A red lever-arch folder, well-loved and battered, sits near me in my office. Throughout my adult life, it has teetered on shelves in various homes, my university dissertation about the women in TS Eliot’s best-known poem, The Waste Land, lying inside – women whose voices felt urgent to me then and still do today.
First published 100 years ago this month in literary journal the Criterion, Eliot’s 434-line poem was instantly notorious. It mixed fragments of languages, religions, references from ancient poems, books, plays, opera and music hall, passages of eloquent speech and scraps of everyday conversations. It translated the restless energy of art movements such as cubism and futurism into vivid words and sounds, uprooting the possibilities of what poetry could be.
The simplest questions in the philosophy of mathematics point to profound issues: why is 1+1 = 2? Why does the statement “1+1 = 2” feel so very different from a statement like “it rained yesterday”? For that matter, what do we even mean by “1”, “2”, …? Does “1” exist? If so, how, and where? These questions have been available to philosophers for as long as mathematics has been practiced. They are, as so many of the questions of philosophy, very general and very difficult to answer – to make real sense of statements like “1+1 = 2”, it seems one needs a lot of philosophical machinery, as was the case with pre-modern forays into the philosophy of mathematics. From Plato, to Leibniz, to Kant, the answers to the questions above led to and formed part of a greater system: the philosophy of mathematics.
But could we actually build an arcology? The size of such a structure would require massive foundations in order to support its weight. "You can build almost anything within reason," says structural engineer Monika Anszperger of BSP Consulting. "The loadings would be massive, but nothing is unachievable. It will just cost more to build the foundations for it."
I'm really into horror, whether it's books or films. At age 12 my girlfriends were living by Judy Blume, but I was reading Stephen King thrillers for the second time.
The first time I got detention in high school was for reading Clive Barker's The Damnation Game instead of the assigned book. I thought I was slick too, sliding my newest horror book into my looseleaf notebook. I was so engrossed that I gasped in the middle of class, much to the dismay of my classmates and teacher. It was sort of hilarious. He took my book and handed me detention. I learned that he was a horror fan, and we chatted about our favorite authors. He ended up reading my book during detention and thanked me for turning him on to someone new.
But who doesn’t want to finish a book over the course of a weekend?
For those of you who do, the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s beautiful new novella, “Foster,” is no less likely to move you than any heaping 400-page tome you’ll read this year.
Kath Kenny is an essayist, arts reviewer and researcher whose book, Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram, provides a detailed exploration of the cultural revolution of the 1970s. By focusing on theatre as a thinking medium, Kenny explores the ways in which women’s liberation changed the setting of the world’s stage.