Roy

Roy

[Peter Freyd]

  The Grothendieck discussion has moved a bit far from the main reason
  for this list but, if I may, a couple of points:

  First -- in answer to Max's query -- Roy Lisker tells me that almost
  all of Grothendieck's autobiography in the original French has been
  transcribed onto www.grothendieck-circle.org.

  Second, who is Roy Lisker? I've valued him as a resource for over 40
  years. He was a student at Penn and a few years later I was a
  character witness in his trial for draft-card burning. Yep. And he
  served a 6 month sentence.

  Among other mathematicians who support his efforts are Lou Kauffman
  and Mike Barr (Mike has known him longer than I have). Take a look
  at www.fermentmagazine.org. First you might want to read:


                              Commonweal
                              02/09/2001

                           Stop the Presses

                          by Richard Alleva

I enter the Russell Public Library of Middletown, Connecticut, just
around the corner from Wesleyan University. Walking past the
circulation desk, I turn left and enter a publisher's office.

No, wait, it's not a publisher's office but the library's reference
department. But, behold, in one corner, publishing is indeed in
progress. Crouched over a computer keyboard is a middle-aged man with
a pate appropriately monkish and a face appropriately gnomic, for like
any good writer he coaxes his thoughts onto the page with the humble
intensity of a monk decorating a manuscript or the greedy intensity of
a gnome counting his gold. He has slipped his complete works onto some
disks which he carries to and from the library. With the aid of a
benevolent library computer technician, he has installed a wide
variety of typefonts on the hard drive which not only he but any other
library patron can employ (thereby making our writer not only the
beneficiary but the benefactor of the library), and once he has
written at least a couple of drafts in longhand, he chooses the most
appropriate font for the story or essay in progress, types it, revises
again and again until satisfied, prints, photocopies, turns the
results over to a bindery, and winds up with the latest of several
handsome booklets with blue or purple or red covers, puckishly
decorated by their author. Presto, a twenty-first-century descendant
of the Elizabethan chapbook.

The contents? Modern variations of Greek and Indian myths, "cynical"
(but actually quite poignant) Christmas stories, short fiction about
Americans in Paris in the 1960s, factual reports on scientific
conferences, ruminations on the state of current academia, horror
stories of the homeless, book reviews, farces, musings on the latest
developments in physics, and one of the most unsparing and tacitly
poignant autobiographies I have ever read.

Whose autobiography? That of Roy Lisker, onetime math prodigy,
ex-wandering musician, contributor to JeanPaul Sartre's Les Temps
Modernes, and local character in a succession of places (mostly
university communities), political protestor and prankster, and
indefatigable self-publisher.

Unless you are Noam Chomsky or historian Howard Zinn or composers
Milton Babbitt and John Harbison or one of the other subscribers to
Lisker's monthly publication, Ferment, you will have to take my word
for it that Roy is worth reading for the way he can make a fictional
character as rooted in the real world as the subject of a New Yorker
profile, while endowing a real-life academic with the fabulousness of
a character in Dickens. If there were any literary justice in the
world, Linker's story, "Sam, The Messiah Man," about a violinist who
devotes his entire career to perfecting the violin passages of a
Handel oratorio, would be as renowned as Borges's fable about another
artistic specialist, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." But what
really concerns me here is to point out how tenaciously Lisker reverts
to the seemingly outmoded notion of the writer as local character and
streetcorner vendor of news, satire, and fantasy. To be sure, Lisker
has been conventionally published (his academic satire, Getting That
Meal Ticket, was published in Paris by Rend Juliard in 1972), but he
now confines his energies to using his private printing press in the
Russell Library, hawking his wares on the Wesleyan campus, giving
readings at local bookstores, and mailing his publications to
subscribers who are all over the country because Roy, in his youth,
had been all over the country befriending and bugging people while
enacting his role of academic-mathematician- wandering minstrel.

  [For the whole thing: www.fermentmagazine.org/Commonweal.html]