get." Avert the eyes of the little ones, the sun is about to go under.

On a lark I did a Google search on Sun-Drunken's titular quotation. Pause a moment, selah, as I did not, and wonder what might come up. What I found -- if you guessed occultist textbooks and gay erotica, you were bang on. Apparently everyone else had the sense to keep their prose blue or red but not both at once.

The Google search summary left a tantalising dangling simile: "...set his locks on fire; his skin was sun drunken like a..." -- like a what, now? What's the end of that sentence? Ancient Bacchanallian reveller? Avatar of Eros? I have it -- icon of Icarus, apt and alliterative. But no: then it would not be "a" but "an." Instead they had a Mesopotamian theme going on:

"Enkidu!" My soul mate.... The light, now a pleasant, soft crimson, set his locks on fire; his skin was sun drunken like a peach.

Oh. So, anyway, that's "sun-drunken." What about "quivering" and "delight"? Well, naturally someone was saying something with "quivering" voice, dicit Google, and if you want to know what went with "delight," you can look it up yourself. I didn't bother. I couldn't quote it to anyone, anyway, for obvious reasons.

So that's where I am now: somewhere south of zealots and smut-mongers. Huzzah.

Back to high-minded parables next time, lads. That's how we're going to climb this valley.

Stellar matters: "light seeking light doth light of light beguile"

There's much afoot these days, but little interesting; therefore this space will be commensurately uninteresting for the duration. I just thought I'd like to get a head-start: one less thing to worry about working/not-working on the other end. So not so much time for the stuff we like: καιρος πολεμου και καιρος ειρηνης, but I promise καιρος πολεμου will be back.

("A time for war and a time for peace," by the way. Eventually I'll figure out how to make the putative erudition less obtrusive. πολεμου, polemou, cognate with polemic.)

Saw a play the other day: Love's Labour's Lost at the local Shakespeare festival, Bard on the Beach. They've got an idyllic setting with professional production and a few actors who can be relied upon to turn in a good performance. Even when I can't manage to get to the opera I still see more than one play there each summer: a very agreeable custom.

I had planned actually to see all four offered this year but it seems, alas, that I won't be seeing As You Like It after all, since it's sold out for the balance of the season and I don't have tickets. It was to be the first I was to see this year; that got postponed unavoidably at the last moment; then I was to see it with a different party and hence cancelled with the first; then organisation broke down with the Party the Second; meanwhile I arranged to see the remaining play on the schedule with Party the Third, having determined to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with Party the First; now I even have tickets for Hamlet with Party the First but no tickets with Party the Second because it's sold out. In other words, if I weren't telling this story chronologically, Party the Second would not be Party the Second.

Part of Party the Third

Since Party the First is so proactive you might wonder how Party the Third even got their foot in the door. The answer is that Party the First was not interested in seeing this particular play. Apparently it's a somewhat vulgar comedy, inferior in this regard even say to Merry Wives of Windsor. On the other hand, this one doesn't have a clown prancing around masquerading as John Falstaff, as Harold Bloom suggests happened in that one. Speaking of Harold Bloom, he has many fine things to say about Love's Labour's Lost, specifically about the splendour of the language, which is why I wanted to see it anyway. For myself I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, modulo one gag I could have done without. Berowne-in-the-tree is a fantastic scene, a mechanism emulated well by writers of the present age's better farces. I had to clear that up, by the way, so that Party the Third realises they're not the third-string guests.

A third part of our Party

Speaking of Party the Third, I should stop speaking of them in circumlocution, but I don't know if they want to get introduced to the public on this page. I have one or two pictures but I know they strongly value their privacy. This, Party the Third, is the reason why one member of our party of four doesn't appear here even by implication except now; you two can file a complaint. That's my brother, right, and "Mom and a Bonsai" up there. If part of the background looks very strange, that's because the photos got touched up a little. They were too dark originally, for shame of me. I'll know better next time.

(I've gone batty, by the way, trying to get those pictures and captions to look one-quarter-decent on the page. Someone give me a hint. The "preview" function here apparently doesn't support some things it should.)

Things to do today. Devise an optimal internal structure for packed boxes and pack them according to this scheme. Construct an appropriate header for the page. Find something to eat. Compute the co-ordinate ring of the affine plane minus a point. (Find out how to write in blackboard-bold font.)

Incipit Metablogging

I'm trying to learn all the various things which a man must learn to make his web page presentable. I'm not hugely keen on this font so probably it will change as soon as I (a) find a better one; and (b) determine exactly what the list of fonts in the blog template is there for. I suppose I figure out what font is being used here and then that's the one to replace? There's a down-side to this program -- my already chatty posts will start to look downright water-fat. Still, if it improves readability -- on which subject these margins are way too big. Lots of work yet.

I'm also trying to find a nice way to upload pictures. I did get myself a nice camera recently with the intent that I could share pictures. There's a B-grade solution in place at the moment, whereby I use Blogger's sponsored "Hello" utility to simultaneously publish and upload to a storage space, then delete the unwanted post but keep access to the uploaded picture. Obviously this is unsatisfactory. I think the A-grade solution is to find out what kind of webspace I get from my future employer. (For some reason it has become customary to give webspace to students. For, I don't know, their huge curricula vitae or something like that.) In the meantime, we cope.

There's now a picture of yours truly, right, in case you forgot what I look like. It's supposed to brighten up the page. It's one of a couple of portraits I took, a first stab at the Sun-Drunken theme. Apparently huge contrast in brightness is fundamental to this theme. The problem with this pic is that if you look at it the wrong way it looks like I'm in pain -- which I am, since that sun was awfully bright; but if you look at it the right way it's vaguely beatific, and that meshes with the theme. Or maybe both do, and I'm just worried about having a picture of someone in pain sitting around here. In the small size it seems to be less that way.

Anyway, let me know what you think. And post 'hello' in the comments here, even if you have no opinion on the pic, just to sign in, as it were. (Postscript. Somehow the comments got set to registered-user-only. Thought I fixed that. Anyway, it should allow "anonymous" remarks now.)

(Further postscript. The A-grade solution has been implemented, thanks to the IT department at Princeton and the miracle of the VPN.)

(Post-further-postscript. This post is fast getting out of date. The margins got moved, a more slippery operation than you might think. Never mind the bragging, I'm still flush from victory. The new font is Garamond, which I chose more or less because I didn't want one of the n fonts that all look like Arial except for slight variations on spacing between letters. Still, it's pretty readable and the italicised text looks pretty good. It's supposed to have character, but not too much, unlike those n² silly novelty fonts that look flashy but have actually no conceivable use. We'll see how it goes. I no longer like how the banner up top looks. Maybe I can replace it with a tastefully snazzy .jpg. -- Saints preserve us, it's turned into a webdesignpublishing and neologising machine!)

Schemes: "supra petram ponere sedem fundamenti"

It means: "--to build foundations on stone," ("cum sit enim proprium/viro sapienti," "if it is the way of the wise man," is the couplet prior), but mainly it's just fun to say. (Go ahead, no one's listening.)

(There's a trend here that needs to be broken, quickly, because if every post around here was such a heavy tome of allegories and allusions that one wondered if there was going to be a quiz on it at the end -- that might have gravitas but it wouldn't be Sun-Drunken.)

BKF Boxmaker I call myself; I make boxes, then I fill them. It's the life of the prole for me. "Slumming it." I even sing songs to myself, working songs, drinking sounds. Tam pro papa quam pro rege/Bibunt omnes sine lege, that sort of thing, you know, classics.

They're sturdy boxes, I just follow the directions, mostly, (the first one wasn't quite right), and at the end I feel good that I Built Something. Then I fill them; this is a packing problem, because every cubic centimeter costs money. (Sort of. Since the stuff currently being packed -- books -- probably weighs more than the "box weight," which is used only, I gather, to charge for volume for underweight boxes, potentially there is no cost incurred against slightly inefficiency. However, if there's something that doesn't fit into the boxes, it gets left out; so that encourages me to be dilligent.)

Needless to say this gives some time to reflect on the emptiness of my mind, or the outer world, or whatever. And hatch schemes. Schemes are an important mechanism to cope with the world around me. The notion is that if you can anticipate, plan ahead, make contingencies, then you can overcome through the power of understanding what initially seems very daunting; and to some of us, almost everything seems daunting, or at least potentially troublesome, hence, the schemes. Or else it's just a bad habit, compulsive planning, that I picked up somewhere, maybe playing chess.

If you recall, I did visit Princeton this March. I met lots of people there, other prospective graduate students, some of whom doubtless will be accepting this offer of admission. The problem is that I don't remember all their names. This could lead to social awkwardness. So what do you do? One obvious thing to do is to play the Pronoun Game until you've eavesdropped enough to save yourself. Another is to always introduce yourself first, a kindness to them since they've probably forgotten yours, and hope they reciprocate -- they have to, really. This latter sounds like a well-adjusted plan to me.

Here's a less obvious game-theoretic type possibility. The fundamental problem is that I do remember some names but have forgotten others. So, some people get the Full Point and some people get Zero Points, and it's this asymmetry that's unappealing. It would be better if everyone got something, even if no one got everything. So the plan is: Never volunteer a name. Instead assert that you remember some fraction of names, maybe fifty percent, but that you don't want to slight those in the bottom half. Now perhaps everyone will think: Fifty percent I got a Full Point, fifty percent I got Zero Points. That's the same as everyone getting a Half Point. But, better, it might not be a zero-sum game. Since any person has no trouble remembering their own name, they always feel bad forgetting someone else's just for this reason -- how hard is it to remember a name?! So I think people are more likely to put themselves in the Remembered group, earning us even a Three-Quarter-Point average or something. Score!

Or they might think I've forgotten everything and am just covering, badly. If I give any name unprompted, too, the percentages change. Worse, they might not think it's a funny story. Maybe they'd think the game-theoretic exposition was a blatant and vulgar attempt to gain favour with bad jokes.

So, those schemes, they can go rotten without ever being put into practice, and then where are you? Just with a broken scheme.

-- well, more, a known-broken scheme! -- huh! I guess that means it's time to pack more boxes. Sing along with me: stultus ego comparor, fluvio labenti: "--then I am a fool to them, [building on] a flowing stream."

Genesis: "quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight"

Someone told me that a beginning is a very delicate time. Someone else told me that a rose by another name might sound more thorny.

So let me briefly tell the story of the quotation that titles this page: "quivering through sun-drunken delight."

For this was the original question; first there was void, then the idea, then the idea got named, stamped, catalogued, and indexed. It could have been anything. From what to choose? It had to be literature of some kind, because it had to be something with which someone else could in principle identify (say if they read the book alluded to), something that could draw in the audience. At the same time it had to be personal, because that's what's interesting.

So what could it be? The first and most obvious course to me was to turn to my old chum Robert Graves. Unfortunately, there is no way to make "I, BKF" sound like it didn't come from an illiterate spambot, and anyway someone I know has already spelunked this cavern, the blogging thief. For those paying extra attention I will say that "BKF the God" although appealing to my vanity would be worse. There ends the infatuation with Robert Graves, barring the possibilty of working "boiled asparagus" in somehow.

Others passed in file for review, consideration, and rejection. I am going to study math, math is huge, math is Platonist voyeurism, but there are hardly any poetic mathematicians and no mathematical poets (more than Euclid have since looked on beauty bare). So it cannot be math -- and anyway math only draws in half the audience, it neglects the key purposes of the title (and does not even describe what I imagine will be a great amount of the content here). Same goes for any number of other niches which maybe I will speak on later, or anyway claim to have considered through my tortured but numinous search for The Idea-in-the-Void's Name -- it will be an easy segue into an extemporaneous disquisition. (Birth of a regular feature.)

Except for one, which hit with the force of divine revelation --

In the original German it is (I think): "da flog ich wohl schaudernd, ein Pfeil, durch sonnentrunkenes Entzuecken" (I say I think because I hardly understand German and Babelfish is truly rotten at making sense of even simple prose) -- in translation (thank you, Walter Kaufmann!): "I flew, quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight."

It is one of my favourite epigram-fragments from Nietzsche's Zarathustra. It summons up all the golden things I wanted in a title. Just reading it I laugh, it is luminous, prankish in its luminosity, something the rejects before couldn't muster at the muster. And -- because of what I just said, what I am saying -- that makes it personal -- hence this post, "und Gott sprach."

Some more context to the fragment:

...My wise longing cried and laughed thus out of me -- born in the mountains, verily, a wild wisdom -- my great broad-winged longing! And often it swept me away and up and far, in the middle of my laughter; and I flew, quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight, away into distant futures which no dream had yet seen, into hotter souths than artists ever dreamed of, where gods in their dances are ashamed of all clothes -- to speak in parables.... ["On Old and New Tablets," Zarathustra III, W. Kaufmann, trans.]

If you didn't think that [this post] was brief, if you thought it was humourless, colourless except in the ultraviolet, in a word, turgid -- forebear; it's been a while since I've done this. But things are getting better: I'm an editor, not just a typer, I can punch it up. Things are getting better all the time. That's our motto at Sun-Drunken.

Ecce homo: "that which does not kill me--"

Dear friends,

Greetings and salutations!

I am not (I will commence by astonishing) a sociable or gregarious man. I say little of what I live and would rather say less; half of it was dull enough the first time around, and the rest shivered like a lonely puppy in the cold mud. But I will shortly be stranded, still tremulous, in an island fiefdom of Canadiana surrounded by murky waters; and no light should pass from there, not even the most colourfully tortured metaphor, if we did not make special measures to keep it safe. Moreover it would be crass to neglect my friends so! (Family is always implicitly included in that word -- now explicitly.) Perhaps something interesting will happen on the way, too. So I tell myself and you my friends stories of what passes.

And I tell myself -- myself. I cannot tell if I am a taciturn man who wishes to be garrulous or the reverse. Perhaps I will find out.

I remain, even when out of sight, yours,

Balin "BKF" Fleming