My modest contribution to keeping alive the values of the Enlightenment
On this morning’s 8.00 am news the BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh told us: “Antibnodies are cells the body creates to help us fight off infection”.
They aren’t cells, they are protein molecules. I suppose Ghosh thought that many in the audience would not know what a molecule is, but that is no excuse for making factually incorrect statements.
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NICE has published a draft guideline on the treatment of chronic pain. This finds that long-term prescription of analgesics such as paracetamol, non-steroidals, and opioids is ineffective and has important unwanted effects. However, acuuncture iks one of the recommended alternatives. They find 27 studies showig that acupuncture reduces pain and improves quality of life for up to 3 months compared with usual care or sham acupuncture, although they acknowledge the difficulty of blnding in trials involving sham.
They acknowledge
This question is really part of a larger one, which is why do I self-publish? Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: it isn’t because I can’t get published by mainstream commercial publishers.
In the past I’ve had seven books published in this way, both fiction and non-fiction, but I’ve abandoned that route now, as have many other writers.
In a word, disillusionment. The science writer John Horgan explains why he decided to self-publish his latest book. “After I got the idea for Mind-Body Problems in 2015, I pitched it to a few agents and editors and got chilly responses. Fuck ‘em, I thought, and wrote the damn book anyway.” My feeling precisely. Mainstream publishing ain’t what it used to be.
In recent years I’ve gone down the self-publishing route entirely, for similar reasos, with eight books produced so far. All are available electronically as e-books and most are also in hardcopy as paperbacks (on Amazon and Lulu).
But why are some of them free? Don’t I want to make money from my writing? (‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’ – Samuel Johnson,) I certainly don’t dislike receiving the payments I get for these books from various sources.
Still, pace Dr Johnson, there are other motives for writing, such as being read. This has prompted Horgan to make his latest book free, and I’ve done the same with three of mine.
This isn’t as quixotic as it may appear. The sad fact is that you are very unlikely to make much money from any of the books you self-publish unless you are extremely lucky or willing and able to invest a lot of time and effort in marketing your work, which I’m not.
That may be discouraging, but don’t think that you’ll do a lot better if you take the commercial route. Mainstreame publishers these days make little if any attempt to publicise and market your book, and the cbances that you will make even a modest income from writing is small unless you have a specific audience in view (as in the case of a standard textbook, for example).
Money always mattered to publishers, of course, but they often also wanted to feel they were doing something for literature. That attitude is as dead as the mechanical typewriter (something else I grew up with). The independent publishers who used to exist have virtually all been swallowed up by giant international conglomerates, which don’t even make a pretence of altruism.
Things were different when my first book, a novel, was published by Chatto & Windus in 1967. My editor was one of the directors, Cecil Day Lewis, who shortly afterwards was appointed Poet Laureate. After my book was accepted I went to see him in his Central London office and he asked me if I would allow him to edit my manuscript for publication, assuring me that I could trust him to do a good job! He also said he thought I had married too young (something which I think he had done himself).
Two decades later things had changed a lot but some of the original publishing houses still maintained their independence. One of these was Victor Gollancz Ltd, which published a book of mine in the 1980s.
I got to meet the Managing Director, Livia Gollancz, the daughter of Victor Gollancz, the founder of the firm. She had been a fine concert musician and became a publisher reluctantly, when her musical career ended owing to ill-health. She was a tall imposing woman who I think ran the firm rather imperiously. She took the decision to publish my book herself, but that wouldn’t happen today. Such decisions are now made on strictly commercial grounds by accountants.
If you have a book published commercially today you are most unlikely to meet any of the directors. In fact, you may not even get an editor, which explains the shoddy standard of some of the books I read nowadays.
The moral of the story is that if you want to write, go ahead and do so, but don’t count on its making you a fortune or even a modest income.
Fear of mathematics is common. Many of us experience it and there is is a page in Wikipedia titled Mathematical Anxiety. An aversion to maths is almost a badge of honour for some. People who would be embarrassed to admit to indifference to art, music, or literature often have no hesitation in proclaiming they are unable to understand maths.
I was in that category myself for many years. I think this was at least partly the result of bad teaching. My earliest memory of maths at school is of being a member of a class, aged perhaps six or seven, chanting the multiplication tables in chorus. Rote learning without insight remained a feature of maths for me for many years afterwards. Continue reading.
I posted my reasons for buying a Kindle reader about 18 months ago (see A Reluctant Conversion to Kindle). I haven’t changed my mind since then but I have upgraded to the Oasis. This is expensive but I’d say worth it, for two main reasons: the larger screen and the buttons for moving forward and back. There are other minor adantages as well, such as the option to turn off the touch screen.
There are other versions of the song by the same singer, Esther Ofarim, on Youtube but I preferred this one.
In today’s Start the Week one of the contributors, Prof. Fritz Vollrath, said that he and his colleagues have developed fake rhino horn and have published the method in the hope that this will help to disrupt the market in poached horn.
I’m delighted to hear this because the idea had occurred to me years ago and I wrote a letter about it which was published in the Independent. I’ve also blogged about it subsequently but had no idea how to publicise it further, so it’s excellent that it’s now happening.
A long time ago I read a poem, ‘Alexandria’, by Lawrence Durrell which contained the lines: “As for me I move/Through many negatives to what I am.” That has stayed in my mind ever since and recently it’s occurred to e that it describes an attitude that has grown in me over the years: a taste for minimalism. Looking back, I seem to see my life as a long succession of relinquishments.
I certainly see it in the way my use of computers has evolved. But there are other examples too.
One is music. Given the choice, I’d rather listen to chamber music or soloists than to an orchestra. And I have a taste for minimalism in music too; for example, I like Steve Reich’s Drumming.
I prefers small gatherings to large parties.
Then there’s my teaching of acupuncture. I’m an advocate of what is often called Western Medical Acupuncture (WMA), which is based on the modern understanding of how the body works (and fails to work) instead of the ancient Chinese ideas. I’ve been involved in acupuncture for over 40 years and in that time I’ve progressively tried to simplify it. We don’t need the traditional apparatus of “points” and “meridians”, for example.
Of course, this should not be taken too far. WMA relies on the modern understanding of the nervous system, and that is a boundlessly complicated subject, but it’s a necessary kind of complication whereas the Chinese stuff is unnecessary. As Einstein may or may not have said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”.
What about religion? I was brought up as a Catholic and that’s a pretty complicated faith. Later I got involved with Hinduism, which is even more complicated. But really I’m more sympathetic nowadays to Buddhism, although even here there are differences; Theravada Buddhism is relatively simple compared to Mahayana. Naturally, I prefer Theravada; however I’m not a Buddhist.
In fact I’ve now left all of this behind. My life seems to have been be a process of progressive simplification. Another poem which I read many years ago – I think it was in a BBC magazine of the time called The Listener – was on this theme of abandoning more and more things. The concluding lines, quoting from memory, were these: “all of it a practice run/For doing without myself”.
I could go multiplying examples of this inbuilt search for minimalism almost indefinitely, The problem isn’t finding enough examples, it’s finding too many. Which is of course exactly what I want to avoid.
I’ve blogged before to support the current protests by schoolchildren and university students about climate change. I’ve recently acquired my fifth grandchild and this brings the necessity for change more vividly than ever before my mind.
Some peoole say that taking a day off school will prejudice a pupil’s chances of getting a good academic qualification. I don’t know if that is true, but even if it is, today’s children may not have a world worth living in unless something effective is done about the headlong rush to irreversible ruin of the planet.
I just saw Greta’s address to the UN in New Yor,k, but I also recommend her longer speech at the Austrian World Summit in Vienna earlier this year.