Close Reading

  It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.  I wonder if you will recognise this. It is the opening sentence of the novel Paul Clifford , by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I have just seen Bulwer-Lytton's name brought up, and the above sentence quoted, in response to the question, "Who have been the world's worst published writers?" I have not read more of Bulwer-Lytton than a few quotes such as that above, but I cannot think he really deserves to be numbered among 'the world's worst published writers'. Tellingly, the person who quoted the above did not give any reason why we are supposed to consider this such bad writing, apart from mentioning that the opening phrase is a cliché

 I've just read a little of this article in the Times Literary Supplement , written by one of the cultural scions of Messrs Strunk and White: Plain Speaking - How to Write Well I do have some sympathy with writing plainly and maximising the virtues of the demotic Anglo-Saxon (in a way that I have not done in this sentence), but I can't help thinking there's a pathology posing as common sense in a lot of this hand-wringing about simplicity.   For instance, from the opening paragraph:   "Our teacher is a seasoned journalist who insists that we learn how to edit our own prose ruthlessly. (If he saw this paragraph, he would cut 'seasoned' – a cliché – as well as all the words ending with -ly.)"   She goes on to say that her teacher would eschew not only obvious jargon, but anything "long and Latinate".   Is this not a kind of stylistic hair shirt, the pursuing of rules for their own sake? Just take the first sentence of the article's first para

 "There are many issues in philosophy which to this day have by no means been adequately resolved." Thus begins Cicero's De Natura Deorum , written as late in the human day as 45 BC. 

I am having to make entries to this blog when I can snatch moments and as the thoughts occur to me. The following is a brief addition to my 'Science Says' posts, the second of which is here . I am criticising this article by Peter Halligan and David A Oakley. I want to return to some lines already quoted: "There are those who believe consciousness is like a ghost in the machinery of our brains , meriting special attention and study in its own right. And there are those, like us, who challenge this, pointing out that what we call consciousness is just another output generated backstage by our efficient neural machinery." In particular, I want to focus on the assertion that "what we call consciousness is just another output generated backstage by our efficient neural machinery".  What does 'backstage' mean here? Does it mean in the unconscious, or in the body, or both? Let's suppose that it means the unconscious. The authors would then be sa

 It is, for me, in the nature of blogging, that one writes somewhat off the cuff. Therefore, I don't expect or intend to make definitive statements here. However, looking back on a previous post, ' Science Says . . . ', I think I need to revisit it. On the whole, I am satisfied with what I wrote there, as far as it went. What I do think needs some correction is that I addressed the argument of the article I was criticising as if it was advocating what is known as 'eliminative materialism': the philosophical view that consciousness does not exist. I think the language of the article is itself confused enough to give this impression in places, but the writers of the article seem to be professing epiphenomenalism: the idea that consciousness is nothing over and above a side-effect of the physical workings of the brain.  There is a great deal to criticise in the article, and I certainly can't do it all in one sitting, but perhaps I will begin revisiting my critici

 I am indebted to Justin Isis for sending me photographs of sample pages from Kingsley Amis's The King's English , two of which I hope I can inset below. Together they should provide us with one entry from Amis's book.   The entry in question is on the words 'infamous' and 'infamy'.  These photographs were sent on the 30th of January 2022. It is the 4th of February 2022 as I write this. It just so happened that earlier today, I came across an example of the usage of which Amis complains. The book in which it appears is A Priori by Edwin Mares, a work on epistemology. The sentence is as follows: "As we saw in [Section] 3.6, Descartes also, infamously, holds that we have an innate idea of God, which he uses to prove that his ideas about the world are accurate." In case it is hard to read in the inset pictures, here is what Amis writes: "Both adjective and noun ['infamous' and 'infamy'] used to be terms of extreme moral disappro