2015 — 27 September: Sunday
Minor confession.1 Much as I enjoyed Max Richter's recent "reworking" of Vivaldi, I listened to probably less than 10 minutes in total of the 8-hour long "Sleep". Bite me.
The sun is...
... shining, it's a balmy 20.1C here in the living room, the nectarine is digesting, and there's already another cuppa partly drunk. Breakfast beckons.
The more we find out...
... what (if anything!) goes on between2 our ears and how we interpret that differently across a range of human cultures, the weirder it all seems. Today's cheery source and snippet:
We once considered the self to be a towering strongbox freighted with our experiences and memories, but the new work has shown that vault to be about as secure and enduring as a large, warmed-over glacier. 'Water runs down the cracks and crevices, melting the ice on its way,' says Anil Seth, a neuroscientist and the co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science in Brighton, 'and then it refreezes in a slightly different way. The process of remembering is one of regeneration and reconstruction.'
Having observed dear Mama's steady, and ultimately quite rapid, descent into the mental abyss I am now more fully aware of the fragility of at least the memory retrieval process, if not the underlying memories themselves. And, without memory, who or what are we?
Prof Seth wrote an enjoyable critique of the film "Ex-Machina" a few months back. And he's just helped produce a fun-looking book of illusions that was featured in the Grauniad. Busy chap.
Another illusion...
... further shattered. I say "further" because I'd already noted a piece in "Prospect" ...
Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the "Keltoi," he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia.
... that demolished a series of treasured myths about the Celts. Today's nice article also asserts that "Celtic" described "people living all over northern Europe". I liked to suppose my 50% Welsh heritage had given me some plausible claim to have Celts in my ancestry — I enjoyed their art, after all, even in more modern variations. Turns out Christa and I possibly had more in common than we realised.
I somehow overlooked...
... today's delivery on its first release in 1992. Quite possibly it failed to make it on to LaserDisc. This is a 2012 re-issue:
I'm hoping it will turn out to be another enjoyably quirky Alan Rudolph film. But let's see, what else was I up to back then, causing me to miss it? Considering the thorny issue of Junior's secondary education, for one thing.
On Monday we were told that Peter's headmistress wanted to see us during the open evening at which all teachers make themselves available for parents to review offsprings' progress. It seems the little paragon is not just top
of his class in everything, nor yet top of his year, but (in maths, for example) level with the top members of the top set two years older. Thus he poses a problem.
... when all his teachers each privately admits that much as they love having pupils like him, they'd think hard about a transfer, and when his maths teacher contradicts my assertion that I see no sign of special ability
with we've never seen a pupil go so far, so fast and the headmistress admits that catering for his brand of special needs is well nigh impossible, I begin to wonder...
We didn't have this advice at the time:
Though Winchester college (which the headmistress seriously advised) cost about that and had a ghastly Judeo-Christian-military flavour to its brochure. (For "ghastly" read "intolerable", perhaps, but that was how we felt about it.)
The BBC...
... deserves congratulations for the just-concluded "Why music?" investigation that has been filling up Radio 3 since Friday afternoon. Mostly very interesting indeed.
Tomorrow...
... would have been my 41st wedding anniversary. I shall celebrate quietly — it's not as if I'm still married, dagnabbit. And I have a six-monthly session with Dr Fang and his toothbrush-wielding assistant to look forward to in the morning. Then I need to do something about the gaps in Mother Hubbard's perpetually-emptying cupboard. If the barometer maintains its present (high) level I may even venture further afield. After all, the Soton Boat Show should be all done and dusted by now.