Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Salon is developing a fun literary tool through which travelers (or interested readers in general) can find literature appropriate to places they’re visiting. The Literary Guide to the World has an interactive map of the World as its primary interface and, as Hillary Frey describes in her introductory article,

…the Guide promises to recommend the best books — fiction, history, memoir or otherwise — to take with you on your travels. And if there’s a place that you’ve always dreamed of seeing, but won’t visit in the foreseeable future, the Literary Guide will point you to the books that offer the best virtual tours around.

Right now, the number of locations is quite limited, but the plan is to gradually build up the number of destinations covered

Throughout the summer, the Literary Guide will feature two new locations a week; in autumn we’ll continue with one a week. There’s much to look forward to, including pieces from National Book Award winner William Vollmann (Norway), Salon favorite Garrison Keillor (Minnesota) and “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” author Rebecca Wells (Louisiana). We’ll take you as far as Papua New Guinea and South Africa, but we’ve also got the books to read if you’re staying closer to home — in Martha’s Vineyard, say, or the Jersey Shore.

This seems like a worthy endeavor as long as they work hard on quality control. I haven’t looked at all their current selections yet, but having John Banville writing and making suggestions about literature to read if you’re going to Irelend seems like a very promising start.

This painting by Dawn Meson depicts Kaluza Klein states from extra dimensions. Dawn Meson lives in the Bay Area and given her name is clearly destined to paint particle physics themes! Several of her paintings adorn the hallways here at SLAC (alas, none on the theory group floor); this one is my favorite.

The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 4th June. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them. Have a look at the last two descriptions here and here.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

It’s perfectly clear. Or is it? Actually, the notion of transparency is surprisingly murky. The clear night air is opaque to much of the light raining down on us from the rest of the universe. The daytime sky blocks even the light of stars. Your body, on the other hand, is perfectly transparent to radio and TV signals; to a neutrino, you’re not even there—trillions passed through you as you read that sentence. Transparent objects can cast shadows. Perceptive people can see right through you. Institutions—including governments—often try to hide what goes on inside, and it’s the job of other institutions—like the press—to make sure they remain at least reasonably transparent.

For our June 4th Categorically Not! UCLA astronomer Matt Malkan will take us on a tour through the universe as astronomers see it, or try to see it, right back to the beginning of time where (and when) newborn galaxies were just coming into being. The birthplaces of galaxies, stars and planets are shrouded in dust, so astronomers, “like aggressive papparazi,” must go to great lengths to get images. (Having spent 20 hours in a delivery room on two occasions, Malkan says he can “appreciate this cosmic modesty.”)

For an artistic perspective, Melinda Smith Altshuler will show how she uses transparency to create works of art with astonishing mystery and depth in her studio at the Hangar. Melinda has shown locally with Sherry Frumkin and most recently with Sara Lee Art Projects at Bergamot Station—as well as in France, Italy, Korea and Central America. She has taught Studio Arts at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, and is an Associate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles.

And finally—accounting! What are credits and debits anyhow? To find out, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose enlisted the help of the 50,000 year old Thog family of mastodon hunters (who will not appear with her) and former Microsoft CFO Mike Brown, (who might) to write the Thog’s Guide to Quantum Economics—which she’ll be giving out Sunday. USC’s PricewaterhouseCoopers Auditing Professor, Zoe-Vonna has been a key player shaping the U.S. financial reporting environment, where transparency is today’s buzzword.

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

Well, I’d better tell you. Before you hear it anywhere else. So remember I was telling you in a previous post a month ago about working with students from the School of Cinema-Television, commenting on their screenplays to be entered for the Sloan Foundation’s fellowships? Here’s a reminder of the Sloan’s statement of purpose in this endeavour:

The goal of the film schools program is to influence the next generation of filmmakers to create more realistic and dramatic stories about science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers through the visual media. With Foundation support, prizes are now awarded at six leading film schools to stimulate top students to write and produce new film and television shows about scientists and engineers: American Film Institute ; UCLA School of Theater, Film,and Television ; Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama ; Columbia University Film Department ; NYU Tisch School of the Arts ; and USC School of Cinema-Television . In addition to screenwriting and production awards, there are now prizes in animation and a first feature film.

Well, it turns out that the Sloan also supports similar efforts in Theatre. See some of their descriptions of their work at this link. I knew about this for a while (although not the full extent until just the other day). They support, for example, the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in commissioning and developing new plays. See this link for more information. The statement of purpose:

The Magic Theatre / Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Initiative has been created with a generous three-year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Sloan Initiative is designed to commission, develop and produce compelling plays exploring the worlds of science and technology, to foster long-term relationships between scientific and artistic institutions, and to challenge the stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the public imagination. The Sloan Initiative will be awarding more than $40,000 in commissions each season.

Recall also that I’ve been working with a playwright, Oliver Mayer, for all those reasons I keep blogging about concerning science and the public, science outreach, science education, science and the media, etc, etc. I’ve been telling you, for example, about the wonderful process of having real actors read your words, and how interesting and instructive the whole experience is. See posts here, and here.

Just before I flew off to hide in Taiwan for a month, in December, Oliver and I dashed off a quick letter to the Magic Theatre, together with a draft of the first act of the play, entering it for consideration for one of those grants. I forgot all about it for several months.

So here’s the punchline. A month ago, while in the act of actually filling in the forms to accompany the students’ screenplays that they were entering into the Sloan’s competition, I got a call from Oliver:

We won one of the Magic Theatre’s Sloan awards to develop the play.

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Well, apologies to all concerned for taking so long to post this, but here it is. The Categorically Not! two Sundays ago was -as usual- extremely enjoyable and informative. This one was all about Illusion, in some sense, the theme being “Really?”.

We started out with a few opening remarks by Bob Miller, who specialises in what some might call “light art”. He’s well known for creating a large number of wonderful works using light and shadow, several of them forming the cornerstone of exhibitions in the Exploratorium in San Francisco, for example. Have a look at the “lightwalk”, linked here.

Bob did not talk much, because he wanted everyone to just play, learning from getting involved. And play they did. He’d been up all night preparing (with KC Cole’s help) various fun things for people to do (see the table in the picture above, for example). All simple, and all with a little printed explanation about what to do, and the operation of the thing they were playing with or effect they were seeing. At the left you see him explaining to somebody how to close one eye and move their head to get a perfect imaginary cube (that your mind has created while looking at a cutout piece of paper - a slightly distorted convex corner) to rotate eerily. The cube you see looking at the convex cutout looks a bit like one of the cubes in the image to the right. Here is the blurb that came with the illusion:

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Well, I’m recovering from an excellent hike up Mount Wilson with the USC Neurobiologists earlier today, so while I do that, I’ll tell you about last night. Recall that the LA Times Book Festival is happening this weekend.

I came closer to seeing a realization of one of those topsy-turvy scenarios I often fantasize about, where more “academic” pursuits, or at least those more associated with the life of the mind, are celebrated in full Hollywood fashion. (I envision it in the context of science and scientists….imagine an Oscar-Like awards ceremony for the year’s best science papers, watched by millions on TV in prime time… but this will do for a start.)

Yes, I went to my first LA Awards ceremony, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, and although I joked about Oscar analogies in a previous post, it actually was rather Oscar-like. The setup of UCLA’s Royce Hall for the event was very plush indeed, with a podium each on the left and the right of the stage for smooth transitions, and a giant screen for either relaying of the closeup image of one or other presenter, for the showing of acceptance speeches from those “who could not be with us at this time”, or for the display of graphics accompanying shortlist readings, etc. Just like in the Oscars. And yes, they had (why?!) the usual eye-candy woman bringing on the actual award, and the announcement envelope to hand to the presenter at the appropriate time.

The Master of Ceremonies was Dana Gioia the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (there he is in full sail, at right, click for larger image). I was rather pleased that the first category announced was the Science and Technology section. (Perhaps it was in honour of there being a blogger from Cosmic Variance in the audience?) I found myself very excited by all of the nominees in this section, and was intrigued by the winning one, Diana Preston’s “Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima”, which I’d somehow not heard of before (No, I don’t know how I missed it either). I had the pleasure of chatting with Diana Preston (and her husband Michael) at length at the After Party (see later), and got the chance to hear about how she went about finding a way into a field -atomic physics- about which she had no expertise (no science background, she said) to the extent that she could win a prize for her science writing. It was also interesting to hear her and science writer K. C. Cole bond over the various Manhattan project people they’d managed to talk to over the years in book research. (K. C. is working on a biography of her mentor Frank Oppenheimer at present).

I really want to read Diana Preston’s book, as well as several others on the shortlist in that section, as I mentioned in the previous post. Speaking of others, I finally met Sean Carroll. No, not our Sean M. Carroll, the Biologist Sean B. Carroll. We were together in line to go into the room where the After Party was to be held, which was taking a bit of time, for reasons I only figured out too late. I introduced myself and joked with him about the name-sharing thing, and told him about the blog. His Evo Devo book (”Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom”) is another one high on my list of things to read. There was an excellent review and discussion of it in the New Yorker late last year by the way. You might be able to get it online. I’d meant to blog about it back then but somehow did not get to it.

Here is the list of winners and presenters. I took it from the blog Nimble Books: (more…)

In case you’re in the area, please don’t forget the Los Angeles Times Fesitval of Books this weekend, held over Saturday and Sunday at the UCLA campus. It is a blast. There are book authors of various types and genres being celebrated as the celebrities they should be, with young girls and boys gasping and fainting as their idols go by. Well, not quite, but I like to imagine this. Here is the website with the schedule. As they say there, you’ll have:

131,000+ Passionate Readers
370+ Famous Authors
300+ Popular Exhibitors
900+ Loyal Volunteers
6 Exciting Stages
2 Interactive Children’s Areas

I went last year and can verify that it is a lot of fun.

Actually, this year I won’t be able to see much because I promised to go with a big group to the top of Mount Wilson the fun way, which will take up most of Saturday. On Sunday, I’m doing the church sermon thing I mentioned earlier and then they are taking me to lunch and doing more Q&A, so I don’t know when I’ll make it over to UCLA that day.

I do get to go to one event for sure. My first LA Awards ceremony!! On Friday night I go to the LA Times Book Awards. I won’t be live blogging from it, as was done last year at The Elegant Variation. I’ll be too busy being embarrassed. You see, I looked at the list of nominees just now, and while several of the books are on my “must get around to reading this gem” list, such as (from the Science and Technology category) Chris Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science”, and Sean B. Carroll’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom”, I have not read anything that has been nominated. I’ve just been too busy the last several months. So it’s going to be so embarrassing - I’ll be exposed as a fraud! On the plus side, I’ve been promised that I’ll be introduced to lots of interesting authors, such as Mariana Gosnell, the author of “Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance”, which I suspect is a truly excellent book. I’m going to get in touch with my inner groupie, for all the right reasons (but remaining slightly aloof on the outside of course).

Hmmmm… I wonder if I can speed-read a few of these overnight? And whatever shall I wear…do I finally get to wear that Tuxedo I bought a while back? Is it too late to rent some expensive jewelry, or get a jeweller who wants the red carpet publicity to lend me some?

-cvj

The day before yesterday I mentioned at the end of a post that I had some film scripts to read. I was not kidding. I spent a bit of time reading screenplays, written by students in the USC School of Cinema-Television. This is, as you may know, one of the finest schools of its type, and it feeds the Industry (entertainment and related visual arts) with a huge amount of new talent. Just look at the CVs of the various writers, producers, directors, etc, who are nominated each year for Oscars and Emmys -and the CVs of the huge number of unsung people who work on those films- and you’ll see how much USC matters in this area.

Well, you might recall that I am passionate about science outreach, public science education, and helping members of society get truly involved in the democratic process (by being able to make more informed decisions about issues affecting our lives) by being more engaged with science, the scientific process, and scientific issues. A major start in this is for them to get more comfortable with scientists, learning that they are real people, in the real world, just like they are. Break down the fear of the scientist (the one that is portrayed most often in the media now) and maybe the breakdown of the fear of science will follow……. and you’ve maybe read my many blog posts on this (see here and also follow the trackbacks in the comment stream; also here)….. So you might agree with me that one way of advancing these goals is to get more science (and especially portrayals of scientists) in the places where people spend most of their time looking: TV, Cinema, and other media (such as this blog). So I therefore cannot ignore the fact that I’m at USC and that there is this wonderful training ground of the future leaders in the Industry not many buildings away.

Turns out that every year the Sloan Foundation awards grants to students for works that advance goals similar to those I expressed above. You can read about the Foundation’s excellent work here, and here is an extract:

The goal of the film schools program is to influence the next generation of filmmakers to create more realistic and dramatic stories about science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers through the visual media. With Foundation support, prizes are now awarded at six leading film schools to stimulate top students to write and produce new film and television shows about scientists and engineers: American Film Institute ; UCLA School of Theater, Film,and Television ; Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama ; Columbia University Film Department ; NYU Tisch School of the Arts ; and USC School of Cinema-Television . In addition to screenwriting and production awards, there are now prizes in animation and a first feature film.

Yes! Somebody gets it! And Somebody with resources.

Anyway, some students took on the challenge. They are required to seek out a real scientist, and get them to read the work and comment. Well, they found me. (I guess there were no real scientists willing to do this, so a string theorist will have to do. LOL!) Well, I did this with one student last year, and it turned into a really fun and informative series of conversations where we both learned a lot. Me about the process and contraints involved in writing for the entertainment industry, and the student about what science and scientists are like. I’ve also spoken about this sort of thing in the context of the (later) playwriting project I got involved in later last last year, about which I’ve blogged here and here, and will tell you more later.

This year, three of them found me (apparently the University’s improved online experts directory is beginning to kick in), and so I had my work cut out for me. Just as happened last year, it was a real pleasure. My initial thought was that I was going to have to cringe my way through this (bear in mind that several of these young hopefuls have never ever spoken to a scientist before….part of the problem in the industry is that fact right there…..) and then I started reading and in each case I was just hooked. First reaction….”Wow, she/he can really write!”, and the second reaction… “They’ve taken the time to try to understand and incorporate the science!”

How can I not try to help and encourage further?

So as it has been a series of spectacular days outdoors here on campus weatherwise, between classes and meetings I decided to go and hide and sit in the sun near a fountain and a tree and really dig through these screenplays. This took a while, including some reading on a couple of bus trips to and from home (yes, one of those great uses of public transport I go on and on about), red pen at the ready.

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 23rd April. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Really?

Look around you. Is the scene you see “real”? Or a story made up inside your head? What about atoms? Are they real? What about love? Physics tells us that familiar space and time are illusions (while black holes and quantum weirdness are real). Artists reveal deep truths by pretending. What does it mean to say something is “real,” anyway? Physicist Steven Weinberg says it means we are granting it a measure of respect.

For this month’s Categorically Not! we are delighted to have Bay Area artist Bob Miller, whose explorations into the nature of light, seeing and believing are embodied in museum exhibits through-out the world. Bob will TALK A LITTLE about, and SHOW A LOT (capitals his) about what we’re REALLY seeing when we open our eyes. It really has a LOT to do with “The Wholeness of Seeing and Being,” he says.

From a scientific perspective, neuroscientist Richard Brown will demonstrate several engaging and powerful illusions currently being studied by scientists, present current views of why our brains evolved to produce illusions, and discuss the significance of illusions in our and understanding of “reality.” Richard studied neuroscience at Caltech and UCSF, and researched human color vision at UCSD’s Center for Brain and Cognition before moving to the Exploratorium in 1998, where he continues to develop interactive exhibits about perception, behavior and minds.

For a literary trip behind the looking glass, Pushcart prize winner Aimee Bender will lead us in a group writing exercise, as well as read and talk about her reality redefining fiction. Aimee is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and Willful Creatures, which feature a girl with a fire hand, a character obsessed with numbers, and pumpkinheads who give birth to children with the recessive gene that produces a head made of an iron. Aimee has published in Harper’s, Granta, The Paris Review and is heard on This American Life. She teaches creative writing at USC.

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

Ok. You are probably tired of me enthusing about how so many things in LA are just great. (Well, those things I say are true, it is great, blah, blah, blah). However, sometimes things are just annoying in that “if we all agreed to fix this it would easily not be this way” sort of way. Here’s one such example:

Tuesday night. I went with two friends, Carol and Ilaria, to see an excellent group called Brazilliando play at Vitello’s in Studio City. It was a reminder of one of the frustrating aspects of LA nightlife. Basically, it was raining a bit outside, and combined with the fact that it was after 9:30pm, this just wiped out the audience. People don’t stay out very late much here especially during the work week (there are several nightspots, some of which I’ve mentioned in previous posts, which are exceptions to this rule, but not nearly as many as you would imagine for a city this size) even when the weather is fine, and when you combine that with a slight chill in the air, or a bit of moisture on the road, people just scamper off to their homes. So we turned up there to catch the second set and maybe hang out for maybe an hour and a half. The people at the font desk looked at us like we were nuts as we came in so “late” (9:30pm), and were not even sure if there was anything going on upstairs (the performance space is above the main restaurant floor).

They let us go up anyway…. The band was beginning to pack up, and there was nobody -absolutely nobody- in the room (upstairs at the back). Just lots of empty tables with solitary candles. It was 9:35pm. Carol knew the percussionist (Ami Molinelli), and so after fond greetings and introductions all around, they agreed to play a bit more. Just for us. We sat at a table and tried to order food. Nope, kitchen closed early. At 9:45pm!!? (After Ilaria pressed a bit, they agreed to go and see if they could find a salad and some bread, which did materialize.) The bar was eventually convinced to produce me a gin and tonic, and we settled down for a personal performance. I tried to put out of my mind my memories of struggling through the snow to get to various Jazz clubs in New York and finding it pleasantly packed with other intrepid music-seekers willing to brave the weather. (Wonderful freezing cold snowbound trips up from Princeton to the Village Vanguard spring to mind….) I tried to put out of my mind memories of listening to excellent performances into the wee hours of the morning in any number of jazz clubs….. What on earth is wrong with these soft Los Angelenos? Sigh.

They ended up playing for us for at least 45 minutes, and they were really great! If you’re in town looking for a sweet, understated, swinging, small (Samba, Bossa Nova…. Brazillian flavoured) Jazz group, look out for Brazilliando, with Robert Kyle (Saxophones, flute), Kleber Jorge, (vocals, guitar) and Amy Molinelli (percussion…really making the whole thing swing). See Kyle’s website for dates. [Update: That night we had Mitchell Long on guitar and vocals, by the way, (see photo) and you can look at his website here.]

-cvj