Dylan on Nelson
Cowboy apparition, writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something. Voice like a warm porchlight left on for wanderers who kissed...
Categories
Literature
Berry - They Sit Together On The Porch
What each one knows the other knows.
Nemerov and Morrison
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
Cope - Differences of Opinion
The planet goes on being round.
Ashbery - Late Echo
It is necessary to write about the same old things in the same way, repeating the same things over and over again for love to continue and be gradually dif...
Nabokov - Pnin
It surprised him to realise how fond he had been of his teeth.
Meredith - The Illiterate
What would you call his feeling for the words that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
Heaney - Clearances and Postscript
You are neither here nor there, a hurry through which known and strange things pass…
St. Vincent Millay - Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)
Yet many a man is making friends with death even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
Glück - Reunion
And as he speaks, ah, tenderly he touches her forearm.
Brautigan - At the California Institute of Technology
I don’t care how God-damn smart these guys are…
Oliver - In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind
So, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath, as under a blanket, and keep warm…
Masefield - An Epilogue
So I trust, too.
Berry - A Meeting
I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees.
Keats - On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Plutarch - Parallel Lives: Gaius Marius
Tell him, then, that thou hast seen Gaius Marius, a fugitive, seated amid the ruins of Carthage.
Borges and Llull - Thinking Machines
On the combinatorics of discovery.
Borges and Rilke - Leopards
You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem.
Parker and Addonizio - Résumé
You might as well…
Akhmatova - Forgive Me
Like acrid smoke with lively flame.
Angelou - Come. And Be My Baby
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass.
Hughes - Tired
I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you?
Shakespeare - King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3
Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
Melville - Moby Dick, Ch. 93
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.
Borges - Death and the Compass
Possible, but not interesting.
Calvino - Invisible Cities
Without the stones there is no arch.
Physics
Group Actions and Infinitesimal Symmetries
Group actions on phase space.
Generators and Conserved Charges
Symmetries and conserved charges in the Hamiltonian formalism.
Contractions, Lie Derivatives, and Integration
Contracting forms and vector fields, Lie derivatives, integrating forms on submanifolds, and Stokes’ theorem.
Symplectic Geometry, Revisited
Rephrasing some earlier results, only this time geometrically.
Higher-Degree Forms and Exterior Derivatives
Forms of higher degree and the exterior derivative.
Manifolds, Vectors, and 1-Forms
Manifolds, vectors, 1-forms, and pullbacks/pushforwards.
Tensor Spaces and Commuting Actions
The permutation and general linear group have commuting actions on tensor spaces.
Representations of the Permutation Group
Constructing irreducible representations of the permutation group.
Partitions, Young Diagrams, and Tableaux
Keeping track of partitions and permutations.
The Landau Problem
Electrons in two dimensions and the Landau levels.
Three-Dimensional Oscillators, Revisited
Mixed representations of SU(3) using oscillators.
Is The Oscillator Formalism Complete?
Does the oscillator formalism for higher rank groups furnish all representations?
Symplectic Geometry
The geometry underlying classical mechanics.
The Oscillator Formalism: Higher Dimensions
Extending the oscillator formalism to unitary groups with higher rank.
Canonical Structures
Hamilton’s equations, the Poisson brackets, and canonical transformations.
The Action Principle
The principle of least action.
The Oscillator Formalism: Two Dimensions
Using a pair of harmonic oscillators to build up representations of SU(2).
The Noether Current for Electric-Magnetic Duality
Deriving the Noether current for electric-magnetic duality rotations.
Books
How Fiction Works (2008)
One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers… rich and daring pro...
Stoner (1965)
He read and studied, and at last came to find some comfort, some pleasure, and even a ghost of the old joy in that which he did, a learning toward no particu...
The Invention of Morel (1964)
The habits of our lives makes us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world.
Movies
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Directed by Alain Resnais.
La Gradiva (2026)
Directed by Marine Atlan.
After Hours (1985)
Directed by Martin Scorsese.
Yi Yi (2000)
Directed by Edward Yang.
The Invite (2026)
Directed by Olivia Wilde.
Commentary
Duminil-Copin on AI and Mathematics
First and foremost, it [a mathematical question] is a lighthouse in the night: it illuminates and guides mathematicians in their wanderings.
Sarnak and the AlphaZero Test
Mathematics is the understanding, and not the corpus of lemmas and theorems it illuminates.