what are you reading now?
yyaldrin
in je ogen waait de wind
Have any of you read Coming up for Air by George Orwell? I finished it last week and was thinking about the last sentence. If you haven't read it don't select the text, maybe it would spoil the reading experience. What do you think George Bowling did?
SPOILER
Quite useless, of course. She'd found me guilty and now she was going to tell me what she thought of me. That might take a couple of hours. And after that there was further trouble looming up, because presently it would occur to her to wonder where I'd got the money for this trip, and then she'd discover that I'd been holding out on her about the seventeen quid. Really there was no reason why this row shouldn't go on till three in the morning. No use playing injured innocence any longer. All I wanted was the line of least resistance. And in my mind I ran over the three possibilities, which were:
A. To tell her what I'd really been doing and somehow make her believe me.
B. To pull the old gag about losing my memory.
C. To let her go on thinking it was a woman, and take my medicine.
But, damn it! I knew which it would have to be.
/SPOILER
C, right?
SPOILER
Quite useless, of course. She'd found me guilty and now she was going to tell me what she thought of me. That might take a couple of hours. And after that there was further trouble looming up, because presently it would occur to her to wonder where I'd got the money for this trip, and then she'd discover that I'd been holding out on her about the seventeen quid. Really there was no reason why this row shouldn't go on till three in the morning. No use playing injured innocence any longer. All I wanted was the line of least resistance. And in my mind I ran over the three possibilities, which were:
A. To tell her what I'd really been doing and somehow make her believe me.
B. To pull the old gag about losing my memory.
C. To let her go on thinking it was a woman, and take my medicine.
But, damn it! I knew which it would have to be.
/SPOILER
C, right?
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blacktulip
Pregnant with mandrakes
jenks
thread death
Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways - may well be one of the finest things I have read in quite some time. He undertakes to walk some of the ancient paths that people have used for hundreds (and thousands) of years starting with the Icknield Way before moving on to the Broomway, a path in the sea which connects Wakering to Foulness Island and has claimed hundreds of lives over the years as unwary travellers have got trapped by the unrushing tides. The writing is quite marvellous - poetic and rich, almost the obverse side to a coin with Iain Sinclair on the reverse - both interested in walking and the connectedness of things but one urban and febrile the other rural and measured.
Honestly, it is utterly marvellous.
http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/robert-macfarlane-walks-the-south-downs/
Honestly, it is utterly marvellous.
http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/robert-macfarlane-walks-the-south-downs/
jenks
thread death
I'm not bothered whether you endorse him or not, it's hardly going to change my opinion on the book or the writer.
bruno
est malade
beautiful paintings/illustrations in that post, i wasn't familiar with the artist.
i'm in the middle of reading john lilly's center of the cyclone, wonderful stuff and fascinating to someone who is still trying to make sense of his experience with hallucinogens.
next in line: hilaire belloc's path to rome..
IdleRich
IdleRich
Bogged down in Swann's Way and Roger Penrose's Shadows of The Mind... my girlfriend's flatmate enticed me down an easier route by leaving I, Partridge on the floor outside her bedroom door. The warts and all biography of Alan Partridge might be a lot easier to read but it is fucking funny - and comes with a (mandatory) playlist of songs to accompany the moments of high drama. Of which there are many.
The way that the creation Partridge has appeared on so many different tv and radio shows over the years (both as a presenter and the ones about his life) means that the book really feels as though it is filling in the gaps in the life of a man (idiot) you've been vaguely aware of for years, rather than building a back (and front) story around one telly show as would be the case with almost any of the other similar tv characters of his era. I like it.
Then back to Roger "If T was decidable and sound then it couldn't be consistent because consistency arises precisely as a function of its w-consistency which is of course trivially impossible due to the nth G(T) not halting but of course soundness implies consistency so...." Penrose I guess.
The way that the creation Partridge has appeared on so many different tv and radio shows over the years (both as a presenter and the ones about his life) means that the book really feels as though it is filling in the gaps in the life of a man (idiot) you've been vaguely aware of for years, rather than building a back (and front) story around one telly show as would be the case with almost any of the other similar tv characters of his era. I like it.
Then back to Roger "If T was decidable and sound then it couldn't be consistent because consistency arises precisely as a function of its w-consistency which is of course trivially impossible due to the nth G(T) not halting but of course soundness implies consistency so...." Penrose I guess.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, please don't think I understood much of that bit either.
'trivially' and 'of course' make me laugh.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.
I do love that book. Check out Picture This after you finish it. I read it a long while ago, but I do remember it being very entertaining - I didn't know much about Rembrandt at all beforehand.
Talking of famous painters and unorthodox (sort of) biographical accounts of them, everyone must see Lust for Life, Kirk Douglas as van Gogh. Fricking amazing.
I do love that book. Check out Picture This after you finish it. I read it a long while ago, but I do remember it being very entertaining - I didn't know much about Rembrandt at all beforehand.
Talking of famous painters and unorthodox (sort of) biographical accounts of them, everyone must see Lust for Life, Kirk Douglas as van Gogh. Fricking amazing.
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bruno
est malade
that's too bad, i've been meaning to read this. the trick i think is to read as you would a novel, the general idea is more important than the detail. or find a different book.
i read a book on gödel's thought called a logical journey, parts of which (especially logic, not my strong suit) were difficult to digest, but i enjoyed the book regardless. to be fair, the author had the almost impossible task of taking a series of freeform conversations with gödel, making sense of it all, then exposing it in a clear manner to the reader. the book deals with the question of mind/matter among other things, very stimulating stuff that i think could be of interest to you.
re:consciousness, antonio damasio seems to be an interesting author, perhaps you have read him?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, it's fucking brilliant, isn't it? One of the few classic 'humorous' books that actually turns out to be genuinely hilarious. So clever, too. Read it years ago, should probably revisit it at some point.
That's the best approach. I could cope with the quantum mechanics, more or less, but the symbolic logic went mostly straight over my head. It's annoying because it would be great to understand his reasoning, but you just end up taking his word for it because he's Sir Roger Penrose, Hyper-Turbo-Ninja Professor of Mathematics at Smartypants University.
Having said that, I dunno if it's orders of magnitude more arcane than some of the stuff you'd find in, say, a Thomas Pynchon novel...
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IdleRich
IdleRich
Yeah, I am kinda exaggerating for (hopefully) comic effect. The book is generally readable - although I have skated over a few bits which I could/should read a few times and really grasp if I were more conscientious. Then again I did do a fair bit of this stuff at university... although that was coming up to twenty years ago!
Nope. But on similar lines I picked up a book by Gilbert Ryle in a cafe yesterday that would make a good companion piece to the Penrose. Probably best to start with the Ryle though as it was (chronologically) first. I forget the title.
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Moshé Machover's book "Set Theory, Logic and their Limitations" is a very good properly technical but still elementary introduction to symbolic logic. It's written for philosophy undergrads so it assumes you're paying attention but requires no previous knowledge. It goes onto Godel and a few other limiting results at the end. (Also, I've only just found out, Machover seems to be some sort hard leftist Israeli anti-zionist. Skill.)
I'm reading Dafoe's Journal of the Plague Year, partly as a result of reading Merlin de Coverly going on about it a while back. It seems okay - so far a moderate number of people have died of plague in specified parishes, and he's decided to stick around because God.
Vineland before that - quite good but not his best.
blacktulip
Pregnant with mandrakes
Defoe - crucial spelling in this case. =)
jenks
thread death
Maybe I should ignore the provocation and move on but I do wonder when you were set up as the high priest of this thread. Maybe we should submit our reading lists to you before we undertake to read a book, in case we enjoy the wrong thing.
I am willing to listen to what you might have to say about poetry and David Jones in particular. But there are limits to what i will listen to you about.
However... successfully stung by being called complacent I will say that the sections in The Old Ways which I think are excellent are the first two chapters on the Icknield Way and The Broomway. I must make a special plea for the latter as it is only a few miles from here and his description of walking into into the sea is rather magical.And i grew up very close to the former and reminded me of childhood summers. I am late to the joys of nature walks and couldn't really read a map properly until about fifteen years ago. I cannot tell the difference between many birds and many trees just remain trees, unnameable. But i have enjoyed the writing of Deakin, Crocker, Maybey, Jarman and others on nature and I am learning.
I like the straightforward idea of The Old Ways, I am less keen on the sections where he visits his old chums but his chapter on Edward Thomas and his final chapter on the mysterious appearance of ancient footsteps on Formby beach encapsulates the metaphoric and literal thrust of the book - walking in footsteps and their disappearances. So it might not be the most remarkable insight but he follows it through all the way - picking up on the ancientness of things, connecting now and then and doing it all through walking.
I don't think he is a lazy writer, he may well be a little too florid for your liking but I think people like Lovecraft are shockingly bad writers but are lauded here. You obviously don't like him but it is not a character deficiency in me to like him.