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Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
2008-04-27 @ 11:17 pm — rc
 Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
I have heard almost only good critics from my friends about Paul Auster, so I was quite hopeful he would be more elusive than most contemporary books I have read or the books I read from the New York Times best sellers list. Well, The Brooklyn Follies might escape the Oprah level, but he does not escape the flaws of the American story telling tradition imo: extravagant plots, outrageous events, extraordinary individuals all wrapped up in a fast paced unraveling in a flat storyline where character development is an underrated writer’s skill. I did enjoy reading The Brooklyn Follies though, great vocabulary and witty plot, and I will admit to the fantastic last 5 pages that come close to classic literature. I felt depressed that he had to throw or force in the affair of Nathan Glass with Joyce Mazzucchelli, and that the outrageous characters with their outrageous lives (the porn star singer sect convert turned lesbian cousin, or the repressed homosexual turned philantropist art forger rare book dealer turned scamming savior who has a compassionate love relation with the Jamaican HIV positive play-back artist cross-dressing sweetheart, to name a few) were not more like normal people with deeper and more sensitive characters, but hell you fuckers this is the great tradition of American story telling where everything ends well anyway and where every body (especially the males) get their fantasy fuck in the end. Well, sorry for that, just to say that I appreciate books like Book of Disquiet or Man’s Fate or writers like Dostoewski and Bulgakov more. I am hopelessly stuck in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.
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Guy De Maupassant, Sicily (1885)
2008-03-24 @ 5:59 am — rc
 Guy De Maupassant, Sicily (1885) 63p.
De Maupassant’s travel notes from his tour of Sicily are not a literary effort in the first place, but without a doubt meant as simple travel notes. In that sense it is not enlightening of a special kind to read his Sicily notes, and it is not interwoven with reflections or symbolic layers. But it can still stand the test of time to serve as a travel guide for those who plan to visit the island, or it is an entertaining report to read again for those who have recently visited and toured Sicily themselves as I did in 2007.
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Andre Malraux, La Condition Humane (1933)
2008-03-10 @ 1:41 am — rc
 Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate (1933) 371p.
“The stupidity of the human race is that a man who has only one life is willing to lose it for an idea.
It is very rare for a man to be able to endure [..] his fate as a man. [..]
All that men are willing to die for, beyond self-interest, tends obscurely to justify that fate by giving it a foundation in dignity: Christianity for the slave, the nation for the citizen, Communism for the worker. [..]
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.
Perhaps love is above all means which the Occidental uses to free himself from man’s fate.”
La Condition Humaine, for many one of the classics in the modern literary pantheon and I would agree, is about the struggle to reconnect to the world we lost, to find humanity in our soul, to live with dignity a life that knows no morals, to accept a path in life and to rise above it. At the end of our way there is death, and our companion is solitude, the road is narrow and we walk it alone. We escape this fate of man and find companion in the forgetfulness of alcohol, drugs and paid women. Or we strive to transcend our civic meaninglessness by becoming gods, and die for a higher ideology that serves mankind. This we dream to believe, but we are but dust in the wind, fond of thinkat we chose the direction in which we are heading. This power of the will is struck dead in an instant, it does not carry the force of our fate.
The existential reflection in Man’s Fate is the deepest representation of man’s thought. His struggle however is to overcome this isolated position in the world by action. And it is the ideological conclusion that drives man forward despite the reality of his existence. Unlike Dostoevsky’s writing, there is no sympathy provoked by or in the characters of Man’s Fate. But this is only to enforce the message that Malraux’ writing bears, that man is detached from the world, from the other, and that in this miserable reality we search and struggle to reconnect ourselves. Some reconcile themselves with the pity minded path that this brings us to, others prefer a chance for all or nothing, inevitably leading us to nothingness. (more…)
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Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1959)
2008-02-25 @ 8:56 am — rc
 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1959) 209p.
Okonkwa is the antagonist of Things Fall Apart. He is a strong man in Umuofia, one of nine villages of the Umuofia clan, widely respected for his achievements in war, his fearlessness for blood, and his strength. Throughout the book his strength dwindles. His strength is motivated by hate for the weakness of his father, he hates his weak son, he kills his strong surrogate son whom he kills because the clan requires it and is haunted by remorse. When he inadvertently kills a clan member he is sent to the village of his mother’s clan, to Mbanta.
Things Fall Apart is a plainly written novel in line perhaps with John Steinbeck or Graham Greene. The characters lack reflection and even their thoughts are rarely exposed, perhaps this is a stylistic element to only show strength and action. But it also makes the characters rather one sided, and it does not generate the love-hate ambiguity that classic literature is capable of bringing out. The novel is descriptive but never achieves great detail. The effect of this style is that the man Okonkwa and the Umuofia culture appear simple, not to say primitive, preventing the reader (the white reader in my case) to develop any heartfelt empathy or even sympathy for the characters. (more…)
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The Death of Literature
Death in literature is an elementary metaphor, as the fear of death is one of our Id’s primal impulses, together with the sexual urge to reproduce and overcome it. The resurrection of our mind is the symbol for the cycle of life, the seasons, birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, destruction and creation, night and day, there’s probably nothing more universal, nothing more primal than death and life. The article in the Guardian In theory: the death of literature is a great short essay that analyzes the perspective of the Romantics on death in literature as an elementary original perspective that lays at the root of the birth of the modern novel. It’s a very original view with lots of references in high overview, which makes it easy to make any argument, but it’s convincing until midway when the argument becomes an old man’s lamentation on modern times. Here is where the author Andrew Gallix the other essence of the Romantics in my opinion, namely the overcoming of the fear of death in favor of a naive and blind will for creation, this resurrection of the conscious mind is what represents the true power of the Romantic era. In the face of death we are not afraid to throw ourselves in the abyss and love.
Der Zauberberg (1982)
An international production of Thomas Mann’s 20th century classic about the first world war, Der Zauberberg (1982).
Divine Mathematics: George Cantor and Infinity
In Dangerous Knowledge – BBC, Georg Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and Georg Cantor‘s life is described. Cantor was obsessed with the problem of infinity. Cantor reminds me Pythagoras, who founded a religious school of Pythagoreans who searched the divine truth by revealing the mathematical formulas that described nature.
Boltzmann defined a breakthrough in the field of probability, which is crucial for the theory of entropy and chaos.
Solve Puzzles for Science - Fold.it
Solve puzzles for science with Fold.it. Crowd-sourcing scientific problems.
The Master and Margarita - Russia TV
The Master and Margarita – Russia TV
Russia’s first television production of The Master and Margarita, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Vladimir Bortko is the director and screenwriter of the new adaptation. The mini-series of ten 52-minute episodes was first screened on the state television channel “Россия” (“Russia”) on December, 2005. The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven about the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.
Hunting the Hidden Dimension
Hunting the Hidden Dimension Pt. 1
This film is about looking at the world around us in a completely different way. If you pay attention, you can see that fractals appear throughout nature. But until Benoit Mandelbrot came along, no one really understood what was there all along. more...
Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Eternity, Coined the Term 'Fractal'
Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85
Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.
Comparative Democracy
Originally, I was playing with the idea that representatives should have to pass an exam to become eligable to run for political office. While listening to C-SPAN broadcasts of Congress committees, or members of Congress giving interviews to NPR, where on some shows they are allowed more speaking time than the 20 or 30 seconds, I am too often shocked by the lack of depth and the absence of fact in their statements. more...
The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. The project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics.
Another project that visualizes the phylogeny of life for the plants phylum is Deep Green by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group of Berkeley University.
Litarary Word Comparison
Introduction
This is one of the small research projects that I am currently conducting. I am not pretending to offer or accomplish any scientific added value to the research community in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) but humbly submit my efforts to gain further personal learning. While the research remains unfinished and until I publish it formally, I will keep this post as a mini-post. As a Universal Man, a Humanist, a Renaissance Man each individual man has an obligation to question and further his or her knowledge and understanding, as it lies within our capacities. Learning is a tool to humble our heart, and most of all we should mistrust brave hearts.
Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture says (says Richard Dawkins in his The Ancestor’s Tale in The Mouse Tale chapter) that “the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye.” Springing from this saying, I concluded that it would be an interesting project to create a plotter diagram in which the major works in literature (written, translated or edited into modern English for reasons of ease of comparison) are set out as number of total words versus the number of different words used and another network graph that displays the relative closeness of literary works by words used. The first diagram is the easiest to create of course, so I will start with this first, then moving on to the next network diagram. more...
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Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934) 287p.
Mikhail Bulgakov, A Dead Man’s Memoir (1965) 167p.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), 71p.
