A Grammar checker.

I’ve just tried Grammatik, a grammar checker built into WordPerfect. To say it’s bad is an understatement. The only actual error it flagged was a typo. All the other errors showed that Grammatik could not parse sentences correctly, and so mistook verbs for nouns and nouns for verbs; demanded modifiers where none were needed; confused proper names with common nouns; didn’t recognise objects; and on and on and on.

One example: “A voice from on high spoke:...” Grammatik said it should read “A voice from a high spoke...”

I don’t know if the other wordprocessors have equally bad grammar checkers. I suspect so. Avoid them, they will thoroughly mislead you.

BTW, Grammatik flagged eight errors in this short screed.

Oliver Sacks: The River of Consciousness

     Oliver Sacks. The River of  Consciousness (2017) Posthumous collection of essays assembled from notes and edited from drafts. As the title suggests, Sacks is thinking about consciousness, the hard problem of philosophy and neurology. In one essay he wonders if consciousness is a discontinuous sequence of moments.
    Vision seems to be discontinuous he says, citing experiments measuring the response times to changes in the visual field. I think it's obvious that vision is discontinuous: the light-sensitiva molecules in the retinal cells decay when struck by light, and must be rebuilt in order to decay again. This process takes about 1/10th of a second. Then the nerve signals generated must be processed so that the human can see. This can take longer than a 1/10th of a second, since objects must be recognised, etc. The fastest conscious reaction times to an expected visual stimulus is about 1/6th of a second in children and teenagers, and double or triple that in adults. Responses to unexpected visual stimuli take much longer. Thus the visual contents of consciousness are constructed from perceptions that take a sizeable time to assemble. the same applies to the other senses. The unbroken stream of consciousness is an illusion. It can be a dangerous one, since what feels like an instantaneous reaction takes at least half a second. At highway speeds a car travels about 14 metres in 1/2 a second.
     Sacks also has interesting observations of the subjective passage of time. His patients vary enormously in the rate at which they process sensory information, and that processing relates to the feeling of time passing. He tells of taking photographs several  minutes apart of one of his post-encephalitic patients, then binding the prints into a flip-book, and seeing the patient slowly lift his arm. Conversely, some of his patients entered a high-speed phase, and reported that they found the world around them moving unbearably slowly.
     The book feels unfinished. Most of the essays consist of extended notes. Sacks didn’t have time to rewrite for continuity, style and clarity, and this sometimes shows in a banal or cliche phrase. However, for any fan this is an essential book. For the general reader it serves as a very good introduction to some of the conundrums of consciousness and mind. ***½
     Correction 2018-11-10: At highway speeds of about 100km/h, a car travels about 14 metres in 1/2 a second.

If you want ot be a writer: Stephen King On Writing

     Stephen King. On Writing (2000). Subtitled “A Memoir of the Craft”. I’m not a fan of Stephen King, not because he’s a bad writer, but because horror fantasy doesn’t move me. I read some of his short stories way back when, and thought they were well done.
     King writes both about the nuts’n’bolts (grammar and style, narrative pace, character, etc) and his own experience as a writer. The book is worth reading for both. If you need some guidance to improve your writing and work habits, read this book. If you need some inspiration and emotional support because you’re not sure you can hack the writing life, read this book. You will improve your mastery of the craft, and you may discover your writing groove. Or you may discover that you’re not a writer after all. Either way, the book is worth reading.
     More take-aways: Writing is a compulsion, it’s what you have to do to maintain your sense of self.
     Reading a lot is essential to your development as a writer.
     A story is out there, like a fossil to be discovered. Writing it is uncovering the fossil.
     Interesting for any Stephen King fan, and for anyone who's curious about the writing life. ****

What did your lfe mean? The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Mitch Albom)

     Mitch Albom. The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) Albom made his name with Tuesdays With Morrie, which was made into a successful movie. I’ve seen the movie, it teeters just this side of sentimentality.
     This book (also made into a movie) teeters over, which is a pity, since it’s a lovely idea: Eddie, the hero, dies while saving a little girl when a gondola on an amusement park ride falls. The story tells of how in the afterlife he meets five people who affected his life in ways he didn’t fully understand or didn’t know. He needs to discover how his life made sense and had a purpose before he can live in his own corner of heaven.
     Eddie had a harsh upbringing, went to war, came home a changed man, and didn’t have the children he and his wife wanted. He ends up working in maintenance in the Ruby Pier Amusement Park, a job his father held, and which he thinks marks him as a failure. The five people he meets show him otherwise.
     Albom writes well, if occasionally too consciously ironic, and with sometimes too much authorial commentary. If the book causes the reader to reflect on how minor and major incidents shaped his own life, it will have succeeded. As a story about a likeable man who finally understands his own value, it’s well-done. Read it. ***

Graham Greene's last book: The Last Word

     Graham Greene. The Last Word and Other Stories (1990) In the title story, an old man with a fractured memory and a broken body lives alone in a one-room flat. We gather that some major social and political change has occurred. Eventually, the old man is summoned to see the General, whose predecessor brought about the revolution. The General is curious to see this relic from the bygone age, the last Pope. He offers the old man food and wine before killing him. The old man thanks him for sending him home, and accepts the wine. His last words as he drinks from it are Corpus domini nostri.... The General does not understand the words, but as he squeezes the trigger, there flashes through his mind the anxious thought that perhaps what the old man believed might be true.
     Typically Greene in its mix of thriller, politics, and religion. The other stories offer much the same mix, demonstrating that Green understood the psychology of power and politics as few other writers have done. Worth reading, if somewhat depressing in its unrelieved pessimism about the secularisation of modern life. Greene died about a year after publication. ** to ****

Vintage SF: Blood & Burning by Budrys

     Algis J. Budrys. Blood & Burning (1978) Budrys’s imagination is as off the wall as Philip K. Dick’s, and as dark, too. Three samples:  In Be Merry, the Klarri have crash-landed their lifeboats on Earth. Humans and Klarri mutually infect each other. One small enclave in New Jersey has found a grim method of healing themselves using Klarr blood.
     In All for Love, an impossibly huge spaceship has landed on Earth, apparently in distress. It casually destroys human civilisation, treating humans as pests. The hero manages to make his way to one of the support legs and damage it. The story focuses on the human cost of attempting an impossible task.
     In A Scraping of the Bones, extreme overcrowding leads to murder for extra space in the hive-like apartment blocks.
     Well imagined, well-written, with a tad too much of the formulaic to be a match for P. K. Dick, but still recommended, if you can find copy. ***

Movies I've watched recently

Mrs Henderson Presents, Pygmalion (1983), Black Panther, Indian Horse. Check the page Movie Reviews I.

Lapham's Quarterly V1, #1: States of War

     Lewis Lapham, ed. Lapham’s Quarterly: Vol. 1, #1: States of War (2008) Lewis Lapham, erstwhile editor of Harper’s, has been collecting snippets from here and there for years. Starting in 2008, he has issued themed collections of them, the first one about War, because that was the time of the 2nd Gulf War, perpetrated by G W Bush Jr. It’s a fascinating, depressing read.
     War is as old as civilisation. The anthropological consensus is that war and agriculture were invented at the same time, because agriculture created the surplus wealth that made cities possible. But the new technology entailed a new polity, that of the centralised state, which the had to defend itself against other centralised states. Hence war, which required ever larger zones of influence, and so led to empire. Barbarians outside the empire of course coveted its riches, which meant more war. Ecological catastrophes (droughts, multi-year crop failures, plagues) disrupted the more or less stable empires, which meant more war. The leftover pieces of the empires reassembled themselves into new empires. New ecological catastrophes began the cycle all over again.
     And so it went and goes. We now have weapons that will cause the same kind of disruptions that ecological disasters cause, so it’s toss-up which will get us first.
     As I said, it’s a depressing read but worth it. The selections range from more or less scholarly disquisitions through advice on the art of war, to chronicles, reportage and personal witness. You can buy past issues from Lapham’s Quarterly, or you may find a current issue at a better bookstore. ****

Nesters vs cattle baron: Louis L’Amour. The Mountain Valley War

  

    Louis L’Amour. The Mountain Valley War (1978) Drifting gunfighter Kilkenny, alias Trent, throws in his lot with some Hatfields and other farmers who’ve claimed good land in the foothills. Local cattle baron King Bill Hale doesn’t like it. Miscellaneous gun battles and fist fights ensue. Nita, an old flame, and a couple of old vendettas complicate the plot, but of course Kilkenny wins, and settles down with Nita to raise cattle and kids. Some philosophical musings about justice and law, the futility of guns and the necessity of government, indicate that L’Amour’s was maturing out of his simplistic libertarianism. Well-done single point of view, plausible plotting. One of L’Amour’s better books.**½

Consciousness: why it's the "hard problem"

 

A New Scientist of 15 May 2013 featured Consciousness. The word is an abstract noun; its suffix --ness denotes the quality, or property, or essential nature of a thing. The teaser questions on the cover emphasise this: What is Consciousness? Why do we have it? What else has it?

I like to think of consciousness as a performance, like a dance or a song. That translates the teaser questions into How do we perform consciousness? Why do we perform it? What else performs it?

What we need is a verb like “dance”. Who can tell the dancer from the dance? Yeats asked. Who indeed. The dance exists only while it is performed, the song while it is sung, life while it is lived. You are singer only while you sing, a dancer while you dance, a living being while you live.

A while ago I came across the verb mentate, but it doesn't sound right to my ears, because it shifts attention to thinking, and thinking is a part (I think a very small part) of being conscious. Verbs such as think, know, attend, imagine, feel, sense, etc, refer to one or another of the elements of the performance, or perhaps to the type or style of performance, like the terms used for discussing dance.

Talking about consciousness without a generic verb is like taking about dancing without the verb dance, or about fruit entirely in terms of apples and oranges, bananas and pears, plums and loganberries. Difficult. I think that consciousness is a "hard problem" because we haven't a verb for it.

2013-05-30/2018-04-19

Major Pettigrew, unlikely romantic hero

     Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (2010) A romance. Major Pettigrew, widower, with an obnoxious social-climbing son, notices Mrs Ali, widow, shopkeeper in Edge-combe St Mary’s. They marry, of course, after overcoming their hesitancy and social and family objections. Like any good romance, a social comedy, well-observed, with nice riffs on the usual stereotypes, but with attractive leads. Mrs Jasmin Ali has more practical common-sense, the Major must overcome his small vanities to prove worthy of her, both are reticent , unwilling to give offence or cause embarassment. They both have to accept family responsibilities. A feel-good story with Important Themes, tailor-made for the reading clubs that will study the helpful questions included at the back of the book.
     The book is above average for the genre. Unusually, it tells the story from the male lead’s point of view, which adds to its charm. As one of Jasmina’s young relatives says, “You’re a good man, for an old git.” Precisely, and the touch of fantasy is what makes romances fun reads. I liked this one. ***

APOSTROPHE RULES

The following is a summary of the apostrophe rules I taught. They are really quite simple.

The apostrophe is a spelling mark, not a punctuation mark. As such, it distinguishes between words that might be confused. (Aside: it’s not really needed, since we never confuse these words when speaking.) In spelling, the confusions arise because the apostrophe is used for two purposes, as set out below.

A) The apostrophe of possession:

1) Singular nouns and proper names: add ’s at the end.  Dog – Dog’s. Jim – Jim’s
    Problem: Words/names ending in -s. Usage for these cases varies. See section C below.

2) Plural nouns and names: Add the apostrophe after the plural. If the plural has no -s, add s’.No exceptions. Parents – Parents’. Children – Childrens’

3) Never make a plural by adding ’s to a word.
    Problem: Some newpaper style books specify an apostrophe to make plural out of a number used as a name: the 1970's, not the 1970s. I think this is wrong.

4) Possessive pronouns ending in -s contain no apostrophe. No exceptions. Your - yours. Her- hers. He - his. It – its. Our – ours. Their - theirs.

B) The apostrophe of omission:

5) An apostrophe is used to indicate a syllable lost or compressed through elision (combining two words that otherwise would be pronounced separately). No exceptions. He had – He’d. It is – It’s. They would – They’d. The garden is lovely  – The garden’s lovely.

C) Nouns/names ending in -s:

1) Preferred usage is to add ’s: “James’s book.” This rule expresses preferred pronunciation.

2) However, usage omitting the possessive -s in both sound and spelling is acceptable: “James’ book.”

Rule: When different usages are acceptable, choose one and stick to it.

Jane Austen: Notes on the Love Romance

 OK, I've put up the best-known portrait of Austen. I like it too.

Austen's Pride and Prejudice is the template for love romance novels. The setting doesn't matter. It's the social difference between her and him that's at the core of love romance: She's much too good for him even though He's (usually) a higher class (eg, the CEO/Owner of the company, and she's just a file clerk). He has to prove that he's worthy of Her. Austen's book is better than most romances because She has to prove she's worthy of Him, too. Not that there’s much doubt about that. Lizzie is intelligent, strong-willed, and unwilling to settle for second best. And she has a fine pair of eyes.

Of course Lizzie is worthy of Darcy, who in the end shows that he is an honourable man. It was that over-nice sense of honour that prevented him from supporting Bingley’s courtship of Jane, and worse, rendered him unwilling to reveal the true nature of Wickham. Darcy makes amends for the damage he has caused: he intervenes in the Wickham-Lydia affair. Lizzie is certain that her sister’s missteps have made herself unmarriageable, but Darcy does the honourable thing. He follows his heart and his mind, both of which assure him that Lizzie is a fit mate for him, and the censure of society is at most an inconvenience. He saves the Bennett family from social ruin at the risk of losing some of his acquaintanceship. Dorothy Sayers gives us another couple in which the man saves the woman. It takes three novels for Harriet Vane to overcome her fear that her attraction to Lord Peter Wimsey is contaminated by gratitude. Austen gets around that problem by having Darcy offer his assistance as an expiation for his sins against good sense and love.

Of course, in reality marriage back then wasn't about love but about property. Darcy’s attractiveness increases enormously when Lizzie visits his estate and realises what she’s missed. That’s why class difference mattered, and why the love romance is still as much about overcoming social as character differences.

The ideal of marriage as a union of compatible people suited for each other by both social status and property, slowly changed since Austen wrote her novels. Love became the criterion for choosing the lucky swain from amongst the competitors. Since approximately the 1950s, that’s shifted even further. Now people think that love is the only justification for marriage. That's why divorce when the love is gone is not only OK, it's mandatory.

Art rules life. If you want to know where society is heading read its popular literature. Or watch TV and movies. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", said Shelley. He’s right.

2011-2018