zondag 17 oktober 2010

Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist.

Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist.

It is the end of an historical epoch, but to an old professor of physics, Victor Jakob, sitting in his unlighted study, eating dubious bread with jam made from turnips, it is the end of a way of thinking in his own subject. Younger men have challenged the classical world picture of physics and are looking forward to observational tests of Einstein’s new theory of relativity as well as the creation of a quantum mechanics of the atom. It is a time of both apprehension and hope.
In this remarkable book, the reader literally inhabits the mind of a scientist while Professor Jakob meditates on the discoveries of the past fifty years and reviews his own life and career--his scientific ambitions and his record of small successes.

Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist. Harvard University Press

vrijdag 15 oktober 2010

Marias

The Next Mariases + Something for the Bibliophiles Out There | Conversational Reading
Also, All Souls has much more of an introvert feeling. In Your Face Tomorrow, Deza was something along the lines of a man of action (befitting the noirish plot), but here his narrative voice is far less so, befitting what is essentially a campus novel. One example:
During my two years of scouting out and hunting down such books with my gloved hands, I obtained many apparently unobtainable marvels at quite ridiculous prices, such as the seventeen volumes of The Thousand Nights and a Night by Sir Richard Francis Burton (better known to booksellers as Captain Burton), which began to appear more than a century ago in a limited edition of a thousand numbered copies of each volume, available only to subscribers of the Burton Club on the understanding (which they honoured) that it would never be enlarged or reprinted: in fact that exuberant Victorian text has never again been reprinted in its entirety, but only in selections or in bowdlerised editions, which, whilst apparently complete, were in fact expurgated of everything considered at the time (or by Lady Burton to be obscene.
That’s from an entire chapter on the used bookstores of Oxford.
ConversationReading

zondag 10 oktober 2010

Emile

Plot Synopsis by Andrea LeVasseur
Independent Canadian filmmaker Carl Bessai directs Emile, the final entry in his identity trilogy that started with Johnny and Lola. Ian McKellen plays Emile, a retired university professor who travels from England to his hometown in Canada in order to accept an educational honor. Visiting the family farm in Saskatchewan, he recalls his childhood relationships with brothers Freddy (Tygh Runyan) and Carl (Chris William Martin). He stays with his grown-up niece, Nadia (Deborah Kara Unger), who still hasn't forgiven him for his misdeeds of the past. Trying to make up for abandoning her, Emile develops an emotional bond with her daughter, Maria (Theo Crane). Emile premiered at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival.
AllMovie

Campus novel: form par excellence

Although McGurl may be right to suggest that the campus novel is the form par excellence of the postwar American novel, these books all had to, at some point, graduate into the real world, and they did so because someone thought they were marketable commodities.
Upost-Article.com
Whether We Should Read the Writing Program as Exceptionally American

Campus Novels Suggestions

Every year late August means students and faculty everywhere return to campus. If you're not fortunate enough to be one of them, you can still get that collegiate feeling by settling into a comfy chair with a great campus novel. There are certain to be many beyond this list, but those below all have one thing in common: they evoke a sense of being at a particular kind of college at a particular point in time.
Huffington Post