If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles—to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are—is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between.

Science’s crisis of faith — www.harpers.org — Readability

Posted 3 weeks ago

Permalink

Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.

The accidental universe: Science’s crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper’s Magazine)

Posted 3 weeks ago

Permalink

He and Robert Lowell were brilliant but in very different ways. You had the feeling that Lowell was an intelligence; you had the feeling that Jarrell was a sensibility—that it wasn’t a matter of grand ideas or anything of that sort with Jarrell, but rather that he knew exactly what this or that choice of language meant about your qualities as a person. I remember that he once spent ten minutes talking about one line out of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—” He doesn’t dare say anything without immediately countering it by something opposite for fear someone might attack or criticize. When he says, “My necktie rich,” he’s proud of it. But then he thinks, Oh, my God, we rich people must be modest. So he says, “but modest.” Rich and modest. But then he thinks, “That’s my trouble. I’m too modest. I’ve got to learn to assert myself: ‘but asserted.’” Then he thinks, Oh, my God I can’t stand assertive people! so he adds, “by a simple pin.” And of course simple is just marvelous because it’s the farthest thing from what he is. Jarrell talked about that line for ten minutes. This was an entirely different kind of richness from what you got from Lowell. But tremendously invigorating and enlightening.

Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 68, W. D. Snodgrass

Posted 3 weeks ago

Permalink

If you get it all down there’s a serenity that is marvelous. I don’t mean just getting the facts down, but the degree of imagination you bring to it. Autobiography is simply the facts, but imagination is the landscape in which the facts take place, and the way that everything moves. When I went to France the first time I promptly fell in love with it. I was forty years old. My wife had been there as a child, and we were always looking for two things she remembered but didn’t know where they were: a church at the end of a streetcar line and a château with a green lawn in front of it. We came home after four months because our money ran out. I couldn’t bear not to be there, and so I began to write a novel about it. And for ten years I lived perfectly happily in France, remembering every town we passed through, every street we were ever on, everything that ever happened, including the weather. Of course, I was faced with the extremely difficult problem of how all this self-indulgence could be made into a novel.

The Paris Review — www.theparisreview.org — Readability

Posted 4 weeks ago

Permalink

GODARD: At first I was thinking of a story that would take place in Serbia, but it didn’t work. So I had the idea of a family in a garage, the Martin family. But it didn’t work for a feature-length film, because then the people would turn into characters, and whatever took place would turn into a narrative. The story of a mother and her children, a film that might be made in France, with lines of dialogue, and ‘moods’.

Cinemasparagus: Jean-Luc Godard Interviewed by Jean-Marc Lalanne in LES INROCKS: “The Right of the Author? An Author Has Only Duties”

Posted 2 months ago

Permalink

Godard’s topped even that by not showing up at the festival today, as Claire Rosemberg reports for the AFP, claiming he was unable to attend “following problems of a Greek type,” and adding, “I will go until death with the festival but I will not take a step more.

Cannes 2010. Jean-Luc Godard’s “Film Socialism” on Notebook | MUBI

Posted 2 months ago

Permalink

He has created an exquisite paradoxical aesthetic. Although he utilizes the convention of melodrama, he doesn’t allow the viewer to experience the conventional spectacle, which makes the experience more painful. He offers to hold the viewer’s hand, but doesn’t want them to cry easily over his films.”[4]

Realism and melodrama in Lee Chang-Dong’s “Secret Sunshine” by Marc Raymond

Posted 2 months ago

Permalink