Tuesday 18 March 2008
I finished Musicophilia a while back. It was something I had never thought of, the relationship between music and the brain. It turns out to be much more complex than I expected, involving several different parts of the brain. So much so that I sometimes wished I had a map of the brain to see the relative closeness of the various bits that deal with music. Much of the book is about the author's patients who had one aberration or another connected with music. Several seemed to have obsessions and heard music when none was actually to be heard by other people. One even obsessively composed music although he had never previously been much interested in it and had to learn how to write it down.
Altogether a new and strange view of music as experienced by some patients with odd problems. The neurologist-author also seemed quite detached from the music side of his patients' problems and viewed them just as symptoms of brain disorders. No doubt this was the only way to treat them. Refreshingly new stuff and expertly written.
The book I'm now reading is the strangely named Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. The author found himself having to teach human anatomy and realised that simplifying the body's structure was a good way to start students off. So he took the fish as an example of a creature with four simple limbs and then saw that mammals, including humans, had evolved from fish of several million years ago. So he took up fossil-hunting with fascinating results. I have read about a third of the book so far. It is brilliantly written and, to me, gives an entirely new slant on evolution in action over massive times scales, and within and across different species.
Saturday 19 January 2008
Steph kindly gave me two books for Christmas: The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking by Simon Singh and Musicophila: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks. I've finished the first, fascinatingly written by a genuine enthusiast who is at the same time a scholar who has done his research. He tells great historical stories, but takes us through the intricacies of the various types of codes and cyphers very gently using analogies to explain the maths. Bletchley Park, of course, is there, but also Mary Queen of Scots, the ancient Greeks, the Arabs, various clever (and some dotty) Americans who have baffled their enemies with new ways either of hiding messages or of reading their coded communications. A much easier read than one might suppose. I've only just started the music book which is also well written by a neurologist. It promises well.
Wednesday 14 August 2002
Nick, the second chef at the Acorn, lent me two more books by Louis de Bernières. Katy first introduced me to him when she gave me Captain Corelli's Mandolin and then Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord. Of course he writes wonderfully well and takes you right inside a culture that, to me at least, was totally strange. I must see what he has done lately.
Thursday 7 March 2002
As my latest sigfiles show, I've been rereading Beatrix Potter. The copies I have are the family ones I had read to me (and soon read to myself) handed down from my elder siblings. So the earliest ones must have dated from about 1920. Naturally they are tattered and coming apart at the seams, but have been repaired with Sellotape and even Elastoplast, a sticky combination not to be recommended: the pages needed a good deal of prising apart. Curious to know what the Eng. Lit. people thought of her, I turned to The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English: "Her tales range from stories of escape from near-death to charming, eventless catalogues of animal domesticity. Each one, however, was written with a natural ear for what she described as 'fine-sounding words'. Her illustrations usually showed animal characters wearing human clothes but otherwise treated without sentimentality." I found them as enchanting as I did 70-odd years ago. Some of the best of her 'fine-sounding words' were to do with the descriptions of animals in motion. In Tom Kitten the three Puddle-Ducks are 'doing a goose step – pit pat paddle pat! pit pat waddle pat!' Peter Rabbit, after his encounter with Mr MacGregor, tried to find his way out of the kitchen garden: 'he began to wander about going lippity-lippity-not very fast, and looking all round.' Wonderful!
Sunday 6 January 2002
My friends have done me proud with books (and lots of other goodies) for Christmas. Erica and Nick have found something I have only ever known on the internet: The Darwin Awards. They are given to people who deprive us of their company by killing themselves in the most stupid of ways, but who benefit us all by taking their cretinous genes out of the gene pool. For instance, one American, needing some money, decided to rob a shop. But the shop he chose was a gun store, outside of which was parked a police car with the police department sign on top. As soon as he produced his gun and demanded money, he was demolished by a rain of bullets from police, shopkeeper and customers.
Margaret has given me the wonderful Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea. The story of who invented the number between one and minus one is fascinating and highly relevant as showing why the current millennium started on 1 January 2001 and not a year earlier. (Why 'dangerous'? If you don't know, try dividing any number you like by zero on your calculator and you will find out.)
Katy too gave me a book on a scientific subject, Galileo's Daughter. She became a nun and therefore by her faith committed to the geocentric theory of the universe embraced by the Church. But she was also intellectually and emotionally inclined to her father's opposing theory that the earth revolves around the sun. Fortunately her letters to Galileo still exist and they are the basis of the book.
So I shall have a great time moving from flippant to serious science over the next few weeks.
Sunday 28 October 2001
I'm reading (or rereading: not sure which, but parts seem familiar) George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier. He writes grippingly, and of course with total commitment. It's like reading about another world, but I was nine when it was first published, so it's not that alien. In among the grim details of grinding poverty, even for those in work, and the means test for the others, there are odd striking stories. He notes that there are lots of mice deep down the mines. 'They are surprisingly common, especially in mines where there are or have been horses,' he says. He speculates that they got there by falling down the shaft, surviving the drop because their surface area is so large relative to their weight. But he did not make the connection that Ali Pearce made: that it is much more likely that they travelled in the fodder for the horses and then bred in the warm darkness.
Wednesday 17 October 2001
I have taken to reading a second newspaper as an experiment. I have read the Financial Times for 15 years or so. It is wonderful because it has almost nothing about 'celebs' unless they are business people or politicians, and the news presentation is pretty straight. But it is not very jolly or committed, so I have been reading The Independent as well. It has a position more like my own on the terrorist thing, and it has been interesting to compare the Indie and FT: perhaps the FT has been too straight. I also read Private Eye for the rumours behind the headlines, and the New Scientist, as well as two local papers, the daily Dorset Echo and the weekly Western Gazette. My two Saturday nationals take me two days to read, thus neatly avoiding having to buy a Sunday.
Sunday 23 September 2001
It may sound strange, but my bedside reading just now is The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. It offers the most wonderful byways of English: all the metres and verse forms that I never bothered to learn at school and later wished I had (story of my life! and perhaps of other people's too); new insights into old favourites, vivid analyses of everyone and everything from Chaucer to Winnie-the-Pooh. It is alarming to realise how much I have left unread. But then the Guide lists 124 contributors who collectively have read the lot, but individually have certainly not.
Some of my favourite books get a mention. Anthony Hope's The Dolly Dialogues is here, 'a series of witty sketches of the London season' which were marvellously read on the BBC Third Programme in about 1950. Pickwick, the first, lightest and most entertaining of the Dickens novels, but nevertheless with a foretaste of his darker books, with their savage satire of Victorian social injustice and hypocrisy. Bede's History and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: they knew all about terrorism in those days, with the Danes in the next valley probably discussing a raid on your village. But, talking of history, for some reason Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 and All That is absent: perhaps too trivial, ephemeral. In parenthesis, Walter Sellar was my housemaster at school.