Authors Electric

Five years ago, I wrote a blog entitled Vitamin pills, toilet rolls and philosophy . It was simply to offer light relief amongst the specific miseries of that period and give a loose idea of the strangeness of the world I inhabit. I’m repeating it here because of two recent events. First, there was a fascinating, informative (and very long) article in The Guardian . Then came the opening of Tom Stoppard's latest play, The Hard Problem , which examines the issue of  the coexistence of 'brain' and 'mind'. Thanks to those events,  I now see that, far from being the ravings of a disturbed psyche, my absurd confessions were part of an ongoing philosophical argument about consciousness  and may qualify me for the role of a modern Brahan Seer . The Guardian article examined the mystery of awareness. Its arguments were too complex for my tiny brain to summarise here but it seems that philosophers, neuroscientists, poets, religious people and all sorts of others have...

After being so pleasantly surprised by the number and nature of comments provoked by my first Authors Electric blog, the pressure is on. And yes, that’s a deliberate example of a hanging participle because it gives me the opportunity to show that I know what a hanging participle is. Anyway, as I was saying ... the pressure. It seems that by speculating on the ‘literary’ aspects of our trade I was offering some sort of relief from the traditional (and, let’s face it, crucially important), topic of marketing, increasing sales, raising profiles and the rest. I can assure you that, had I been any good at selling, I’d have written about that, but I’m not. So, at least to begin with, I’ll try to fill the role of a specific archetype in this village-like online community. Villages have vicars, pub landlords, squires and postmistresses, but there’s only one role that includes the word ‘village’ in its title – idiot. However, despite Danny Boyle’s plans for the Olympic opening c...