Just finished watching Les Choristes in preparation for showing it at the film series later today. It’s possibly the most predictable, profoundly-awful film I’ve seen in the last decade. I called the very last scene as soon as that character was introduced. Ugh.
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Buster Benson, on narratives. I love that last line. History, in a way, could be interpreted as an eternal battle between truth and the narrative. It’s the force of my unease towards too-slick histories like The Devil in the White City, and part of my interest in messier stories like Zodiac. And I don’t think history is the only field of study that falls prey to this war between truth and narrative. In the popular consciousness, the theory of evolution still has problems taking hold because it simply doesn’t make sense to many people as a story of how the world came about. Just as we need to rewrite our knowledge of the world as new truths are discovered, so must we create new forms of narrative to tell their stories. |
Payday Swag
Today I could finally afford to go into town, eat a non-cafeteria meal, and buy some more books… and I kind of went a little crazy in the process. From the top:
Not pictured are If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino - already given to my girlfriend to read - and two books she picked up on the trip: Old School by Tobias Wolff, and a volume featuring Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies in both German and English on facing pages.
And with that, my collection of books here in Michigan now exceeds the shelf I’m storing it on. I’m thinking about combining my books with my DVDs in a free-association shelving scheme. Liar’s Poker next to Michael Clayton? Sure!
Yet another data-point in favor of the theory that nature abhors a Higgs boson.
Also mentioned is the fail-safe system that kicks in if the temperature rises too high for the metals to maintain superconductivity:
Had this week’s feathered baguette-packing saboteur struck in coming months, with a brace of beams roaring round the LHC’s magnetic motorway, the climbing temperatures would have been noted and the beams diverted - rather in the fashion that a runaway truck or train can be - into “dump caverns” lying a little off the main track of the LHC. In these large artificial caves, each beam would power into a “dump core”, a massive 7m-long graphite block encased in steel, water cooled and then further wrapped in 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding. The dump core would become extremely hot and quite radioactive, but it has massive shielding and scores of metres of solid granite lie between the cavern and the surface. Nobody up top, except the control room staff, would even notice.
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Maureen Tkacik, writing “Gladwell for Dummies” in The Nation. It’s a pretty sweet burn. For all of Gladwell’s feints towards complexity, he always treats the world as amenable to both metaphor and science, understandable using our current cognitive tools and a little bit of hard work. It’s a fundamentally optimistic view, almost a throwback to the America in the ’60s when we imagined a world advanced by scientific inquiry - every problem the opportunity for a solution - all encompassed within a generation or two. For all the assumptions that Gladwell goes through the motions of upending, he leaves intact our faith in the current course, running through a process of textual inquiry more palliative than curative. |
“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
— Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
See also: Mills’ post on the same, albeit without awesome Jeff Dunham burn.
I’m 21 suckars!
My best friend Zoe is 21 today! Unfortunately, I had to be several states away when she finally got around to turning the big two-one. Hopefully we will manage to meet up somewhere in Kansas or Michigan and celebrate properly.
For now, this awkwardest-picture-I-could-find-on-Facebook will have to do.
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William Styron, quoted by Anne K. Yoder from the latest volume of the Paris Review interviews. The writing I adore has always been about grappling with something - trying to wrestle it to the ground and encompass it within one’s grasp - whether it’s the crooked timber of everyday experience, or the ways that we try to connect with each other. Maybe it’s just that function proves to be a wonderful organization-tool, or that I’m only able to explain why I like something in terms of its purpose. But there still seems to be something there, some element of essential empathy because I understand the kind of battle they’re fighting. |
