http://ashujo.blogspot.com/2009/11/hermitian-operator-in-self-imposed.html
Nullis in verba
PEREGRINATIONS OF A RESTLESS SOUL
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2009
A hermitian operator in self-imposed exile
Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century
Masha Gessen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
Pure mathematicians have the reputation of being otherworldly and divorced from practical matters. Grisha or Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician who at the turn of this century solved one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, the Poincare Conjecture, is sadly or perhaps appropriately an almost perfect specimen of this belief. For Perelman, even the rudiments of any kind of monetary, professional or material rewards resulting from his theorem were not just unnecessary but downright abhorrent. He has turned down professorships at the best universities in the world, declined the Fields Medal, and will probably not accept the 1 million dollar prize awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute for the solution of the some of the most daunting mathematical problems of all time. He has cut himself off from the world after seeing the publicity that his work received and has become a recluse, living with his mother in St. Petersburg. For Perelman, mathematics should purely and strictly be done for its own sake, and could never be tainted with any kind of worldly stigma. Perelman is truly a mathematical hermit, or what a professor of mine would call using mathematical jargon, a "hermitian operator"...
Monday, November 16, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Go, Look: The Comics Reporter on The Best American Comics 2009
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via The Inkwell Bookstore Blog by The Inkwell Bookstore on 11/3/09
In his review of the '09 edition of The Best American Comics, The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon does a great job describing the mental push and pull of these inherently argument-inducing 'Best Of' books. I particularly like the line, "Most passionate comics readers with the ability to do so read the best the medium has to offer (at least in their view) somewhere between two months before the book comes out to two weeks after it hits the stands." In my opinion, this is the capital-d Difference between the target audience of The Best American Comics collections and those of the, say, poetry and short story collections. Most comics readers (myself included) are hyper-obsessive, highly opinionated motherf*ckers who -- before they've even opened a 'Best Of' book -- have already cataloged a laundry list of stories and strips that they believe are waaay more worthy of inclusion than the ones being blurbed on the cover. I mean, I may be wrong, but I doubt the folks reading The Best American Magazine Writing 2009 feel that they've read the lion's share of this year's premier periodical pieces, but I know for damned sure that your average comics reader believes they've read the best that their chosen art form has to offer. They're assh*les like that. (Myself included.)Anyway, I'm rambling. Click here to read similar ideas expressed more succinctly.
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KIRSCH ON ROTH
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via The Elegant Variation by TEV on 11/3/09
Writing for Tablet Magazine, Adam Kirsch finds The Humbling "thinly imagined, with few surprises in plot or language."
The books he has produced since then, as he entered his 70s, can only be called late late Roth—or better still, endgame Roth, since they are a series of meditations on last things. In Everyman and Indignation, Roth's protagonists are actually dead, looking back on their lives from beyond the grave. In Exit Ghost, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is impotent, which for a Rothian hero is a fate worse than death.
Now comes The Humbling, the latest installment in this wan series. The title could have been used for any of those three books, especially Exit Ghost, for Roth is once again dwelling on impotence—in this case, not just sexual but artistic, too. "He'd lost his magic. The impulse was spent," read the first lines of the book, and they tell us everything we need to know—in fact, just about everything we ever learn—about Simon Axler, Roth's latest avatar. Just as Saul Bellow used to make his alter egos professors or journalists, but wrote about them as if they were really novelists—that is, as if they were himself—so Roth makes Axler an actor, a calling that can easily be translated back into its writerly original.
We haven't read The Humbling yet, though we plan to, and we're interested to see how it compares to Eclipse, John Banville's story of a stage actor who loses his gift. Would make an interesting Compare and Contrast. (Not too make too much of names but Banville's actor is Alex Cleave, and the proagonist of Shroud, his next book which involves Cleave's daughter, is Axel. And now Roth gives us Axler.)
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Humbling on Bookslut
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via Blog of a Bookslut by Jessa Crispin on 11/3/09
This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Humbling by Philip Roth.
"Because it's my book and in my books younger women always want to have sex with me."
She had now become insatiable. "As it's you, Philip, I mean Simon," Pegeen had said, "I'm up for the full range of dirty-old-man sexual fantasies. Bring on the anal sex, the dildos, the strap-ons and the threesomes with another girl with a shaved bush."
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Monday, November 2, 2009
PHILIP ROTH INTERVIEW
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via The Elegant Variation by TEV on 10/22/09
Philip Roth sits down with Tina Brown for a rare series of video interviews, in which he discusses the new novel, The Humbling, writing about sex, and other topics. (We share Roth's approval of Tina Brown's useful designation, the "vomit draft".)
Philip Roth on Writing 'The Humbling' from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
The other parts of the interview can be found here at The Daily Beast.
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