GRGR(6) Discussion Opener

[j minnich]

>
>9) "Old Brigadier Pudding can live ... it's gone, another gone, another,
>   oh dear...."  
>   
>   What's going on in this paragraph?  We seem to go from a description 
>   of Pudding to Pudding's attitude towards Pointsman, to Pudding's 
>   reminscence about Pointsman's father to Pudding daydreaming about 
>   Polygon Wood (a WWI battle site?).  Did Pudding serve with Pointsman's 
>   father?  Who *was* the ginger-haired chap?  What's "no bleeding use"?  
>   What's "gone"?
>

This is all done from within Pudding's POV, his personal bandwidth is
narrowing and his memories are going, one by one.


>
>19) Anyone have anything to say about the MMPI and how it gives infor-
>    mation different from a Rorschach test?  Structure vs. lack thereof.
>
>P. 82
>
>20) Who is Rosie's "most famous compatriot" and what would make the staff
>    "swear they've seen him crawling headfirst down the north facade"?
>

He's from Transylvania, so it'd be Count Dracula, natch.

>
>23) Who are "Watson and Rayner"?

Probably John B. Watson.  Here's a short excerpt from _The Broken Image_,
page 54:  "Although Pavlov himself cautiously refrained from drawing
psycological deductions from his animal researches, his findings were seized
upon by experimental psycholgists, most of all in America, as the
long-awaited key to a truly rigoruous science of behavior.  Particularly
ambitious in drawing out these implications was John B. Watson, an
experimentalist whose training was in the animal field."  I am about half
way through this book at the moment, and (because it first appeared in 1964
and because of its subject matter) I get the feeling that TRP also had it in
mind when writing _GR_.  It begins in the intro by talking about C.P. Snow's
notion of the "two cultures" which has also been discussed on this list.  I
think TRP mentions Snow's notion in his essay on Luddites.  I dunno about
Rayner.  He doesn't appear in the index of _The Broken Image_.  


7) Mexico: "...but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may 
>    have been taken as far as it will go.  That for science to carry on
>    at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less...sterile set of
>    assumptions."
>    
>    Are we here referring to the onset of quantum mechanics, a statis-
>    tical enterprise?
>

Once again, _The Broken Image_ has much to say on this topic.  

                             -j minnich