Summer sort out & Iris Murdoch

For the past couple of days I have been having a clear out and tidy up of the study. Six boxes of books, articles, magazines, etc have been despatched to the garage. Four boxes of cds might well follow them. The area behind my chair which had been home to vast piles of books, magazines and cds has been just about cleared, at least to the extent that it now just consists of magazines, newly sorted by subject. This does at least highlight that I don't really read many of the magazines I buy - perhaps time to reflect on my many purchases?

My biographical project - though in its very early days - has also benefited from the sort out. It now consists of five boxes of materials. Mainly academic articles, but also photocopies of selections from a surprisingly large number of books. I have prepared a bibliography of articles from the Journal of the History of Astronomy and marked the articles I need to copy from the Radcliffe Science Library. I have then merged this bibliography in with the existing "working biography" for my subject and this now totals some 700 entries and 35 pages. For a book of 450 pages, this suggests that each reference only provides about half a page of text to the finished book on average - surprisingly low I thought.

I have been reading A.N. Wilson's book Iris as I knew her. This is one of the books I bought at Waterfields the other week and is a surprisingly book in many ways. He had been involved in a project to write an authorised biography of Iris Murdoch but hadn't done it in the end. Instead there is this strange memoir. In many ways it is a quite offensive book, and is perhaps interesting for that reason. I have only ever read a couple of books by Iris Murdoch - the novel The Philosopher's Pupil, her book on Sartre and bits of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. I wonder if her long term legacy will be as the Alzeimer's victim as portryed by husband John Bayley and the movie, Iris. This is something that Wilson is clearly concerned about. There were lots of Murdoch novels in Blackwells when I looked - I can't imagine reading one though.

But I have paid 1p to buy John Bayley's Iris Trilogy secondhand off Amazon.