The Dedekind Cut - The Road To Reality- Roger Penrose

I think I just understood the Dedekind cut, as a way of defining the irrational numbers (like the square root of 2) as occurring in the spaces between the rational numbers, but with having recourse to the slightly clunky (in certain mathematician's view) geometric visualization of the number line. See The Road To Reality- Roger Penrose, p58.

Bob Dylan - an after-thought

It says something about how horribly suggestible and easily led I am (well, we all are is what I am getting at) that as soon as I hear that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize I want to listen to Blonde on Blonde.  This is rather strange because I never liked Bob Dylan that much and at the time Blonde and Blonde ( my cousin had it) was just too folky and acoustic to be something that I really liked to play.  I knew, even then , that it was an iconic album, but his voice just grated and droned on a bit. It was Blood On The Tracks, and to some extent Desire that got me listening to Dylan.  But, anyway I called it up on Spotify and began to play it, just like a million, maybe ten million other people probably did. Or maybe it's just sad fucks like me that play some guy who's won the Nobel prize's tracks even though they didn't like them much in the first place. And it was OK. OK. Rainy Day Women was the dirge that it always was, especially without that nudge nudge hey that's about getting stoned kind of smile that you had when it played in the 6th Form centre of my youth. In the end the Dylan I play the most is Slow Train Coming - especially You Gotta Serve Somebody. Gotta say something about me, but I don't know what.

The Vorrh - Brian Catling, China Mieville, Witold Gombrowicz - Ferdydurke

I found The Vorrh while browsing the science fiction table in Waterstones in Tunbridge Wells, being a place that I escape to when having to be in Tunbridge Wells for a short time. I was attracted by the first few pages, by Philip Pullman's high praise, but I wouldn't have bogt it unless I had been  in a physical bookshop looking for new authors - I must have missed the reviews when it came out, or else glossed over them. So this post is in praise of the casual looking through the shelves as much as it is in praise of the book itself. And of course this is how I used to read, but it wasn't Waterstone's I lingered in, it was our local public library, housed in an old house behind a circular drive, with its wooden counters and infamous notice in elegant letters on one of the posts.

"NO 

DOGS 

SMOKING 

PRAMS" 

I found the Hobbit there, I found the Lord of the Rings there, and I also found Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, a scurrilous surreal piece of literature that fascinated me. I'm trying to remember what else I found there, because I remember being so pleased when I finally got an adult ticket and could take out I think about eight books at once.  Ferdydurke was a strange concoction about which I can remember nothing very much, but it does lead into to talking about The Vorrh, a fantasy/ steam punky cross over science fiction novel that has fascinating strands of narrative carried along by inventive prose. Reminds me of China Mieville, one of those writers I have always desperately wanted to like, but have never been able to finish a book by him because his books always seem to lack an emotional core, whereas The Vorrh has all the strangeness and alienness but still has something more recognizable and connectable with at its core. I tried reading Perdido Station so many times, and Mievilles book blurbs always seem to promise so much, plus he seems an incredibly serious and complex writer whose novels I should enjoy.

American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold

If you've ever worked in a tele-sales, or even door-to-door this film will surely show you things that you saw and felt - the ridiculous competitions and prizes for first sale of the day, most sales of the day, the pressure always on because if you don't sell you won't be coming back the next day. A bus load of fairly anarchic teenagers are taken to different areas of the US to sell magazine subscriptions door to door. The icy Krystal leads them, chooses the areas, is driven by one of the sales team in an open top car. What do they want? Money.

There's a great soundtrack, which both entertains and underpins the frenetic rolling pace. For the heroine, Star it's an escape - the first scene she is crawling in a skip with her eight year old sister, trawling for food, while the four year old, too small to climb in, waits outside. Anything has to be better than this, or you would think.  American Honey takes its time but with few long set pieces - the Texans in white hats are a set piece, the oil worker is a set piece,  but for the rest it follows this uncomfortable, crazy world of selling as it happens from place to place, using short realistic scenes to punch its message at you. It's a bleak message, but full of kaleidoscopic moving, dancing and cameos of the riders in the mini-bus. The colours are harsh, bright and blaring, just like the life they are leading. The cast were picked up from streets and beaches to join the film,  so there is a fine natural feel to the group of misfits that Krystal has assembled.

Great dialogue keeps it moving, and ultimately it teaches you that selling is about selling yourself, nothing else, the product, the magazine is secondary. It's a lesson that Star learns and it isn't a happy one.

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False- Thomas Nagel

This snappily titled slim volume arrived in the post today and I've started reading it immediately - interesting it's the only thing I've been reading in the last few days that has really motivated me to write. Not that my previous few days reading hasn't been fulfilling and interesting - still immersed in Virginia Woolf's biography and her diary - but I haven't had the stimulus to write until now.  The Woolf books are full of the minutia of her family members and their mental upsets and moods - her father used to have black depressions, used to walk around making involuntary groans, other family members were just barking mad and taken to asylums - it's all a little too close to home - especially that moaning out loud. I lay in bed late yesterday, waking from strange nightmares every fifteen minutes or so with a horrible sense of dread and a small involuntary cry, all that remains of the scream inside my head. The fact that this is something so many experience is of some comfort but not much.

So, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (M&C from now on), essentially picking at questions that bother me - just the sense of how improbable it was that self replicating life evolved, and the difficulty in invoking consciousness as purely an emergent property of material chemistry.  Quite aside from the horrible complexity of DNA and RNA as the companion messenger molecule, the sheer difficulty of scaffolding these complex chemicals together into a cell is not understood in any way. It is possible that early clays left pockets in which complex organic molecules could replicate - that's one theory, not in the ascendant at the moment. There are other guesses, with good if speculative thinking and science behind them, but Nagel argues that we don't live in the world of the Blind Watchmaker, that there must be another principle, another way of thinking that will allow explanation of the improbable, that pure reductionism is ultimately not enough. He's not into intelligent design though - but he does say that the intelligent designers arguments about improbability of evolution have been unfairly discarded in the rush to ridicule the concept of intelligent design.

I have a feeling that this might be useful read in the context of both Nagel and Woolf, but I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Here's the Amazon blurb for Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, Liah Greenfield

"Modern nationalism, says Greenfeld, rests on bedrock principles of popular sovereignty, equality, and secularism. Citizens of the twenty-first century enjoy unprecedented freedom to become the authors of their personal destinies. Empowering as this is, it also places them under enormous psychic strain. They must constantly appraise their identities, manage their desires, and calibrate their place within society. For vulnerable individuals, this pressure is too much. Training her analytic eye on extensive case histories in manic depression and schizophrenia, Greenfeld contends that these illnesses are dysfunctions of selfhood caused by society's overburdening demands for self-realization. In her rigorous diagnosis, madness is a culturally constituted malady."

The alternative to this "unprecedented freedom" appears to be feudalism, slavery and despotism, so not much comfort there.