Francine Prose's Blue Angel

 I like Blue Angel. 

Francine Prose is my unacknowledged muse. Born exactly a year after me, on April 1, 1947. Siri, my day younger twin, Francine (unknown to me, and Siri is not speaking) and I overlapped for a year in Cambridge, Mass. Much smarter, she graduated a year ahead of me. And then we everlapped in San Francisco , the same world, no intersection.

A very personal lesson I took from Blue Angel is that whenever a student is in my office, both of its doors stay wide open. 

Here is a good May 2010 review by late D. G. Myers:

"Few serious critics today would single out Francine Prose as the leading American novelist—if only because there are few serious critics today, and even fewer who read novels for enjoyment and news about the human mystery. [...] her novel belongs to the same tradition as William Golding’s, a tradition that originates with Gulliver’s Travels and passes through Heart of Darkness. [...] Provoked by the case of her friend Stephen Dobyns, a poet and novelist who was suspended from his job at Syracuse University after remarking upon a gra­duate student’s breasts, Prose creates a hero who is guilty of some­thing worse (sleeping with an under­graduate)." 

Goes on. It's really good.

Here is May 2000 Francine Prose explaining how the book was written, as she slowly realizes that Charlie Rose had not read the book. Given the chance to apologize, Swenson finds that he can­not. Blue Angel:

"he is not particularly sorry for having broken the rules of Euston College [...] He is extremely sorry for having spent twenty years of his one and only life, twenty years he will never get back, among people he can’t talk to, men and women to whom he can’t even tell the simple truth."

Here are a few snippets from other people that I mashed into a short summary:

"Blue Angel is about the complex relationship between a 47 years old hapless English professor Swenson and his student Angela, a pouty, punk-rock aspiring writer, a trouble with multiple piercings and tattoos, and Swenson is vulnerable to it. Her writing is way better than what he’s been reading. In fact, it’s better than what he’s been writing. We spend the whole novel inside Swenson’s head. A lifetime in creative writ­ing classrooms has left him defenseless against literary art. The joke is that the brilliant student is also a terrible writer-- the excerpts we read of her novel are cliches of goth/riot grrrl anomie, with the lurking menace and squalor and minimalism and repulsive/erotic imagery. No sooner has she gotten him in bed than the trouble begins.The rest of the novel, like a slowly ripping Band-Aid, chronicles the incrementally torturous demise of a good man’s life. The chick turns on him, his wife leaves, he takes to the bottle and loses his job, the chick gets a book deal, his editor tells him to give up fiction and write a memoir about substance abuse. The novel is about the truth - how hazy it becomes, how we become ensnared in the lies we tell ourselves and in the stories others tell us. How eventually, the truth can become so tangled there is no clear path out." 

There is a movie adaptation, Submission. Francine Prose says: "It's no longer for possible for a woman to say `Something happened' and be told `No, nothing happened'. I have not seen the movie - it's on Amazon. 

The title comes from a 1930 classic Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) (see it here) by Josef von Sternberg, the beginning of Marlene Dietrich’s rise to superstardom. Immanuel Rath, a gymnasium professor follows his students to the local cabaret, The Blue Angel. He becomes obsessed with headliner Lola Lola, played by Dietrich. This leads to his ruin and humiliation.

State of Mac - Phillipsović Report

The State of Mac is serious, irreversible and only downhill from here.
First, the numbers, as of January 29, 2025:

The platelets range from 28 to 46 to 64.  Normal range       140-400
White cells, 1.2,                                                Normal        3.7-11.1
Red cells 3.3 down to 2.76 in the last week,     Normal       4.1-5.7
Hemoglobin 8.9 down to 8.1 in half a week,    Normal       8.1-13.7,
        Below 8 Mac gets a transfusion of unit of blood, below 7, 2 or 3 units.

No hemoglobin means no oxygen distributed by blood, makes one weak and tired. Transfusions keeps him alive. His weekly pill box is amazing, has more pills than what I have consumed in my lifetime, so it's hard to figure out what is affecting what. Mac is in one chronic pain, followed by another. Chemo is brutal. He does not drink enough water, for so many poisons flowing through his body. Mac is depressed. But then, not really, as surrounded by love from all directions. 

[Guapo]

He's fighting the cancer. He is not ready to die. He is his lovely usual Mac self, kind and enjoying chatting and reminiscing.

[Chanda and Mac]

Over recent months (says Chanda) or over the past year (says Amani, The Boyfriend) Mac has gone downhill, and is wobbly, especially in the mornings. He's gone from the Michigan normal man size to the California normal men size by losing 50-60 lb, which makes him handsome, 

[Mac & Guapo, by Chanda]

but the muscle-tone is gone...

No white cells means that if Mac gets if an infection, any infection, he's in a very serious trouble. This being America that learned nothing from having 1/2 million Americans killed, millions crippled by pandemic and a bad government, everybody in the house except Mac navigates world outside as full, unmasked, unsanitized life.

Doctors do not know how long he will live.

Should you visit?

Chanda would love you to come and visit. Mac will firmly say no. He will say he is depressed much of the time, he has no strength to be a good host.

Ignore him. If you can just show up. Chanda is from the old country, where every guest is welcome, hosted and feasted. LisaBeth and Amani are the sweetest young folks you ever will meet. So, instead of brooding over Mac in his suspension bed, we were taken to very tasty Kampuchean, Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants, to a reggae festival, to a modern (post-)ballet performance, to a tour of Berkeley Hills.

[Guapo will love you]

Probably best to do what we did, find another place nearby to stay, to give the family space. We stayed at Hilton 10 min walk away,

[Hilton hotel room window]

[with beautiful San Francisco sunsets]

but that was needed as Sara can only walk short stretches, you can loan Mac's car and stay someplace else.

[map]

Now, there is one thing you should be aware of: out there, Guapo's arch enemy,

[The Turkey, lurking at the entrance door]

[The Turkey attacks]

is laying in wait, ready to attack Guapo's defender at any time: here he's rushing at me, nipping at my pants.

How I got my unpronouncable name?

(see also ChaosBook.blogspot.com/2010/10/whuz-yr-name.html )

Zu meinem Nachnamen: Der Name meines Adoptivvaters Cvitanović (Cvit = Blume, tanov = Sohn von, ić = Kleiner) ist ein verbreiteter kroatischer Bauern- und Fischername. Mein Name (Pre = zu viel, drag = wertvoll) stammt aus einem serbischen Epos über zwei Straßenräuber „Predrag und Nenad“, einer Nacherzählung der Geschichte von Kain und Abel. Nenad („unerwartet“, auch „Keine Hoffnung“) stammt von meinem kroatischen leiblichen Vater, der seine Studentenkollegin, die Tochter eines serbisch-orthodoxen Priesters, unerwartet schwängerte; das Ergebnis war mein älterer Halbbruder Nenad Belić. Daher wird der 2. Sohn „Predrag“ genannt. Die beiden Väter haben sich also verschworen, um meinen Namen für fast jeden auf der Welt unaussprechlich zu machen.

Der Familienname meiner Mutter, Golmajer (früher Gollmayer / Gollmayr geschrieben), macht mich zu einem Österreicher: Die Gollmayers waren Leibeigene, die von ihrem deutschen Herrn im frühen XVII Jahrhundert nach Slowenien gebracht wurden. Jahrhundert nach Slowenien gebracht wurden. Es gibt auch Ungarn in der Mischung, insbesondere die Familie Esterházy und auch General Josip Filipović, der die österreichisch-ungarische Besetzung von Bosnien und Herzegowina im Jahr 1878 leitete. Die Folgen kennen Sie.

[Übersetzt mit DeepL.com]

About my surname: my adoptive father's name Cvitanović (Cvit = flower, tanov = son of, ić = little one) is a common Croatian peasant and fisherman name. My name (Pre= too much, drag=precious) comes from a Serbian epic about two highway robber men "Predrag and Nenad", a retelling of the Cain and Abel story. Nenad ("unexpected", also "No hope") comes from my Croatian biological father, who got his university student colleague, daughter of a Serbian orthodox priest, unexpectedly pregnant, result being my older half-brother Nenad Belić. Hence the 2nd son gets to be "Predrag". Thus the two fathers conspired to make my name unpronounceable to almost anybody on the planet.

My mother's family name Golmajer (previously spelled Gollmayer / Gollmayr) makes me Austrian: Gollmayers were serfs, brought to Slovenia by their German lord in early XVII century. There are also Hungarians in the mix, in particular, the family Esterházy, and also general Josip Filipović who led the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878. The consequences you know.

Children of professsors are not like us

 

S and I went to Hopfield's Nobel Lecture 

 

 

 (very good, but do not waste one minute on Jumper's lecture) and talked about you, children of professors vs. our own expectations as scientists. A lover from graduate days at Cornell, which I was madly in love with, had been introduced to me as a "daughter of a Cornell professor", a bit of information that seemed irrelevant  - nobody ever brought up professions of parents of other friends I had.  But maybe you guys are not like us, civilians.

Hopfield's was a child of two physics professors, and already in his teen years was pondering what would be important problems, meaning Nobel Prize level important.

I was raised as an often hungry child of a single mother in two-rooms 5th floor walk-up of what used to be the kitchen and the maid's room of a what originally was large apartment owned by a Jewish family that vanished under Nazi occupation, and I am still - honestly, really! - amazed that I have job that gives me freedom to sit and think about what I love to think about, and nevertheless a paycheck magically appears on my bank account most months of the year. A thought that I should think about important problems never crossed my mind.

The same with S. She was perfectly happy teaching evening adult physics classes at U of * - she started that at age 16 not to have to ask her father for any money, and hanging out with other physics nerds, until one evening when she was told to flee the country or otherwise be  disappeared the next day by fascist thugs. Kind colleagues at U of * made it possible for her and her husband to enroll into the graduate program in the weird barbarian north. Once she understood that her adviser was an ignorant fool, she did whatever seemed interesting. The thought that what she worked on should be important never entered the considerations. 

But you guys (and I have crossed paths with many, statistics of fessors begetting fessors being what it is) seemed to belong here, starting age three.

I apologize if I am off the mark, as - beyond knowing you professionally, I know nothing.

This thing -being Central European "intellectual"- I did get from growing up in a home at all hours filled with equally semi-hungry poets, sculptors, art historians, writers constantly arguing, with conflicting views on things they were blissfully ignorant about.  They made me who I am, I fled them for math and physics, where things were either true or false.

The History of Byzantium

 

I'm back to where I was in November 2016. Now (and then) I've deleted my account in the fascist cesspool of X, and my Washington Post subscription. On YouTube I only watch my moron physics colleagues pine that the Nobel Prize in Physics was this year given to computer programmers. This, after they had given one to that weatherman Parisi.

The only podcast I listen to is "The History of Byzantium" . He is now at the year 1328, with episode 311. Only 125 years to go. They are typically 25 min each, my ride back or to work. But I've forgotten everything I had learned back in November of 2016,  so I'm restarting with the prelude to the year 476 episodes.

Other than that, inspired by certain Vattay's contribution to ChaosBook.org, I have discovered that the PhD theses of certain Artuso and Aurell are wrong in a subtle way (see p. 42 here, or listen to yet another bombastic video here). I do not know how to have these faulty PhD titles revoked, so I'm forced to labor alone on the correct theory . It would be fun to do this together, but all of the above have tenure, so... (see Not-Jamie Dimon's conjectures here).

As long as they do not come for me, I'll be OK.

Alberto Martínez "Beyond 1905: Einstein's Light, Love, and Lies"

(Alberto Martínez gave us a fascinating history of science lecture with above title)

Liebe Albert(o)

I think your combination of human miseries of young Einstein and what really took to get to relativity is just wonderful. Thanks for a great lecture!

I bow my head in shame. In spite of being friends with Abraham Pais and Engelbert Schuking, I knew nothing of what you taught us. I teach relativity like a late 20th century barbarian, as a triviality, first teach them SO(n) and then SO(4)=SU(2) x SU(2), then confuse them a bit with SO(1,3) and spinors. Done.
Life is even easier for Dr. Zangwill whose happy life never required learning any gruppenpest. He takes time to be pure imaginary. Done. Legitimized by real menschen, Pauli and t'Hooft.

I think why someone like Bram Pais would not bother including into a scientific biography of Einstein his "Die Leiden des jungen Alberts" sexual triumphs, pregnancies and miseries, as they were standard for any educated bourgeois male of late 19th, early 20th century. Bram's own biography would be like that - who saved him from Nazis and Dutch collaborators through the 2nd WW? And this misery might be standard again, if our crypto-fascist christian ayatollah succeed returning this country to pre-French Revolution feudalism.

A book that might be helpful in capturing the zeitgeist of pre-Nazi takeover Mittel Europa / central Europe is Margaret MacMillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. I recommend it as a true Oyropeen intellectual (AKA, I have not yet read it myself): YouTube.com/watch?v=T7iXNZJsa6s&t=4s.

Regarding our conversation about Einsteins human rights activism in 1931: Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann sent a letter to the International League for Human Rights in Paris to protest the murder of Milan Šufflay, appealing for protection of Croatian people from the oppression of Yugoslav regime.

New York Times.com 1931/05/06 article

A series of such high profile political assassinations, as well as murders of ordinary Croats, eventually led to horrific, Hitler-Mussolini sponsored civil war, a war within the 2nd World War, and then to the second, post-communist 1991-1995 war, a preview of the current Russian assault on Ukraine.

How you can do all this  without speaking German of Goethe, Heine and Kafka is beyond my ken. Should I mention that young Šufflay spoke French, German, Italian, English, all the Slavic languages, as well as Latin, old Greek, and middle Greek? Before his assassination by Serbian police, he had also learned modern Greek, Albanian, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. 

Fortunately, with AS (Artificial Stupidity) no one will ever have to waste time on learning a foreign language again. Or learning anything at all 🙂

 

"This is not physics!" or "Why did the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics go to two computer scientists"

Wonderful prize! I totally agree with the choice and reasoning for the choice.

 

My "fundamental" physics colleagues (particle physics, general relativity, strings, ...) have been more idiotic than usual. 

The funniest thing is the chorus of particle  physicists and such,   croaking

  "That's not physics!"

Sabine Hossenfelder is under impression that Hopfield is a computer scientist:)  But what for did he get the Buckley Prize, the Dirac Medal, the Boltzmann prize, was a President of APS, what for, then? Couldn't they, like, check the wiki before dismissing as prominent a physicist as Hopfield for the sin of having opened a new path forward?

 

October 18th klogW (APS GSNP and GDS) virtual seminar on the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics is excellent, especially in emphasizing the importance of this work for the development of contemporary computational neuroscience (not Large Language Models). About minute 43 into the video, Sara A. Solla tells the story of Hopfield 's 1983 APS March Meeting plenary talk, and how the work was received by Hopfield 's colleagues:

  "Very interesting. But. It's not physics, is it?"

 

There are some well based considerations about who should have also been included. I've been told Daniel Amit, but he had already committed suicide. Some people think Amari:

 

F writes: Amari in 1977 introduced the Hebbian learning and thus the 1982 Hopfield Network. Go figure what's going on! There are similar issues with the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The wife of one of the Nobel laureates is the first author, along with her husband, on the key paper that led to him receiving the prize.  

For this, the required viewing is The Wife, with Glenn Close. Amazing movie. Especially for me, as S is taking me to the Nobel festivities in Stockholm as her spouse. Though, she did all her work with no interference from me 🙂.

S had been Amari's guest at RIKEN, and has fun stories to tell about what is it to be a famed physicist visitor from Bell Labs (while visiting as a woman 🙂)

Shun-ichi Amari is universally respected, cited by Hopfield in The Paper, and I am not  aware of any contentious Nobel Prize priority claims from him.

Benny Lautrup: Så megen venlighed 1953

 Bennys erindringer: 

"Min mor gled i en hundelort på Vesterbrogade i København, da min far tilfældigvis kom gående forbi. Han hjalp hende op, og derfor er jeg."

Fra yumpu.com - fra Benny's nbi.dk konto
Benny Lautrup - populære artikler, anmeldelser og foredrag
bibliotek.dk articles - da.wiki

Benny died age 85, on January 3, 2025. Alzheimer was the cause.
NBIA obituary

Birthe: "Benny har de sidste måneder oplevet alvorlige skred i sin sygdom. Og især inden for de sidste to uger er det gået drastisk ned ad bakke, hvor han så yderligere pådrog sig en lungebetændelse, mistede sin bedste ven på plejehjemmet, og holdt op med at spise og indtage væske. I formiddags kl. 11 døde han fredfyldt, efter jeg og hans drenge havde haft to vågenætter hos ham. Hvor meget jeg end vil savne ham, er jeg glad for, han nu har fået ro, for han var så stærkt svækket af sin sygdom, at livskvaliteten var forsvundet.

Han holdt meget af dig, og så ofte på jeres fælles 2005 billede."

Translated with DeepL.com :

In recent months, Benny has experienced serious slips in his illness. Especially in the last two weeks, he went drastically downhill, contracting pneumonia, losing his best friend at the nursing home, and stopping eating and drinking.

This morning at 11am, he died peacefully after his boys and I had spent two nights awake with him. As much as I will miss him, I am glad that he is now at peace, because he was so weakened by his illness that the quality of his life had disappeared.

He loved you very much and often looked at your picture together.

Søren Brunak: Mindeord for fysikprofessor Benny Lautrup       25. februar, 2025

Benny was one of the institute's most colorful employees, a formidable researcher, teacher and public debater.

Against all odds, a boy born to a single mother in Istedgade, he became a trailblazer and in 1965 earned a master's degree from the country's most prestigious academic institution, the Niels Bohr Institute. His career took him to the US  Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and later to CERN in Geneva and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifique. In 1974 he returned to the Niels Bohr Institute as an associate professor of theoretical physics and later used his supercomputing skills to research artificial neural networks and contributed his physics toolbox to the development of artificial intelligence.

However, Benny came home to a Denmark in crisis, and this also applied to universities. It was a time when people were very stingy about promoting associate professors to professors. Despite the fact that people could be professors, associate professors had to take lessons in chair dancing to be able to boast about the professional level they had reached. At one point, there was an official announcement from the management that lecturers could call themselves “professors abroad”. Associate Professor Lautrup, who had an international background, found this ridiculous and started answering phone calls by saying “It's Benny Lautrup, professor abroad”.

He was not shy about criticizing the system - or his colleagues for that matter. In 1975, after Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, the idea arose that the institute's old tandem accelerator (which can accelerate charged particles) should be replaced with a new version at a cost in the three-digit millions.

The new machine would advance the institute's research in nuclear physics. Benny's view was that the investment would be backward-looking and that it would be much more offensive to boost other under-funded areas of the time, such as high-energy physics and complex systems physics.

Benny's critical outspokenness led to him being invited for a stroll in Bernstorffsparken, where Aage Bohr tried to convince him of the merits of the plan. Aage had been so eager in his argument that he forgot to look where he was going and inadvertently stepped on an elderly lady's small dog. It howled wildly - after which the lady called the Nobel laureate a boor. Benny was later amused by how an associate professor and an elderly lady in a park had jointly tried to resist a tandem accelerator. 

Benny was hard to mess with. I thought of him recently when I heard about the death of DR journalist Jens Olaf Jersild. In connection with the publication of Benny's and my joint book Neural Networks - Computers with Intuition in 1988, Jersild interviewed us on TV Avisen.

Benny demonstrated our artificial neural network, which was trained to find syllables in Danish words and insert hypen-dashes in the right places in the words. A hyphenation problem had arisen in the newspapers when they had fired the language-competent typographers and left the task to stupid computers. The result was quite comical mistakes.

Jens Olaf Jersild asked Benny to type the words “kvalitetsfjernsyn” and “Kvægtorvet” into the program on the screen, and the correct answers came back immediately. Jens Olaf Jersild suggested that the latter was the opposite of the former, but Benny stuck to the science and didn't get involved in the TV host's little vendetta against the newly launched competing channel TV2, which was based at Kvægtorvet.

We were very proud that our network split both the words grill-bar and jazz-festival correctly, even though it had never before seen a single example of a word with a double consonant where word sharing was not allowed. Benny's sense of language was close to reality and life, which could otherwise slip into the background in all the physics theory, which he also mastered sublimely.

Ironically, the American physicist John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for his neural network model, which we described in detail in the book.

Benny was a very charming man who was not uninterested in women. He had the advantage in city life that, due to his upbringing in Vesterbro, he rarely drank alcohol in large quantities. He was therefore able to stay attractive throughout the evening when the competition had long since gone under the table.

He had three lovely children, each with their own mother. Very surprisingly and fortunately, what physicists call a “phase transition” occurred in the middle of his life: He met Birthe, and the city life was exchanged for a quieter life with a cottage on Falster and flowers in a vase.

It was his fortune that Birthe and his children gathered around him for 30 years. The circle of friends was large, and Benny's funeral was, in Bent Fabricius Bjerre's words, “a success”: A packed church and a wake where people stood like herring in a barrel.