Weekend work

A busy weekend of study with Linda way teaching a course.

First up, a new book, Brian Osborne's Writing Biography and Autobiography, which I have only skimmed through so far. I am interested in three main issues here at the moment. One, the practical aspects of this "craft" such as the creation of time lines, casts of characters, etc. Secondly, the issue of how to deal with background information related to a life (which can in some cases, be vast). Finally, what to do about very technical matters (e.g. how does Fermelo's The Strangest Man handle quantum physics or how does Westfall discuss Newton's Principia in Never at Rest)

Then some progress in sorting out my work the next year of PH404. I plan to mainly study Kepler for really the entire year. So I have found my copies of Jardine's Birth of History and Philosophy of Science, Voelkel's Composition of Kepler's Astronomia Nova, some works by Kepler himself, and 9 files of secondary material - so far!

I have also discovered that the city of Linz in Austria is staging the premier of Philip Glass's new opera- Kepler - in November. I feel I should go to this - it is exactly the sort of thing to talk about in the prologue of one's book, for "added colour". I believe the technical term used by some biographers is "optical research". As far as I can tell, tickets go on sale in September. It costs about £250 to fly to Linz via Frankfurt it seems

An article in The Indepedent on a 10 day Vipassana retreat. This doesn't go into the detail that some accounts I've read have done, but is the main feature in the second section of the paper and so probably got a decent readership. Once or twice recently I have been pondering on going to Gaia House again for perhaps a week's retreat - I should have a look at what they have on later this year.

Had a look at the website for the Warburg Institute in London. Victor joined this and said they had a superb library of Kepler-related stuff. Apparenty I would just need the sign off of academic at LSE - which should be fairly straightforward should it not?