Loving Faster than Light

Forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in November 2012

“Loving Faster than Light” focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain, demonstrating how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, new media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s. Blending literary analysis with insights from the history of science, Katy Price reveals how cultural meanings for Einstein’s relativity were negotiated in newspapers with differing political agendas, popular science magazines, pulp fiction adventure and romance stories, detective plots, and esoteric love poetry.

“Loving Faster than Light is a very well-written, insightful examination of one of the essential problems of the history of science—how does elite, esoteric knowledge get read, used, modified, and owned by those outside the professional scientific community? Katy Price focuses on one of the defining scientific ideas of the twentieth century—relativity—and skillfully demonstrates the many genres and styles through which it was adopted and changed. An excellent book that brings together a number of disciplinary approaches.” (Matthew Stanley)

 “In this witty and often lyrical book, Katy Price recaptures the heady moment when the public first learned of Einstein’s revolutionary vision of the cosmos. She shows how ordinary people made sense of the theory of relativity by thinking through its implications for their own concerns—about social status, money, gender, romance, and more. Price’s literary sophistication offers historians an innovative model for reading popular science.” (Deborah R. Coen)

 “‘The latest craze is Mr. Einstein’s Relativity Theory,’ D. H. Lawrence remarked in 1923; ‘everybody catches fire at the word Relativity.’ Katy Price reveals just how far and how fast—and how strangely—that fire spread through the 1920s and beyond.” (Randall Stevenson)

polymerase

This week I went to the School of Biosciences at Kent for the Chain Reaction event where artists go to a lab for a day. We learned about the polymerase chain reaction and made one ourselves, then saw the results.

Despite growing up among scientists and medics, and reading lots of popular science, I have never before had a moment where I thought ‘this is amazing’: reproduction of life code happens in organisms, and people have found out how it works, and we can do it ourselves in a lab. It was the combination of being in the working environment, having really patient and passionate explainers, and having a chance to play with pipettes (a bit more fancy than the ones at school).

The next step is to turn this into text that can be displayed in a gallery. As a devotee of the cut-up method for making poems, I’m looking at the list of ingredients for PCR and thinking what their equivalents might be in the cut-up process: how to create a textual PCR machine.

Here are my ingredients, nestling in a box of crushed ice (not for cocktails!):

• ddH20: double distilled water – gives a total volume, and a known, precise concentration for each component
• 10x buffer: stabilises the reaction, giving the enzyme an environment in which it can be effective (salts, magnesium and stuff)
• dNTPs: the As, Gs, Ts and Cs – spare letters to make new DNA code from
• T7 / BGHR primer: bits of joined up letters ready to get the copying started
• Taq polymerase: the enzyme that drives the synthesis – what builds letters into strips
• template DNA: what you are copying and amplifying, in order to find out what’s in it, or do some further analysis on it

Initial thoughts: water as medium and scale (eg how many sheets of paper and how big); buffer as formal features – eg lineation and stanzas or sections, the cells of writing; dNTPs – letters

For my template DNA I’ll use a scientific paper, maybe something on the HIV virus where PCR has brought new understandings. The cut-up method shows you what is hidden inside a text, amplifies or subverts its values and brings its resources out for thinking about the topic in other ways than the authors intend. Cutting up a paper can give a new perspective on its message, as William Burroughs did in his poem ‘Cancer Men‘.

Primer and polymerase are the really clever bits of the reaction: what enables copying to get started, and drives it. My primer could be key phrases from the cut up paper, and polymerase might come from a cut-up of a mixer text – an adjacent article to a newspaper story about HIV research, for instance.

So much for the idea: but these things never work out the way they are planned. I’m sure the method will have to be adjusted or abandoned before I have something worth displaying.

What I’m aiming for is an engagement with lab process that is deeper than a poem that simply makes connections between DNA copying and some theme in human emotional experience, but not as deep as Christian Bök’s Xenotext poem which is actually coded into an organism. He spent years learning biochemistry and I only have a few months to produce something for the November workshop!

S A L V A G E

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hard to imagine batteries whole
clear thick square jars
A C I D L E V E L

filled with flowers
fairylights, blue sand
online treasure.

Hard to imagine a crate slipping
the paperwork
the swearing

underwater nurturing
of wood and screws
and packaging.

Hard to imagine the sound of glass
and gravel dropped
on rocks at night

laundering of weed and shards
in green formation
up the beach.

Hard to guess how many collisions
made the edges
almost safe

with mud between each memory
pick letters out
keep walking.

Collective Brightness

My poem ‘Singing in Tongues’ is now published in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality.

It’s a sonnet describing the experience, aged around 13 years, of being in an enormous church when all the worshippers (except for me) were moved by the Holy Spirit. I wrote this after a workshop at New Writing Worlds in Norwich 2006.

There will be a UK launch for the anthology at the London Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green, on Friday 21 October at 7.30pm – everyone is welcome! All the UK poets in the anthology will be reading and the editor Kevin Simmonds will be there.

Taking science seriously as a poet

Empson on Donne’s use of the Copernican world-view:

he took it seriously as a poet; and this doesn’t at all mean taking it as a fancy but concentrating on what the human consequences would be if it were true – treating it like a theologian, you might well say, though not like a scientist

(Essays on Renaissance Literature Vol 1, p. 30)

The Aeneid

My reading journal has fallen slack for too long, but now it’s August, the book manuscript has just gone off for reports on the second draft, and I have a few blissful weeks to think about everything.

Andrew Nightingale and I have been reading long poems with a view to what makes them tick, and I chose the Aeneid because I’ve never read any classical epics. I picked the C. Day Lewis translation and was surprised at how readable it is. He somehow manages to balance a conversational tone with relating grand (and very bloody) events around the founding of Rome (my Latin is at pre-GCSE level, so not sure how far this is a feature of Virgil’s writing).

I found the manipulation of time and space interesting – the way that action is made to fit around the discussion of a character’s background or status, or comparisons with nature, or attention to customs. How the narrative is distended or shrunk in order to dwell on key moments.

Liked wolf similes the best:

just like
Marauding wolves in a black fog, at a time when their rabid hunger
Has sent them blindly prowling, and the cubs they have left are waiting
At home, their gullets parched, so through the enemy barrage
We went as to certain death, we steadily made for the heart of
The city, and were engulfed in the black night’s ambient shade.

Amused by how they keep getting shipwrecked and yet always seem to have plenty of sheep or bullocks handy to sacrifice, and shiny things to give away as wrestling prizes. The whole thing is quite homoerotic, and apart from Camilla and the sister of Turnus women are generally pathetic – Dido some kind of proto-Bridget Jones.

Golden bough somewhat underwhelming – very cursory treatment of something that I’d assumed was super-important part of mythology. Perhaps it was the equivalent of a car explosion or bridge jump in action movies: the audience will be disappointed if it doesn’t feature, but to dwell on it for too long would be boring.

And surely every good boy deserves a Mum like Venus.

Late Darwin

I was invited to contribute to a forum on ‘Late Darwin and the Problem of the Human‘, but didn’t manage to formulate a response in time. Instead, I have finagled a villanelle from Gillian Beer’s phrases, which I find delicious and suggestive.

Late humans and the problem of the single

for Gillian Beer

How he sees the changed achievements of women:
seizing their partners round the neck with their sickle shaped jaws
did not give central place to the human.

Now, when two men are put into competition,
conjoined, lurk at the heart, haunt
the changed achievements of women,

inevitably it attracts attention.
Gathered into the title ‘Man’ he is torn,
cannot give central place to the human.

The key point to observe is that once again
we are ‘all netted together’ and that all
the changed achievements of women,

indeed, the law of equal transmission
alert to the ghosting presence of past life forms
may not give central place to the human.

Figure the ancestor as single almost as often,
the ‘single progenitor’, ‘one primordial form’:
how he sees the changed achievements of women
might then give central place to the human.

Chroma Launch

Tonight I read at the launch of Chroma issue 11.

Sophie had organised a really amazing panel with impressive yet very accessible speakers who talked about how we fuck cinema and a film called Dandy Dust which I want my life to be, and cells made from olive oil that frolick in labs.

Best of all I met various other writers associated with the magazine, who had inspiring suggestions for performances to attend and stuff to read.

Brrnrrd writes comix and poetry and Andra Simons also poetry, I saw him perform at a Chroma launch a couple of years ago and hope to see another show soon, he is fantastic.

Other ideas from the panel – everything by Rachel Armstrong; Cinesexuality by Patricia MacCormack.

Bookmachine

It was good being back at Kettle’s Yard for another concert with Tom Hall, Richard Hoadley and Katharine Norman. This time the theme was Luddites and ‘Framebreaking‘.

For my piece ‘Bookmachine’ I took the phrase ‘a book is a machine to think with’ from I.A. Richards literally, using the book to make machine noises with my nails and a bic.

In a Luddite spirit the book was then attacked (with my Mum and Dad’s breadknife, a hole punch and some selotape). Mmmm, selotape makes a nice noise.

Andrew Nightingale helped out by typing phrases from Richards into the Speech programme (running on a ‘Beeb’ emulator). We also used the Mac’s inbuilt text speaker to read out extracts from the advertising for print-on-demand bookmachines. This text was perverted in amusing ways.

The third source text was from A Thousand Plateaus. I still don’t understand this theory but it did lead me into some useful ideas for gestures, for example trying to speak while covering my mouth with torn out pages.

I enjoyed this performance though afterwards several people said how worried they’d been that I was about to cut my fingers off.

Jussi has written a nice rambly review of it on his Machinology blog. Hopefully I’ll have an mp3 up here before too long.

Tangled Stories

This poem was compiled by participants in ‘Tangled Stories’, held at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on 6 July 2009 as part of the Cambridge Darwin Festival Fringe. With thanks to everyone who came along to share their words and listen.

I am a small boat. My descendant was a mega ship strong and courageous fighting through the vicious seas.

I am a blue Buriad hat and my descendant is a large Mountain Peak in the highlands.

I am purple and splendid and my descendant is the spiced red cabbage in a thanksgiving feast.

I am black and ostentatious and my descendant is a chelsea wagon.

I am a black engraved boomerang and my descendant is a winter’s night with the wind’s stories.

I am above you – in swirls of lines. I’m metal, shaped & separated.

I am supposed to be 8ft tall and am clumsily poised. My descendant is this room I’m calling home.

I am furry and spotted and my descendant is Remy the Housecat.

I am wide-eyed & unfathomable and my descendant is a baby.

I am stern and holding a fish to my chin and my descendant is a gourmet chef.

I am silvery and time worn and my descendant is my watch face.

I am a wakahupa with rivulets of blood through my heat and my descendants are water and they are pregnant with me.

It is tall and brown (totenpole) a tree.

I am enamelled and bling and my descendant is my crown.

I am a khangar dark, and pointy like stabbing eyes of a criminal. My descendant is the ancient wrighting from Jesus bible.

I am empty I am fat my descendant is a hollow tree trunk.

I am whalebone with a mother-of-pearl eye, and my descendant is a vigilant satellite.

Intricate colourful butterfly in spring. Beautiful silk dress.

I am wooden & musical and my descendant is a 2nd hand spanish guitar.

I am FRAGILE and AGGRESSIVE and my descendant is a LIGHTBULB.

I am pale and mysterious and my descendant is a Belgian woman.

I am flat and heavy. Flatscreen TV.

I am dark and I am light and my descendant is the shadow of my feet.

I am blue-green and shiny and my descendant is the iris of your eyes.

I am a silver love amulet – my descendant is deodorant.

I am a flute and a whistle blower and my descendant is an air rifle.

I’m among shelfs of ice           my descendent is rusty and sunk.