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May 17, 2004
Readings
I've been very free of late.
So I do nothing but read.
I've read :
1) The Outsider - Camus
A quick read with thought-provoking issues. I had initially likened Mersault to apathy, only to realise he is perhaps, the most honest any human can get. He really doesn't care and social construct failed to make him care. Camus's hero - but I think such a "hero" is not enough.
2) The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould
I loved this book, if only simply because it counters what most people believe that science is logic and science is objective. Because, truly, nothing is objective in the world. Not even blind fucking Justice.
"...science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information...It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuiton. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to the absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts."
3) Ungentle Shakespeare - Katherine Duncan Jones
Because I am a Shakespeare groupie. This book disappoints in that there isn't anything I don't know already about Shakespeare that isn't postulated and argued here. Oh, maybe except for this:
Do you know that these words are carved on Shakespeare's gravestone in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford:
'Good friend, for Jesu's sake forbear
To dig the dust enclose here.
Blessed be the man who spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones.'
And that perhaps explains the lack of attempts to disinter or reanimate him, and that explains the enigma behind the institution of Shakespeare.
Posted by lainey at May 17, 2004 05:01 PM