A Mind @ Play

Despite the advancing years I had up until receiving this book for Christmas never read any Wodehouse, though I had been read excerpts in my younger years. Of course, the problem with Wodehouse is that being such a prolific author, it’s difficult to know where to start. And since most Wodehouse readers have their favourites, asking for advice on what to read is a bit like asking which football team you should support.

As someone only just playing around with digital photography, I picked up this book as a complement to Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Exposure to get me started and provide some inspiration. Neither book disappointed. Where Peterson’s book is an excellent starting manual for people new to the world of photography, Freeman’s goes into much greater depth about composition techniques.

The book is divided into 6 chapters, with each chapter further divided into sections dealing with a certain aspect of photographic design. Whilst some sections make reference to others, and in particular to photographs on other pages, in general it is possible to read this book piecemeal, skipping over bits that are of no interest, or returning and dipping into others. Each section abounds with example photographs, many also exploiting instances of photographs that didn’t quite work to further highlight a point.

In titling his book (or having his book titled?) “Is that a fish in your ear?”, David Bellos has certainly made categorising this work a difficult task. It looks and feels like it should belong firmly in the ‘popular science’ section, yet as other reviewers have pointed out, the writing sits it firmly in a half-way academic category. Still, the material covered should be of interest to a wide range of readers, with the book split into fairly short and relatively self-contained chapters, that one can really dip and choose or skip out the parts that are of little interest. The book covers a very wide range of topics, and skitters over numerous areas such as philosophy, biology, religion and of course linguistics.

Der Klappentext behauptet, dieses Buch sei „Der stumme Frühling“ des literarischen Geistes. Zwar vergleicht man hier Äpfel mit Birnen, aber im Kern gibt es in diesem Buch eine provozierende Erörterung der Auswirkung verschiedener Techniken auf die Funktionsweise des Geistes. Carrs Hauptthese, die er in seinem Artikel „Is Google making us stupid?“ schon ausführlich erklärt, ist, dass das Internet Veränderungen in unseren Hirnen auslöst, die unsere Denk- und Erinnerungsvermögen nicht unbedingt positiv verändern. Grundsätzlich spielt das Internet die Rolle eines Universums der Ablenkung, das eine unendliche Vielfalt an leichter Unterhaltung und sinnlosen Unterbrechungen einführt, wodurch wir unsere Gehirne nach einem süchtig-machenden Muster von ineffektivem Multitasking trainieren. Wir heben die neue Technik auf ein Podest, als Eingang zu einer neuen Welt des Wissens und der Kommunikation, die viele Vorteile im Rahmen von sozialer Wechselwirkung, persönlicher Freiheit und wissenschaftlicher Bemühung mit sich bringt. Carr ist jedoch der Meinung, dieses Portal sei beileibe nicht ohne Nachteile, dass diese Technik unsere Fähigkeit des tiefen Denkens und das effektive Nutzen des Gedächtnisses beeinträchtigt.

The blurb claims this book to be a “Silent Spring” for the literary mind. That is certainly comparing apples to oranges, but at the core to this book there is a thought-provoking argument about the impact of various technologies on the workings of the mind. Carr’s main thesis (to be found almost in its entirety in his article “Is Google making us stupid?”) is that the Internet is changing our minds, our ability to think and the way we use our memories, and all this not necessarily for the better. Essentially, the Internet is a universe of distractions, offering endless light entertainments and pointless interruptions that train our brains into an addictive shallow pattern of ineffectual multitasking. We hold up the new technology on a pedestal as a doorway to a new world of knowledge and communication, bringing with it benefits for social interaction, personal liberty and scientific endeavour, but Carr claims that this portal is not without its drawbacks vitiating our ability to think deeply, or use our memories effectively.

Which is precisely why I picked up this book when it was on offer. Purporting to be “an accessible guide” and advertising itself as “the place to start” when wishing to learn a bit more about the symphonic form, this book seemed perfect for someone like me, who would be likely to listen in to the BBC Proms but very unlikely to turn up and get his hands on the programme. In the introduction, Nicholas Kenyon explains that this book was designed to provide the information prepared for the programme notes produced for the Proms to a much wider audience of music lovers.

GTA: Vice City

Last week I had one of those urges that only a pregnant man can have, to step back into the shoes of Tommy Vercetti and relive the delights of Vice City. This 2003 Rockstar outing was easily one of the best games I ever played, everything about it simply oozed style and polish. It’s almost as if the developers took a standard checklist of things that get rated in a game, made sure every area got given the works, and then spent the rest of their time filling in the gaps. Because it’s exactly that which nails it for this game, the attention to detail that makes playing Vice City like stepping into the ’80s: the clothes, the music, the cars, the giant mobile phones, heck, even the intro scene features the game being loaded on a Commodore 64 . Rockstar’s particular sense of humour is also here to see by the bucketload, from the tongue-in-cheek nature of some of the missions, through the fantastic dialogue and hilarious radio stations, to the small jabs and puns that little the streets of Vice City.

All of which is without even touching on the gameplay. Sitting firmly in the sandbox genre, Vice City gives you a wonderful feeling of being able to go about things your own way. Goofing around, stealing cars, running from the police, there’s plenty to do in the game when you aren’t really doing anything! But fortunately that doesn’t mean that Rockstar skimped out on the main storyline, which is by all means fantastic, and features all sorts of mission types, from starting riots, racing through the streets, to knocking off banks and delivering numerous methods of ‘persuasion’ to various denizens of the city. Aside from the main plot, there are plenty of other side missions and extras to discover, which add ample distraction to the standard mayhem generally meted out whilst driving between missions.