Presentations - Day two

Bizz and Jenny - I really liked the dual picture you two painted. It was pretty obvious that you two spent a lot of time on it and I thought that it worked really well with Pale Fire. When you guys brought up the idea that Kinbote and Shade are mirror images of one another, I was like "Oh my god! Chirality!" I have kind of forgotten if I explained it or not, but if you imagine a molecule is held up to a mirror, and its mirror image cannot be rotated to give you the same molecule, then the molecule is chiral. If you have a mixture of the two different chiralities, then it would be called an achiral mixture. I think you could argue that Gradus is one chiral personality with Shade as his opposite, and Kinbote as the mixture of the two.

Jenny - I liked your exploration into chess in Pale Fire. It reminded me as a kid when my Dad and I would walk into this one store in our mall that had fancy chess sets. There would be a lot of different (and expensive) sets, but you could always count on there being a fairy set. Eventually we made our own chess board out of wood, and later I tried to make one in pottery class. Lets just say that I like the wood one a lot better, even if one half of the board is bowed.

Bizz - I have a close friend who is dyslexic, so I found this presentation really interesting. I was already going to give them Pale Fire, but now I may follow up on their reading more closely than I would have. I should really learn more about dyslexia.

Ashley - If that wasn't your A game, I don't really want to see what your A game is. I think reading your paper would help a lot with this book.

Michael and Sarah - You both brought up ideas that I think I need to consider for my own essay. During Michael's presentation I realized I probably need to talk about chess for at least a little bit. I am relating organic synthesis to the construction of order and meaning from some of these texts, and I forgot that synthesis is often likened to chess. I liked Sarah's idea that multiple layers exist in Pale Fire. I kind of wish I had thought of that, but oh well. It ties in nicely with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which I was going to talk about a little bit when talking about the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment.

Madeline - The guy tapping on the windows must like you a lot. Or he owed you a big favor. I would have been really embarrassed to be standing outside a random building, tapping madly on the windows while a bunch of people inside a dark room were screaming and shouting. I thought your presentation was a little frantic, but I don't know anything about The Tempest at all, so I might just be applying my experience falsely onto your presentation.

I think that I want to talk about the role of the critic in our texts. I had a better word for it half an hour ago, but oh well. It is obviously everywhere in Pale Fire, but it has also been in other things we have read. It is in The Idea of Order at Key West. Ramon Fernandez is mentioned in the poem, and he was a French literary critic who later worked for the French Nazi government. Then there is the whole thing in the poem about how we attempt to describe what we see in nature, and we come close, but we aren't to describe it exactly the same way. But in the end this doesn't matter a ton because our interpretation is what we think is beautiful and what we go with. I think the majority of the people had a different opinion at the beginning of the semester, but as a scientist that is what I see. I would have to root around for a little bit to flesh out my ideas, but criticism is in The Biographer's Tale. And if this isn't enough I could also talk about Hedda Gabler. But I think Pale Fire would be first and foremost in the essay. Not only is Kinbote a critic, but criticism is present in the poem and elsewhere.

It is kind of vague at this point, but I don't think it was an accident that a large number of the texts we have read have included literary criticism as a part of the story.

I think I might hazard a guess as to where the crown jewels are. I think the crown jewels are in our hands whenever we read the book. I think the crown jewels is the poem, with Kinbote later making up the story of the jewels as a parallel for the poem.

But I think that this might contradict something else I have been thinking about. Everything in the book has Kinbote saying that the poem fell one line short. But what if it was too long, one Canto too long. I don't think Canto Four fits with the others, the tone is just completely different. I reread it a couple times and it feel like Nabokov is permeating the story and writing about the development of his ideas. I think it is cleverly written, but it feels like the end passage of the book where Kinbote gives a description of himself that is exactly like Nabokov. Kinbote describes Shade as writing long into the night, but in Canto Four it is said that "My best time is the morning" (873). Kinbote has a note to this line, but it is about Gradus, not the inconsistency. Then there is the two lines "Man's life as commentary to abtruse/Unfinished poem. Note for further use." (939-940). You could easily argue that the poem was purposefully left at 999 lines by Shade/Kinbote/Gradus (they are the same person, with Shade being the ideal and Gradus the floor, with Kinbote desiring to be like Shade yet pulled down by his similarity to Gradus.) . But you could also argue that this is Nabokov brain storming for ideas that became Pale Fire, and that the poem ended at the end of Canto Three, and was unfinished because Shade didn't fully expand on his faint hope. Another part of this disjointed note I am writing is the tryptich image on line 381, hinting that the poem should have been a three canto poem. The last major point would be lines 957-962, as Nabokov started titling his books poetry collections Poems after the first couple collections he wrote. I tried looking and couldn't find it, but I would be willing to bet money that Dim Gulf, Night Rote, and Hebe's Cup(Herculeus' wife as a god) have something to do with his writing. There is a lot more I could use to support this idea I think, but I got it written down.

Another random note, but either Vonnegut took his idea for Slaughterhouse-Five from Pale Fire, or both Nabokov and Vonnegut read the same thing that gave them the same idea. Both the main characters try to create stories that make their lives seem far more interesting and fantastic than what they are. And on page 236 Kinbote writes "So it goes".

Listening to the Radio

I was listening to the Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor this morning and he read this poem.

From Out the Cave by Joyce Sutphen

When you have been

at war with yourself

for so many years that

you have forgotten why,

when you have been driving

for hours and only

gradually begin to realize

that you have lost the way,

when you have cut

hastily into the fabric,

when you have signed

papers in distraction,

when it has been centuries

since you watched the sun set

or the rain fall, and the clouds,

drifting overhead, pass as flat

as anything on a postcard;

when in the midst of these

everyday nightmares, you

understand that you could

wake up,

you could turn

and go back

to the last thing you

remember doing

with your whole heart:

that passionate kiss,

the brilliant drop of love

rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,

then you wake,

you stumble from your cave,

blinking in the sun,

naming every shadow

as it slips.

I don't know the whole legality of this so here is some sort of citation: "From Out the Cave" by Joyce Sutphen, from Straight Out of View. Beacon Press, 1995.

Dramatic shifts in knowledge

To be honest I have not been able to get farther into this book. But I will try to contribute something meaningful so that I am not simply dead weight. Though after Dustin's discussion it became more appealing than it was before.

In class Dustin talked about how at some point something that was previously true is no longer true. While I think the discussion was based more off of social and cultural stuff, there definitely examples in science. The obvious example is that of quantum mechanics. In the later half of the 19th century people were being somewhat dissuaded from going into the field of physics because it was believed that for the most part that we understood how things worked, and that some loose ends would need to be mopped up. Well, turns out that while we knew a lot, we didn't know nearly as much as we thought we did. Before quantum mechanics light was viewed strictly as an electromagnetic wave and that particles were strictly particles (overlooking Newton's guess that light was a particle). However, after Einsteins work on the photoelectric effect, showing that light could behave like a particle, and de Broglie extending this to particles behaving like waves, we realize that matter does not behave strictly in one way. This would all be useless hypothesizing without observable evidence. The photoelectric effect was first observed before Einstein explained it, but de Broglie suggested that particles would have a wave length before it was observed. But this has been observed since with molecules as massive as Buckey-balls producing a diffraction pattern after passing through two slits. This all eventually led to the realization that molecules do not have a continuous spectrum of energy, but rather it is quantized in discrete packets. All of this would have been disregarded as untrue by the previous generation of physicists. Even a lot of the scientists dealing with quantum mechanics suffered through depression because a lot of it didn't make sense to them. Einstein was never really won over by the Copenhagen interpretation, saying that he didn't think that God would determine things by probability. Niels Bohr said "Einstein, don't tell God what to do". Another quote highlighting the difficulty of conceptualizing these developments was "Shut up and calculate". In other words, don't think classically, rather let the math tell you what is true.

Quantum mechanics is a field of science that is ripe with philosophical implications, so it gets a lot of press. It doesn't hurt that the personalities of the important figures make them interesting to people who are not scientists. However, these shifts of knowledge are in all science. For synthetic chemists it was once believed that the only molecules that could by made were simple molecules, and that the complex natural products would be impossible to make. Now however, any natural product can be realistically made, though it might have low yields and be unrealistic for manufacturing. We have come a long way from synthesizing urea in the early 19th century to potentially synthesizing this bad boy with enough graduate students. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vincristine.svg

I kind of wanted to talk about sense perception, the Herman Melville quote about the whale, the order at key west poem and some other relevant things, but I think that will have to wait for a bit. I think this post would just get to exhaustive and people who happen to read it would get bored.

Hasty Conclusions

I should start this by saying the only part of Foucault that I have been able to get through is the intro. But Holy Hell, for only being 16 pages that took a really long time, and I understood nothing. It instantly reminded me of this quote by Paul Dirac - "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible" Maybe the book becomes less convoluted past the intro, I will know better tomorrow morning. But if it doesn't, I guess Foucault didn't get the message.

Enemy of the People

The translation that I read was done by Farquharson Sharp provided for free by Penn State. I read that he also did translations of A Doll House and Peer Gynt, and I think the translations were done around the time they were written. But I am not exactly sure on that last bit.

I think I read the play differently than both Steve McQueen/Arthur Miller and Professor Sexson. Or maybe bridging the gap is a more appropriate term. I didn't see Stockman as such a steadfast character as Miller did. I think that Miller ignored some things, like Stockman playing with Peter's cane and hat in the newspaper office, or how Stockman seems to bring up not wanting recognition an awful lot for a guy not wanting it. But at the same time I didn't read it quite like Professor Sexson. I didn't see Stockman as a bumbling boob, causing problems and full of himself. (Probably putting words in your mouth, professor. Sorry about that.) I guess I saw him as more of a mixture, somebody who didn't handle the situation very well, and at times got a little carried away, but who tried to do the right thing the entire time.

This might be because I have read A Doll House before this class, but what I noticed was Petra's character. For all of Stockman's talk about progressing and such, he doesn't give his wife a lot of voice in the matter. She is often silenced in the play, with Stockman ignoring her towards the end of act IV, and planning on moving the family to America without discussing the matter with her, I felt like Stockman was a product of his generation. However, Petra has a job of her own teaching, and she has ideas that are "extremely emancipated". It seemed to me that her character is far more liberated than her mother is, which makes me feel like Ibsen's intent was to make her the most sympathetic character in the play. Or what is probably happening is that my having read A Doll House is slanting my views.

I think it would be awesome to have McQueen's facial hair in this movie. Seriously, the beard was epic.

I should start titling these things

Maybe it was just my first reading of An Enemy of the People, but I didn't think it was that great of a play. I mean, it wasn't a bad play. But I didn't think it offered anything ground breaking in the way the story was told. I feel like the baths wasn't a very complex image. Baths have been an image of cleanliness and health since the aqueducts, and probably longer. The fountain of youth is another obvious example. And their being contaminated to show the sickness of society to me wasn't groundbreaking. Being exiled north also isn't that unique of an image. Maybe there is more significance to this, with some relation to Viking myths that I don't know about. Peter's clothing being used to show the stiffness of his character. The foreboding presence yet physical absence of the people in society with the most wealth was also boring.

Maybe it was just my first read, or maybe these literary devices have become boring because this became the play that people copied. Or maybe it is because I haven't seen it acted out. Overall I felt like the play's purpose was to present the dramatic essay that act four was. It seems like I am bashing the play, but that wasn't really my intent. I think that the story was well told and put together, but wasn't that interesting. Maybe I had higher expectations of Ibsen after reading A Doll House and The Master Builder, where even though you could see were the story was going they held your interest.

Another passage in The Biographer's Tale that is interesting is when Nanson is in the the museum of the Linneaus society. In the previous passage I looked at, either Linneaus wrote about finding the plant he named Andromeda, or Destry-Scholes created the story. In the passage on pages 131 to 134, more attention is given to Andromeda and what Linneaus thought of it, as well as a mention of Ovid, a Roman poet who wrote about her. There is a poem written by Linnaeus, as well as the drawing that the poem is on. There is also a section of a text written by Linnaeus about the flower. Both of these show the blurring between fact and myth that happened with Linnaeus. While Linnaeus was write, that plants were related to one another and could be classified, his method was flawed and doesn't hold water today. This is not to say that Linnaeus wasn't important, but that he was a product of his time.

But more importantly to The Biographer's Tale, this emphasis on Andromeda and the myth behind it indicates that the myth of Andromeda is also important. It is interesting that Andromeda was originally promised to her uncle Phineus, but ends up with Perseus. I do not believe that Byatt also naming her protagonist was a mere coincidence. But at the same time, I do not have a clue what it means. Andromeda could relate to Fulla in the passage on page 67, with Phineas acting as Linnaeus. Or Medusa could be related to Fulla, as they both have eccentric hair, but I find this unlikely. It is clear to me that Fulla and Vera are supposed to be the parrallel of the women in Bole's tale, the passionate woman in Turkey, the reserved woman in England. And Phineas ends up with both women. And their is no lost romance with Phineas in the story. Wikipedia gives multiple meanings to the name Andromeda, one being "to think, to be mindful" and another being "she who leads". The former could easily be Vera, and the later could just as easily be Fulla. But again, it doesn't really fit. And in the end of the myth, Phineus is turned to stone with Medusa's head, and I don't really see a parrallel in the story.

Either I am reading too much into this, which I suspect is easy to do with Greek mythology, or I am missing something.

Another thing I found interesting was Fulla's initial description. Her hair is related to the sun and comets. I find that interesting as it reflects her personality, as she is fiery and passionate. But at the same time she is an ecologist, some one concerned with the organic, things built upon carbon framework. Yet she is compared to very inorganic things, stuff made of metals, hydrogen and helium. Probably not really important, but I found it interesting.

One of the passages in The Biographer's Tale that I liked was the last exert from Linnaeus, starting on the last line of page 65 and continuing onto the next page. There is a lot of juxtaposition in this passage, making the section seem cloudy. Linnaeus writes that he "was walking rapidly, facing the icy wind and sweating profusely". Either the wind was more of a gentle breeze, or Linnaeus was moving really dang fast, or there isn't something right with the story. He goes on to say that he was "always on the alert", yet he walked past a plant, then he decided to check it out again. But then he almost leaves, thinking it is another plant when he decides it is a new one. These contradictions of the description make the validity of the story questionable.

Later, Linnaeus goes on to write that the sun, being far north, shines into the eyes and makes it difficult to see. He also writes that "the shadows are also extended, and by gusts of wind made so confused, that things not really a bit alike can hardly be told apart". I think this line in this section is the most important to the book as a whole. An biographer's job is to not only find out things, but to also group them well or to not group them at all, which can be difficult if there is something obscuring the facts. Also, if you are to examine what looks like it should go together, but shouldn't, they you also need to examine stuff that looks like it shouldn't go together but actually should.

This idea goes beyond writing a biography. In diffi eq, problems sometimes relied on being able to group terms that were similar so that they canceled out nicely, leaving an easier problem to solve. This is also similar to NMR, which uses the same principles as MRIs but is used to identify molecules. A NMR hydrogen spectrum will give various peaks for all of the hydrogens in a molecule, but if the sample is impure it can often be difficult to group the different peaks correctly so that you can tell what is in your sample.

Lists

Lists are an important way to classify and organize things or ideas that are similar. However, lists can often be confusing unless an explanation comes with it. I could write down "

- Enolate

- Aldehyde

- Ether

- Alcohol

- Ketone

- Ester

- Acid Anhydride"

and that would be a list that would make little if any sense to the vast majority of people. However, the list of words is not random as all of those are names of functional groups that all contain oxygen. That is what these three sections have in common. They all contain lists that would be difficult to decipher without other information. Foucault gives outside information to help explain his list of words that mean resemblance. Destry-Scholes had left a list compiled completely of names that went to a collection of marbles. With no explanation given, it is difficult for Vera and Phineus to find each marble's corresponding name. They end up relying on matching up he colors and shapes of the marbles to the name that makes the most sense. This relies on the assumption that Destry-Scholes did not name the marbles arbitrarily. They also relied on information from Phineus' research that would relate to the names on the list. However, they end up abandoning the attempt. The list in Pale Fire is the most confusing of the three. It is a list of letters grouped together by a board, that when arranged differently but in the same order form some words. However, as it is it is difficult to draw any meaning from the list.

These difficulties happen in science when trying to piece together what is happening. If you have enough of the right information, you can often figure out what is going on. However, if you do not have a large amount of detailed information to go along with a list, than it can become difficult to piece together what is happening. In organic synthesis, it can be easy to piece together the list of chemicals that are formed with a certain reaction. However, if the right information is not available, it can be difficult to piece together how the chemicals that went in turned into the chemicals that went out. However, even determining the products of a reaction can be difficult, which would be like the list in Pale Fire. You have something, and you set up a reaction where you thought that was the only possible product, but then you got something different. You are left wondering "What the heck, this makes no sense".