An Elephant of One's Own

I don't have an ideology. I don't have a position on the political spectrum, either. I am left or right depending on where you happen to be standing. I don't have a manifesto. Whatever you want to do to bring about a better world is fine by me, always provided you adhere religiously to the First Commandment of the post-scriptural age, viz. Thou Shalt Not Piss On Thy Neighbour's Chips. It is upon this Commandment that I wish briefly to discourse here. It will help me sort out a few questions that have been bugging me of late, what with YouTube, and the social justice warriors, and the Trumpocalypse, and all of that. I haven't finished Rawls yet. I'm saving him till Christmas. But one thing I will say for him: it is to his enormous credit that he saw that there was a question waiting to be answered with regard to Equality. That question being: why ? I have to say that, at this stage, I don't set much store by his answer (can't quite be doing with stratos...

It riles them to believe that you perceive the Web they weave. (G.E.) OK, I have an excuse for the pseudonym: I live in Ecuador, a country where any kind of free expression in one's own name can land you in jail and/or with a million-dollar fine to pay, particularly if the President doesn't like what you have said. Worse, I work in the public sector, over which an explicit prohibition against expressing opinions in public media hangs like a dense choking smog. But what about those people who don't live under grinding tyranny in Third World countries? Is there, perchance, something wrong with their using pseudonyms to write blogs and post comments? As discussed in the old Spanish blog, Mark Zuckerberg thinks there is - but then, he would, wouldn't he, Facebook having practically reconstituted itself into the fourth arm of government, after the executive, legislature and judiciary. It's at times like these when, forgetting for a moment the state of my lungs, I fee...

Quite simply the best song about seeing Emily play that's ever been made.

"I don't know how you let your daughter speak to you like that." "Oh, it'll pass, I'm sure. She's just going through the Dark Ages." "You mean she spends her days illuminating manuscripts in a cell on a rocky promontory beneath a dramatic gloaming?" "Not exactly. I mean there is a hobnailed boot whose arc of movement is determined by an axle held by a projecting framework attached to her head. Every day, when she wakes up, she is herself for a few seconds, which may be blissful seconds or they may not, but after those moments of unalloyed but sleepy selfhood have ticked by, the boot suddenly comes to life, swings round and kicks her in the forehead." "Indeed. How does she experience this subjectively?" "As an act of awakening, of mental preparation to face the day. Unfortunately, she is not only remembering her agenda - what to do - but, also, who to be and for whom. Thus is she daily ejected, with hideous...

Si expulsas todo el aire de tu boca, y luego con la boca cerrada haces retroceder tu lengua, tus mejillas serán chupadas hacia dentro, creando sendas concavidades exteriores. Si ya no tienes muelas, las concavidades así creadas lucirán mucho más dramáticas. Tales ejercicios de autozigoplastia burlesca constituyen, para los viejos (más de 50 años) una entrañable diversión, ocupando el mismo lugar para ellos que el sexo para la gente más joven. ¿No me crees? Espera tener cincuenta y cinco años y verás. Si no hubiera trabajo que hacer, uno pasaría gustoso todo el día improvisando muecas espantosas. Con o sin dentaduras fácticas hechas de austeros segmentos de piel de naranja adornados con esfero. Pero sucede en este caso un fenómeno interesante: la profundidad de las mencionadas concavidades resulta estar sujeta a un límite infranqueable. Cuando las mejillas se tocan dentro de tu boca, ninguna de las dos puede distorsionarse más, porque se lo impide la presencia de la ...

"How do I reveal to my Muslim daughter that women who look and dress like her mother have had their hijabs torn from their heads (...)?" The article makes a few valid points about the threat of anti-Muslim hysteria, though it's hard to pick them out in the fog of exaggeration and partisan bias. It's a long time since I tuned out of Pat Condell, one of YouTube's currently most famous self-parodies, due to his apparent inability to distinguish between two quite different animals, viz. the religion of Islam, on the one hand, with its scriptures and strictures, and on the other, the notional collective of people who claim to subscribe to one or another form of that religion. For me, the simple recognition that a person is not and cannot be a religion, or a book (or a Book) is enough: I don't feel the need to play with taxonomies, and I have a certain visceral dislike for the term "moderate Muslims" (is there such a thing as a "moderate Jehovah...

This isn't quite where I'm going, but I'll say it anyway, as this is a blog post not an essay: one of the most seductive features of mythical Golden Ages is that in them, everyone seems to know who they are and where they belong. My mythical Golden Age (a 60s English childhood fading off at the edges into a very selectively drawn Edwardian or even Victorian pastoral) is certainly like that. In that kinder, mellower Hovis past, if you were dumb you knew you were dumb, and were correspondingly humble and didn't say or do much, other than doffing your cap occasionally. If you were smart, you went to Jura, spat blood and wrote books. What you didn't get is... I was going to say something catty about Business School graduates, but I'd better be careful. Ahem. What you didn't get is people like me. People who generally feel they don't get it, whether because of never having got to grips with Higher Mathematics or for whatever other reason, but who are unable ...

Now is hell. I mentioned this discovery in a previous post, but it's as well to recapitulate: I woke up once, maybe thirty-five years ago, in pitch darkness, and after a few seconds of vague panic, realized that I had forgotten everything, including who and where and when and why I was. Imagine a computer booting up and then, on attempting the routine peripherals checks, finding the hard disk not working. That feeling. My memory was completely inaccessible, if not erased. I may have groaned, or cried out. I scrambled to my feet, stumbled a few paces, felt around blindly. Eventually, after perhaps thirty seconds, I found a light switch. When the light was on, I was even more terrified to see a room I did not recognize. I sat down on the sofa where I had been sleeping, and tried to remember. After about a minute the hard disk started whirring, belatedly. I identified the room as my mother's living room, and the sofa as the one I was meant to sleep on. Half a minute more a...

Another poetical masterpiece. Gorgeous harmonies, set off by Astaire's unparalleled gift for making you not need a lyrics page (well, there's Sinatra of course, but I never liked Sinatra, too bland by half). I'm hoping that if I play this enough times it will start to rain. Never know.

I think it was Christmas 1980. Might have been 81 or 82 but I'm going for 1980. I was a painfully shy, painfully thin bearded Modern Languages student who smelled of Old Holborn rollies and peered at the world through a pair of habitually dusty National Health spectacles. It was the holidays so I needed a job. Through a stroke of good fortune I landed a stint as Lift Attendant at the Café Royal in London, which was about the easiest job going: you simply turned up, slipped into your uniform (jacket with copious braid and epaulettes and gold buttons, white gloves which had to be draped over shoulder), then spent the evening accompanying people up and down in the lift and doing the flunkey thing: "your floor, sir", "your floor, madam" and I forget the rest of the spiel. I knocked off around midnight, or a bit later, depending. Since at that hour there were no buses back to High Wycombe (my mum's house, where I didn't actually have a room but could kip on...

I feel the presence of three hundred and sixty US dollars. I don't know where that money is. It is everywhere and nowhere. If I am in the bottom of a deep well, it peers over the rim, high above, punctuating the circle of sky. If I am hiding in a car park, it laughs at me from the branches of a nearby tree. When I was 15, chord fingerings superimposed themselves daily on the face of a Lady Verney's girl on the bus. The girl had curly black hair and a face like a hymn book. I never found out what she was like. Perhaps she was an Ancient Egyptian wall painting and only pretended to have three dimensions. Lots of people pretend to only pretend to have depth. Had he persisted, Sir John Mandeville would have discovered and documented the twin islands of Lols and Lulz, inhabited by blind tree-people with bony, accusing fingers literally shaking from the seismic cycles of ague drawn up through their roots. The winds on these islands can tumble a drunken ha...

"Lightly sung, her song is the latch on the morning's door" Match that, suckers.

Full disclosure: I think "hate speech" laws are unnecessary, illiberal and arguably counter-productive (see below). If you support such laws, you may want to speculate that I am a covert Nazi sympathizer who probably tortures kittens in his spare time, and read what follows with this possibility firmly in mind. Why this post? Very simple. As a linguist I am forced to be aware of polysemy and of semantically diffuse terms, and as an armchair philosopher I often find myself wondering to what extent our individual and collective thought is constrained by verbal imprecision, which may be built into the language we use. The lexis of emotion, for example, is puzzlingly inadequate: many everyday mental states are impossible to reference in English without recourse to circuitous figurative language and symbolism, or to Eliot's Objective Correlative. Well, it strikes me that "hate" is an obvious example of a word whose meaning is seldom, if ever, precisely and adequatel...