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@mathbook.cafe

open.spotify.com/track/6eIfC6...

Coltrane adds: "I don't try to set standards of perfection for anyone else. I do feel everyone does try to reach his better self, his full potential, and what that consists of depends on each individual. Whatever that goal is, moving toward it does require vigilance." And as the performance shows, that vigilance is not without its tensions. Listening to Coltrane work through his own challenge may well stimulate self-confrontation in the rest of us. Each listener, of course, will himself be challenged in a different way. For many, the basic beginning will be that described by Don DeMichael in a Down Beat review of Coltrane: "This music... opens up a part of myself that normally is tightly closed, and seldom-recognized feelings, emotions, thoughts well up from the opened door and sear my consciousness.

October 5, 2025 at 1:03 AM

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@mathbook.cafe

August 30, 2025 at 4:12 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

I like the prosody in Felix Klien’s explanation of Bürgi logarithms. He’s writing with purpose and with pride of his students and country in a time of (relative) peace in Europe ca. 1904

August 22, 2025 at 12:33 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

I hadn’t thought of the visual and cultural connections between Basquiat artistic style and the signatures of Haitian loa until I saw this inset in Zora Neale Hurston “Tell My Horse”

really obvious in retrospect

making the signature of Agoue’ta-Royo “Master of Waters”

August 16, 2025 at 10:33 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

Part of Hurston's received heritage-and perhaps the paramount received notion that links the novel of manners in the Harlem Renaissance, the social realism of the thirties, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement-was the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers, to beings who only react to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose culture is "deprived" where different, and whose psyches are in the main "pathological." Albert Murray, the writer and social critic, calls this "the Social Science Fiction Monster." Socialists, separatists, and civil rights advocates alike have been devoured by this beast.
Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by "the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal." Unlike Hughes and Wright, Hurston chose deliberately to ignore this "false picture that dis-torted...." Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain,
"was something internal. ... The man himself must make his own emancipation." And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the "arrogance" of whites assuming that "black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions." Her strategy was not calculated to please.

August 11, 2025 at 12:35 AM

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@mathbook.cafe

A retired mathematician brought a couple bags of her books into the shop today. The Coxeter was a good find— first edition good condition. I price it around $50 while bookfinder says there’s listings of very good copies in the hundreds

August 8, 2025 at 12:33 AM

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@mathbook.cafe

Fun Life-Making

August 7, 2025 at 10:52 AM

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@mathbook.cafe

One Ocean: vis.social/@infobeautif...

August 1, 2025 at 3:08 AM

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@mathbook.cafe

one lesson an anti-capitalist technologist can draw from the story is that the product ("data") can be used to turn against the same culture that abuses its consumption. Kadallah seems to recognize this possibility

In this era of violence, when the sword has been augmented by the pen, which has been augmented by the keyboard, it is particularly important to understand the double edged nature of our words to protect ourselves from violence of all varieties, but also to make sure we’re wielding our own weapons effectively (in this case, demanding data autonomy). By lifting the veil and understanding the nature of invisible violences, we can finally begin to halt and heal from it enough to ask the important questions: How am I both a victim and perpetrator of harm? How can we avoid recreating old violences in new systems? When are intentional violence, non-violence, and anti-violence necessary in the design of technologies?

July 29, 2025 at 6:03 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

Papa LaBas is the main protagonist of Mumbo Jumbo. He works towards reviving Afro American culture through teaching HooDoo. He’s an imperfect example of author Ishmael Reed’s NeoHooDoo — Reed shows why in this scene following where his assistant Earline has been exorcised if a loa

Well it's like this, PaPa. You always go around speaking as if you were a charlatan and putting yourself down when you are 1 of the most technical dudes with The Work. Abdul was right that night. .. I didn't want to say. You ought to relax. That's our genius here in America. We were dumped here on our own without the Book to tell us who the loas are, what we call spirits were. We made up our own. The theories of Julia Jackson. I think we've done all right. The Blues, Ragtime, The Work that we do is just as good. I'll bet later on in the 50s and 60s and 70s we will have some artists and creators who will teach Africa and South America some new twists. It's already happening. What it boils down to, LaBas, is intent. If your heart's there, man, that's ½ the thing about The Work. Even the European Occultists say that. Doing The Work is not like taking inventory. Improvise some. Open up, PaPa. Stretch on out with It.
Maybe I'm a bit too rigid. 1 of Berbelang's friends, Jose Fuentes, called me a repressed Negro.
There was silence for a moment.
Don't you think we ought to check with Earline to see if the other 1 has completely left.
O pop, I don't believe that a little Erzulie ever did anybody any harm.
The sisters smile. T Malice smiles too.

Three Loas (Ézulie Congo, Erzulie Freda, Erzulie Petro), by Andre Pierre, Haiti, c. 1962

July 29, 2025 at 4:27 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjb/114929834307029719⁠

July 28, 2025 at 11:26 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

- Garner, Bryan A., The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation
- Garner, Bryan A., Garner’s Modern English Usage
- The Chicago Manual of Style

are the three best resources an editor can have in the office, in my opinion

in my opinion. You needn't use this phrase, normally, unless it's a ferociously debated point with lots of contradictory evidence. Only an immature thinker writes, In my opinion, My Fair Lady is the best musical ever.
Without the in my opinion qualifier, it's entirely clear that you're stating an opinion. —Garner’s Modern English Usage

July 25, 2025 at 11:07 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

Here’s John T Frederick introducing a collection edited by Sylvestre C Watkins for The Modern Library in 1943. This’ contemporaneous with the beginning of the March on Washington Movement — discussed by A Phillip Randolph in this volume — a generation before MLK famous “I have a dream” speech

I do not know the specific ways in which the Negro's place in American life is to be made better. I do know that it will be made better in one way or another. And I know that it can be made better by all of us, working together. The problem of the Negro's place in American life is not a local problem alone or primarily, or a state problem, or a regional problem. It is a national problem, because on the Negro's place in the American nation depends our future relation to other nations, the rising nations of that great majority of the peoples of the earth whose skins are colored. It is a national problem because on its solution depend our national consistency, integrity and self-respect.
That the Negro's place in American life is a national problem means that it is the individual problem of every citizen of the nation.
It is a problem that cannot be ignored, evaded or postponed. It must be faced and dealt with now, while millions of American Negroes are fighting side by side with other millions of Americans against fascism and for the Four Freedoms.
In our individual responsibility, most of us greatly need knowl. edge and understanding: knowledge of what the Negro's place in American life today really is; understanding of what the Negro thinks and how he feels about it. To give us such knowledge and such understanding, Mr. Watkins' anthology is of the highest and most timely value.
Chicago, December, 1943.

July 25, 2025 at 3:46 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

I’ve taken care for the science and mathematics sections at Bryn Mawr Bookstore, Cambridge, MA. Hence recent posts about various books.

Here’s an item #retrocomputing folks might like: Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis by John A Rice — includes an IBM PC floppy disk!

Data Disk for Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis for use with IBM PC or compatible

July 24, 2025 at 9:28 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

two copies of Roger’s’ Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability, 1967. Still advertised at a decent value online. I may borrow this copy for a couple weeks

Ex Libris: Brandeis University Library. In memory of Dora and Samuel Leavitt. Given by Judy Morss, Brandeis University National Women’s Committee, Boston Chapter, 1975

July 24, 2025 at 9:23 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

Milnor, John, Introduction to Algebraic K-Theory, Annals of Mathematical Studies, Princeton University Press, 1971.

This copy printed in Japan by Tokyo University Press

July 24, 2025 at 8:36 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

Toomer, Wright, Ellison, Little (better known as “X”) all had very similar experiences. It’s largely the result of a rapidly industrializing yet socially repressive environment. They all had inconsistent outbursts of genius, then, well, various troubles…

July 24, 2025 at 5:38 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

in other words, our national sins still pay dividends

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/scapegoating-the-algorithm

After the Democratic Party embraced civil rights and the Republican Party pursued a “Southern Strategy” to appeal to white voters opposed to racial integration, American politics entered a period of political realignment that has created more internally consistent and differentiated political coalitions. As political scientist Lilliana Mason and others have documented, this process of realignment and social sorting has increasingly transformed partisanship into a “mega-identity” that encompasses a wide range of other identities and characteristics, including race, religion, geography, and even personality traits.

The emergence of a thriving partisan media ecosystem exacerbated this trend of increasing polarization. But this, too, predates the internet and social media: it’s typically traced to the Reagan administration’s 1987 termination of the “fairness doctrine,” which had required broadcasters to discuss controversial topics in an unbiased manner.

July 23, 2025 at 4:48 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

I feel this’ a good representation of Richard Wright’s key influences. Margaret Walker’s literary biography may be a bit uneven, somewhat strange in some places, but she does a monumental job pulling together a huge library and showing how it worked in his imagination to help produce his own writing

July 18, 2025 at 2:52 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

Annette LePique for Newcity

There is a dearth of good translators in the Anglophone world who recognize and respect language's creatureliness; language is like desire, like the act of wanting it changes us, it transforms us, it constantly makes and reshapes us.

July 18, 2025 at 1:53 AM

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@mathbook.cafe

Does anyone else think of Cher when they think about Reagan’s Navy?

Under the rubric of a plan for "rearming America," he advocated a profound shift in national priorities in the allocation and distribution of national treasure and resources. The Pentagon was named the beneficiary of an enormous infusion of funds, the domestic ledger the target for deep cuts in programs and spending. So munificent was the defense buildup plan Reagan endorsed that as part of attaining a six hundred combat ship navy, he even sought to bring back into active service from "mothballs" that old symbol of American military prowess the battleship, at a cost of additional billions. Many military strategists thought the notion foolish. In their view, battleships were dinosaurs of the seas, obsolete in the missile and nuclear age, when atomic-powered submarines carrying enough power to destroy the world patrolled the depths virtually undetected and when intelligence earth-orbiting satellites continuously circling the oceans left no place for battleships to hide. They were, besides, hopelessly limited in their capacity for modern warfare, their sixteen-inch guns woefully out of range and no match for missiles against which they would be forced to defend.

Cher mounted on the big gun of the USS Missouri, a WW2 battleship retrofitted for continued service in the 1980s

July 17, 2025 at 8:55 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

Walker uses Gritting’s critique of Southey’s biography of Horatio Nelson to critique Fabre’s biography of Richard Wright

talk about literary history! using books about books to critique books about books to frame writing a book about books!

I love it

Then, in 1973, the literary critics in the white press hailed the long-awaited biography by Michel Fabre as the scholarly, authorized, and definitive study of Richard Wright that had eluded Constance Webb and that Saul Maloff had longed to see. Fabre had everything he needed in the way of research material-primary and secondary sources-but neither the true personality nor the creative genius and achievement of Wright emerges, to say nothing of his political significance. In The Nature of Biography, Robert Git-tings criticizes Southey's biography of Horatio Nelson and Forster's biography of Dickens—these criticisms underscore the restraint with which Fabre apparently approached his subject:
Biography became, in part, the art of concealment. Illegitimate children do not exist; so Emma Hamilton's own feelings for Nelson in Southey's words, "did not, in reality, pass the bounds of ardent and romantic admiration." This type of biography, written not to reveal but to conceal human nature, persisted throughout the century. Forster's life of Dickens not only conceals the novelist's estrangement from his wife and his shifts to meet his mistress, Ellen Terman; it blankets Dickens' manic-depressive character, his half-mad outbursts of insult and anger, anything that deviates from the popular picture of a great, spiritually inspiring, and above all Christian writer. Besides, biographers often had their eye on the great man's widow-or even worse, were the widow.

Richard Wright DAEMONIC GENIUS A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work, by Margaret Walker

July 17, 2025 at 12:30 PM

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@mathbook.cafe

Mark Tomczak gave a nice reinterpretation of Gilgamesh on Mastodon.

I need more (1) epic poetry reinterpretations and (2) cross-sharing between alt platforms