Roughening the Surface of Physics

On the flight down to Mérida (United---two legs from Phoenix, switching at Houston Intercontinental), I had watched a video of a talk Martin had given recently at Duke University. It was at a conference calls "Jews and the Ends of Theory." Martin's talk was called ""Against 'the Attack on Linking': Rearticulating 'the Jewish Intellectual' for Today". I had downloaded the Youtube video to my iPad so I could listen to it during the flight wearing my earbuds. I purchased an extra-wide seat upgrade from the leg across the Gulf of Mexico, the hop between Houston and Mérida, over the blue water. The talk sent me thinking in many different ways.

The youtube video was actually a two-talk session. Martin's was the second talk on the video. The first was by a woman from Harvard, a Russian Jewish woman professor in her Forties. I tried to listen to her talk, but her accent was too thick for her to be picked up well on the microphones in the classroom at Duke.

All I could get out of her talk was that she mentioned Victor Shklovsky a couple times. I knew exactly who that was, because we had just covered that in the Yale Introduction to Literature course I was taking online. He was one of the greatest of the group of literature critics called the Russian Formalists.

I mentioned this Martin during our first conversation, which was over breakfast in the hotel dining room on the morning after I arrived. Martin was blown away that. Sadly he said the woman who gave that talk had since passed away from cancer.

I wound up brining up Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists over dinner on the last night of the conference, when a bunch of the older Americans and the remaining Israelis dined at the fancy restaurant just across the street from the hotel, including several of the wives who had come, and including Alex Gerstein and his wife, who had come all the way from Beersheeva, and who had been the senior attendees at the entire conference.

I was sitting in the middle of the table, and over drinks, I told everyone that I thought that what we were doing at the conference had a lot to do in spirit with the Russian Formalists.

I explained that the Russian Formalists had begun as a school of thought that literature could be studied in terms that close to being scientific---for example, in defining what makes "literariness," which is something they thought about a lot.

But there advanced over time among the Formalists the desire as well to accomplish something beyond a rational study of literature, and towards a value-driven goal, of using literature to create a "roughening of the surface" of everyday life, which otherwise could dull and boring.

"That's what this conference is about," I said. "It's about roughening the surface of physics, in a way."

They understood what I meant, I could tell.