An Elephant of One's Own

I was never going to be a good guitarist. Tall people never are: the ultrafine motor coordination required for virtuoso musicianship requires the shorter sorta arms normally found attached to a shorter sorta torso. But I plodded gamely away at it, practising the scales and twanging my awkward way through Sor, Carulli, Tarrega, Bach, Bert Jansch, Stefan Grossman, Chet Atkins and all the usual suspects through my teens and twenties. In the process, partly out of frustration at not being able to get the fast runs right (esp in the Bach Chaconne), I found myself churning out bass lines, chord sequences and melodies, optimistically labelled "songs" (a handful even had lyrics), in accordance with the maxim "if you can't do, teach" (or in musical terminology, "if you can't play, write"). I authored perhaps three or four hundred of these, touting them around the various bands I was in. The response was always the same: "too difficult", presumably...

"Tell the truth - or at least don't lie," enjoins J Peterson, in his latest poetry collection  12 Elegies for the Mass Funeral of the Bleedin Obvious . I agree. Readers of this blog (that still-empty set) will have noticed I take this commandment rather seriously. I don't know what he finds to say as a gloss to his version of the age-old injunction (haven't bought the book, nor plan to) but if it was me, I'd probably find it useful to examine, one by one, all the ways in which people are tempted to lie and the (emotional) reasons they have for doing so. Also, as an addendum, the reasons why some of us are unable to tell the truth about certain painful things in our own experience, and, so as not to lie, have to settle for just keeping those things under wraps until we die. That too. One of the forms of lying I'd mention is the one exhaustively picked apart by Orwell in Politics and the English Language , viz. letting the pret-a-porter cliche steer your t...

My weekend? Nice of me to ask. Well, it was the weekend of the referendum, the weekend of me uploading some old poems to this blog, and the weekend Dr Randomercam did Grid Girls, with his usual combination of charisma (I don't envy him that, I never had any so we might as well be talking bobsleigh for all the skin I have in the game) and wordplay (something I actually have tried to be good at, but have so far mostly goofed at [but see below], and consequently do envy him: that title is to die for, or at least, to stub your toe on a chest of drawers for, twice). I mention the Grid Girls thing as a convenient segue into something that's been at the back of my mind for a while, viz.  beldades , though it's probably more suited to a treatment in Spanish on the other blog, which I might get around to in a few days. But here's the essence of it, for what it's worth. Light up and sit back: this might take about ten paragraphs to get through. About grid girls, I'm in...