The Fire i' the Flint

Mary Shine Thompson, Ed. Four Courts Press. 2009. ISBN 978-1-84682-073-1

Subtitle: Essays on the Creative Imagination. Essays based on the Seamus Heaney Lectures, 3rd Series.

A gift from Susan McKenna-Lawlor, one of the contributors. Beautifully-produced, with several brilliant essays. Perspectives from practitioners on creativity in poetry, painting, music, scientific work, and fiction, and on its place in education. Heaney on Kavanagh, a visual essay by Bridget Riley,
Peter Hamel on musical improvisation, Alan Titley on the writer's visceral relationship with words, Susan on our evolving understanding of the cosmos.
The essays on education (Seymour Papert, Kieran Egan, Jones Irwin, and others) present radical critiques of current practice.
In Titley's essay, even the prose is poetic. I disagree with him about the importance of the content, as opposed to the words, in literature, but I sympathise, too. In fact, I do admit the value of some work that lacks meaning, such as Jabberwocky and Finnegan's Wake. His discussion ranges over a considerable set of writers and tongues, and the quotations and discussion from various greats were stimulating. In particular, he stimulated me to revisit Lorca and to dig deeper in the Gaelic poets. Curious, coming upon his enthusiastic endorsement of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabhán so soon after reading Keating.
I particularly liked Egan's essay, entitled Imagination and Education, emphasizing the central importance of stimulating the child's imagination, and the rôle of story. This is good:

The trouble with our lives is that they don't have any clear meaning, except in so far as we can fit them into stories.

I also liked:

My uncle has a dog with no legs. I asked, 'What do you call him?' He said, 'It doesn't matter. He won't come.'

They've reduced our online journal access

Spent a little time on politics, and
sent out this letter to the editor today:

Two days ago I listened to Dr. Craig Barrett addressing the Academy and 600 of the country's leading figures, and making the point that we face a crisis much more serious than the transient fiscal problems that are in the news. Over the medium to long term, we cannot continue to enjoy our present levels of prosperity and comfort, unless we lift our performance on three key fronts from mediocre to excellent. The first two of these (the slogans are "smart people"
and "smart ideas")
involve Mathematics and Science. We need more people studying these to the highest level, we need at least 2000 more qualified Mathematics teachers,
and we need world-class scientific research.

At the same time, the community of mathematical researchers was just trying to come to terms with an action that threatens to set them back twenty years. As and from the 31st of January, we have lost online access through IReL
(the Irish Research e-Library)
to many of the main journals in our field. The situation is unclear, still. In some cases, there may be other ways to access the journal. But since the start of the month, I keep hitting screens that demand payment, when I go to check an article. Jobs that should be finished are hanging, while I try to find a work-around. To explain the realities, the research paper I am currently drafting with my collaborator in Bern needs results, so far, from 23 earlier papers, and counting. Since we use them, we have to check them: get the exact statements,
and make sure the proofs are correct. In January, I could see these papers from my desktop. Now I'm asked for cash, or invited to subscribe. Twenty papers, on a pay-per-view basis, would set me back about 500 euro. This puts me back where I was in the bad old days.

In recent years we have managed to attract (and attract back)
significant mathematical talent from overseas,
largely due to the improved research environment produced by government action, through SFI and the HEA. These people are not going to
tolerate a return to the kind of research conditions in which a
handful of patriots kept the flame alive in the old days. They will
go elsewhere, to continue the work they prioritize
in a supportive environment.

A setback at the level of key university researchers is going to damage the entire educational
system: these people are also training young
researchers, and future maths teachers at all levels, they are training people in other scientific and technical fields, and they contribute expertise and advice to ensure that our system of maths education is in touch with global developments. For instance, last
Tuesday I listened to the Minister for Education and Science telling
a conference hosted by the Academy and organized by Engineers Ireland
that he was pinning his hopes on Project Maths, in order to lift
our performance in Maths. Project Maths involves many inputs, and
one important one (namely the vetting of technical content
for correctness) is assisted, on a pro-bono basis, by university academics.
The Minister also said that it was "completely unacceptable" that
one-third of our secondary maths teachers are inadequately-trained.
The cure is, obviously, to increase the output of maths graduates.
But this is not going to happen if we wipe out the apex of the pyramid.
People are already disillusioned by increased teaching loads due
to a staffing freeze, and pay cuts of up to 25 percent. Hitting
their ability to use the time left for research as productively
as possible could be the last straw.

Our colleagues in the Physical Sciences are also hit by this change
to IReL, although the crieria used by the librarians seem to have
had a differential impact, and not hit them so hard. Nevertheless,
firm support for growth in the areas of Physics and Chemistry is
absolutely essential. These vital subjects are in catastrophic decline
in the schools.

If there is any kind of joined-up plan for this country, the IRel
resources for Maths, Physics and Chemistry
must be restored at once and in full.

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?