Foucault's Pendulum discussion

Since the novel touches on a lot of issues that might require a bit of extra information, I'll start the group off by creating a thread where we can post info or links that might help with this.

One of the first subjects I myself need to read up a bit on, is exactly what a Foucault pendulum is.
According to Wikipedia:

The Foucault pendulum,... named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, is a simple device conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth.

While it had long been known that the Earth rotated, the introduction of the Foucault pendulum in 1851 was the first simple proof of the rotation in an easy-to-see experiment. Today, Foucault pendulums are popular displays in science museums and universities.

For more detail, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault...

They have a few nice illustrations there, even if you don't feel like reading through all of the theory.

Impressive Trav, you are an industrious lady and an endless well of wisdom! ;P

:) You're making me blush, Dolors. Glad you like it!

The second thing we could add to our background discussion is the most obvious thing that Eco refers to, being the 10 Sephira or sephiroth from the Tree of Life of the Kabbala wich originated in Judaic mysticism.

Before we even start reading the novel, we see a drawing of something which looks very similar to the 10 sephiroth :


..and then there are the chapter headings too, of course.

Here's a short list of what the sephira represent:

1. Keter-"Crown" (Chapters 1 & 2)
2. Chokhmah/Hohmah-"Wisdom" (Chapters 3 - 6)
3. Binah-"Understanding" (Chapters 7 - 22)
4. Chesed/Hesed-"Kindness"
5. Gevurah-"Severity"
6. Tiferet-"Beauty"
7. Netzach-"Eternity"
8. Hod-"Splendour"
9. Yesod-"Foundation"
10 Malkuth-"Kingship"


Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_... :

The Tree of Life's symbolic configuration of 10 spiritual principles [...], arranged in 3 columns/pillars, describes the manner in which God creates existence ex nihilo, the nature of revealed divinity, the human soul, and the spiritual path of ascent by man. In this way, Kabbalists developed the symbol into a full model of reality, using the tree to depict a map of Creation.

This excerpt from Will's review is probably worth taking to heart:
“Some notes for readers: this book follows the pattern "Our Hero, just before the Final Confrontation, takes a moment to flash back to all the circumstances leading him to this moment." So you start out right near the end. You will be confused and overwhelmed. Press on, dear reader. All the important things will be explained. Don't worry too much if you don't know everything about Kabbalah or Socialism in Italy in the 1960s - they are not vital to the story. But reading about them does add to the enjoyment.”

Launched google and I found out it's León Foucault's 194th birthday today!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9o...

Happy Birthday, mate! :)

Hello everyone.. I am not really joining the group since I cannot be reading this now.

But similarly to Dolor's I saw that GOOGLE, at least in Spain (www.google.es) is commemorating the birth of Léon Foucault.

So no need to post further, since Dolors has already done it.

Enjoy the read... !!!!

I will quit now after saying Hi...

:)

Very cool! You can move the sliders to show different times over the sidereal day, and to show how it works at different latitudes. I still don't quite get the difference between what happens at the poles and what happens at the equator, but I'll keep playing with it until I do!

Got it. At the North pole, the pendulum inscribes a full clockwise circle over a sidereal day (just very slightly more than 24 hours). At the South pole, it inscribes the circle counterclockwise, and at the equator, if you can make the slider hit the midpoint exactly you won't knock over any pins at all, as it doesn't appear to rotate.

Despite an entire adult life of coveting this novel, my sorry ass has never found its way to exploring what the pendulum actually looks like. The Louisville Science Center boasts one and I've used such as an example. Excuse my blush as I note how very wrong I was.

The pendulum is quite a fascinating thing, isn't it?

Thanks so much for all of your interesting contributions, people!

For some reason updates from this thread never reached me, so this is such a nice surprise to find!

Glad to hear that we don't really need that background info, Derek, but we don't have to let that stop us from investigating it anyway, right? ;)

Kalliope wrote: "Hello everyone.. I am not really joining the group since I cannot be reading this now.

But similarly to Dolor's I saw that GOOGLE, at least in Spain (www.google.es) is commemorating the birth of ..."

Hi Kall! Thanks for the link.

The actual Foucault's Pendulum discussion proper will only go full swing on December 1, when the NonoWriMo people can join us, so if you want to pop in then, you're quite welcome. :)

We may fiddle around on this thread in the meantime, but like Derek said, the background is not absolutely essential to enjoyment of the novel.

However, I do think that reading up on it, will make our discussion and experiencing the novel itself, more rich and rewarding.

So, nibble on the additional info as much as your personal inclinations guide you, dear friends, or not, as you desire.

So, was that a Foucault's Pendulum in "Lost"?

Michele wrote: "So, was that a Foucault's Pendulum in "Lost"?"

Interesting question, Michele. I never managed to watch that show to the end.

I'll leave that question to someone else, but I wanted to quickly say something about a quotation that Chapter 3 starts off with.
Eco is soo cryptic, grrr.

Anyway, I've started peeping at the 'problematic' bits, and I'm wondering how many languages are represented by the members on this group, because Eco is pretty multilingual, and we tend to encounter a few languages when reading him.

Well, I hated Latin class, so I shuddered a bit when I saw the following: In hanc utilitatem clementes angeli saepe figuras, characteres,
formas et voces invenerunt proposueruntque nobis mortalibus et
ignotas et stupendas nullius rei iuxta consuetum linguae usum
significativas, sed per rationis nostrae summam admirationem in
assiduam intelligibilium pervestigationem, deinde in illorum ipsorum
venerationem et amorem inductivas

-Johannes Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica, Hagenhau, 1517, III

Some people over here tried to translate that https://groups.google.com/forum/#!top...

I rather preferred this translation because it seemed more flowing:
"To this advantage, clement messengers have discovered designs,
symbols, shapes and spells, and have set before us mortals tokens
both obscure and enormous, in no manner near to the accustomed usage
of speech; but through the highest wonder of our reason, we have
been led over into an earnest examination of intelligible things,
and thereupon to their very reverence and love."

Is there anyone around here who has Latin who would like to give it a go for us? Well, we don't have to do that right now, of course, when we get to this part in the discussion later on this month, I'll link to this post again.

I'm using this thread for making notes. I'm just skimming the text for now, because there's soo much detail that I'll have to research before I know what he's talking about.

Taking into account Derek's caution that we don't have to understand or know about every single allusion to understand what's going on in the narrative, I want to sift out which are necessary or not. Heh, but if I don't even understand a word of a quotation, I can't so that even, so I'm growling a bit at Eco by now... :P

OK, I looked it up. It "maybe" was a Foucault's Pendulum in Lost according to the "Lostpedia". Considering JJ Abrams, it was supposed to be.

(Eloise Harker) "worked in a laboratory, which was a DHARMA Initiative station known as The Lamp Post, attempting to plot out the next location of an "event" using a giant swinging pendulum (possibly a Foucault pendulum), a chalkboard, and a computer (an Apple III, a model made from 1980 to 1984)."

Here is a picture of it in Lost:
http://www.geekosystem.com/leon-fouca...

Very interesting, thanks for that, Michele! I petered out watching Lost after the third season--it never seemed to get towards any kind of a resolution; though I was very enthusiastic about it at first...

So was the ending satisfying? I wonder if I should rent the whole show bit by bit and watch it over a few months?

Traveller, it was kind of a mess. The ending ending was definitely not his greatest work. It was a "well, that was all a dream" type of ending. I think if you weren't loving it, then you probably wouldn't love it any more. The one exception is that there was a lot of time travel shenanigans going on in the last seasons. I am a huge sucker for time travel. That would be the only reason I might suggest you pick it up: if you love time travel.

I rewatch it once in awhile, but I was pretty hooked by it. I was willing to forgive all the sloppiness.

Hmmmm... I think what might play with my head, is that I like my SF and and my fantasy in their place, in their own genre. When I started watching Lost, I had thought the show was going to be based on reality, (more or less, or rather horror really than fantasy) so bringing in fantasy/SF elements breaks the whole atmosphere for me. :(

Not that I don't love SF and fantasy, but I need to visualize the universe I'm reading about, as in being in the SFF genre from the beginning--not sure if I'm explaining myself well there.

Actually, I wonder if FP is going to break the boundaries and 'go there'. Funny enough, just from reading the blurb, I wouldn't be too surprised...

...and then you start reading Catherynne M. Valente, and what I just said about genres, goes completely out of the window.

Of course, mixing genres is the po-mo in thing, and some people do it very well...

You're just trying to turn me right off. I never liked po-mo.

what is po-mo?

Post-Modernism. As far as I can tell, that means: the future.

Ah, sorry about that. In context, we are in the postmodern era now. In the era of digital information and globalization.

The era of industrialization was the "modern" era. in which 'modernist' fiction was written, ( J. Joyce, Ezra Pound, V.Woolf, (Bloomsbury group) TS Eliot, Beckett, Kafka, etc. etc) and other arts, such as music (Benjamin Britten, Bela Bartok, Stavinsky etc) and architechture also attained the 'modern' label in this era.
Postmodernism.. well, let me quote from one of my favorite books (Literary Movements for Students )

Postmodernism is the name given to the period of literary criticism that developed toward the end of the twentieth century.Just as the name implies, it is the period that comes after the modern period. But these are not easily separated into discrete units with specific dates as Postmodernism came about as a reaction to the established modernist era, which itself was a reaction to the established tenets of the nineteenth century and before.

What sets Postmodernism apart from its predecessor is the reaction of its practitioners to the rational, scientific, and historical aspects of the modern age. For postmodernists this took the guise of being self-conscious, experimental, and ironic.

The postmodernist is concerned with imprecision and unreliability of language and with epistemology, the study of what knowledge is.

Postmodern authors include: William Gaddis, John Hawkes, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon (though the latter is often described as 'high modern'. There's lots more, of course, I named just a few.

We were wondering about Eco's academic background in the first thread. Apparently, his interest in medieval studies came first, and his interest in semiotics only came later.

According to Wikipedia:
His father was the son of a family with thirteen children, and urged Umberto to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his Laurea in philosophy in 1954.

Who knows if his education with the Salesians had anything to do with it?

In any case: In 1959, he published his second book, The Development of Medieval Aesthetics, which established Eco as a formidable thinker in medieval philosophy. [...]

About the Middle Ages, he wrote that there was "a geometrically rational schema of what beauty ought to be, and on the other [hand] the unmediated life of art with its dialectic of forms and intentions", the two cut off from one another as if by a pane of glass.

Eco's work in literary theory has changed focus over time.

Initially, he was one of the pioneers of "Reader Response". Hmm, interesting. I met with the latter form of lit crit through Wayne Booth and Roland Barthes.

He only seems to have become interested in semiotics in the late sixties and early seventies.

I understood he was a philologist, essentially an Italian counterpart to Tolkien. So, the medievalism is perfectly natural. Philology could easily lead to semiotics.

We're readily assuming that semiotics is somehow divergent from the project of the theologian, those with agency acting without sanction become heretics. It is all about signifiers and Grace.

Yes, the philology explanation certainly would make sense, and would cover his interests in medieval aesthetics, in medieval heresies, in literary criticism and narratology and in the interpretation and analysis of texts, in (mass) media studies, and in semiology/semiotics.

Here is a link for more about Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, with some images of his equipment that the narrator of this first part sees in the museum: http://www.artsense.eu/use-cases/labo...

And here is a close-up of the mirrors he mentions:

In case any of you missed the news, William Weaver, who translated several of Eco's books into English including Foucault's pendulum died recently:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...

Thanks, J-M. I was unaware and found the piece compelling.

Jan-Maat wrote: "In case any of you missed the news, William Weaver, who translated several of Eco's books into English including Foucault's pendulum died recently:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013......"

Thanks, Jan-Maat. Interesting things in this thread. I'll have to read through it.

Thanks, Jan-Maat. My copy of FP was translated by Weaver. I must be on the lookout for his translations. I wonder if my translation of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler was by him? Yes, it is. :)

I read the book twice, some 20 years apart and had very different experiences. It was the second reading that blew me, perhaps as a result of my own experiences and enlightenment in between.
The themes that fascinated me in the second reading was that of credulity and disbelief. In every book of Eco, the protagonist defines the genre and the key issue and this book is about belief and disbelief.
Umberto Eco is a major proponent of the concept of Open Text (the technique is as old as humanity and is embodied in the ancient epics, but the literary theory is new), where the work gets its meaning only through the perception of the reader. As I was reading two different parallel narratives flashed in my mind, both valid but mutually exclusive, like an optical illusion jumping out of a Salvador Dali painting. One narrative from a credulous perspective and the other very rational. Both perspectives are viable and is testament to Umberto Eco's genius.

Able wrote: "I read the book twice, some 20 years apart and had very different experiences. It was the second reading that blew me, perhaps as a result of my own experiences and enlightenment in between.
The t..."
Thanks for adding your insights as well as referring to Eco's Open Text theory to the discussion - which seems oddly both appropriate as well as in some ways initially insufficient for this huge text.
Appropriate, because, exactly as you say, the text is so opalescent that each individual will carry away something different from it, based on their own personality and experiences in life, and insufficient in the sense of that of course, the text is hugely referential to actual tropes, movements and occurrences in the real world.
But, just like his fiction, Eco's theory is also multifaceted:
According to Eco, works of art can be read in three ways: the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical. Each is not only distinct but can be fully anticipated and directed by the author (or the artist) of the work.

Of course, my reply is only 5 years late - I apologize for that. And of course, poor Umberto is not with us in body anymore, although he will remain in our minds and memories for as long as we live.