An Elephant of One's Own

“Walk with me.” Immediately we launch into a sauntering, unhurried rhythm kept going more with percussion in the treble register than with anything in the bass, other than a thoughtful, minimalistic bass guitar. The introductory four-note phrase promises a straight walk up to E flat, the presumed tonic, but stops on the subtonic, giving us a major seventh chord right away. For non-musicians, major sevenths are those guitar chords you discover by accident just when you’re getting bored with straight majors and minors with the odd minor seventh thrown in. One day you’re strumming a C chord and take your index finger off the fret and... hmm, interesting. Play again. Explore more. Find other major sevenths. String a few together. No matter how tonally far apart they are, they can be combined almost at random, and the more random the combination, the more you feel sucked into an unsuspected musical realm of mysticism and mystery and vague yearning. A musicologist will tell you that’s becaus...

 He'd gone to bed with too much on his mind, as usual, had slept a bit, and was now awake again: it was awkwardly the middle of the night, the wrong time to be awake, but he soon realized he wasn't going to fix that easily. It took him a few minutes to realise that the dream he'd just had was the dream all old men have, with only a few minor details to individualise it. In the dream, it was generally known (at least by the scruffy layabouts who hung around the landings in his tenement building) that his wife was sleeping with his son. Everyone seemed OK with this, and expected him to be, but there was something about the arrangement he didn't particularly care for. He couldn't feel any animosity towards his son - given that the boy, or young man, was pretty much a copy of him, only with the genetic defects and limitations more openly on display, less plastered-over - or towards his wife, naturally, but he felt sad and discontented all the same. He decided to approac...

 Dear Blog, sorry I haven´t really "been here for you" lately. I'll be brutally honest: Twitter is more fun than you, as well as younger and sexier. It's more fun because on Twitter there is a reasonable expectation that anything you write will be read by at least three people, which isn't a lot but it's three more readers than you are likely to get for anything posted here, let´s be frank. Admittedly, Twitter does offer a perverse system of incentives that Blogger doesn't.  While any blog post of mine is destined to get 0 views regardless of whether it is (comparatively) well written or absolute crap, I have long since discovered that on Twitter, likes are inversely proportional to quality, such that anything cogent or profound will inevitably get 0 likes whereas a stupid, frivolous throwaway remark will get 3 likes, and if it's exceptionally poorly expressed the number may even rise to 15 or 20. So, like a nicotine addict, you end up carefully regula...

Found this in "drafts". Posting as is, unfinished, with abrupt ending mid-bullet-point, since it´s unlikely I´ll ever have an incentive to finish writing a post that is likely to be read by nobody at all. The question of why I continue to post stuff that, unfinished or not, nobody reads, is one that undoubtedly deserves its own unfinished discussion further down the line. Ahem. "Sorry, I don´t hate anyone"  (Not even myself, these days. Haven't the energy.) I've talked about hate elsewhere. For me, it's an exotic emotion, so rare than when it bubbles up momentarily (usually a few metres away from a Ford Explorer driver) I want to hang on to it, to calm it down and study it before it wriggles free and escapes.  But it never lasts longer than a few minutes; and I can honestly and thoughtfully say I have never acted or spoken under its influence (other than perhaps accelerating a bit faster than a careful driver would). Consequently, I find it hard to tak...

 I don´t often write here these days, so let's get a few things out of the way: 1. The current Blogger interface sucks goat. Google, please change it back. I promise I'll blog more if you do. 2. I am not George Orwell. The title is a combination of laziness and a far-fetched random association of ideas I doubt I'll be successful at communicating, and may have forgotten about before I even get around to trying. If it helps, just ignore it. Now to business. The Death Penalty. What follows will be my answer to Mr Saad's article here . As is usual with this blog, in composing my answer I'll be ignoring every single one of the guidelines I regularly offer my students on "now to write an essay". In particular, I will not be writing from an outline, nor have I allowed myself any time to ponder what I am going to say or how I'm going to organise what I say. Who knows, in unguarded moments I may even cite Wikipedia. Nevertheless, I think I can give Mr Saad a ru...

 No, not Gillette (that's a whole other article), but George Gillett, who wrote this . Having seen the article cited in Twitter, and mistakenly believing it to be recent (big fail - the date is right there), I asked some of my students to write a critical analysis, and being the responsible teacher I am, decided I ought to come up with one of my own for illustrative purposes. This was done late last night and could do with a great deal of polishing, not to mention citations. Provided without warranty, in case anyone finds it useful or at least cautionary. Copy-paste from Word. CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ARTICLE ‘We shouldn’t fight for “gender equality”. We should fight to abolish gender’ (George Gillett, New Statesman, 2014) "[T]he end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally." (Fires...

 As they reached the corner of the narrow, gently sloping street and stepped off it onto the low-walled Victorian market forecourt that served as a sea prospect and alternative route to the High Street, Berthold leaned on Grassa's arm, unconsciously drawing her close as he tried to arrange some vague plans for the rest of the holiday fortnight in his mind while simultaneously sharing them out loud with her, confident of her approval or at least her sympathetic understanding.  "My mother," he told her, "said this morning that she didn't need to go back to London just yet, so I thought..." He paused for a moment, feeling a twinge of guilt as he reflected on how he'd left his mother aimlessly pottering in the house all day for, what, three days now, while he'd been out joyously gallivanting round town with Grassa. "So I thought, well, we could maybe take her out tomorrow, bring her for a walk around town." Grassa looked up at him, a glance of ...