Funny, I feel like Barbara Pittman.

Two songs of hers come to mind today. "Sentimental Fool" and "I'm Getting Better All the Time." Heehee.


When did I become such a scaredy-cat? The other night as I lay in my bed in my new apartment, I pulled the covers up to my chin and prayed that I could keep this up. I was rather surprised by the intensity of this fright, as I haven’t experienced quite that much fear of the world in nearly twenty years.

I guess, little by little, my happiness and self-confidence has been eroded over the past four years. I mean, don't get me wrong--I have learned a HECK of a lot and I have grown in leaps and bounds. Most of all, I’ve recently realized is that this seeming "downswing" is because I’m not truly doing well for myself unless I’m living alone. Even in Kansas City, when I was constantly struggling for stability even more than I am now, I was still going to school full time and working full time. But I lived alone at that time, and in retrospect, all these patterns make sense. I need to be my freaky little self where no one can see.

I feel like I need to submerge myself in “me-ness” for a month or two. Then maybe I can re-emerge at a point where I can look someone in the eye and smile confidently again…not forced, or self-consciously. Maybe if some fellow asks me on a date I can accept happily, knowing they are interested and knowing that maybe I don’t have to work that hard to make someone like me in "that way" after all. Hey, it happens! I've forgotten how to recognize it, though.

I just want to re-gain my confidence and 'find myself' again. I have found me before, and it was beautiful. I can hardly believe that I have gotten to this desperate point once again, but at least I am older, wiser and know how to fix it. And that's apparently what life is about.


But--I’m getting better already. This is why.

Last night I enjoyed myself and felt more relaxed than I have in months. Breanna came by at 7pm, crowed and cooed dutifully over my new place, and then we went to Marakesh for Mediterranean food. We split a bottle of great Spanish Cabernet, ate kebobs and talked non-stop about life goals, my living situation and her fabulous job in publishing and the oddities she runs across every day. She’s an amazing woman, and I don't see her nearly enough. After dinner we went over to a 2nd street gelateria, where I ordered a tiny cup of coconut and banana flambé –flavored gelato. We sat and ate our gelato and talked until 10:30pm, when she drove me home—to my own small but true HOME.

Amongst the boxes, topsy-turvy tables, misplaced chairs and face-to-the-wall paintings, I put on an Ink Spots record, fired up the tea kettle, and smiled to myself. I sat on the back porch in the summer humidity and watch the clear, nearly-full moon high above the live oaks.

I have learned that my apartment building is situated directly on the slave quarters of what used to be the Goodrich Plantation. There are graves from the church, yes…but older even than that are the small, nondescript markers of slaves. The church and the site have a longer history than I’d originally known. There are some grave markers even thirty feet away from my back door. It’s all historical land surrounding our yard and building.

I sat and looked at the moon high above the trees and realized just how old the trees are. I mean, 150 years ago, someone no doubt sat just where I was and contemplated the same moon above the same oak, perhaps a bit smaller then. Someone sat where I was and stared up and wondered "Why?" as they mourned for their child or sibling or parent. It brought a lump to my throat to think about it…the kind of lump I’d fully expected to experience in Spain, but did not.

And now I can get that sentimental lump in my throat any time I want to.

It sounds strange, but I find that a lovely thought. Melancholia has a distinct beauty, and I do not shy away from it.

GARGANTUA!!!

That's what I have named the spider outside the window of my house. I was taking down the curtain to pack it away since I'm running behind on all my packing.

When I removed the curtain, about 1 foot in front of my face was a huge spider about a body about 1 1/2 inches lengthwise and 3/4 inch crosswise, and legs that were spiny and three inches long. What a big 'un!

It had built an orb-style web across the width of the entire top pane of the window. If the glass hadn't been there I probably would have had a little freakout, that's for sure! I took a picture because not only was she HUGE, but she had a two-inch egg sack up in the corner of the window and was also feeding on a moth as I watched. YUCK! But kinda cool too.

Because I am trying to educate myself about spiders so that they don't freak me out, I did a little bit of research. It's called an Argiope spider (or yellow garden spider). It's one of the biggest orb-weavers in Texas. Here's a site:

http://home.att.net/~larvalbugrex/argiope.html

And here's a picture that's much better than my cell phone picture:

BLEAGHHHH!!!!!

I wasn't excited to see the grey of THIS dawn, but....

I got a call at 9:20AM from Jennifer, the gal with the apartment. Things are all ready to go!

I went to pick up the keys from her and met her parents and also met the apartment manager who was just that warm, salt-of-the-earth South Austin type. When I went into the place, it was BETTER than I remembered. Hallelujah! I am starting with a full day of moving stuff (until it starts to rain again). Tomorrow the move with the big stuff will take like five minutes because I'm getting a bunch in there today.

Wahoo!

I don't need a dinette set after all since there's a built-in table. And I have a back patio! This is amazing. I am going to LOVE it. LOVE it love it love it.

Although, I *am* kind of bummed that Reid, a guy I know who lives upstairs in the apartment building, grabbed her full-length mirror out of the dumpster while I was busy talking with them. Good thing I know him already and can give him guff about it. Heehee.

I'm not happy to see the grey of dawn

One of the worst mornings I've had in recent memory, and it's only 7:15am. I awoke at 6, my digestive tract roiling with its usual way when I am stressed beyond capacity. My eyes are swollen from crying over a sad, difficult conversation I had last night; my head is pounding, and my heart is aching. As if that weren't enough, stupid money worries are gnawing away at the lining of my stomach and my brain is racing trying to solve the problems and not being able to because quite simply, I have nothing.

I know, I KNOW, things will be okay. Today I am decidedly not okay.


I do not like knowing that my phone will be disconnected because to pay it means I would owe more than my entire paycheck. My mom has sent me money but apparently, just my luck--the card is lost in the mail. Tom & Laura are giving me a little for taking care of their pets too, but I probably won't see that until they get back. My health has deteriorated a lot since this time last year, and to top it off, on Sunday I am having my 35th birthday. No one can tell me I am a young woman anymore. It's getting to me more than I thought it would. I feel stunted in personal growth, run-down and world-weary, and realizing that I may never find real, true, two-sided romantic love. At 35, I thought I would be firmly ensconced in who I want to be, and happy about it.

I am completely depressed today in all aspects.

Nothing comes without its price

Real personal freedom and well-being sure is hard to hang on to. Is that supposed to make it more valuable to me or something? I don't agree with that. I've learned plenty of damned "life lessons", and don't feel like getting told that the ultimate life lesson is learning to accept that I will always be struggling for personal freedom and well-being. I can be the worst sort of fascist dictator when it comes to my inner voices.

I'm exhausted from tackling, finagling, manevering, and otherwise struggling to maintain the simplest but most important things in life....home, heart, and health.

It had better get easier really soon.

Today I wanted to hear stories

So I listened to THIS fantastic one:

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=246

Norman M. on Norman K.

For years, I've had an under-nourished fascination with the man that is Norman Mailer. Most of my exposure to him has been through his books and not his movies, which by the sound of it bodes well, generating from me a somewhat more respectable view of him than his movies would probably have brought (although I'm easily entertained). That's actually it, though...I've simply enjoyed and been thoroughly entertained by much of what he has to say. In particular, his writings on Marilyn Monroe are adept and worthy of attention.

Anyway, I'm wishin' I could jet off to New York to see my brother and take him with me to this event.

From the New York Times:

************************************************

Norman Mailer, Unbound and on Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life Selves

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 20, 2007
NY Times

Who was Norman T. Kingsley? No Wikipedia entry exists to provide a full biography, but in his day Kingsley — or N. T. K., as he was sometimes called — was a figure of considerable world historical significance. A filmmaker who invited comparison to Buñuel, Dreyer, Fellini and Antonioni, he was also a formidable potential candidate for president of the United States, an object of relentless media fascination and the target of far-reaching conspiracies of the rich and powerful. Backed up by an entourage of hoodlums and street fighters known as the Cash Box, he was, in equal parts, artist, outlaw, pornographer and saint.

Kingsley lived in perpetual danger of assassination. He reveled in the company of boxers and beautiful women and was said by some to have “a proclivity toward Greek love.” His background was somewhat mysterious — Russian, Irish and Welsh with rumors of Gypsy and what in those days was called Negro blood — and his accent seemed to travel, in the space of a single utterance, from Brooklyn to Harvard to Texas. If one man could be said to crystallize the violent contradictions of his time and place, surely it was Norman Kingsley.

Not that such a person ever really existed. But somebody — one person in particular — had to invent him. Norman Kingsley is the main character in a movie called “Maidstone,” and the alter ego, avatar and namesake of the film’s director, Norman Mailer (whose middle name, by the way, is Kingsley). “Maidstone,” shot in the Hamptons in the summer of 1968 and released in 1971, is the third of four feature-length films Mr. Mailer directed, following “Wild 90” (1967) and “Beyond the Law” (1968). The fourth, an adaptation of his 1984 novel “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” is the only one in which Mr. Mailer does not appear and the only one that can be said to obey the conventions of commercial narrative cinema. It stars Ryan O’Neal as an ex-convict and aspiring writer mixed up in a series of murders in Provincetown, Mass.

All four of these will be shown as part of “The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer,” a fascinating and wide-ranging retrospective taking place during the next two weeks at three Manhattan cultural institutions: the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Paley Center for Media and Anthology Film Archives.

The cinematic oeuvre of Mr. Mailer, now 84, cannot quite stand by itself; the movies he directed run the gamut from curiosity to catastrophe. Happily, this retrospective turns out to include a lot more: adaptations from his books (notably the excellent mini-series made out of “The Executioner’s Song,” his nonfiction masterpiece); movies suggested by his life and personality (like Karel Reisz’s “Gambler,” written by Mr. Mailer’s disciple James Toback and starring James Caan as a singularly reckless literature professor); and a generous smattering of documentaries and television shows (from “Firing Line” to “Gilmore Girls”) in which he appears.

The objection can be made that all of this stuff is trivial and secondary, an amusing distraction from the substantial and vexing edifice of Mr. Mailer’s real work, which is his books. Many of them, it seems to me, are too infrequently and poorly read, and some of their boldest gambits and thorniest truths are overshadowed by their author’s reputation for excess on and off the page.

To see him as he was in his various nonliterary incarnations — as cinéaste and talk-show guest, as politician and polemicist — is to understand some of what he was up to in books like “Advertisements for Myself” (1959), “Armies of the Night” (1968), “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970) and “The Prisoner of Sex” (1971). And Mr. Mailer’s first three films — “Maidstone” in particular — are worth seeing for the insight they provide into the ideas and ambitions that fueled Mr. Mailer’s writing in the 1960s and ’70s, the wildest, most productive and most contentious period in a career that has never been especially calm or easy to comprehend.

In those years Mr. Mailer’s extracurricular pursuits, including the forays into filmmaking, sometimes attracted more attention than his prose. He seemed perversely intent on transmuting his early fame, acquired with the commercial success of his first novel, “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), into cheap media celebrity or even tabloid notoriety. His ego seemed boundless, his appetite for the spotlight so ravenous that it could look like a hunger for public ridicule. In 1967 he treated antiwar protesters in Washington to a drunken, rambling, scatological impression of Lyndon B. Johnson; two years later he undertook a quixotic run for mayor of New York City on a platform of municipal secession; he spewed obscenities at Germaine Greer on the stage of Town Hall in Manhattan in 1971. That same year he exchanged insults with Gore Vidal on an especially memorable episode of “The Dick Cavett Show.”

All of these events and many more can be witnessed anew in “The Mistress and the Muse.” Their entertainment value — see Mailer the candidate pressing the flesh on the streets of Harlem and Queens! Watch as Mailer the male chauvinist pig does battle with the assembled Amazons of the women’s liberation movement! Thrill to Mailer the literary pugilist as he accuses Mr. Vidal of “intellectual pollution”! — is undeniable. And so is Mr. Mailer’s charisma, his remarkable ability to mix the roles of crusader and clown, prophet and fool, rabbi and ham.

Some of this magnetism derives from his sheer physical presence — the jug ears, the piercing blue eyes under the woolly, graying thatch of hair, the stubby frame capable of surprising turns of quickness and grace. And then there is the voice, the rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant aperçus delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners. He flexes his upper lip like a boxer testing his mouthpiece, and his impressive eyebrows jump up in mirth or bear down with exaggerated menace.

In short Mr. Mailer is, as he might put it, no mean performer. He has appeared in a handful of movies by other directors, including Milos Forman’s “Ragtime” (1981) and Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” (1987). And his improvisational gusto as an actor is the most striking aspect of “Wild 90” and “Beyond the Law.” In the first he plays a gangster of some kind, his voice, often unintelligible because of poor sound quality, taking on Irish, Italian and African-American inflections when he is not on his knees barking in the face of a perplexed German shepherd. In “Beyond the Law” he is a detective with the soul of a poet, whose blend of sensitivity and profane machismo seems to be both a knowing parody of Mr. Mailer’s self-image and its sincere apotheosis.

On screen, whether he is playing Norman Mailer or Norman Kingsley (or, much later, King Lear), Mr. Mailer is almost always testing a hypothesis that the most hyperbolic presentation of the self will also be the most authentic. Fame was not only his burden, but also his subject and his method. “I was a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and status,” he wrote in “Advertisements for Myself,” looking back with some ambivalence at his transformation, at the age of 25, from college man and ex-G.I. to the most acclaimed writer of his generation. And that book chronicles, among other things, his awakening determination to figure out how to use this curious existential condition as the basis for his work.

While his films, with their long, ragged scenes of improvised dialogue, show a superficial affinity with Andy Warhol’s, Warhol and Mr. Mailer are, in the context of their times, antithetical figures. Warhol was primarily interested in the distancing, depersonalizing effects of celebrity, in the way that media reproduction could turn persons into ciphers, emptying them of affect and individuality. For Mr. Mailer, affect and individuality were everything, and his project was to conceive a personality large enough to withstand the shrinking, homogenizing, castrating forces of contemporary life.

It was a fundamentally romantic project, and it makes him a grandiose figure and a curiously vulnerable one. Introducing him on “Firing Line” in 1968, William F. Buckley Jr. observed that Mr. Mailer’s “technique is one of unalloyed narcissism mitigated by a recognition of — not to say a devotion to — his shortcomings.” While this summation is unkind, it is not inaccurate, and it goes some way toward capturing what an exasperating, fascinating character Mr. Mailer had become.

I use the word character advisedly. By the later 1960s his major strategy, already evident in “Advertisements,” would be precisely to collapse the boundary between author and character, to make himself the explicit protagonist of his writing. The result was a series of remarkable literary hybrids that cast the template for what would later be called New Journalism. “Armies of the Night,” in which the third-person “Norman Mailer” participates in the anti-Vietnam march on the Pentagon in October 1967, is perhaps the most sustained and successful performance in this vein. And while its reportage is justly praised — there is no better snapshot from that era of the intelligentsia at war — the formal radicalism of that book is in many ways underestimated.

Because Mr. Mailer’s milieu was the popular media rather than the academy, and because he was, from the start, a best-selling novelist rather than a critical darling, he is not generally grouped with the experimental novelists of the period. But even though he was schooled on the broad-backed realism of Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell, and even though the literary deity of his young manhood was Ernest Hemingway, he nonetheless undertook as thorough and audacious a re-imagining of the aesthetic parameters of the novel as did Thomas Pynchon, John Barth or William S. Burroughs.

That same experimental impulse — the drive to push at the frontiers of convention, to blast settled patterns of expression with the shock wave of his personality — drives his other activities, from filmmaking to politicking. Mr. Mailer’s acquaintance with the avant-garde theater and experimental film that flourished in New York in the 1950s and ’60s is evident in his films, which are always less concerned with polish or coherence than with plumbing the mysteries and serendipities of process. He does not want to represent an experience, but rather to induce one, to precipitate chaos in the hopes of glimpsing some new inkling of order.

His camera operators included D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock, mainstays of the cinéma vérité movement. Mr. Pennebaker was on hand to capture the skirmish with the feminists at Town Hall and turn it into “Town Bloody Hall,” and he also filmed an infamous scene at the end of “Maidstone.” In that film Mr. Mailer describes what he is doing — whether he’s speaking as himself or as Kingsley is not clear, and perhaps moot — as pursuing “an attack on the nature of reality,” a slogan that could fit much of the art of the time.

In any case, reality took its revenge, or called Mr. Mailer’s bluff, in the person of Rip Torn, an actor in the film who assaulted Mr. Mailer with a hammer as Mr. Pennebaker’s camera rolled and the novelist’s children screamed in terror. Real blood was shed — Mr. Mailer nearly bit off his assailant’s ear — and schoolyard obscenities were exchanged as if they were ontological brickbats.

This scene, I admit, has a lurid fascination. But it also captures something essential in Mr. Mailer — his reckless bravado, his willingness to court ridiculousness and the loss of control. Very few artists today, in any medium, exhibit this kind of crazy passion, and that’s too bad. At the beginning of “Advertisements for Myself,” Mailer admits that “like many another vain, empty and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last 10 years in the privacy of my mind.” Near the end of “Maidstone” he notes that “in reality, someone like Kingsley could never run for president. But in fantasy — in fantasy — he could.”

True enough. And while some people seem to be fantasizing that the current mayor of New York, by virtue of his level-headedness and managerial competence, might make a good candidate, my own imagination runs toward the man who placed fourth in a field of five Democrats in the 1969 mayoral primary. And if Norman Mailer won’t run, maybe Norman Kingsley will.

Times, they aren't a-changing

Anyway, if either NY Times or LA Times ever wanted to hire me to write for them I'd be SO there, even with my contempt for the LA Times. That might just be because it's LA.

NY TIMES ARTICLE

In Archimedes' Puzzle, a New Eureka Moment

By GINA KOLATA

Published: December 14, 2003

Twenty-two hundred years ago, the great Greek mathematician Archimedes wrote a treatise called the Stomachion. Unlike his other writings, it soon fell into obscurity. Little of it survived, and no one knew what to make of it.

But now a historian of mathematics at Stanford, sifting through ancient parchment overwritten by monks and nearly ruined by mold, appears to have solved the mystery of what the treatise was about. In the process, he has opened a surprising new window on the work of the genius best remembered (perhaps apocryphally) for his cry of "Eureka!" when he discovered a clever way to determine whether a king's crown was pure gold.

The Stomachion, concludes the historian, Dr. Reviel Netz, was far ahead of its time: a treatise on combinatorics, a field that did not come into its own until the rise of computer science.

The goal of combinatorics is to determine how many ways a given problem can be solved. And finding the number of ways that the problem posed in the Stomachion (pronounced sto-MOCK-yon) can be solved is so difficult that when Dr. Netz asked a team of four combinatorics experts to do it, it took them six weeks.

While Dr. Netz acknowledges that his findings cannot be proved with absolute certainty, he has presented the work to other scholars, and they say they agree with his interpretation.

On a recent snowy Sunday morning at Princeton University, three dozen academics gathered to hear Dr. Netz speak, and then congratulated him, saying his arguments made sense. "I'm convinced," said Dr. Stephen Menn, a McGill University historian of ancient mathematics, in an interview at the end of the two-hour session.

Among all of Archimedes' works, the Stomachion has attracted the least attention, ignored or dismissed as unimportant or unintelligible. Only a tiny fragment of the introduction survived, and as far as anyone could tell, it seemed to be about an ancient children's puzzle — also known as the Stomachion — that involved putting strips of paper together in different ways to make different shapes. It made no sense for a man of Archimedes' stature to care about such a game.

As a result, Dr. Netz said, "people said, `We don't know what it is about.' "

In fact, he has concluded, the prevailing wisdom was based on a misinterpretation. Archimedes was not trying to piece together strips of paper into different shapes; he was trying to see how many ways the 14 irregular strips could be put together to make a square.

The answer — 17,152 — required a careful and systematic counting of all possibilities. "It was hard," said Dr. Persi Diaconis, a Stanford statistician who worked on it along with a colleague, Dr. Susan Holmes, who is also his wife, and a second husband-and-wife team of combinatorial mathematicians, Dr. Ronald Graham and Dr. Fan Chung from the University of California, San Diego.

Independently, a computer scientist, Dr. William H. Cutler at Chicago Rawhide, a manufacturer of oil seals in Elgin, Ill., wrote a program that confirmed that the mathematicians' answer was correct.

Perhaps as remarkable as the discovery that Archimedes knew combinatorics is the story of a manuscript that dates to 975, written in Greek on parchment. It is one of three sets of copies of Archimedes' works that were available in the Middle Ages. (The others are lost, and neither contained the Stomachion.)

"For Archimedes, as for all others from antiquity, we don't have the original works," Dr. Netz said. "What we have are copies of copies of copies."

Investigators evaluate copies by asking whether they agree on the text they have in common, and by looking for unique passages, which lend them particular interest. By those measures, the manuscript was invaluable. But it was nearly lost.

In the 13th century, Dr. Netz explained, Christian monks, needing vellum for a prayer book, ripped the manuscript apart, washed it, folded its pages in half and covered it with religious text. After centuries of use, the prayer book — known as a palimpsest, because it contains text that is written over — ended up in a monastery in Constantinople.

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, a Danish scholar, found it in 1906, in the library of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Istanbul. He noticed faint tracings of mathematics under the prayers. Using a magnifying glass, he transcribed what he could and photographed about two-thirds of the pages. Then the document disappeared, lost along with other precious manuscripts in the strife between the Greeks and the Turks.

It reappeared in the 1970's, in the hands of a French family that had bought it in Istanbul in the early 20's and held it for five decades before trying to sell it. They had trouble finding a buyer, however, in part because there was some question of whether they legally owned it. But also, the manuscript looked terrible. It had been ravaged by mold in the years the family kept it, and it was ragged and ugly.

In 1998, an anonymous billionaire bought it for $2 million and lent it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it still resides.

"I should emphasize how incredibly uncommon the situation is," Dr. Netz said.
With the manuscript in hand, a small group of scholars set out to reconstruct the original Greek text. It was not easy. "You look with the naked eye and you see nothing, absolutely nothing," Dr. Netz said.

Ultraviolet light revealed faint traces of writing, but it included both the prayers and the mathematics. "The major problem is the combination of the fact that many characters are hidden with the fact that many are so faint that they are invisible," Dr. Netz said. Then there are the gaps where the pages were ripped or eaten away by mold.

Computer imaging helped. Dr. Roger Easton of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Dr. Keith Knox of the Boeing Corporation and Dr. William Christens-Barry of Johns Hopkins University managed to write programs to pick out writing from the "noise" around it, and in many places the Greek letters fairly pop off the computer screen.

"The product of the software is incredible," Dr. Netz said. But it too has limitations, especially near the tattered edges of the pages. To reconstruct the writings, Dr. Netz and Dr. Nigel Wilson, a classics professor at Oxford University, are using every tool available: ultraviolet light, the computer images, Mr. Heiberg's photographs and their own intimate knowledge of ancient Greek texts. Still, in some areas, "the text is likely to remain a conjecture," Dr. Netz said.

It was chance that led Dr. Netz to his first insight into the nature of the Stomachion. Last August, he says, just as he was about to start transcribing one of the manuscript pages, he got a gift in the mail, a blue cut-glass model of a Stomachion puzzle. It was made by a retired businessman from California who found Dr. Netz on the Internet as a renowned Archimedes scholar.

Looking at the model, Dr. Netz realized that a diagram on the page he was transcribing was actually a rearrangement of the pieces of the Stomachion puzzle. Suddenly, he understood what Archimedes was getting at.

The diagram involved 14 pieces, and the word "multitude" seemed to be associated with it. Mr. Heiberg and those who followed him thought this meant that you could get many figures by rearranging the pieces.

"This is part of the reason people didn't see what it was about," Dr. Netz said. But the old interpretation seemed trivial, hardly worth Archimedes' time.

As he examined the manuscript pages, piecing together their text, he realized that what Archimedes was really asking seemed to be, "How many ways can you put the pieces together to make a square?" That question, Dr. Netz said, "has mathematical meaning."

"People assumed there wasn't any combinatorics in antiquity," he went on. "So it didn't trigger the observation when Archimedes says there are many arrangements and he will calculate them. But that's what Archimedes did; his introductions are always to the point."

But did Archimedes solve the problem? "I am sure he solved it or he would not have stated it," Dr. Netz said. "I do not know if he solved it correctly."

As for the name, derived from the Greek word for stomach, mathematicians are uncertain. But Dr. Diaconis has a hunch.

"It comes from `stomach turner,' " he said. "If you get involved with it, that's what happens."

LA TIMES ARTICLE

13th-Century Text Hides Words of Archimedes

By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer

December 26, 2006

The book cost $2 million at auction, but large sections are unreadable.Some of its 348 pages are torn or missing and others are covered with sprawling purple patches of mildew. Sooty edges and water stains indicate a close escape from a fire.

"This manuscript is, by far, the worst of any manuscript I've ever seen," said William Noel, curator of manuscripts for the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it now resides. "It's a book that is on its last legs.

"The sheepskin parchment originally contained a 10th century Greek text, which was erased by a 13th century scribe who replaced it with prayers. Seven hundred years later, a forger painted gilded pictures of the Evangelists on top of the faded words. Underneath it all, however, is an exceptional treasure — the oldest surviving copy of works by the ancient Greek mathematician and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived in the 3rd century BC.

About 80% of the text had been transcribed and translated in the 1910s after it was rediscovered in an Istanbul monastery, but since then much of it became unreadable again because of deterioration. Fully deciphering its mysteries has had to wait for advanced technologies, some of which had never been applied to ancient manuscripts.

The unusual cast of detectives includes not only the imaging specialists who helped photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls, but also a Stanford University physicist who studies trace metals in spinach with a particle accelerator. Together, they have been carrying out one of the most remarkable "salvage jobs" in the history of codicology, the study of ancient manuscripts.

Archimedes, it turns out, is only one secret of the text.

Among the mathematicians of antiquity, Archimedes was one of the greatest and most cunning.He was one of the earliest to devise ways to calculate the area beneath curves and was the first to prove that a circle's circumference and diameter are related by the constant pi. He developed the Archimedes Screw to lift water and invented deadly devices, such as the Claw of Archimedes, which was designed to grapple enemy warships.

Archimedes died in 212 BC, when Syracuse was sacked by the Romans. Legend holds that he was drawing figures in the sand. "Don't disturb my circles," he supposedly told the soldier who killed him.

Knowledge of Archimedes' work is derived from three books.Codex A, transcribed around the 9th century, contained seven major treatises in Greek. Codex B, created around the same time, had at least one additional work by Archimedes and survived only in Latin translation. Codex C has been an enigma.

It was originally copied down in 10th century Constantinople, now known as Istanbul. Three centuries later, the manuscript was in Palestine. By then, it was no longer a precious vestige of ancient learning but an obscure text that could be put to better use as a prayer book. A scribe began by unbinding the pages. He washed them with citrus juice or milk and sanded them with a pumice stone. He cut the sheets in half, turned them 90 degrees and stitched the new book down the middle.The scribe wrote prayers over the blank pages. Codex C had become a "palimpsest" — a recycled book.

The book eventually was brought back to Constantinople, where it sat until the 1890s, when a Greek scholar wrote down a fragment of erased text that he was able to read. That fragment was brought to the attention of Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906, then the foremost authority on Archimedes.

Armed with a magnifying glass, he translated everything he could read, publishing his work in 1910. The palimpsest disappeared amid the chaos of World War I, only resurfacing in 1998, when a French family named Guersan offered it for auction at Christie's in New York.

An anonymous book collector paid $2 million and deposited it at the Walters Art Museum for conservation. Mold had attacked much of the manuscript, and four forged paintings of the Evangelists made in the 20th century covered some of its most important pages."That was our worst nightmare," said Abigail Quandt, senior conservator of rare books and manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum.

Roger L. Easton Jr., a 56-year-old imaging specialist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, had just come off his success revealing hidden text in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Christie's had commissioned him to make ultraviolet images of the palimpsest for the auction catalog, and now he offered his help to the museum.

Easton and his colleagues began their work in 2000. They tinkered with different methods for capturing the image with the ultraviolet light, which makes the parchment glow more whitish.They then merged those images with another set taken under a tungsten light, which enhanced the reddish hue of the Archimedes text.

The resulting "pseudocolor" image made it easier to distinguish the black prayer book writing from the burnt sienna words of Archimedes. Using this painstaking method, Easton and his team took two years to uncover another 15% of the text.They were stymied in penetrating the rest.

Two more years passed before Stanford physicist Uwe Bergmann, 43, read a magazine article about the Archimedes palimpsest that mentioned it had originally been written with iron gall ink.

One of Bergmann's projects at Stanford was investigating the process of photosynthesis in plants by using the synchrotron X-rays to image small clusters of manganese atoms in spinach. "Why not find traces of iron in an ancient book?" he asked.

Bergmann sent an e-mail to the Walters Art Museum, and the museum agreed to a test. Bergmann set up the palimpsest experiment at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. Spread over an area the size of a football field, the synchrotron is part of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a Department of Energy facility set in the foothills of Menlo Park.

The synchrotron hurls electrons at near light speed, forcing them to give off X-rays as they veer around bends. That X-ray beam is channeled away into the laboratories. Bergmann figured the powerful and precise beam could be used to make iron molecules fluoresce, thus allowing him with a sensitive-enough detector to pick up even the faintest traces of ink. Bergmann first had to determine the exposure time. Too much time and the powerful synchrotron X-ray could damage the parchment. Then, they adjusted the intensity of the beam, which could be so strong that it blinded the detectors that picked up the glow from the iron gall ink.

After two years of refining their technique, Bergmann and his colleagues began the laborious process of imaging the palimpsest this summer.Each side of a page, mounted in frame that moved in front of the beam, took 12 hours to record. The machines processed the pages continuously for two weeks.

Beneath a moldy, torn painting of St. John emerged two layers of writing.On the edge of the first page, they saw a signature dated April 14, 1229: "By the hand of presbyter Ioannes Myronas."It was the name of the priest who had erased Archimedes. In an office near Memorial Church at Stanford, Reviel Netz flicked off the lights. Netz, a slight 38-year-old with dark hair, leaned close to the screen of his laptop.

Bergmann's X-ray work had produced a black-and-white picture of a page from "The Method of Mechanical Theorems," a text found only in the palimpsest. One phrase — "let them be arranged so they balance on point theta" — had already been translated by Heiberg, although he had had to guess about the word "on," which was unreadable.

Netz, a professor of classics, looked at the X-ray image and nodded. He smiled.The actual word was "around.""That's not trivial," he said, explaining that the change altered the meaning of Archimedes' calculations involving an object's center of gravity.

The X-ray image also revealed a section of "The Method" that had been hidden from Heiberg in the fold between pages. It contained part of a discussion on how to calculate the area inside a parabola using a new way of thinking about infinity, Netz said. It appeared to be an early attempt at calculus — nearly 2,000 years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented the field.

The discoveries may seem small, but they are significant in the understanding of ancient mathematics, Netz said. One passage he studied several years ago involved the innumerable slices and lines that could be made from a triangular prism similar to a wedge of cheese. Netz said the passage, which was unreadable to Heiberg, showed that Archimedes was grappling with the concept of infinity long before other mathematicians.

For Netz, a specialist in ancient mathematics and cognitive history, the chance to decipher the palimpsest "is the fulfillment of an incredible dream," he said. One of his biggest breakthroughs involves a quirky part of the palimpsest called the "Stomachion," which literally means "Belly-Teaser.

"Stomachions were children's games in which 14 geometrical shapes were rearranged to create new shapes. Heiberg translated fragments of the manuscript but paid little attention to it, thinking it was just a game. Netz saw a deeper significance.

Archimedes asked a more restricted question in his "Stomachion": How many different ways could you combine the 14 triangles to make a square?

Netz believes the fragments address an area of mathematics known as combinatorics that scholars have only recently believed interested the Greeks. For all the high-tech efforts, there are still gaps remaining in the Archimedes text, perhaps 2%, Netz guessed. Among the jumbled fragments are clues that perhaps the deepest secrets are yet to be found.

A century ago, Heiberg copied down two lines that he couldn't identify. They began: "The youngest had been abroad for so long that the sisters wouldn't even know who was who."The passage was not Archimedes.

In 2002, scholars were able to cross-reference the quote. It came from "Against Timandros," written by a 4th century BC Athenian orator named Hyperides. Although Hyperides is little-known now, contemporaries frequently compared him to Demosthenes, an acknowledged master of oratory.

No complete versions exist of "Against Timandros," which Hyperides had written as part of a lawsuit over an inheritance, said Judson Herrman, a classicist at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Further study determined there were 20 pages of Hyperides in the palimpsest, including a previously unknown text called "Against Diondas."

The palimpsest, it turns out, took parchment from seven texts, including what are believed to be a commentary on Aristotle's "On the Soul" and a group of biographies of the saints, plus two still unidentified texts.The works are even more difficult to discern than the Archimedes because the ink is different and the pages more thoroughly scrubbed.

"I have been cursing all morning," Herrman said of his work on a few lines of Hyperides. The scientists aren't giving up. Easton's team recently began experimenting with precisely tuned light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, to illuminate the text.

The team also is using angled light to detect the outlines of letters etched in the parchment by the acid in the ink. The team made progress on a few pages, but it may take decades — or longer — before technologies are developed that can unveil all the texts."We'll probably leave something for future scientists to work on," Netz said.

Ay yi yi.

Been sick all weekend AGAIN. I am so sick of this! This time it's a bacterial infection that apparently is fairly serious. It's taken all weekend just to feel normal and I do believe I won't really be normal for a few more days. Sigh. When am I going to pack? My energy level is so low, it's driving me crazy.

One good thing: for some reason my student loan company has decided to up my monthly payments by $.14, and due to the change they are not taking a payment from me this month. My payments have been lowered already within the last few months so the $.14 I can of course afford, and the timing for the change is PERFECT becuase every single penny is one I'll need for bills, gas and grocery while I move. I still need things like shower curtains and a set of knives, but overall that's a welcome, if small, reprieve.


Last night I got totally stir crazy and drove a few blocks to Westgate to see the latest showing of Harry Potter, while I wazs feeling up to it and somewhat less contagious. Figured it was worth the expense and about all I'd be physically able to do. Good call. Theater was almost empty. Escapism I needed. Creepy movie.

Uck. Still sick. Gotta go.

Stick-thin and VERY cranky

I'm being dramatic.


Stick-thin and very cranky...that's how I'm going to be until I get paid on August 15. Up until today, I've been happy that I've scraped by enough to get into my own place. Wahoo!

Then today I got my T-Mobile bill from my Europe trip, due July 30th. If I pay it, I won't have any money for gas or food for an entire month. That is no exaggeration. None whatsoever. The amount of the bill (nearly $350.00) is slightly over what I had left over for food and gas and other necessities during the month. Argh.

The crankiness will be somewhat alleviated by the fact that I will have my own place (although today it looks like I'll have to return all the household items I got for it, like my vacuum cleaner). The stick-thinness will eventually happen, but not without crankiness the likes of which no one has seen before. I'll probably just keep going to the gym and to Town Lake and pretend that I don't need food, 'cos it just makes me fat.

Panicking, I just started making a big pile of clothes to sell at my garage sale that I think I'd better have next weekend. Purging while making money from whiny yardpickers. I can hardly wait.

Also, I thought of donating blood and selling books and CDs.

Dang it all.

On being and impulsiveness

I was talking with Steve tonight about my state of being for the past couple of years, and suddenly I realized something. Bless him for being there.

I've known I'm impulsive for pretty much my entire life, but it's not a good thing or a bad thing; it's simply a personality trait of mine.

Bad impulses: Overeating, overshopping, explaining my existence, apologizing, feeling guilty, smoking, drinking, lying around all starey-like, running away, undersleeping, watching movies slothfully for hours that spread into days, oversleeping; negative thinking.

Good impulses: exercising, eating more consciously (smaller, healthful portions), cleaning and organizing, spending time with close friends, getting up earlier, practicing singing, making bread, writing songs, listmaking and other forms of planning, bill-paying, spontaneous walks or drives in the countryside, dancing around my house, bubble baths, lying around late at night bathed in candlelight and surrounded by the sound of a good record, reading thought-provoking books for hours, writing for business and writing for pleasure.

It's 2007 now (yes, I state the obvious).

I'd say that 70% of my time awake since mid-July of 2003 has been spent experienceing the above-mentioned bad impulses.
Before then, I had been at the top of my game mentally, physically, creatively more than ever in my life before. Since then, just maintaining the equilibrium to feel and do the good impulses has been a struggle. Sometimes I do feel them but overall, but it's been a real struggle to get to a place where the good impulses happen naturally. Heartbreaks, car accidents, unenjoyable living environments, gigantic financial fluctuations, and weight gain have all played a part in the raising of the "bad impulse" percentage.

I'd like to get my life back around to the point where I am experiencing 70% good impulses and 30% bad impulses (I'm human, after all). It's time. I'm almost there; I can taste it on my tongue.

And dang it all; no more explaining myself, apologizing, feeling guilty about imposing on others or worrying about others sitting in judgement on me! Who is it I owe my happiness to again? Enough already!

Thank goodness (this is a rather dumb blog, sorry).

Thank heavens that the Harry Potter movie marathon is on, because being sick is no fun without some lovely gooiness such as that to keep me complacently staring (dozedly) at the television. I never really watch television unless I'm sick anyway. It breeds its own brand of sickness most of the rest of the time.

My sweetie-pie Vance is going to play bass with us on Friday. This excites me. It's about the only thing that excites me about playing this Friday. Wahoo for Vance!

I need to get a move-on with my move-in'. I haven't started packing at all yet, although I've been collecting little odds and ends I'm going to need for the apartment once I get it all set up. You know...a vacuum cleaner, mop, kitchen trash can--and a new hair dryer since almost all of my personal appliances got blown out by the voltage converters in Spain. Easy come, easy go. If I knew I might go there again in the near future, perhaps I would have invested in a European one whilst last I was there.

I need to clean and wash my sheets and the like, so that I may have a non-fussy night a-bed (since last night a-bed clearly wasn't enough). I'm hoping that if I lay low again tonight, that tomorrow morning I will awaken refreshed and bounce out of bed energetic and ready to do things like work out at the gym and go shopping or to a movie. Cackle, cackle...we shall see.

I've been planning not to get a computer for my new home for some time, but now I'm thinking of things I'll need to do, musically speaking, like planning sets and burning rehearsal CDs and handling iTunes...and so I'm seriously re-considering slthoguht he though and the expense stresses me out to the nth degree. I have to get one, soon...especially while the album is in the works. Harrumph.

Money down

Apartment mine.

YAY!!!

Happily purchased at 1/2 Price Books on North Lamar, this very afternoon

The books are both riveting so far. Wahoo!