Learning english.

The command of the English language came to me from scientific journals and the blues. Blues rock mainly.

Therefore I can use words like percolation and spinodal or decomposition in the same line with

"How unlucky can one man be  
Well every quarter I get now Lord, 
Blackjack takes it away from me"

I can even consider using precipitates and nucleation or shape control of 3d and 1d structures in 

"You don't wash your hair
You don't wash your clothes
What else you don't do
Baby, nobody knows"

Every now and then there is diffusion that jumps in 

"Sweet as sugar, love won't wash away
Rain or shine, it's always here to stay
All these years you and I've spent together
All this, we just couldn't stand the weather"

Imagine this, having a drink, talking randomly about excitation and not ionisation then dropping a line like 

"Ain't no use to hide
Ain't no use to run
'cause I got you in the sight
Of my girly gun"

I found nanotechnology to mingle quite good with the blues. Materials science too. You read and argue, conclude on graphs and analyses and in the end if a material performs differently than expected you add in the discussion something like 

" Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you" 

Followed by "the results are promising".

Christos Tsotsos is the author of The secret of the elements (just google the title)

Let's talk about Shit

I was invited to give a talk to young students with an interest in academic education. There was an initiative to promote the progressive and constructive thought of academics to inspire high school students to follow academic life. The scope stated clearly that academics and scientists were free to speak openly about anything that displays the philosophical and methodical thought of academia. We were to reference our talk and provide material, which students can easily access, to read further on the subject we talked about. We were not obliged to talk about our research; we were encouraged to demonstrate how academic thought extended in everyday life. For a moment I felt they wanted us to talk about how a mathematician shops for groceries. The aim was to promote original thinking and inspire young pupils to become academic scholars. 

I thought “great!” I love to talk about whatever. I finished my drink and sent an application to the program organiser. A week later I had a slot at 8 in the afternoon and was requested for a title and a short, one hundred words or less, abstract. 

I titled the talk "Talking about Kitsch"

Wikipedia was the first reference: Kitsch (/ˈkɪtʃ/; loanword from German) is an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value.

Of course I had a different thing in mind, something Kundera mentioned in the Unbearable Lightness of Being about the original meaning of Kitsch. That was my second reference.

In reality I wanted to talk about excrement and its literary value. I wanted to talk about the many references in literature on humans emptying their bowels and how it 'levels' man down to earth. There is a liberating feeling when reading the philosophical musings of writers on crap. How writers love it when they characters are doing it because they have to, doing it uncontrollably, how they  being embarrassed, how it is hidden, how sometimes they choose not to see it is there and it is happening. Some writers love to talk about wiping that hole, using that peristaltic pump to relief yourself. They use it to show that shit makes us equal. Man becomes one with every living thing on the planet. There is always the same thing in the mind of a writer when shit enters text. A person is exposed by their needs. One cannot control them; they are there whether they chose to show them or prefer not to talk about them. When it comes to shit we are all hidden in a closet. We become Kitsch by not talking about it. 

How many of us say to colleagues at work. "I woke up this morning took a shit had a shower and my breakfast and came to work." We might just say I did my morning toilet thingy or whatever I went to the loo. Nobody talks about public toilets the way Bukwoski talked. The public toilet where hundreds, thousands of people empty their intestines. Nobody thinks of the large underwater canals expanding for many miles carrying our produce to water treatment plants. Many also ignore that the water we drink in our cities may have passed through 15 people at least before we drunk it and it carried our shit with it.

We say I have a gut feeling. I suffer from an acute case of an expanding gut. I am constipated. Nobody says. I am so afraid I feel a watery turd leaking to my underpants or I need to shit immediately or I haven't crapped for days, to strangers. We keep it for our closed ones. It is not an expression you would use in an interview. It is taboo, a Kitsch taboo.

Well think that Obama wipes his ass. Merkel too (I mean her ass and not Obama's). Those who control the world wipe their own assess. Now surely that makes them somehow similar to us and every animal who shits all over the place. You will not hear the President in a speech saying. "Well I was taking a shit today and I thought 'Good god we have to do something about education' (glunk!)"

Hollywood rarely shows protagonists taking a crap. They only show people who are about to die on the crapper. As if it is humiliating to die with your pants down, reading a poop book/magazine/newspaper. Some of our needs are glorified while others are a humiliating reminder of our fragile nature.

A sack of shit. A sack of intestines full of shit.

Shit, however in literature has great value. It shows how Kitsch we are. We would love to have some needs wiped out from our everyday life and by doing so we wish to destroy our true nature and replace it with an inferior, tasteless copy of man, or a worthless imitation of man that which gains popular value. We lose our substance, refraining to acknowledge that everybody shits.

I walked in the room with the presentation title projected on a screen above my head. The students were tired and yawning, some were texting on their cell phones, others chatted. I had to act quickly to win the audience, so I said. 

“There is small subtitle to my presentation. Tonight I would like to talk to you about Shit.”
There was laughter. Some had a disgusted look on them, I bet they thought I was going to show them slides of turds floating in the toilet.
“That’s right, Shit, the smelly thing we do.”
Nobody left though, and nobody spoke a word for half an hour or so. I must have won them over. They had questions too. I am pretty sure that they left imagining me wiping my ass. Now that is something to aspire to.


 (Christos Tsotsos is the author of "The secret of the elements")

God Killer!

Receiving hate mail from religious fanatics is not something you get used to. It can be funny though when you read things like “...you will be rapped in Hell”. I immediately got this mental picture of me in a black-and-white film beaten in dialogue by my companion’s wit. My drinking buddy said that the man who sent me the email was not thinking of repartee. Maybe he had in mind something different, like me being strapped to a chair in the middle of a white room waiting for Tupac and Biggie. They will enter and take turns to perform and when they finish they will make me choose who I liked best. Regardless of who I select I will get the other to punish me for all eternity. If I select Tupac I might get to carry Biggie up a hill then just before I reach the top he will jump and run back down hill, I will have to go after him, catch him and carry him up the hill over and over again until the end of time. If I chose Biggie, Tupac may have me standing on an open beer barrel next to a buffet of steak sandwiches. Every time I would reach for a sandwich the buffet will move away from me, and every time I will reach for a drink of beer the liquid will draw away from my hand.

Then again, they may force me to take a test on styles of rap I have no clue about. They will put me in a room where crews will rap non stop old ‘skool’, hip hop, chicano rap, indie rap, I-have-no-idea-what-else rap. After the class I will be alone in the room with a sheet of paper and a pensil on a desk in front of me. Speakers will blast the sound at me, surrounding me, engulfing me. I will float in music, my belly will resonate, my head will explode and my body will wear an astral suit and I will be cannonballed through interstellar gates into the beat. Once the music stops I will have to identify the style, the date the song was recorded and released and, of course, the artist. If I fail the test, which I probably will, Tupac and Biggie will tantalize my ass for eternity.

Speaking of “ass” my drinking buddy said that the emailer probably means “raped in hell” instead of “rapped in hell”. Ah! Now. That makes more sense. It’s a little p that trickled down and escaped editing. So he threatens me with anal sex. He thinks of me as a heterosexual male who shares his homophobic views and therefore I should feel insulted or be terrified by the thought. I told my buddy that I found it kinda sweet. This man thinks we have something in common, he considers that my process of thinking is dictated by feelings similar to his. Someone who wishes eternal sodomy for me identifies himself with me. I felt a part of this world, a part of humanity. My buddy on the other hand stopped pouring me whisky and claimed that the emailer most likely hopes to have sex with other men in this, and not the imaginary after, life. He went on to explain that the person is projecting his wants in his threats. I looked at him with the admiration of a drunken pupil, he argued for a good ten minutes and concluded that my hate emailer is a frustrated homosexual, closeted, in his late forties, married with kids in their teens, who lives in an extremely conservative and religious community and that he is, probably, torn apart by his sexual desires that contradict his imposed upon “ethics”. I burped an alcohol bubble then added. “Nonsense, what you say is science fiction.”

We laughed and switched the laptop off. Jazz from Hell was playing in the background. Then my friend said something which really hurt me. His unintentend rhetorical question fired through me while he was lighting a cigarette. “Why he calls you a god killer?" That's it he never read my book. I said with a frown "he is a confused individual that jumps into conclusions misunderstanding the context of the written word". He sensed he said something wrong and swiftly opened the bottle of whisky again. I drank. Spicy, thick, single malt. Your sins are forgiven my son.

(Christos Tsotsos is the author of The secret of the elements.)