Introduction

I published Glanglish, a collection of essays, back in 1990.  And I mean published in the traditional sense: it was a physical book – second-hand copies can still be found on the usual sites.  Those 52 essays were just a selection of the many that I had written at that time, chosen because I presumably thought they were the most suitable.  I wrote even more of them afterwards, and vaguely contemplated a second collection, but was dissuaded from doing so by the complete failure of the first set.

Recently I came across hard copies of all the unpublished essays, each of which is exactly one page long. I do have digital versions, but they are on three-inch floppy discs, as used on the Amstrad PCW 8256, my main computer system for many years.  These non-standard discs are impossible to read nowadays unless you pay exorbitant sums to one of the few data services that can still convert them.  So I have decide to re-type all the essays – great exercise for my piano-playing fingers – and to put them online here as they appear in those hard copies, without any further editing, other correcting obvious mistakes.  I have around 150 to type up, so it will take a while as I work my way through them, in no particular order.

I have chosen to list them chronologically, since I was curious to see what I was writing about when, and how productive I was at various times.  I have included the Glanglish essays in their relevant chronological position to show how the fit into my overall essay production, and what other essays I could have chosen, but didn’t. They are marked with an asterisk, and link to the main Glanglish site, which includes audio versions of all the essays appearing there, for those who might find that an interesting alternative way of approaching them.

Index

Introduction

Madonna 06/09/85
A smooth operation 03/02/86
The first novel 04/02/86
The longest day 06/02/86
The world is full of marred men 14/03/86
Of Africa 15/03/86
Pravda* 18/03/86
The Quiet Earth 19/03/86
Compact discs and Jimmy Young 22/03/86
PLG British string quartet 22/03/86
The Saxon shore     22/03/86
White nights 23/03/86
Glengarry Glen Ross 25/03/86
Difficult loves 29/03/86
Absolute Beginners - the book 31/03/86
Absolute Beginners - the film      08/04/86
Music of eight decades        08/04/86
Random experiences 21/04/86

Ran    21/04/86
Awakenings – Oliver Sacks 23/04/86
Voices – Roger Eno 23/04/86
Vox Boxes 27/04/86
Back to the future 27/04/86
Polish notation 04/05/86
A week in Gourmandy 06/05/86
Chorus of disapproval 07/05/86
The engineer of human souls 08/05/86
French comix 21/05/86
Good timing 21/05/86
Le Nozze di Figaro 27/05/86
Taxi 27/05/86
Arvo Pärt – Almeida Festival 10/06/86
Albert Herring - Aldeburgh Festival 19/06/86
Being there again 21/06/86
Madrigalia 21/06/86
A217 22/06/86
Monteverdi 22/06/86
Talking to myself 22/06/86
True amateurs 23/06/86
The discreet charm of Perrier 30/06/86
Proust and journalism 30/06/86
Economising 26/07/86
The school of graffiti 26/07/86
Bucks and berks 26/07/86
Unfinished symphonies 29/07/86
Venetian dawn 29/07/86
The great Wurlitzer 29/07/86
Early music, late musician 09/08/86
Systems music 09/08/86
Boldly going 10/08/86
The arrogance of florists 12/08/86
The Golden Gate 27/08/86
Symphony in white 27/08/86
Dalliance* 27/08/86
The aristos 10/09/86
Friends like these 25/09/86
Vinyl virtues 25/09/86
Hip hop 07/10/86
Jericho 07/10/86
A walk on the Wildenrath side 07/10/86
The carwash 10/10/86
Contingency 10/10/86
The mystery of the 48 10/10/86
The lie 16/10/86
The collector 22/11/86
Invitation to the voyage 22/11/86
Windowlene 22/11/86
Giants’ work 19/12/86
Rossini 19/12/86
Meditation on a Christmas card 20/12/86
Zen and the art of motoring 21/12/86
Deep structures 28/12/86
Mona Lisa 28/12/86
Outer London 28/12/86
Wolfing it 28/12/86
Accounting for professionals 31/12/86
The baby boomers 05/02/87
Back to Bach (1) 07/02/87
Haydn in the morning 07/02/87
The havs and the hav nots 08/02/87
The significance of theories 08/02/87
The weekly essay* 09/02/87
Counting the cost* 10/02/87
Where there’s a will there’s a won’t 15/02/87
A matter of luck 07/04/87
Invisible royalty* 12/04/87
The treasure house 13/07/87
Love letters 26/07/87
The impossibility of letters 27/07/87
The new heroic age 28/07/87
It’s a small world 30/07/87
Exhibitionists 01/08/87
Lake District knowledge 02/08/87
Gouldberg variations 04/08/87
The universal Village 05/08/87
Alpha and omega 06/08/87
Quick, quick, Oslo 13/08/87
The lie 16/10/87
The post-it modern age 17/10/87
The knife's deity* 17/10/87
Windy city* 17/10/87
Old Budapest 18/10/87
Mozart’s problem 18/10/87
Happy eaters 08/11/87
Casting about 28/11/87
Hydeing in the park 29/11/87
Letter bombs 01/12/87
Modern magic 03/12/87
A dream of a murder 26/12/87
Form v content 28/12/87
Character head 16/01/88
First steps with Lorenzetti 05/03/88
The ultimate tie 06/03/88
Miles better 07/03/88
Revelations 19/06/88
Palladio’s puzzle 20/06/88
The bellyache of an architect 02/07/88
Village voices 02/07/88
Making an art of itself 02/07/88
Madonna 02/07/88
Mercury’s messengers 08/07/88
In Guangzhou zoo 17/07/88
Nuts 17/07/88
What masterpiece?* 18/07/88
8.8.88* 08/08/88
Working it out 09/08/88
Where are the New Chiliasts? 10/08/88
Repeatability* 15/08/88
Silly farts* 21/08/88

Moody in Edinburgh (3.9.88)   4/09/88
Forever Eden* 07/07/89
Stargazing* 16/10/89
Archaic symphonies 17/10/89
Getting the idea* 19/10/89
Dateline: Bali 20/10/89
Scenes from childhood 21/10/89
Start the day: write 21/10/89
Wallpaper* 21/10/89
Intraviewing* 21/10/89
LP RIP 22/10/89
Rubbish* 23/10/89
The insolence of the inanimate* 24/10/89
Nostalgia for Brezhnev* 25/10/89
Colonising names* 26/10/89
Bookness 27/10/89
Power art 28/10/89
The smell of the new 29/10/89
Weird messages* 29/10/89
Thoughts for your pennies* 29/10/89
Poem of urban choreography 31/10/89
Take and give 17/11/89
In Moody’s boatyard 18/11/89
Nan’s ninth 18/11/89
Chiral asymmetries* 18/11/89
The contingent apple* 18/11/89
The profit of the beard* 18/11/89
Spot the similarity* 18/11/89
Dire diary* 18/11/89
Ecstasy 19/11/89
The plane truth* 19/11/89
Glanglish* 19/11/89
The finite brain* 19/11/89
Antics* 19/11/89
Accidents and substance* 20/11/89
The oscillating universe* 21/11/89
Looking at glass* 22/11/89
Cacography* 24/11/89
Sex and Billy Graham 25/11/89
I think therefore - 25/11/89
Systemic dis-ease* 25/11/89
The check-out* 04/12/89
Three sciences* 05/12/89
Socratic wisdom* 06/12/89
Looking down the catenaries 09/12/89
Managerial joys 09/12/89
Our type 09/12/89
Micro politics 09/12/89
Booting up* 09/12/89
The policeman’s bifurcation 10/12/89
Food’s grammar and graces 10/12/89
Ludwig van who?* 10/12/89
Corporeal integrity* 11/12/89
To the power station 12/12/89
Skirmish 13/12/89
Hoardings* 13/12/89
Chopin’s fingering 16/12/89
In security 17/12/89
The new Jesuits* 18/12/89
If were were a has been 20/12/89
Digital reality* 21/12/89
Deep listening 02/01/90
Young hubris 04/01/90
Meta-physicality* 05/01/90
The crown in the jewel* 06/01/90
Scarlatti’s cat* 06/01/90
God in the body* 07/01/90
Truckling on* 07/01/90
Parallel worlds 08/01/90
The slide 23/12/91
Sign of the times 23/12/91
Spot the similarity 24/12/91
Translations 24/12/91
Dust to dust 24/12/91
If I were a gnat 24/12/91
The Wipees 24/12/91
When Greek meets Greek 25/12/91
Unshod for water 25/12/91
Normality 25/12/91
Digital disease 25/12/91
The souls of the feet 26/12/91
Techno-babel 26/12/91
The Beethoven syndrome 26/12/91
Thank you, fug 26/12/91
Entitlements 26/12/91
The career of language 26/12/91
Harlem whispers 26/12/91
In security 27/12/91
All what jazz? 27/12/91
The hills of Venice 27/12/91
Exponents 27/12/91
Ferry lands 27/12/91
The great joke 27/12/91
Fricative frisson 28/12/91
Dateline: Bali 28/12/91
Consumption 28/12/91
Unlonely planet 28/12/91
Pushing the envelope 28/12/91
Curried away 18/01/92
Like a virgin queen 18/01/92
One world 25/01/92
Popular fiction 01/02/92
Real virtual reality 08/02/92
Intellectual love 08/02/92
Negotiating life 22/02/92
The domestic time machine 22/02/92
If 'were' were a has-been 22/02/92
Going back 22/02/92
The Hour of the Sheep 23/02/92
Radio activity 23/02/92
The class of 39 23/02/92
Così fan tutti     29/02/92
The eyes have it 29/02/92
Walk on by 29/02/92
Just say nay 29/02/92
Banal retention 01/03/92
Chopin’s hands 01/03/92
Capital ideas 01/03/92
The Connection Machine 01/03/92
The itch 01/03/92
Credit cards 13/03/92
Conti 14/03/92
Help 14/03/92
The art of the baroque airline 14/03/92
The analytic L-matrix 15/03/92
Police Aware aware 15/03/92
Word stars 15/03/92
The flip of a copper 15/03/92
The game’s the thing 15/03/92
Models of conduction 21/03/92
Switched on Bach II 21/03/92
Deep listening 22/03/92
Cicatrice 22/03/92
Hamlet’s omelette 31/03/92
At your service 26/04/92
Killing Murgatroyd 02/05/92

Help

Although I lived through the 1960s I did not, happily, live them in the intense way that those a few years older than me clearly did.  I therefore have none of the current cloying nostalgia for these supposedly halcyon times.  Indeed my most perfect sixties moment was also in retrospect one of my most perfectly embarrassing: that of performing at about the age of eight a feeble interpretation of the Twist on a stage before the assembled junior school along with a few other deranged classmates.

My only other Beatles memories are the early hits 'She loves yeah, yeah, yeah', 'It's been a hard day's night' etc. and the thoroughly wholesome film 'Help', scenes of which are still vivid in my mind almost thirty years later.  My knowledge of the Beatles' subsequent hits is thereafter rather sporadic, the result of chance, unordered encounters rather than concerted listening; but at least as a result I am able to approach the later albums, taken as a whole, with a completely fresh ear.

For example, listening to 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' I recognised such classics as 'With a little help from my friends' and 'When I'm sixty-four', but the rest and above all the overall effect were completely new to me.

I was therefore quite unprepared for the amazingly witty self-referential title track, the Beatles pretending to be another band hymning a third, or for its striking orchestration of tumbling horns interspersed with thicker textures.  The infamous 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' I had heard of, but never heard: Lennon's tripped-out images and dazed triple time form a powerful contrast to McCartney's more homespun social realism in 'She's leaving home' or in his soft-centred 'Lovely Rita'.  More contrast too in the sitar-soaked and tabla-tickled 'Within you, without you' George Harrison's incoherent but affective Indian takeaway philosophising and in the splendidly bouncy and surreal 'Being for the benefit of Mr Kite'.

But even more impressive than these particular components is the structure and effect of the whole.  For perhaps the first time in pop music there is a sense of direction: the opening song is clearly the equivalent of an overture; its return at the end is equally clearly a reprise before the final coda.  And what a coda: Lennon and McCartney know that there is the world of difference between a song played at the end and a song that is the end. 'A day in the life' effects the latter perfectly.

The other innovative elements - the use of one unbroken band on each side of the vinyl, the gatefold sleeve, the cut-out cards and the cheerily megalomaniacal cover by Peter Blake showing the Beatles surrounded by eighty-odd cardboard notables and a host of definitive sixties paraphernalia - all reinforce the sense that this is a breathtakingly original record, perhaps the single most inspired production in the world of recording.  Listening to it and sensing the feverish excitement of the 129 days that went into its making I find myself strangely excited too, filled with the happy hope that perhaps music like this could really change the world, making it a better, more loving place.  In other words I find myself living the 1960s for the first time.  Perhaps I need help. 

(14.3.92)

Index

Killing Murgatroyd

I remember well the day that I killed Murgatroyd.

He was in my class at school, and an avid concertgoer. The summer when I killed him he was often up at the Royal Albert Hall, a regular in the long queue for places in the Prom area.  One Saturday, he was absent from class.  We all knew that he was Promming again, even though his mother would write that he had been sick and unable to attend school that day.  At some point the form master asked "Where's Murgatroyd?" - and before I could stop the words, driven by who knows what adolescent impulse to tell a secret or simply to curry favour, I had blurted out "He's up at the Proms, Sir!" - and immediately wished that the earth would swallow me up as my schoolmates looked on with horror at what I had done.

I felt terrible at the time for having snitched - albeit involuntarily on a schoolmate.  But as with a hundred other experiences of childhood I learnt to live with it, and soon forgot it.

As I soon forgot Murgatroyd after I left school to go to university, and our ways parted.  We had not been particularly close, so when I heard a few years later that he had been killed in a car accident I naturally regretted his death but felt it barely at all.  I realise now that this was wrong.  Because in fact I caused his death in that accident.

When Murgatroyd came back to school the week after that Saturday, he was naturally reprimanded by the form master for lying.  An embarrassing moment for him, no doubt, but one that seemed to have to further serious repercussions.  Except that it led to his death.  Because by my thoughtless action I had changed his life.  Remove my words from that Saturday and you remove the knock-on effects on Monday.  And with a different Monday there would have been a different Tuesday, and so on all the way down to that fatal hour when he was killed in a car.  If the car had been a second earlier or a second later, would he have been killed?  Probably not.  So my words that day had led, slowly but inexorably, to his death, whose responsibility was therefore mine.

This, of course, is absurd.  My action may have changed Monday for him, but by Tuesday the ripples it sent out into his life were tiny. By Wednesday they were almost non-existent.  In terms of demonstrable causality, my actions could have had no direct effect on that last day of his life.  I am therefore absolved of his death.

Or am I? As we now know through Chaos Theory - which, however much it suffers from over-exposure, is a respectable mathematical technique with proven applications and dramatic consequences - the tiniest changes in a system may feed through to huge effects later on.  Although my faux pas that childhood Saturday may not have caused the accident, it did alter the world infinitesimally.  More relevantly, it altered Murgatroyd.  Had I not said those fateful words, his reaction at the time of the crash might have been sufficiently different that he would have lived.  In this sense, then, I did kill him, just as all of us have killed everyone who has died after we were born, simply by virtue of our world-changing existence.

(2.5.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - Maths, Murgatroyd And Murder

Index

The post-it modern age

Yellow is supposed to be the colour of madness; Van Gogh's colour, British Telecom's colour.  If this is so, then it seems that the world must be mad; everyone has taken yellow to their heart.  Wherever you go, you find them, these garish distinctive splotches of yellow.  They cover desks, walls, chairs, phones, books and paper like virulent algae.  Turn your back for a minute; and the place is infested.  It is the Dutch elm disease of our modern IT age.  It is the Post-it.

The Post-it seems to be the quintessential idea of the late eighties, one of those totally unexpected key new concepts which burst upon a culture and colonise it almost overnight.  They are distinguished from mere fads like Filofaxes by durability and universality; they transcend fashion and the concerns of any one group such as the yuppies.  They are not factitious crazes; to sell, they do not need manufacturers' massive hype like CDs, since they come complete with their own vacuum which they then effortlessly fill.  Most crucially, once introduced, life becomes unimaginable without them.  For an earlier example of a new and indispensable idea, consider the VCR; who today could envisage not owning and using one? 

Superficially, the Post-it offers few advantages over notepaper.  But ours is a lazy, style-conscious age.  Loose sheets of paper get misplaced; fixing them to memos with pins or paperclips works, but is inelegant – and quite inappropriate for more general note-making tasks.  Post-it scores by offering adhesion which is not only simple, but reversible.

By dint of its ability to stick more or less anywhere, a Post-it allows you to comment on anything.  This may take the conventional form of detailed notes on a document, where each Post-it refers to particular passages of the text.  More imaginatively, they can be used to comment on books, graphics, desk layouts, wallpaper, furniture and carpets - even to comment on comments.  Today, everyone has an opinion on everything, and the Post-it provides the perfect medium for adding your two penn'orth.

Even more importantly, it allows you to change your mind.  Unlike comments which are scribbled directly onto the material under review, Post-it notes can be removed.  In an age which is nervous about commitment, the Post-it provides the perfect escape: if in doubt, you simply take it all back – no tell-tale marks, no one any the wiser, no unpleasant consequences.

For the user, the Post-it note is an instrument of power.  Like the royal decrees which are sent forth throughout a kingdom, they become embodiments of their maker.  The more you comment, the more you extend your implicit jurisdiction, and the bigger your world becomes.  The little sheets of paper are bright yellow flags claiming an empire on the shifting atlas of reality.  They are signs to fellow imperialists: here I have been, they say, I exist and this is my proof.  And in a world which has been deconstructed into nothing but signs, where anything can be taken and made new by adding the slight but witty contextualising comment, what could be a more appropriate sign for today than the simple, spare, yet forthright post-modern conceit of the omnipresent Post-it? 

(17.10.87)

Index

Sign of the times

Whatever history's ultimate judgement on its value and ethics, there can be no doubt that one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the late twentieth century has been dealing of shares, commodities, currencies, and futures.  The sums involved can be so mind-boggling - more profits made in a single transaction than most companies will earn in a year - that it is little wonder that the power-dressing phone-toting dealer has become one of modern life's defining icons.

It is interesting to note, then, that the whole industry resembles nothing so much as a race among extremely powerful and fast sports cars driven by a team of myopics unable to see much beyond their nose.  For it is a fact that among dealers the ability to predict the future and hence make a consistent killing by wrong-footing the opposition has been abysmal. 

To be sure, whenever a major crash - or market adjustment as it is usually called - occurs, there is always someone who happened to move their funds to the right place.  But come the next crash, it will, just as surely, be someone else.  The stockbroking and forex firms are themselves acutely aware of this failure, and invest many billions of pounds annually in a desperate attempt to find some structure in the world and its evolution.  To do this, they employ the so-called 'rocket scientists', highly-paid mathematicians whose job is to find patterns in the churning figures of the markets and indices of the world, and to extrapolate those shapes into the future.  As companies realise that any fool can buy and sell, but that it requires a genius to know when and what, so these new high-tech haruspicators are rapidly edging out the simple sales people.

But the sad fact is that for all the former's regression analyses and best fits, for all their computer modelled economies and scenarios, they are as blind and unscientific as their predecessors.  Since they have rightly realised that they cannot understand the world they work in - it is simply too complex, too 'chaotic' as the latest buzzword has it - they are reduced instead to spotting trends in the past and hoping that they might continue into the future, as any amateur gambler might. 

In their own defence they might plausibly point out that if the world is completely deterministic - and as good rocket scientists they must indeed believe this - then everything in the future is completely determined by the past.  True, the formulae governing that evolution will be too complex ever to solve, but there remains the hope that there will be parallel patterns to be discerned, simpler, correlated manifestations of the same immense equation.  Their desperate search for patterns, faint shadows of the universe's hidden machine, is the best they can do.

Theoretically they are right: if the universe is deterministic, everything is part of a whole, and is subtly but irrevocably related to everything else.  But one might with equal validity argue that commodities and markets are related to things like the tides, or the stars.  The logical conclusion of the rocket scientists' work would therefore seem to be that they should be replaced with an astrologer.

(23.12.91)

Index

Popular fiction

The first stories were probably regarded as histories, fact rather than fiction.  Judging by the residues that have come down to us, they seem to have mostly concerned the gods and creation, and were therefore nearer explanatory natural history, or science, than consciously false fables. 

After the gods, the stories would soon have been of the great predecessors, the heroes and heroines down through the generations.  Almost by definition these would have been the kings and queens, and hence divine or semi-divine themselves, extensions of the pantheon.  These are the characters which live on in the literatures of the Heroic Age: the Greek princes at Troy, the Germanic Beowulf.

Two major developments then took place. First, the inherently subversive nature of writing meant that stories became increasingly democratised.  After the kings and queens it was the nobles who became the focus, even further removed from the divine than royalty.  And then finally mere mortals were granted the same privilege of textual apotheosis.

The second factor was a move away from the literal.  At first tales would have been attempts at factual reportage; then embellishments would have crept in, rhetorical flourishes to impress the audience, magnify the achievements.  One of the earliest examples is the Egyptian saga of Kadesh, the battle of Ramses II which was at best a draw and at worst a disaster for him, but which became in the hands of his gifted scribes a personal triumph for the king.  From such convenient blurrings it was only a short step but a crucial one to invent entire events, complete characters.  So the divorce between fact and fiction, real and imagined, began.

Over the centuries, that gap has widened. Writers seeking originality have created ever more striking characters in more extreme situations.  Initially the process was slow as fiction retained its pristine sense of discovery and audacity - being able and daring to create other worlds with words.  But as with all such processes, the need constantly to outdo predecessors, and to overtrump contemporaries has led to a gradual but unmistakable acceleration through the ages.  This century in particular has seen the boundaries of fiction pushed ever further - from the initial shocks of 'Lady Chatterly's Lover' and 'Ulysses' through to the more recent brouhaha over 'American Psycho'.

But something strange is happening.  Where before such books moved away from the everyday, now they find themselves being outdone by it.  When story-telling began, the world's population may have been less than a million.  Within each tribe, everyone was known and part of the community.  Today we are moving rapidly towards the ten billion mark, and people have never been so isolated.  Within that loneliness, society creates its monsters.  The fact is, there are now simply so many people in the world, and so many outside the process of socialisation and normalisation that some live out realities stranger than any imaginable fiction.  And so we have come full circle, with all of our writings, however extreme and superficially implausible now, nothing but histories of unknown characters, waiting out there amidst the people for their author to discover them.

(1.2.92)

Index

Pushing the envelope

For the digitally efficient late twentieth century, the letter is such an implausible artefact.  The to-do required to send it, the individual sorting, the hand delivery, the use of pieces of paper which actually have to be written in on some way - seems so primitive.  Which is probably why receiving one is such a joy.  We feel as the first kings and priests must have felt when a papyrus roll was sent to them; portable writing, whatever would they think of next?  And because letters are sealed, there is always that element of mystery, surprise, of limitless potential.  It may only be the gas bill, but it could have been the premium bonds.  And who knows? - tomorrow's post may bring a letter from a secret admirer.

Hard to believe, then, that the postman's knock was for many, until 1840, a thing to be feared.  Until that date and the invention of the postage stamp, it was the recipient who paid for the privilege of being sent a letter, an early and lightweight example of inertia selling.  Once Rowland Hill had the brainwave to charge the sender, the dynamics of the postal system were put on a proper, logical footing, and the service became popular and universally employed.

Today, there is a peak flow of several hundred million letters in the few weeks around Christmas.  Think of all that collecting and sorting and delivering; little of it is mechanised except for some of the sorting.  What is going to happen once this figure becomes a billion -  ten billion? Will the system be able to cope in its present form, or will it have to change utterly? 

The problem is that the amount of work involved in running a postal service increases with roughly the square of the number of users.  Treble the number of senders and you multiply the effort required by nine, because not only do three times as many letters have to be sorted, but they have to go to treble the destinations, which increases the sorting process slightly and the delivery process by a factor of nearly three.

As the world becomes a more closely-knit community, this dizzy growth will begin to occur.  Potentially there are probably already three or four billion letter senders out there; admittedly not all of them will want to send everywhere, but you can clearly foresee the day when the system cannot cope, when it is pushed too far by the sheer volume of letters.

The obvious solution is to replace mail with email, or electronic mail.  With this approach, letters and documents are held as computer files, and sent over telephone or dedicated lines as electrical impulses. They appear at the other end on a computer as the original file, and can then be printed out as 'hard copy' - a letter. 

For business, where speed and reliability is essential, this has to be the future.  But receiving from your loved one something as ghostly and evanescent as a file on your computer hardly has the same emotional impact.  It seems likely, then, that the letter and envelope will be with us for many years to come, even if their delivery becomes progressively more sporadic and delayed.  This might even add to the charm.

(28.12.91)

Index

If 'were' were a has-been

Newspapers are principally about communicating content, so we tend to overlook the specifics of their form.  For example, British broadsheet newspapers are made up of a dense patch-work of quotations, strung together with interconnecting phrases of explanation.  Seen under this rubric, they have the texture of a novel or a play, with a roster of rapidly-sketched characters who enter, have their say, and then leave.

Contrast this with a heavyweight German newspaper like the Süddeutsche Zeitung or the Frankfurter Zeitung.  There you will find far fewer direct quotations, and far fewer characters who introduce themselves; instead the texture is nearer to that of learned essay, with supporting citations reported as indirect speech - that is 'The minister said that he is in good health' rather than 'The minister said: "I am in good health." 

There is an interesting consequence of this approach. With indirect speech, German uses the subjunctive tense rather than the indicative.  In the example above, what would actually be written is 'The minister said that he be in good health' - where 'be' is the subjunctive form of 'is'.  The subjunctive is generally used in Western languages to indicate states of doubt, fearing, hoping and such like as in 'I wish that he were here.' 

So to read a heavyweight German newspaper is, because of the constant subjunctive state of the writing, to enter a twilight world of scepticism, where many things may be, but where nothing is absolutely certain - a neat expression of the inherent caution of good journalism.  It is something that equally rigorous writers in English must convey with clumsy phrases such as 'it is claimed' or 'allegedly." 

In German, the main use of the subjunctive is to convey indirect speech in this way.  The romance languages are richer.  Both French and Italian allow themselves to be far more susceptible to their emotions, and show it with their words.  When wishing or hoping or fearing the subjunctive is frequently used by them to convey what an uncertain world we live in.  But this is nothing in comparison to the Spanish language, which seems to live in a constant tremble of doubt about the solidity of facts and opinions.  Reading a paper like El País is to be borne on a mighty current subject to a constant ebb and flow of indicatives and subjunctives. 

Even the Spanish grammatical structure pales into insignificance compared with the ancient languages that have come down to us.  Latin and Greek use the different moods of verbs to introduce the finest linguistic gradations and distinctions into their prose and poetry.  It is almost as if down the centuries our perceptual and conceptual response to the world has coarsened and dulled, just as our ears gradually lose the ability to hear high frequencies as we grow older.  This is nowhere more true than for English.  Where a distinct subjunctive exists as in 'I was' and 'I were - it is now usually ignored.  To say 'If I were in London' means that now you are not, but are thinking about what would happen were; 'if I was in London' means that you are thinking about what actually used to happen when you were there.  To confuse them is to lose the ability to say something clearly, and hence even to think it clearly.  It would be a sad day if 'were' and its ilk were to become a has-been.

(22.2.92)

Index

At your service

The key word in business today is not quality or even price, but service.  And yet the first manufactured artefacts were entirely innocent of this concept.  They were usually produced by their future owner for themselves - a club or an arrow head - and service is always something provided for someone else.  It was with civilisation that objects first came to be made to command by specialised workers.  But even then the product was the service; no extra spice was needed to ease its consumption.

The Industrial Revolution began the move towards service.  Fundamental to this shift in manufacturing was the harnessing of mechanical forces: first steam power, and later electricity.  This meant that tasks could be carried out on a scale hitherto impossible, and the economies this brought meant big savings and lower prices.

Once begun, this drive towards cheap, mass production proved unstoppable.  Companies were forced either to join this mainstream trend or to specialise and become marginal.  Competition in the main arena of manufacturing became fierce.  As more and more companies reaped the benefits of mass production, so pricing became keener.  The key issue was how efficiently goods could be produced using the new techniques.  Technological advances meant that prices fell even as features were added; but because of the democratic nature of that technology - essentially available to everyone - the differentials in pricing soon became too small to be decisive in the marketplace. 

Over the space of a century and a half this led to an emphasis on quality for competitive advantage, and it remains today the dominant issue for production managers.  Given that prices of goods will be similar, concentrate on quality, is the theory.  The Japanese in particular made quality control the watchword in their factories, with well-recognised results.  But like price, quality is essentially driven by technology, and hence is readily transferable.  Now most companies are able in principle at least to match if not beat Japanese standards.

Hence the more recent move to service.  The cry now is that prices and quality may be the same, but the service - the extra, magical ingredient which comes with a product -  is not.  For a while that may be true.  But just as with price and quality, so service will in its turn be common to products, taken for granted, and varying little between competing goods.

So where next?  On the one hand there is the trend in the West to get out of manufacturing altogether as margins are squeezed ever thinner.  This has led to the rise of whole new sectors of business which produce nothing tangible, but work instead with information.  Significantly, these are called service industries, and are becoming increasingly important in the older economies.  But as far as manufacturing is concerned, perhaps the next move will be to completely customised products.  With the Just In Time and flexible production techniques of manufacturing now in place, it is possible to build almost to order.  Soon, you will probably be able to design and control directly from your home, via computer, the manufacture of any artefact, in any shape, colour or material.  Even an arrow head.

(26.4.92)

Index

Exponents

It was a Golden Age: the mid-'60s, the sun shining down on the smart little suburban cul-de-sac of detached houses and semis less than a decade old, the flowers growing in the front, the immaculate grass lawn at the back so long and so green under the massive, ancient oak-tree.   I was still at primary school, and had barely a care in the world.

And so it was one bright morning that I was doing sums, sitting in the front room with its smell of wax from the polished red tiles under the window-sill.  At some point my father must have looked on benignly, perhaps puffing on his pipe - for in those far-off halcyon days there were no cancers caused by smoking.  He noted perhaps how I was trying to multiply quite large numbers together, and not always successfully. 

"Here, have a look at this, son," he said.  And digging deep in his own childhood memories, and using an old book of tables from somewhere, he proceeded to expound the theory of logarithms.

They seemed to work in a mysterious way beyond the ken of the child: just by converting two numbers using the tables to these logarithms, then adding the latter together and looking up the answer in the same tables, you obtained the answer to horrendously complex problems.  This was real adult magic.  Soon, with his halting but essentially correct explanations of exponents and mantissas, I found myself master of this new skill. 

I have always been grateful to my father for passing on to me that knowledge, especially as it probably represented the limit of his mathematical education, and so possessed an almost symbolic value as a final gift from one generation to the next.  But I later found out that there was something rather disturbing about logarithms which my father had not told me - perhaps had not known, since it was a well-kept secret.

The rows and columns of figures to be found in log tables are factual and inarguable.  For a given accuracy every publisher's set of tables should be identical.  However, this being the case, there is no need for other publishers to go to the trouble of calculating their own; they could simply use everyone else's, which should all be identical. 

But they are not.  Precisely to prevent this occurrence, every set of log tables published differs very slightly from its rivals.  In this way a publisher can demonstrate conclusively if its numbers have been filched.  The consequence of this is shocking: every set of logs is wrong at some point - but you do not know where.  So it is possible that your crucial calculation - for a bridge, say - is wrong, simply to enable a publisher to claim copyright in its tables. 

When my father taught me about logs, I had not known that he was presenting me with a cankered rose, the mathematical equivalent of a tragic hero with a fatal flaw.  And I had not realised that logs were actually a paradigm for something far larger than numbers: the whole capitalist system, and its insouciant disregard for truth in the pursuit of profit.  An Age of Innocence indeed. 

(27.12.91)

See also Moody Sonnets - The Third Eye

Index

Techno-babel

One unexpected aspect of the introduction of microcomputers into the office and home has been the extent to which people talk to them.  Or rather at them: mostly the voices heard are raised, angry because of a machine's failure to do what was wanted.  The fact that the error is nearly always the operator's does not, needless to say, soften the words.

Imagine, then, what will happen when computers can talk back.  It can he done now, very easily - voice generation software and hardware are cheap - but what is still expensive and not totally reliable is the complementary voice recognition system to enable the machine to understand what it hears.  But high-power, low-cost versions will assuredly be with us before the turn of the century. 

Initially the options will be limited; perhaps the choice of a male or female voice, for example.  That in itself will revolutionise the way we use computers - and think about them.  Already there is a high degree of anthropomorphisation to be found - implicit in every swear-word we hurl in its general direction.  But once a micro gains a voice, and can decode ours, we shall start to see some increasingly weird 'puter-person relationships. 

But products will not remain at this simple level.  The micro industry being what it is, suppliers will rush to offer myriad programs and prostheses for adding that little bit extra to your system. For example, you will be able to make your computer frightened of you, whimpering submissively; or, if your tastes lie in another direction, it can become a real dominator/dominatrix from hell, endlessly excoriating your pathetic attempts at operation: "Call that a save command, you worm?" 

In short, voice capabilities will bring out all our hidden desires - and our worst aspects.  If we have sexist tendencies that we dare not express in real life, fine, let them lose on your customised computer; fear a particular ethnic group? - easy, put them your machine and watch them grovel.  Fancy the boy or girl next door? - no problem, just tape his or her voice and your micro will soon be sighing sweet simulated nothings.

The general-purpose micro will turn us into petty, selfish dictators because it is infinitely adaptable and eternally complaisant.  In other equipment, voice-controlled mechanisms will be much more limited, and so will affect us somewhat differently. 

For example, it will not be long before this technology gives us ovens that will tell us how much longer a dish needs cooking; washing machines that warn of incipient breakdowns, and fridges that beg to be defrosted.  Soon, then, the modern home could be filled with a veritable cacophony of chattering half-brained computers - far less intelligent than the standalone machines.  They will be tiresomely literalistic, and lack a sense of humour completely; like small, whining children, they will be constantly competing for our attention.  Amidst the growing din of this techno-babel we may find ourselves looking forward even more to having a good, long chat with our sympathetic and understanding micro. 

(26.12.91)

See also Moody Sonnets - So, What’s Next?

Index