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Much peregrination since the start of May: Scotland, to hike up Ben Nevis; Madison, WI, to work on the biholomorphic group; conference in Edwardsville, IL; day in Chicago, mostly at the Art Institute; Helsinki; holiday in the Ebro delta; Valencia; Connemara, to hike the Maamturk mountains. Entertained visitors in between. Met many old friends, and perhaps some new. Now looking forward to some stability.

Recently read, or reread:

J.M. Castellano Gil and F.J. Macias Martin. History of the Canary Islands.
84-7926-114-5. English a bit broken. Interesting (and sad) story of the conquest. Some data on references in antiquity (Homer?, Hesiod, Pindar, Herodotus, Diodorus of Sicily, Strabo, Plutarch, Sallust, Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder. Also some folklore, including a story about Brendan the Navigator. Short chapters on links with America, the literature, and art.

S. Vere Benson. The Observer's Book of Birds. Ferederick Warne. Rev. ed. 1960. My old bird book, a very useful field guide.

Eric Dempsey and Michael Casey. Finding Birds in Ireland. The Complete Guide. 978-07171-3916-3. About places where birds may be found. It is very hard to use it to locate info about the location of a particular species, as the index is unhelpful in this regard. Has many maps, and has a glossary of Irish names for most species.

Colm O Lochlainn. Irish Street Ballads. Three Candles. Dublin. 1939. This and More Irish Street Ballads, 1965, are indispensible.

Henry James. The Wings of the Dove. Slow build-up to a classic disaster. After the first few hundred pages, I couldn't put it down, and stayed up far too late in Helsinki to finish it. Great book.

Tom Brown's School Days, by An Old Boy. Rev. ed. 1889, repr. 1890. (f.p. 1857). Not at all what I expected, and much more interesting. I expected something like a propotype of Frank Richards' books, but this is a far more sober affair, much concerned with moral matters, such as the duty to study honestly. In relation to the famous fight with Flashman, the author has a disquisition about the place of fighting in a boy's life. I was struck by: "After all, what would life be, without fighting?"

Ray Monk. Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius. Vintage. 1991. 0-09-988370-8. Very good read, but every time I begin to think I understand W's point of view, he does something that proves me wrong. In the end, I am torn between the desire to read it again from the start (and spend serious time studying W's work) and the rather attractive idea that I should take W's advice to his various friends, and give up philosophy altogether to do something useful.