An Elephant of One's Own

"So the Swedes are at it again," said a man with straw hair and a parallelogram for a nose, "voting for a number of different political parties, including one that the Guardian doesn't like. There have been articles, comments, pundits and Punditssons, all stalking around this obscure tragedy, peering into the flames, trying to understand. I know no Swedish, yet happen to understand perfectly, free of charge, because like the Swedes, I am a yes man." "A yes man," he went on, lighting his moustache and waving away the proffered crumpet, "is a man who says yes while miserably dreaming the alluring no. A man for whom 'free choice' is an alibi rather than a motive, something you just invoke to get out of the fix of explaining. A man whose choices - because actually unfree, constrained to binary by a maritime git's bony legs round his neck - lead to diminished and dismal outcomes, the sort that garner distracted smirks, and the odd Irish ...

In later years he would wonder how close he’d been to death, that afternoon when, home early from school and to a Jerry Garcia soundtrack, he’d downed the full bottle of Gordon’s and three cans of Carlsberg Special Brew, dappled by the fidgeting tree-shadows of a suburban bedroom. There were no explicit suicidal intentions behind Project Drink-Myself-into-a-Coma, but equally, as he remembered it, his adolescent consciousness was burdensome enough for its irreversible cessation to seem, at the time, a risk scarce worth examining and easily worth taking. Strange, though, that forty years on, he could so clearly recall this accelerated descent into the carpeted Hades of paralytic inebriation, at least from the point at which he found himself, finally, lying on the floor, surrounded by vinyl silence, unable to move a single useful muscle. Strange because the paralysis that had overtaken his body might be expected to lead, as drinking often does, to amnesia: yet he could still remember, a...

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, ...