Fragmented Mind

Solar Panels - Seen The Light

2012-02-04T04:04:00.000-08:00

You may see adverts for solar panels from time totime and may be encouraged to buy them, in part to reduce your electricityconsumption but mostly to qualify for the feed-in tariff currently available inthe UK and some other countries. You may also come across sales stands inpublic places such as supermarkets and garden centres. If you do, be careful.

Following a visit by a salesman we installed tenpanels. While they plainly work, the output from the panels is so much lowerthan the estimate that they were obviously miss-sold. The projected output was 1,974 kWh – yet the actual output for the sixbrightest months of the year was only 556 kWh. My projections show that at thisrate the panels will require 39 years to pay for themselves. Since the feed-intariff stops after 25 years this is not going to happen.

I have pointedout these and other facts to the company, Go Solar Now. They have ignored bothmy letters, the second having been signed for on delivery to them. But they clearlyknow where I live. In this period they have sent me two letters, neither ofthem referring to mine. The first was aChristmas card containing a letter.

‘We are hoping to introduce a pricing structure that will give returns of9% or greater – try getting that from a bank!’

Try gettingthat from Go Solar Now! At the moment we are not on course for a return of 2%,which we could easily exceed from a bank.

The secondletter outlined a maintenance plan. Looking down the list of items to bechecked I was amazed: the installers hadtold me that maintenance was not required since the system had no moving parts.How things change when the company wants to boost its income stream!

To add insultto injury I have also received a phone call from my energy company, EDF,suggesting that I must have made a mistake reading the meter. Given the installation,they said, the reading was 35% lower than they expected. Their advice was tocontact the installers.

Tried that. Sincethe company refuses to reply my next stop will be Trading Standards.

Editing

2009-05-02T01:54:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to learn the art of editing and come to difficult conclusions, though the first is simple enough. Any first draft, especially one written by me, will require pruning. And the same is true of any second draft. After that the issues arise.

It is surely inefficient to write a great deal which later needs to be excised. Although this seems obvious I'm not sure it is. The excess may well mean that the author has fully realised character and scene for himself, which is desirable. If some of that work is later withheld from the reader it may still have a beneficial effect on what remains.

Another issue troubles me a lot. I have heard it said that we live in a digital age, which I took to mean an age where things happen rapidly and attention spans are short. The speaker implied that we remember this in our writing - that we don't hang around, that we keep things moving. But if we write and edit with this in mind we might end up cutting too much flesh from the bone.
Who wants to curl up with a skeleton?

A spare, lean style can be very effective, but is that the only style open to us now? Can't we be expansive any more? And are digressions out of the question? I hope not. Yet I notice that some queries are doomed from the start on word count alone. So I would guess that if an author wants to be expansive these days, he/she will only have a chance of doing it when established.
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Musical Notes
Normally, we edit to improve a text, but sometimes the desire to edit can be problematic. It can happen that an author or composer edits compulsively and doesn't know when to stop. Henri Duparc was a case in point, being unable to leave a good song alone. On other occasions the problem is one of quality control. Cases of this include Brahms, Paul Dukas and Jean Sibelius.

Early on in his career Sibelius doubted the quality of his work, withdrawing Kullervo soon after its first performance. He had well known problems with the violin concerto and the fifth symphony and felt that, even after heavy revision, the fifth symphony was not entirely successful. He also had doubts about Tapiola.The worst case was the eight symphony, on which he expended a great deal of work before burning what there was of it - evidently a great deal. There is no way of knowing if his instinct was right about the eighth syphony, but I believe he was correct about the other works.

But maybe he took it all too seriously. He could have adopted a more relaxed attitude, done his best with a given work and left it to listeners to decide. Many imperfect works are enjoyable. Why deprive us of pleasure because you take yourself too seriously? Renoir didn't. He kept painting after arthritis weakened his technique. The art market hated that, but why would he care? Painting was what he did.

The Pratchett Problem

2009-04-03T12:32:00.001-07:00

We now have a second study purporting to show that Alzheimer's may be detected in the work of authors who continue to write after the onset of the condition. The first study examined Iris Murdoch, the second Agatha Christie. Among aspects examined were range of vocabulary (which decreased) and use of indefinite words such as 'something' (which increased).

It is known that Murdoch suffered from memory loss but there is no evidence that Christie was ever diagnosed. However, Christie may have provided a clue in the title of her last novel, 'Elephants Can Remember'.

If the research is on the money it suggests to me that the common nostrum, use it or lose it, may be wide of the mark.

Self Indulgence in Writing

2009-03-15T05:41:00.000-07:00

Many agents and publishers will come across this, where the writer can't bear to leave a passage out and is indulging him/herself because it should be excised. A friend described this to me using the old cliché about not wanting to kill your children, though I don't think this is a helpful image.

But I believe the problem can occur at the other end of the spectrum too, where the author is so well established that the editor doesn't try to edit out, or does try and gets knocked back.

A book I have in mind is 'Until I Find You' by John Irving, and I should say at the outset that this problem has nothing to do with hard work. The author is far from lazy. My edition of the text is 820 pages long and Irving wrote it twice. The first version was in the first person, but his wife persuaded him that it should have been written in the third and he rewrote it (mostly successfully, though tiny outcrops of first are still detectable).

Why is the book so long? The first section (125 pages) tells the story as the child Jack understands it. Unfortunately, he is being lied to by his mother and ends up many years later retracing his steps in an attempt to figure out what had actually happened. So the same sequence of events is narrated twice, once at the beginning of the book and again at the end. Telling the same story from different viewpoints isn't uncommon - Robert Browning went over the top with this technique in The Ring and the Book, and who reads that now? - but it is surely difficult to bring off.

This is not the only reason why the book is so long, but it is the single most important. Some time ago I attempted a detailed analysis of this title on Goodreads, but it was rejected because it was too long. I pared down the review and it was rejected again for the same reason. What I ended up posting was a shadow of what I had written. The one and only round to Irving!

Publishing in the UK

2009-03-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

Let’s consider the simplest way to publish a novel in the UK. It’s easy - be well known, be a celebrity, then the publisher will rely on your name moving the book. And this will usually be without reference to its merits. So who are the favoured celebrities? Two groups: politicians and the rest. Consider the politicians who have had novels published. Okay, it started with Disraeli, but he wrote his before getting into politics. Moving on to modern times: Douglas Hurd, Edwina Currie, Helen Liddell (Stalin’s granny), Anne Widdecombe and, wait for it, yes, Iain Duncan Smith! I have only read extracts from their books, but none were inspiring enough to lead to a purchase, and this is a very polite way of putting it.

But certain other individuals are offered deals too and on the same basis, that their name being already in the public domain copies will walk off the shelves without too much help from the marketing department. I don’t know when this started, but the first case I can remember was the yachtswoman, Claire Francis (Night Sky, 1983). Though this novel left a lot to be desired, so do many others, and she had written three autobiographical books before she started it. She was/is an intelligent person who takes her work seriously.

How things change. With giant stride I move on to the present day. Take Jordan. Okay, don’t. But for those of you who haven’t come across her, she is a model tending to the pneumatic and, more recently, a ‘star’ of reality television.

‘Jordan, the glamour model and reality TV star, has secured her debut as a novelist with a six-figure advance before she has written a word. Random House, Britain's largest publisher, announced yesterday that it has signed up the model, whose real name is Katie Price, to write an autobiography and two novels. Better known for her appearance on the show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and subsequent romance with her co-star, the former pop star Peter Andre, Jordan is adding fiction to her CV at the suggestion of the publisher.’

Notice, folks, it was the publisher’s idea. Two novels have now appeared, Crystal and Angel. Her name is on the cover but I have no idea who actually wrote them. Not a Clare Francis, then.

Which takes us nicely on to autobiography. Staying with Jordan, her first sally into the field, ‘Being Jordan’, sold close to 500,000 copies and earned £4.7 million when it was published by Blake last year. The second, ‘Jordan: A Whole New World’, covers her wedding to Peter Andre (don’t ask, I have no idea either) and the birth of their baby. I don’t know how well it’s selling. Other comparable celebrities have published autobiographies, including Jade Goody (Jade; My Autobiography) and Jodie Marsh (wittily entitled 'Keeping it Real') All of this is fed by the tabloid press, both newspapers and magazines. I recently came across a magazine entitled Celebrity Bodies. I thought it was a joke – but it wasn’t.

Leaving these people aside ( and what a good feeling that is), we have that other group who never tire of producing autobiographies – sportsmen and women. Footballers come high on the list, though when England won the World Cup (Rugby Union) several members of the team hit the supermarket shelves. Another example from a different sport is Kevin Pietersen (Crossing The Boundary). Kevin plays cricket for England and felt impelled to zap us all with his story. I will major on a footballer, though, one Wayne Rooney. Wayne kicks a mean ball, I’m told. Having listened to him talking he should leave communication to his feet.

‘Manchester United and England striker Wayne Rooney has signed the biggest sports book deal in publishing history. The 20-year-old has agreed a 12-year contract with Harper Collins to write a minimum of five books for an advance of £5m plus royalties. Rooney's first book will hit the shelves at the end of July 2006 and will be an autobiography of his life so far, including this summer's World Cup.
The follow-up books will cover the rest of Rooney's playing career and there will also be a Wayne Rooney Annual published in the autumn of 2006, aimed at younger fans.’

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea.
The rest of this post concerns academic publishing and may safely be skipped.
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Publishing is sometimes required of academics to get on in their profession. Academics are supposed to conduct ‘research’, even when their subject is, say, English literature. In a subject such as this research isn’t possible. Two other activities are: scholarship and criticism. Both of these can be useful. A scholar might discover the commonly accepted text of a given author contains several errors, some of them serious. If these are corrected, that’s fine. A few critical books shed useful light on their subjects. Many do not. The first time I entered a bookshop near a university I noticed that the shelf-space devoted to poetry, plays and novels was dwarfed by the space given over to learnéd texts. One was written by my professor and included the sentence: ‘It is tempting to speculate on the unique felicity of tripartite division in complex works of art.’ Eloquent or what! The parasites were overwhelming their hosts.

In the sciences, things are more complicated. Genuine research is usually possible here, but not all research is useful. For example, recent research shows that shy men are more prone to heart attacks than less shy men. Fine, but why should that be? If it’s because they have less outlet for pent-up emotion than their more out-going counterparts then it’s hardly to be wondered at. Or suppose a shy man visits his doctor. What is the doctor supposed to say, ‘For God’s sake pull yourself together, Cedric, sake stop being so shy!’

In the UK a university’s funding is contingent, to an extent, on the research it carries out, so scientists can earn good money for their institutions. Nowadays, too, there are often spin-off companies which, if successful, are another valuable asset. But in both fields, the arts and the sciences, the fact that lecturers have published papers in academic journals or turned their theses into books does not mean they are capable of teaching. But I forget myself, what do universities have to do with teaching? With every passing year, less and less.

Books we don't finish

2009-03-03T14:27:00.001-08:00

A while back, people in the UK were surveyed to discover which books they failed to finish. I have listed the fiction results here though, for the record, 'My Life' by Bill Clinton came in second on the non-fiction list.

Top ten books people cannot finish - fiction
1 Vernon God Little, D.B.C Pierre 35%
2 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling 32%
3 Ulysses, James Joyce 28%
4 Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres 27%
5 Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell 24%
6 The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie 21%
7 The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho 19%
8 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 18%
9 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy 16%
10 Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky 15%

Of the reasons given for failing to finish a book, none related to the book itself , but I don't know what the questions were. Maybe there was no opportunity to address this question.

Top reasons for not finding time to read:
Too tired 48%
Watch TV instead 46%
Play computer games 26%
Work late 21%

So, do any titles on this list surprise you? Some surprise me. I'm amazed Ulysses is listed and Finnegan's Wake isn't. Maybe the reason people didn't fail to finish Finnegan's wake is that they were smart enough not to start it in the first place. War and Peace makes its expected appearance but Proust doesn't figure at all. Since I don't read books for peedie folk I can't account for Harry Potter. I'm also surprised to find The God of Small Things on the list. It seemed an excellent novel to me.

Arundhati Roy is an interesting case. Ms Roy is heavily into politics and I think it unlikely she will publish another novel. Is this a good thing? I don't believe it is. There are plenty of politicians out there and even more people taking an active interest in politics. But Ms Roy has a talent for writing which will go to waste if she doesn't use it. I'm reminded of Alexander Borodin. Not only did he divide his energies between chemistry and composition, he was in constant demand to join committees and often agreed to do so. Yet he had a natural talent for music and many of his melodies are instantly recognisable as coming from him. Not many people have that ability. (Life in the Borodin household is beautifully described in Rimsky-Korsakov's book, My Life in Music.)

Here's my question. If you wanted to add a title to the fiction list, what would it be and why?

Here's my answer. 'Underworld', by Don DeLillo. I started this book several times, failed to finish it each time, and gave it to a charity book-shop – which might not be deemed a charitable act. The first, lengthy section centred on a baseball which was hit into the crowd as a result of the winning strike. Who had it? Where did it go? A character in the book then makes it his life's work to track this ball down. Interesting or what! Now I realise that the search for the ball is a mechanism by which a range of environments and issues can be explored. But it's so boring! Yet apparently I'm in a minority of one. How do I know this? Because the marketing department went into overdrive for this title and had everyone from the Pope to the Dalai Lama extol its virtues as of it were the best thing since sliced bread. 'Everyone' includes a number of authors, and I believe I hear the loud and unpleasant sound of mutual back-scratching at work here.

Confucius

2009-02-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

Master Kong (551-479 BC) is better known in the west as Confucius (a corruption of 'Kong fuzi' – master Kong). Growing up in my part of the world I was frequently zapped by lunatic statements beginning with the words 'Confucius say . . .' usually delivered in a strangulated accent calling to mind the likes of, 'Ah so, Glasshopper, we meet again!' I had no idea who Confucius was, let alone what he might actually have said.

So why am I attracted to Master Kong? He gave a great deal of thought to how people should behave in a civilised society and encouraged others to consider this too. His usual approach seems to have been to have them arrive at their own conclusions through conversation, though if asked a question he would answer it as best he could. It is some of those answers I find most interesting.

Like Plato, he had very little opportunity to put his ideas into practice. Unlike Plato, he was devoid of totalitarian tendencies. Master Kong loved music, which is very important in his life and his philosophy. Plato recognised the affective power of music and so was hostile to it. If the dialogues are any guide, Plato employed Socratic questioning to pin down those he was conversing with. Without the benefit of knowing Socrates, Master Kong did the same.

Master Kong comes down to us through the Analects in which, to me at least, I meet a real person whom I find very engaging. And he is not the only person we meet. Take Yan Hui, for example. Few people got Master Kong's thinking more than this modest and very poor man who, unfortunately, died young. Anyway . . .

Preamble For Under-Appreciated Bloggers
The Master said: 'You do not worry about the fact that other people do not appreciate you. You worry about not appreciating other people.'
Book 1/16

The influence on Master Kong of his student Yan Hui
The Master said: 'I spend the whole day talking with Hui, and he does not put any counter-arguments but seems stupid; but when he is no longer with me and I study his private conduct, he is after all capable of setting an example. Hui is certainly not stupid.
Book 2/9

The Master said to Zigong: 'Of Yu and Hui which is the better?' Zigong replied: 'How dare I even have a look at Hui? Hui is the sort of person who, by hearing one thing, understands ten; but I am the sort of person who, by hearing one thing, understands two.' The Master said: 'You are not as good as he is. Both you and I are not as good as he is.'
Book 5/9

The Master said: 'Hui is not a person who helps me. In my words there is nothing he does not admire.'
Book 11/4

When Yan Hui died, the Master became distressed as he bewailed him. His followers said; 'Master, you have become distressed.' 'Have I?' he said. 'Well, if that man is not to be the object of my distress, then for whom am I to be distressed?'
Book 11/10

The Master said: 'A man of quality indeed was Hui! He lived in a squalid alley with a tiny bowlful of rice to eat and a ladleful of water to drink. Other men would not endure such hardships, but Hui did not let his happiness be affected. A man of quality indeed was Hui!'
Book 6/11

The Master as Life Coach
Ran Yu said: 'It is not that I do not feel pleased with your Way, but my strength is inadequate.' The Master said: 'Those whose strength is inadequate fall out along the way, but now you are already imposing limits.'
Book 6/12

When the men of Lu were working on the Long Treasury, Min Ziqian said: 'Why not restore it? Why must it be rebuilt?' The Master said: 'That man does not normally have anything to say, but when he does he is always on the target.'
Book 11/14

The Master said: 'Shi goes beyond and Shang does not arrive.' 'If this is so,' Zigong said, 'then Shi is the superior, is he not?' The Master said: 'To go beyond is no different from not arriving.'
Book 11/16

Gongxi Hua said: 'Zilu asked whether, if you hear something, you should practice it. You said no. But when Ran Yu asked the same question you, Master, said that when you hear something you should practise it. I am perplexed and venture to question this.' The Master said: 'Zilu is backward and so I urged him on, but Yu is an over-enthusiastic person and so I held him back.'
Book 11/20

A Handful of Extracts
The Master said: 'There are few indeed who fail in something through exercising restraint.'
Book 4/15

Ji Wen Zi thought three times before acting. When the Master heard of this, he said; 'Twice will do.'
Book 5/20

The Master said: 'To those who are not eager to learn I do not explain anything, and to those who are not bursting to speak I do not reveal anything. If I raise one angle and they do not come back at me with the other three angles, I will not repeat myself.'
Book 7/8

The Master said: 'Even in the midst of eating coarse rice and drinking water and using a bent arm for a pillow happiness is surely to be found; riches and honours acquired by unrighteous means are to me like the floating clouds.'
Book 7/16

When the Master was singing with others, he always had the good bits repeated before joining in.
Book 7/32

A villager from Daxiang said: 'Great indeed is Master Kong, but despite his broad learning there is nothing for which he has made a reputation.' When the Master heard this he said: 'What do I take up? Do I take up charioteering? Do I take up archery? I take up charioteering!'
Book 9/2

Zizhang asked what a public servant might be like so that he might be called successful. The Master said: 'Whatever is it that you mean by successful?' Zizhang replied: 'Certain to be heard about, whether employed by the state or a noble family.' The Master said: 'This is reputation, not success. The successful man is by nature straightforward and fond of what is right. He examines what people say and notices their looks and is anxious to give priority to others. But the man of reputation assumes an air of humaneness although his conduct belies it, and he does not feel any misgivings about persisting in this.'
Book 12/20

Fan Chi asked about humaneness. The Master said: 'It is to love others.' Fan Chi asked about understanding. The Master said: 'It is to understand others.'
Book 12.22

The Master said: 'When the multitude hate somebody, it is necessary to look into his case; and when the multitude love somebody, it is also necessary to look into his case.'
Book 15/2

Mechanics

2009-02-14T03:21:00.000-08:00

We learn in mechanics that if you make one part of a machine more efficient you are doing it at the expense of another. I now realise that this applies to biological machines too.

You wish to improve the efficiency of your heart and lungs so you cycle, only you discover the arthritic pain in your hip gets worse if you do this. Or you aggravate bursitis in the same area.

Your cat has a growth on her spine affecting her hind legs so she doesn't exercise so much. As a result her weight increases and she is now too heavy. The vet advises steroids to shrink the growth and hopefully regain full leg use. But, she says, the steroids will make her more hungry and thirsty. So given the chance she will eat more, not less.

An elderly woman has high blood pressure, a weak bladder and insomnia. The doc gives her 'water tablets' to lower blood pressure, but these cause her to get up in the night more often - toilet bound - so her sleep is even worse.

Your work is disturbed by a bluebottle. You open a window to let it out. Another flies in from outside.

So why bother. Stick a straw in your ear, lie back, and relax.