Missed getting wet at last weekend's WOMAD festival, listening to the highlights now on replays of the BBC's Late Junction show.
A Latin lesson for a friend
omnibus = for everyone; ignoramus = we do not know
So, not being nouns in Latin, they don’t form plurals ending in -i. You might say, “omnibi are for ignorami”.
There are English speakers who decline to decline English nouns, whether or not they came from Latin. Two mathematicians, invited to attend “a series of colloquia and symposia dealing with some well-known conundra”, replied we are not going to sit on our ba and do sa.
Long hours of programming over the weekend yielded two hours in Starbucks yesterday with the August issue of Prospect. Lots of interesting pieces: under WTO trading rules rich countries screw the poor. Poor Bangladesh notoriously pays as much duty on its exports to the US as does rich France. Vast US and EU farm subsidies block our markets to poor overseas producers. So scrap WTO and globalised trading rules? Not a bit of it says Kevin Watkins, head of research at Oxfam: the WTO’s multilateral rule-based trading regime has teeth and is infinitely preferable to the network of bilateral trading agreements that the US would otherwise impose.
Trade issues dwarf all other aspects of development. If we want poor countries to thrive we should buy their products. The WTO next meets at Cancun, Mexico, in September. Pray that the organisation does not wind up as marginalised as the UN.
Also this month: Aidan Foster-Carter on the coming fall of North Korea (I used to live 60 km from the border); the US and the EU compete for affection in south-east Europe. One of the most interesting ideas to emerge recently from the radical centre was Ackerman and Alstott’s proposal that we give every young adult a substantial ‘inheritance’; Samuel Brittan reviews the UK’s modest implementation of this.
Saw Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine last night. Though I’m not finding Stupid White Men as funny as its cover thinks I will, Moore’s dramatisation persuades me of the importance of Glassner’s Culture of Fear analysis. In the movie, Moore observes that Canadian politicians talk funny; he misses the combative rhetoric of American leaders. The US has its War on Drugs, War on Poverty, War on Terrorism; Canadians just have programmes and policies, and leave their front doors unlocked.
One good turn gets most of the blankets. Is age too high a price to pay for maturity?
Miki Yamanouchi arrived back in town yesterday, bringing a superb egg-custard tart from Bangkok patissier ka-nom in a box marked eggs-pert eggs-tarts eggs-press. Delicious!
» Ka-nom, 266/8 Siam Square Soi, 3 Rama Road, Pathumwan, Bangkok; phone +66 (2) 252 8520.
do what you can for them — how they need you! — and party on
from the Radio Times 10-16 May 2003; sadly, the writer is unidentified in the clipping I saw
Save the best till last How the young do dread old age! I can’t think why. Of course, it would be nice in some ways to be young again: to have long, smooth legs, no stiff joints when you wake, to be eyed up by the opposite sex and to be able to leap from a low sofa without thinking about it, but these are fleeting and trivial advantages.
Pity the young — don’t envy them. How they observably suffer, from social embarrassment, panic attacks, indecision, pimples, they’re miserable in love and anxious out of it, can’t bear being alone, they need drugs to get them through the day, let alone the night. Their powerful reproductive passions keep them short on self-determination, free will and moral choice. They can’t keep their relationships going — they must always be after something better around the corner. They lack the wisdom and conviction of experience.
We who are older know that people are not just bodies: they are minds, spirits and souls as well. People love you and you go on loving them, whatever your age. Friendships get stronger; so does the entertainment value of the world around you. The coachload of Saga tourists is having a better time and better conversation than the young couple off on holiday with the kids in the car, obliged to play ‘I Spy’ to get a little peace.
Old people, too, fall in love. I was once called in off the street to witness a wedding between Buttercup (third time around) aged 92, and Walter, bachelor, aged 87. It’s true that when they said, “the bride will now stand”, we had to help her up, but stand she did, and kiss the groom she did, and as they left, back to the retirement home where they had met, he said, “Now they’ll have to give us a double room.” Life stops when you want it to.
Odd how the young want to deny the old the rich pleasures of the present. They think sex is only for the youthful and the beautiful. (Are they mad? What do they think they look like when they’re at it, with their pimply backs and crimson faces, without the benefit of lighting and expert cameramen?)
But then the young have a vested interest in keeping the old neat and tidy and under control. No new bathroom extension, thank you very much, waste of money; no new partner — God forbid, the will might be changed; no luxury holiday up the Nile, might be dangerous, and how much? Let the old fight back, say I, and spend and live as they want, remembering how bad inherited money is for the character.
The young sometimes seem to want to terrify the old out of their wits, presenting old people’s homes as dens of misery, neglect and vice, where the toothless are tormented. It is true that sometimes horrible things happen, but they do anywhere, and certainly money must be spent and care must be taken.
Yet on the whole the staff of old people’s homes — my mother passed away in one recently at the age of 95 — are kind, lively and interesting, come from many cultures and have a genuine and reciprocated concern for their patients. The knack, I always thought, was to move into a retirement home earlier than family, friends or doctor would advise, so that fresh friendships can be formed and new interests acquired, until this world does indeed begin to close in and one quietens down in proper preparation for the next.
But that can be decades on. In the meantime, as I say, pity the young, do what you can for them — how they need you! — and party on.
After a day cutting code, rolled out my bicycle to see a movie in Muswell Hill. Perfect summer weather had given way to the beginnings of an electrical storm, and I doubted the wisdom of crossing the ridge of Parliament Hill as clouds growled above me. But the shower passed, I saw the movie and rode home over the Heath as the crowds were leaving the Music on a Summer Evening concert at Kenwood House. A friend has borrowed my car to take his son camping. Good to be back on a bike.
He was not one of those fortunate people whose anger refreshes and stimulates them. Bruce Bannerman’s transformation into the raging green giant Hulk is a disturbing reflection of America in the 21st century.
Bruce Bannerman’s transformation into the raging green giant Hulk is a disturbing reflection of America in the 21st century
He was not one of those fortunate people whose anger refreshes and stimulates them.
Robertson Davies
Leaven of Malice
You are nothing but a husk, a wisp of consciousness, waiting to be swept away by the real person within, the hero’s father tells him. Earlier, his foster mother put it less dramatically, telling him as he sets out to college that she is sure “some kind of greatness” would emerge from him.
The hero is Bruce Bannerman. The greatness that emerges from him gives his story its title: Hulk. Hulk is an enraged green giant, not the least bit jolly. Bannerman’s transformation into Hulk is triggered by anger, so Hulk always appears raging against his enemies. In the recent film, he rages to spectacular effect under Ang Lee’s direction, throwing cars and bursting through walls. When attacked by four M-1 tanks, he picks up one by its gun barrel, spins and hurls it away like a Highlander throwing the hammer, then demolishes the second and third with a gun turret torn off the fourth. Refreshing and stimulating.
Dr Bruce Bannerman is not one of those people Robertson Davies describes “whose anger refreshes and stimulates them”. Nor is his love interest, Dr Betty Ross. Both (as played by Erica Bana and Jennifer Connelly) have the tightly wound, intense look and restrained movements of melancholics. At the beginning of the movie Bannerman has recently broken up with her; she attributes this to his difficulty in expressing, or even experiencing his emotions, and urges him to loosen the tight rein he keeps on them. Be careful what you wish for.
Of course, what emerges when the reins do slip is the green-eyed monster. Not Jealousy, but Rage Incarnate. Each time, Hulk emerges from mild-mannered Dr Bannerman, it is in response to bullying and intimidation. It doesn’t take Bannerman long to catch on. You’re making me angry, he warns a baddie, You might not like me when I’m angry.
Bannerman likes himself angry though. He confesses to Ross after a green episode that when he’s Hulk he feels strong and free. Of course he does. It’s anger’s job to mobilise the body for conflict. It’s a huge rush, and some people get addicted to it.
Ironically, Bannerman is freer than Hulk. Bannerman enjoys the ordinary freedoms of the man who is seen as no threat. Hulk attracts the enmity of those who guard the state’s monopoly of violence.
Like Rambo and King Kong, Hulk plays to a Good Joe fantasy of the peaceful man pushed too far. To his credit, Ang Lee has made another delicate and evocative action film. But its appearance at this time has disquieting reverberations.
Hulk is disquietingly close to America’s fantasy about itself: the good guy pushed too far. The movie revels in the rage of the quiet man, the worm who turns. Tellingly, despite the ordnance turned on him, in this Good Joe fantasy the green giant’s violence is never lethal. He hurls characters through walls; they merely show up later bandaged and limping. A soldier is seen climbing, shaken but unharmed, out of the tank in which he has just been hurled a mile through the air. Hulk knocks helicopters out of the air, and their stunned pilots stumble away from the wreckage. The only damage done is to dignity and offensive power; the enemy is humiliated and disarmed. Does any of this remind you of the spin from Iraq?
Of the world’s ten biggest military establishments, America’s is not only the biggest, but gets more money lavished on it than the other nine combined. There is no precedent. No other nation in history has enjoyed such supremacy.
There is a comic-book element to this. In 1938 Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster produced Superman for DC Comics. He was invulnerable and invincible. All he needed was an opponent dangerous enough to require the exercise of such powers. Over the years he got what he needed: a parade of superhuman villains and super-villainous humans. Of the latter, we celebrate Lex Luthor, the archetypal Bad Egg, who likes to make money being mean and sneaky, but will settle for just being mean and sneaky.
America’s superhuman opponent, the Soviet Union, folded its tents in 1989. The American military budget might have shrunk then, as Americans enjoyed the ‘peace dividend’. Not so; it went from strength to strength. All it lacked was a plausible opponent.
Until Al-Qaeda came along. For all the ferocity of its real attack on the World Trade Center, and its reported hidden networks of well-funded subversives communicating through encrypted emails, Al-Qaeda has failed to strike again. Lex Luthor remains in hiding.
Meanwhile the green giant rages, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, and is now rolling its eyes at Syria.
I can think of good reasons for storming into the Middle East to ‘clean up Dodge City’; though I haven’t been able to think of any good enough to warrant actually doing it. Blair and Bush managed to find one: they assured us we were in imminent danger from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That didn’t seem very likely, but, heck, they were supposed to know, given those expensive intelligence services. Now it turns out to be hooey, and worse, hooey that had been exposed as hooey before it was used to justify an invasion to us. Now it looks like the intelligence six months ago probably said the same as the UN weapons inspectors: Hussein was not an imminent danger to anyone but Iraqis.
So we must have invaded Iraq for some other reason.
It’s chilling to find that the US and UK governments can take us to war without letting us in on the reason. There are ample precedents, as anyone who has reviewed the origins of World War I knows. I had supposed, after all the examples of recent history, such a thing could no longer happen in the western liberal democracies. Naif of me, it turns out, as perhaps I should have understood from exactly those historical examples.
The West won the World not by not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations: And The New World Order
While we persist in seeing ourselves as Good Joes, we license and justify rage against the world. In doing so, we nurse a dangerous addiction.
The words of Bruce Bannerman’s father haunt us. You are nothing but a husk, a wisp of consciousness, waiting to be swept away by the real person within.
Welcome feedback: software developers’ newsletter Java Today features my article on requirements specification as a Wittgensteinian language game and attracted some comment.
» Java Today Ignoring Requirements
I gotta use words when I talk to you
T.S. Eliot
Last week I refused to sign a requirements specification document. It caused a small stir, because the developers were sure I had to approve it before they wrote any software for me.
The meeting had been running for half an hour before one of the analysts blurted out the question she’d come to get answered. She pushed the document across the table to me and looked me in the eye. “Is it complete?” she asked, “Is it correct?”
“I’m sorry, have no idea,” I answered, and paused. The project manager eyed me thoughtfully. “We only just issued it. Perhaps you need more time to read it carefully.”
‘‘I have no intention of reading it carefully,’’ I replied, ‘‘If I knew enough about mainframe interfaces to verify that this is correct and complete, I wouldn’t need you guys.’’
The document described how they would meet my requirements with the resources of the mainframe system. To tell the truth, it described the design, not the requirements; there really was no point showing it to me.
But something needed to be done to address the analyst’s concern. I said, “We’ve worked together some hours on this. You know the business and what we’re up to. It looks like you’ve put a lot of work into this. The conversations we’ve had leave me with a lot of confidence that we’re going to get useful information from the interface. You should go ahead and build it.” I turned to the project manager. “That reduces but doesn’t remove uncertainty about whether this is complete or correct. That’s why we’ve planned this in two passes. We could do enough analysis to remove the uncertainty entirely in one pass. But that would tie up your system experts for weeks and months rather than days.” He paled, and showed me the title page of the document with a list of names and spaces for signatures. “I still need an approval.” I agreed to send him an email repeating what I’d said.
I spoke to him again a week later. He’d completed his list of signatures, except for mine. The list included the manager of the business unit, and his manager as well, neither of whom had any IT skills.
I wondered what it all meant. The front page looked like evidence that the signatories had approved the contents of the document. In a weak sense, that was true. No signatory objected to the work going ahead. In this sense, it was like the part in a wedding where anyone who knows any reason why it should not proceed is invited to speak up “or forever hold your peace.”
But in a strong sense, it was plainly false. Only the analysts and the programmer could do more than skim it. As communication between analyst and programmer it was fine. To the rest of us it communicated only that the analysts had done some work.
It reminded me forcibly of the times I’d seen a business manager invited to approve a thick document containing a formal description of ‘his requirements’. In my experience, the manager always signs it.
There is always something to be learned from looking carefully at such ceremonies. Why would he sign it?
Consider first his direct relationship with the document. Nobody imagines that he has been sitting up nights, reading the thing in bed. He might dip into it and find a description of some detail of the system. If it is as he expected, that will encourage him. If it’s not, he will challenge it. He might find he’s caught the team out, and if so he should send it back for review by his people, for the chances of him casually spotting an error should be small. More likely he will hear that, in order to achieve some desirable effect, the detail was done this way rather than the way he would have expected it. He doesn’t have all the details.
He doesn’t have all the details. Of course he doesn’t. Naturally, he expects his people to have been through all this. So he approves the specification, and allows his money to be spent writing software, not because he can see it describes what he wants, but because his people tell him it does. (Even the features he hasn’t thought about.)
But this just shifts the epistemological problem to his people: how do they know it describes what they want?
Here things look a bit more hopeful. They have been working with the analysts for some time. That’s exposed them to the world of systems-think. So they’ve been thinking and talking for some time about imagined systems. Doing this with analysts is different from doing it among themselves. Analysts have a vocabulary for the job. Their vocabulary allows them to identify familiar components in the requirements and to abstract from them. It also helps them to make discriminations and distinctions important to the programmers.
Working with the analysts, the business people acquire some of this vocabulary. They get some fluency in describing the imagined system. Features that are at first awkward to describe acquire familiar tags. Freed from the tyranny of detail, they are able to participate in discussions of process, more confident of the context of the conversation, of what is and isn’t assumed.
Distinguish two modes of reading: understanding (U) and analysis (A). An Arts graduate will have done most of his reading in mode U. This is how one reads novels. Mathematicians do most of their reading in mode A, toiling over individual lines of proofs.
But these are not individual Arts and Sciences modes of reading. Arts and Sciences both use both modes. A paper in experimental psychology can be read mostly in mode U, but the experimental design and the discussion of results must be read in mode A.
Some texts can be read in either mode; consider a poem or a philosophy paper. I once had a five-thousand word essay to write on three paragraphs in the Parmenides; that required mode A reading. Business people use both modes; tabulated reports must sometimes be skimmed, sometimes scrutinised.
A formal requirements specification can be read in either mode, but it can be verified only in mode A. This is the habitual mode for analysts, and the only mode for programmers. Part of the value of the document lies in its being complete in certain formal senses.
But do the business people ever read the requirement specification in mode A? Do they study it, constructing it in their minds as a mathematician constructs, examines and tests a theorem?
Not a chance.
So how can they tell their boss to approve it?
It’s the conversation. They’ve spent weeks or months in conversation with the analysts, answering questions, getting answers to their own and solving problems together. Because of this, they have confidence in their impression that the analysts understand what’s wanted, and that the document records the results of their work.
In effect, they’re telling their boss These guys now understand what we want; we should have them build it.
Notice this. Any fluency that the business people gained in the analysts’ vocabulary was a real help, possibly an indispensible help, in working with them. But it didn’t have them read the specification in mode A. That was never going to happen.
Here’s the inauthenticity stated baldly.
The development process pretends that the business people use the requirement specification to confirm that the analysts have grasped what they want. But that’s not true. The business users don’t rely on the requirement specification to tell them this.
So what do we rely on?
It’s the conversation. In long conversations about our business and the imagined system, we had the experience of being understood. That — more than anything else — tells us we can rely on their work. Without it, we’re not approving anything.
What gives us the experience of being understood? How do we know the IT people are, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, people “I can do business with”? It’s simple to say, hard to analyse: they speak our language.
Consider someone learning to speak, say, Italian. We can distinguish different levels of competence in speakers, from my toilet-and-restaurant Italian (which suffices for holidays, thank you) to the ability to speak like a native. The test for the latter is something like the Turing Test. If an Italian can’t tell Italian isn’t your first language, you speak Italian like a native. For other levels of proficiency, there are other tests, written and spoken.
A test looks like this. You get to write or speak the language in response to some question, and the examiner judges how well you use it.
In this light, most disciplines look like language acquisition. When I read for a degree in psychology I read books and went to lectures to discover how the language of psychology is used. I attended tutorials and wrote essays to practise my new language. And when I was examined, I sought confirmation that I was using the language correctly and effectively. In effect, I was joining a linguistic community, the psychologists, and the requirement for membership was their acknowledgement that I speak their language.
What can we learn, and what practices borrow, from thinking about requirement specification as language acquisition?
If I am going to pay you to write software for me, you have to speak my ‘language’ well enough for me to have confidence in your work. How do I know that you do? Not from your requirement specification document. If I spoke Italian and you German, that would be like you producing an Italian-German dictionary to demonstrate that you have learned Italian. If I don’t speak German, your dictionary doesn’t tell me anything.
No, I will judge your competence in Italian by how well you speak Italian.
So, the requirement specification doesn’t do what it’s said to do. It does document the analyst’s understanding of the requirements, but it doesn’t demonstrate to the users that he’s understood them.
If you are the business manager, and you want to reduce your uncertainty about the analyst’s work, what can you do? Informally, you can talk to the analyst and gauge for yourself how well he speaks your language. Taking him to lunch and chatting about the business might do nicely. (For the record, I like Italian food.) Informally, you can ask your people if they have the experience of being understood.
But if you wanted formal evidence that your requirement has been understood, you would not look to the specification. You would borrow a practice from language acquisition. You would set an exam.
The higher the analyst’s score, the likelier it is that he has got it right. There would be standards. A fail mark would show that he does not yet know enough about the business to specify the requirements.
If you were a project manager and wanted to assess the solidity of a requirement specification, you could do worse than set such exams for the analyst and the business user. You would set an exam on the business for the analyst (get the business people to write it) and for the business people on some of the distinctions of software specification and development — if they haven’t picked up anything about that, there’s something missing in their communication with the analyst. The product of their competency scores in each other’s language should predict the stability of the requirements specification.
It is a privilege to learn a language
a journey into the immediate
Marilyn Hacker
Wittgenstein has much useful to say about this. He showed in Philosophical Investigations how it is in the nature of languages that they are acquired through use not study.
The language game we are considering has two parties simultaneously learning each others’ language. What can a project manager borrow from language acquisition to improve results?
I know eight European languages with varying degrees of competence. I learned English first and know it best. Danish is probably my ‘second’ language, though I learned it fifth. I learned it in six months, while living in Copenhagen, and I learned it at KISS faster than any previous language and better than any but English. Twenty years after I left Denmark, my Danish is still usable.
The key, well-known to language learners, was immersion: practice and feedback. The teaching was divided into intensive two-week courses. Each course comprised six lessons on alternate weekdays evenings. Each lesson set enough rote-learning homework to occupy the following evening; the next lesson rehearsed, corrected and exercised what we had learned. Feedback every other day, the language spoken all about me, and more feedback every fortnight: a course not mastered had to be repeated.
Contrast this with my experience of learning Latin. I learned what Latin I know through studying it as a ‘dead’ language; there is no community of competent speakers to join, no feedback. The small Latin I know is a meagre return on five years of study.
Consider the extent to which systems analysis resembles the study of a dead language.
A project manager who knows this will arrange for business users to sit with the analysts rather than meet them from time to time. He will also arrange development in as small increments as he can manage, to provide feedback on their learning.
Extreme Programming (XP), fiercely focused on communication, makes the most radical moves in this direction, replacing formal requirement specification with always-available face-to-face communication between users and programmers. Analysis gets dropped as a distinct phase and merged into programming. Working software provides the feedback to programmers and users on how well they are understanding each other. XP relies on ‘steering’ through feedback; and the best feedback comes from delivered software.
Treating requirement specification as a Wittgensteinian language game leads you towards practice and feedback, towards XP. In my view, working code is the best evidence a business manager could ask for that his requirements are being addressed.
But if I had to ‘sign off’ a requirements document, and needed evidence of its quality, the lesson I’d draw from Wittgenstein would be to ask my people and the analysts to set each other exams to demonstrate competence in each other’s language.
A good soaking rain at last to end the heat wave. And I've installed NewsGator, a news aggregator. If this works well, I'll look at what it takes to feed 5jt.com as XML through an RSS feed.
Hot weather at the Royal Horticultural Society flower show at Hampton Court Palace. My mother has been staying with me so she can visit the flower show. My experience with gardening is that stuff dies, so displays of plants and deftly designed gardens don’t engage me. When, in thirty-degree heat, we found the BBC’s tiny water garden, with shade, cushions and a small swing laid out over a pond, it looked like the perfect place for an afternoon’s reading.
Steven Spielberg captures it so well: our image of the Good Life centres on a loving family. Arguably, our politics reflect our different presumptions about how to map that to civil life. Or perhaps, how to recover in adult society a remembered or imagined happiness. Pinker reminds us of the lessons of evolutionary psychology: that families encompass real conflicts of interest, between siblings, and between parents and children.
If communication helps to reduce conflict, it isn’t because conflicts just conceal misunderstandings. Where interests conflict, resolution needs some larger context in which the combatants share an interest. In families, the family itself is so prioritised, by culture and by inherited behaviours.
Sisters of Mercy Other groupings present themselves as extended families to adduce for themselves the priority we innately give to family. Brothers in arms, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Family of Man; liberté, egalité, fraternité; blessed are the cheesemakers. (If the purpose is to control conflict, brotherhood naturally figures more prominently than sisterhood.)
Without an overriding common interest, communication has nothing to offer.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel Fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of Creation.
Douglas Adams · The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Killing one’s adversary is the ultimate conflict resolution technique.
M. Daly & M. Wilson · Homicide, cited in Pinker
If we’re going to have peace in the Middle East, we’re going first to find interests in common. The more I learn about what happened there over the last century or so, the more challenging a task that seems.
We could start by identifying and acknowledging why we (Britain and the US) invaded Iraq. We can now be confident it wasn’t for the reasons given so we voters so could approve the expense of blood and treasure. It was some other agenda. But what that was remains a matter for speculation.
I suspect that the deception is of the kind we practise on ourselves; we deceive ourselves about our motives to preserve our manifest sincerity as Good Joes. Tony Blair is the poster boy for Sincerity. When we start telling the truth to ourselves about our motives, we can start dealing with the consequences. I shall have more to say in this line later.
One of the pleasures of working at home in summer is breaking in the afternoon for a swim in Hampstead Pond. Pictures by Miki Yamanouchi.
Gates of Eden Julian Jaynes speculated in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that schizophrenics’ auditory hallucinations — hearing voices — are the remnant of a once-universal internalisation of authority that broke down in the second millenium BC, and that from this breakdown arose our subjective consciousness; that is to say, our experience of ourselves as actors with free will. On his view, consciousness is more recent than literature, and he traces its emergence in the books of Homer and the oldest parts of the Bible.
Consciousness emerged in suffering with the disappearance of god-given certainty. By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept. Jaynes describes how early matter-of-fact representations of the divine companions of rulers gave way to rulers and priests supplicating the gods. My god, my god, why hast Thou forsaken me? This shift is depicted in the artwork on Sumerian cylinder seals, the oldest art objects we have. (There is a large collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, though I didn’t see the shift clearly when I looked.)
Science continues the religious project to recover the lost certainties of Eden.
During his temporary blindness, Paddy McAloon spent long hours listening to short-wave radio.
And so I rake the sky, but my net is not fine enough, and I miss you.
Of course, there is another way to look at this. Your daddy loves you.
I said: Your daddy loves you very much. He just doesn’t want to live with us any more.
» Paddy McAloon I Trawl The Megahertz
Hubris report: just reviewed the tape from Saturday’s session with Tim. My voice is no way ready to debut! It’s badly undersupported, and I couldn’t hear that without the tape. I need to do more work with the tape recorder until I’m producing reliable, even tone.
Christopher Logue will read tomorrow night for the Wordsworth Trust at the Thistle Hotel in Grasmere. I spent rapt hours in Tuscany this summer wrapped in his version of the Iliad, a chilling, whip-your-breath-away account of pre-humanist life and a potent mix with Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
like sucking in cold air on a chipped tooth — painful, but you know you are alive. And the battle scenes belittle anything from Hollywood. reviewer at Amazon
They do, they do.
Spent the early evening working with accompanist Tim Ryan preparing sheet music for Singers Night at the Tatty Bogle Club in Soho on Tuesday (8pm Deans Yard, Soho). Live performance shifts out of the someday slot and into impending.
I’m reminded that nervous and excited are indistinguishable body states with different interpretations.
The whole spam thing gets more and more alarming. My spam ratio is now running 5:1 against legitimate mail. Most of the spam is offers to enlarge my penis. The technology must be very sophisticated, but still: how do they know?
» Spamdemic map