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If you’ve ever journeyed back to the past you’ve noted the “Do Not Disturb” signs. The idea is to leave everything as it was so that the future will fulfill its promise or more specifically exactly the world you, the time traveller, occupied before you left. Is there a divine or supernal touch in this iteration or is it consistent with the philosophy of cosmologists like stephen Hawking whose A Brief History of Time is the Baedeker for those challenging the l86,000 mile per hour speed limit—at which spacetime curves? Everything is as it’s supposed to be or it would be different is a calming spiritual saw that makes it sound like everything is part of god's plan and thus set in a divine kind of stone or marble. However, with the once unthinkable becoming ever more possible—in a quantum universe--a whole new set of parking regulations and speed limits is needed to accommodate the imminent cosmological traffic jam.
Kip Williams' adaptation of Genet's The Maids is extraordinary for both good and not so good reasons. What's not so good is its dazzling display of pyro-techniques. It a dog and pony show with flashing lights on a big screen in which Madam(Yerin Ha) is an influencer with millions of followers. You might criticize the production for being one big selfie, using an iPhone. The other side of the equation is that Genet's work is fundamentally a selfie, waiting to happen, as its primary stock is about identity and domination. The faces of the two maids Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban) are explosive and the technology only amplifies the extraordinary feats of acting, in particular, the massive outcry of words, tumbling out of, at times, garishly painted mouths. One is reminded of Billie Whitelaw's famous mouth in Beckett's Not I. The ending is also a question mark. Genet is a so-called absurdist playwright and the director pays homage to that by reinterpreting the finale as the end of the world. It's one of those Mad Max movies in which the characters negotiate a desecrated landscape, leaving all their frenetic attempts to be on top, as empty, hopeless attempts to fill the void.
"Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour" is the long title of the Wordsworth poem, "Tintern Abbey," dating from July 13, 1798. The poem comprises a definition of the romantic notion of beauty, a feeling of transcendence, by which the poet describes the sublime. The cover of the Penguin edition of a novel like Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, also set in rural England conveys a similar feeling. Today the sublime is disappearing. Its last remnant may have been the drive-in theater found on Route One or at the end of an Interstate like 95 as it runs past Co-Op City into Bruckner Boulevard. If you journey up to Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, a town famous for its psychoanalytic stable, you'll find a well-preserved relic of the past, the Wellfleet Drive-in Theatre, where another kind of romanticism once burgeoned (and perhaps still does) in the backseat of a sedan.
Have you ever confused Holstein, a breed of cow, with Holbein, the Younger (1497-1543), the Northern German painter? Samstag Nachmittag, to introduce a non-sequitur, sounds like title of a British kitchen sink film, dubbed into German. Saturday Afternoon say like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), the Karel Reisz film from the Alan Sillitoe novel starring Albert Finney, as the factory worker, Arthur Seaton. But back to Holsteins. Imagine a Holstein, the Younger, whose life is cut short in an abattoir.
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| Which one is Newton? |
What is the difference between a differential in calculus and one in life? Is there a calculus of life? "Calculus" is derived from the Latin for pebble. A differential is thus a small change, but it can also be employed to describe any method of reasoning or figuring things out for example in the citation of an "ethical calculus" or "political calculus." "Algebra" by the way, derives from the Arabic al-jabr, "the reunion of broken parts." One of the simplest examples of a differential is finding the area of a square when one of its side lengths increases by a small amount. In lay terms it's tipping the boat. You are living together happily, but one of you gets a new job which involves travel. It's a no brainer, If A represents an unchanging relationship with the same amount of distance on each side. Then. A squared represents the space. Sometimes people need space, but instead of having to run just go, dA=2x.dx. Why spend money on a therapist when it's a D.I.Y situation, best handled on the abacus at home? Of course, differentiation is what makes for horse races. If you can't differentiate between what's important and minor then join 'em!
Weike Wang's "The Dreamdrive" in the May 25th New Yorker is extraordinary because it's about broken consciousness. You may have never read anything like it. Unreliable narrator is an understatement. Is the character dreaming? Is he driving? Is his existence a pathological condition? Is he falling asleep at the wheel both literally and metaphorically? Dreamdriving? Part of the experience of reading the story is feeling like unnamed subject--that you don't know what is happening, but it's a controlled confusion and not one that is the result of the author generating confusion, due to unearned ambiguity. One interesting bit is the confuting of phenomenology. Intention is the question. Objects don't possess subjectivity. "Another doctor focused on the sofa waves. Which, more specifically, were gravitational waves All objects emit gravitational waves, the doctor explained, and should those waves interact unfavorably with those of the self, through the calibrated physics of destructive interference, destruction ensues." Wang is the author of the novels Chemistry and Rental House. Her universe here is a literary form of Joseph Schumpeter's economic notion of "creative destruction." Freud, who is cited in the piece, also described free association as looking at reality through a train window-- which is, indeed, another form of driving. There is a theory going around town, that dreaming is the reality and reality the dream. It's perpetrated by the same person who believes that abstract expressionism is a branch of photorealism, but that's another "story."
Effect refers to result, affect a cause. You affect and effect But affect is a crucial part of human sensibility. How one is greeted in an environment affects how you feel about one or another milieu. Say you walk into a restaurant and all the staff welcome you with open arms, asking where you've been and how you are. Likely you walk away feeling it's a great meal. On the other hand, there's always the maitre d' who sizes you up with a malign eye, looking, you think, for the least visible table, say by the restroom with their polished male and female profiles. You always thought it was a lousy place, don't know what you were thinking and certainly have no intention of going back there again.
