Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog

The modern Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche can be seen here (or at least, part of it):

No, not everybody's (or at least my) favourite white wavy tower, but the facade on the left. But, yeah, that tower:

And some more Kirche/white tower views. The Kirche rather cleverly manages to swap sides!

"Only one conciousness per mind." (NOT brain.) Possibly tautological; "Only one mind per mind." Possibly wrong; IIRC one theory of "voices" in schizophrenia is intrusion of normally subconcious sub-personalities into the main personality i.e. you're actually hearing someone else's thoughts!

A frequently quoted book, "Man on his Nature", Sherrington looks more valuable than this essay...because properly scientific.

The punning language is reminiscent of Shakespeare even if the poetry is not as good.

Junior Brother is in really deep trouble, now, thanks to the unintended consequences of his brothers' manouvres.

Switching between third and first person in the same narrative always feels weird to me.

I haven't seen much African art; apart from this book's exhibition, the only other display I remember is in The Met in New York.

These Things Happen: Bradbury seems to have idolised certain authority figures as a child, particularly librarians and teachers.

Why should brains generate conciousness when they are made of the stuff as everything else? No answers - just a description of the problem. A not very clear one...

Ambitious' and Superfluous' machinations achieve exactly the opposite of the intended result.

Vampires are trying to attract the attention of our hero in a rather brutal manner.

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche was hit by bombs during WWII. There's a very modern new church on the site and the remains of the old one have been made safe and left standing:

Are you bored of Berlin photos yet? Because I have many more...

The quality of the reproductions is excellent.

There's a suggestion in this book that tribal designations are often inaccurate and in some cases little more than inventions of Colonial Europeans. Is this meant to imply that the entire tribal concept is wrong? I would have to research to find out; at least check the references.

The Screaming Woman: I don't recall any other Bradbury stories written in the first person.

Has human evolution ceased? Medical argument that it has; behavioural argument that it hasn't; now thoroughly out-of-date discussion of Lamarkism.

The medical argument seems wrong to me; it's only been valid (generously) ~200yrs. We face the complete failure of antibiotics and an impending Malthusian population crash with attendant resource wars in the near future. Hence the timescale is way too short to say evolution of the species has permanently ended. Meanwhile stone-age Amazonian tribes remain oblivious to modern technological survival advantages and exposed to many selection pressures, anyway.

Strong theme of sexual immorality; adultery, seduction, prostitution, (sort of) incest. Many now think Middleton wrote this play: He's a much less well known playwright of the period because it wasn't possible to Bowdlerise his work - it relied too heavily on sexual themes, nothing would be left, hence his plays were dropped from the repertory and print entirely, instead. Only relatively recently did this change.

Hive Monkey

Another rip-roaring sci-fi adventure, this time with as much cyborg WWII flying-ace monkey as you could want! It moves along faster than Ack-Ack Macaque's Spitfire can fly, which is almost enough to make you not notice that the new characters and ideas are largely under-developed and unoriginal. It's over in a flash and it's fun but it's pretty flimsy.

Shoulda seen that coming!