David Chart's Blog

Author: David Chart

  • The Collected Stories of Henry James

    I’ve just finished reading the Everyman’s Library edition of Henry James’s stories. They only published a selection, but they still run to two volumes, totalling 2400 pages or so. Henry James was quite productive. Henry James’s style is interesting. The word “lapidary” comes to mind: hard, precise, glittering, and very carefully crafted. It’s not the…

  • The Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents

    Today I went to observe a meeting of the Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. I mentioned going to the open meeting in my diary back in December, and after that I felt that I wanted to see what a normal meeting was like. My original plan was to go in January, but that…

  • Exercises

    Something over twenty years ago, I bought a book of exercises. It includes graded exercises, divided into ten weeks. I am currently on week seven. I feel that the overall plan may have been a little optimistic. It is true, I must confess, that I have not managed to keep up daily exercises for the…

  • Taxes

    Japan has lots of taxes. It isn’t that the tax rates are particularly high, but there are just a lot of categories. Yesterday, I submitted my return for my income taxes. I actually calculated my national income tax bill on the form itself, but the same information will also be used to calculate my local…

  • But is it news?

    Recently, I’ve been listening to the podcast from the Yomiuri newspaper just about every weekday. This is partly to improve my listening comprehension, and partly to keep up with the Japanese news. The podcast is released every weekday morning, and generally follows a fixed format. First, there are half a dozen or so news stories,…

  • Power of Faerun

    I’ve just finished reading Power of Faerun, a Forgotten Realms book for D&D. I have to confess that I wasn’t over-impressed with it. It wasn’t actively bad; quality control at Wizards of the Coast is far too good for that to happen. However, it was distinctly uninspiring. It’s a background book, dealing with high-level (powerful)…

  • Watch Me Grow!

    My Mum sent us this book as a present, so that we could follow along with the baby’s development. It’s really good, because it isn’t a technical discussion of what goes on and the sorts of problems there might be. Instead, it’s basically a collection of 3D ultrasound pictures of various babies, at various stages…

  • Diary Entry

    I’ve put up a new entry in my Japan Diary. So I don’t need to write more than a notification here.

  • The Most Difficult Language in the World

    I mentioned to my sister that Japanese would take at least four times as long to learn as French (which she has already studied), and she asked me where that was from. A quick Google turned up a webpage of language learning difficulties for English speakers. If we assume that these difficulties are roughly symmetric,…

  • An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

    Yesterday, I finished reading David Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. It was, naturally, interesting. Although I read his Treatise of Human Nature years ago, and taught the causation and induction sections for something like ten years at Cambridge, I’d not previously read the whole of the first Enquiry. One of the most notorious sections…