WILLIAM AND MARY (ROALD DAHL) AND THE COVERINGS OF BRAIN

And now, as I say, I'd take a small oscillating saw and carefully remove your complete calvarium--the whole vault of the skull. This would expose the top half of the brain, or rather the outer covering in which it is wrapped. You may or may not know that there are three separate coverings around the brain itself the outer one called the dura mater or dura, the middle one called the arachnoid, and the inner one called the pia mater or pia. Most laymen seem to have the idea that the brain is a naked thing floating around in fluid in your head. But it isn't. It's wrapped up neatly in these three strong coverings, and the cerebrospinal fluid actually flows within the little gap between the two coverings, known as the subarachnoid space. As I told you before, this fluid is manufactured by the brain and it drains off into the venous system by osmosis

The coverings of the brain are very well explained. The tale is about a dyng man who is offered to keep his brain alive in a basin, with an eye as the only way to interact with the enviroment. The man accepted the offer only because he would be able to read.

At the end of the short story, the wife wants to take her husband´s brain home because she realizes that she likes him better now and it/he gives her no trouble.

Last month, in Yale´s University a group of scientists has brought brains of pigs back to life. This fact is linked with another of Dahl’s tales – ‘Pigs’, a wonderful allegation in favour of veganism, just like the film The Executioner, by Berlanga, is the best allegation against death penalty

THE INVENTED PART (RODRIGO FRESÁN), JOHN UPDIKE AND ART AS REFUTATION OF THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

The day Updike died, he reread something the writer said in an interview and that he’d always found really moving: “My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”

One good thing about this definition is that it is correct regardless of the quality of the art. A bad novel, a bad song, a bad movie...they also bring something to the world, they bring order. From my point of view, this is more of a refutation of the second law of Thermodynamics, than of the conservation of matter. A sculptor, for instance, just redistributes the preexisting matter, like David is said to have been taken out from a piece of marble by Michelangelo

Only Embryo Growth and the birth of a new living being are similar to the artistic creation, that is why we say things like “the artist has given birth to a masterpiece”