Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, is a murder mystery novel following the adventures of main character Blue van Meer. Daughter of a traveling professor, she spends most of her life on the road, a modern day nomad. She and her father settle in each location only for a semester of schooling, and then uproot and drive to the next location, all the while giving Blue a first rate ‘on-the-road’ education.
The story begins when she and her father settle down for her entire senior year of high school, and much of the book documents her exploits as she tries to fit in with the students there, and for the first time, makes some friends. The curious nature and subsequent death of friend/teacher Hanna Schneider during a non-school camping trip sparks the main plot of the story. Blue must overcome a tangled web of deception and apparent coincidence as she attempts to unravel the death of this teacher, and, ultimately, the disappearance of her father.
I am not normally a fan of murder mysteries, and certainly would never read this book on my own if not for this class. However, I found it brilliantly written and constructed, aside from a few points in the immediate beginning of the book. The authors dense, never-ending forest of metaphors and references make for an intellectually stimulating (and challenging) read. It also adds a curious new aspect to the diction that I have yet to see anywhere else: each person reads the book slightly differently. As it is neigh on impossible to be familiar with every single reference in the story (some of them are made up, for instance…), each person will relate to the book in different ways with different background knowledge. Excerpts that made me chuckle with underlying humor seemed to make no sense to some of my classmates, telling me that they were unaware of what Pessl was referring to in the text.
Overall: a solid read, and something I’m glad I was made to look into.
4.30.2007
Colonal Kurtz (Final)
Colonel Kurtz is a character in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Coppola. He plays the part of an American colonel in the Vietnam War, driven insane by combat to the point that he has gone AWOL and taken command of a group of natives. These native people worship him and fight under him so vehemently that the American and Vietcong forces will not go near his "territory".
In the movie, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is ordered to take down Kurtz by any means necessary. The story follows his trek through Vietnam, as the conflict grows more and more out of hand the farther into the jungle he goes. At the front lines, leadership is almost nonexistent, and battle between forces is chaotic at best. Graphic scenes of war and a few sub-plot elements ensue during his journey, but eventually he reaches the fortress Kurtz has established.
Willard is soon taken captive and his team killed. Kurtz tells him his story of how he became involved in the war, and his steady decline into madness, which he describes as a loss of self-control to the point where he believes that senseless killing and brutality is the only way to win the war. Willard realizes that Kurtz wants to be killed, because he cannot control his own madness. In the end, Willard kills Kurtz with a machete, and the native forces try to take Willard as their new leader, but he refuses and leaves, which signals the end of the film.
War in general is a great interest of mine, and I spend much of my free time watching films and reading books on the subject. Apocalypse Now is an extremely dramatisized film, but at some points it very much shows the mindset and the environment of Vietnam during the war. I hadn’t seen the film before reading Calamity Physics, but watched it after I did the original post on the character of Kurtz, and liked it. The fictional mind of Colonel Kurtz is an exaggerated but acceptable view of what the rigors of jungle warfare are capable of doing to the human psyche.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Kurtz
War in general is a great interest of mine, and I spend much of my free time watching films and reading books on the subject. Apocalypse Now is an extremely dramatisized film, but at some points it very much shows the mindset and the environment of Vietnam during the war. I hadn’t seen the film before reading Calamity Physics, but watched it after I did the original post on the character of Kurtz, and liked it. The fictional mind of Colonel Kurtz is an exaggerated but acceptable view of what the rigors of jungle warfare are capable of doing to the human psyche.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Kurtz
Carl Jung (Final)
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Carl believed that too much of the field of psychology was based on logic, and that much could be learned through the study of dreams, art, philosophy and religion. His work was spread wide, as he studied fields from astrology to alchemy to literature.
Jung proposed many completely original concepts over the course of his studies, including but not limited to The Archetype, The Complex, The Collective Unconscious, and Synchronicity.
While working with Freud early in his career, he became fascinated with the unconscious human mind, and devoted his life's work to discovering its secrets.
Jung introduced many parts of the human unconscious not yet brought out into light. The Individuation is a person's gradual journey towards identifying him or herself. This process is what generally causes the "mid-life crisis" halfway through an adult's life, as they begin to understand long hidden desires and fear wasting the second half of their lifespan.
His Idea of the Anima and Animus within the human psyche was also a first in psychology. The anima is the female component of a male's mind, and the animus is the male component of a female's mind. People not in touch with their anima or animus may seem overly masculine or feminine, off balance from the social norm. Repression of one's Anima/us will result in this part of the human brain attempting to gain attention by manifesting itself in how that person sees others.
Another of his psychological discoveries is the idea of The Shadow. The Shadow of a human mind is the part of each person that we choose not to acknowledge and is general the exact opposite of how that person portrays him or herself. The shadow of a kind man will be overly cruel, and vice versa. It also works with one's mental projection of ones self, as a person convinced that they are beautiful will have a hidden, ugly shadow beneath. Jung’s further work involves the exploration of different psychological typed of people, including investigation of the introvert versus the extrovert. He also proposed spirituality as a cure for alcoholism. Connections in his life to the Nazi party overshadowed his work during the years of the war and after, though he was never proven to be part of the Nazi movement, he did write in favor of Hitler's book Mein Kampf, and he served as the president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, a Nazi dominated organization.
Carl Jung was not only a giant in the field of Psychiatry; he invented a lot of it. Because of this, he is a highly interesting figure to me, as the study of the human mind and human social interaction is something I take great interest in.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_jung
Jung proposed many completely original concepts over the course of his studies, including but not limited to The Archetype, The Complex, The Collective Unconscious, and Synchronicity.
While working with Freud early in his career, he became fascinated with the unconscious human mind, and devoted his life's work to discovering its secrets.
Jung introduced many parts of the human unconscious not yet brought out into light. The Individuation is a person's gradual journey towards identifying him or herself. This process is what generally causes the "mid-life crisis" halfway through an adult's life, as they begin to understand long hidden desires and fear wasting the second half of their lifespan.
His Idea of the Anima and Animus within the human psyche was also a first in psychology. The anima is the female component of a male's mind, and the animus is the male component of a female's mind. People not in touch with their anima or animus may seem overly masculine or feminine, off balance from the social norm. Repression of one's Anima/us will result in this part of the human brain attempting to gain attention by manifesting itself in how that person sees others.
Another of his psychological discoveries is the idea of The Shadow. The Shadow of a human mind is the part of each person that we choose not to acknowledge and is general the exact opposite of how that person portrays him or herself. The shadow of a kind man will be overly cruel, and vice versa. It also works with one's mental projection of ones self, as a person convinced that they are beautiful will have a hidden, ugly shadow beneath. Jung’s further work involves the exploration of different psychological typed of people, including investigation of the introvert versus the extrovert. He also proposed spirituality as a cure for alcoholism. Connections in his life to the Nazi party overshadowed his work during the years of the war and after, though he was never proven to be part of the Nazi movement, he did write in favor of Hitler's book Mein Kampf, and he served as the president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, a Nazi dominated organization.
Carl Jung was not only a giant in the field of Psychiatry; he invented a lot of it. Because of this, he is a highly interesting figure to me, as the study of the human mind and human social interaction is something I take great interest in.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_jung
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