If I were born calm I would have wanted to be a physicist. It would have made for nice balance. But I wasn’t. I came into the world hyper and full of stress. So I write. It’s where I find my peace.
When I was a kid I loved Einstein, because he was funny and had cool hair; and the merry-go-round, because it made me feel like I was on Quantum Leap and I totally dug Scott Bakula. Like a mini collider, it’d spin you so fast the world would warp and then you’d be spat out against the ground like some odd little particle…with everything else still moving because time and space are relative to the position and velocity of different observers and you, having been slung ahead of yourself by a playground accelerator, are observing both from two places at once and neither your brain nor your body know quite how to cope. It’s a fabulous rush, but being pushed off your axis also makes for nauseous. That’s how I feel about physics. Like a kid just flung from a merry-go-round. Much as I’d love to, I can’t play with it too much or there’s a good probability my head will explode.
Brain Snack: Brian Cox
I’ve spent pockets of my life consumed with the collapsing and curvature of time and space – it’s my Walter Mitty life. Things like string theory and super symmetry excite me beyond belief, but they take a lot out of me as well. I’m not speaking metaphorically. I get breathless and all short-circuity just thinking about it. Not least because dark matter and fourth dimensions always seem to give rise to certain philosophical questions and as much as I’m a monotheist I’m a pantheist as well, two things which aren’t at all mutually exclusive, but which make for complicated brain work all the same. Not zen, my friend. Especially when you’re trying to live below the neck.
I’m not an elegant mathematician. I can get there, eventually, but not before I’m foaming at the mouth. And since it’s probably helpful to stay sane when you’re dealing with the theory of everything, I don’t think I could ever be a physicist. Not made the way I am. A ninja, maybe. But never a physicist.
Every literature or creative writing course I’ve ever taken has addressed this topic: Britishness. What does it mean to be British? Do we do the same thing in The States? I don’t think so. (I never did.) But I’ve never taken a literature/writing course on U.S. soil. So, maybe…
Zadie Smith was the first writer I explored with this particular question in mind: What does it mean to be British? In my view, she answers it fantastically. But I’m a Yank. So what do I know? I’ll tell you what, this – Smith is a brilliant comic novelist (you will especially agree with me if you’ve ever heard her read aloud her work.) And I think Amis does a disservice by not pointing it out. But again, who am I to question the son of Sir Kingsley?
According to Professor of Creative Writing Martin Amis, he and fellow ‘Literature and Britishness’ panellist Howard Jacobson are the last remaining British comic novelists. If successful humour hinges on implied superiority over other groups we have become a nation terrified of referring to people collectively at all, let alone to any kind of grudge or rivalry based on national identity.
Jacobson claimed to be uncertain whether Britishness actually exists, and certainly not to believe in multiculturalism. In his view, the concept is a device of the English intelligentsia, which would hate its own country’s culture if it couldn’t dismiss the English aspects and embrace those from elsewhere. Yet he spoke of an appealing English quality in the voices of novelists like George Eliot, which he described as simultaneously satirical, tolerant, aloof, and aware of its own absurdity.
He agreed with comments by Amis about the effective tradition of sexual symbolism in British writing, going so far as to say that “…the best sex in an English novel has no mention of sex”. In Amis’s view this is again related to British writing being unusually grounded in sanity, with a median, middle class world its traditional subject matter.
* Listen to the full debate online
* Download the full debate as an mp3 file
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content – lecture notes, exams, videos, etc. It’s not a degree-granting or credit-bearing initiative but it is a publication of the course materials. Which works well for someone like me who has no practical use for things like the Essentials of Geophysics but finds it wonderfully fascinating and know-worthy all the same.
I’ve sat about 30 of these over the past year – working my way through everything from String Theory to Tolstoy. I have absolutely no plans to touch the mathematics modules. At all. (Have always loved physics. Have always hated pure maths.)
Christmas could not excite me more than the content for literature and writing.
The MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies gives students the opportunity to learn the techniques, forms, and traditions of several kinds of writing, from basic expository prose to more advanced forms of non-fictional prose, fiction and poetry, science writing, scientific and technical communication and digital media.
A study of Milton’s poetry, with some attention to his literary sources, his contemporaries, his controversial prose, and his decisive influence on the course of English poetry.
The American Novel Since 1945
The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones.
Modern Poetry
The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance.
One of the things I loved about the University of Manchester were the special collections (which date back to the 3rd millennium BC) held by the John Rylands Libraries. Stateside, Princeton University Library is digitising its rare books. Their latest addition is the Islamic Manuscripts Collection. The University Library holds approximately 9,500 Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and other languages of the Muslim world written in Arabic script. The manuscripts date from the 9th to the 19th centuries. Two hundred of these manuscripts are being digitized for the digital library.
There’s also a late 13th-century Byzantine manuscript from Constantinople which contains Aristotle’s Organon (De interpretatione, Analytica priora, Analytica posteriora, and Topica), accompanied by diagrams and other textual materials.
These links are more for me than anything. I use to print and bind articles of interest into a journal. I’ve now gone digital. And yeah, I still have a crush on my pink western digital passport, but it’s no comparison to paper. Nothing really is.
The diaries of the novelist George Orwell are now published online as a daily blog.
Interesting video interview with Ray Bradbury on Literature and Love.
And in The Economist…Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. His and Hers.
Most favoured of all the Man Booker award winners. Salman Rushdie’s recent CNN interview.
