I know this is cheating, but a couple of peeps have asked about my reviews which appeared in The Cambridge Student (one of the student rags) earlier in the term. Since I'm concerned about you wasting your lives, I've deliberately made them short. One's on Nabokov, the other on Pop Science (a few of my favourite things). The Nabokov was for a 'Cambridge Classics' column, a weekly review of pieces set in Cambridge; hence the focus on setting.
Here's something I prepared earlier:
Vladimir Nabokov – Glory
It was a sad moment when the man in the UL pasted a virgin date slip on the inner cover of Glory. I calculated that the book had sat there unborrowed for twenty-seven years; a harsh service of solitude for any book, but particularly for an all-time favourite, and for one which images 1920’s Cambridge so beautifully.
Sadness, however, quickly transmuted into gush, as I remembered how much I loved this novel. Glory is a charming Bildungsroman-type story, which tells the life adventures of Martin Edelweiss, a Russian born boy/man whose father dies early, and mother dotes dearly. Just as Martin hits the romantic stride of adolescence, he and his mother must flee revolutionary Russia. Via a formative dalliance with an older woman in Greece, and a brief refuge with his Uncle in Switzerland, it’s decided that Martin should attend Cambridge. Here he falls in love with an unattainable family friend, forms an awkward threesome with Darwin, who is equally smitten with first friend, dines with the pederastic professor of Russian literature, wins the college championship over St John’s as goalkeeper for Trinity, floats down the Cam in the languid suspension of an early summer, post-exam, pre-result day, fights Darwin in the meadow, then tenderly washes Darwin’s wounds in the river.
If those vignettes narrow too much, it may be because Glory’s program encourages delight in the small details, pointless joy in the ordinary everyday. Martin is a wholly sympathetic creation, a naïve, imaginative youth who relishes adventure for adventure’s sake. The happy portrait of Cambridge is one more reason to read a novel that doesn’t require them. All it asks is to feel that mysterious something upon arrival at an ending which is not-much-of-an-ending: ‘just a bird perching on a wicket in the grayness of a wet day’.
Review of S. J. Gould Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
Stephen Jay Gould was the original golden-haired jock in the now crowded cafeteria that is the genre of ‘popular science’. So popular was this populariser that he even made it into the elite pop-culture club of animation as himself in The Simpsons. But don’t let your anti-vulgar reflex deprive you of reading Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: for there was certainly substance to the hype.
This book is superficially about geology. But it is also a fascinating application of literary criticism to a discipline that doesn’t tend to indulge this kind of close reading. Treating non-fiction genres (especially history, science) as art is still a small business. Gould’s strength is just this: the recognition that scientific discourse is as much about the wrapping as the precious idea-nugget inside.
Gould frames himself as a man on a mission: the revolutionary re-reading of three ‘canonical’ works in the history of geology. These are Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth (1680-89), James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788) and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. All three feature prominently in the ‘textbook’ (Gould’s term) narrative of geology’s history, from armchair dilettantism to real (masculine?) empirical observation. Gould brings in the straw men only to set them alight; he deconstructs the myth with a dexterity that would impress any self-respecting revisionist. His strategy is to unlock these texts by showing that all three scientists were contemplating the same dichotomy: namely time’s arrow (a view of time as one-directional progress) versus time’s cycle (time as eternal repetition). The debate is old as time itself, but it puts our (sometimes) unquestioned 21st century view of time-as-progress into long-term perspective.
In Gould (1941-2002) we had an historian of science who was not only receptive to the literary art of his scientific predecessors, but a wonderful practitioner of it himself. His language is rich in metaphor and vivid with pithy phrases like ‘Science self-selects for poor writing.’ Yes it does: and Gould made the evolutionary cut. I would heartily recommend this book to posterity, which, according to Lyell’s cyclical time, might well be another race of ichthyosaurs.
Here's something I prepared earlier:
Vladimir Nabokov – Glory
It was a sad moment when the man in the UL pasted a virgin date slip on the inner cover of Glory. I calculated that the book had sat there unborrowed for twenty-seven years; a harsh service of solitude for any book, but particularly for an all-time favourite, and for one which images 1920’s Cambridge so beautifully.
Sadness, however, quickly transmuted into gush, as I remembered how much I loved this novel. Glory is a charming Bildungsroman-type story, which tells the life adventures of Martin Edelweiss, a Russian born boy/man whose father dies early, and mother dotes dearly. Just as Martin hits the romantic stride of adolescence, he and his mother must flee revolutionary Russia. Via a formative dalliance with an older woman in Greece, and a brief refuge with his Uncle in Switzerland, it’s decided that Martin should attend Cambridge. Here he falls in love with an unattainable family friend, forms an awkward threesome with Darwin, who is equally smitten with first friend, dines with the pederastic professor of Russian literature, wins the college championship over St John’s as goalkeeper for Trinity, floats down the Cam in the languid suspension of an early summer, post-exam, pre-result day, fights Darwin in the meadow, then tenderly washes Darwin’s wounds in the river.
If those vignettes narrow too much, it may be because Glory’s program encourages delight in the small details, pointless joy in the ordinary everyday. Martin is a wholly sympathetic creation, a naïve, imaginative youth who relishes adventure for adventure’s sake. The happy portrait of Cambridge is one more reason to read a novel that doesn’t require them. All it asks is to feel that mysterious something upon arrival at an ending which is not-much-of-an-ending: ‘just a bird perching on a wicket in the grayness of a wet day’.
Review of S. J. Gould Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
Stephen Jay Gould was the original golden-haired jock in the now crowded cafeteria that is the genre of ‘popular science’. So popular was this populariser that he even made it into the elite pop-culture club of animation as himself in The Simpsons. But don’t let your anti-vulgar reflex deprive you of reading Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: for there was certainly substance to the hype.
This book is superficially about geology. But it is also a fascinating application of literary criticism to a discipline that doesn’t tend to indulge this kind of close reading. Treating non-fiction genres (especially history, science) as art is still a small business. Gould’s strength is just this: the recognition that scientific discourse is as much about the wrapping as the precious idea-nugget inside.
Gould frames himself as a man on a mission: the revolutionary re-reading of three ‘canonical’ works in the history of geology. These are Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth (1680-89), James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788) and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. All three feature prominently in the ‘textbook’ (Gould’s term) narrative of geology’s history, from armchair dilettantism to real (masculine?) empirical observation. Gould brings in the straw men only to set them alight; he deconstructs the myth with a dexterity that would impress any self-respecting revisionist. His strategy is to unlock these texts by showing that all three scientists were contemplating the same dichotomy: namely time’s arrow (a view of time as one-directional progress) versus time’s cycle (time as eternal repetition). The debate is old as time itself, but it puts our (sometimes) unquestioned 21st century view of time-as-progress into long-term perspective.
In Gould (1941-2002) we had an historian of science who was not only receptive to the literary art of his scientific predecessors, but a wonderful practitioner of it himself. His language is rich in metaphor and vivid with pithy phrases like ‘Science self-selects for poor writing.’ Yes it does: and Gould made the evolutionary cut. I would heartily recommend this book to posterity, which, according to Lyell’s cyclical time, might well be another race of ichthyosaurs.
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