Trick Of Light Research Articles

Tricks of Light: New and Selected Poems by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Reviewed by: Tricks of Light: New and Selected Poems by Thaddeus Rutkowski Amy Holman (bio) tricks of light: new and selected poems Thaddeus Rutkowski great weather for MEDIA https://www.greatweatherformedia.com/store/thaddeus-rutkowski-tricks-of-light 94 pages; Print, $18.00 There is a shifting of ground beneath the poems Thaddeus Rutkowski writes, so that they seem casual commentary while turning slightly to accommodate another meaning. Often written with disport and wit, but also discernment of worry and insult, they accumulate their tricks of light to present a clear perspective. He is, in the poems, both and neither: writer and editor, between the races, an extension and limit of vision. It would be tempting when composing one’s New and Selected to consider not only a timeline of one’s life, as he does, but also to look at the present condition of society for conversation. Where do the seventy-nine entries in Tricks of Light: New and Selected Poems fit in response to identity, economics, and family? Throughout this book, Rutkowski spots the question on people’s minds about who he is—or worse, what—and where he might belong, such as in the dentist’s chair when he muses about the appearance of fillings after being asked if his dental work was done in another country, until he settles on the underlying query: “Maybe what looks different is my face, / as if I’m from a different country.” He’s certain the dentist and his assistant don’t even know which country that could be, only that it couldn’t be theirs. Yet he is the one more curious to know, and the one with his mouth open waiting for someone else to speak. Denial of race is all too familiar, as he writes in “Where I’m From,” about the divided perspectives that brought him up in a one-street town invisible to outsiders: “I was raised as white, but I’m not white. / My father saw no difference between races, / while my mother never forgot hers.” Even in poems that point to the poet’s loneliness or stress, he can write with nonchalance that only makes me feel his suffering more. He’s not even sure if he has close friends, and he often lets relationships with them drift, shatter, and freeze. Difference outweighs likeness, targeting the unidentifiable as suspect and deeming friendship [End Page 146] implausible. As Rutkowski writes in “Nothing in Common,” he once believed he’d have more to share with anyone of color because experiences being judged or targeted would produce empathy and kinship: But I was wrong.Factors other than colorwere more important to people of colorwhen it came to being friends with me. He writes a kind of Ars Edita, if you will, at the same time as Ars Poetica, one perspective usurping the other, or joining in solidarity. “Just One Word” is both wry economy of diction—“my” versus “the”—and economics of writing life, when Rutkowski distinguishes between writing and editing text, the latter granting him a credit the former could not. To start the book with the announcement that he succeeded in writing one word that day, taking possession of the window and its limit of vision, is a smooth move into a collection about perspective and judgment. “Beyond that, it is editing my word, / not someone else’s word.” It’s his view that matters here. Rutkowski’s bicyclist poems coasting through the collection are some of my favorites for the catalog of experiences and tone of observations, and the cumulative allegory of the bicyclist as unwelcome and in between identities. Though lightweight and portable transport in reality, the bicycle is neither automobile nor pedestrian, and its rider is often disdained by driver and walker for taking up space. Clipped, battered, and cut off through several poems, the poet ignores shouts to move onto sidewalk and takes a newly paved, sticky road around a steamroller that honks at him; swerves to avoid one rider moving the wrong way, and gets his arm bruised by a taxi whose cabbie could care less; and is struck by something “soft, like a bird or a...

Water waves grow tall with help from a trick of light

Water waves grow tall with help from a trick of light

ChemInform Abstract: Tricks of Light on Helices: Transformation of Helical Polymers by Photoirradiation

AbstractReview: [39 refs.

Tricks of light on helices: transformation of helical polymers by photoirradiation.

The following polymer structural transitions were achieved using light: preferred-handed helix formation for poly(9,9-di-n-octylfluoren-2,7-diyl), helix racemization (helix-helix transition) for poly(2,7-bis(4-t-butylphenyl)fluoren-9-yl acrylate) and poly(2,5-bis[4-((S)-2-methylbutyloxy)phenyl]styrene), and helix decomposition for poly(2,7-bis(4-t-butylphenyl)-9-methylfluoren-9-yl acrylate) and poly(2,7-bis(4-t-butylphenyl)fluoren-9-ylmethyl methacrylate). Although these types of transitions and chemical transformations have been studied mainly using heat or chemicals as stimuli, light can also cause these structural alterations. In the helix construction and the helix-helix transition, a key transition is a twist-coplanar conformational change of a biphenyl or an aryl-aryl unit in the side chain or the main chain of the polymer. Furthermore, the helix-helix transition was caused only by light and not by heat. The examples discussed in this review are expected to trigger off a new direction in synthesis and reaction of chiral polymers.

Hour Thirteen

Hour Thirteen Jen Hirt (bio) I had this thought upon learning that my fifth-grade math teacher was applying to be the first teacher in space: The space shuttle will explode. I didn’t know what to do with this thought because it was so confident and so future tense and so informative. But was it really information? I was an imaginative girl and what the adults would say I already knew. Every time my family flew, I quelled a cousin demon: The plane will crash. Foolish, anxious me, never in a plane crash. So I dismissed the worry and by January 28, 1986, had even forgotten it until my reading teacher was called to the office just past noon. When she returned, the news whispered in my thoughts before she spoke explosion and my premonition met its event in a tiny collision, like a half-drawn circle finished fast by an unseen hand. Yet I felt complete too—I had been right—and in this excitement I had to remind myself into sadness and concern. Our class was to gather in front of the library’s television, which sat high on a cart that students were not allowed to push because in some other school a little girl had yanked a cart and the tv had tipped like a monolith and crushed her head, a freak accident that no one saw coming. So we stood in front of that tv with its many warning signs and watched the countdown against the blue sky, and the roar of propulsion and ingenuity and America and science, then the soft puffs of annihilation blooming in a doodle. It was the first time I stood with a group and watched a disaster on tv. I slipped to the back and scuffed my shoes on the gray carpet. I didn’t want to keep watching. I didn’t want to tell anyone anything. From “Precognition of Disaster,” a 1970 article published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research: [End Page 65] Two central premonitions bureaus have been set up in London and New York. These bureaus receive reports of ostensible precognition sent in by percipients before the related events have happened. It may be possible to use the premonitions like a distant early warning system, alerting persons or communities threatened with some disaster. One morning in the month of the twenty-five-year mark of the Challenger explosion, a neighbor told me she’d thought about a body in the river and then there was a body in the river and wasn’t that the damndest thing. We had crossed paths while walking our dogs along the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. At first we had the usual chat: I had been out of town for the holidays, happy to get back to my own bed last night; she and her sister had visited lovely neighborhood parties. The river was almost thawed and weren’t the shattered ice floes marvelous against the cold, abandoned islands? Our dogs played big like gladiators. She then shared her extraordinary secret: A few days after Christmas, she had been out with the dog, as usual, but she had a random thought about a body. Then she believed she saw an arm about fifty feet offshore, saluting from the ice. Three times to look, then four, from different angles. But it was just a branch and a trick of light, she was sure. Not an arm. She continued: The next day someone else spotted the body for real—fully clothed, angled as if standing but not standing. EMTs pulled off the flannel and jeans and boots, awaited the coroner, the police. A cursory examination (right there on the sidewalk where we all walk our dogs) showed no trauma. When she finished her story, her dog trotted to the slushy water and she frantically called him back, saying that the river was no good today, as if it were tainted. The premonition must [End Page 66] have haunted her, although she didn’t say as much, not calling it an outright premonition (instead repeating how she’d had a feeling), but I could hear it in...

Photoinduced Racemization of an Optically Active Helical Polymer Formed by the Asymmetric Polymerization of 2,7‐Bis(4‐tert‐butylphenyl)fluoren‐9‐yl Acrylate

A trick of light: An optically active preferred-handed helical polymer synthesized by asymmetric anionic polymerization underwent stereomutation upon photoirradiation, whereas the helix remained stable upon heating (see picture). This photoinduced racemization of a synthetic helical polymer occurred without any changes in chemical bonding, such as bond formation, bond cleavage, or the isomerization of a double bond.

Pasadena, 1901

Pasadena, 1901 Erin McGraw (bio) No one could tell me a thing. Eighteen years old, I had goals as clear in my mind as fence posts—although fence posts were exactly what I wanted never to think about again. Yearning could undo a person, so I shut my mind tight against memories that shimmered like heat mirages—tricks of light and wind. I did not let myself think of old times, old voices, a life left blinking in surprise when I stepped onto a train and escaped. Pa used to say that since we weren't rich in cash or land, we were rich in common sense. I used it, and got out of Kansas. And truly, leaving behind the wind and the blank heat and the depthless prairie was easy. Slipping away from Jack, my husband—God knows, easier still. The difficulty came after I arrived in Los Angeles, only stopping there because I couldn't go any farther. Like the other girls who poured into the downtown Arcade Station from Missouri and Texas and Ohio, I found work as a shop girl, bringing home six dollars a week. Four of those dollars allowed me a room in a gas-lit firetrap, sticky with heat and loud as a switching yard, where many of the lodgers were single women whose doors opened directly to the street. They passed me in the corridor without speaking, the greasy cotton of their wrappers swishing unpleasantly. Sometimes they grinned when I drew back. If I lived on oranges and tap water, I could save six dollars a month. Six dollars wasn't enough to buy me a fine pair of shoes, much less a decent address. I looked in bleak hatred at Levant's, the dim department store where I stood every day, selling gloves and collars. The [End Page 120] customers who populated my imagination with such bright elegance did not come to a dark downtown street where the garbage and horse droppings were banked at the curb. The ladies did not care to bring their custom to a store without display counters or electric lights. The ladies shopped where they lived: in Pasadena. I knew nothing about Pasadena, but the other shoppies talked about it, especially on the weekends, when we drank beer and were apt to say things. Streets in Pasadena were boulevards, expanses forty feet across. On either side, mansions spread out behind trellises and fountains with statues. "It's filled with money," my friend Josephine said, as if the point required plain statement. "That's where money goes to live." We were sitting at a dance hall, half-shouting over the noise and our beers. The room, a big wooden shell with only a rough platform for the ragtime orchestra but an enormous dance floor filled with jiggling dancers, was ripe with the smell of damp, eager bodies. Josephine's sister Mabel was sitting on the lap of a fellow whose name we were never told, and a girl named Mathilda kept getting up and sitting down, getting up and sitting down. She banged into the small table and beer was slopping everywhere, but no one complained. When a fellow with a wide moustache came over and asked me where I lived, I said, "Pasadena." "No, you don't." He grinned. "I do, though. Go there and look for me." "I'm looking at you now. And I don't want to stop looking." Then the other girls hooted, all right. "There's your Two-Dollar Bill," Mabel said. What right had she, sprawled on her fellow's lap? Anybody could see how she was hoping that night would end. She was bound to be disappointed; already the fellow was looking for a way to dislodge her. To my boy with the moustache I said, "Prove to me you're a gentleman." "Can't do 'er. Sorry." "Then prove to me I shouldn't call the cops on you." [End Page 121] "Here?" He gestured at the unpainted wood walls, the shirt-sleeve orchestra at the far end, the dance floor jammed with tipsy, roaring couples. Like everything else in my life now, the racket—you couldn't...

The “Valuable Deformity”: Calipers and the Failed Trope of Postcolonial Debt in Deepa Mehta's Earth

Dès le début de Earth, la cinéaste Deepa Mehta établit un parallèle entre une assiette fracassée, un pays morcelé et le corps endommagée de la jeune Lenny. Par un décodage idéologique de ce physique infirme, la réalité corporelle vécue de ce corps échappe au regard critique. Ôn ne remet pas en question la gestion et le positionnement du corps perclus, qui n'est qu'une métaphore de la gestion et du positionnement postcoloniaux. Le corps de Lenny est empreint de dystrophie. On la réprimande et la tourmente. Les personnages non-handicapés la bousculent. Ce qui illustre le champ social qui démarque Lenny. Pour ces personnages, comme pour le spectateur, le corps de Lenny est une surface qui évoque le « schéma » aristotélicien or le « réceptacle » platonicien, et il est ainsi hors de lui-même. Quand Judith Butler explique que le corps importe, elle note que « ce qui constitue la fixité du corps … sera repensé sous l'action du pouvoir. » Earth nous permet d'explorer l'inscription du pouvoir sur le corps.

Some Trick of Light

Some Trick of Light

Digital imagery analysis of unusual Martian surface features

Image processing results in support of ongoing research into the origin of a collection of unusual surface features on Mars are presented. The focus of the investigation is on a mile long feature in the Cydonia region of Mars which resembles a humanoid face that was imaged by Viking orbiter in 1976. While the face has been dismissed as a trick of light and shadow by some, there remains considerable interest in this feature, which others believe was sculpted into the form of a humanoid face, and several nearby polyhedral objects which appear to be spatially aligned with it. Image enhancements of the face show it to be a bisymmetrical object having two eyes, a nose, and a mouth; fine structure in the mouth suggesting teeth are apparent in the enhanced imagery as well as crossed symmetrical lines on the forehead. Facial features are also evident in the underlying 3-D surface which was reconstructed using a single image shape-from-shading technique. Synthetic images derived from the 3-D model by computer graphics techniques suggest that the impression of facial features evident in the original Viking imagery are not a transient phenomenon; i.e., they persist over a wide range of illumination and viewing conditions.

I look at Fleet Street

I MAY have been a little prejudiced against the roaring Street of Ink. You see I was living in the Temple, by the plane trees in King's Bench Walk. It was a quiet place, given over to precept and precedent and the leisurely but inevitable processes of the Law. Grave gentlemen in wigs and gowns walked slowly through the cloisters, discoursing of torts and common pleas; their clerks trod softly and talked in whispers; even the boy who brought the milk in the morning refrained from whistling in case he might be committed for contempt of court. The Temple was grave, disciplined, serene. Sometimes, when the young moon hung over the Thames, it might be a little whimsical in a mild sort of way, because Crown Office Row was round the corner and something was due to the memory of Charles Lamb. But the whimsicality was kept in decent bounds; it was no more than a trick of light on the solemn face of the Law. The Temple stood as witness to eternal, and oh how solemn, verities.