HOME Thursday 4 January 2001

I regularly read the columns of Uri Geller and Michale Hewlett in Computeractive magazine. Reading Gellers column, most times, is like reading science fiction. I have long suspected that he has lost all touch with reality - as well as the rest of the human race - but his article in Computeractive for 28 December 2000-10 January 2001 makes me come to the conclusion that he has either regressed to childhood, or is deliberately trying to bamboozle people.  He starts off by quoting some phychologists opinion that the mind of mankind, or their motivations, have not changed since the stone age. He says he "recoils from this theory", and spends the rest of his article detailing various upcoming technological developments, ending by thriumphantly declaring, "If that doesn't represent evolution, then who needs Darwin?"  One longs to pat him kindly on the arm and say, soothingly, "Of course it's evolution, Uri, dear, but it's technological evolution, not human evolution. It's so easy to mix the two up when one is forever dreaming of robots. Some day (hopefully) when you grow up, you'll see the difference."  On a personal note, I've always been of the opinion of those phychologists, myself. No one who has read any ancient history, recent history, or the legends of prehistory, could think anything different. If you took away the trappings of civilisation, what would there be to distinguish modern man from his ancestors?

Friday 5 January 2001

Prompted by the world-wide stage production of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (which I haven't seen!), I got the book in the library, the two-volume Everyman's Library edition of 1909, translated by Charles E. Wilbour, and am, at the moment, ploughing my way through it.  Ploughing is hard and not very interesting work, so why bother, some people may ask. Well, from ploughing, something good will eventually emerge, something of which you can make some use. This is also true of Les Misérables.  In its kernel, is an interesting story with intriguing characters, well written, but surrounded by a thick shell of sometimes obscure philosophising, which is not very interesting, nor even original. In addition, nineteen chapters, stretching over about a hundred pages (equating to some twenty thousand words), about the battle of Waterloo, are inserted near the start of the first volume, on the pretext of giving the early history of one of the minor characters. This piece of vital? information is revealed in only the last page of the Waterloo segment, so why the other ninety-nine pages? Perhaps, in Hugo's day - as indeed now - people thought quantity meant quality.  I have always been against abridgement of any books, but I feel that Les Misérables would be much more widely read - and might even become a best seller - if all the useless verbiage were cut away. Alas, now it is too late to do it, since the thing has become an antique and restructuring an antique, as everyone knows, makes it an antique no longer, although, perhaps, useful once more.