August 17, 2006

  • Special Topics

    From a review by Liesl Schillinger in the Aug. 13 New York Times of a new novel by Marisha Pessl:

    "... Special Topics in Calamity Physics
    tells the story of a wise newcomer who joins a circle of students who
    orbit a charismatic teacher with a tragic secret. The newcomer, a
    motherless waif named Blue van Meer, spent most of her life driving
    between college towns with her genius poli-sci professor father,
    Gareth....  Gareth is fond of making oracular statements, which
    his daughter laps up as if they were Churchill's: 'Everyone is
    responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,' he
    tells her. And, he cautions, 'never try to change the narrative
    structure of someone else's story.'

    .... Heeding Gareth van
    Meer's dictum that the most page-turning read known to man is the
    collegiate curriculum, with its 'celestial, sweet set of instructions,
    culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam,' Pessl structures
    Blue's mystery like a kind of Great Books class.... A professor is
    all-powerful, Gareth liked to tell his daughter, he puts 'a veritable
    frame around life,' and 'organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions
    it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism,
    imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation,
    Midterms. All that order-- simply divine.' Blue's syllabus also
    includes a murder or two. Her book's last pages are a final exam. You
    will be relieved to learn it is mostly multiple choice, and there is no
    time limit."

    Multiple choice:
    The examination below, taken from a page by a scholar at a Jesuit university, is on the Borges story "The Garden of Forking Paths"-- a classic of multiple choice.

    No time limit:
    See the first question.

    Examination on
    "The Garden of Forking Paths"

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    "What is the meaning of the idea expressed by Yu Tsun that 'everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now.
    Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen'? What
    is the significance of the emphasis on the present moment, the here and
    now? Is this related to the carpe diem ('seize the day')
    idea? How? How is the present effectively connected to the past and the
    future? How is the present associated simultaneously to choices,
    actions, and consequences? How is the present moment relevant to the
    idea of the 'forking paths'? What is the symbolic meaning of forking
    paths when understood as a crossroads? What is a person confronted with
    when standing at a crossroads? What are the implications of a choice of
    road? May this be connected to the myth of Oedipus and its concerns
    with human choices and supposed predestination? What is suggested by
    the idea that 'in all fictional works, each time a man is confronted
    with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in
    the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses-- simultaneously-- all of them. He
    creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves
    also proliferate and fork'? What does it mean to make all choices at
    once? What view of life do such beliefs embody?"

     

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