Free-wheeling liberal to big-bearded conservative: Charles Darwin this is your life…
Shall we blog?
On the face of it, the Romantics’ attempt to deny science its claim to imagination would seem to be a non-starter. In the twentieth century we have come to see and science a supreme exercise of the imagination; we see its history studded with dazzlingly imaginative feats. Was not Copernicus able to imagine the massy earth into motion; Galileo to a matching await the very atmosphere that inhibits uniform acceleration due to gravity; Newton to a match in the first universal laws of nature; Darwin to imagine the grand scheme of natural selection out of the most scattered hints and scraps of evidence… ? Clearly the scientist, in his cogitational realm of ideal gases and perfectly classic bodies, of infinitesimal genes, quarks, and quanta, of curved space and the expanding universe, must think constantly against the grain of common sense and obvious appearance. (Roszak, 1973, pp. 262-3)
He wasn’t much of a Romantic – unless living into your sixties with a huge family you mostly neglected while writing long-winded tales about boring protagonist in icky relationships with teenaged girls – but as a social critic, Charles Dickens had a lot to say about England’s industrialization. Here is a brief video of his rise to fame on the dramatic reading circuit:
On an interesting side-note, Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend is believed to be an aquatic mystery novel based upon the groundbreaking theories of Charles Darwin. You’re up next, Darwinnie!
Can’t say that I spoiled the movie for you, when this YouTuber beat me to the punch…
Excerpts from the THE TENTH RECORD OF MOVIE TICKET STUBS:
The Prestige – Granville Seven Cinemas – 16:00 – Wednesday, 20. December, 2006 ($9.85) – I seem to have lost my magical ability to create records of two movies for an individual movie ticket stub, but I am a bit out of practice. However, I don’t mind paying another $9.85 for this film (which is still a few dollars cheaper than most discounted tickets back in Japan). This is by far the best film I have seen this year (slightly edging out Tideland, which would’ve remained the number one of 2006 if I had waited some couple of months to see the Prestige in Japan). A superb character study that takes on imaginative innovation and envious rivalry in a twisting, turning tour de force, one of its chief attractions is the story gets set up right at the beginning, just like the pledge that Michael Caine’s Cutter kindly explains to the audience. And there are plenty of turns during the turn; including the narrative structure, where Borden reads Angier’s diary account of his attempt to decipher Borden’s notebook – not sure what you’re watching, or when events in this story take place, is the filmmaker’s trick of making the ordinary extraordinary so that the prestige, in its rightful place at the end of the film, makes the viewer look back in wonderment. I can’t imagine anyone who could watch this, closely following Borden’s initial advice to watch closely, and figure out all the tricks, upon one’s first viewing, and I would gladly stand in line again to see how what I know by the end affects everything from the start of the film. Some big questions that came out of this, my first viewing, may still only be partially answered with the next viewing, or the one after that – not that I am going to be fatally obsessed or anything. One of the big questions that may eventually be answered is at what point did Borden find his double Fallon? That either of them could have tied the wrong knot is dramatically significant, but does Julia’s death come before or after Borden met with Nikola Tesla? It at first seems like all sympathy should be with Jackman’s Angier, as Bale’s Borden is reckless, arrogant and the reason behind Angier’s tragic loss. But there is something missing from Angier, the Great Danton, a part of his psyche knocked out of place by grief and professional envy. These are crutches he uses to justify his actions that drive him on in a bitter, savage rivalry. But they are only his attempt to make up for what is truly missing, some passion to be innovative that only Borden and Tesla understand, and only Tesla of the two understands fully. Danton’s competitive urge makes him doubt all the obvious signs: the transported man is merely a trick with trapdoors and doubles, that Fallon wears a disguise, or rather is the disguise. One scary tell from Angier comes when he tells Olivia that he doesn’t want his wife back, but rather wants to get back at Borden. Perhaps what gets him the most is that Borden has Jess, his daughter, while Julia met her watery demise when perhaps she was with child? The drowning sailor story that Cutter tells Angier is rather a nasty trick when Cutter tells the whole truth. It seems to suggest that Cutter knew more than just Angier’s murderous design, although he is supposed to have been left in the dark along with the blind stagehands. Did Cutter cruelly let Angier commit suicide every night, just to aide Borden’s reunion with his daughter after his execution? There is something in it reminiscent of the arts courses I took at university: Angier’s romantic sublimity compared to Borden’s modern expressionism (or something like that – I should really get to my storage locker soon to find my old notebooks and sort this out). One thing I have been studying a lot recently is the nineteenth century novel, often concerned with the dualism found between characters, and this movie gets a lot of bonus points for presenting the turn of the last century at the turn of this one – just when you think you had seen everything there is see at the movies, along comes the Prestige!
The Prestige – United Cinemas Kanazawa – 14:45 – Sunday, 1. July, 2007 (¥1000) – Here is a merry meeting indeed. Not just to get Yuko out to see this film, one of the best to be screened last year despite its cruel treatment of birds (as suspected, she had an adversity to scenes of cages crushing them), but we were also joined by John and his girl Hiromi (someone I had only heard about the evening before the wedding dinner, and met on the following night). Getting the four of us to meet up and see this film proved to be more of a challenge than one would think, with weeks of planning, mainly me sending text messages to John, repeatedly being thrown out the window at the last minute – I can only imagine how long it is going to take for him to watch Titus! Nevertheless, we all got to the theatre without a hitch, and while it was the first time for others in our party, I had a very engaging time watching this spell-binding film for my second time. Was the written request (in English and Japanese here) not to reveal the ending part of the film as I saw it in Vancouver? Whether or not I had been instructed beforehand, I upheld the tenent of this pledge by not giving too much away to either Yuko (except for the aviary carnage) or John (except for David Bowie appearing as Tesla). It was a lot more clear this time concerning the narrative structure, that had me stumped the first time I saw the film: Bowden reads, in prison, the diary Angiers wrote as he was deciphering Bowden’s diary, which was only used to lure Angier away from London. Pretty obvious, once you know the trick of it. One thing which was much more obvious on the second viewing was the class difference, and every little nuance and gesture shows the two magicians up for what British society would expect of them: Angiers is a count, respectfully married one would imagine, to Julia, and both of them dabbling in magic as if it were a lark. Without his love, Angier is a wreck, near alcoholic mirror to the gruff actor Root. An impressive theatrical life Root must have had, being Hotspurs and Tamberline, yet stooping to play the Great Danton, and later his Judas. He may be more alike Angiers than the latter could imagine. Even in the end, Angiers doesn’t end up as bad as I had first thought, with his impressive “the whole world is solid, through and through” speech in his dying moments. Since Julia’s death, he has been rehearsing his own similar drowning, whether literally in his kitchen sink, or figuratively at the bottom of his glass. His discovery in the Americas, the creation of Nikola Tesla allows him to perform his suicide nightly, with the added incentive of snaring his rival in a cunning trap, similar to one played upon him. Yet for all these watery deaths, Lord Caldlow lives a comfortable life, never getting his hands that dirty, but enough blood on his hands to make the green one red. In contrast to these high stations, Alfred Bowden is at the bottom of the social ladder, and knows what it takes to make his way up. He lives by his wits, and as he explains to his future wife’s nephew (who may indeed grow up to be a Houdini himself) once people know your trick, you are worthless to them. Not only is he wiling to get his hands dirty, but strives to put them to better use, such as tying the Langford double and being a bit more innovative than the next guy, who to both their misfortunes is Angiers. He has his great trick, which may or may not have used a Teslian teleporter/human facsimilie machine (some intriguing comments on IMDB suggest that Fallon may have been his naturally born twin brother, and whatever Tesla would have invented for him – if he invented anything at all – would have only been a dummy prop, but more on this later), yet puts off this less dangerous dazzling trick until need presses him, as he can’t keep doing the bullet catch and losing more fingers or worse. Yet once the game is afoot and his double life leads him to fame and fortune as two halves of the Professor, some monstrous changes begin happening, worse than what he cunningly cautions the Great Root Danton about working with a double. His Fallon-half, perhaps better to call him Alfie, doesn’t so much go on a power trip, but just wants more of what Bowden, his other half, worked hard to come by. Here it is achingly apparent with the loves of each of their lives: Bowden loves Sarah, and lives for their daughter, Alfie does his part to keep the Professor’s pact, but has little interest in his partner’s family, feeling more at home with Olivia, another street urchin living by her wits. It is perhaps Alfie who wants to push the boundaries of his craft, and most definitely had his hands in tying the fatal Langford. Bowden truthfully answers Angiers increasingly angry question about the knot, yet keps back the more honest answer that his double Alfie would remember which know he tied. This dishonest truthfulness comes back to haunt him, as his wife Sarah begins to understand which days he is in love with her, and chillingly tells him when it’s “not today.” The other woman caught in between, Olivia, may have met up with Sarah prior to the latter’s suicide, and would have discovered the monstrous truth. His own argument with himself, from the discovery of the trapdoor on the stage in the final act of Angier’s hit show to Alfie’s final moments on deathrow, the Professor keeps his professional secret safe, knowing al the life how worthless he is without it. While Angiers seems to be the picture of wounded vanity, staring out at the faces looking in wonder at him, Bowden has been etched with the greater vice pride, and it is hopefully with Alfie’s death, this precious part of himself, that the deadly sin is erased. How exciting, too, this film has one more layer that reveals yet another doubles in rivalry, very similar to Angiers and Bowden’s career. Nikola Tesla has the innovative spirit in the field of science that was lacking in his more successful rival Thomas Edison – one is truly a wizard, while the other is a sorcerer’s apprentice made rich by stealing others’ potions and selling them as his own. Yet unlike Angiers, enterprising Edison had no qualms about doing dirty work, and his reward was to become a household name. no surprise filmmakers had it in for him, as Edison infamously ripped off the Méile’s Trip to the Moon, he is the proto-film pirate. Tesla was a scientist of a different stock – a horrible businessman, yet knew lots about risk, even cautioning his prospective client about the dangers of following an obsession. If it is true that Bowden never got a teleporter from him, and the designs in the diary were just a sham, Tesla had the marvelous ability to make the impossible reality. As I expected, John was impressed with these Teslian scenes, and had much to say about the enigmatic inventor after the film. Of these tales about “the most advanced human that ever existed” he told us of his plan to evade death for 151 years or so, flying above the Earth in his spacecraft… wait a moment, that chamelion of pop, David Bowie, seems to have an unusually long life and knows a thing or two about spaceships… do you think he might be Tesla himself? Yuko must have enjoyed the film, too, even though her initial response after the credits was along the lines of what the fu–. She was at least relieved that no harm came to Alley’s cat.
“Hardly a peaceful prospect, any of this. Nobody wanted this commercialization of life. How bitterly it was resisted can be appreciated only if we take one last journey back to watch the economic revolution taking place.
We are back in France; the year, 1666.
The capitals of the day face a disturbing challenge that the widening market mechanism has inevitably brought in its wake: change.” (Heilbroner, 1972, p. 26)
“The new philosophy brought with it a new social problem: how to keep the poor poor. It was generally admitted that unless the poor were poor, they could not be counted upon to do an honest day’s toil without asking for exorbitant wages. “To make the Society Happy…, It is requisite that the great number should be Ignorant as well as Poor,” wrote Bernard Mandeville, The shrewdest and wickedest social commentator of the early 18th century.” (Ibid., p. 37)
“The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged and his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values materials goods only in so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interest which eventually ensure that the required steps be taken.” (Polanyi, 1957, p. 46)
Photo of UBC 2014 stage production of Twefth Night
“But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.” (Smith, 1776, p. 14)
Untitled poem, Anon., (n.d.)
Upload my book review here
Two questions:
Does modern science split humans from nature, and does such a split lie at the root of our problems?
What explains the success of the mechanical world view?
Three quotes:
“A second tradition, the magical, provided is scientific framework in which the world of nature was seen as a work of art. (I use the word ‘magical’ in preference to ‘aesthetic’ because it suggests the overtones of mystery which I think were involved.)” (Kearney, p. 24)
“When mechanical philosophers sought to explain pleasant and unpleasant smells or tastes by pointing to the rough or smooth texture of bodies’ constituent particles, where they really offering something different from, and inherently more intelligible than, the explanation of their Aristotelian opponents? The historical philosopher Alan Gabbey thinks not: in the mechanical philosophy “the phenomena to be explained were caused by entities who structures were such that they cause the phenomena. Previously, opium sent you to sleep because it had a particular dormitive quality, now it sent to you to sleep because it had a particular corpuscular micro-structure that acted on your physiological structures in such a way that it sent you to sleep.” From this perspective, the superior intelligibility, and therefore the explanatory power, of the mechanical philosophy was more limited than its proponents claimed.” (Shapin, p. 57)
“Darwinian evolution presented a continuation, a seemingly final vindication, of the intellectual impulse established in the Scientific Revolution, yet it also entailed is significant break from that revolution’s classical paradigm. For evolutionary theory provoked a fundamental shift away from the regular, orderly, predictable harmony of the Cartesian-Newtonian world in recognition of nature’s ceaseless and indeterminate change, struggle, and development.” (Tarnas, p. 288)
One Epic Rap Battle:
Who won?
Taking up the idea of braiding other people’s stories with your own, tonight’s class gave us a Saulian phrase, métissage to mull over as we composed an Elementary Métissage, based upon the poetry of Joe Brainard:
The Five Senses
by Dave, Heidi, Kyle & Sharon
I remember shadows flitting on a white screen, that special day activity room.
I remember the brassy taste of my baritone horn’s mouthpiece
I remember that plasticky Styrofoam smell, signalling the arrival of McDonald lunches
I remember the rubbery plonking sound as the red blue yellow balls came bounding out of their crate
I remember the metallic tug of the flagpole cable.
I remember the coffee grounds scent filling the library at PT nights
I remember tasting hickory sticks when our field trip detoured into a corner store
I remember the warmth of the glue gun just before the science project came together
I remember the dreadful film with that killer ceiling fan and a blueberry-bodies girl
I remember that far-off distant whine as the skytrain started and stopped
I remember the smell of freshly cut grass on the way to Mitchell elementary.
I remember the sound of Terry Fox’s voice on the TV in my second grade classroom.
I remember the taste of ice cream sandwiches from the cafeteria.
I remember the rough red fabric of the high jump mats.
I remember the view of the playground from my classroom and the tire swing still spinning after lunch was done.
I Remember Carolinas lips on mine during a game of girls catch the boys
I remember the fruit roll up and how I stole it from Courtney Mcfarlands lunchbox
I remember walking home through Mitchel field with my head down and the wet pants pressed against my legs after I failed to make it to the boys room
I remember the undercover play area and 80s dance music And the way the grade sevens danced like I’d never seen before
I remember walking into my grade four classroom on the first day of school and seeing a tank of goldfish swimming as excitedly of the students discovering the new classroom.
I remember the smell of chili on the first cool days of fall pouring out of the cafeteria making the school smell delicious.
I remember the fluffy buttery taste of the rolls served at lunch once a week.
I remember the booming authoritative yet kind voice of Mr. Carter our principal over the PA system every morning welcoming us to another day.
I remember the chilling uncomfortable touch of chalk as I wrote on the chalkboard.
Remember my second cousin coming into my grade one classroom during break.
I remember in grade four, seeing Mrs. Smith’s arm flab shaking as she wrote on the green board with white chalk. This was the first time I ever noticed flab on arms. Today I have arm flab.
I remembered the sound when I return from the UK to Canada of kids saying mean things to Beverly Dunlop, pushing others into her desk and their cruelness towards her. I recall my bewilderment of such barbaric behaviour.
Poetry seems the perfect antidote for SSHRC proposal-writing (arguing to such a fine point where hardly anyone but the three or four people pouring over each $31.50 word can’t be bothered to figure out) whereas poetry is so much more expansive and “capracious” as Dr. Leggo calls it. How much can it do with just a few smartly crafted phrases, the occasional rhyme and a balance between babble and doodle? The poet Jane Hirshfield gives poems six qualities: music, rhetoric, Image, emotion, story and voice. Physicist David Bohm seems to get it too, writing about the creative process like it ain’t no thing (yet has the power to name everything that is and was and will be). And to top it all off, Hermes Trismegistus, that mysterious alchemist from RMES 501, makes a guest appearance in LLED, proving that grammar came from the French word for magic, spelling also took roots in these mystical arts, and to cap it all, hermeneutics from his own namesake, the trickster god of messages!!
So onto my own writing, what I did in class today. First a ten-minute free write:
It gets a bit crazy how much my car is not like other cars on the lot but it is still mine this piece of darkness I will own it till it finds its way to the bottom of the sea. Or will it be the bottom of the sea finding its way up to it? This was going to be the world’s worst movie made on a watery deck on a sound states that the great green one could not contain but instead ended up breaking Hollywood out of bits in the solar rights – why just make a big budget Pix servers the USA can enjoy when Waterworld lead the way overseas for who cares about the nuance of a character or the finally designed backstory when oil tankers get to explode and there is a hint of a woman’s breast just inside of the male protagonist. I know it is transforming car is taking over China so the non-exploding oil tankers can fill the demand for Tarsem gold that we are just too happy to provide. So yeah my toe Yoda will probably outlive the planet but at least I don’t have to worry about the resale about you going out when it sinks to the bottom of the sea and gets filled with ping-pong balls because the future craigslist shoppers want to bid on this relic of such a wasteful aids. The movies won’t last so long all the digital blips have long since been sucked up into the ether and reprogrammed the seven spirits – those planets that used to influence us to good or bad and have been long since ignored. They were still operating in sleep mode and it just took a couple of downloaded blockbusters like Transformers eight or the prequel of Harry Potter to tip the scale towards planetary restart mood.
Not bad, iPad Siri, you got most of what I wrote down on the page with some reinterpreted words (some of the. Are poetic improvements that I can’t really take credit for unless I admit my pronunciation went a bit off at times. In any case, much of this first attempt to write freely was inspired by articles I read obsessively from Cracked.com – the only source I go to now for a sense of what is happening around the world – take that Georgia Straight and Huffington Post! At some point I may revisit the above writing sample and put the hyperlinks in. For now, let’s see how voice recognition handles my next classroom writing sample, the longest sentence in four minutes:
In order to understand how are one the singular planet traveled from that universal central point, known as where the Big Bang took place, and reach the present gravity well of our heliocentric solar system where it’s main job is to build up enough escape falsity to leave the dying star behind it is important to know that the earth has never been nor will it ever be, and the exact same three-dimensional unit of space time that great back to me an idea of a crown a tope then it has is or ever will be again BECAUSE everything is moving away from a singularity.
Still doing okay with the voice-to-text, and finally the one gem I found on my twenty-minute walk outside the classroom:
I am too street for Wreck Beach.
But I still got to put my hands in the sea!