Looking Out To Sea

This Sunday we’ve got another Potluck and Prose, the lazy person’s book group, where you don’t technically need to have read your book, and bringing one is only suggested. As long as you’ve got a dish then all is fine.

Thankfully, after a bad start with Swallows and Amazons which I took two months to get through, I’m on a roll. This month I finished my own Foundation and Helen’s book too, Flowers for Algernon. Since then I’ve also been reading Innocent When You Dream (a compilation of interviews with Tom Waits) and started Quicksilver.

This latter is another seriously hefty book from Neal Stephenson, and is something like a prequel to Cryptonomicon. I cannot praise Cryptonomicon enough and would recommend it to anyone who asked. It was a fictionalised account of cryptography in the Second World War and modern computing, and riveting to boot. In order to outdo himself, Stephenson has chosen “science” as his theme and “the Age of Enlightenment” his time period. I’m only a few chapters in but it’s not disappointing so far!

Back round to the other book group, for science stuff, the next few books have been announced. One in particular looks very interesting, and will no doubt be particularly enjoyable once I’ve finished Quicksilver. It is Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. That’s not until March next year though.

But before that we’ve got:

• How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood by Alison Gopnik, Patricia K Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff
• Genesis Machines by Martyn Amos, which I own and have read
• Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

This is one of those I should have been doing this ages ago posts that will have other people rolling their eyes and muttering “well, yeah”.

bread
© ian

Last week I made a batch of low-yeast bread which was allowed to develop over the course of an evening. I moulded them and let them prove overnight in the fridge.

Not only was it easier and less hassle to bake first thing in the morning but I also had the satisfaction of making some of the nicest loaves I’ve made in a while. Helen and I took a baguette each and a box of sandwich ingredients to work, which also cut down on my effort in the morning. No more making sandwiches!

I’ve been too busy to do this again lately — I tried again on Sunday but the yeast was more active than I assumed it would be and it would have been over-proved after a night on its own. So I just baked that night. But I’m looking forward to doing this again.

This month for the book group we’ve both been reading science fiction stories. I had Foundation by Isaac Asimov and Helen read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. My book was quite short so I ended up reading them both.

I’ll have to give my thoughts to the group next Sunday so I have to work out what they are!

Foundation seemed very old-fashioned, even more old-fashioned than Swallows and Amazons. It really seems to be true that nothing dates faster than our idea of the future. The truth is, Foundation was mostly a Victorian adventure story set in the future — men with moustaches arguing things out over brandy and cigars and taking Science and Religion to the Heathens. For a book about the collapse of a galactic civilisation it really seemed like all the action took place in a single room, like it was really a stage play rather than a drama set across the full length of known space. Each scene was a set-piece where the Protagonist meets the Antagonist and subdues him with Superior Intellect.

The book is a collection of short stories in the lifetime of a small planet at the periphery of the aforementioned galactic empire. The empire is collapsing and various planetary warlords and tinpot dictators are appearing out of the anarchy. Each chapter was published as a self-contained story, each taking place a generation or two after the previous one. The central conceit of the whole series is the invention of “psychohistory”, a statistical method of predicting the behaviour of extremely large groups of people (ie, quadrillions of people). At the start of the first story the inventor of psychohistory predicts the imminent collapse of society and records a series of further predictions which are played back at appropriate points along the thousand-year lifetime of the planet, to coincide with the society overcoming some new problem that threatens that their lives.

Each story takes place as some slow-burning problem comes to a head and just in the nick of time some Übermensch steps into the breach. Every single damn time it looks like their society is about to come a cropper someone with amazing intellect and wit and guile manages to manipulate the situation so the threat is deflected and the force of the attack is used against the attacker. It’s interplanetary political judo, innit?

I read another of the ‘Foundation’ books when I was younger but don’t remember liking or disliking it particularly. It’s strange that it seems so silly when given a fresh reading now that I’m old enough to understand it. I didn’t dislike the stories but they were rather juvenile and not very well written. The characters were interchangeable and I found it fairly difficult to determine who would turn out to be the central character in each story. They were all rather boring people.

The second one was Flowers for Algernon. It’s set in the “present day”, which I guess was some time in the sixties. The story is told through a series of diary-style reports written by Charlie Gordon, a retarded man who later undergoes an experimental procedure to increase his intelligence. The simplicity of this approach is devastatingly effective in the opening chapters. We see the events of Charlie’s life through his eyes, but can infer all the details which he misses from the narration. It’s a really saddening experience to watch Charlie stumble through things and having people who he thinks are his friends take advantage of him.

The Algernon of the title is the lab mouse who was made super-intelligent and which led the scientists in the story to try the technique on humans. Charlie becomes more intelligent but remains emotionally immature, while Algernon begins to regress. By this stage Charlie is clever enough to understand the experiment he was put through and discovers why Algernon — and ultimately Charlie — only had a short-lived brilliance.

The closing chapters of the story follow Charlie’s own regression. It’s sad and sickening, like watching someone lose their faculties to dementia over the course of a dozen pages. The frustration is palpable, as the books around him become harder to understand, his writing skills deteriorate, his concentration drops and his memory fades. It’s a book with many questions and no answers — and it’s hard to even know if the questions are good — but it’s well worth your time.

We’re just back from a leaving party at the drill hall across the road. Our downstairs neighbours are leaving for Brussels on Tuesday. It’s a shame that this is basically the first time we’ve had a chance to meet them when we’re not just passing in the stair. I guess we need to make a bigger effort with the remainder (and whoever rents their flat when they go).

This evening we’ve got an engagement party and a flatwarming party to attend. It’s gonna be a hard night. There’s a birthday up in Aberdeen that we can’t attend because there’s so much happening here. (Sorry Emily.) I think tomorrow is free though?

An old friend from university, Andy, was up at the weekend. Unfortunately we couldn’t rustle up anyone else from the old days. But he had a few old flatmates to chase up while we were doing other things so I think it all worked out in the end.

On Friday night we made a small effort to clear some of the ancient things in the freezer. We defrosted and used some meatballs, with spaghetti and a tomato sauce. We had a bottle of wine given to Helen by her boss for prevailing with a particularly awkward sample and producing good results.

(We’ve taken to writing on wine bottles when we receive them. It’s nice to know a few months down the line who gave you the bottle. Don’t be shy: just whip out the marker pen and write on the label. It’s very satisfying. This bottle said, ‘Jon Warner, Aneuploidy, 2008’. It also means you can thank the person when you get round to drinking it. And this was a nice bottle.)

On Saturday morning we helped Kate and Ben move flat. They moved onto the same street that my mother used to work on. Whenever I visited there was always an old couple that would spend all their day at the window of their flat, arms rested on a cushion, staring into the street below. And the strange thing is that it was a quiet side street. Nothing happened in that street. And that’s the block of flats they’ve moved into — but I didn’t see anyone looking out the window when we helped move them in.

Their new flat is massive compared to the broom cupboard they lived in before. But magically their possessions appeared to inflate to fill the new space available. Funny how that happens, eh?

In the afternoon everybody came back to ours to watch the tennis. We pulled quite a stunning snack lunch out of the hat in a fairly short time and watched the Williams sisters play it out in the final.

In the evening Maryanne and Amy had organised a Fourth of July celebration on the Meadows, to celebrate their freedom from the United Kingdom. Which they do by living here. :-) I made some little baguettes (like stick-shaped rolls, I don’t know what the proper name is) and we took them and a couple of bottles of wine in Helen’s amazing picnic hamper rucksack. We hardly ever get a chance to use it but it’s really useful — cutlery and crockery for four, two wine bottle–sized insulated pouches, four plastic wine glasses, and a large inner compartment for two tupperware boxes. Enough room for my sixteen mini-baguettes!

The bbq was just getting under way when we arrived. I think Mat has had a revival of his breadmaking enthusiasm. He totally outdid me with his little rolls with cross-shaped slashes and two large chocolate pannetone. The two different shaped rolls complemented each other quite nicely — stars and stripes, for burgers and sausages respectively. Some people brought crappy packets of rolls and continued to eat them, for reasons I will never be able to fathom. And the chocolate bread was really good. I wonder if I should do something sweet next time I make bread for the food/book group?

We didn’t do much on Sunday. In the evening we went to Guilty Lily for a pub quiz. Bex and Dave joined me, Helen and Andy, and we got totally gubbed. 8th out of 9 teams, and twenty points behind the leaders! Was a bit disappointed with the question about the make-up of rhino horn. We put

keratin (protein that makes hair/nails)

but were marked wrong because the answer was… “hair”. Sigh.

Back to work on Monday. Andy left us a bottle of wine to say thanks for putting him up for the weekend. It’s on the shelf now, with his name and date on it.

We’re finished, finally finished. Five seasons of the re-imagined/rebooted Battlestar Galactica. It certainly wasn’t cut short like Firefly, for which we can always be thankful.

What is it? That’s easy — it’s a war story. The main characters are the defenders of the last of humanity, the military crew of the titular spaceship. But there are other places and people too — the civilians that truly make up what is left of the human race, and the enemy who chase them through the stars. It’s an epic, a space opera in the least pejorative sense of the word.

And since it’s written on such a grand scale there is plenty of opportunity to examine the minutiae of life and society — fledgling government, military rule, religion, war propaganda — as well as larger questions of humanity. Like any good science fiction, it provides a safe, removed theatre in which to examine some tricky subjects.

If anyone wants to borrow the complete thing, we have a substantial number of DVDs here. I totally recommend it.

From Charlie Brooker’s latest column:

God/no God? No God. We’re all freelancers. Some of us may choose to sit in imaginary offices from time to time, pretending to receive memos from our made-up boss, or enjoying watercooler conversations about the loving/vengeful/forgiving nature of our fictional chief with our colleagues, but no matter how many hours we clock up, it doesn’t alter the fact that no one’s actually running things on the top floor. This is good news. We own the company!