Loss of trust as disconnection in John Updike’s Trust me.

While the title of John Updike’s short-story collection, Trust Me (1987), and the theme of betrayed trust of the first story (“Trust Me”) offer a thematic coherence to the collection, it would be restrictive to read the stories through the simple thematic filter of betrayed trust leading to weakened human attachments. Trust is given a wider articulation in the collection, that of a mode of connection for human beings to their world, their lives, and to others. The loss of trust for the protagonists in the stories, “The City” and “The Wallet,” is undergone as just such a loss of connection, engendering in both cases an existential disquiet. The article explores the nature of these existential crises, situating them within Updike’s wider deployment of the motif of the fall in his collection. The article goes on to consider the manner in which the existential theme of these two stories is informed by Updike’s own recurring existential unease, a reflection justified by the avowedly autobiographical dimension of his short fiction

Preface to the special issue on "recent developments and new directions in thin-film flow"

Thin films of fluids are of central importance in numerous industrial, biomedical, geophysical and domestic applications, and display a rich and varied range of behaviours, including pattern formation, dewetting, rupture and finite-time blow up. As well as being of great interest in their own right, thin-film flows provide a “test bed” for research into a variety of challenging nonlinear problems in engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. As a consequence, research by a wide range of scientists, using a variety of analytical, numerical and experimental techniques on many different aspects of thin-film flow, has grown significantly in recent years, as novel applications have continued to appear and increasingly sophisticated theoretical and experimental techniques have been developed

Pinning, de-pinning and re-pinning of a slowly varying rivulet

The solutions for the unidirectional flow of a thin rivulet with prescribed volume flux down an inclined planar substrate are used to describe the locally unidirectional flow of a rivulet with constant width (i.e. pinned contact lines) but slowly varying contact angle as well as the possible pinning and subsequent de-pinning of a rivulet with constant contact angle and the possible depinning and subsequent re-pinning of a rivulet with constant width as they flow in the azimuthal direction from the top to the bottom of a large horizontal cylinder. Despite being the same locally, the global behaviour of a rivulet with constant width can be very different from that of a rivulet with constant contact angle. In particular, while a rivulet with constant non-zero contact angle can always run from the top to the bottom of the cylinder, the behaviour of a rivulet with constant width depends on the value of the width. Specifically, while a narrow rivulet can run all the way from the top to the bottom of the cylinder, a wide rivulet can run from the top of the cylinder only to a critical azimuthal angle. The scenario in which the hitherto pinned contact lines of the rivulet de-pin at the critical azimuthal angle and the rivulet runs from the critical azimuthal angle to the bottom of the cylinder with zero contact angle but slowly varying width is discussed. The pinning and de-pinning of a rivulet with constant contact angle, and the corresponding situation involving the de-pinning and re-pinning of a rivulet with constant width at a non-zero contact angle which generalises the de-pinning at zero contact angle discussed earlier, are described. In the latter situation, the mass of fluid on the cylinder is found to be a monotonically increasing function of the constant width

Three-dimensional coating and rimming flow : a ring of fluid on a rotating horizontal cylinder

The steady three-dimensional flow of a thin, slowly varying ring of Newtonian fluid on either the outside or the inside of a uniformly rotating large horizontal cylinder is investigated. Specifically, we study “full-ring” solutions, corresponding to a ring of continuous, finite and non-zero thickness that extends all the way around the cylinder. In particular, it is found that there is a critical solution corresponding to either a critical load above which no full-ring solution exists (if the rotation speed is prescribed) or a critical rotation speed below which no full-ring solution exists (if the load is prescribed). We describe the behaviour of the critical solution and, in particular, show that the critical flux, the critical load, the critical semi-width and the critical ring profile are all increasing functions of the rotation speed. In the limit of small rotation speed, the critical flux is small and the critical ring is narrow and thin, leading to a small critical load. In the limit of large rotation speed, the critical flux is large and the critical ring is wide on the upper half of the cylinder and thick on the lower half of the cylinder, leading to a large critical load. We also describe the behaviour of the non-critical full-ring solution, and, in particular, show that the semi-width and the ring profile are increasing functions of the load but, in general, non-monotonic functions of the rotation speed. In the limit of large rotation speed, the ring approaches a limiting non-uniform shape, whereas in the limit of small load, the ring is narrow and thin with a uniform parabolic profile. Finally, we show that, while for most values of the rotation speed and the load the azimuthal velocity is in the same direction as the rotation of the cylinder, there is a region of parameter space close to the critical solution for sufficiently small rotation speed in which backflow occurs in a small region on the upward-moving side of the cylinder

Beckett's Molloy: As the story was told. Or not.

Narrative convention and exPectation lead us to conceive of Molloy's narrative as a chronologically consistent account of a single journey, the events of which -are causally, spatially lind temporally related to each other. Drawing -first upon the narration of the A and B episode, and then upon the evidence of the entire text, this article proposes that what Molloy relates is not, in fact, the story of a journey, nor of .!. journey, nor of a journey -to his mother, but is, rather, an achronic narrative organised according to the sylleptic theme of Molloy's permanent condition of journeying around the figure of his mother