Motherload

I've been having trouble with hearing voices for years now. Don't worry, I'm not going nuts, or no more than usual. The problem I have is a writing problem. How do you convey multiple voices in a narrative? How do you do polyphony convincingly? When you're in the school playground, on the bus, in a restaurant, in a cafe surrounded by mothers, when you're in a park, or waiting outside some activity or other, you are surrounded by conversation. People — especially women — chat about their lives constantly. While it's very difficult to define what the 'stuff of life' really is (once you've identified DNA, you realise you don't even know what consciousness is), we are indubitably brilliant at using language to continually construct, shape and reshape our reality, and that's what conversation is all about. So at least capturing conversation might help you convey 'reality'? I've been trying to write Motherload  for something like ...

This morning, on In Our Time , Melvyn Bragg was being peremptory and testy with one of my former professors and mentors, Terence Cave. The subject was Montaigne, death, friendship, the essai , stoicism and living in the moment. I do need to digress to poke a stick at some Braggadocio. Thank goodness the man exists so that this programme itself can — but, oh, the misogyny, the pomposity and the insecurity! He speaks over any woman he has on the show and is rude to anyone more intellectually prestigious than himself. Quite often he behaves like a second-year student, who got drunk the night before and only has half an essay, and so is compensating by being bloody-minded. Hearing him order Professor Cave to "go on, tell us what Montaigne was on about, then," was excruciating. Professor Cave and his excellent Renaissance companions teased out how Montaigne harnessed and channelled his classical education and his experience of public life into his writing. Unlike anyone writi...

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...