Goon for Lunch (book review)

     Harry Secombe. Goon for Lunch. (1975) Secombe played Neddy Seagoon on The Goon Show, his tag line was It’s all rather confusing, really. These pieces, written for Punch and other magazines, make up a glimpse of an autobiography. He grew up in Swansea at a time when children spent as much time as possible out of sight and hearing of grownups. He was in North Africa and Italy for most of the War, and didn’t like it. But he did meet Spike Milligan there, and they ended up doing skits together, which  helps explain the Goon Show.
     The pieces are mildly funny, they recount small injuries and large confusions. I enjoyed reading them, both for the reminders of post-war England and for Secombe’s company. He was a nice chap, on the evidence. His Neddy Seagoon is not far removed from himself. In Italy, he and a comrade were almost blown up removing an unexploded bomb from a house in a village that had been recently vacated by the Germans. His comrade believed the bomb was a dud. It sounds like a Goon Show incident. I suspect that the craziness of War fed into a lot of Milligan’s scripts.
     The book is out of print, but worth a search. ***

History of the World: Lots of pictures, no maps..

     National Geographic Society. Essential Visual History of the World (2007) A nice fat little book, well printed, reasonably well researched, lots and lots of standard illustrations. Arranged chronologically by “era”, with two pages per entry, which reduces history to unconnected chunks of events. And not a single map, which reduces its usefulness by about 80%. Pity. *

Stratford Mosaic

     Gerald Jaggard. Stratford Mosaic (1960) Jaggard owned The Shakespeare Press, an antiquarian book shop on Sheep Street which he inherited from his father Capt. William Jaggard, who compiled the first Shakespeare bibliography. Peter and I visited his shop at least once. Besides the books, there were many memorabilia; it had the air of a museum.
     This collection of memories is an odd mix. It focuses on the Shakespeare Club and its role in developing the Birthday Celebrations, as well as some remarks on the first Memorial Theatre, the fire, and the new Memorial Theatre. He tells of the Gower Memorial, the Fountain in Rother Street, and the Mop, an annual fair that I remember with affection. He ends the book with brief memoirs of Marie Corelli, Sir Archibald Flower and Capt. William Jaggard.
     Jaggard was himself a member and later the Secretary of the Club, which gave him access to the minute books. His selection of highlights shows how the Club’s focus shifted slowly from enjoying their common admiration for Shakespeare (and good food and cigars at the annual banquet) to promoting Stratford as tourist town. As a record of some of the behind the scenes events, it’s a valuable resource. I’m not so sure about it as a history or as an impression of Stratford. Jaggard meticulously and repeatedly records all the honorifics and professional qualifications of the people he mentions. His bardolatry several times drops over the edge into self-satire. He waxes romantically and lyrically clichéd when describing Stratford as a beauty-spot. According to him, Sir Archibald Flower was man of pure civic virtues, with no warts at all. And of course Shakespeare is the Immortal Bard of Immortal Memory, etc.
     An amazing performance. My grandmother gave it to me. It mentions two of my ancestors, John Morgan, stationer and book seller (my great-grandfather), and F. C. Morgan (Uncle Peter), who was briefly librarian at the Theatre, and later Librarian and Curator of the Hereford City Library. Jaggard's brother Geoffrey contributes nicely turned verses describing the streets of Stratford, most of them decorated with pleasant drawings by D. R. Mathews (uncredited). Published by Christopher Johnson (London), which I suspect was a vanity house. I found nothing about it online, but several copies of this book are available. If you are a fan of Shakespeare and Stratford, you could do worse than add it to your collection. **½

Cells are computers, organisms are fractals

     Cells are computers, organisms are fractals

Some notes towards a concept. I’ve long thought that the notion that a neuron as an on-off switch was too simplistic. These notes represent an attempt to produce a better notion. 2016-06-03 & 05. WEK.

The metaphor of DNA as blueprint is misleading. Better: DNA is a program guiding the assembly of proteins. Better yet: It’s the operating system, since it’s RNA that produces the proteins. But if DNA is a program, then the question is, How does it execute? The answer: like any program, at any given time some part is running, the other parts are silent. A program can also trigger other programs. The operating system controls how multiple programs run, it allocates memory and CPU time, access to video and audio subsystems etc. A “call” from one program will stop or start some part of another program. An “interrupt” will cause (re-)allocation of memory, access to subsystems, etc. DNA starts and stops protein synthesis, turns genes on and off, analogous to OS controlling program execution. So the cell is a computer

Recent research shows that inputs to the cell “turn genes on and off”, analogous to calls and interrupts controlling how a program runs. The genes control the functioning of the cell. Exactly how is complicated, but the general pattern is chemical feedback loops. A substance increases, which triggers or stops gene expression, which results in a series of reactions, which cause that substance to decrease, which stops or triggers gene expression, and the cycle repeats.

A neuron responds to the chemical environment outside it by adjusting its internal processes. These processes control gene expression. The feedback loops within the neuron determine the types and quantity of neurotransmitters emitted at the synapse with the next neuron in the circuit. Since both type and quantity of neurotransmitter vary depending on the inputs to the neuron, the neuron is computing the output. The concept of a neuron as simple on-off switch is inadequate.

But a cell is an odd kind of computer. The relation between input and output depends on the internal feedback loops. A given substance may be implicated in two or more feedback loops, which means that the neuron is topologically a net. The computation of the output depends on the topology of the net of chemical reactions, which happen both simultaneously and in sequence. That makes the cell a parallel computer.

More precisely, the cell is a net whose topology varies over time as the chemical feedback loops cycle between limiting states and intersect with each other. Thus, the cell cycles through a series of topologies. It’s a self-modifying net.

The concept of a self-modifying net applies to assemblies of cells (tissues), to organs, and to the organism as whole. The organism too is a complex system of feedback loops. Mathematically it’s a chaotic system: it tends to maintain itself within an envelope of states (the attractors). Illness and disease move the system outside the envelope, and recuperation is a return of the system to the dynamically stable cycles within the envelope.

Conclusion: An organism is a multi-dimensional net of feedback loops. Its topology varies over time at many scales, which implies it’s a fractal system.

The Cavalier in White (mystery)

     Marcia Muller. The Cavalier in White (1988) Joanna Stark, partner in a security firm specialising in museums and art galleries, finds herself sucked back into the business when a client’s murder ties into the theft of a Frans Hals painting, Cavalier in White, stolen from a gallery owned by her friends. Much conversation, a second murder, family secrets and the past come together in a nice melange of entertaining characters and plots. The novel often reads more like a Harlequin romance than a mystery. Muller’s Sharon McCone tales are solidly in the PI tradition; this book dances on the borders of the two genres as if Muller couldn’t make up her mind which one she wanted to write. There was one more Joanna Stark novel which I haven’t read. This one is OK for a few hours pleasant entertainment, but only a diehard Muller fan would want to keep it. *½

Colin Dexter, The Jewel that was Ours (Chief Inspector Morse)

 

    Colin Dexter. The Jewel that was Ours (1991) This novel began as a TV script, The Wolvercote Tongue, in which a Saxon artefact figures as the McGuffin. A gaggle of US tourists descends on Oxford, one of them dies, the Tongue disappears, then one of the presenters turns up naked and very dead at Parson’s Pleasure. Morse as usual hares off after the wrong solution until an unrelated datum noticed by Lewis as an odd coincidence triggers the re-arrangements of the facts, which are beautifully summed up in chapters 57-59, and explain the dual meaning of the title. Chapter 60, the last, ties up a loose thread, another amorous disappointment for Morse.
     The novel is easy to read. Short chapters allow interruptions without losing the threads, which are satisfyingly tangled. If you don’t know Morse, the book is a good intro. Still, the whole reads like a potboiler. Dexter has developed a set of tics and tropes that give the fan the comforting sense of a reliably familiar world. We can concentrate on the puzzle if we wish, or just let the TV-derived imagery carry us along. A well-done entertainment, but that’s all. **½

How to study Shakespeare and survive

     Richard Armour. Twisted Tales From Shakespeare (1957) A re-read. The introductions are nicely done parody of what the student reads in school editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Then Armour dissects the six school classics: Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello. 

     The jokes are gentle. Armour likes puns, and he clearly has vivid memories of studying the plays, which inform his not-quite-fractured versions of the stories. Anybody who knows the plays will find amusement, those who don’t could do worse to read this book as a first intro to the canon. The best thing is Armour’s satire on the authorship question: It is a contemptible attack on higher education ... to suggest that a person who never went to college could have written poetry that is too difficult for most college students. Precisely so. 

     Recommended. ***