Foucault's Pendulum
"Looking at one instant forever doesn't mean that, as you look at it, time passes."
City of Hope is paying me $4000 this summer. So far I have botched several expensive experiments and finished a book about Diabolicals and telluric currents (Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco).
One of the research fellows I work with regularly tells me things like I am going to have to work until 9 pm or that if I contaminate anything in the tissue culture room, my research career is finished. It is hard to tell when he is joking and when not: on my first Friday of work I seriously thought I was going to have to put in a 12 hour workday, and this in the first week of a 10 week internship. Needless to say, I almost died.
Early September I will have some time to play with on the other coast. I hope to see some of you.
Foucault's Pendulum in a nutshell:
"Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is--or at least the world as it will become. Women are a lot more like Milady than they are like Little Nell, Fu Manchu is more real than Nathan the Wise, and History is closer to what Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects. Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls."
City of Hope is paying me $4000 this summer. So far I have botched several expensive experiments and finished a book about Diabolicals and telluric currents (Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco).
One of the research fellows I work with regularly tells me things like I am going to have to work until 9 pm or that if I contaminate anything in the tissue culture room, my research career is finished. It is hard to tell when he is joking and when not: on my first Friday of work I seriously thought I was going to have to put in a 12 hour workday, and this in the first week of a 10 week internship. Needless to say, I almost died.
Early September I will have some time to play with on the other coast. I hope to see some of you.
Foucault's Pendulum in a nutshell:
"Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is--or at least the world as it will become. Women are a lot more like Milady than they are like Little Nell, Fu Manchu is more real than Nathan the Wise, and History is closer to what Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects. Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls."
posted by Ben at 2:46 AM
1 Comments:
I picked up a copy of that at the big Ithaca used book sale last fall because the jacket description looked fun.
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