Y
Page 16
The good deeds a man has done before defend him
Notes
The facts of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life that were included in this novel were drawn from a variety of sources, including the incredible American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and the beautiful The House at Otowi Bridge by Peggy Pond Church. Further research included reading J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century by David C. Cassidy, 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant, Our Southwest by Erna Fergusson, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Priscilla J. McMillan, The Manhattan Project by Stephane Groueff, An Atomic Love Story by Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus, and Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, edited by Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner.
This work also draws from Oppenheimer’s own writing, most notably his papers ‘On Massive Neutron Cores’ (co-written with G. M. Volkoff), ‘On Continued Gravitational Contraction’ (co-written with H. Synder), and his two books, Science and the Common Understanding and The Open Mind.
The poetic passages, which include George Herbert, Charles Baudelaire, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Donne, and T. S. Eliot, were all taken from various public domain websites. The parts of the Bhagavad Gita are a combination of Stephen Mitchell’s (2000) and Arthur W. Ryder’s (1929) translations.
Acknowledgements
This manuscript was written on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. I am grateful to live and work on this territory as an uninvited guest.
I would like to begin by thanking Alana Wilcox for an incredible job editing this work. It was tremendous to have such a careful and caring eye on the text; she taught me so much about reading and writing. Thank you as well to everyone at the Coach House, especially Jessica Rattray for all the energy promoting the book, an unending well of positivity, and Crystal Sikma for the many jobs she did, including, but not limited to, the double- and triple-checking. To Ingrid Paulson for the beautiful cover. Thanks, too, to Emily Cook and Richard Nash for the tireless American publicity work. A note of gratitude as well to Stuart Ross for the parsing and proofreading. And, of course, thank you to everyone involved with the making and printing at the Coach House.
This book has had many generous, thoughtful readers that have helped along the way: thanks to my agent and friend, Stephen Murphy, for working so hard to get this out into the world. Thank you to Marianne Apostolides, for the friendship, and for the hardest edit, the earliest, and for moulding this text into something that was ready to give away. To Jordan Scott for the love, knowledge, and encouragement; to Ally Fleming for her enthusiasm and intelligence; to Sean Hickey for his reading prowess and kindness reaching way way back.
Thank you to the authors and researchers I had the pleasure of reading and engaging with in this book.
Beyond this, thank you to Adam Seelig for the conversations and beer and always showing me the most interesting parts of Toronto; to Tyler Harper, Elliot Harper, and Renee Jackson-Harper for introducing me to Stephen and for the enduring support; to Ted Nolan, Catriona Wright, and Daniel Scott Tysdal for the late night exchanges down the stretch; to Dale Smith, David Hadbawnik, and Kevin Varrone for the friendship and help.
My gratitude towards the Ontario Arts Council for providing funding in the early stages of this novel; to the White Wall Review for publishing an excerpt of the work; to the Ryerson English Department for their continued personal and professional support, and to my union, CUPE local 3904, for providing me with countless levels of aid.
To my loving parents, Sherrie and Cam Tucker.
To Julia Polyck-O’Neill, for everything.
Aaron Tucker is the author of two collections of poetry, irresponsible mediums: the chesspoems of Marcel Duchamp and punchlines, as well as the two scholarly manuscripts, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Popular Cinema and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema. His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures, which are then 3-D printed; he is also the co-creator of The Chessbard, an app that transforms chess games into poems. In addition, he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University.
Typeset in Albertina, Trade, and Gotham.
Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover by Ingrid Paulson
Author photo by Julia Polyck-O’Neill
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto ON M5S 3J4
Canada
416 979 2217
800 367 6360
mail@chbooks.com
www.chbooks.com