MindReadings

Philip K Dick’s The Electric Ant

February 19, 2024Literature, Philosophy2 Comments

It is Dick's exploration of existential questions and the malleability of reality that I am concerned with in this blog. The short story “The Electric Ant” deals with what it means to be human and how the experiences of an android might differ, if at all, from that of a human being. Our protagonist Garson Poole wakes up in hospital to find that he is missing his right hand and that he feels no pain. This is the start of his discovery that he is not human, after all, but an android. It is in fact a horrible awakening

Ray Bradbury’s The Earth Men

December 19, 2023Literature, Medical humanities, Psychiatry, Psychopathology4 Comments

Captain Williams and three of his men arrive on Mars and walk into the closest town, knocking on doors and announcing their arrival but are surprised and saddened to discover that no one seems impressed at what they believe to be a momentous event, travelling from Earth to Mars by rocket

Rita Dove’s Portraits Without Brushes

October 20, 2023Literature, PoetryLeave a Comment

I think of Rita Dove as a portrait poet, a poet who without paint brushes, captures the essence of a subject, giving voice and character, also giving a probing uniqueness, a singularity to the person.

Hitchcock’s Pranks

August 16, 2023Literature, Medical humanities5 Comments

My memory of Hitchcock dates back to the 60s, when I was a schoolboy in Lagos. We had taken possession of our first TV, a Sanyo, in a mahogany box. Everyone else that we knew had a Grundig TV, a box with a walnut finish. That was a time when American series were taking over from British fare on Nigerian TV. We watched the likes of Hitchcock Hour, The Twilight Zone, and incomprehensible comedies such as Sergeant Bilko, Lucille Ball Show and so on. The American accents seemed more normal, somehow more euphonious compared to what we heard on Z cars, and Steptoe & Son.

E.M.CIORAN: Melancholy & Decay

June 30, 2023Literature, Medical humanities, Philosophy, Psychopathology2 Comments

He was born born Emil Cioran in 1911, in a small Transylvanian village, Rasinari. He moved to Paris in 1937 and died there in 1995. He was a Romanian philosopher and essayist who was known for his pessimistic and nihilistic perspectives.

Alberto Moravia’s La Noia

May 14, 2023Literature, Medical humanities, Psychopathology1 Comment

My boredom resembles a repeated and mysterious interruption of the electric current inside a house: at one moment everything is clear and obvious- here are armchairs, over there are sofas, beyond our cupboards, side tables, pictures, curtains, carpets, windows, doors; a moment later there is nothing but darkness and an empty void.

Ursula Le Guin & social anthropology

April 7, 2023Literature2 Comments

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin introduces the concept of shifgrethor and that was my introduction to the wonderful, wonderful and rich world of Le Guin’s social anthropology.

Kobayashi Issa & Death

February 27, 2023Literature, PoetryLeave a Comment

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) along with Basho and Buson, is considered one the greatest Haiku poets of Japan. His most endearing gift was attention to detail, with such intense delicacy and sometimes playfulness, that the ordinary came to transcend its everyday mundaneness. Even though my interest today is in his focus on death, but I will start with the birth of his daughter.

Kafka and Marriage

January 24, 2023Literature5 Comments

I don’t believe that I have ever met a single person who in the long run in his ordinary human relationships, in normal everyday life (and what else is it all about?), could be more hopeless than I.

Differences Require Identity

December 21, 2022Travel1 Comment

Outside in the already darkened dusk, the din of traffic attacks your senses as does the unairconditioned air and there’s too the odour of tropical humid Africa, that aromatic fragrance of soil and vegetation.