Grid girls and poems (part 2)
"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...