I’m reading - and enjoying - Alfie Kohn’s classic, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A, Praise, and Other Bribes. It’s definitely a one-issue book, but that’s not such a bad thing: what’s more, it’s one of those rare works which is both pleasurably readable and impeccably referenced: three hundred pages of text, a hundred of notes and bibliography, so if you want or need to follow up on the research results which inform every argument Kohn makes, you can. [1]
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The estimable John Nolan, with whom I’m in the habit of swapping book recommendations, waved Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman at me, saying “I’m half-way through the introduction, but it’s already making me think…”. Recommended, duly bought, and now some weeks later somewhat digested. This is a long time for me: not a reflection on the writing, which is conversational, urbane, knowledgeable. The quality of the discourse and the thinking behind it made me realise quickly that this was a book I wanted to spend some time with.

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So when it all gets too much … what do you do?

After finally solving the problem with SEF links in my Joomla/Mojoblog site yesterday morning, I’d had enough - of PHP, CMS systems, plug-ins, Chunks, Snippets, Rails, the whole lot. So a day and a half off-line has cleared my head.

Staying with Joseph last weekend rekindled my passion for food, so I’ve been cooking (a hat-tip to Joseph for an amazing asparagus and salsiccio pasta recipe). Reading - finished Geoff Dyer’s wonderfully evocative But Beautiful, and almost (so nearly) finished the amazing 2666 by Robert Bolaño - at the point where I really don’t want it to end, I’m so into it. Playing, of course: there’ll be a (rare) musical blog shortly on Sor’s Op.6 studies, and the art of balancing the apparently simple with the intriguingly complex, and achieving perfection in the seemingly ordinary.

A visit to the RA’s impressive exhibition of prints by Kuniyoshi, with my daughter Evelyn and her partner. (Amazing colours, and in the earlier warrior prints in particular an overwhelming sense of movement. These were the original mass-media images, it was interesting to try to rewind my head to the days before screens, TV, video, films, where the only images were static ones).

Having been digging for a while, I found and downloaded a great performance of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, by the group Concerto Italiano. Immediate and vivid, and (unlike many performances) using small choral forces.

Helped of course by the gorgeous weather and a good bottle of wine! Head back in the game tomorrow, but it’s been a good weekend.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - a justly famous book on the nature of science - introduced the term “paradigm shift” into the study of the history of science and thereby into our common discourse. It’s one of those works that everyone talks about but - it seems - few have read: including, sorry to say, me, until this last few weeks.
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Having raved about Charles Stross’ novel Halting State here, I was very pleased (thanks, alexis) to find out about the Crooked Timber blog seminar on his writing. Contributions by fellow writers, academics, economists (yes, that Paul Krugman), both a great overview of the author’s work (I still have the Merchant Princes series to look forward to) and a demonstration of how even popular and genre fiction can carry important ideas.

A small (and belated) selection of what worked for me in 2008…
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Some while ago I promised Steve Freeman a review of a big pile of books on my reading list. First instalment here - feedback on not one, but three books.

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Thanks to Steve Freeman for a great pair of book recommendations - Atul Gawande’s Complications (A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science) and Better (A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance).

Keen observation, great writing, and a mine of great stories about individuals and groups working in a field of particular “risk and consequence”, as Gawande memorably puts it.
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Back from a holiday (long walks in Swiss mountains) to look alarmingly at the pile of books that’s built up before and during my trip. I like the way some schools/colleges give their students a reading week half way through a long term*, though I think in my case a reading month would barely do it.

Courtesy of JP’s blog, a stimulating article by Nicholas Carr - Is Google Making Us Stupid? - along with a set of rejoinders on The Edge from the likes of George Dyson and Jaron Lanier.

I like the article a lot (it passes all my criteria for non-fiction writing I wrote about a couple of weeks back). There’s a self-consciously contrarian side to it that goes too far - Carr seems to suggest there’s an evil conspiracy amongst software developers in general and Google in particular to overthrow Civilization As We Know It. I don’t think there’s an argument with his key thesis - that the nature of the way we interact with information on the web, and the way it’s replacing the sustained narrative of the media of yore with a multiplicity of fragments of information, changes the way we structure our attention, and changes the structure of thought and hence the mind. I’m not going to comment on it directly (read it!), but here are some of the resonances that it evoked for me, from my own experience and from other bits of reading and thinking I’ve done over the past few years
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