Painting Fakes

I've somehow missed out on knowing anything about American writer and activist  Rebecca Solnit until this year, when a chance social media post referenced something she said.   My starting point has been her little book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities,  first published in 2005 and re-issued with some more recent material in 2016.  She was writing in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and George W Bush's re-election to the US presidency.  There was a lot of despair around.  The massive peace movements in the US and UK opposing the invasion had seemed powerful, but the invasion went ahead anyway and both Bush and Blair were returned to power in their subsequent elections.  Were they all wasting their time, was the world doomed? I remember the time well.  Bush, Blair and Howard all pushed the line that the Iraqis had 'weapons of mass destruction' (which it turned out they didn't), and even hinted that they were harbouring A...

 After my speculations, aided by various authors, about whether trees are intelligent , or even fungi , Peter Godfrey-Smith has settled me down a little.  While I was returning Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life  to the library I saw his book  Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness  sitting awaiting re-shelving, begging me to borrow it. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science who teaches at the University of Sydney and spends much of his spare time diving in the various bays around the Sydney area.  One result of this is an obsession with octopuses, about which he has written another book and which feature strongly in this one as well.  Both books deal with the question, part scientific and part philosophical, of what constitutes a 'mind' and what kind of creatures have them. Historically, theories of mind have varied widely.  One view is that the mind (perhaps equivalent to or similar to the soul) is an add-on which co-habits the b...

 I can't remember where I heard about Flatland.  I suspect in more than one place.   Edwin Abbott Abbott was famous in his own time as the principal of a prestigious London school and a writer of school textbooks.  It's fascinating that almost a century after his death, the only reason he is remembered is for a a little book he published in 1884 which the editors of the British Dictionary of National Biography  didn't even feel was worth noting in their entry on him. Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions  is, at one level, an extended set of mathematical jokes.  They begin on the title page, where we learn that the tale is narrated by A. Square, a play on Abbott's own name (in mathematical notation his initials could be rendered EA 2 ).  I would not be surprised if many of the geometrical illustrations in the book began their lives as jokes to liven up dull geometry lessons for his pupils. The first part of the story describes the land of Fl...

When I published a short post about fungi last month, a friend suggested I should read a book called  Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures, by a chap called Merlin Sheldrake .  So I did.  Thanks! Merlin Sheldrake is an English mycologist - a person a who studies fungi - with a PhD from Cambridge University which he earned studying fungi in the rain forests of Panama.  He is like the opposite end of the pole from me.  I know barely anything about fungi, he is a fungal tragic.  He studies fungi for a living and in his spare time he does fungus-related things for fun.   In researching this book he brewed wines and beers from all sorts of organic matter using the yeast already present on their skin and in the air (yes, yeast is a fungus).  He took LSD, an artificial hallucinogen modelled on hallucinogenic mushroom compounds, as part of a scientific experiment.  He immersed himself in a fermentati...

  Back in late March and early April we had buckets of rain and the mushrooms appeared as if from nowhere.  For a couple of weeks they dotted our parks, footpaths and yards.  They appeared in long grass, on bare dirt, out in the open, under trees.   They came in different shapes.  Little circular tables appearing in clusters like an open air dinner party.  Dense forests of tiny, fragile flowers sheltering under shrubs.  Little balls like maracas which may have been buds waiting to open.  White stalks with upturned plates on top that look like tiny water towers.   They lasted for a week or two, and then they disappeared again. I've lived most of my life not really thinking about fungi.  Most of the time you don't see them, then they seem to appear out of nowhere.  Where do these marvellous growths come from?  I got interested and decided to find out what thousands, millions of people already know. Turns out that mushro...

 I've been reading a couple of books about trees.  It's made me think, are trees just chemical factories, or are they intelligent? The Overstory  by Richard Powers was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2018.  It has human characters, because otherwise no-one would read it, but it is quite clearly a novel about trees.  Powers has one of his characters sum up what seems to be his ambition for the book, as Ray and Dorothy Brinkman read their way through The Hundred Greatest  Novels of All Time. The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands.  But they share a core so obvious it passes for given.  Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive - character  - is all that matters in the end.  It's a child's creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in a federal ...

Here's a different kind of stretch of the imagination .  One of the perennial political debates around the world is the question of budget deficits.  In every election we see politicians vying to present themselves as the more financially responsible alternative, meaning that they will balance the budget, that government spending will match government income and extra borrowing will not be required. Although this appears to be a partisan debate, it is based on assumptions which all mainstream politicians share - that government money is limited and that they can't perpetually spend beyond their means, that the money governments borrow needs to be paid back with interest in the future.  The partisan debate then focuses on how to do that.  Progressive politicians will favour increased taxes on the rich to pay for more generous social programs, conservative politicians will favour budget cuts and if possible tax cuts.  In budget terms they have the same aim - to ba...

Here's another little thing about imagination which neatly brings together the idea of animals having their own reasons , and the fact that Australia's First Nations have some different ways of seeing the world. The story of the orcas and whalers of Eden is one of those iconic Australian stories, popularised in Tom Mead's book Killers of Eden in 1961 and since the subject of various books and documentaries as well as a quite impressive little museum.   Eden sits on Twofold Bay in southern NSW, on the country of the Yuin people.  The story involves three generations of the Davidson family, who ran a shore based whaling operation out of Eden from the 1840s to the 1920s.  In the 1840s a number of different crews tried whaling from Eden, but only the Davidsons' survived.  They were successful because they, and they alone, had the assistance of a pod of orcas who acted like sheepdogs, driving the whales towards their boats and harassing them until the whalers could...