Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt

Can't resist a book with a title like this!

“A guided tour of ideas, theories and arguments about the origins of the universe…. Through discussions with philosophers of religion and science, humanists, biologists, string theorists, as well as research into the scholarship of days past—from Heidegger, Parmenides, Pythagoras and others—and an interview with John Updike, Holt provides a master's-level course on the theories and their detractors. The interludes find the author positioning himself as an existential gumshoe, but also working through the sudden loss of a pet and, later, the death of his mother. Holt may not answer the question of his title, but his book deepens the appreciation of the mystery.” (Kirkus Reviews )

It's Tuesday...time for...Weight-Training

It's that time again to get fit, grow some muscles and learn to feel comfortable inhabiting a mesomorphic body. Ah - sounds great in theory, but then you have to actually do the sets with all those reps! 

Immortal Songs of the 1970s - Woo! Yeah!

Ah, the 1970s. Breathe in, breathe out. I know. I know. It seems like every middle-aged person these days has some remote area of nostalgia/expertise that no one else on the planet really cares about or regards as anything but the most irrelevant minutiae...BUT... for better or worse...that was my decade.... the 1970s....Breathe in, breathe out. That wacky, wondrous, frizzy, outrageous, cheesy, gritty, sadly depressing, shockingly freakish time when all of the fallout from the 1960s suddenly started coming home to roost (for many of us who, at the time, were too young to know that we were the "guinea pigs" of a new age ...) Granted, the food was processed and unhealthy (we didn't know, we just didn't know), the air-quality (where I grew up) toxic and asthma-inducing, the hair-styles feathered and relentlessly blow-dried, the furniture inexpensive and amazingly drab, the carpet thick, plush and foot-friendly, the sporting events inspiring and quasi-religious, the schools regimented yet experimental (and filled to the brim with bullies, preps, jocks, smokers, stoners, rejects, social climbers, rebels and "sarcastic future bloggers"), the radio stations mesmerizing and oracular, the tv shows monolithic and insipid, the relationships (or should I say gender roles): fleeting and peripatetic, the drugs (or should I say "medications") sadly ubiquitous and entirely unoriginal (fie! fie! la bourgeoisie!), the clothing (or should I say "threads") loud and somewhat dysfunctional, the family units loud and somewhat dysfunctional, the political and economic trends dismal and not worth mentioning. But hey....we'll always have the MUSIC! Right? That was OUR DECADE - folks. Hello? Anyone? This may sound pathetic, but please understand. I'm not trying to win any converts here - you're either with us or agin' us as far as that goes. I mean, I could rattle off some obscure titles that time keeps on pushing into the fog: "Jive Talkin'... "Rainy Days and Mondays"..."I Saw the Light" ... "Sister Golden Hair"...."Babe"..."Funeral for a Friend"... "(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden"... "Disco Inferno"..."Cruel to be Kind"... "Bad Time"... "Ain't No Sunshine"... "So Far Away"... "You're So Vain"..."Time in a Bottle"..."Fire and Rain"... "Oh Very Young"... "Heart of Gold"... "American Pie"... "Vincent"... "Seasons in the Sun"... "Let's Stay Together"... "I Love Music"..."Saturday in the Park"..."Peace Train"... "Love Train"... "Jet"... "#9 Dream"..."This Masquerade"... "Another Star"... "Don't Let Nothing Get You Down"... "Low Rider"..."Superstition"..."Bad Sneakers"... "Oh What a Lonely Boy"... "Meeting Across the River"..."Could It Be I'm Falling in Love?"... "999 Arguments"... "It Never Rains in (Southern) California"... "Dust in the Wind"..."Love Will Keep Us Together"... "Let It Rain"... "Stairway to..." (what is the name of that song?) and you'd either nod your head in the affirmative or you wouldn't. It's that simple. So just for starters, I'm going to ask you to think of a song that you have probably heard at least on a subliminal level (in a store, an elevator, a car, a dental office, a rock-n-roll museum)... It's a song by ELO from back in the day.  ELO - for those of you who don't listen to oldies stations or classic rock outlets - stands for Electric Light Orchestra. A fact that none of our parents would have known or ever cared to know. But you remember. Or else you have an older sibling who remembers, or you have parents who remember, or a guidance counselor who remembers, or the old guy on the park bench who remembers! Good grief. I feel old. Now just follow me here. I want you to just start humming this tune gently to yourself. "Sun is shining in the sky/There ain't a cloud in sight/ It's stopped rainin' /Everybody's in a play and don't you know/ it's a beautiful new day/ hey-eh-yay." Great poetry, I know. But just keep going until you get to the chorus: "Mr Blue Sky/Please tell us why/You had to stay away for so long..." and see if IT (the song, the feeling, the decade) doesn't stay with you (refusing to leave your thoughts) for the next month or so. I myself can't get it out of my head!  (Another of ELO's big hits. Look it up.)

So This is Summer?

The guy who makes the weather nice!

Goethe said...

Goethe said that humankind could not endure a succession of fair days (i.e sunny weather), but looking out the window here, catching the first glimpse of what I hope will be that "endless summer" feeling, I beg to disagree...

Pierre Bonnard - Images of Summer

 It just wouldn't be summer without Pierre Bonnard.

The Way We Live Now

With all the current noise about Dickens, it would be easy to miss the fact that another Victorian is casting his shadow over today's literary landscape. Anthony Trollope's  The Way We Live Now remains the supreme example of the state of the nation novel, a sprawling tour de force with a huge cast of characters and a labyrinthine plot. The shifting viewpoints, keen engagement with contemporary themes, and use of London as a microcosm: this is the model upon which a number of important recent novels have drawn.

1. The Way We Live Now (Vintage Classics)
2. by Anthony Trollope
3. 
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

Search the Guardian bookshop

1. Tell us what you think:Star-rate and review this book

With our robber-baron bankers, our financial panics, our privileged political elite and our disenfranchised migrant workers, it can feel as if we are living through a new Victorian era; certainly the narrative mode that Trollope established in The Way We Live Now has seen a renaissance in recent years, and specifically in a certain breed of sweeping, often sentimental London-based novel. While one can find traces of Trollope's ensemble approach to the capital in earlier books – Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Iain Sinclair's Downriver spring to mind – it has taken the boom-and-bust noughties to restore this particular novel to the forefront of our cultural consciousness.Trollope returned to England from Australia in 1872 and, disgusted by the unscrupulousness and greed he found in that particular period of irrational exuberance (one of whose features was easily secured mortgages), he wrote a satire attacking the shady financiers and those who kowtowed to them. The action turns around the banker Augustus Melmotte and some dodgy stock-price manipulation, the society dame-turned-trashy novelist Lady Carbury, the wide-eyed farm girl Ruby Ruggles, the upright young engineer Paul Montague, and a host of other characters who, over the course of more than 800 pages, fight and scheme and fall in love. In the end, the reader's sympathies are so firmly knitted into the narrative that it is something of a wrench to look up from the book and find that these are not our friends, but made-up characters. London novels have never gone away, of course, from Maureen Duffy's  excellent Capital (1975) to Ian McEwan's more recent Saturday. But as the credit crunch hit, with London at its heart, it became clear that few writers had engaged successfully with the financial and economic stories that filled the front pages of our newspapers. And it has turned out to be Trollope who provided the best model for marrying the seemingly irreconcilable worlds that make up a global metropolis like London. Foremost among the neo-Trollopians are Amanda Craig ( Hearts and Minds), Sebastian Faulks (A Week in December) Justin Cartwright (Other People's Money) and now John Lanchester  with his forthcoming Capital. The similarity in subject matter and formal approach of these four novels is uncanny. Each uses a cast of characters drawn from across the social spectrum; each has a racy thriller-ish subplot that hurries the narrative along; each is fascinated with property and money; each takes an essentially tribal approach to London, showing the isolation of the urban condition, and yet counteracts this structurally by using the intersection and (often romantic) coming together of the various strands to give London life a comforting coherence. These novels are beacons against the alienating multiplicity of city life. - Alex Preston (The Guardian 2-13-12)