Know Your Quanta!

This is Me:

Also, have I mentioned that I seriously miss cats?  One cat in particular…

Read it and weep:

Although Kant does not explicitly mention the predictive role of differential equations in the process of Anticipations of Perception, the notion of differentiability introduced by infinitesimally calculus permeates his text.

From Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics, a text that as far as I can tell, is just a big giant book of Kant and Math.  The pages even have that crisp ultra-white color of incredibly dense textbooks.  You know what I’m taking about.  Oh dear.

But there is hope:

[...]

Both schools are mistaken, the venerable mole declared.

Birds and cats are optical illusions produced

by the refraction of light.  In fact, things above

 

Were the same as below, only the clay was less dense and

the upper roots of trees were whispering something.

but only a little.

 

And that was that.

 

Ever since the moles have remained below ground:

they do not set up commissions

or presuppose the existence of cats.

 

Or if so only a little.

From Miroslav Holub’s poem, “Brief reflection on cats growing in trees”

 

Lunch interview?

I do love this woman.  Interview with Elizabeth Grosz, my favorite theorist.

quite the house

Check this out.  While I’m not a fan of decorative clutter, like piles of boxes that serve no useful purpose or knickknacks that are just taking up table surface, I love the stuff that’s on this guy’s walls.

Update on the Big T

That would be ‘T’ for Thesis, of course.

- I’m sitting in bed, surrounded by several piles of books, with a thermos of tea, a water bottle, a bunch of cut-up pieces of index cards (for bookmarkers/notes in library books), a pencil sharpener, and everywhere I find the squares of library requests which come with all my books.  A Great Mess.

- Am re-reading Time’s Arrow so that I can make a somewhat helpful outline of my chapter on it.

- Am reading Physics as Metaphor, which is not, as I had originally thought, about using physics as a metaphor but how physics is a metaphor.  The book is written by a physicist, so I guess it’s legitimate, although it does have cartoons  and the last chapter first demolished then defended astrology.  Working in its favor, it has been cited by more than one scholar I’ve read.  It’s a thin book, but pretty darned dense.  Enjoyable in short bursts.

- Also reading Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction which may have a couple relevant chapters on the non-mainstream but not genre SF fiction (the author’s close readings include the work of Doris Lessing and Thomas Pynchon).  I am beginning to realize that having anything about genre studies in my thesis is going to involve an enormous amount of study.  It’s not enough to read the scholars; if their theories are all based on texts, then I’m going to have to read the fiction work as well.  And I’m not sure that reading a bunch of SF is really the best use of my time.  In fact, I know it’s not.  And I really really dislike genre SF.  So my plan at the moment is to skirt the rim of this giant can of worms for as long as possible.  I’ve ordered a book from the Staabi by Darko Suvin (v. cool name, ps) that seems to be The definitive book on science fiction genre studies .  I’m a bit worried that it’s outdated (late 70s) but the good thing about SF genre is that it’s consistent and I can always use more recent scholarship in journals to supplement my reading.

- On the close reading front, I’m currently looking at Gut Symmetries for feminist re-writings of physics, Time’s Arrow for deconstruction of scientific causality, and Into the Silent Land for scientific narratology.  We’ll see how these change.  Although the close readings are what I’m most comfortable with I want to get more comfortable with the science first (ha! call it core knowledge!).  I also think that the way I approach these texts could be unique if I go for the harder stuff first.

-The harder stuff:  philosophies of science and literature.  Empiricism.  Physics as a metaphor.  Max Weber and the disenchantment of the world.  This stuff is the harder stuff because it’s all spacey and abstract.    I am mightily intimidated.

- Also.  I was going through my books to see if any of them might be useful in this project: Italo Calvino’s The Uses of Literature, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics… will de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life come in handy?  Maybe not, but having it in front of me might remind me that other works by him certainly will be.  Then I went through my extensive collection of articles and essays (and here I offer up praise of OneNote) and found many potentially useful things.  One was actually a page where I had jotted (can one jot on a computer?) down some great passages from Doctorow’s City of God.  I remember that I had been interested in using this book in my thesis, but had cast it aside for British texts.  I pulled it off my shelf and realized rather suddenly it, as well as Gut Symmetries, AND Time’s Arrow have a lot to do with either the Holocaust or Jewish histories (TA being very much about the Holocaust, but not very culturally interested in Judaism; while GS and CoG are very concerned with Jewish thought and place in the passage of time).  Well, here is another can, but one which I much more interested in opening.  I might have to write about how not only physics, but Einstein himself has captured the imaginations of fiction writers.

- The other articles I found were a number of articles on Winterson, which will help come close-reading time and some about Calvino, which I put in my thesis ‘folder’ because I know he’s going to sneak in somewhere.

- Lastly, on “potentially relevant” texts:  There’s got to be some of the decadent collector in me, because I love assembling texts together and imagining how I would analytically connect these ideas in my Big Project.  I did this with my div III.  And it’s not that the connections aren’t there; given very little information about a text that I haven’t read yet I can start drawing lines between ideas in my excitement.  And, somehow, time slips away and I don’t have the chance to actually read the book or article.  NOT. THIS. TIME.  My reading list might be a hundred texts long at this point. no matter.  I will devour them.  And from my head a usurper shall spring, armed and ready.

a master of what exactly?

I recently read an article about the importance of fact-based core curricula in elementary and high school education and how this significantly improves the academic success of college students AND an article lamenting the decline of the English Department, whose author cited that Harvard has done away with its freshman survey courses in favor of a thematic structure. (The first article, here, on E.D. Hirsch and the “Massachusetts miracle”, and the second, here.)  I’m going to choose to ignore the actual concerns of these articles’ authors and instead launch off on my own conceptual musings, therefore revealing how indoctrinated I am by the wishy-washy world of progressive education.  But well, let me think for a bit about “core knowledge” (And I’m not going to go into the elementary/middle school arena as the first article does–there’s no pedagogical defense for fifth-graders not knowing who Sherman was).  I remember looking at colleges and visiting one where our tour guide proudly proclaimed that the first year English course would include all the fundamental texts of the English canon.  I believe my mother and I exchanged a glance at this.  A very traditional view of the English canon would find the biggest fault with this class to be its naive ambitiousness.  How exactly do you intend to read all of Shakespeare et al in a single year?  But more fundamental is the utter trust that this approach has in the concept of a canon in the first place.  There has been a lot written, especially in the revisionist history arena about the constructions of aestheticism and power that affect why certain texts and authors are canonized and while others are placed aside.  When we talk about core knowledge that is not simply knowledge of who fought in World War I and when it happened, we move into a dynamic space, in which the telling and writing of history reflects all the conflicts of the historical moment to the present (or even before the historical moment).  This isn’t knowledge you can pin down.

I have a professor, who also happens to be my thesis supervisor, who has made disparaging remarks in several classes about the presumed (correctly, if I had to guess) lack of classics-reading by her students.  We aren’t schooled in Henry James? Mein Gott.  How did we get here without him?  Now, this is an interesting question on many levels (as I read Winterson I know that she has been well-schooled in James, is he in her pages?)  But it makes me wonder about fundamentals, especially when we reach the college and graduate levels.  Education is based on a quantifiable progression, a clear linearity of steps taken to reached an awarded degree.  It is a measurement of knowledge.  Unfortunately, knowledge doesn’t seem to want to fit into that line, preferring webs and pastiches and all those lovely (post)structuralist and social constructivist metaphors.  Critical knowledge, that is, discursive knowledge, has a problem with causality because it has an explicit problem with time, or rather, timing.  I am involved in my knowledge and the relationship is not all like a sponge in water.  My brain is choosy for reasons that no one has fully explained and my ability to draw connections between disciplines makes me a better thinker.  When I was in my first year at Hampshire, some students were up in arms about a newish requirement that we had to take a course in each of the five ’schools’ during our Division I studies (basically, the first year).  Hampshire students tend to be very individually motivated and many really know what they want and they don’t want to “waste their time” in disciplines irrelevant to their interests.  I sympathized, mostly because I was horrified at the idea that I had to take a course in Natural Sciences.  Other students laughed at the requirement, because sometimes the classes seemed randomly assigned to schools when they should have been in others. I think it would be safe to claim that most Hampshire students study humanities-related fields and there always seemed to be some tenuous humanities-friendly courses in Natural Sciences.  This requirement, the closest Hampshire got to “core knowledge” as a whole (I’m betting NS programs were slightly different), had more to do with core thinking than providing a platform of basic facts (we should have gotten that in high school).  Beside the NS school requirement, which was really tough for me, the other frightening school was Cognitive Sciences and I thought I had totally lucked out because my course in CS was on Plato.  I thought it clearly belonged in the Humanities school, or maybe Interdisciplinary Arts but now I see that the CS school was not really about all the neat brain and computer studies that most CS students were doing but about systems, linguistics, semantics, and logic.  Plato fit perfectly.  And I have major problems with math-based, quantifiable problem solving, which is probably why that Plato class was hard.  It was all about logic and nothing at all about its applications. What is my point?  Basic facts can be learned in middle school, maybe high school, but by the time someone has reached college, they should be pushed to think critically about everything and this has more to do with the processes of knowledge than the building up of it.  Even scientists, who may need more building up of knowledge because of how science has been created (no inherent quality assumed), greatly benefit from the study of other disciplines (I think postcolonialism at the very least should be studied by everyone who intends to spend any time on this earth).

Okay, this is just a really long confession that I’ve never read Henry James.  Never! In February I will be award a degree, I’ll be a Master of English Studies and I have no idea what that means.  I’m thinking conceptually, of course, not in the terms that many people get degrees for, namely, because is a requirement of employment in that field.  If we go down that road pretty soon I’ll be asking what is the conceptually point of getting a degree in anything; considering my unwritten thesis, I should probably avoid asking that question.  If I had the choice to receive a degree that is awarded based on mastering of knowledge, I’d really choose a degree in Thinking.  I find that much more rewarding than this pompous idea that I could be a Master of English.  What am I really a Master of?  Thinking in English.  I recently read another article, this one somewhat loosely connected to my rant-disguished-as-an-essay on the Booker Prize, called “Decadence, Nationalism, and the Logic of Canon Formation” by Matthew Potolsky.  Potolsky’s ultimate thesis was that the arbitrariness of the Decadent collection reveals how all canons are arbitrary and construct their authority through their own creation.  The idea of survey courses in the essentials of English literature supports the supposed organic nature of canons, in fact, Potolsky points out that college curricula lists are instrumental in the process of canon formation.  Again, this is dynamic knowledge.  You, as a freshman student, are not merely walking into a lecture hall to soak up the knowledge that will form the base of your further study, you are participating in the canon, you are authorizing it.  The canon does exist except as a list of texts, implying a development through time as we move from decade to decade. Again, knowledge and time.  It strikes me that this is quite a modernist view of human development, that each year we progress, we build up, each new piece of art is more sophisticated and artistic than the last.  I hate to use the word, but this is a teleology of constant betterment that inherently makes us feel superior to “primitives”, to the past, to everyone and every country that hasn’t followed history to its brilliant telos, us.  Constraining knowledge with a concept of time that is bizarrely linear (read some physics if you don’t think it’s that bizarre) subjects it to all of our nefarious prejudices.

I still don’t know if I’m a Master of anything… but I didn’t imagine that I’d be coming to any conclusions, brilliant or not, by the end of this blog.  Well, I leave you with Potolsky:

“Against the nationalist model of community as organically and essentially bound to a specific place and vernacular tradition, the decadents imagine a community fashioned on the model of the decadent collection: artificial, international, and united only by taste.”

Great Things For the Future

Of the many, many things I’m looking forward to when I go home in December, these rank pretty high:

Monsters of Folk canceled their Berlin show :(   I’ll have to settle for the CD

more greatness from george saunders

Here

schneewittchen

Last night Tam and I went to see Schneewittchen (Snow White) by the Staatsballett and it was fan-tastic.  It began intense with a birth/death scene and did not let up.  Some of my favorite parts were the wicked queen’s cat sidekicks, who managed to both be great dancers and wonderfully personified cats.  The mirror was very very cool as well, with dancers on one side mimicking the actions of the dancers on the other side (including the cats!)  But the very best part of the ballet was the entrance of the seven dwarves, who repelled down the back of the stage on a mock rock-face and then proceeded to do a ballet dance on the wall.  It was neat.  The seven dwarves were also not very serious, despite their excellent dancing, so it was fun to watch them.   Much more fun to watch them than Snow White or the Prince, though after Snow White was stricken, the Prince did dance with her semi-dead body, which was equally beautiful and disturbing.

I’m so glad I went! Now I really want to see the Nutcracker, for some reason.  Tam and I both decided that we have to see more ballet this year.

no house and no housekeeper

I’ve been laid low for the last week and a half because of a cold.  It stinks.  The weather is changing to that wet cold of Berlin winters, unpleasant to say the least.  I’m reading Walden for my American Renaissance course and am intrigued by the connections between modern agricultural/foodcultural movements and the work of the transcendentalists.  There’s an unavoidable hierarchy between humans and nature/civilised vs. savage that I find distracting, but some of their words are compelling:

As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern.

(Emerson, “The Transcendentalist”)

The moralizing of Emerson and Thoreau is perhaps the most distracting element for the modern reader, it is, should we say, a sign of their times.  I’m thinking about it a lot as I’m reading, wondering if modern environmental writing has had to claim the term ‘ethical’ over religiously connotative term ‘moral’ because religion seems to be removed from the discourse.

That’s all I have the energy for now…

“you cannot progress without revolving”

A downright inspiring day.  Last night I could not sleep until 2am (again) and thus slept until 9, instead of getting up at 8 as I had planned.  Actually, I stayed in bed until 10, trying to rest without going back to sleep and finishing Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate.  When I finally got up I was sluggish but the quick walk to the Staabi, with my breath rolling out in front of me, cleared my mind.  I had received some sort of fine from the library that I didn’t understand and was also unable to order a book the night before, so I was worried that my card had expired even though it says that it’s good until February.  I remembered that when I had gotten the card the woman told me to come back in October because of something having to do with my visa.  So I was anticipating much bureaucracy and fumbling German when I went to the Staabi counter.  Miraculously, everything worked out and I did not need to renew my card, though I did have to pay the 2 euro fine for not returning my book in time.  The ease with which this all happened made me a bit giddy and I bought some beautiful postcards made by the Staabi and practically skipped home.  I updated my blog and took a little too much time doing so and ended up not being able to go grocery shopping (something I am regretting a little at the moment).

At 2 I had class at the JFK Institute called ‘ The American Renaissance: Nature and Ideology in American Culture’.  I went just because ‘nature’ was in the title and we’re reading Thoreau and Emerson and I feel like a bad American for never having given much (or any) or my time to the transcendentalists.  But then, well, the professor, a German with almost perfect American accent, revealed that we’re not only looking at the transcendentalists, but the movements they inspired in later music, architecture, painting, and films.  We’re looking at Frank Lloyd Wright, John Cage, Thomas Cole, and a ton of other people whose names I recognized as important but couldn’t say why.  The professor was phenomenally excited about the work and he made me really excited as well.  And we might be watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and I want to do my presentation on it!  I pretty much died when I saw the film on the syllabus.  Is it bad that I’m more moved by James Stewart than Charles Ives?  Anyway, it was very neat to walk into a class and become excited about material I knew nothing about merely through the professor.

Then I hung out with a friendly Canadian (a joke, because Tam, Diana and I became friends with him in a matter of minutes) who just started in our program and convinced him that he had to stay for the ‘Beyond Postmodernism’ course at 6.  This course.  Well.  If you don’t know about Mircea Cartarescu, nothing on the useless internet is going to make you understand what this man is like.  On paper, he’s perhaps the most famous Romanian author (he’s friends with Herta Mueller, the Romanian-German writer who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature).  My friend Diana has read him in Romanian and she had been gushing about this course since it was first posted online.  But this is not a good description.  Though it might be unfair to compare one author’s personality to another author’s work, and thus couching him in another context, I have to say that listening to him was like being inside a Borges story;  he spoke as the Borges narrator does, with extreme precision and detail in context and place punctuated by profound moments of poetry.  I know this sounds over the top.  And I’m not just trying to be poetic myself by making this connection.  I was leaning forward the whole time he spoke, probably with my mouth half open.  I had this feeling of intense …momentousness?  He began by telling us that his english is not very good, which might be true in terms of knowledge of vocabulary or grammar.  But of course, language is not the sum of its parts, and he proved it.  The things he could say with a limited number of words was pretty spectacular.  He used parables, metaphors, and told us stories, all while basically just explaining what we were going to do in the course.  He quoted frequently, more postmodernist and modernist and philosophical people than I can name, making me have this rather childish desire that he show me his library and then read to me from it.  Really, there was something approaching the sacred going on in that cold (drafty) room. I was happy to see that Diana and David both had the same reaction to him (I’m not the only crazy/smitten one).  I eagerly look forward to next week’s class and though I love a good discussion, I actually wouldn’t mind if he just lectured to us for the whole semester.  He also has office hours, which means a one-on-one discussion–a thought so incredible that it’s completely terrifying. I hope I have the guts to sign up.

That was my day.  Class ends at 8, I’m home by 8:30 and I haven’t eaten anything but some toast this morning and a very small, sad salad at the mensa.  I think I have a carrot and a loaf of bread.  But feeling the way I do right now,  I could thrive on far less.