The Fellowship of the RLF

My new home-from-home, the Biomedical Sciences building

I am now in my third week of an RLF Fellowship, so it seems a good point to comment on this remarkable institution and its work.

The Royal Literary Fund is a charity that was set up in the eighteenth century to support starving authors - and it still helps those in difficulty today, but arguably its more prominent role is now educational. The fund now has Fellows, who are professional writers, in over 50 UK universities and similar institutions (you can see an impressive map of where they are here), where their role is to help students and staff improve the quality of their writing.

I'm one of two Fellows in the Science faculty at the University of Bristol, working alongside short story writer and poet Tania Hershman, and so far a summary of the experience would be 'exhausting but brilliant.'

Need to get right to the top of the road as seen here

The exhausting part is partially because after 20 years of working for myself I'm not used to doing a proper job (at least that's what some might say), and partly because getting to our base in the Biomedical Sciences building involves a climb up the south face of St Michael's Hill, an ascent that I'm sure most professional climbers would not attempt without all the right gear (though students do power past me with monotonous regularity).

As for the brilliant part, it is extremely rewarding when it's possible to help someone with their writing - and its hard to imagine a more welcoming faculty. It's only early days, but I think this was a good project to take on.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense

Search This Blog