Despite my trade, C believes, I have no imagination. This came up because I admitted I don’t enjoy paradoxes (except my own ones deep down in the psyche etc etc). I don’t enjoy paradoxes because, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, I am quite a pragmatic person. Also, all the pre-quantum ones seem cheap.
Take hares. I get The White Hare, it’s romance. I get The Granemore Hare, it’s death. I get The Hare & the Tortoise, it’s advice. But I don’t get Achilles & the Hare, it’s a geek thing. In the world, hares are caught, & eaten; & if they aren’t it isn’t because the gap between them & their pursuer always remains fractionally open. It’s because Achilles fell over. I don’t care about paradoxes, & neither does the world, which just goes on working & thereby sustains all this parasitic babble of attempts to describe it.
C believes I have no sense of humour, either. What I don’t get most just now is why the title of this book is Lewis Carroll in Numberland, when it should so obviously have been called Carroll in Numberland. Maybe Charles Dodgson could have posed that as an entertaining mathematical puzzle.
Dodgson sounds ghastly.
A cracking review, MJH. I especially liked this: “There’s no way to fault sentences like these in terms of truth or structure. They simply don’t say anything.” I come across too much of that in academia: perfectly acceptable, and on occasion even rather beautiful sentences that say nothing at all. (I also find a lot of horribly disfigured sentences hiding (possibly) great truths, but there you go.)
I think you’re right, Lara: a prim moralist with a number obsession (he only really liked girls in single digits) who remains a strange attractor for certain hobbyists to this day. Curiously, despite all the heat, there isn’t a biography that casts much light on him: even the stutter’s a matter of debate. He’s still being kicked about like an historical football as various factions decide how much nonce there was in the nonsense.
The book sounds glib, Mike, and a case of the mixture as before. Martin Gardner did all this much more entertainingly – and with far greater focus. But Carroll studies are a bit like titles with a swastika on the cover: there’s always a certain market out there, just waiting for them.
You mean one girl at a time, or lots of girls under the age of 10…?
It was (ahem) multiples.
To be fair, I don’t get a sense of perversity from Dodgson’s letters to his child friends – and none of them remembered him in later life with anything but affection. Beyond the nudge-nudge factor, he may just have been a frustrated father.
JM Barrie’s a very different kettle of kippers, though. My skin crawls at his fulsome descriptions of little boys, and there’s a cold and suffocating quality to some of his writing that calls up pictures of quietly spoken men in black ties. But perhaps that’s just me.
The comparison of little girls and serpents (because they both eat eggs) always made me uncomfortable, made me wonder in an uninformed kneejerk reaction kind of way what kind of issues he (Carroll, not the Pigeon) might have. Okay, I get now that he was a mathematician, and maybe (according anyway to Wikipedia) this is an example of a kind of abstract reasoning etc. Or maybe not. Whatever, it still skeves me out.
On the other hand, he’s also responsible for one of my favorite lines in literature: “Don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.”