Painting Fakes

 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 Flatland through the eyes of A

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 fermentation bath, a bath of warm compost which is said to

 A few years ago I read and reviewed Neil Woods' Good Cop, Bad War, the story of his work as an undercover police officer in the UK infiltrating illicit drug networks.  Woods tells the story of his 14 years as an undercover operator, beginning in the early 1990s.  It's a hair-raising tale of subterfuge and danger written with a clear purpose.  Woods was the chairperson of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an association of former and current police and customs officers campaigning for drug law reform, and he wanted to use his own experience to highlight the futility of the 'War on Drugs'. I recently came across a Queensland equivalent to this story, Drugs, Guns and Lies: My Life as an Undercover Cop, by Keith Banks, published in 2020.  Banks was a Queensland police officer from 1975 to 1995, entering the academy as an innocent, naïve 16 year old intent on helping the good guys by taking out the bad guys, and leaving in 1995 with a more realistic idea of who exactly

While I've been recovering from a piece of minor surgery I've spent a bit of time reading Philippa Mein Smith's A Concise History of New Zealand. Strange reading for a health break, you think?  Well, I've spent most of my life in Australia, just a short trip across the Tasman from New Zealand, and yet I'm ashamed to say I know less about the place than about many countries further from me.  The closest I have come to visiting is a quick change of planes in Auckland Airport, and before reading Mein Smith's book I knew almost nothing about its history. Like most Australians I guess, I see New Zealand as like a younger sister.  They are near us, they were founded by the same British colonialists, they speak the same language, they share a history of displacement of their original inhabitants.  Like younger sisters everywhere, they are similar to us, but a bit nicer.  Their people are a bit friendlier, their race relations a bit less oppressive, their politics a bit

  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 mushrooms are not organisms themselves, they are the fruiting bodie

 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 court.  To be human is to confuse

I just wrote my eighth letter to our dear Prime Minister on the subject of climate change.  I haven't had a sensible reply to the previous seven (one spin letter in response to the first , one brief acknowledgement of my praise of the Government's handling of COVID in the fifth which fails to mention the actual subject of the letter) but that's not the point.  The point is that he and his minions hear, repeatedly, that there are Australians who are not happy with inaction on climate change. For this eighth letter I have widened the audience.  Along with the original to the PM I have sent a version to all Queensland Senators, my local Commonwealth member and the Minister for Emissions Reduction (sic.), and to my State and Local Government representatives.  This is the main content of the letter, without the opening bits which were tailored to each audience. *** As we roll out the COVID 19 vaccines and we can see the containment of the virus approaching, all of us are turnin