2015 — 3 September: Thursday

Continued eating1 necessitates the replenishment dodged yesterday. I shall also try to dodge the hordes of legless children being conveyed to their daytime internment camps by their doting parents in their Chelsea tractors. Give me a moment to feel around behind the sofa cushion. It's always possible Junior dropped a sovereign or two...

I fear this...

... is the sort of guff that gives SF a bad name:

... his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to modernism in the arts; the historical periodisation of the genre; and the dramatic challenge to narratology as a field, with implications for the theory of ideology as well as for the analysis of narrative structure itself (of which the time-travel story, with all its ineradicable paradoxes, suddenly becomes the fundamental paradigm). Nor is philosophy itself untouched by the fallout from these dramatic revisions: after all, the phenomenological ego is a temporal matter, and time itself one of its fundamental paradoxes, which neither Husserl nor Heidegger ever laid to rest.

Fredric Jameson, reviewing "Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative" in LRB


Having reached my present age blissfully unaware of the concept of "narratology" I foolishly asked Mrs Google to clarify its meaning for me. Beware Morlocks!

Something...

... doesn't quite add up, it seems:

core skills

I was never paid that much :-)

However...

... unwicked Uncle ERNIE has just splashed out £25 to dear Mama2 and £75 to me. Ev'ry little helps.

Symphony #15...

... by Shostakovich has been steadily growing on me over the last 40 years. Is it time to replace my ancient (1972) non-Dolby cassette yet?

  

Footnotes

1  A Good Thing, no doubt.
2  As her Executor I collect any prizes until March 2016, and will divvy them up with Big Bro then. I get to keep her "stash" of Bond money, however, as John got his share by a mutually-agreed Probate adjustment. (Things are a lot less fractious when the two Executors are also the two Beneficiaries.)