Motherload

I loved Jeffrey Eugenides's Virgin Suicides , for its kooky, gothic feel, and the beautiful pendulous, globular writing. His next, Middlesex , meh, not so much. It felt to me like a novel-length splurge on a Foucauldian or Judith Butlerian problem. Perhaps a little precious of me, but it seemed dated, although apparently to the rest of the world, a thing of wonder. I also felt there were longueurs . The Marriage Plot , which we have waited many years for, feels like, literally, more of the same. I found it meandering, for all the wrong reasons. If its title referred ironically to its own lack of plot, this raised little more than a tired lit crit eyebrow in me. I kept waiting for the motor to start, to get under way. I felt as though I kept being fed character synopses. Perhaps this was because he'd chosen to write a perspectival novel in the third person: we move from one of the three main characters' points of view to another, filling in gaps in the (very simple) plo...

Daniel Kahneman was on Radio 4 today. The author of Thinking Fast and Slow set listeners a couple of logic problems. I put down the broccoli chopping and paid attention. A bat and ball together cost £1.10. The bat costs £1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? I fell straight into the trap — the ball must cost 10p. I jotted it down, and waited for the next. All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. Is the logic right or wrong?  WRONG! Just because some flowers fade quickly, it doesn't mean that roses are in that group automatically. And while some roses might fade quickly, it's not because of the reason that 'some flowers fade quickly'. The latter I felt able to 'do': it was a syllogism , and its third part didn't follow from its first two, a logical fallacy. The maths question niggled at me, I felt dumb, because I knew it must be a trap, but I literally couldn't think how to solve i...

Here's something a bit fascinating. I just looked up the definition of 'jubilee'. It comes from the Hebrew, yobel , meaning ram or ram's horn, the thing with which you proclaim a jubilee. In Jewish history, the year of Jubilee was: A year of emancipation and restoration, which was to be kept every fifty years, and to be proclaimed by the blast of trumpets throughout the land; during it the fields were to be left untilled, Hebrew slaves were to be set free, and lands and houses in the open country or unwalled towns that had been sold were to revert to their former owners or their heirs.  The Romans got hold of this concept, and then the Christians, so that in the Roman Catholic church during the Middle Ages, a jubilee is 'a year of remission during which plenary indulgence may be obtained by a pilgrimage to Rome and certain pious works' . By 1526, it's come to mean 'shouting'. By 2012, as far as this mother is concerned, it has come to mean thi...