James R. Mayer: The Shackles of Conviction

James R. Mayer Publishing. 2008. ISBN 978-1-906706-00-5
The author sent me a copy. It's a novel with alternate chapters tracking a fictional version of Gödel and a TCD undergraduate. In the foreword, James Meyer says

... since I can reasonably claim that I am the first person to have ever actually understood Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, I wanted to give an analysis of that theorem in terms that are as accessible as possible.

The undergraduate sets out to disprove the theorem, and apparently succeeds. This half of the plot is a framework which allows the author to expound his ideas, by putting alternate sentences into the mouths of the student and his girlfriend. All rather improbable, and unlikely to appeal to anyone who isn't mathematically-inclined, but easy reading for the most part. There is an outrageously improbable episode near the end, where the two of them prioritise attending a lecture over reporting a homicide, and the hero gives a brilliant discourse despite this recent trauma and some preceeding torture. The half about Gödel is a better story, but completely disgraceful. The novel carries the usual disclaimer that any resemblance to living persons is coincidental. But Gödel and his wife are dead, and this story (1) has his wife plotting the death of Hahn and then Schlick in order to assist Gödel in hiding the fact that Hahn had found a flaw in the proof, and (2) explains Gödel's psychiatric problems as the result of his inability to cope with this flaw. This is terrible stuff.

Beatrix Potter: Treasured Tales.

F. Warne. 1999. ISBN-13: 978-0-7232-8013-2. Originals f.p. 1904-1913.

I report that The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher was well-received by Oisín and Rian. (Mr. Fisher, a frog, has a fishing adventure, and is almost eaten by a trout. He is saved because the trout dislikes the taste of his macintosh.) This surprised me a little. I think the clincher was the exquisite illustrations, and the beautiful (physical) finish of the book. Of course, it helps that the boys love fishing. They both caught their first decent trout this past Summer, in Mayo.

Daniel Corkery: The Hidden Ireland

Subtitle: A study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century.
Published by M.H. Gill and Son, Dublin. 1941.

Some teacher mentioned this when I was in secondary school, and recommended it highly. Finally got round to reading it.
Woefully self-indulgent writing, endlessly repetitive, and stridently polemical. His main message is that the Brits and the Ascendancy, with the arrogant superiority of the conqueror, were wholly unaware of the cultural life of the impoverished gaelic peasantry, but ought to have noticed it. DC was angry about this.
He relies mainly on secondary sources. This is partly justified by his declared aim of addressing the poetry, as opposed to the mere language of the poetry -- he rails against the 'grammarians'. He usually prefers to quote verse translations, sometimes very free, where these are available, instead of providing literal versions.
Ignoring its flaws, the book tells an interesting story of the bardic schools and the courts of poetry. I had not heard of the practice of composing while lying in bed, in the dark, cut off from noise. This may reflect the origin of the bards as druids, and derive from a similar method of divination. It has been suggested that some prehistoric rock-art, located in rather inaccessible recesses of cave-complexes in France, was associated with divination by shamans. (David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave, Thames and Hudson, London. 2002. ISBN 0-500-28465-2; a very good book.)
The main value of DC's book is in the verse quoted. Some is very fine, and it is good to have this material on my shelf. It is a pity that he makes no attempt to explain bardic conventions. He could have added to the little I know from other sources.

Fainne Geal an Lae (The Bright Ring of the Day)

We had a week on Geometrization last week: 18 lectures on Ricci flow, the proof of the Poincaré conjecture and the Thurston geometrization conjecture. These were organised by Constantin Vernicos, and delivered by Silvain Maillot and Laurent Bessière. Beautiful stuff. Turned out that SM plays tin whistle and is a fan of Irish traditional music, so Michael Clancy brought his fiddle on Friday and they had a session. I sang a couple of songs, and that reminded me that I don't know (any more?) the words of Fáinne Geal an Lae. This was the first tune I ever learned to play on the tin whistle, and nowadays it is better known as the tune that suits Patrick Kavanagh's Raglan Road. So I dug out my school song-book: Amhránleabhar Ógra Éireann (Songbook of Irish Youth), 3rd ed. 1954. (Ógra É. was a kind of club we had at school.)
Here is the text, p.34 (It's printed in the sean-chló, and I've rendered it into cló rómhánach, roman print):

Ar maidin moch do ghabhas amach
Ar bhruach Locha Léin;
An Samhradh 'theacht 'san chraobh len ais,
'Gus lonradh te ón ngréin.
Ag taistil dom tré bhailte poirt
'Gus bánta míne réidhe;
Cia gheobhainn lem ais ach an chúilfhionn deas
Le Fáinne Geal an Lae.

Ní raibh bróg ná stoca cadhp ná clóch'
Ar mo stóirín óg ón spéir;
Ach folt folt fionn órtha síos go troigh,
Ag fás go barr an fhéir.
Bhí calán crúite 'ci 'na glaic,
'Sar dhrúcht ba dheas a scéimh,
Do thug barr-ghean ó Bhénus deas
Le Fáinne Geal an Lae.

(Singer went out for a walk by the Lough Lane
at dawn, and met a heavenly blonde, wearing
just her long golden hair, and carrying a
milking-pail. He was impressed.)

Anthony Beavor: D-Day

He provides a more balanced account of the main features of the battle for Normandy in June-August 1944. This has become easier to do, now that practically everyone involved had died. The main strengths of the account are the accounts of (1) the effect on the civilian population, (2) the experience of war, based on individual memoirs, and (3) the well-documented violations of humane and decent behaviour by all sides.

Some of my prejudices (i.e. prior judgements) were supported by reading this: (1) My low opinion of Montgomery's character. (2) Ditto of Churchill. (3) That most of the killing is done in cold blood, and consists in the killing of unarmed people. (4) That the Germans were scarily good.

Nuggets:
1. German soldiers occupying Paris were forbidden to smoke in public.
2. Allied soldiers who wounded themselves were imprisoned. Germans were shot.
3. 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombing, more than the number in Britain killed by German bombs.
4. Airey Neave was in MI9.
5. Hemingway was a prominent and flamboyant member of the press corps in Normandy.
6. 20,000 women had their heads shorn.
7. Most captured SS members were murdered.

I used to assume, when I was young, that we would have a war, and would have to fight. I have been extraordinarily fortunate, to be born early in this prolonged period of peacetime, in my part of the world. I have been spared exposure to the utter breakdown of decency that has always gone along with the passage of hostile armies through the land. (For this, we have to thank the Europen Union, above all else.) Even worse than the things that would have been done to me and my loved ones, are the things I may well have done myself. How do I know that I would have adhered meticulously to the provisions of the Geneva Convention?

Lustrum, by Robert Harris.

Enjoyable and instructive read. Sequel to "Imperium".
For me, the most interesting aspect of the story is the account of Caesar's activities in the capital city up to the moment when he set out for Gaul. Caesar fascinates me. People decry the 'great man' approach to History: the idea that all that really mattered was what the major players did. They argue that larger forces, at work on a wider scale, determine the course of History, and that the great men were just the instruments of these forces. Greatness thrust upon them, in fact. But it is hard to maintain this position in relation to the changes wrought by Caesar.

Thomas Mann: The Holy Sinner

Penguin 1969. Translation of Der Erwaehlte (how do you type a-umlaut?) Ah!, ä (ampersand-a-uml-semicolon). Make that Erwählte.
1951.
Fantastic book. Based on a Middle-High-German epic, Gregorius vom Stein, by Hartmann von Aue, and retailing an awful catalogue of disasters, culminating in dreadfully-compounded incest. Beautifully composed and cadenced, and culminating in unhoped-for redemption.
On the sin: "...her soul for horror had swounded, but only play-acting-wise, for on top the soul pretends and makes to-do about the diabolical deception practiced on it, but underneath, where truth abides in quietness..."
On divine mercy: "Great and extreme, woman, is your sin,... You are expecting that I shall raise my hands and curse you. Has never anyone told you, who had studied God, that he accepts true repentance for all sins and that a human being, be his soul never so sick - if his eye only for an hour grows wet with rue, then he is saved?"

The Existence of God

Read Irreligion, by John Allen Paulos. Hill and Wang. New York. 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-5919-5.
He writes well, with humour, and has put in some time on the research. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, he avoids the kernel of the problem. Right at the start, he has a quick attack on the First Cause argument. He sets up the most naive version of the argument, and shoots it down. The rest of the book is given to the demolition of various other 'proofs', and is generally unobjectionable, since these proofs do deserve demolition. He is particularly good on the ontological proof of St. Ambrose. His treatment is marred by some ad-hominem attacks on American fundamentalists and their political backers. One understands how the influence of these folk is an irritant, but the source of an argument should not influence our appoach to its validity.
The key question for me (and as I have just learned, Leibnitz!) is: Why is there anything?^[2]
Why is there any thing at all?
This is not a question about prior causes, things that were there in the past and caused what is there now. It is a question about now, and always,
and here and everywhere. Why, now, is there any thing?
There are two possibilities: (1) There does not have to be a reason. (2) There has to be a reason.
(1) is an interesting possibility, that I need more time to think about. If we accept (2), then the reason is a being that is at least as real as the thing, and we are quickly led to the existence of a being that contains its own reason for existing. Let's call it B. Then there are two possibilities: (2.1) B is the space-time we detect by our senses and explore by the scientific method of conjecture and refutation. (2.2) B is different from space-time, but somehow sustains it, and B.
Many thinking people, among them some of my friends, believe (2.1), so it is not crazy. All my life, I have believed, and still believe, (2.2). I could be wrong, and I don't understand how B goes about sustaining space-time, or why. I do know that I will never understand anything about this unless I believe, to begin with. Augustine said: You must believe that you may understand. Faith is an act of the will. It is not compelled. I accept that (2.2) is one step more complicated than (2.1), and hence violates Occam's Razor. Neither (2.1) nor (2.2) can be disproved, but they have profoundly different consequences for our view of life.
Accepting (2.2), we have two possibilities: (2.2.1) B is not intelligent,
or (2.2.2) B is intelligent.
As far as our attitude, hopes and moral stance go, (2.2.1) has no consequences that differ from those following from (2.1), whereas
(2.2.2) provides ground for hope, and meaning. (This not an argument for its truth.)
(It is also interesting to note, in passing, that without (2.2.2) we have no reason to suppose that experience, or any thing, is intelligible. The scientists who laid the foundation for that very 'modern science' which is taken by many as disproving the existence of God were motivated to search for intelligible patterns by their belief that the universe is made to a plan.)

^[1 What is the source for this?