Andrew Tink, once the attorney-general in waiting, began his first intensive radiation treatment for throat cancer. But while his health may have prevented him realising his political dream of serving as part of the O'Farrell cabinet, it didn't stop him achieving another one: being a published author. Through his first battle with prostate cancer, he completed his first book, a biography on colonial explorer, land owner and politician William Charles Wentworth. During his second battle, this time with throat cancer, he completed his second biography: Lord Sydney: the Life and Times of Tommy Townshend, published today. It's the first biography of the man after whom Sydney Cove was named in 1788 - an astonishing hole, now filled. Having got through the worst of his recovery, Tink, now some 20 kilograms lighter than he was before his treatment, is giving speeches, with the occasional aid of a small blue drinking bottle filled with water. The treatment gave him third-degree burns to the inside of his throat, making it impossible to swallow for some time. He told the Herald's Anna Patty that, apart from his wife and family, the one thing that kept him going was his appearance at the Sydney Writers' Festival in May this year, just after his final session of radiation treatment. ''Through the whole of my treatment I was saying to the oncologist, 'I want to make my commitments at the Writers' Festival - please let me have enough of a voice and enough of a brain.' That became my goal.''
Monday, December 26, 2011
Depth Vs Breadth
From the Brisbane Times' 'Blunt Instrument', this comment:
A slight 100 years ago people were generally deeply read, but not widely read, meaning that they read the bible and perhaps a few other books deeply, but they had not read widely. It wasn't until the appearance of Mechanic's Institutes, public libraries, and more frequently found fee-based lending libraries that people began to read more widely and less deeply.
It appears that today the trend is toward technical reading and away from wide or deep reading. The purpose of technical reading is to extract information from a screen full of a mix of images, graphics, and text. This type of heavily graphics-oriented reading wasn't practical when I was young--in the 1950s. Up until the advent of the microcomputer graphics--especially color graphics--was an expensive proposition for print. Dense (and cheap) text was the norm.
As usual with technological advance it is difficult to grasp the qualitative differences in change. Really, is the change good or bad? Or, is it more likely that the result is just something "different"? With "deep" reading people could quote and recognize homilies from the bible. With "wide" reading that didn't happen so often, but we could identify the "sound" or structure of Shakespeare, a cowboy and indians tale, or a British spy story.
With technical reading people tend to think in multiple dimensions and see "exploded" technical images in their minds that they can rotate in multiple dimensions--graphical images of glaciers moving in and melting, images of the solar system rotating about multiple axes. Tricks like that make understanding concepts difficult to describe using just words, like evolution, suddenly simple to understand. Different techniques, different results. Not better, not worse, just different and adapted for the times.
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