Standard Fireworks
Read Peter Kay's Diary, a very light and enjoyable read, as I was feeling somewhat stressed at work. The book is everything you would expect from Peter kay: warm, nostalgic, and funny, with occasional more serious notes.
Peter Kay's father used to buy Standard Fireworks, which crop up in one of my favourite stories told by Bob Mortimer! As David Mitchell says, it's a funy name. Standard Fireworks: for a bonfire night you will forget!
Robot
Read Robot by Adam Wisniewski-Snerg, written in 1973 in Polish, translated into English in 1990 by Tomasz Mirkowicz, and finally published in English in 2021.
This was a challenging read. The story is deliberately disorienting and confusing, as we experience the uncertainty of the protagonist. Who is he? Is he human or robot? Are the other characters real? Are there discontinuities in their reality? There are general themes of suspicion, paranoia, identity, personal agency and free-will. The robots in question aren't the mechanical sort of the AI sort; they are biological and possess a free-will. They are created by the Mechanism to follow their own instincts and will, which will somehow fulfill the Mechanism's wishes. I did not understand the plot entirely; but maybe I wasn't supposed to.
Are we in the Shelter?
'Haven't you yet noticed,' she said after a moment, 'how some of the Shelter's inhabitants, at times needlessly, strive desperately to appear exactly who they are? Hasn't it caught your attention how carefully they affect a certain innocence, how they mask their deepest feelings, even of repugnance, and how by feigning total compliance, pretend to be busy and, when the need arises, even by shamming greed and stupidity, they do everything possible to make their behavior appear absolutely normal; in short, haven't you noticed they are doing their best to hide in the crowd?''Robot, by Adam Wisniewski-Snerg
Short stories
Read several colletions of short stories. First, aborted Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, written in 1902. I expected colonial attitudes about e.g., seeing the animals as resource or as something to be put to work, but I didn't expect explicit racism about non-European people.
Switched to Stories for Seven Year Olds, a collection published by Harper Collins. On the whole, we enjoyed it, and discovered some interesting stories and authors. Vardiello was a highlight, as was discovering Leila Berg, an advocate of children's rights and children's literature.
For myself, read the collection The People's City, a collection of short stories centered in Edinburgh, with a rousing introduction by Irvine Welsh and contributions from Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith.
Finally, attended a wonderful seminar by Jordan Stoyanov, an academic grandson of the great Kolmogorov. The talk introduced a few intriguing problems and their connections to probability theory. The problems discused were similar to recreational maths, for example, find random variables for which $$X + Y = XY$$ with equality in distribution. These little problems are, to me, the short stories of maths. They have intrigue that captures you, but can be consumed satisfying in a single period, without multiple strands to the story line or many characters entering.
Tags: reading, short stories, maths
The Last Bell
Read The Last Bell by Donald McRae. A thoughtful and moving book about boxers and boxing, worthy of the William Hill nomination that drew me to it. McRae is a veteran sports journalist, and writes about grief and death in his personal life and in boxing bouts that end in tragedy.
The case of Patrick Day is particularly poignant. His brothers remark that he had so many qualities that boxing didn't value. I was already conflicted and ambivalent about the sport, but no longer think noble champions, even Oleksandr Usyk, can justify or redeem it.
RIP Patrick Day.
The Church of Reason
Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I didn't expect so much relevance to academia (though new little about the book):
The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn’t lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Phaedrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer “holy ground.” The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation …
The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
Tags: reading, academic, philosophy