#bookadayuk February 2nd

"I'd like to know what @__'s favourite book is" #passthebook

I'm going to do a cheat here, sort of, and pick several.

First of all, I'd like to know what my daughter Lara's favourite book is going to be. I would ask her myself, but she's only 4 days old. I suspect I might have to wait a little while.

Secondly...I'm really struggling. Many names come to mind, but most of them are dead, some of them are fictional characters and most of the rest aren't on Twitter. Hmm. So here's a mini-list:

Dead: James Stewart

Fictional character: Spenser, Robert B. Parker's fictional detective.

Not on Twitter: Bill Bryson

Of the rest, I'm pulling a name out of a hat and selecting @daraobriain.

#bookadayuk February 1st

#bookadayuk

This hashtag on Twitter has (albeit, in all likelihood, only temporarily) inspired me to resurrect this blog. So, here goes.

Day 1 - "Book that defined my teenage years"

The one that comes closest to fulfilling this description is "The Hobbit" (I don't really need to say 'by J. R. R. Tolkien, do I? What do you mean "you just did."?). My first memory of this book is watching, and being enthralled by, Bernard Cribbins reading it on Jackanory. From memory I would have said this was when I was around 6 years old, placing it in 1980, but swift recourse to Google determines that it was 1979 so I didn't do too badly after all in dredging that up. 

Anyway, that was my first encounter with it but during my teenage years I must have read it, without exaggeration, 30 times. My reverence for it almost certainly goes a long way towards explaining how disappointed I was with Peter Jackson's movies. The bits that worked, for me, were all Tolkien's original material. All the Jackson-imagined parts were weirdly clunky and incongruous - like gluing hands onto a chicken.

Enough rambling, it's late, it's halftime at the Superbowl, and I'm going to bed.

Comfortably dumb

So, David Gilmour is a bit of a dick, eh? No, not that David Gilmour, another one.

"Who is he and what has he done?" I hear you cry. Well, he teaches literature at The University of Toronto and has recently revealed in an interview that he refuses to teach books by women authors. So, like I said, a dick. That's not what prompted me to take up my metaphorical pen, however. No, I'm more interested in another question.

Men, in general, (it is my observation) do not write female characters particularly well. It has been pointed out to me that this is improving and whilst I would agree with this I think my original thesis still stands. Now it could be argued that this is because men don't think like women. I'm not sufficiently well up on my neuroscience to know if this supposition could have any basis in biology, although I suspect (granted this is only a gut feeling) that it may. So my question is this: given that men, in general, don't understand women sufficiently well to write them convincingly, is it okay for men to choose not to teach things women have written for the same reason? I can't decide.

Can you? Note: even if the answer is "yes, it's okay" the above logic doesn't apply to Gilmour. He's still a dick.

I believe that this is a complicated question whose very validity rests on supposing that men and women do indeed think, in some real and fundamental way, differently. And this, in turn, comes down (eventually) to a question of free will. Consider: assume for a moment that we do not have free will, that each and every one of our actions arises directly from the hard-wired structure of our brain. It seems to me that, since this structure is DNA-dependent, and also that since this DNA differs by a whole chromosome between men and women, it logically follows that men and women do, fundamentally, think differently. If, however, we do possess free will then this house of cards collapses. From whence does this free will arise? That's a question for another day.

Pseudo-reality bites

Stop for a moment and take a look around at your surroundings. What do you see?

It doesn't matter. It's not real.

Okay, that's not quite true. It is real. It's just not really real. Let me attempt to explain.

As some of you may recall, I'm (still) reading Bryan Magee's "Confessions of a Philosopher" and in today's small segment the subject under discussion was reality and what we mean when we say 'reality'. Think of a scene, any scene, say the one in front of you now. Think of all the ways there are to portray it; e.g. a drawing, a photograph, a painting in oil, a painting in watercolour. Nobody would argue that these are anything but representations of the scene, not the scene itself. These are all, if you will, different textures of the same thing.

Now here's the key thing: the same logic can also be extended to cover all the sensory data your brain receives. It's another texture-layer we lay on top of reality which enables us to interact with it; the chair you see in front of you is in no way the real chair any more than is the photograph of the chair that you can hold in your hand. It's just another level removed, perceptually, from the (for want of a better term) chairness of the chair itself.

That's not to say that we create our own reality and that nothing is real. It just means that we can never see reality as it really is. In fact, I'm not even sure that is a meaningful statement.

I'd welcome your thoughts.

Really.

A Little Lunchtime Escape-ism.

Over the years I've known quite a few people for whom writing has been an aspiration (I use that term solely because describing them as fully-fledged writers would be, in some cases, disingenuous). I myself could never hope to be an author - if you saw the struggle I had to get that previous sentence to make anything like grammatical sense you would immediately understand why (but I digress). My digressions (often parenthetical) are another reason. I usually try to avoid reading anything my friends have written; or, at the very least, I keep it to myself - after all, I don't want to be the one to have to tell them they're not very good. Or, worse, lie to them. Of course there are bound to be exceptions, I imagine, but I prefer to play it safe and so generally I try to avoid it.

Having said that, today at lunchtime I read the short story "Escape", the first story in the Five Empires series by Joely Black and, I have to tell you, it was just great. It moved along at a good pace, it hung together beautifully and it left me wanting more (in short, all you could ask for in a short story). Luckily, there is more, and I'll be reading the second instalment, "Wasps", soon.

Edit: I read "Wasps" on the way home and, I'm happy to report, I enjoyed it every bit as much as its predecessor. I look forward to the next instalment.

Just some snippets

At the moment on my daily commute I'm (still) listening to the audiobook of "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson. Whilst it's proving to be entertaining and highly informative, I'm finding that it's not causing any moments of particular inspiration, hence the paucity of postworthy thoughts of the last few days.

A couple of facts have interested me sufficiently, however, to make them worth repeating here:

(I've already posted these on twitter so you may have already seen them)

• The biochemist with the best name ever!
• The naturally-occurring element Francium is so rare that it is thought there maybe as little as 20 ATOMS on the whole planet. (I'm not sure where Bryson got this figure - perhaps the printed book has references - the best figure I could find online was 20-30g at any one time)
• The human requirement for vitamin B12 is so miniscule that 1 ounce (ah, those crazy Americans with their antiquated measurements) will last your entire lifetime. (again, I'd like to see a source on this).

Okay, they're not particularly Earth-shattering, I'll grant you, but I liked them. Hopefully you did, too.

Cogito ergo summat

Do you think in words?

If you're like (I suspect) the vast majority of people, including me, you answered "yes" to that question. Apart from when you're trying to consciously visualise a specific image, be it an object, a place, or a person you probably always think in words. Or so you would suppose.

Wrongly.

Let me share with you this (forgive me, rather lengthy) excerpt from "Confessions of a Philosopher" by Bryan Magee to demonstrate further:

"The fact that we do not necessarily think in words is demonstrated in public as well as private ways. We all have the experience sometimes of not being able to hit on the precise word we we want in order to express something. We hesitate and stutter, and the people we are talking to suggest words to us, perhaps all those that in the thesaurus immediately surround the one we are looking for, but we say 'No'...'No'...to all of them, until at last someone comes out with the right one, and then we exclaim, 'That's it! That's the word I'm looking for!' If we had known less precisely than the focus of language what it was we wanted to say we would have accepted one of the words that were exceedingly close to the one we finally chose. But we did not. And that was because we knew what we wanted to say as exactly and precisely as language can say it, yet without the word; we knew that there was one and one word only that would do, and what is more we knew that it was a word we knew but could not think of at that moment. This shows that we can, and do, think with the utmost precision of which language is capable and yet without the use of the words themselves."

Now, I don't know about you, but this strikes me as exceedingly profound. At the very least, it's....dare I say it?...something to think about.