An Elephant of One's Own

A quick glance at this blog and you'll see that these days I scarcely do blog posts any more. No one seems to want them. Instead, I do tweets. No one wants those either, but at least they take up less time. Here's my latest one: I understand not going gently into that good night. But that's no reason to kick the nurse. This post is intended to be a footnote to the above, just in case it's not clear enough. Shouldn't take long, but you never know with me. Sometimes I need to say quite a lot to know what I think. The Dylan Thomas reference: it was his dying father he was on about. Now I don't know what sort of a Dad Dylan had: maybe he was the sweetest and wisest of souls, maybe he was a bit of a plonker, maybe he was a dispenser of frequent beatings like the one I had. Point is, he was (we gather from the poem) on his deathbed, and he was Dylan's dad. And the thing about when Dad is on his deathbed is, it doesn't seem to matter whether he was a bit of a...

Pensaba nunca más volver a escribir en este caduco espacio (hoy por hoy me atrae mucho más Substack) pero en vista de que últimamente mi rincón de Twitter se ha llenado de ofuscaciones ridículas acerca del plagio, perpetradas tanto por los defensores de la Sra Fiscal Diana Salazar como por sus detractores, veo la oportunidad de arrojar un poco de luz sobre el tema mediante la técnica de citar fuentes inapelables. Mi motivación es muy sencilla y muy egoísta: soy profesor universitario y aunque me falta poco por jubilarme, es probable que los próximos tres años siga con el mismo trabajo de calificar ensayos y trabajos, y a veces de revisar artículos hechos por mis estudiantes. trabajo donde la detección de plagio es una tarea tan molesta como necesaria. Muchas veces me encuentro calificando ensayos después de un examen, procediendo con cierta premura en vistas de que mi clase espera los resultados para mañana, y de repente me encuentro con algo sospechosamente "perfecto", visto...

“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...