In pandemic times I need connection and beauty from what I read even more, especially when itās academic work in my research areas. I need conversation about thoughts with long histories I can weave into my world. I need stories that are sparks. More on that from the blog this week:
Scholar, would you tell me a story?
āProportions alternate between infinitesimal and astronomical. The signals are infinitesimal. The sources are astronomical. The sensitivities are infinitesimal. The rewards are astronomical. The human ambition to understand the universe is merely epic, and astronomical trumps epic.ā ā Janna Levin inĀ Black Hole Blues
Ā Ā Ā My father, the wonder-full layman, and I, the one who broke up with professional science, read the same pop science books. We know that where they make bald declarations they are wrong in significant ways. From the ones who seem to have their noses thrust up skywards as they declaim we keep a correspondingly disdainful distance. Stephen Pinker is too confident. Malcolm Gladwell pushes too many Unified Theories. The collector and commentator E.O. Wilson ofĀ The Diversity of LifeĀ is far more compelling than the later E.O. Wilson grasping after ultimate meaning inĀ Consilience. I find Wilson on social insects more beautiful than Wilson on beautyāin his care, his wonder, his generosity towards both subject and audience.
Ā All the authors Iāve cited put forth simple, big ideas. Simplified, too. They leave out most footnotes or make them endnotes, as I believe they should. As best I can figure it, the ones that inspire wonder and midnight conversation differ from the ones we condemn as condescending and simple-minded mainly in whether they are inviting us to sit in front of or next to themā¦
Brilliant storytellers of ideas: Maria Popova
Maria Popova is unmistakable. Her weekly newsletter BrainPickings is the biggest gift coming into my inbox each week: an expansive, masterfully composed weaving together of thinkers old and new: poets, artists, scientists, philosophers, working people, activists, tied together by how they realize the particularities of overreaching human concerns: love, beauty, faith, cosmology, identity, communityā¦
When her magnum opus Figurings came out early this year, I skipped lunch the day my pre-order came, read the 500-page offering in two days, then turned back to page 1. Start with her newsletter (now 13 years old) before you make the commitment to this longer journeyā¦ but know that I gifted it to all my closest, queerest, thinking-est, loveliest humans right away.
Popova will certainly be in the acknowledgements, whatever my dissertation ends up looking like. Her chapter on Keplerās family life led me to his Latin sci-fi Somnium (āThe Dreamā) about how the Earth would look to Moon inhabitants. It sent me down my current months-long rabbit hole with its gripping story, told to the Catholic layman for political purposes, possibly contributing to Keplerās mother being put on trial for witchcraft, with footnotes 3 times as long as the text that cite Keplerās astronomical tomes to defend the truth of it all. Iām excited about it as a model for linking creative work to scholarship. Further down the rabbit hole, I fell into hundreds of letters between Early Modern astronomers full of peer review, professional gossip, poetic allusions, and yearning, so much yearningāfor connection at a distance, for Truth and discovery as bulwarks against the vicissitudes of family fortunes.
Zooming out, Iāve been using this case study to think about genre among prolific humanist scientists, the code-switching they did between Latin and their vernaculars, the linguistic identities of Latinists, and alternative models for communities of knowledge-makers. The aspect of connection at a distance took on sudden urgency in March: those who understand Latin can listen to my podcast episode about that here.
What Iām wondering
Reading about a postcolonial Digital Humanities and the interaction of local, national and global is pushing my thinking on ancient and Early Modern encyclopedia projects that have ambitions towards universality: what are the āarchival silencesā in Plinyās Natural History? How can we talk about ancient authorsā positionalities? What did Albertus Magnus choose not to catalog, and what do we lose out on as a result? How much of what hasnāt survived from Latin writings is a lost data problem, and how much was left out on purpose(s)? Philosophizing aside, I desperately want to hear from the builders and craftsmen of the ancient world about their art, not just from the Architecture Studies-type Vitruvius.
How did our Solar System come to be? Needing a learning project utterly unrelated to my professional work, Iāve dived into solar system astronomyāa return to my physicist past. What I love most is the unification of abstract natural law and the quirky biography of each planet. I picked the solar system over galaxies or cosmology to counter my mathematicianās generalizing impulse and become a naturalist amateur astronomer for a time. The factoids (Mercury is Earthās weird twin, unique in our solar system for having magnetic fields) feed my wonder and help me get this new knowledge into my body. I love it almost as much as the Particle Zoo, a series of plushies (!) that anthropomorphize (or muppetify?) invisible, supremely abstract fundamental particles into a cast of irresistible characters. Fond memories of being That Girl (then) who taught college physics with puppetsā¦
(From ParticleZoo.net)
For those who read German, Florian Freistetterās Eine Geschichte des Universums in 100 Sternen is a delight one can read right through or dip into for starry vignettes. I sincerely hope thereāll be an English translation soonāitās so good that in a fit of hyperactivity I nearly decided Iād write to the publisher and see if theyād take me on to translate it myselfā¦but actually.
Latinists, I need your help to help you better:
I have the great gift of time in the next two months or so, supported by my doctoral fellowship that lets me out of teaching, if I want, to do public-facing work.
Iād like to dedicate much of that service time to creating monolingual Latin editions of texts I havenāt seen given this treatment yet. My ultimate hope is to focus on nonfiction and post-classical Latin to expand the range of student choice and awareness, but in these extraordinarily crushing times for teachers, I want to do what is needed, so I will eagerly work with texts, say, on the AP or IB list as well (just please, no Caesarā¦..)
So Iād SUPER appreciate a quick reply (and thereāll be a follow up that goes out to the Latin teaching lists and groups):
What genre of texts, themes, or authors would you most like materials for?
Of Kepler, Pliny, Seneca (beyond the letters), medieval bestiaries, or natural philosophy passim, what sounds most desirable for you right now?
Would you prefer Oerberg-style adaptations, Ad usum delphini paraphrases, or something else entirely?
Thanks for being here with me for this while. Iād love to hear from you, and Iāll always reach back.
Jamie / Jacobus
ā
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