Category Archives: Reading

The Mind’s Eye – Oliver Sacks

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I have just finished this book and it addresses so many of the areas that interest me that I struggle to know where to begin. It also highlights the foolishness of my attempt to give my blog six categories. Two major elements in my life and work (as a sculptor and research psychologist) have no assigned category.

Before I become boringly introspective, I should say that The Mind’s Eye is a fascinating book for both layman and those interested in brain function. There are case studies of real people, full of human detail, telling what happens when parts of the brain cease to work as they should. It also contains a thrilling chapter about the discovery of a brain capacity – stereoscopic vision – in a person who had never had it before. The wonder and delight this brings makes you appreciate the world we live in even more. In addition, Dr Sacks uses his personal diaries to talk us through the complex and alarming experience of his own loss of vision in one eye. One of the revelations to me, is the variation in how much people have, or are able to use, visual imagination. Some people have none to speak of, others have continuous, 3D Technicolor images (as I do), simply by reading a description.

The final chapter, titled The Mind’s Eye, looks at the current state of research into vision and imagery. There are multiple examples from individuals who were born or became blind, as well as input from experts on the brain function behind visual imagery. The whole field of imagination, and its visual substrates, is discussed in an accessible way. A great read.

Now for the introspection:

For many years I was a sculptor and for many years a research psychologist and now I write. Yet the roles are not as separate as they appear in my life. From childhood I have performed thought experiments in the hope of deciphering the actions inside my head, and even now, twenty years since I last made a three-dimensional object, my inner imagination is undoubtedly 3D – very handy for writing. And of course I have a penchant for building brick paths and suchlike.

While I have no synesthesia (cross firing of the senses, e.g. Monday is seen as blue, or the number three smells of vanilla), I have long been convinced that beneath the conscious separation of the senses the brain is more promiscuous. I have been aware (just) of the brain touting problems around at another level. So an engineering problem, which starts life as, perhaps, a set of calculations, with some visual aspects (trying to get, say, a pole to stay upright without a hole or visible means of support) is taken on a tour of unlikely brains areas – hearing, sensory, motor, olfactory, emotional etc – in case these can contribute to the solution – which they sometimes do.

Certainly I belong among the people for whom vivid visual imagery is normal, so from childhood, I can sometimes be confused about whether an image in my head is from a book or a film. I am also baffled and irritated by people who assume that to write about something, you must have lived it. In my experience there are no limits to what you can create inside your own head.

How ‘visual’ is inner imagery? Any activity in the brain is made up of cells firing together. In this sense all imagery is the outcome of sets of switches being on or off – cells a,d,f are on, cells g to z are off etc. Yet if you imagine a complex 3D item in your mind’s eye and turn it round, timing and fMRI scans, show that this actions takes place over natural time as would in the physical world. This suggests there is a spatial element in the brain’s instantiation of inner images…

I’d better stop there.

Tolstoy versus Sacks

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I am disconcerted, by my lack of discipline when it comes to reading. I cannot think of a time when I only had one book on the go and though my ‘to read’ pile is enormous, I happily add to it on an almost weekly basis.

Our next book for discussion is Anna Karenina, given its length (and the fact that I requested it), nothing else should intervene. However, I am unable to resist The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks, which I am finding riveting as it has case studies that are connected to the work I used to do. I popped in Smith by Leon Garfield, a Folio Society book which a friend wanted to know whether to bother with. A fast-paced, Dickensian story from the back streets of London in the early nineteenth (?) century. A little soppy perhaps, but very enjoyable. I picked up and started 22 Britannia road by Amanda Hodgkinson and I have been lent WordPress for Dummies which I keep dipping into.

It will, as it always does, sort itself out. I can’t make up my mind whether reading several strands simultaneously is productive or foolish.

Books, Books, Books

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In the last few weeks my reading has ranged a little widely, but unintentionally each book influences my reading of the next

Contested Will by James Shapiro – an excellent and absorbing analysis of the many, often hilarious, theories about who wrote Shakespeare. The astonishing thing is that so many people still believe one or other of these. The Shakespeare doubters fall roughly into two schools, those who believe that a shoemaker’s son from Stratford could never have achieved such sophisticated heights and those who believe that all writing is autobiographical. Shapiro deals painstakingly with the wide spectrum of theories and then returns the reader to solid ground with the contemporary evidence.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey – the investigation into the true nature of King Richard the III, written as an immensely entertaining novel. I have read this several times before, it is still in print after 70 years. She makes her characters live and makes you love them. (Oh envy!).

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith – A slightly dour book, it is difficult to love the main character, Isabel. On the other hand, I have a strong sense of self-recognition; Isabel over-thinks and imagines full-blown scenarios out of the tiniest stimuli. It is uncomfortable to have your own failings brought before you. EG is enjoying it for its Edinburgh setting.

Beastly Things by Donna Leon – As always, Leon creates a good read and deals with important subject matter, in this case the introduction of meat unfit for human consumption into the food chain. Greed, nepotism, and the criminal underbelly of Italy are displayed, and set against the warm surroundings of Brunetti’s home life and cuisine. These stories are a little formulaic and the use of metaphor occasionally gets out of hand (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/23/rules-writing-block-metaphor), but still, especially for lovers of Venice, a good read.

I have started reading Fitz by Jenifer Roberts (in manuscript) – a lively and entertaining history of James Edward FitzGerald, a wayward, charming, talented man who was so influential in the colonisation of New Zealand. The story is much enhanced by the original diary material of so many of the men and women involved.

One Good Turn

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Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn (A Jolly Murder Mystery), has been sitting deep in my bedside pile for more than a year (possibly two). It is, as it claims, a jolly murder mystery, with what, for the individual characters, feels like unlikely co-incidence after co-incidence, but is for the reader a slowly building chaos, the result of the lifestyle and criminal choices of one man. There are hilarious scenes, a sense of real life and events (Russian brides, cheap labour, fringe comedy, theatre and circuses in Edinburgh, novelists as real people). One of the funniest moments is when an intellectually challenged heavy finds himself in the same place as most of the people he’d like to kill and is spoilt for choice. The last line is brilliant and yet fitting.

A jolly good read!

The Secret Life of Bees

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I finished the Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd a few days ago. This atmosphere was so warm you could almost bath in it, yet not saccharine or without dark events. I was happy to linger on the page and spend time with the characters. Although I wanted the story to reach a satisfactory conclusion that seemed less important than spending time with the people and places. I really enjoyed the directness of Lily’s thinking and speaking, she felt like a kid I would like to meet. That doesn’t happen to me very often.  It was good to read a different take on the black/white relationship from the usual ones. The antagonism was there but outside the stories of the main characters. I also found it startling to think that although the background to this story feels like ancient history, it all happened during my lifetime. Although there have been massive changes in the relationships between ethnic groups, we clearly still have a long way to go.

In our discussion group the story provoked a great deal of reminiscence about badgers, hedgehogs, etc. The bees play such a central part in the story that they made us all think about our connections with local wildlife, though I admit that I found this concentration on the backcloth rather than the story a little disconcerting.

writer’s balancing act

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A rejection yesterday; today a request to discuss my first novel, A Small Rain (out of print), with a book group. In yesterday’s paper a brief article by a literary agent complaining about capricious, deadline missing, needy, rude authors. I want to put my hand in the air and shout, “Please Miss, please Miss, take me instead. I work happily to deadline’s, I don’t do rude, or writer’s block and…” but she’s not listening.

However many books I finish, I always seem to be reading three more. Current trio are Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn, James Shapiro’s Contested Will (good scholarly look at the history of Shakespeare doubters) and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees.

Warm, sunny, windy spring day. Gardened to exhaustion.

Musician’s Lives

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This morning I finished 1853 A Year in Music by High MacDonald. It sorted out a whole lot of misconceptions about composers’ and performers’ lives. Liszt, Berlioz, Schumann – Robert and Clara, Brahms, to name only the most famous, were zig-zagging about Germany performing, meeting, talking and planning non-stop. Every now and again they managed some composing. Wagner was exiled from Germany, but they all went to Switzerland or Austria to meet him, or they all spent time in Paris where technically Berlioz lived and worked, he also visited and performed in London. Verdi dropped by, but didn’t meet up with them. It was the amount of travelling they did, both the famous and many others less well-known today, that astonished me.

I had always thought of Brahms as a big solid man with enormous hands. Pianist friends had told me that you needed a giant span to reach his chords. He turns out to be (in 1853) a slight, shy, beautiful young man, with a high voice and modest bearing. Nearly silent in company, but an acknowledged genius both as a pianist and a composer almost from his first appearance. He was also a perfectionist. Many of the compositions played in 1853 were never published as he felt they were not good enough.

Clara Schumann comes to life as both a hardworking pianist/composer and an astonishingly devoted wife and mother. Liszt is a dynamo, moving, stirring, managing, travelling non-stop, composing, playing. Robert Schumann, firing on half his cylinders, a somewhat lost soul, in the last year before his confinement in a mental home. Wagner a frustrated exile, a troubled hypochondriac, full of gigantic plans and dependent on friends, both for society and money.

I just don’t know how they coped with all the travel. It was dizzying even to read about it.

age and procrastination

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I have noticed an interesting effect of age. I no longer put off doing a major job properly. So in the garden, finding the protective mortar flaking off the lowest level of bricks in one area – which was in the same state four years ago when I was laying paving slabs there – I know that I must deal with it. I have this feeling with all heavy work in the garden; best to do it now, I may not feel like it in a year or so’s time, and best make a good lasting job of it.

This feeling spreads to other areas not necessarily involving physical strength. There is no longer anything to be gained by waiting for a better/quieter/more mature period in my life. While the tendency to cook up long term schemes and projects has not left me, perhaps I am finally learning to live in the moment.

I read that you should only touch a piece of paper once – meaning that when you open a letter you should answer and file it in one go. Looking at the pile of paper in the box that masquerades as my in-tray, I still have a way to go on that front.

Of course it may not be age at all. I have just finished reading an unpublished memoir of a WWII Far Eastern Prisoner of War (Dishonourable Guest, by W G Riley). Riley is a young Signalman who starts POW life in Changi, works on the Thailand-Burma Railroad, gets transported on the doomed Hokofu Maru troopship, and is one of the 23 Britons rescued in the dramatic Cabanatuan Raid at Luzon. I have read many POW memoirs in the course of the last three year’s research. Elements are the same, but each man’s story is unique. You would have to be very obtuse to reach the end of even one of these memoirs and not learn to appreciate the moment.

Riley made, in his son’s words, ‘anguished attempts to get the work published’. His whole life was affected, not only by his experience as a prisoner, but also by his need to get his  story written and known. It was never published as a book, but his son, Steve, had the second version of the text (the first was lost) typeset and printed 1988. This certainly puts the odd rejection by agents or publishers into perspective.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist – part 2

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We had a group discussion of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist last night and I left feeling faintly troubled. Most people wanted to talk about the subject matter – leading off into all sorts of world views and favourite gripes. I had been knocked out by the use of language and the writer’s skills. One of the consequences of writing, which has both an upside and a downside, is that your perspective changes. You can’t help, even in the most absorbing of stories, becoming aware of the writer’s craft skills. I used to regret that total loss of self as I read, now I relish it.

That wasn’t the only disquiet I felt. I thought Hamid had taken us, very skilfully, by the hand and led us from a world perspective we shared into one that we mostly fail to understand and yet are worried by/curious about. The curiosity and worry were certainly shared by my fellow readers, but I am not sure they had all come on the same journey. Part of this is the assumption that the writer is the protagonist – an almost unshakeable belief held by so many readers – and this led them to mull over who Hamid is, and where his allegiances lie.

Having said that, the story is so concentrated – while appearing to be deceptively straightforward – that each person had noticed (or read about) aspects of the story that the rest of us had missed. I will certainly need to read it again. Perhaps I should lay aside my concern as there was a general vote to read another book by him.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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Just finished Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I am knocked out by both the writing and the story. I don’t know how he does that – keep the prose so spare and yet so vivid and rich. It is as if there is not a single misplaced word in the whole text. I love the way this astonishing monologue sways on an invisible fulcrum between the story and the immediate surroundings. It never jars. There is both dialogue and description and yet only one voice. There are new truths and perspectives. I don’t think you could ask more from a novel.

As you can see it is wipeout for this writer, as I try to look at the quiet engineering behind the prose and attempt to learn something – anything – from this example.