1,441 research outputs found
Sappho: Fragments
In Sappho, Jonathan Goldberg takes as his model the fragmentary state in which this sublime poet’s writing survives, a set of compositional and theoretical resources for living and thinking in more fully erotic ways in the present and the future. This book thus offers fragmentary commentary on disparate (Sapphic) works, such as the comics of Alison Bechdel, the paintings and cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Reid-Pharr’s “Living as a Lesbian,” Madeleine de Scudéry’s Histoire de Sapho, John Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis,” Todd Haynes and Patricia Highsmith’s Carol, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, writings by Willa Cather, and the paintings and writings of Simeon Solomon, among other works. Goldberg challenges readers to imagine and experience what Sarah Orne Jewett named the “country of our friendship,” a love both exceedingly strange and compellingly familiar. Just as Sappho’s coinage “bitter-sweet” describes eros as inextricably contradictory — two things at once, one thing after another, each interrupting, complicating, each other — the juxtapositions in this book mean to continually call into question categories of identity and identification in the wake of a quintessential woman writer from Lesbos. Over and over again, Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments inquires into how race, sexuality, and gender cross each other. The theoretical genius of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick presides over this set of meditations and mediations on likeness and desire. Rather than homogenizing its many subjects, it invites the reader to explore and inhabit new transits within and through what Audre Lorde called “the very house of difference.
Solutions of Penrose's Equation
The computational use of Killing potentials which satisfy Penrose's equation
is discussed. Penrose's equation is presented as a conformal Killing-Yano
equation and the class of possible solutions is analyzed. It is shown that
solutions exist in spacetimes of Petrov type O, D or N. In the particular case
of the Kerr background, it is shown that there can be no Killing potential for
the axial Killing vector.Comment: To appear in J. Math. Phy
Particle Physics on Ice: Constraints on Neutrino Interactions Far Above the Weak Scale
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos probe energies far above the weak
scale. Their usefulness might appear to be limited by astrophysical
uncertainties; however, by simultaneously considering up- and down-going
events, one may disentangle particle physics from astrophysics. We show that
present data from the AMANDA experiment in the South Pole ice already imply an
upper bound on neutrino cross sections at energy scales that will likely never
be probed at man-made accelerators. The existing data also place an upper limit
on the neutrino flux valid for any neutrino cross section. In the future,
similar analyses of IceCube data will constrain neutrino properties and fluxes
at the O(10%) level.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, published versio
- …