September 22

Saturday September 22, 2007 4:45 am Lennox Head, NSW Australia

I do not have Internet access at the moment.

A. Morning Musings

4:45 am

This is the beginning of our second week in Australia. We are pretty well settled in but I am still working on getting an internet connection as well as moving the barbeque down here from Lismore. Both activities should be completed on Monday.The realtors are still working on getting the television working. The electrician we had yesterday replaced the outlet box which was corroded and loose but that didn't make a difference. He thinks the problem is with the set itself. We have had a very successful birding walk from our unit and will try to do this again in the next few days.

sunrise

I completed reading "The Captive" yesterday. Rather than continue on with "The Fugitive" at the moment, I will focus on a mathematics book about symmetry. This is primarily a book to be read rather than a book with exercises.

I also want to begin reading "My Forbidden Face" by Latifa. The subtitle is "Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story". This is a book that I left behind from our last trip to Australia. It is time to read it. Reviewing my Literature web page, I notice that I have now read 17 books that I purchased since 2002 as well as 13 books that I have purchased this year. However there are another 23 books that I have bought this year and have yet to read. In one sense I am losing ground - the total number of unread books has increased by 6.

Immediate	Description	Time
Mathematics	"Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry" by Ian Stewart	1 hr
Literature	"My Forbidden Face" by Latifa	2 hr
Literature	"Three Dollars" by Elliot Perlman	1 hr

C. Actual Learning Activities

10:20 am

We are back from a cappucino at the Blackboard by the Beach, a local corner cafe, and have read the Saturday edition of The Australian. One story caught my eye: the Canadian dollar is now on a par with the US dollar, the first time since 1976. We also sent off a couple of quick email messages from an internet cafe to let people know we are fine and having a grand time.

I have read "My Forbidden Face". A simple yet effective story of one young woman's experiences growing up in Kabul under the Taliban regime. The relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan takes on a new meaning after reading this book.

As I put this book in a box which will eventually go to some charity, I noticed another book that I read when we were last here: "A Reading Diary" by Alberto Manguel. He sets himself a schedule of a book a month for the year 2002. What is interesting is how he interleaves his daily life with the story he is reading at the time.

manguel

I keep thinking of the interleaving among my fiction and non-fiction reading. How to represent this? One of the features of language is its linear, temporal nature: one word, then another, ... , and so on. This is also the very essence of narrative. A story unfolds, it does not all happen at once. But an image or a diagram is different. There is an immediate gestalt of the whole, which can be linearized by deliberately focusing on first one part of the image and then another, but which will vary from one viewer to another. The diagram may give an artifcial sense of structure and pattern, but it is the commentary that gives it a linear sense of relationship: this first, this next, ... .

This is what I am having difficulty creating. Such a narrative requires time, time to put down in words what one is thinking. But this takes time away from other activities such as more reading, or doing New York Times crossword puzzles, or - perhaps more importantly - walking on the beach or looking for birds in the underbrush, or relearning calculus, or reading about the development of the mathematics of symmetry.

Now to have a look at the first chapter of Ian Stewart's book "Why Beauty is Truth".

9:00 PM

Another first for us. We watched the whales from our balcony! There were about a half dozen of them, maybe more. Most of the time we would only see the blow spout as they expelled their air but there were a few times when we saw their tail flukes. Amazing. This was the first time we have seen whales.

The weather went bad about 3 PM with lots of lightning and thunder and some heavy bursts of rain. We had the computer turned off for the rest of the day. This area, as well as almost all of Australia, could really use the rain. Hopefully this helped a little.