Currently Reading..

Heard sung outside on the street at around 9am: I do, I do, I do believe in faeries...

I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's excellent The Road yesterday. Its sparse, exquisite prose reminded me of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead as did the preoccupation with love and tenderness. However, while Gilead is about a place and staying there, The Road travels through nameless towns, through woods and across mountains. It deals with a world where there are no places or localities - insofar as 'place' is situated in time (cf. Foucault and the discussion of space/place) or in memory. McCarthy's book is bleak, austere and shockingly beautiful. It is also a strong contender for Best Read of 2008.

Speaking of which, one of the best reads I had last year was the flawed but absolutely fascinating The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas. I just picked up her PopCo and I am somewhat reassured by reviewers insisting that despite the ghastly cover, it is 'intelligent and witty'.

Finally, astute readers with stalkerishly attention to blog-details may note that I have re-designed Fourth Edition and that it now bears an astonishing resemblance to a certain blogspot blog I kept years and years ago. What can I say? I'm retro.

Mapping the World

A tired day today.

So why not go look at Strange Maps instead?

It's seriously one of the coolest, most informative websites around. It does what it says on the tin: Maps. Strange ones.

The content ranges from the very informative - a map of how various denominations of Christianity are distributed throughout the US - to the bizarre - a map of Neu-York: how New York would have looked had Nazi Germany conquered it.

Personally I like looking at maps that challenge my preconceptions - who knew that Papau New Guinea is such a polyglot society that it dwarfs the rest of the world? Or that Great Britain could easily fit within Borneo?

If you think this sounds all a bit too heavy, there are maps of the US made out of pumpkins, the US as perceived by Japanese people, cats' maps of the bed etc. And for you über-geeky technosavvy ones out there, how about a subway map of the Web 2.0?

Slices of Life

Since I last had an MRI scan (mid-90s, if I recall correctly), technology has allowed the patient to listen to the radio during the scan. Unfortunately this meant I was forced to listen to a talk show debating killing stray dogs and then people suffering from claustrophobia. Not ideal listening material for someone who likes dogs and is trapped inside a snug plastic tube for 40 minutes.

Seeing as today is Super Tuesday, the Slate article, Can I Get My 5-Month-Old Daughter Photographed With Every Presidential Candidate? is a very apt link. The photos are great - I particularly like the first Barack Obama photo and the hilariously panicky Rudy Giuliani photo.

Today is also Shrove Tuesday - Pancake Tuesday - here in the UK. I made pancakes earlier today and served them Danish style with butter, a touch of ground cardamom and granulated sugar. Multi-culturalism r us, yo.

Boom-Di-DA-DA-Boom

Let's be positive! My downstairs neighbour is not a hypersensitive man who complains that I 'type too loudly'. He is not a schizophrenic albino who loves Celine Dion and talks to his absent father whilst hiding from the people in the walls. He is not a Norwegian couple who argue until 4am, then shag and who will eventually leave me with two desert rats called Legolas and Gimli. Let's face it, I survived all those people, so why should I be so grumpy about him being a hippie stoner who puts the same prog rock song on repeat until 2.30am.

I must be getting old. Well, I did take up crocheting the other week..

Now, to paraphrase the amazing Flight of the Conchords: it's Hospital Time.

The Scandal of the Season

I am currently reading Sophie Gee's "The Scandal of the Season" and it is a bewildering read.

The plot outline: 18th century Britain. Catholics and Protestants live side by side uneasily. The young poet Alexander Pope is heading to London to make his name. He encounters a situation he'll later immortalise in the wonderful mock epic The Rape of the Lock. So, by all accounts you get literary history in the making, the (in)famous flirt between Lord Petre and Arabella Fermor (as immortalised in the poem), religious troubles and a look at the early 18th century landscape. Ms Gee knows a helluva lot about the period and therein lies the real problem of this book.

I cannot enjoy it as fiction. The characters speak wonderfully witty early 18th century English but they all speak in the same manner. There is no distinct turn of phrase, no subtle nuances to their voices and after a few pages it begins to grate. The characters are not fleshed out, they never leap off the page and the plot drags. Furthermore, because Sophie Gee has her characters repartee so beautifully, the more modern phrases she occasionally employs spring out and annoy. As an expert writing on the literary and political landscape of early 18th century London, Gee convinces, though. I wish she had written a nice, witty treatise on that subject - she has apparently written academic articles on the matter - but it's not very likely that little book would have made it to my little secondhand bookstore.

I did find Read for Pleasure through googling for Sophie Gee, so not all's lost.

Knotted Brain Much?

The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art: "the world's largest collection of anatomically correct fabric brain art. Inspired by research from neuroscience, dissection and neuroeconomics, our current exhibition features three quilts with functional images from PET and fMRI scanning, a knitted brain, and two fabric pieces interpreting single neuron recording."

Their disclaimer amuses this soon-to-undergo-MRI-scan woman: "While our artists make every effort to insure accuracy, we cannot accept responsibility for the consequences of using fabric brain art as a guide for functional magnetic resonance imaging, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, neurosurgery, or single-neuron recording."

Found via the scary, slightly incomprehensible Knitting For Nerds which also includes links to knitted nonorientable manifolds (no, I don't know either) and The Periodic Table sweater.