Truth Force

Vexation and irk: my first go at this post drowned in an inopportune Safari hang. Needless to say, what follows is but a pale shadow of the luminous ideal that went before.

The week was structured by a couple of "generic skills" deadlines:

• Two referee reports -- attempting to review as a peer papers that (i) are written by people considerably better versed in their fields than yours truly, and (ii) have already been subjected to the peer review process and reached publication. I guess it's inevitable that the educational endeavour is rather artificial at times.
• A website through which to disseminate work. WT readers will find no surprises there -- a good few blog posts over the last 7 months have been written expressly to be repurposed for this minor course requirement. I did in desperation publish a preliminary sketch of Case 11 that has not yet seen the light of day here, but otherwise it's mostly been a matter of expletive deletion. On the question of uses of the word "fuck" on a college site I have unhesitatingly taken the coward's way out. On the one hand, cowering before authority is ingrained. On the other, many people do take cussing as symptomatic of inarticulacy -- however wrongly -- so why invite disapprobation? Fuck that.

Elsewhere, we went to see Philip Glass's minimalist Gandhi opera Satyagraha at the ENO. It's produced in collaboration with theatre company Improbable, previously encountered doing sellotape pyrotechnics on the South Bank and incarnating Neil Gaiman's domestic wolf eruptions for the National Theatre of Scotland. Satyagraha is a defiantly non-narrative opera and -- how to put this? -- sedately paced, but the music is mesmerising and the staging really beautiful. It's a marvellous piece of work, heroic and transcendent, a hymn to all that is best in humanity. As I write there are only two perfs to go here in London, so there's little point recommending, but I will anyway: Go! It's great. And the Met were co-producers, so I imagine it will turn up in NY before long.

Current favoured summer project topics are astrobiology and structured light microscopy. Time will tell.
Posted by matt at April 28, 2007 10:04 PM