1. M. Ravel and I
Between 1914 and 1917 Maurice Ravel composed the pieces we now know as Le Tombeau de Couperin. Wikipedia assures me that this particular Tombeau does not mean tomb, but rather “a piece written as a memorial,” in this case to personal friends who died in World War I. Since M. Ravel is not around to do the same for me, I’m doing it for myself by publishing some of my writing as a website. The website is now up (as you can see), and I will be adding additional material as I write/edit/revise it. In addition, I promise to change the images at the top of the homepage from time to time so we don’t get sick of them.
The lower (non-animated) portion of my homepage is divided into three categories: Japanese Popular Culture, Original Fiction, and Science. Entries in each column consist of an image (thumbnail), one or a few sentences that serve as a front-cover blurb or tagline, and a link button that brings up the requested text as a single web page. By design, the images are not clickable.
2. Categories
Japanese Popular Culture The two papers in the Japanese column are quite long, profusely footnoted, and conclude with extensive bibliographies. Because of their length, a table of contents is provided with each. Despite its already stupefying bulk, I am committed to writing one more chapter for the 1Q84 paper. It will be titled "The Authors’ Authors".
Original Fiction These are a sampling of stories I have written over the past thirty years, which I have now revised and edited for web presentation. I write in a variety of “styles” (whatever that means), with a relationship to reality that spans a continuum from total fantasy (“Primatology”) to total realism (“Puyallup”).
With the exception of Remember Your Name, the stories currently up are very short. But short does not mean simple—just the opposite: the shorter the story, the greater the demand on the reader to participate in creating the fictional world. If my stories are read like weather reports, they will make no sense at all. They may fail to make sense even when read carefully, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take. Will you take it with me?
Science I will be posting papers of my own here, but a substantial amount of editing needs to be done first. In the mean time I have chosen to celebrate what is possibly the greatest matched pair of intellectual and technological achievements in the history of science. The first achievement was the publication between the years 1905 and 1916 of papers by Albert Einstein that we now refer to collectively as general relativity. The second was the design and construction of two fantastically sensitive instruments (aLIGO) that have now recorded ripples in spacetime (gravitational waves) created by the coalescence of two black holes more than a billion lightyears distant from us. The detected signals conform in every respect to computational (numerical approximation) models based on the equations of general relativity. This triumph was announced in early 2016, a neat one hundred years after Einstein made his startling prediction.
3. The End of All Things
Brother Umberto on the Telling of Stories Over a long and prodigiously expansive career, Umberto Eco made so many astute and pithy observations about life, language, aesthetics, and semiotics that entire websites are devoted to cataloging them. For example, in The Island of the Day Before, he writes “To survive, you must tell stories.”
Professor Eco also said that to live and die is like leaving a note in a bottle. Maybe. But only if we write and publish. This website is my note-in-a-bottle launched into the vastness of cyberspace. Some claim that such an act confers a kind of immortality, but I do not believe it.
The man who famously studied signs, the semiotician Umberto, as he drew a final line beneath the long life of Brother Adso of Melk, merged with the medievalist Umberto with this intertextual quotation exhumed from the tenth century CE:
Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
Yesterday’s rose endures in its name. We hold empty names.
Notes
1. Le Tombeau de Couperin was first published as six pieces for solo piano, as you can see above. Ravel later orchestrated four of them, and it is in that form that the suite is best known. Wikipedia reports that the cover “of the first printed edition [was] designed by Ravel himself.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_tombeau_de_Couperin) My image is from Wikipedia.
2. The fictional Benedictine novice/monk Adso of Melk is both narrator (in old age) and participant (as teenage novice) in Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose. The final line of the novel is stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus, untranslated. It is from De contempt mundi, by Bernard of Cluny, ca. 952 CE. The translation I have used is from The Key to “The Name of the Rose”, by Haft, White, and White, (University of Michigan Press, 2008-2011).
3. Beginning with Bernard of Cluny’s thought from 952 CE, then Eco’s deft melding of it with his own field of semiotics, we might plausibly arrive at: We hold empty URLs.
4. When I contemplate Eco’s 1984 photo gazing out at me from the Wikipedia article, this is what I hear: “Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” (Postscript to The Name of the Rose, paperback American edition, Harcourt, Inc., 1984) More poetically perhaps, the novice Adso observes: “Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.” (The Name of the Rose)
5. Eco’s novel L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before) was published in 1994 in Italian and 1995 in English.
