An Elephant of One's Own

Can't remember who said it: it was in a YT video on l'affaire Peterson , and we even got "they're a part of me, like an organ of my body", or some such. Cute or cringe, you decide. Hearing this, I reflected it was time someone put out a compilation of 21st century Magical Thinking superstitions, of which this proprietary nature of personal pronouns could be one, along with, say, The Patriarchy, or the Male Gaze - you know, the one which causes things and people evilly ogled to burst into flame, crinkle, self-destruct, be objectified, and all the other Planet Krypton stuff those remarkable laser eyes get up to as soon as you let them off the hook. Is the proposed extension of the set of English pronouns achievable as a long-term goal? I would say yes, in principle, if restricted to a single additional set of non-gendered third person singular pronouns. However, I don't think it's either necessary or desirable, and I also don't think it will probably g...

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...

If perchance you are a reader, of the human sort (which means you're probably here by accident, since this blog gets no visits), well, don't hold me to any of this. I'm just trying to make sense of something to my own satisfaction, by building a tentative model, and haven't got far with it yet, and it might yet collapse like a house of cards. I might decide soon that this is just a stupid random notion, as most of my notions are, and bin it. Meanwhile though... lust. As in sexual desire. Do we all understand the same by it? Do we all experience it in the same way? Seems to me the answer is obviously no, to both. And also, that if we were to approach the question through, I dunno, some sort of triangulation of questionnaires with discourse analysis of people's utterances on the subject, focusing particularly on the distribution of certain keywords, we might be able to distinguish a plurality of discrete views or approaches to desire, each with its own assumptions, ...

Well, that was interesting. It's not often I get to talk to people (as in "talk to", as opposed to "talk at" [my students] or "talk past" [colleagues, etc]), so of course I jumped at the chance, once it turned out that, miraculously, one of my meandering comments on YT had actually been replied to by a real human. My interlocutor was a feminist, and the topic was (once again) "toxic masculinity", but you can't have everything. It could be worse: I could have been talking to a Canadian about hockey, or someone from Missouri about the boil on his bum. The conversation chuntered along nicely, with clarifications on both sides, until this appeared onscreen (quoting from memory, I hope accurately): ""Men view themselves a certain way and this needs to be undone." You know that sinking feeling when you've been chatting to an apparently perfectly ordinary person in the pub and suddenly they casually make some outrageou...

Sí, la película vale la pena. Historia absurda, mucha niebla simbólica, pero se quedará imborrable en tu memoria y es lo que cuenta. No tengo tiempo para escribir. No sé cuándo lo tendré. Tal vez nunca. Y por eso escribo ahora, porque para mí haber escrito algo es haber vivido algo, y últimamente me harto de tantos ensayos virtuales, que no sobrepasan de fugaces excitaciones neuronales y no dejan huella ni en papel ni en pantalla ni en el recuerdo - cuando quiero poder recordar, de aquí seis meses, que hasta en estos días difíciles, algo fui capaz de pensar. Lo que difícilmente habrá es ton, y peor todavía, son. No me pidan tanto. Son cinco minutos máxime que puedo dedicar a esto. Tema 1: El Telégrafo . Hace tiempo decidí dejar de leerlo: lo mío con ese pasquín gobiernista siempre fue malsano. Pero echo un tímido vistazo, y ahí está, de nuevo, la Sylva Charvet , como para sacarle de quicio a uno. Habría esperado que la retaguardia correísta se quedaría estos días en silencio, por e...