The Christmas Spy (Howlett)

     John Howlett The Christmas Spy (1975) The title refers to the time frame. A muddled plot, in which the title hero stumbles on a drug-smuggling operation on the Italian-Swiss border, and old ghosts are raised by his encounter with his opposite number in Italy. This man is killed, probably by the Mafia. “Paris” tries to control the operation. The Italian police and the carabinieri also get involved. There is another death, conveniently labelled suicide, a bit of sex, a bit of family pathos, and so on. A very bleak story with a muddled plot. An example of the pornography of evil: the writer relishes the awfulness of his world, and invites us to relish it with him. Much of the action takes place on trains, which is the reason I bought the book (second-hand), and but for that I wouldn’t have read it. Howlett is good at atmosphere, and not much else. **

Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide 1993

     Leonard Maltin Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide 1993 (1992) I’ve used this book a lot, and its tattered look proves it. Compared to other movie/video guides, Maltin has two great strengths. First, he lists all movies ever shown on TV, including those not available on video. Second, he is very good on everything except science fiction. I also like the fact that he puts dates, credits, etc at the head of the entry. His only serious weakness is that he doesn’t understand science fiction, and so of course he over-praises things like Metropolis and Forbidden Planet, while he puts down Bladerunner. Otherwise an indispensable reference. It’s time I got a newer version! *** (2001)

Dining by Rail (Porterfield)

James D. Porterfield Dining by Rail (1993) Just what it says: a brief history, with emphasis on the menus, the experience, and the operation of dining cars, followed by a selection of dishes served by various railroads in North America. The history is sound, the photos are poorly reproduced (this is a p/b version), and the recipes sound yummy. Not a book to read from cover to cover, but one to dip into, both for tidbits of history and reminiscence, and for the recipes. I hope Marie tries a few; I may have to learn to cook, however. As railroadiana, it’s very good. I can’t judge it as a cookbook, but it sounds luscious. *** (2001)

Stations (Flanagan)

    Michael Flanagan Stations (1994) Forty paintings depicting a fictional album of photographs and a few maps of two fictional railroads set in Virginia. They are the Buffalo and Shenandoah Railroad, and the Powhatan Railroad. The album pages bear hand-written notes by photographer Russell’s lover Anna, herself an artist, and sister of the memoirist Lucius. Lucius writes the notes for the pictures. The combination builds a blend of family memoir and regional history whose effect is hard to describe. A family tree and an extended introduction preface the “reproduction” of the album. A few items of apparatus (reference to a local professor of history, who has written an essay on the photographs; footnotes; careful crediting of the sources of the annotations) help with the illusion of authenticity.

     The album pages themselves look weathered, creased, and worn. Flanagan went to a lot of trouble to create that trompe l’oeil effect. At normal viewing distances, his images look like photos, too. Several paintings are based on actual photographs (credited). One of the photographs relates to an encounter with “Virgil Ross”, a model railroad builder who lived near the Powhatan Railroad. His model railroad and his character indicate that Flanagan knew about John Allen. I think he should have credited Allen, especially since the track plan of “Ross’s” layout is almost identical to the Gorre and Daphetid.
     A wonderful book, with a dreamy realism mixed with sharp edges, like sand mixed with broken stones. The overall tone is elegiac: Look what we have lost, it says, yet consider also how hard were the lives of the people who built and operated these railroads, and the people who lived near them and depended on them. Russell and Anna are misfits, for they cherish the reminders of the past, the bits and pieces of history. Russell’s project, to photograph every named place on the two railroads, reminds us that we tend to amnesia. *** (2001)

The White Pass and Yukon Route Railway

     Graham Wilson The White Pass and Yukon Route Railway (1998) Compilation of photos and excerpts from contemporary texts (diaries, news reports, etc) and some bridging narrative. A nicely done book. The target audience is clearly the casually interested tourist, but the fan will find a lot of interesting and useful information. The emphasis is on the people and the hardships of the work. There are some technical errors, but they don’t seriously detract from the effect. Information for the modeller is sparse but valuable. A very few photos show rolling stock and structural details. On the other hand, several of the views of stations and line sections give the modeller insight into the impression they might wish to create. A nicely done book. **½

The Math Gene (Devlin)

     Keith Devlin The Math Gene. (2000) An attempt to explain how humans are capable of mathematics. After reviewing brain functions and brain evolution, Devlin spends some time on language and the evolution of language. Finally, he hypothesises that gossip is the source of mathematical thinking. Why? Because gossip is about relationships and relationships between relationships, ie, about patterns. By exaptation, the human brain becomes capable of abstracting these patterns and investigating them (telling stories about them.) Devlin’s theory is plausible, and may be correct.
      I do quarrel with him about the idea that syntax is an either-or property of language. Protolanguage has a rudimentary syntax. Two word sentences have patterns like object-action, or property-object, or their inverses. This is true both of human infants’ protolanguage and of the protolanguage of apes who have been trained to use symbols or signing. It seems to me that a creature that can produce true language syntax for some utterances will be able to reason about its environment more complexly. It’s not necessary for all utterances to be syntactically complete. They aren’t when children make the transition to syntax: it’s not a one-day-to-the-next phenomenon. And, as I believe Bickerton and others have pointed out, pidgin utterances are often syntactically incomplete. It is the creation of a syntactically complete language by the children of pidgin speakers, based on their parents’ pidgins, that so impressed Bickerton, after all.
     An interesting book. *** (2001)

The Feeling of What Happens (Damasio)

    Antonio Damasio The Feeling of what Happens. (1999) Damasio attempts to account for the neurology of consciousness. He points out there are two questions about consciousness: a) what is it like? and b) How does the brain create it? He addresses the second one.
     Essentially, what he says is as follows. At the most primitive level, the body receives input from the environment, and responds. The responses consist of both changes within the organism and actions by it. At the next level, the nervous system creates images or maps of both the sensory input and the body state. It uses the first to direct its actions (fight or flight), and the second to potentiate the action. This means that certain changed body states are linked to certain objects.
     The next stage is to link the changes in body state together with the object: this is emotion. In future, the organism will exhibit the emotion when encountering the object again. Now it becomes possible to create what Damasio calls second order maps: an image of the body state is maintained, and updated as new information in the form of emotions, new objects, and new actions is produced. The continually updated image of the body and its state he calls the proto-self. The associated feeling he calls core-consciousness.
     When the nervous system creates an image of itself processing the information in the proto-self and in core-consciousness, we have full consciousness. This would be a third-order map. In humans, the existence of language, memory, and so on results in two more levels of consciousness: the auto-biographical self, and extended consciousness (which may be the same: Damasio is fuzzy about this.)
     So, in essence, consciousness consists of the brain creating images of itself processing information that it has received both from the body and from its own internal processing. Simplified, creatures with sufficiently complex brains have emotions, those with more complexity have awareness of emotion or feeling, and those with the most complex have awareness of their awareness, or consciousness. Insofar as emotion is an image of the body’s states, feelings an image of the emotions, and consciousness an image of the feelings, consciousness is also an image, ie, an illusion. This is Dennett’s point, but Damasio rightly emphasise that the images really exist, in the form of patterned firing of neural assemblies.
    Damasio’s account persuades me. I’ve read Descartes Error, in which he argues that reason alone is insufficient to enable choice and therefore insufficient to produce action. Emotion is the driving force. That book was elegantly and clearly written. This one is turgid, repetitive, and overly technical. It is academic, in other words. Still, it is a useful book, because it is a neurologists’ attempt to link the processes of mind to brain functions. As an attempt or first approximation, it succeeds. Damasio is careful to distinguish between hypothesis and fact, between observations and explanations. He offers his account as his theory, tries (usually successfully) to show where he agrees and where he differs with other researchers, and tries (not so successfully) to address the lay reader.
     The most interesting of his claims is that consciousness arises in the oldest parts of the brain. Damage to these (eg, brain stem, cingulate, etc) impairs consciousness in ways that damage to so-called higher structures (eg, frontal cortex, the language areas) does not. If he is right (and I see no reason why not), then all creatures with brains have some sort of proto-self, and those with more complex brains will have core-consciousness. That is, they will have emotions, and some of them will have feelings. This means that the anthropocentrics, who ascribe human personalities to animals, are partly right.
     Excellent content, so-so style. ***