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Recently I came across hard copies of all the unpublished essays, each of which is exactly one page long.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
Random experiences 11/04/87
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

The aristos

It is a common childish conceit that we are royal foundlings.  That we were stolen away from our natural blue-blooded parents by gypsies, and grew up amidst alien corn, barely enduring the grossness of our foster-parents who dare to call themselves our mother and father.  Perhaps this is just a natural reaction to the sheer contingency of life; not so much why me? as why them?  We try to imagine how our lives would have been if we had been born to someone else - blissfully unaware of the contradiction which lies at the heart of these speculations. 

Recently I have experienced once again this bridling at the petty constraints imposed by the given contours of my life.  Although I should hasten to add that this has not been directed against my parents. It has to do with my intellectual genealogy.  This differs from the purely genetic form in that we can shape and alter what we are mentally, to a certain extent at least.  And we must therefore bear responsibility for what we have become from what we were. As far as our chromosomes are concerned, we are absolved.

These thoughts have been prompted by reading Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Aside from its own very studied intellectuality, which seems to call across disciplines from practitioner to initiate, its harping - anachronistic in fact - on the Greek learning of the fourteenth century re-awoke in me my feelings for that language.

It is some five or six years since I learnt and read Classical Greek.  Stumbling again, painfully, through some easy Herodotus was like entering rooms kept locked for years, blowing away thick cobwebs from the furniture which began once more to evoke memories of happy, earlier times.  As my mind got into the very particular and wonderful grove of the language, I felt an old power begin to surge through me.

As each ‘men’ was answered by the ineluctable ‘de’; as each meticulously plotted tense change moved along the sentence; and as each constructed word unfolded before me, its components fitting together like an intricate mechanism, and yet with a freshness and pristine beauty of language which we have lost many years ago, I felt that same sudden, childish pang which most of us felt at some time in our earliest years.

I felt as if cast out, and stumbling upon a never-forgotten inheritance.  It was like finding an ancient sword and shield, dull and lustreless, but demonstrably part of an older, nobler order which was once yours.  As I traced the steely-sharp logic of that language which is built for discourse, and as I crawled along the mental assault course for which I was now so unfit, I realised what I had left behind.  I had forgone - or so it seemed - that perfect clarity of vision, that sense of the horizon which had once been a constant part of my life. I felt beggared. 

But all was not lost. In discovering what I had loosened my grip on, I also discovered what I once had.  Like a child who has found incontrovertible proof - a royal birthmark, say - of superior origins, I had found my own mark: of intellectual aristocracy. 

(10.9.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - “to proto alouminocarto”

Index

Vinyl virtues

Apparently the coming thing is DAT - Digital Audio Tape, which will kill off compact discs, the present coming thing.  I can't say I care much.  For me there is only one medium for storing music: the 12 in. LP.

This is not through any neo-Luddism.  Few love technology as much as I do.  A strong argument could be made for regarding technology as the dominant intellectual endeavour of our era, over all artistic activities which once represented the cream of our civilisation.  It is simply a case of irrational gut reaction.

What could be more improbable than the LP?  A piece of black plastic, flexible, fragile?  And the method of recording? - a groove whose walls wiggle for some 2000' of a single spiral.  It is so primitive it attains the kind of grandeur found in attempts to climb Mt. Everest without oxygen, or to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a reconstructed coracle. 

Perhaps it is something akin to tenderness: the medium seems to be vulnerable, and its offering such an achievement in the face of almost insuperable obstacles.  In fact it is a miracle that the level of sound reproduction can be so high; it says much for the associated machinery as well as the surprisingly resilient nature of this medium.

Perhaps I am also attracted by the physicality of the LP. There is nothing quite like it in shape: perfectly round, thin, black and elegant - the ultimate after-dinner mint. Handling them, gingerly, reverently, you have a sense that this is a special object.  Somehow it seems to speak of civilisation, the denial of petty difficulties by human ingenuity.  In comparison compact discs are footling things, poor little slivers, without mass or solidity.  As for the mundane practicality of tape…

En masse, LPs gain even more in grandeur.  Serried ranks of their slim forms speak eloquently of the sense of collection.  Their shape means that they can be stored very efficiently; it is possible to have hundreds, thousands even, placed side by side to give a kind of massive, grouped effect.  Possessing them, you feel that you really have the music they contain in a very literal way. 

On second thoughts, perhaps I welcome the latest round of technical innovation.  At the moment, the LP is king; vast quantities of music are available on them.  Soon, however, it will be merely a quaint curiosity, a collector's item requiring specialised equipment like the 78.  At the moment the universe of LPs is still expanding, indeed the choice is almost embarrassing as record companies dig ever-deeper into repertoires to find unrecorded works.  Soon this will be a thing of the past as the new technology begins to colonise the old territories anew.

As we are put back at square one in some respects, with a smaller range offered in glorious, garish technicolour, so the old LPs will acquire a new-found worth.  As their rarefied contents become more and more prized in comparison to the faded favourites on compact discs and digital tape, so the world will come, like me, to love the LP.

(25.9.86)

Index

Consumption

In the nineteenth century the trendy letters were TB: tubercle bacillus or tuberculosis. If you had any pretensions to being artistic, you had it.  Today the letters are TV; television.  If you have any pretensions to be politically correct, you watch it.  Both fashions arose from false syllogisms based on snobbery or its inversion.  In the nineteenth century the reasoning was that great artists had died of TB, so having TB - or appearing to have it - made you a great artist.  Today the logic is that TV is the medium of the masses, so watching TV, or appearing to watch it, makes you one of the people.

Society's name for TB was consumption, because the disease seemed to eat away at sufferers, visibly sapping their strength.  The wan images of dying artists that resulted from this helped feed the idea that they were not of this world, that they were only visitors, that the act of creation used up their vital force, consumed them through the agent of disease. 

TV might also be called consumption.  It is clearly consumed; night after night, hour after hour, it is eaten by its viewers.  But it is so insubstantial, so unsatisfying, that they must soon come back for more.  As for the abuser of alcohol or drugs, the users of TV soon habituate, soon need ever greater doses to satisfy the raging monsters of desire within them. 

One of those monsters relates to a different kind of consumption.  For TV's principal content lies in its endless parade of consumer products that the viewer consumes.  Today it is not just in the impossible worlds of soap operas that objects are more important than plots or people.  Films aired on TV are frequently partially funded through the new technique of product placement - the guaranteed conspicuous use of some consumer item - a watch, a car, a soft drink - with no relevance to the story, but there simply to sell, to 'shift product'.  Most recently in the UK we have seen entire programmes sponsored by companies; in the US this is rife, with every conceivable slot now tagged and tinged with a company or its goods.  TV as the ultimate in conspicuous consumption - what could be more conspicuous than on the screens of a million homes? 

But this is not the worst type of consumption involved.  Most viewers doubtless think that they are consuming the programmes - TV's overt product; the wiser among them might realise that they are also consuming the products placed within this product.  What even they do not appreciate is that the TV is in fact consuming them. It is eating up their lives through the wasted hours they spend staring at it; it is gnawing away at their minds with images and ideas it tosses there, and with the messages and desires it buries there.

In this respect TV is truly the heir of TB.  But with the difference that TB was seen - however fancifully - as a price paid for something worth having in return: creativity.  TV, by contrast, is an illness without recompense; it takes and gives nothing of value.  Except, perhaps, a condign punishment for an insatiable consumer society which finds in it a very different kind of maw.

(28.12.91)

Index

Police Aware aware

A few years ago I was driving down in the West Country, the first time I had been there for a while.  At one point I notice that there was a car by the side of the road.  Nothing odd in that, except that it had a sticker on it: 'Police Aware', it said.  A little later on the same journey I was surprised to see a second car off the road, this time in a ditch.  It too had this mysterious sticker.  I was even more confused to see yet a third car later that day, also off the road with the same sticker.

I thought to myself: one car off the road marked in this fashion is clearly an accident; three of them can only be art.  I remembered reading about one of the artist Christo's latest ideas.  Bored with wrapping up entire buildings and bridges across the Seine in plastic and ropes, he had progressed to constructing hundreds of miles of giant metal sunshades along American and Japanese roads.  Could this be something similar? I wondered.  Some local exponent of this large-scale art? 

But no, it seemed unlikely.  Perhaps the explanation lay in those mysterious words 'Police Aware'.  Was this some phrase in the local Devonian dialect, the equivalent of 'Police Awa' in Scotland?  Was it some terrible West Country imprecation that had so disequilibrated the normally mild-mannered Bobbies in their patrol cars that they had forced off the road the three cars I had seen?  But this too seemed unlikely, not least because there were no obvious scratch marks down the side of the bodywork - the customary hallmarks of automobilic self-wounding, analogues of the mysterious bruises which spontaneously appear on prisoners in custody. 

The common feature of a sticker with the words 'Police Aware' suggested some kind of fraternity. Perhaps hereabouts there was a club of drivers intensely aware of the Police - so aware, so worried, in fact, about the possibility of transgressing the Highway Code in some way that no less than three of them had driven off the road in sheer panic at the sudden awareness of the propinquity of Police, cars, and driving.  Or perhaps the 'Police Aware' signs were cries for help: look, they seemed to say, we are incapable of driving, we are liable to career off the road at any moment.  And indeed, they had done so.

The idea that the words were apotropaic, designed to ward off the Police, was also attractive.  After all, it was quite true that I saw absolutely no Police around any of the cars that had gone off the road, so in that sense the stickers seemed to work.  But following on from this thought, I had a brainwave.  There could be another reason that the Police were nowhere to be found at the scene of these accidents: the stickers meant that in fact the Police themselves were aware of these cars, and had left their marks there to indicate that they already knew as much as they wanted to about these incidents, and had no intention of doing anything more, thank you very much, so would the public be so good as not to bother them further.

At last I felt that I was there, I understood.  But as I drove past my fourth crashed car marked 'Police Aware', inspecting it with a certain satisfaction, I nearly joined it as I luxuriated rather too fully in this new 'Police Aware' awareness and forgot to look where I was going.

(15.3.92)

Index

In security

Every lock, by definition, must have a key, which allows its rightful owners access to the thing locked.  But after locking, there is always the danger that the key could be lost, rendering the lock worse than useless.  Worse, because the lock would not just be inoperative, failing to keep out the world as it should, it would now be turned against its very owners, refusing to acknowledge them, refusing to open.  This is the Paradox of the Lock: that by using it you may one day have it used against you.

 
The obvious remedy is to keep a spare key, separate from the first. But where? If it is kept too conveniently near to the lock, it can be found by others who will use it to open the lock.  If it is too hard to find, or too difficult of access, the lock whose main key has been lost remains effectively closed to its rightful owners.  A compromise avoiding these two pitfalls seems hard to find.

Nor is this problem one that is likely to disappear, germane only to an older society where locks played important practical and symbolic roles.  As our cities become ever more threatening, and the countryside more touched by the city, more and more people will turn to locks - several of them - and will be faced with the Paradox of the Lock several times over. 

We might look to technology to resolve this dilemma, replacing the crude mechanism of turning wards with silent, incorruptible silicon in the form of computer-controlled doors with secret passwords.  But there a different conundrum awaits us - what might be called the Pitfall of the Password.

A password is a word or phrase or collection of letters and numbers known only to you.  It is used to activate certain processes within a computer that has been set up earlier to recognise you through precisely this password.  The temptation is to choose a password that is easy to remember - your name, for example.  Except that anyone trying to gain unauthorised admittance to your computer could easily guess this.  So you may try something more obscure, something that no one else could guess.

But by definition 'obscure' in this context means not obviously connected with you.  Which means that the link between you and the word is necessarily tenuous - and hence eminently forgettable.  Just as before, the key can always be lost - but now mentally.

Once again, the solution is to keep a separate record of the password.  But as with the second key, this cannot be too near to the machine - because it will be found - nor too distant, otherwise it is effectively useless.  This is the Pitfall of the Password.

Perhaps, some might argue, there is hope beyond the physical key or the abstract password.  Perhaps a computer could be trained to recognise you just as your friends or your family do - from your face or your voice.  Although this technology will soon be with us, it does have one serious flaw.  Choosing these manifest characteristics is like brandishing a key in public, or giving the world hints about your password; it makes forgery much easier.  Ironically, the homely key, for all its problems and paradoxes, probably offers more security.  Hang on to it.

(27.12.91)

Index

Like a virgin queen

Few would dispute that Madonna is the key cultural icon of our times.  The material success of this material girl speaks for itself: her earnings are already over $100 million, and there is no reason why she should not go on to become the first pop billionaire.  Her standing with the audience is also not in doubt: as the sales figures indicate, people keep on buying her singles and albums, which almost invariably reach number one on both sides of the Atlantic.  And the public seems to love her as much for her flouting of taboos as for her fabulous tunes.  More remarkably perhaps, her favour with the critics is also not in question: her lyrics are endlessly analysed and explained by commentators and academics, and in them are found and applauded trenchant critiques of modern hypocrisies.

But it is because of her ability to tap into so many powerful currents that course through the body politic - and her knack for channelling them into a form that gets that body on to the dance floor - that her real importance lies.  In one of her key songs - 'Get into the groove' - she manages through a disco beat, matching cavernous acoustic and an unrelenting bass riff to forge the tangled worlds of love, sex, desire, music, fantasy and power into an irresistible pop anthem.  In it, she demands that we prove our love by getting into the groove of today, the groove of the music, the groove of the record, her groove.

And yet this remarkable woman seems trapped by her own success as a myth-maker, even by the power of her hits.  Her unbroken public success seems horribly mirrored by persistent personal failure.  After the public failure of her famously fraught marriage, her subsequent liaisons have either been hopelessly self-promotional, strangely furtive, or simply gossip-column fantasies.  One of the richest people in the world, totally dominant within her sphere, and often projecting through her songs an image of a confident woman both sexually capable and demanding, she now finds herself conspicuously and ironically alone.

Much of the problem lies with society's inability to cope with the reality of the strong woman: it has so few precedents and models.  Indeed, it is probably necessary to go back to someone like Elizabeth I to find Madonna's equivalent if not equal.  There, four hundred years before, was the same imperiousness, the same power, the same steely will to succeed, to be better than a man - and the same loneliness, the same inability to find a match.  There was even the same shadowy, haunting figure of a mate found then lost: The Earl of Essex, perhaps Elizabeth's one love, a love she herself had to destroy because of his chronic stupidity.  Madonna may not have executed Sean Penn, but his subsequent remarriage seems to have been for her another kind of irrevocable death. 

It is hard to know what will become of Madonna.  Icons do not age well, and today's consumer society has a callow bias towards youth which may in due course rob her of her power over it.  Perhaps she will marry again - anyone, almost - marry to have a family while she can.  But perhaps she will find another way forward, staying alone except for passionate affairs accepted as always to be doomed, remaining aloof, regal, another wise, sad but mighty Virgin Queen, untouched since that very first time.

(18.1.92)

Index

Entitlements

Giving things their due title and place seems important in the German language. For example, native speakers have a strict set of rules to determine the order of words in a sentence.  Thus verbs not used in imperatives always come second - preceded or followed by their subjects according to what comes first - except in subordinate clauses where they come last, and their subjects come first after the conjunction.  Misplacing them or any other word is a solecism that goes beyond the merely grammatical and borders on the social, an affront to logic and Germany.

No wonder, then, that the Germans set great store by honorific titles.  If you have them, you do not choose one, but use them all.  Thus exotic beasts such as Frau Doktor Doktor Schmitt are not just possible but obligatory in Teutonic circles.

No wonder, either, that by contrast in the understated world of hints and irony inhabited by the British, titles are regarded as rather pompous and self-promoting.  Most German managers have a doctorate in something, and bear it proudly like a blazon; in the United Kingdom only academics ever bother brandishing them, and even then there is always a suggestion of a desperate - and forlorn - bid for respect.

Ironically the one title that is universally acknowledged in Britain is the medical doctor.  Ironic because it remains a courtesy title, used without justification, unlike the official but almost universally ignored doctorate of the PhD.  And there is another such curiosity within the medical profession.  Once someone becomes a Fellow of the College of Surgeons, he or she is entitled - as a privilege - to be addressed henceforth not as Dr, but Mr, or any of its feminine equivalents. 

Nor is this the only example of the Briton's love of a subtle rhythm in the ebb and flow of honorifics.  At one level they can be used to indicate degrees of recognition.  Referring in a conversation with a third party to 'Smith' on its own would suggest - if no value judgements were involved - that the name is more or less unknown to the speaker and possibly the audience too.  'Mrs Smith', on the other hand, implies a recognition by at least one of the parties.  Beyond this lies 'Smith' - pronounced very slightly differently - who is somebody famous, or at least a woman known to all concerned, and needing no further introduction.

When recognition is not an issue, there is another set of many-layered niceties in the play among 'Smith', 'Mr Smith' and the first name - John, say - which are indicative of the speaker's opinion of that person. So, for example, in the mouth of a Briton, nothing could be more scathing than the heavily emphasised 'Mr' of 'Mr Smith'.  In comparison, 'Smith', is almost studiedly neutral. 'Mr Smith' - spoken without acerbity - represents a more respectful salutation, while 'John' implies familiarity, a friend or colleague.  Then comes 'Smith', as in 'I saw Smith today' – a jocular and affectionate way of describing a good friend, or a close colleague.  Beyond these lie impossibly subtle gradations and alternations of all three, used by only the most intimate of family, friends and lovers.  But we are not, of course, entitled to discuss them here.
 
(26.12.91)

Index

Dust to dust

"Dust: you've noticed, haven't you, how you just can't seem to get rid of it?  No matter how hard you try, no matter how often you clean - and you do clean, because you look after your house - it just seems to keep on coming back.  But have you ever asked yourself where it comes from?  Because, you know, the answer is surprising. Once you know where it comes from, you realise what it is.  And once you know what dust really is... 

Did you know that most dust is dead human skin?  That's why it keeps coming back, just as if it were growing - because it is.  Or rather somebody else is growing it for you. How does it feel to have somebody else's dead skin in your home, in your kitchen, in your bedroom, falling onto your loved ones, into their hair, into their eyes, into their mouths? 

But it's not only dead skin from humans.  Dust is dead skin from mangy dogs, from dead birds, from infested rats in the sewers.  It's a billion dead flies and maggots and lice, it's all the disgusting sweat and filth and ordure and vomit that animals and insects excrete and spew out every day of their lives - and it's right here, in your home, now.  How does it feel to be surrounded by all that dirt, to be eating in it, sleeping in it?  Don't you desperately need a vacuum cleaner - at this very instant?"

The door-to-door sales pitch is very persuasive.  After all, the dust is demonstrably there - they will gladly demonstrate - and they're right about the skin: a high proportion of dust is old human skin, though mostly yours, probably.  So perhaps you should buy that vacuum cleaner...

Before you reach for your chequebook you might like to cast your mind back to one of those hoary old chestnuts beloved of maths and physics masters at school.  The one about calculating how much of Julius Caesar's dying exhalation is in each breath you take.  You may recall that it turns out that you have about a million molecules in common.  And yet that figure never worried you, did it? 

So was it simply that as the dying breath of an emperor, his molecules were somehow acceptable?  Of course not: the point is all molecules of a given type are by definition the same.  Whether you breathe in some of the last gasp of Julius Caesar or of Adolf Hitler - as you are also doing - makes not the slightest difference. 

And so it is with dust.  By the time whatever dust was before it became dust passes into that state it loses its particularly identity - just as Julius Caesar's breath does - and becomes an anonymous chemical.  To be sure, it can still cause problems for people with allergies, and it can still contain noxious substances.  But it is on these objective grounds that we should worry about dust, not on emotional ones about its origin.

We should see dust as something that we have in common with everyone and everything else in the world, rather than grounds for a futile attempt at apartness.  Dust unites us through its origin - it comes from us all; in its impartial generosity - it goes to us all; and in its all-encompassing nature - it is us all, and we are it.

(24.12.91)

Index

Real Virtual Reality

So I was really going to try it.  I had known about it for a couple of years, and even written about it way back then.  Later, when all the style magazines caught on, and after them the trendier supplements and then finally the heavyweight daily press and television, it had all seemed rather stale, rather passé. But able to wangle a private demonstration of one of the few Virtual Reality systems – or VR as it is known to initiates - in the country, I was still disappointingly excited.

After a short pretence of being interested in the technology - an Atari PC with 'secret' graphics boards at its heart, and magnetic sensors within a ring to detect arm movement and body and head orientation - rather than mad-keen to experience the personal reality, I finally allowed myself to be plugged in.

Even before you sample VR itself, the associated accoutrements make you feel that you are strapping on the twenty-first century.  A chunky black belt goes around your waist, a neat weapon and motion unit in your hand, and a monstrously cybernautic helmet on your head.  Cables are fed from the helmet and the gun to the belt and thence to the processor inside the circular podium, from which issue struts to support the nearly-closed ring of magnetic detectors at waist height. 

As you put on the helmet you see two small colour LCDs - miniature screens - which gradually coalesce as your eyes refocus to give you stereoscopic vision.  Before you is a strange geometric world: five chessboard areas, the central one lower and connected to the four surrounding boards by rising stairs.  In each area there are rows of brightly coloured pillars.  As you turn your head you can see all around you; if you look down you can see your feet.  You move through this world by pressing a button on the handheld unit.  Your virtual heartbeat quickens, strange sounds disturb you.  Beyond the edge of the chessboards lies the blackness of infinity. 

Avoiding a fall over the edge is the least of your worries: for in this world you are being chased by a maniac with a gun - a virtual enemy, but one quite able to blast you into virtual death.  This is spectacular, and results in your being spread thinly over this tiny universe.  Happily, you are granted a virtual resurrection to live on and fight back.  And as if this were not enough in this nightmare world, there is also a pterodactyl - well, there would be - which swoops down upon you, seizes you, rises and then drops you to another spectacular virtual fragmentation.

Although movement and reaction - and hence survival - remain difficult, accepting this garish, violent world as totally real is not.  The graphics are good, and the speed of response of the system excellent.  This and its successors will doubtless prove totally addictive.  Unfortunately my own experience of VR was spoilt somewhat be two factors: first, the sharp pain I felt from having the helmet jammed down on my head inexpertly, and secondly, my abiding consciousness that I was wearing all this kit and ducking and weaving like a maniac outside the Rock Garden in Covent Garden, in full view of the gawping and guffawing public.  So for me, it was virtually Virtual Reality, but still not quite the real thing. 

(8.2.92)

Index

When Greek meets Greek

There have been strong and mutual links between Greece and Britain for many centuries: from the visits of the more adventurous Tourists in the eighteenth century, through Byron's gallant if quixotic efforts to expel the Turks in the nineteenth, to the respective armies fighting alongside each other during the Second World War.  There is also a close parallel between the way in which the Greek Empire and its artistic and philosophical achievements were assimilated by the Romans in the last years of the pre-Christian epoch, and the similar take-over of Britain's imperial role and cultural assumptions by the Americans in the 1950s. 

The two peoples also have much in common linguistically.  Greek obviously has the more ancient literary tradition, but English can trace back its roots to an equivalent epoch.  The language of Homer, probably dating from around 700 BC, though treating of events five hundred years before, is essentially that of a heroic society of warriors who were primarily concerned with matters of war and its contingent conflicts of love and honour.  In Anglo-Saxon there is the Beowulf epic, composed around 750 AD, but located in the fourth or fifth century AD, which deals with precisely these same themes.  Indeed, even the poetic technique used by each – the so-called oral-formulaic approach of set, almost cliched phrases woven together to form a new and brilliant tapestry - is identical. 

Thereafter the trajectory of both languages is remarkably close.  Both became subject tongues: Greek became the secondary language to first Latin and then later to Turkish, while English was subsidiary to the Anglo-Norman spoken by the invaders of 1066.  The effect of these centuries-long subjugations was the same; both languages lost much of their original complexity as the ruling classes, hitherto the guardians of correct morphology and grammar, switched to the speech of the conqueror. 

Partly as a result of this erosion, and partly through the increased importance of the accented syllable, English reduced most unaccented vowels to the 'schwa' sound; so 'photographer', becomes 'fuh-tog-ruh-fuh’.  Modern Greek has analogously reduced many of its vowel sounds to that of 'ee'.  One language is now full of thuds, and the other of squeaks.

Modern Greek does, however, differ from English in one crucial regard: a few years back the decision was taken to 'simplify' the spelling by removing most of the ancient accents, reducing them to just one.  Logical enough in the sense that nothing was lost in terms of pronunciation.  But as the recent uproar over the proposed simplification of French orthography showed, language has little to do with logic.  Rather, it is an organic record of a speech, of a nation; in its crazy, archaic forms it presents fossils for us to recognise and admire. The fear must be - as the French rightly feared - that fiddling with the orthography would eventually lead to one of those emasculated factitious spelling systems periodically proposed by various do-gooders and cranks.  Greece's misguided simplification of its accents might be just the first step along this slippery road to deracination.  Let us hope that in this respect at least, English does not follow suit, and that if any attempts are made to do so, that there will be a suitable tug of war over our words.

(25.12.91)

Index

The discreet charm of Perrier

What is it about Perrier that accounts for its fizzing success? Why does it seem to be on the lips - and in the mouth - of practically every yuppie around?

For aesthetes, there is the clear attraction of the bottle.  Not since the first introduction of the Coke bottle has a shape so impressed itself on a generation and summed up an era.  Its lines are smooth and unhurried, with a classic amplitude which reminds you of Rodin, a delicacy of curve that is positively Brancusi.  It could almost be a Greek artefact, miraculously preserved in some southern French port after a long journey from Neapolis.  It is the embodiment of the Platonic essence of bottleness; as such it deserves no less than to be the carrier for the essence of liquidness: water. 

But perhaps that water is more central to its appeal than its form.  In fact it goes some way to negating the studied artistry of its container.  On the one hand, you see the ultimate in artifice, a bottle which somehow represents the summation of the bottler's art, a lifetime's - perhaps a chain of lifetimes' - experience refined and solidified.  On the other we have the simplest compound in the world - water.  Tasteless, odourless and colourless, it is utterly self-effacing.  It is almost a rebuke to its bottle.

But the power of the imagery of water is too strong; even a beautifully gross encapsulation cannot dim its bright purity.  And this is what the punters are buying: they are purchasing a symbolic purification, conveniently sold in bottles.  It is a token of their own rarefaction, of the fact that they are not constrained by gross mortal needs.  No vulgar sticky Coca Cola for them. Each cool green bottle bespeaks a moral refinement, a self-control, attained only by the chosen.  It says: "See, I have chosen almost nothing; so subtle are my tastes that I can derive pleasure even from this." 

Perrier is the ichor of the bronzed gods and goddesses who live and die by the Nautilus machine.  It argues the same rigour, the same sense of sustained self-improvement and maintained asceticism as gritty physical exertion and tight-kneed celibacy.  It is a statement about the depraved and corrupt times in which we live, and in which its drinkers have no part save as wiser and happier onlookers.

But where water on its own would be passive, and quite out of sorts with the dynamism which lies at the heart of the near manically active yuppie.  Perrier has a further attraction, which is at the same time its own emblem: effervescence.  It is nothing, mere invisible gas.  It is a mysterious quality, only released when the bottle is opened.  It is the ultimate metaphor for its consumers: people who pre-eminently fizz.

However, like all great and deep trends, the pursuit of Perrier contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.  Lately we have witnessed the ultimate perversion: flavoured Perrier.  It could well be that the languorous tear-shaped bottle becomes a fitting memorial too.

(30.6.86)

Index