FEAST OR FAMINE

The Book of Evidence (1989, this edition 2001) is set in Coolgrange, Ireland. The narrator, 38-year-old Frederick Montgomery, is in prison as a remand prisoner, awaiting his trial due in a month’s time. Montgomery says he is not seeking to excuse his actions, but to explain them. It started in the Mediterranean when he borrowed money from an American guy called Randolph. He can’t pay it back. He says he would have to go home to ask his friends and family to help him out. He knows though that he is ‘running away’ from his responsibilities. Back home, he hopes to sell his mother’s paintings, but Dorothy (Dolly) has sold all of them to Binkie Behrens. Frederick is not happy about this and goes to Whitewater to visit Anna Behrens – whom he loved briefly, 15 years ago. But she turns him away. He then tries to steal a painting, bludgeons a girl (Josie Bell) to death, evades the police, and implicates his 60ish-year-old friend, Charlie French. Montgomery ha...

Time magazine included an article in its Science section on June 26, 2015, with the headline: ‘Why You’re Pretty Much Unconscious All the Time.’ What does ‘pretty much’ mean? The article is about the human brain. It refers to a paper published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences in which psychology researchers at San Francisco State University studied consciousness. The researchers devised a ‘Passive Frame Theory’ which states that nearly all of a person’s thinking is conducted at the unconscious level, completely without the person’s knowledge. The decision-making part of the thinking process is passed to the conscious mind, which does the work. In other words, the real thinking process is only a small part of the process. The brain’s guiding principle in mediating between the conscious and unconscious is described as elemental, action-based, simple, and evolutionary-based (EASE). The researchers stated, ‘Consciousness is the middle-man and it doesn’t do as...

The National Botanical Garden of Georgia in Tbilisi is 98 hilly hectares of trees and natural vegetation, with a river, waterfalls and springs. The fauna in the garden included a dog, beetles, birds, butterflies, bees, lizards, and snakes. MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author of:-  Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

In addition to 130 artworks of Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani (1862-1918) the Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery (The National Gallery) in Tbilisi holds the works of three 20th century artists: sculpture Iakob Nikoladze (1876-1951), painter David Kakabadze (1889-1952), and painter Lado Gudiashvili (1896-1980). Nikoladze, Kakabadze and Gudiashvili are on display in the enormously large hall. It is interesting to note that all three artists lived in Paris in the 1920s - it was the place to be (and so thought American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).  Iakob Nikoladze, from Kutaisi in Georgia, studied in Paris and worked as an assistant to Parisian sculptor Auguste Rodin – famous for sculptures such as The Thinker (created between 1879-1889) and The Kiss (1889). Nikoladze turned down the offer to accompany Rodin to America and instead returned to Tbilisi in 1910. He intended to emigrate to Paris in 1921, but was persuaded to remain in Georgia...