'The Making of the British Landscape' by Nicholas Crane

 This blog marks a very special moment as it is number one hundred and so in marking that flag in the sand I give you a book about the country I live in.  For every who reads these blogs you have my eternal thanks and I hope to keep writing another hundred as I have a few bookcases to get through. 

What does a patriot understand about Britain.  Ask a typical one and what will you get?  Maybe a comprehensive account of Britain's history, maybe flag waving.  

Since I live on this island I might as well learn something about it, why it is the way it is, and find out who the hell we are.

'The creation of Europe's largest island was unlikely to have been the cause of celebration.' And we've been causing trouble ever since.  Britain is the balance of Europe's powers making sure that no one nation could achieve overall control.  

We are Europe but separated from it.  An ambiguous cousin not entirely sure they want to be part of the family.  We're independent but not immune from invasion.  We produce some of the greatest geniuses that revolutionised the whole world and once we had the whole world in our hands.  Small dogs with big ambitions.

We were once connected to Europe physically by a place called doggerland, now sunk in the sea.  We had Romans, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans all pay a visit, wild Celts and wild animals hung around, the history is one of continual transformation, albeit over many generations.

'Britain's first fieldworker', John Leland of the 14th Centaury, captivated me.  He was on a royal mission to rescue 'bibliographic treasures' from libraries after the suppression of the monasteries and privately as a topographer charted the land he inhabited.  He saw more of the country than anyone else at the time.  He also, for reasons unknown, went mad.  

'He knew he was compiling an unprecedented audit of a remarkable land, but he also knew that it could never be finished.'  It sounded like an idyllic journey, in a Britain that 'was almost entirely green: a rumpled, rustic island sparsely dotted with tiny, intense hubs of urban activity.'  How times change.

Our ancestors had different ideas of life.  They built monuments to their ancestors where 'the stones and the earth would be bequeathed to the next generation.  They were expressions of continuity in a timeless world that gave so few years to the ant-like routines of humankind.'  

Stonehenge, the White Horse of Uffington, St. Paul's Cathedral, Edinburgh Castle, the M5, all expressions of every age making it's mark on an island.  A flags are not enough I need mythology and certainly this book gives much a lot of what I need.  I love Britain.      

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Live long and prosper.

 

  

'The Fabric of the Cosmos' by Brian Greene

 At the turn of the end of the 19th Century scientists thought that science was coming to an end; the quest to understand the Universe was coming into it's destination and all that was left was to mop up the last bits of details to complete the picture.  Then someone decided to look at the Very Small, probably nothing was there but you need to check these things.  Then everything changed.

The world the scientists saw was a world of protons, neutrons and electrons- it was made out of atoms.  With Einstein's yet to be finished revolution of relativity and scientists forced to create a whole new conceptual schema called quantum mechanics the underlying reality of the atomic and subatomic fashioned a entirely new frontier.

It seems that with the stereotype of the scientist as the person with the Answers seems to no longer apply.  Frankly they don't have a clue.  They seem now to be a new type of shaman beckoning us to imagine exotic new landscapes of utter mystery and weirdness that seems, for a change, not entirely made up as it's all backed up by observation and repeatable experiment.  The world we thought we knew and grew bored with it's familiarity now seems profoundly strange and uncomprehending.  Just where the hell are we?

This is where you need a man like Brian Greene, with his book 'The Fabric of the Cosmos', to help guide us through this thicket of wave-like particles and particle-like waves and get to grips with what is going on.

'Is science unable to grasp a fundamental quality of time that the human mind embraces as readily as the lings take in the air, or does the human mind impose on time a quality of its own making, one that is artificial and that hence does not show up in the laws of physics?' is one of the many fruity questions that Greene asks that will make you think and think again and the ready made world we inhabit.  It offers a feast of thinking.

There are many sentences where he casually turns your whole world upside down such as: 'it is far more likely- breathtakingly more likely- that the whole universe we now see arose as a statistically rare fluctuation from a normal, unsurprising, high entropy, completely disordered configuration'.  The creation of a universe something of a commonplace affair, he seems to imply.  It certainly turns a lot of our beliefs on their heads.  

Mostly it's a test of the imagination or a heavy meditation session to read this book.  The size of the universe and our bewilderingly localised part in it certainly makes you forget the pettiness of politicians.  It's hard to care about Nations or Teams winning wars and sports when you look at a star and realise that it doesn't know that it doesn't know that we are here beating each other up and giving ourselves a hard time.  

Greene notes that even the common elements don't add up to much: 'If protons, neutrons, and electrons had been left out of the grand design, the total mass/energy of the universe would hardly been diminished.' This reminds me of the Georges Perec book 'A/void' where he writes, in French, the novel without the letter 'e'.  If it's possible to take out such an important part of a whole product then what else can you get away without?

And the book's packed with this extraordinary stuff that for any student of the universe is good reading providing mystery, inspiration, and sheer fucking wonder that we could find this out.  

Our home is an odd place.  As Greene says:

'Nature does weird things.  It lives on the edge.'

 

  Now it's audience participation time!  If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways:

- by being my patron on Patreon.com

-give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee

-Buy one of my literary books

-Share this blog on your social media

-Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book

-Follow me

I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog.

Live long and prosper.

'China' by Arthur Cotterell

 China.  A vast and complex country with an equally vast and complex history.  What book should you start with to grapple with all that China has been and done?  'China: A History' by Arthur Cotterell should be your first point of call.

Starting in pre-history and ending just after 1945 this relatively slim three hundred page book covers all main events in between trying to grasp what makes China China.  No small feat in either researching or making that research comprehensible to the general reader.  \Certainly, I feel, this book will, or should, be on the history and international politics syllabus for a long time.  As a primer on the subject this is the gold standard.

With a history as long and rich as China's it is surprising that in the West we know so little about it.  All the warriors, emperors, philosophers, poets and inventors' stories haven't travelled very well, which is a great shame as there are plenty to draw inspiration from here.

Take one of my favourite stories in this book, about the Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi, which I will re-print in full:

'One day the ruler of Chu sent two high officals to ask Zhuang Zi to assume control of the government.  They found Zhuang Zi fishing.  Intent on what he was doing, he listened without turning his head.  At last he said: "I have been told there is in the capital a sacred tortoise which has been dead for three thousand years.  And that the king keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a casket on the altar of the ancestral temple.  Now would this tortoise rather be dead but honoured, or alive and wagging its tail in the mud?"  The two officials answered that it would prefer to be alive and wagging it's tail in the mud.  "Clear off, then!" shouted Zhuang Zi.  "I, too, will wag my tail in the mud here." 

The Daoists believed in non-engagement, relinquishing control to be better able to understand the world around them.  But China isn't all wise sages handing down ancient wisdom.  There are also foolish rulers like Di Xin on whom the fall of the Shang dynasty is blamed.  The following anecdote, about lusting after the beauty of Dan Ji, demonstrates this:

'Around her ornate chamber, decked out with the precious stones from the royal treasury, he heaped up mounds of meat, hanging dried joints on all the trees, filled a pond with wine until they could row a boat on it, while naked men and women would appear at the beat of a drum and drink up the liquor like cattle.'

This is just a sample of what is in this book and only a particle of what must have really happened in that fascinating country's history.  There is so much more to explore.

In this book I think I have found a motto for my life that comes from Confucius:

'Love of humanity without love of learning soon becomes silliness.  Love of wisdom without love of learning soon becomes lack of principle.  Love of rectitude without love of learning soon becomes harshness.  Love of courage without love of learning soon becomes chaos.'

Now it's audience participation time!  If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways:

- by being my patron on Patreon.com

-give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee

-Buy one of my literary books

-Share this blog on your social media

-Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book

-Follow me

I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog.

Live long and prosper.

'The Grand Masters'

It's been a strange year.  Not too many posts and plenty of time for reflection.  However I am happy to admit that a new book of mine is available to get, so some achievement.   

'The Grand Masters' is an allegorical tale about a man who has to travel the world to defeat the Grand Masters in an otherworldly series of Games.

It's my first novel and am glad that I am no longer working on it, as it has taken a long time.

 The Grand Masters by Alistair David Todd | 9781839459849 (feedaread.com)

Buy Me a Coffee

Now with the wonders of technology you can now Buy Me a Coffee if you like my work and want to help support me creating blogs about books.  It is a one-time donation and really does help with  my work.  Or if you want to help support me long term then look at my Patreon page where for a small sum you can receive a copy of any self-published book I may bring out.  The link is below: 

Alistair David Todd is Poetry (buymeacoffee.com)

The Bandaged Hand

It's that time of the year where I get to plug on of my own books.  

'The Bandaged Hand' is a collection of poems written over a five year period, dedicated to the NHS for their helping me to cope with my bi-polar.  It is as Melanie Branton says 'eclectic' as it digs deep into life and finds treasures.  

As part of the private pleasure of writing it is also a pleasure to be sharing it publicly to others who may want to read my sustained efforts of writing.  

For those who read this blog I want to thank you for showing an interest as it has helped me keep on with my passion and curiosity of reading and writing.

There is more to come...

'A hero of mine' -David Oakwood

'There is courage and persistence in these words'-Richard Lawson

'His off-kilter imaginative perspective will surprise and delight'- Melanie Branton

 

 The Bandaged Hand by Alistair David Todd | 9781839455056 (feedaread.com)

'Physics of the Future' by Michio Kaku

For those that have worries about the future fear no more for Michio Kaku in 'Physics of the Future' says that it's going to be unrecognisably amazing. How amazing? Well by the end of this century we will 'control computers directly with our minds', we'll have emotional robots, designer children, programmable matter and increased risk of climate change. Pretty cool, yeah?

There will be those of us (me included) that will find reading this book, written almost ten years ago, with a straight face a little difficult. Kaku is the asbestos optimist, nothing seems to throw him off with how great technology will make our lives. And I'll grant him that it does seem to create a more humane world. 

 But what about cultural, historical and political forces that might get in the way? Will it just increase inequality? Will there be a Roussean backlash with people wishing to return to a simpler 'state of nature'? What if Yuval Noah Harari is right and our governments hack our bio-systems? What if Capitalism eats the world? All this will have a destabilising effect, yet it feels more and more these days that nothing is truly stable so if we can have electronic wallpaper to keep moral up than so more the better.

I am reminded of the game 'Deus Ex' where you played a character in between two camps of people. Those who have no technological implants and those who are fully cyborg. Is it possible that we could see a split between two different attitudes of mind? Mentioned in the book are the Islamic extremist who really don't want modern technology, but the people who do embrace technology in it's fullest will be the people who will be like gods to those who have nothing to do with it.

Kaku isn't just blue-sky thinking as his book is based on over three hundred conversations with leading scientists so it could become a very accurate prophesy if we survive as a species long enough to find out.

It also reminds me of a quote from a climate scientist who said that they thought the problems of climate change was green house gas, rising sea level and erosion of topsoil when really they found that the real problems were greed, apathy, selfishness and lack of compassion. And this really gets to the nub of the problem for me. I can communicate with the whole world from the vicinity of my living room and watch 80s Egyptian films whenever I like but it doesn't solve the fundamental emotional problems I have.

Or put it another way; there's no technological fix for the soul. Of course behaviour is entirely dictated to by economics and environment and by changing these things different behaviours are produced. It could be said that having TV programmes that document the cultures of other countries has given us a global consciousness the like we have never experienced. 

 For me I have a workable knowledge of Japanese society from watching programmes about it. It's partly the reason why I eat noodles every day because I want to emulate aspects of that culture that I like. And so in this way there is an argument that technology is making us more tolerant, peaceable and even kind.

Then there is the argument that it allows total nutters and highly dangerous people to connect and form increasingly powerful groups that could destabilise all the scientific knowledge needed to create this beautifully painted picture of the future.

But hark! Kaku has thought about this and says: 'There is so much noise on the Internet, with would be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.' It's going to take a while for that to happen I fear but if that is true then hopefully I could make a killing in the future.

And there is a place for me in the future. When my bartender said to me that AI are now capable to writing structured screenplays, though with largely nonsensical dialogue, I thought my days were done as a writer. But fear not! Kaku again comes to the rescue: 'Novelists, scriptwriters, and playwrights will have jobs, since they have to convey realistic scenes, human conflicts, and human triumphs and defeats'. Now that's a vision of the future I can look forward to.