Blogging is a vain activity. In both senses of the word. We bloggers are often asked “why?” As my own blog is given over to frivolity at present, let me take the last chance before handing James his keys back to give my answer here. At least my answer for today.
With our companions in life we play the fool, the villain, the romantic lead. We progress to the meatier parts of maturity, until - if we are lucky - we play our Lear and exit. In the meantime, we become typecast. We play to our “type”, however far it may stray over the years from our inner voice. That’s fine on a stage or in a book. All creativity proceeds from an essential truth to a crafted set of gleaming lies. But must there be so much play-acting in life?
Millions, God help them, live without hearing truth spoken, still less speaking their own. Lies - mostly white and petty - are the fuel of human organisations. They spray lies through carburettors of convention and politeness.
Cynical old hacks in every organisation flaunt the conventions slyly. Having believed successive generations of contradictory untruths, they lose the ability to adjust. But even they, except between each other, must pretend to believe.
When a black lie is told, however, these gentle conventions can prevent us from challenging or even detecting it. For how many years of Blair’s premiership, did he have the benefit of the doubt? Though the man was plainly dishonest, his office protected him. He was able to tell the “big lies” that history shows are much easier to pass off than the small ones.
Thus liars prosper. Often the truth is only told in jokes.
I want a space, however small, which is unencumbered with the conventions of my everyday life; somewhere I can tell the truth as I see it. I was so enraged in 2005 by the Prevention of Terrorism Act (and even more by its slavish acceptance by media and addled masses) that I felt I had to speak; however hopeless the cause.
I continued because I found it therapeutic. It gave an outlet for my frustrations. Then the comments began and I realised I was not alone. The comments led me to other blogs and to a new sense of community. I have friends “out there.” It was weird, but I soon became accustomed.
That community became the purpose. Blogpower is part of it. I smiled at the simplicity of it to begin with, but James had really had a great idea. Ellee and Welshcakes provide insights into other worlds from mine, as do Lord Nazh and Ruthie. Blogpower brought shades of grey (and not just Shades of Grey) back to a life which - in my political rage - had become too black and white.
The good news is that there are are people out there who long to tell their truths; great and small. Meet them in their everyday lives and they would be playing their parts. We would not really know them. In a sense, they would not really be them. As bloggers (particularly anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers) their inner voices speak.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
ANOTHER EPISTLE
It is a truth universally acknowledged by women d'un certain âge that intelligent, decent, heterosexual men in their forties and fifties do not usually come in single packages. It is another truth universally acknowledged that when they do, they want twenty-something trophies who can reproduce, not bright, witty, kind women of a like age with whom they could actually have a conversation. Readers of my own blog will know that I am an addict of the BBC Radio 4 soap The Archers and a few years ago the story line seemed so ridiculous to me that I wrote the following epistle to its editor:
UPDATE: I'm rather glad I didn't take Alistair under my wing now, as he has become a rather sly character who gambles away the family silver. But so would most men, if they were married to Shula!
I only posted this because it's gone quiet over here!
Dear Ms. Whitburn,
Yours sincerely,
UPDATE: I'm rather glad I didn't take Alistair under my wing now, as he has become a rather sly character who gambles away the family silver. But so would most men, if they were married to Shula!
I only posted this because it's gone quiet over here!
[lost for words] don't stop yet!
I would like to thank all who contributed guest posts during my time away [which hasn't actually finished yet, in an oh so Russian way].
I also wish to thank all those commenters who added to what turned into a mini-festival. I'm gobsmacked at the quality and before you say "he would say that" - actually he wouldn't if he didn't think so. He wouldn't say anything about them at all.
But they were excellent.
I had no idea what would happen and to the commenter who thought it was in order to "up my stats", I can say with a completely straight face that that was the furthest thing from my mind. I confess I thought that if I invited 32 guest posters, if even half of these contributed, then there'd be a pretty interesting read for people.
It has been a fascinating read [I've now finished them all] and there is a favourite post or two but I'll keep that to myself.
What I think might be an idea in the long term future is to run a three day festival, say quarterly and invite certain people to post on certain days. No one would know when someone else would appear. Or else everyone would know - it would be scheduled.
But that gets into the Carnival idea which I'm not crazy for as I think the "made to order" post always lacks something unless the blogger is lucky enough to already have the idea half formed in the mind.
I must confess that when I'm asked to guest post, I always fear that I won't do justice to the blogger who invited me. One of our guest posters felt this and Lady MacLeod replied to her, I think correctly:
[Y]ou are a modest woman of excellent manner, however the above statement says more about our judgement than your modesty. I have a touchy trigger on this subject (we all have something), but I was given this lecture when I was quite young - the example being if someone tells you are pretty or smart and you say "No, I'm not." you just called them a liar or a bad judge of what is; how much better to duck your head and just say "Thank you." :-) there I'm done, I feel all better.
Now as to this EXCELLENT post m'lady……
I see guest posters as putting up pieces they might not normally get around to on their own blogs but the most important thing is that they must be left free to post virtually whatever material they wish.
Awards madness continues
Anyway, to those who posted from the 18th to the 29th inclusive and also to former guest posters, for you is this little award from me if you'd like to have it. Many, many thanks. Now there's one condition attached to copying and pasting the award - you must NOT embed a link directly to my blog but rather to your own guest post.
Similarly, for those who contributed more than one comment during this time, this award is for you and along with it also go my thanks.
Silent invisible readers
MyBlogLog clearly shows [haven't checked Sitemeter yet] that many people came in many times just to read and to you - if you'd like to use the second award also, I'd deem it an honour.
If you're interested, these were the stats I had up to Tiberius' problems with the words "aisle":
Guest Posters
L'Ombre [4]
Shades of Grey [3]
The Last Ditch [2]
Sicily Scene [2]
Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe [2]
Nobody Important [2]
Buckeye Thoughts [2]
Ruthie Zaftig
Commenters
lady macleod [7]
jmb [6]
Matt [5]
Colin Campbell [5]
mutleythedog [4]
Delicolor [4]
Mr Eugenides [3]
Ruthie [3]
FlyingRodent [2]
Tin Drummer
I'm not really back yet. Tomorrow is a pretty Russian day with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and so I probably won't post until late tomorrow or Saturday. The flat looks like new and in the process I've been lucky enough to score two new cleaning ladies who will keep it that way. They've just shown their wares now, we've come to an agreement and they've departed for the evening along with the other three ladies.
Oh, I forgot to mention that my cleaners are 37 years old [i.e. their ages add up to 37].
More tomorrow. Please don't stop posting until the 29th is well over. Pretty please?
Gordon Brown take heed
A warning from the Adam Smith Institute Blog that Westminster isn't quite the desirable area it sounds:
By the way, it may be Gordon Brown's dream home, but Downing Street is in a seedier area than folk imagine. In a council house just over the back fence lives an extended family run by a grumpy old woman who keeps a pack of fierce dogs. Her husband makes racist comments and a local shopkeeper says he murdered his son's girlfriend – but the police do nothing. Most of their kids have broken marriages, and their grandchildren are always out clubbing. They all live off the state, and every day the papers are full of their excesses. Who'd want to live near Buckingham Palace?
(Crossposted (and heavily pruned with the ofensive stuff about the outgoing Prime Minister removed) from ShadesBlog
By the way, it may be Gordon Brown's dream home, but Downing Street is in a seedier area than folk imagine. In a council house just over the back fence lives an extended family run by a grumpy old woman who keeps a pack of fierce dogs. Her husband makes racist comments and a local shopkeeper says he murdered his son's girlfriend – but the police do nothing. Most of their kids have broken marriages, and their grandchildren are always out clubbing. They all live off the state, and every day the papers are full of their excesses. Who'd want to live near Buckingham Palace?
(Crossposted (and heavily pruned with the ofensive stuff about the outgoing Prime Minister removed) from ShadesBlog
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
How to spell aisle?
A minute ago I was correcting an article on Bits of News about the recent defection of Quentin Davies MP from the Tories to Labour- its a political event which has some fleeting importance. But anyway in writing this, at one point too insignificant to mention I used as a verbal flourish the word aisle- but in my folly spelt it isle instead of aisle. Its a brief incident but as I corrected it I began to think- why had I got it wrong and why hadn't I noticed it when I wrote the original article last night.
The thing is that isle and aisle actually sound exactly the same- the thing about my writing and I don't know whether this is true for others is that as I'm putting these words down on the screen I am sounding them in my head. You are basically receiving an internal monologue- with full stops. So my mind guides me to write phonetically what I should write. That's not quite true though- take the word phonetically- I actually should write that fonetically were I writing phonetically- so its a little more complicated than just that my mind is transposing the sounds I hear in my head direct to the page.
What its actually doing is a feat of translation- there isn't a one to one correspondence between a letter and a sound- the letter e for instance can sound as it does in does, between or even isle where its silent. Rather my mind works with groups of letters, for some reason I have recorded in my brain that the letters g r o u p sound out something that phonetically might be spelled groop- its like a piece of coding that my brain automatically uses to refer to the sound I am making internally in order for your brain to make the same sound internally as you read what I've written. (I don't know about you but as I read I speak the words inside my head that I am reading.) Despite the fact that my fingers are tapping particular keys what I'm actually doing is writing whole words- groups of letters which signify various sounds in my head.
One of the interesting things about this though is that that's not quite how it works- if it were so I wouldn't know how to pronounce a new word that I'd just come across- all of you would know roughly for instance how to pronounce the word pasot though it doesn't exist in English and that's because what our minds are doing is stepping between two sets of signifiers- one is the set of letters, a b c etc, the other is the set of words that we remember where each letter changes slightly its basic meaning. The problem is that definitely in my mind I infer a logical relationship between the letters and the words- I infer that if there is a word I can't spell then I should by logically combining letters be able to spell it.
I think that's the reason I struggled with aisle this morning- because what afterall is that a doing there- doesn't add anything to the sound that isle doesn't already give you. Its silent. The odd thing about it is that at the same time I didn't wonder about the s or the e at the end of the word which also are behaving in peculiar ways- but you see my mind had remembered that the chunk of letters isle were sounded in a particular way- it hadn't remembered the a. I often have this- the word what for instance quite often causes me confusion- because again my mind loses its database of words and tries to combine the letters to get to what- and realises that the logical combination of letters isn't the combination that English actually uses.
The way that letters and words relate strikes me as a fascinating insight into the way that systems can almost but not entirely map onto each other- in a sense if I can be even bolder today its a useful analogy because as words relate to letters, to concepts relate possibly to the data that we receive. Again the data that is contained within a concept ought logically to add to the concept but one of the key lessons of life is that that isn't true- that concepts map indirectly and inaccurately onto the world- that the ideological equivalent of that a in aisle exists.
Ultimately we use words to sort the world, and indeed to sort letters into groups- but those groupings whilst not arbitrary don't neccessarily relate to the logical combinations of the definitions of the letters- the sounds are not neccessarily reflected- its interesting to consider language because I think it reveals wider epistemelogical problems- afterall why is there an a is aisle- there is no a-ness about it- nor is there a p-ness about what that p is doing in phonetically- they are both historical accidents not neccessary conclusions of the arrangement of the language.
And to prove my point I'm sure I've made tons of spelling mistakes in the above!
The thing is that isle and aisle actually sound exactly the same- the thing about my writing and I don't know whether this is true for others is that as I'm putting these words down on the screen I am sounding them in my head. You are basically receiving an internal monologue- with full stops. So my mind guides me to write phonetically what I should write. That's not quite true though- take the word phonetically- I actually should write that fonetically were I writing phonetically- so its a little more complicated than just that my mind is transposing the sounds I hear in my head direct to the page.
What its actually doing is a feat of translation- there isn't a one to one correspondence between a letter and a sound- the letter e for instance can sound as it does in does, between or even isle where its silent. Rather my mind works with groups of letters, for some reason I have recorded in my brain that the letters g r o u p sound out something that phonetically might be spelled groop- its like a piece of coding that my brain automatically uses to refer to the sound I am making internally in order for your brain to make the same sound internally as you read what I've written. (I don't know about you but as I read I speak the words inside my head that I am reading.) Despite the fact that my fingers are tapping particular keys what I'm actually doing is writing whole words- groups of letters which signify various sounds in my head.
One of the interesting things about this though is that that's not quite how it works- if it were so I wouldn't know how to pronounce a new word that I'd just come across- all of you would know roughly for instance how to pronounce the word pasot though it doesn't exist in English and that's because what our minds are doing is stepping between two sets of signifiers- one is the set of letters, a b c etc, the other is the set of words that we remember where each letter changes slightly its basic meaning. The problem is that definitely in my mind I infer a logical relationship between the letters and the words- I infer that if there is a word I can't spell then I should by logically combining letters be able to spell it.
I think that's the reason I struggled with aisle this morning- because what afterall is that a doing there- doesn't add anything to the sound that isle doesn't already give you. Its silent. The odd thing about it is that at the same time I didn't wonder about the s or the e at the end of the word which also are behaving in peculiar ways- but you see my mind had remembered that the chunk of letters isle were sounded in a particular way- it hadn't remembered the a. I often have this- the word what for instance quite often causes me confusion- because again my mind loses its database of words and tries to combine the letters to get to what- and realises that the logical combination of letters isn't the combination that English actually uses.
The way that letters and words relate strikes me as a fascinating insight into the way that systems can almost but not entirely map onto each other- in a sense if I can be even bolder today its a useful analogy because as words relate to letters, to concepts relate possibly to the data that we receive. Again the data that is contained within a concept ought logically to add to the concept but one of the key lessons of life is that that isn't true- that concepts map indirectly and inaccurately onto the world- that the ideological equivalent of that a in aisle exists.
Ultimately we use words to sort the world, and indeed to sort letters into groups- but those groupings whilst not arbitrary don't neccessarily relate to the logical combinations of the definitions of the letters- the sounds are not neccessarily reflected- its interesting to consider language because I think it reveals wider epistemelogical problems- afterall why is there an a is aisle- there is no a-ness about it- nor is there a p-ness about what that p is doing in phonetically- they are both historical accidents not neccessary conclusions of the arrangement of the language.
And to prove my point I'm sure I've made tons of spelling mistakes in the above!
The Latin
Whenever I hear the word Latin, what springs to mind is a British comedy sketch.Beyond the Fringe was a stage review put on by four young Brits (Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Peter Cook) for a few years in the early sixties. It is considered the forerunner of the British TV shows like Monty Python's Flying circus. This Wikipedia article gives you the whole story.
For the fans of this type of British humour, who couldn't attend the stage productions, a vinyl record was produced and we listened to it eagerly.
To my mind, one of the best skits was by Peter Cook, called Sitting on the Bench. He played a coal miner regretting the fact that he didn't fulfill his ambition to become a judge. The sketch is very funny, but best summed up in these sentences. "Yes, I could have been a judge, but I never had the Latin. I never had the Latin for the judgin'."
Well I had the Latin. In my high school we all had to have the Latin, well at least for the first year. But I loved the Latin, I don't know why. Somehow it appealed to me, the orderly sense of conjugating verbs and different cases for nouns. Almost mathematical in its orderliness. We all hated the teacher, Miss Simons, with a passion. She was a cranky old unmarried teacher (probably still in her forties, I was only 12 after all) handing out detention left, right and centre, making you copy out a vocabulary word 20 times if you missed it in a test. This only happened once to me, let me tell you. But she couldn't deter me. She was my Latin teacher for 5 years, and I even took Latin honours for matriculation. I still insist it was probably the most useful subject I ever took in high school.
When I went into Pharmacy people said to me, well aren't you lucky you have the Latin. Huh? Even in the fifties the Latin had almost disappeared from Pharmacy. It was easy for anyone to learn the few expressions left, although those with the Latin knew exactly what the abbreviations meant, for example: bid (bis in die - twice daily) or prn (pro re nata -literally for the thing that is born, or as necessary).
The next use I found for the Latin was in gardening. When you are looking for a specific plant you can't rely on the common name, since the common name may refer to three different plants, depending on the region. On the other hand, one plant may have three different common names. Consequently you need to use the Latin name. Indeed, it has been a great asset to me in all the garden clubs I've belonged to over the years, with those long botanical names rolling off my tongue.
So you see I could have been a judge. I wasn't, but I could have been, because you've got to have the Latin for the judgin' and I definitely had it.
This is a bit of past whimsy from my blog.
The next use I found for the Latin was in gardening. When you are looking for a specific plant you can't rely on the common name, since the common name may refer to three different plants, depending on the region. On the other hand, one plant may have three different common names. Consequently you need to use the Latin name. Indeed, it has been a great asset to me in all the garden clubs I've belonged to over the years, with those long botanical names rolling off my tongue.
So you see I could have been a judge. I wasn't, but I could have been, because you've got to have the Latin for the judgin' and I definitely had it.
This is a bit of past whimsy from my blog.
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