Charmed Particles (Book acquired a few weeks back)

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Chrissy Kolaya’s novel Charmed Particles is forthcoming this fall from Dzanc. Their blurb:

Rural Nicolet, Illinois, is a city anchored between two opposing forces, a living history museum and a laboratory for experiments in high-energy particle physics. When the proposal to build a Superconducting Super Collider under the town sparks debate between the scientists and the locals, two families find themselves on opposite sides of the controversy that fractures the community, exposing deep cultural rifts between longtime friends.

Abhijat, a theoretical physicist from India now working at the National Accelerator Research Laboratory, has a sole obsession: the charm quark, a revolutionary particle and his springboard to international recognition. The search for answers to abstract questions blinds him to the burgeoning distance between him and his wife and daughter. Across town, Rose Winchester strives to raise her precocious daughter Lily, stitching together an unconventional marriage from the brief visits and astounding letters of her husband Randolph, the last great gentleman explorer.

Charmed Particles traces the collision of past and progress, science and tradition, and the unimagined elements that may arise in the aftermath.

Name a Hemingway story that doesn’t have a priest, a plumber and a picnic — Roman Muradov

Roman Muradov

“A Mistaken Identity” — Lord Dunsany

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Detail from Crivelli’s Annunciation

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RIP E.L. Doctorow

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RIP E.L. Doctorow, 1931-2015

Ragtime–-what a book. Up there with the best of the metafictionists, if also different, to its credit. I dug The March too, even though historical fiction isn’t my bag. Read “Wakefield,” Doctorow’s recasting of Hawthorne’s classic tale. First paragraph:

People will say that I left my wife and I suppose, as a factual matter, I did, but where was the intentionality? I had no thought of deserting her. It was a series of odd circumstances that put me in the garage attic with all the junk furniture and the raccoon droppings—which is how I began to leave her, all unknowing, of course—whereas I could have walked in the door as I had done every evening after work in the fourteen years and two children of our marriage. Diana would think of her last sight of me, that same morning, when she pulled up to the station and slammed on the brakes, and I got out of the car and, before closing the door, leaned in with a cryptic smile to say goodbye—she would think that I had left her from that moment. In fact, I was ready to let bygones be bygones and, in another fact, I came home the very same evening with every expectation of entering the house that I, we, had bought for the raising of our children. And, to be absolutely honest, I remember I was feeling that kind of blood stir you get in anticipation of sex, because marital arguments had that effect on me.

“Montparnasse” — Ernest Hemingway

Detail from Crivelli’s Annunciation

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Phoenix — Katsushika Hokusai

Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story (Georges Perec)

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From “The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” collected in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. English translation by John Surrock.

Detail from Crivelli’s Annunciation

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Double Portrait of the Twins Clara and Albert de Bray — Salomon de Bray

Twins

Five from Félix Fénéon

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Pandora — Agostino Carracci

Detail from Crivelli’s Annunciation

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Sunday, 19 July, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life (Kafka)

Sunday, 19 July, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life. When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects. I was not, as a matter of fact, educated in any out-of-the-way place, in a ruin, say, in the mountains – something against which in fact I could not have brought myself to say a word of reproach. In spite of the risk of all my former teachers not understanding this, I should prefer most of all to have been such a little dweller in the ruins, burnt by the sun which would have shone for me there on the tepid ivy between the remains on every side; even though I might have been weak at first under the pressure of my good qualities, which would have grown tall in me with the might of weeds.

From Franz Kafka’s July 19th, 1920 diary entry. From The Diaries of Franz Kafka. Translated from the German by Joseph Kresh.

The Bus — Paul Kirchner

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