Literature Category Archives
с картой по жизни
27 July 2010 | Geography, Literature, Technology | No Comments
а вот и логичное явление предсказанного — литературные маршруты для Google Earth:
This site is an experiment in teaching great literature in a very different way. Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest road trip stories of all time took place… and so much more!
состояние, впрочем, пока зачаточное (и бэджик Made on Mac не делает сайт удобнее), однако, направление движения, безусловно, верное — кто бы не хотел проследить “Одиссею” пальцем на карте? разве что остается добавить еще и сами карты былых времен — ведь и тот же “Портрет художника в юности” странно выглядит на фоне современных улиц, а что уж говорить обо всем остальном.
падали яблоки
20 July 2010 | Literature, Science | 1 Comment
а гравитации-то больше нет:
Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, Erik Verlinde argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.
<...>
What is new, he said, is the idea that differences in entropy can be the driving mechanism behind gravity, that gravity is, as he puts it an “entropic force.”
<...>
Think of the universe as a box of scrabble letters. There is only one way to have the letters arranged to spell out the Gettysburg Address, but an astronomical number of ways to have them spell nonsense. Shake the box and it will tend toward nonsense, disorder will increase and information will be lost as the letters shuffle toward their most probable configurations. Could this be gravity?
кто-нибудь, скажите Пинчону!
на дороге
19 July 2010 | Geography, Lifeform, Literature | No Comments
отличный план.
мнимая легкость
18 July 2010 | Culturology, History, Lifeform, Literature | 1 Comment
хорошая 
kdm17 напомнила о письме Джорджа Оруэлла в защиту Пэлема Грэнвила Вудхауза от обивинений в коллаборационизме.
примечателен там, впрочем, не столько анализ мотивов самого Вудхауза, сколько трактовка Берти Вустера, как фундаментальный камень одного из аргументов Оруэлла:
But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. <...> A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England during the sixteen years that preceded his internment. His picture of English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a naive, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture. <...> In his radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether “the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the war,” not realising that they were ghosts already. “He was still living in the period about which he wrote,” says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915.
так и есть: он просто не мог существовать, об этом в полной мере рассказали Олдингтон, Во, и другие.
находиться в поисках
14 July 2010 | Literature | No Comments
и вот еще одна, раз уж зашла речь:
She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said toan odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps even in this last secondbut there was no way to tell. She glanced down the corridor of Cohen’s rooms in the rain and saw, for the very first time, how far it might be possible to get lost in this.
так и есть.
начало пути
13 July 2010 | Art, Literature | 2 Comments
а вот то, что вызвало Эдипины слезы:
In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedies Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. <...> She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. <...> If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
очень важная цитата, к слову сказать.
капали буквы
13 July 2010 | Cookery, Literature | No Comments
литературные коктейли:
In Thomas Pynchon’s newest novel ["Inherent Vice"[1]], the main character Doc Sportello, a Lebowski-esque private detective, frequents the Belaying Pin restaurant. Known for its devil-ray filet deep-fried in beer batter and house anchovy loaf, the waitress always recommends Tequila Zombies because, “You’ll want to be good and f**ked up by the time this [food] arrives.”
там же и знаменитый gin gimlet, так полюбившийся Рэймонду Чандлеру:
Raymond Chandler didn’t include the gimlet in his first draft of the novel ["The Long Goodbye"]. However, after a trip to London, he fell in love with the drink and wrote it in. The novel’s popularity caused the cocktail to blow up in the United States. Now it’s the drink most associated with this infamous alcoholic writer.
а так же mint julep:
While the mint julep is most often associated with Southern writers, like William Faulkner (bars would often let him make his own), the drink first gained national popularity after its inclusion in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel ["The Great Gatsby"].
хотя я, конечно, предпочитаю straight.
–
[1] — а электронной версии так и нет до сих пор.
какой же русский не любит быстрой езды
5 July 2010 | Geography, Lifeform, Literature | No Comments
цитата из книжки:
It is a Russian custom that no project should ever actually be completed.
и судя по рассказанному (1 + 2 + 3) — книжка замечательная.
предсказатели
24 June 2010 | Lifeform, Literature, Science | No Comments
Роберт Бойль тоже, оказывается, Нострадамус, — пишет “The Washington Post”:
In the 1660s, English chemist Robert Boyle wrote an extraordinary document, a combination of wish list and predictions of what science might achieve in the coming centuries.
<...>
Samples from Boyle’s list:
- The Prolongation of Life.
- The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.
- The Art of Flying.
- The Art of Continuing long under water, and exercising functions freely there.
- The Cure of Wounds at a Distance.
- The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation.
- <...>
но мы-то знаем, в чем дело.
via.
новые формы
20 June 2010 | Lifeform, Literature | No Comments
к слову о книгопечатании — вот первые результаты нового проекта Нила Стивенсона:
And though I keep calling it a “book,” The Mongoliad is actually an app written for mobile devices (currently iPhone and iPad). I had a chance to look at an early version of the book for iPad this week, and [Jeremy] Bornstein walked me through its features.
<...>
The Mongoliad began as visual media, not text. “A year ago Neal said he had an idea for a movie and some of us got together and were writing a screenplay and the settling,” Bornstein recalls. “The first part was set 200 years earlier than the [movie story], and that’s what we’re releasing as The Mongoliad. We aren’t doing a movie because we don’t have the skills to do that. Instead, we have software folks like myself, and everything we need to build this story.”
While Stephenson, [Greg] Bear, and others worked on the text, Bornstein developed the app backend, focusing on collaborative software. The group dubbed the result the “personal ubiquitous literature platform,” or PULP.
<...>
Bornstein hinted that the book will eventually contain “a few games too.”
по ссылке так же более детальное описание проекта и одна картинка.