A letter to Il Coruptore AKA Peter Carruthers

Carissimo Il Coruptore,

I write with moody forebodings of impossibility of attaining anything, the mood reinforced by the cheerfulness of danish December: I do not see how I am going to visit you in the foreseeable future, to the extent that there is future. Maybe next winter? Where did the time go? I thought I would be basking in Arizonian sun right now... But in a few days I am escaping to New York - UF will cheer me up with Wagner and Kindertotten Lieder.

Then I am supposed to be back and do what? Repair rotten doors on my edifice, harangue students? Is that it? All those years of crazy self-reliance? and looove, where did loooove go?

Pagarlo delle Lire, pagarlo delle dollare... Why did I ever turn bourgeois?

di notte nordice
Amleto il Danesco

Hamlet, Feigenbaum constant and the fine structure constant

There is a Procaccian chapter in our Hénon epic that makes me go to Hamlet to cheer up - "... is it better to suffer the outrageous ..." etc etc  soliloquy.

The whole idea was building my Ruinofficio was to have a place big enough to absorb my friends with their nasty habits and still sustain life as we know it. Empty it is as insane as any Latin American deserted oversized hacienda from Marquez.

The madness persists - I am getting visa papers to fly in November to Bezerkley and deliver a single review lecture of profound wisdom to nuclear physicists at LBL. The man in charge is the selfsame person (Switezky) who has related Feigenbaum constant to the fine structure constant, a paper that baffles me even more upon rereading now.

Not sweet paprika, but cayenne

I have been through some rough times. First Fessor Pro has been threatening me with this fat manuscript of uneven quality. It all climaxed one Thursday, with me surrounded with many steaming and burning pots and pans and spices, pushed into a corner by certain Paladin, who insists on teaching me the correct multifractal formalism. Everything in sight is boiling and burning and he is shoving at me pieces of paper covered with old computer code, between lines of which he scribbles integrals over tangent spaces (ie Lyapunovs), with q meaning Chicago tau, s(mu) meaning P(lambda), and everything Bowen-Ruelle-Sinai and indescribably rigorous. As I am nodding in exasperation I note that the spice which I am copiously pouring over the
brew is not sweet paprika, but cayenne, and so on and so forth.

So I fed them cous-cous and they loooooved it and so we proceeded to the Royal Ballet where all was all very cultured and deadly boring. And I am as good as dead. But Romeo and Juliet ballet was a good preview for what followed: we had a 5 (yes, five!) days of a superstrings symposium here, and I went to the lectures in the same spirit as to Romeo and Juliet; I wanted to see strings dead, I wanted to see them all die. But no, it is like Mercutio. He gets stabbed, he falls down and you think it is over. He gets up; dances and falls down. Over? No - here he hops up again, piruets and keels and falls over. And so it goes - on, and on, since Regge poles through duality through extended supergravities to this. When is the s#!t going to die? It is frightning - a whole bunch of bright kids seem set onto making this a life career; oh, die, please die gentle death! The world around us is asking us infinity of fascinating questions - do we have to lobotomize all this young talent?