Silent Love

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is one of Vladimir Nabokov’s most autobiographical novels and it has often been observed that Sebastian’s passionate affair with the femme fatale Nina Rechnoy is a dramatized extension of Nabokov’s infatuation with Irina Guadanini. In this book it is shown that the novel also conceals another, secluded, love affair Sebastian had with a man, which reflects the main episode in the life of Nabokov’s brother Sergey. By pursuing many biographical and literary references and allusions, and by disregarding the deceptive guiding by the narrator (Sebastian’s half-brother), this moving story about Sebastian’s silent love becomes brightly visible

Gladys Heldman and the Original Nine: The Visionaries Who Pioneered the Women\u27s Professional Tennis Circuit

The purpose of this study was to examine the events that led up to the formation of the women’s professional tennis circuit in the United States in 1970, and the political battles of the subsequent three years. Under the guidance of Gladys M. Heldman, the founder, editor and publisher of World Tennis magazine – the sport’s most influential publication at the time – nine women tennis players decided to leave the jurisdiction of the United States Lawn Tennis Association and form their own circuit. The women broke away from the USLTA in a dispute over the prize money distribution at tournaments, which was heavily weighted towards men players. In order to understand the climate in which these women decided to break away from the USLTA in 1970 form their own tour, this study gives a detailed history of the politics of tennis in the twentieth century, including an examination of how the USLTA controlled amateur tennis players, the practice of “shamateurism,” the growth of professional tennis tours since the late 1920s, and the forty-year battle for open tennis, which allowed amateurs and professionals to play in the same events

University of San Diego News Print Media Coverage 2009.03

Printed clippings housed in folders with a table of contents arranged by topic.https://digital.sandiego.edu/print-media/1074/thumbnail.jp

Xavier University Newswire

https://www.exhibit.xavier.edu/student_newspaper/3838/thumbnail.jp

Word upon World: Half a century of John Banville's Universes

There is a clear engagement with theories of time across Banville’s oeuvre, from his earliest published work through to the twenty-first-century novels. I explore how, in their engagement with age and ageing, Banville’s characters adopt and interrogate Albert Einstein’s and Henri Bergson’s competing ideas of the present and the passage of time, sliding from favouring the former to prioritising the latter. Martin Heidegger’s conception of Dasein, a Being-toward-death, allows me to explore how Banville’s characters evoke either Einstein’s spacetime and series of nows, or Bergson’s psychologised Duration (Durée). This is borne out in Gabriel Godkin’s subverted and anti-atavistic narrative in 'Birchwood' (1973), the battle over authenticity between Copernicus and Rheticus in 'Doctor Copernicus' (1976), and how Hermes controls the mortals’ time and tries his best to age in 'The Infinities' (2009). I conclude that Banville’s characters’ evolving preference for Bergsonian over Einsteinian tropes indicates an acceptance and happy engagement with the ageing process

A short solution to the many-player silent duel with arbitrary consolation prize

The classical constant-sum ‘silent duel’ game had two antagonistic marksmen walking towards each other. A more friendly formulation has two equally skilled marksmen approaching targets at which they may silently fire at distances of their own choice. The winner, who gets a unit prize, is the marksman who hits his target at the greatest distance; if both miss, they share the prize (each gets a ‘consolation prize’ of one half). In another formulation, if they both miss they each get zero. More generally we can consider more than two marksmen and an arbitrary consolation prize. This non-constant sum game may be interpreted as a research tournament where the entrant who successfully solves the hardest problem wins the prize. We consider only the ‘symmetric’ case where all players are identical (having the same probability of missing at a given distance), and for this case we give the first complete solution to the many-player problem with arbitrary consolation prize. Moreover our theorem includes both the zero and non-zero-sum cases (by taking particular values for the consolation prize), and has a relatively simple proof

The Advocate - Dec. 13, 1962

Original title (1951-1987)--The Advocate: official publication of the Archdiocese of Newark (N.J.)

To have done with theory? Baudrillard, or the literal confrontation with reality

Baudrillard, Eluding the temptation to reinterpret Jean Baudrillard once more, this work started from the ambition to consider his thought in its irreducibility, that is, in a radically literal way. Literalness is a recurring though overlooked term in Baudrillard’s oeuvre, and it is drawn from the direct concatenation of words in poetry or puns and other language games. It does not indicate a realist positivism but a principle that considers the metamorphoses and mutual alteration of things in their singularity without reducing them to a general equivalent (i.e. the meaning of words in a poem, which destroys its appearances). Reapplying the idea to Baudrillard and finding other singular routes through his “passwords” is a way to short-circuit its reductio ad realitatem and reaffirm its challenge to the hegemony of global integration. Even in the literature dedicated to it, this exercise has been rarer than the ‘hermeneutical’ one, where Baudrillard’s oeuvre was taken as a discourse to be interpreted and explained (finding an equivalent for its singularity). In plain polemic with any ideal of conformity between theory and reality (from which our present conformisms arguably derive, too), Baudrillard conceived thought not as something to be verified but as a series of hypotheses to be repeatedly radicalised – he often described it as a “spiral”, a form which challenges the codification of things, including its own. Coherent with this, the thesis does not consider Baudrillard’s work either a reflection or a prediction of reality but, instead, an out-and-out act, a precious singular object which, interrogated, ‘thinks’ us and our current events ‘back’. In the second part, Baudrillard’s hypotheses are taken further and measured in their capacity to challenge the reality of current events and phenomena. The thesis confronts the ‘hypocritical’ position of critical thinking, which accepts the present principle of reality. It questions the interminability of our condition, where death seems thinkable only as a senseless interruption of the apparatus. It also confronts the solidarity between orthodox and alternative realities of the COVID pandemic and the Ukrainian invasion, searching for what is irreducible to the perfect osmosis of “virtual and factual”. Drawing equally from the convulsions of globalisation and the psychopathologies of academics, from DeLillo’s fiction and Baudrillard’s lesser-studied influences, this study evaluates the irreversibility of our system against the increasingly silent challenges of radical thought. It looks for what an increasingly pessimistic late Baudrillard called ‘rogue singularities’: forms which, often outside the conventional realms one would expect to find them, constitute potential sources of the fragility of global power. ‘To have done with theory’ does not mean abandoning radical thought and, together with it, the singularity of humanity. It means, as the thesis concludes, the courage to leave conventional ideas of theory and listen to less audible voices which, at the heart of this “enormous conspiracy”, whisper — as a mysterious lady in Mariupol did to Putin — “It’s all not true! It’s all for show!”