The bigger picture

From the Meiss Trail near South Lake Tahoe.

Even in tough times, it's always worth renewing and recharging.
Happy midsummer.

Time and the time: a belated wish for the New Year

This winter, trying to come up with something tangible that my husband could buy me for Christmas—all I ever really want is for the holidays to be over—I finally settled on a wristwatch.

I took to the Internet to find the simplest possible example. If not actually analog, my new watch had to strongly espouse analog-ness: a large, circular face, with clearly visible numbers and hands—nothing else. I just wanted it to tell me the time. Compared to my phone, which I had been using for that purpose, and which then lured me onto Facebook and Twitter and myriad other distractions every time I checked it, I expected a plain watch to be pure, sanity-restoring elegance.

But looking at one ultra-basic watch after the other dredged up a visceral memory: That Clock. The one I stared at beseechingly throughout my childhood, in 1970s and 80s public school classrooms, where rote, one-size-fits-all learning ruled the day. You probably know That Clock, too. Now sold on EBay, Etsy, and elsewhere as a “vintage” or “old-school school” clock, its current incarnations still preside over all manner of institutional spaces. It’s one foot in diameter, white with slightly-too-thick black numbers and two hands. The versions at my school didn’t even have second hands, because their continuous motion and/or ticking might have drawn attention. Instead, the minute hand lurched forward, presumably regularly, with a thunk.

The institutional clock denies the bored student, or the enmeshed bureaucrat, anything to gaze at or reflect upon. It thwarts distraction, sending its seekers reluctantly back to their work. This was exactly what I had wanted from my new watch, rendered sinister. In places where time feels most oppressive, most necessary to try to accelerate or halt, the anti-aesthetic institutional clock tells us: Don’t bother. The hours and the minutes move no faster or slower than they must. Do not beseech, do not wonder. Do not look up from your task. You will learn nothing more from this dullest of clocks than the time, which is simple, quantifiable, and instantly knowable.

And yet time—as opposed to the time—is anything but dull, simple, or knowable. As I’ve gathered from reading popular cosmology books, time remains a tantalizing conundrum. What’s it made of? How does it function? How might we alter its speed or trajectory? No one really knows. What we do know is that it’s closely related to entropy, the universal tendency toward increasing disorder that originated, in our universe, with the Big Bang. Objects break. Mountains wear down. We grow old, and we die. So far, the arrow has only ever pointed one way.

Time is everything falling apart. And while we realize disorder is inevitable, we have no idea how, or when, or (often) why it will occur. Time is in fact the opposite of the time, of what That Clock says and claims to know. Time is mystery, and surprise.

We humans resemble time—mysterious, surprising, often surprised ourselves. We don’t fully know what we’re made of. But, while disorderly, we’re curious, intelligent, empathetic, creative, and courageous. When things come apart, we can put them back together in new and better ways. And while we can’t yet stop aging (and we may not actually want to), inside we can slow down or speed up, or come at the world from different angles. We can imagine.

So here is my wish for this already advancing new year: Let us embrace time as entropy, not as order. However, I don’t mean we should completely reject That Clock. In fact, we can enlist it in our efforts. Whenever we see it, or any tool of numb officialdom, let’s remember to question its message of resignation. Let That Clock—in fact, any clock, our lovely new wristwatch, even the bewitching clock in our phone—remind us to look up, to dream, wonder, and reflect more often.

And let us imagine and work toward a world where everyone can do the same.

Why is Bigfoot scary (and funny)?

Just in time for Halloween, I contemplate this pressing question over at G. G. Andrew's Writers Who Read blog.

Hovering and recovering

Ah, my poor, neglected blog. For the past two weeks I've been on vacation, trying and largely failing to say away from all electronic communications. The need to promote the book hovers, always, like a mild illness. I am not doing enough. I know I am not doing enough. But I cannot make myself do any more. Well, maybe a little more. Like what? I don't have the foggiest. Well, I kind of do. More appearances. More approaching strangers, offering the irresistible chance to meet me. More guest posts. More tweets (about what?). More Facebook (god help me). More ... just more.

It's certainly not the worst fate to befall anyone. And I brought it on myself. Maybe I'm even getting a little better at it. Then again, is it working?

Anyway, here's a picture from our trip to Olympic National Park. It was a beautiful day at Hurricane Ridge.

The poet's brain in a jar

Here's a little coda to my piece in the LA Review of Books on Yuri Olesha's memoir-in-fragments, No Day without a Line. I tried so hard to get this into the piece, but it just wouldn't go ... So here it is.

In the section of No Day called Moscow, Olesha writes about several famous Russian writers he befriended in the early twentieth century. He was particularly close with the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide ... leading to this amazing memory:

When the evening after his death we had gathered on Gendrikov Lane in ... the Briks' apartment [where Mayakovsky had been living], we suddenly heard loud noises coming from Mayakovsky's room--very loud noises, unceremoniously loud, as if somebody were chopping wood. It was the opening of Mayakovsky's cranium to allow the removal of his brain. We listened in horror-struck silence. Then a man in a white gown and boots came out of the room--either an attendant or a medical assistant, but a stranger to us--and in his hands he held a basin covered with a white cloth raised in the middle almost like a pyramid, indeed, just as if that soldier in boots had been carrying a paschal cream-cheese pudding. In the basin was Mayakovsky's brain.

This scene, surreal even by Olesha's standards, defies belief. And yet, recently, an intrepid reporter from Vice Magazine, Joy Neumeyer, paid a visit to the Moscow Brain Institute. There she found Mayakovsky's brain, residing in a jar alongside those of many other luminaries. She even quotes Olesha to explain how the brain got there.

So Olesha was not making this up. As Neumeyer explains, "When a Soviet celebrity died, the brain-collection process worked in one of two ways. Sometimes, the family or the deceased had already agreed to give their brains to the Institute. Or—as in the case of Mayakovsky—they came without asking."

Ray Harryhausen and writing

In the NYT obituary for legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, I found myself dwelling on this statement:

“There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in ‘King Kong,’ that adds to the fantasy,” he said in 2006. “If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.” 

As a fiction writer--and reader--I've always agreed with this, without ever quite knowing why. Now I actually suspect it's because I grew up watching Harryhausen's movies, often on the big screen, in gorgeous Technicolor. The way Harryhausen's monsters moved impressed the hell out of me--at once faster and slower than humans, with starker contrasts between light and shadow. I don't remember precisely how they looked. The movement was what made them otherworldly, and therefore more real, in the sense of more plausible as monsters. Why would something from another world (or from the imagination) move as we do, and exist in precisely the same plane? The movements of Harryhausen's creatures made them seem both here and somewhere else at the same time--and that lent them real power and real magic. And as he suggests, the more realistic CG effects become, the more disappointing they become, even as we marvel at the technical achievement. The monsters really have been brought down to Earth.

That's probably not the *only* reason that I prefer a veneer of unreality in fiction. But if you're going to go ahead and create a world, why not let it shimmer and quake a little around the edges? Because you have made something. You have brought something into our world from another one--your imagination. That wonder and that strangeness, it seems to me, deserve attention.

Affirming life with The Pale King, of all books

I have now officially finished reading The Pale King. I make a special point of mentioning that I've finished, because it has been my habit to opine at some length about a book I am only halfway through ... only to discover that you kinda do need to read the whole book to understand what it's about. Also, I am very proud of myself. This is a long book--ultimately unfinished by the author himself, as we know--and it is full of tax-law arcana, which is fascinating in that it was fascinating to DFW.* But not at all fascinating otherwise.

I mean, what sort of mind can engage itself with that stuff at that level of detail? Of course, that's the central question The Pale King asks. And the answers within the book differ from those we've learned from DFW's biography. We all know that the author committed suicide before finishing the novel. So that suggests the mind in question was not a conventionally healthy one. But I just went back and added "conventionally" before "healthy," because without the adverb, the adjective seemed to cast judgment on that mind. Despite the terrible end to DFW's life, it seems, from the evidence of this book alone, that there was something right about his mind, something good and powerful, which may or may not spring from the same well as his depression.

I also think it's a mistake to look for clues to "what pushed him over the edge" within this book--even though I had avoided reading it precisely because I thought it would be littered with such clues. Reading it seemed somehow ghoulish, and I feared being sucked into depression myself. Yet nothing of the sort happened. I was able to forget, or put aside, my knowledge of Wallace's death, because the book is so full of ... yes, life. It's energetic, hilarious, compassionate, fascinated and amused by the most ordinary aspects of human life, sometimes frightening, and also pretty stark raving crazy. If anything, I found myself wondering, Why would a person who saw the world this way want to die?

I don't know the answer. But if I had to guess, I'd say that he couldn't sustain this level of embracing joy. Perhaps he could not even reach it at all, and this book is an act of straining toward what he could never actually grasp. Or maybe (like most of us, really) he grasped it only for brief instants, and the slipping away of that joy was unbearable to him. I was thinking about an episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge on NPR last weekend, the topic of which was "Why Do We Love Sad Songs?" One segment concerned the supposedly saddest piece of music ever written, Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. The author of a book about that piece, Thomas Larson, explained how Barber wrote it during one of the happiest times of his life. An artist, he said, does not need to be in the same mood as the work he is creating. Rather, he needs to have access to that emotion--and that access might, in fact, depend on distance. In other words, if Barber had actually been that sad, he might not have been able to write that piece at that time. The reverse might be true of Wallace.

*Yes, I skimmed a lot of that. And some of the footnotes.


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Advertising, fiction, and Mad Men

So I recently figured out that people want the same thing from advertising as they do from fiction: an emotional experience. In advertising, that experience is designed to spur you to buy, or at least think favorably, about a product or service--which may or may not be an admirable goal. In fiction, that experience leads to ... what, exactly? If there's a purpose beyond giving the reader pleasure (and I don't think there needs to be), perhaps it's strengthening the reader's capacity for empathy. Some studies show fiction actually does do this, although it could still be a chicken-and-egg problem (maybe more empathic people tend to read more in the first place).

At any rate, at the heart of both successful fiction and successful advertising is people's hunger for emotional experience. Not just pure experience, though--it somehow needs to be at a remove, so that it's safe and understandable, as well as powerful. You want the experience plus the meaning, or the solution. Fulfill that hunger, and you've got yourself a happy reader, or a willing buyer.

All of this reminds me of a scene from the first season of Mad Men, which has always stuck with me. Here, Don Draper presents his campaign for the Kodak slide "wheel," which he has renamed the Carousel. I find this a tremendously moving, and telling, scene. It's layered by Don's own nostalgia for a childhood he never really had, and for a family that, even now, is not exactly his (because he cheats on his wife, and, as we begin discovering in this season, he's assumed another man's identity). His longing exists, as perhaps it does for all of us, because he can never have what he seeks: a true home, an ideal past. He can only have a substitute, or talisman--the slides, and the projector that lets him see them. But the scene is also powerful because it illustrates the genuine power of advertising. There may be something sinister or shallow in its motives--the bottom line is always shareholder value, and eventually the projector will end up in landfill, or, as in my family's case, in a box in the garage marked "SLIDE PROGECTOR." Yet the emotion the campaign generates, in Don and in us, is anything but false. And that's why we still, at least somewhat willingly, respond to ads and to fiction: we want this genuine experience, in any form we can get it.

A small accomplishment, overblown

I'm short on time and brainpower this week, so I'll just show you this picture--

--which is of me at Pt. Reyes, just before I free-climbed that rock wall in the background.

Yes, well. I didn't climb the part that's over the water. Also, the same feat was achieved by many others, including women notably older than me, children, and at least one small, fluffy dog.

Still.

How Sherlock Holmes enchants the world

I'm a little behind on my Hound reading, but fortunately I have a great link to keep that Sherlockian tingle going till next time. Via Andrew Sullivan, Michael Saler says that the deep appeal of the Holmes stories is a kind of enchantment--and not the usual kind, either. Holmes goes against the grain by making enchantment an effect of reason:

Unlike many contemporary scientists and logicians who disdained the imagination, Holmes brought reason and the imagination, logic and intuition, together in a new synthesis that he called “the scientific use of the imagination.” He made critical thinking into a romantic adventure. Through his discerning eye, every detail of modern life, from newspaper advertisements to the footsteps of a giant hound, became charged with meaning, possibility, and wonder.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the Holmes stories should be taught in every school in the land. Intellect and reason are the path to enchantment, not its enemies! Understanding, not ignorance, is the source of transcendent delight! Never mind that Conan Doyle himself got pretty woo-woo in his later life, when he fell for some "photos" of fairies that make the guy in the Bigfoot film look like Bigfoot. Perhaps Holmes is the unique product of a mind that craved magic, but couldn't (or wouldn't) yet accept its actual existence. So, like our best realist fiction writers, Holmes makes magic from the everyday.

Of dorm-room philosophizing

There's this scene in my new novel where some characters--adults well over 40--are discussing whether the color blue that you see is the same as the one I see. And then I come across this very same question (same color even) on some blog or other, and it's being mocked as a "dorm-room" conversation.*

So, wait...did that question get answered, and I missed it? Was I out getting coffee or something? Is it the same color? Or is this just too dumb of a question to bother with, now that we're out of the dorm? I get the impression that there are those who believe that asking these kinds of (so far) unanswerable questions is a sign of immaturity. College is the place where they are explored, and contained; they have no place in the real world.

Why not? Is it because after college, one is (and is supposed to be) preoccupied solely with practical concerns? Is ordinary life so fast and furious that contemplating unanswerable questions is really a waste of one's limited time? Maybe so. And maybe the "blue" question is not particularly interesting, although I kind of think it is. What concerns me is this brusque dismissal of an act of wondering. This notion that certain questions aren't appropriate for adults--and not because we have the answers now. It's just time to stop wondering and get on with it, whatever "it" is.

Personally I'd rather be in a dorm room than a cube.

*I can't find that blog, but here's this, about the "dorm-room" conversations in Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. In his book they may be meant as satire, and in my book, they aren't. Or at least I don't think so.

Vacant lots in Cleveland

There's a very interesting piece in today's New York Times about the vacant lots in Cleveland, my hometown. (OK, my hometown was actually a suburb, but I still identify, for better or worse, with the "metropolis.") Anyway, there are enough of these lots now to constitute an actual ecosystem, and naturalists are studying it.

The article and the photographs convey the sadness of the city's long, probably permanent decay. But you can also see the charm: the brick buildings, the old broad-leaf trees, the mugginess--not always awful--of the summer air.

Werner Herzog (again)

Missed my Tuesday blog post. Swamped. Fortunately The Millions has a great post up about Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and that wild, wacky, Herzogian method of magic. Enjoy...

Wind

Yesterday was windy.

Years ago I read a wonderful book called Wind: How the Flow of Air Has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land by Jan DeBlieu. Naturally I can't find my copy now, but from the Amazon review: "Jan DeBlieu lives on North Carolina's Outer Banks, where 'wind is culture and heritage... Wind toughens us, moves mountains of sand as we watch, makes it difficult to sleepwalk through life.'" At one point, I remember, she says that she feels strange in places that aren't windy like the Outer Banks--not just breezy, but what many would probably call blustery.

I thought of this yesterday, watching the giant redwood at the top of a hill in our neighborhood swirling its branches like some multi-fronded sea creature. My life is largely a still affair, with lots of sitting at desks and staring at words, which may create imagined movements in my head but don't engage in a whole lot of activity on their own. I sit in cars or planes and watch the world pass alongside or beneath me. I am not buffeted, except by psychological currents. In other words, I tend to think of wind as something wrong--as in, it was a beautiful day, but windy.

Wind is strange to me. The air, which normally I just walk through and don't notice, is coming after me, insisting I feel and respond to its presence, affecting the way I move. But why should this be bad? Sure, no one wants to get hit with a trash can lid or a falling tree limb while out on one's daily stroll, but apart from certain hazards, wind's strangeness--for the suburban knowledge-worker, anyway--is psychological. It's a reminder that things are changing all the time. And not just changing all around us, but within us and through us. We're one of those things the wind blows around.

Since I've been immersed in cosmology books lately, the wind also reminds me that we are always in motion, whether we feel it or not. The earth is turning and revolving around the sun; we (the earth, the sun, our solar system) are riding roller-coaster like around the galaxy; we (now expanded to include our galaxy and its compatriots) are shooting along to who-knows-where on the constantly expanding fabric of space-time. That's relativity for you.

I'm not as anchored as I think. Or, rather, I must think of being anchored differently.

No Day Without a Line (and at least one day without a screen)

While I was casting around for something to write about today, my eyes landed on a book that I've been using, completely fortuitously, to prop up my monitor: No Day Without a Line by Yuri Olesha.

As some of my former students know, Olesha is really my favorite author of all time. I may have raved on this blog about others who are far better known, like Dostoevsky and Melville, but Olesha really is the guy.* This Soviet-era author, born in 1899, was "young with the century," as he put it. He is best known for his 1927 novella Envy, a magical-realist encomium to, and take-down of, early Soviet-style materialist culture. You see the influence of H. G. Wells and Dostoevsky in the story, but at the same time, there's really nothing else quite like it. It's a Freudian/political fairy tale that employs some of the most vivid and memorable images I have ever come across.

Here's just one passage (from the NYRB edition, translated by Marian Schwartz):

I entertain myself with observations. Have you ever noticed that salt falls off the end of a knife without leaving a trace--the knife shines as if untouched; that pince-nez traverse the bridge of a nose like a bicycle; that man is surrounded by tiny inscriptions, a sprawling anthill of inscriptions: on forks, spoons, saucers, his pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils?

No Day Without a Line is a fragmentary memoir written, according to translator Judson Rosengrant, primarily during the six years before Olesha's death in 1960. In it, we see Olesha entertaining himself with observations--a pleasure which is also a serious discipline. Many of these observations are not direct, but in the form of childhood memories which Olesha observes meticulously. In fact it's childhood in the form of memory that makes these images so striking. They are not dry recollections of "what things were like back then," but brief, poetic addresses to sights Olesha saw and loved and knows he will never see again in this same way:

In Odessa we sailed on the sea in punts. These were large, heavy boats with a flat bottom and no keel--something on the order of a cart thrown into the sea without its wheels. They were crudely painted in red and blue and moved by means of huge, heavy oars secured to the oarlocks with a strength sufficient at least for tethering oxen. In the bottom of these boats there was always water--puddles in which rags, pieces of shrimp, or a bottle swam. The punt skimmed over the waves. There was something of the Greek myths about the appearance of these boats. Even now I remember, as if I'd only seen it yesterday, the brown pear-like calves of the fishermen as they ran behind a boat they were launching, in order to leap into it once it was afloat.

Those "pear-like calves" are pure Olesha: that unexpected comparison, often between food and a body part, which makes the comparison both memorable and slightly forbidden. There's a visceral, yet innocent attraction to the fishermen's calves that an "adult" mind would probably chase away--especially one in Olesha's place and time. (Envy is often read as a story of unrequited gay love.) But if we can learn not to banish such images, we can light up our own fiction with startling beauty. It sounds like a cliche, but this passage really makes me feel like I'm right there in Odessa in the early 20th century. That's an amazing feat of teleportation, and it works because we're traveling through a particular consciousness, rather than generic reportage.

All of this makes me worry more than ever that I--and possibly many of my fellow writers--are spending way, way too much time in front of screens. We are no longer entertaining ourselves with unmediated observations. We are not going down to the sea and watching fishermen get into boats; or if we do, we are too distracted, or cynical, or something, to just take it in. Maybe we are not taking the time to really remember--and color with memory--what we saw in childhood. There are too many layers between writing and experience. I certainly sense this in my own work; the screen is always there somehow, humming, inserting itself ever so subtly. Writing today may be more "knowing," but a lot of it doesn't seem nearly as fresh as Olesha's much older work.

Fortunately that problem is fixable, entirely free of charge. If I can just tear myself away from this computer.

*I did have the opportunity, some years ago, to rave about Olesha in Tin House. That obviously didn't get the raving out of my system.



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Ohio spring

I do miss some things about living in the Midwest. One is the approach of spring. Here in Northern California spring begins in, oh, December--as soon as it starts raining and the hills turn green. While we've had our bouts of cold rain, and the great Almost But Not Actual Snow of 2011, the flowers have been out for weeks. As a transplanted Midwesterner, I never feel I've earned these flowers.

Whereas in the Midwest, you do earn them. You savor spring's arrival. It comes on slowly at first. The air becomes gentler, less brittle. You see a crocus or two along the myrtle bed. Later some blue-eyed grass will appear between the bricks on the patio. You start skipping the down jacket in favor of a sweater and windbreaker; you find don't have to shovel the driveway or scrape off the car this morning. The days get just a little easier, and you know that the really lovely weather is still to come.

That said, I understand it has been snowing in Ohio.

The everlasting lightning storm in Venezuela

This is amazing. And a perfect setting for a (magical-realist) novel.

The Turn of the Screw: How to transform cliches into awesome new images

This week, Henry James teaches us a way to transform a totally hackneyed trope into something new and amazing. Ready? The secret is: be Henry James.

Sorry, that was discouraging. In fact, I think writing can be taught, even to those of us who aren't scions of brilliant, eccentric clans. Which is to say, I think in many cases, teaching means giving permission. Like everybody else, writers get stuck in ruts. Getting out of them is often simply a matter of showing us that something we thought couldn't be done, can be. Wait, it's OK to do that? Who knew?

In The Turn of the Screw, James gives us permission to depict that hoariest of literary tropes, silence, not as an absence, but a presence. Mind you, this could have turned out badly. He might have used a hack phrase like "palpable silence" to attempt to create that sense of presence. But he doesn't. Rather, you can almost imagine that he started with that phrase, and then decided to really examine what that feels like. As a result, when the apparition of Peter Quint manifests itself to the governess for a third time, we get this:

I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not—I found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease—for the time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I can't express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.

What's striking in the part I've bolded how the narrator herself is struck. She doesn't just say something like "the silence was heavy and thick," and go on to describe the way the figure turned. Instead, she tells us how she watched the silence become an "element" into which it's possible for a figure to disappear. She is still amazed by how she saw the figure turn into the silence. She doesn't--importantly, I think--compare the silence explicitly to something else, such as a fog or a curtain. She describes as best she can the astonishing visibility of the silence, but at the same time she can't be too precise, because this is such a singular experience. This isn't exactly like stepping into a fog: it's a unique sight, because silence is a unique "element"--made visible here for the first time.

So what can fiction writers learn from this? One, when you find yourself about to employ a cliche, ask yourself what about that cliche appeals to you. Rather than simply steering clear of it, you can really inhabit that cliche (palpable silence, burning rage, heavy sorrow, whatever) and imagine how it really feels. Two, and even better, translate it out of its usual sensory medium. Silence is an auditory experience usually, and perhaps tactile as well. James has made it something we can see. So maybe "heavy sorrow" could be something you could hear, or smell, or taste, rather than feel.

Over my head in Cantor dust

This is the sort of thing I've been trying to get my head around for my new novel. Below is information from Wikipedia on the Cantor set, which is also, rather more poetically, called the "Cantor Dust." (It may only be "dust" when it's in 3D.)

The Cantor ternary set is created by repeatedly deleting the open middle thirds of a set of line segments. One starts by deleting the open middle third (¹⁄₃, ²⁄₃) from the interval [0, 1], leaving two line segments: [0, ¹⁄₃] ∪ [²⁄₃, 1]. Next, the open middle third of each of these remaining segments is deleted, leaving four line segments: [0, ¹⁄₉] ∪ [²⁄₉, ¹⁄₃] ∪ [²⁄₃, ⁷⁄₉] ∪ [⁸⁄₉, 1]. This process is continued ad infinitum, where the nth set is

The Cantor ternary set contains all points in the interval [0, 1] that are not deleted at any step in this infinite process.

The first six steps of this process are illustrated below.

An explicit formula for the Cantor set is

The proof of the formula above is done by the idea of self-similarity transformations and can be found in detail.^[7][8]

Yeah, no, I can't read these equations at all. But the basic idea is that the set, as James Gleick explains in Chaos, "the points that remain are infinitely many, but their total length is infinitely small." That concept is the basis for fractal geometry; it's the infinitely large AND infinitely small concept that I am really interested in. Just look at the picture! It's amazing! The universe we live in!

But this is all just to say, I am in way over my head here. At some point I am going to need a real mathematician and/or physicist to read this thing. Also I'll need a psychiatrist, although you probably guessed that already. If you know anyone who'd like to help (probably a few months down the road), please email.

Brian Greene on Fresh Air

On Monday Terry Gross did a great interview with Brian Greene about parallel universes (the subject of his new book). You can listen and read an excerpt here. Apparently there's a difference between an infinite universe, and infinitely many universes. Both are possible.