Aren't You Glad That's Over?

Well that was interesting wasn't it. I'm not sure that Quality outweighed Quantity in any of those poems. My wife thought a couple of them were quite good but as they were often inspired by current reading material which at the moment is Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Quantum Book, some of them were on obscure-but-interesting points about The Uncertainty principle which BC and JF managed to explain so that it only took me three goes at reading the paragraph. There were a few "so that's how it works" moments which in Quantum Theory explanations is always a good sign. I have also just finished The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis which I was going to jettison very early on except that I knew it was about the victim hood of his poor sister and thought I should get past the Teenage Kicks of the first four fifths and find out what he really meant. I never did find out and I'm not sure that he did either; I must be missing something important unless the fact that The Sexual Revolution was good for some and bad for others is the entire point. I think the point could have been made in a more relevant way. It was of course beautifully written and MA is so much cleverer than what I am.

Why Can't We Be Cheese and Onion Beetles?

It is nice to see that Mrs Trellis has got her own website though I have to say that so much ISIHAC humour in one place does place a strain on whichever part of the mind that Jonathan Miller identified as the centre of humour (and in the process analysed all laughs into oblivion).

I have to admit the following PUSH on the book stack.

Reading log - PUSHED The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis - Saturday 14th November - so Doctor Alice is having to wait though I am whistling through it and I am sure, missing some of the subtleties in amongst all that teenage lust and intellectualism. Will I be shouted at for saying that Charles Highway can be rather like Adrian Mole? Of course not! Adrian Mole is just like Charles Highway. Now of course the question is how autobiographical is The Rachel Papers? I think I managed to get through the whole of Experience (probably because of the obvious grief for his missing cousin - a victim of Fred West) and it seems that Charles Highway and Martin Amis are pretty much the same person at a particular point in time. Wiki pretty much confirms this but what do I know? I should be able to POP by the weekend at the current rate.

This reminds me that I might just be able to get a 90% accurate list of all the books I have not finished. Unfortunately I suspect that the bookmarks have been removed so I won't be able to go back and retrieve them which means a lack of closure but then again life is not that smooth corridor. I will die with the book stack ragged and unpopped, my lifetime list of coffee cups like Toilets' coffee spoons - measuring a stuttering regime of back-and-forth, no sense and no reason other than to be happy and to minimise the negatives.

Dimensionasaurus

Listening to Electric Guitar Phase by Steve Reich - Played by Dominic Frasca

After my mention of higher spacial dimensions, Marcus du Sautoy's book on symmetry has taken this to extremes and started talking about objects that exist in hundreds of thousands of dimensions and have quintillions of symmetries. I just cannot begin to imagine how a mind even contemplates the programs needed to run to create mathematical models of such objects. It amazes me that the human mind is able to memorise phone numbers let alone these sort of things. Praise is du(e) to du Sautoy for making his book about this so easy and compelling. It's real beauty however, is the direct link between the ancient mathematicians of Greece and the Islamic world, through the Renaissance solvers of cubic equations, the French revolutionary Mathematicians to du Sautoy himself, reach a peak with the planet-sized brain of his mentor John Conway, a man who seems able to 'see' in these dimensions as far as I can tell. Rudy Rucker has been informed.

On a completely different subject, Martin Amis has written a juicy article on Iran for the Guardian. No punch-pulling here I'm afraid but there is obvious recognition that the situation is far more complex than anything solvable with force. I'm not sure it actually makes me like Martin Amis any more but it maintains his position as one of the greatest living British Writers.