tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22541108837720584432024-03-08T02:54:04.380+00:00GlanglishGlyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-81204666820509299342022-12-31T11:14:00.000+00:002022-12-31T11:14:59.647+00:00Moody: the works<div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">A list of links to all my non-tech writings:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><b>Essays</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Glanglish</a> - with audio versions </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">- <span style="color: red;">new post</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><b>Travel writings</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://moodysbnn.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Moody's Black Notebook Travels</a> - <span style="color: red;">new post</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="http://walkswithlorenzetti.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Walks with Lorenzetti</a></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="http://partialindia.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">A Partial India</a></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><b>Novels</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="http://doingthebusiness.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Doing the Business</a></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="http://egyptianromance.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Egyptian Romance</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-87090349891414751762022-12-31T11:13:00.003+00:002023-01-07T18:59:21.273+00:00Glanglish - Contents<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-weekly-essay.html" target="_blank">The weekly essay</a><span> - with audio</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/chiral-asymmetries.html">Chiral asymmetries</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/wallpaper.html" target="_blank">Wallpaper</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-knifes-deity.html" target="_blank">The knife's deity</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/ludwig-van-who.html">Ludwig van who?</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/02/rubbish.html">Rubbish</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-new-jesuits.html">The new Jesuits</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/02/systemic-dis-ease.html">Systemic dis-ease</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/02/weird-messages.html">Weird messages</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/03/looking-at-glass.html">Looking at glass</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/03/placing-words-in-english.html">Placing words in English</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-plane-truth.html">The plane truth</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/03/meta-physicality.html">Meta-physicality</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/04/accidents-and-substance.html">Accidents and substance</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/04/colonising-names.html">Colonising names</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-crown-in-jewel.html">The crown in the jewel</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-turing-point.html">The Turing point</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/05/thoughts-for-your-pennies.html">Thoughts for your pennies</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/05/repeatability.html" target="_blank">Repeatability</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/05/intraviewing.html">Intraviewing</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/05/socratic-wisdom.html">Socratic wisdom</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/05/invisible-royalty.html">Invisible royalty</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-oscillating-universe.html">The oscillating universe</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/06/digital-reality.html">Digital reality</a> <span>- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/06/forever-eden.html">Forever Eden</a> <span>- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/06/pravda.html">Pravda</a> <span>- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/07/glanglish.html">Glanglish</a> <span>- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/07/scarlattis-cat.html">Scarlatti's cat</a> - </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">with audio</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-check-out.html">The check-out</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-finite-brain.html">The finite brain</a><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> - </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">with audio</span><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/07/8888.html">8.8.88</a><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> - </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">with audio</span><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/08/silly-farts.html">Silly farts</a><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> - </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">with audio</span><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-contingent-apple.html">The contingent apple</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">with audio</span><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-profit-of-beard.html">The profit of the beard</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">with audio</span><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/08/what-masterpiece.html">What masterpiece?</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">with audio</span><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/09/spot-similarity.html">Spot the similarity</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/09/cacography.html">Cacography</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/09/windy-city.html">Windy city</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/09/corporeal-integrity.html">Corporeal integrity</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/10/counting-cost.html">Counting the cost</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/10/dire-diary.html">Dire diary</a> <span style="color: black;">-</span><span style="color: black;"> </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/10/three-sciences.html">Three sciences</a> <span style="color: black;">-</span><span style="color: black;"> </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/10/antics.html">Antics</a> <span style="color: black;">- </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/10/god-in-body.html">God in the body</a> <span style="color: black;">-</span><span style="color: black;"> </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-insolence-of-inanimate.html">The insolence of the inanimate</a> <span style="color: black;">-</span><span style="color: black;"> </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/11/hoardings.html">Hoardings</a> <span style="color: black;">-</span><span style="color: black;"> </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/11/stargazing.html">Stargazing</a> <span style="color: black;">-</span><span style="color: black;"> </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/11/truckling-on.html">Truckling on</a> <span style="color: black;">-</span><span style="color: black;"> </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/12/nostalgia-for-brezhnev.html">Nostalgia for Brezhnev</a> -<span style="color: black;"> </span>with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/12/dalliance.html">Dalliance</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/12/booting-up.html">Booting up</a> - with audio<br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/12/getting-idea.html">Getting the idea</a> </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">- with audio</span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-19564833861229520892022-12-31T11:12:00.000+00:002022-12-31T11:12:47.087+00:00Getting the idea<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-52-getting-the-idea/glanglish%2052%20getting%20the%20idea.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-52-getting-the-idea/glanglish%2052%20getting%20the%20idea.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">You may already be infected; if not, you will be once you get to the end of this paragraph. If you wish to remain uninfected, there is still time to stop, but by reading on you will certainly catch it. I caught it from Richard Dawkins' book 'The Selfish Gene', where the idea first originated, where the infection first started. The idea was that of a 'meme', or an idea viewed as a general class of mental objects. When you grasp an idea, you can be said to be infected by that meme; passing that idea on spreads the infection. By reading to the end of this paragraph you are now infected with the idea, or meme, of a meme.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />It may seem a trivial redefinition. But viewing ideas as something like independent entities which can spread and be passed on like viruses, say, emphasises their vitality and hints at their power. Ideas are a fundamental, dynamic component of the world in which we live. They can change it in dramatic ways. A great idea, infecting or inhabiting the right people, can drive them to great actions with far-reaching implications. They are the visionaries, the religious and political leaders whose single-mindedness is a by-product of an idea's force.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Not all ideas are so grand. But even the humblest of them is worthy of admiration and gratitude. We all know the experience of the sudden revelation brought about by an encounter with a new and hitherto undreamt-of - unthought-of - idea. It is as if a door or window has opened, or a light has been turned on. Somehow we see and understand something which before was a mystery, or perhaps was simply not present in our mental universe.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The relation between the meme and the memed is therefore a symbiotic one. Without the mind in which it can live, an idea has no active existence. In a book or a play or a film, it lies dormant like those viruses that can survive in the most hostile conditions until a suitable host comes along, when they are suddenly activated. For the carrier of the meme, the world is a different place. It is as if the meme were an organism which secreted some subtle substance, a perception-enhancing drug perhaps; harbouring an idea we vivify it, but we also drink its intangible nectar.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Sometimes that nectar is poisoned: a meme may be an epiphany of the sadness and badness in this world. Ideas are irresponsible and morally neutral in themselves; only the mind they inhabit can judge them, choose amongst them, act on them and manifest them. But it can rarely destroy them, just as we cannot will to forget, though time and age may eventually achieve this. There is, however, a kind of natural selection which favours the more beneficent memes. For example, someone infected with the meme of random violence is likely to be destroyed themselves; with them dies the instigating meme and the possibility of further direct infection.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Ideas are precious things; and rare enough too. How often have we read a book, talked with a person, listened to music, and experienced no new thought, no sudden illumination? It is like eating cardboard. So the next time you encounter a fine, wholesome meme, savour it; enjoy the infection as it grips you; pass it on.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-52-getting-the-idea-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-30141284421186253962022-12-31T10:59:00.001+00:002022-12-31T11:00:56.393+00:00Booting up<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-51-booting-up/glanglish%2051%20booting%20up.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-51-booting-up/glanglish%2051%20booting%20up.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The blank page has always been the writer's foe. It lies there, supine, flaunting its passivity so shamelessly that it gradually assumes the character of a challenge. Today, however, the author has an alternative which not only avoids these traditional pitfalls, but even counters them with corresponding benefits: the word processor.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The blank page is replaced by a blank screen, but one which is vivified by the business of loading up the word processing software. The preliminary acts alone bespeak a new, more dynamic approach. First you place the floppy disc in the disc drive; it is like a key inserted into a lock: it promises to release you from the writer's prison of wordlessness. Then you power up - a gloriously apt phrase for that heady sense of artistic potentiation, of the incipient forging of words into worlds.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Upon switching on the machine, it already starts reacting, coming to meet you halfway - no mere tool, but an accomplice. It purrs like a sleek and thoroughbred animal, and the screen flickers into action, awaking from its silent silicon dreams. Words appear - the machine is giving you words before it attempts to take them, encouraging you by its example. Sometimes the initial messages greet with an easy familiarity, sometimes they are reassuringly business-like. Either way, they spring into life with an ease which begins to imply that all succeeding words will follow as fluently and as effortlessly. The blank screen becomes now a taut-stretched canvas, straining for your marks, the tiny blinking cursor in the top left-hand corner an eager child signalling for you to join the game.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Compare all this to the typewriter - which is revealed now as a kind of decerebrated word processor, inert and unable to respond, a purely mechanical assemblage of levers. The pen and pencil are seen for the wicked, pointed weapons that they are; no wonder that the blank page is so recalcitrant - paper is not used but abused: you attack it, applying an unremitting pressure with your mad surgeon's word scalpel.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />By contrast the computer's keyboard is like that of a piano - or, better, like that of some infinitely delicate and subtle instrument such as a clavichord. As the fingers wander gracefully over its keys, they seem to be tapping out an intricate prelude of Bach. More than that, as you type, the gentle and flowing movements gain a rhythm of their own; the tactile sensation passes from mere sensuousness to sensuality, until the act of writing is transmuted into a constant loving caress.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Switching on a computer is sometimes called booting up, a reference to the process of bootstrapping, or pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. The phrase is a neat metaphor for how the machine manages to load a program before it has loaded a program which tells it how to load a program. This marvellous act of self-creation is a gift such machines offer their users every time they are turned on. Booting up stands as a constant reminder to the writer who is about to construct without scaffolding some bridge of words across a chasm of non-existence that such miracles are indeed possible.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-51-booting-up-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-465904227896884232022-12-24T09:36:00.000+00:002022-12-24T09:36:50.919+00:00Dalliance<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-50-dalliance/glanglish%2050%20dalliance.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-50-dalliance/glanglish%2050%20dalliance.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">As we came out of the theatre after a performance of Schnitzler's Dalliance we wondered out loud whether we would ever see again the <a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/06/pravda.html">strange lights</a> we had noticed some months previously. As we walked back across Waterloo bridge, we looked up into the area of the sky where they had appeared before. To our mingled horror and delight, there was the same quivering brightness.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />We slowed our steps, our hearts in our mouths and our stomachs in our boots. We were half-pleased that what we had seen had really been there, that it was reproducible. But we were also slightly disappointed that, being reproducible, the phenomenon might have a mundane explanation, that we had not been privileged spectators of the dawn of a new age. It seemed unlikely that UFOs should choose to hover over exactly the same spot of the Thames during a period of some months - and never be noticed.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />We walked along the bridge, our straining eyes riveted upon the same indistinct watery light we had seen before. Again there was no sound of helicopters, just the wind blowing on this slightly cloudy night. As we stood by the parapet, we noticed a woman who was talking to a man next to her. Occasionally she glanced in the same general direction as we were looking. We went up to them. I made some non-committal remark about the sight and she replied unperturbedly, then went on talking with her companion. We looked at this man; he too was gazing up at the sky. And he seemed to have something in his hands.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />It was clearly a reel, though the cord was too fine to be seen in the dark. Simulating a greater sang-froid than I felt, I asked him if he were responsible. He said yes. I restrained myself from hurling him into the river there and then, and asked for more details.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />He was American, and an inventor. His brainchild was a kind of kite with a rotor which he claimed could stay aloft with even the merest hint of wind. It was effectively self-supporting. It glistened and glimmered as it spun in a light which shone skyward from Somerset House - the reason he had chosen this spot. I quizzed him on the double occurrence we had seen, and the rapid movement. He said he sometimes flew two, and that slight movements on the ground could bring about deceptively large ones in the sky. He was doing this as a publicity stunt prior to the publication of his book on the subject. So now we knew.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />I left very chastened. I had learnt that however improbable or even impossible it may seem at the time, there is always an explanation. Those two shocking and cancelling experiences produced by their mixing a kind of vaccine that has inoculated me against all further heretical anti-scientific thoughts. As a re-confirmed rationalist I am prepared to chant with the rest of the adepts the creed of logical positivism. But one day something will be discovered that does genuinely lie outside the present boundaries of science. The latter will then be expanded just far enough to include the new phenomenon. This leaves us seekers after certitude with a rather elastic kind of dogma, one still with a frightening leeway for perfectly reasonable flirtation with the perfectly unreasonable.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1986)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-50-dalliance-1986" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-33047868629512601672022-12-17T09:21:00.000+00:002022-12-17T09:21:49.925+00:00Nostalgia for Brezhnev<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-49-nostalgia-for-brezhnev/glanglish%2049%20nostalgia%20for%20brezhnev.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-49-nostalgia-for-brezhnev/glanglish%2049%20nostalgia%20for%20brezhnev.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In 1982, I was trapped in Tashkent. I had stopped over there after sightseeing in Samarkand, and was due to fly back to Moscow. Instead, Intourist whisked off the few foreign travellers present in the city on a curious and palpably fake tour. After driving around the centre, rebuilt without character after the devastating earthquake which presumably destroyed any original Uzbeki architecture, we were shown the spotless - and theoretically quake-proof - underground railway system. It was almost as grand as that in Moscow, but without the chandeliers. Then we were driven to the outskirts of the city which ended in a dusty and squalid shanty town; clearly Intourist had run out of things to show us.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The reason for this surreal non-tour of a non-city was that all Aeroflot planes had been commandeered for the day. They were needed to fly politicians from the Soviet Republics to Moscow for an urgent session of the country's ruling body. It was no ordinary gathering: they were meeting to choose a new President. Brezhnev was dead.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Everywhere in Moscow you came across his portrait, raven-haired, white-skinned, always against a garish red background. Like some Slav King Kong, his huge, craggy face peeked from walls and billboards between gaps in buildings. Blown up to huge proportions, the Neanderthal cast of his features - the lower bony ridge of the forehead sprouting feral, bushy eyebrows, the deep-set eyes, the massive jowls - was truly frightening. It seemed irrefutable evidence that physiognomy did indeed reveal the inner man.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />It was some while before the world realised that this was the end of an era. Even when Gorbachev was chosen after Andropov, it was assumed that, progressive and relative youngster that he was, his attempts at reforms would be circumscribed and cautious. As we now know, nothing could have been further from the truth. Each day has brought us new, ever more audacious acts of dismantling, of liberalisation, of risk-taking. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />But amidst all these enormous potential gains, I feel - totally selfishly - that there has been a loss. As the communist world rushes to embrace much of our capitalism, our materialism, and our culture, the USSR is no longer the great, mysterious Russian bear, the Cold War behemoth, mapping out a unique destiny. It has lost its old specialness.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The Brehznev era epitomised that lost world. Russia was a barely open land; it was ruled by fear and bullying; its people eked out secret lives, fighting the state with magnificent tiny defiances. When I had visited Moscow at this time, the sub-zero temperatures, the clogging drifts of snow, seemed climatic correlates of the iciness and inertia which gripped the country. Today they are just weather.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />In a world where you can hear the latest Rick Astley single within weeks of its appearance as you walk through the ancient bazaar in Kathmandu, there are few places which remain truly alien, truly elsewhere. Even Romania has fallen. Nobody wants Gorbachev's reforms to fail; but some of us are glad that we saw the Brezhnev era before it vanished.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-49-nostalgia-for-gorbachev-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-87956530937741035852022-12-10T09:46:00.001+00:002022-12-10T09:59:55.292+00:00Truckling on<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-48-truckling-on/glanglish%2048%20truckling%20on.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-48-truckling-on/glanglish%2048%20truckling%20on.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">'Truckling' is one of those words that become odder and odder the more you say or ponder them. 'Truckling' now means to yield meanly or obsequiously. It is a reasonable and intriguing question to ask why this particular word in this particular form has acquired this sense. Fortunately we have a number of lexicographical snapshots of its earlier incarnations which, like those unbelievable and embarrassing photographs taken so many years ago showing us with weird haircuts and in outmoded fashions, map out quite clearly the sometimes startling shifts of meaning and - further back - of morphology.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Before it acquired its present pejorative sense, 'truckling' meant to place yourself beneath someone else. It derived from the truckle bed, which was habitually stored under an ordinary bed, and so was necessarily lower. It was therefore a fairly natural jump to talk of someone 'truckling' - taking the truckle bed - in other situations. But it was also an inspired one, born of people's love of analogy, of finding shapes in life that match, of fleshing out the one-dimensional literalism of a word with a multi-dimensional panoply of sly and sideways meanings.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The truckle bed was named for the truckles - small wheels or castors - which it employed. It was therefore once the bed with the truckles; the English language's powerful compacting ability - where nouns can be rammed together in these pithy, descriptive combinations with an ease denied many other great languages, for example the Romance family - created a new concept out of two old ones. Time and habit soon did the rest, until the truckle bed became a single idea apprehended without any sense of bifurcation.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The truckle as castor had its origin in an earlier meaning of the word: in medieval times it was a small, grooved wheel used as a pulley for a rope. Again, our innate ability to spot similarities encouraged the transfer: when people started using small wheels as castors, they clearly looked like truckles, even though they were different in purpose; so truckles they became - or rather the world of the truckle was extended to embrace them. Linguistic dynamics and the society which drove them then saw to it that the centre of gravity of the word shifted from its original usage to the later, apparently more common and useful one.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The truckle as pulley can be traced back centuries more. There is a Norman-French word 'trocle' with the same meaning; truckle is merely its Anglicisation. 'Trocle' in turn derives from a simplification of the Latin word 'trochlea', itself a honing of the Ancient Greek 'trochilia'; both mean a pulley wheel. What is remarkable is not that we can follow the word back so far, but that down the years such myriad tugs and turns have been inflicted on its form and function. What we do not know are who the people were who caused these shifts. For every one of them was instituted by someone, at a certain moment, who had the requisite insight or indolence or ignorance. Nor is this process at an end; who knows what 'truckling' may mean tomorrow? Perhaps you do: perhaps you will make the next great semantic leap for the world and language to follow. After all, someone has got to do it. Keep on truckling.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1990)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-48-truckling-on-1990" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-58910783671669824502022-12-03T09:18:00.000+00:002022-12-03T09:18:32.937+00:00Stargazing<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-47-stargazing/glanglish%2047%20stargazing.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-47-stargazing/glanglish%2047%20stargazing.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">A flat earth implies edges, and beyond the edge lies the unknown and the abyss. We hold ourselves superior cartographers: our world is a safe, unending sphere. But we ignore the facts of geometry. The surface of a globe is all edge; naively we seek the abyss at our feet: it lies above us.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />When we look up at the sky we do not see this yawning infinity. First our eyes rest on the comforting pillows of the clouds - but these are poor comfort. As insubstantial as air, they serve best as lowering backgrounds to Dutch landscapes, or as prompts to our histrionic imaginations - in a solitary cloud we may see a mighty whale, and in a blazing sunset we can feel the sadness of great aerial cities in final conflagration. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Beyond the clouds there are the aeroplanes, shining symbols of technology's prowess. Unlike the passive floating hazes which hang like veils before our eyes, the aeroplane determines its own course, and seems to have cut the earth's heavy leading strings. But they only skirt the world's new edge, staying in sight of land like timid galleons before the sextant.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />At least from the plane our perspective begins to change. As we rise with it, through the great blue dome which seems to shield us, we find the sky turns black, the blackness of absence. We begin to realise that there is nothing there, that it is all literally a trick of the light.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Yet when, of a clear summer's evening, we contemplate the stars, we still wilfully misapprehend them. The recidivist poet within us says they are tiny sequins embroidered on a huge tent roof; they are a thousand glow worms on a great cave's ceiling.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />We ignore the awesome generosity of the sky: we do not see the stars as billions of fiery spheres wheeling through space unimaginable distances away in an ungraspable structure. We ignore the message of their patterns: we do not see the waving speckled band of the Milky Way as the cross-section of the galaxy's spiral in which our sun forms such an insignificant part. We ignore the imperious laws of physics and the arduous journey the stars' light has made to reach us: we do not see the night sky as the cosmic Daguerreotype it is, an ancient image of other suns which died perhaps before the earth was born.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />We ignore all these things because they put us in the ultimate context. They beg the terrible questions: how was the universe created? By what? What came before it? What comes after? - all the questions which have nothing to do with the world that was once flat and the centre of all creation, all the questions which seem to negate the point of every quotidian act or thought. Confronted by the reality of the stars we are confro</span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">nted by the galactic irrelevance of our lives.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Which is why we turn the sky into a protective carapace, a hemisphere of Blue Wedgewood, cushioned by amiable clouds, the playground of the proud arching aeroplanes, and the stars into baubles. And who dares see more?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-47-stargazing-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html" style="background-color: white; color: #997f4d; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Contents</span></a></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-62448354337079231942022-11-26T08:59:00.000+00:002022-11-26T09:01:38.421+00:00Hoardings<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-46-hoardings/glanglish%2046%20hoardings.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-46-hoardings/glanglish%2046%20hoardings.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Advertisements offer the best and fastest sociology. The extreme economic Darwinism of the industry - where accounts, even the most successful, are rarely kept for long - ensures a constant scrabbling after the very latest in ideas and trends. Furthermore, the format of advertisements demands that concepts be simple, striking and memorable; tapping into society's deepest fears and desires - particularly if hitherto unarticulated - has proved to be one of the most effective ways to achieve this.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />This sociological aspect of advertising is well-known; what is recognised less widely is the industry's assumption of the Church's mantle of unending textual exegesis.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Once the place of Christianity at the heart of medieval society was assured, expansionary proselytism was replaced by consolidating interpretation, and action by thought. The rich and powerful monasteries were filled with the best minds of the day, with little to do but read the unchanging word of God. As a result, with time and through a natural desire to surpass predecessors and teachers, simple commentaries blossomed into ever more recondite investigations of meanings and patterns. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />A single phrase, of little import in itself, might, in the obsessive mind of a monk, attain through brilliant if empty explication some pivotal significance. And pondered long enough, most sequences of events or sets of relationships can be mapped on to any other; hence the Bible was found to be an endlessly echoing, self-referential book of inexhaustible complexity.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />And so it is within the domain of advertising. Latter-day monks in the form of account executives are similarly closeted with a fixed text - that of the product - which they must then expound to the world, and find new ways of explaining. Like their medieval forebears, they are burdened and constrained by all previous interpretations - that is, all previous campaigns. Sometimes they will react against them; sometimes they will build on them, extending an idea by a series of elaborate mental tropes and toccatas.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Advertisements provide the most detailed, most ingenious examination of our lives that there is. Just when we thought that every nuance, every angle, every possible allusive joke had been dug out of the baked bean, the latest young advertising star pushes an idea further, notices another avenue, produces another pun. This frenetic investigation proceeds on several fronts: the basic concept and its gamut of cultural, intellectual, economic, sociological and sexual references; the name of the product, and all its associations, rhymes, similes, homonyms and homophones; and visual elements, be it in terms of the shape of the product, its colour, a typeface or simply a design associated with the brand. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The net effect is that we are amazed that our world even in its most trivial aspects is so rich; we are grateful that each day we gain a fresh and exciting perspective on everything in it. And if we buy the concept, we might even buy the product.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-46-hoardings-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html" style="background-color: white; color: #997f4d; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Contents</span></a></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-61699133835767120562022-11-19T10:52:00.000+00:002022-11-19T10:52:17.461+00:00The insolence of the inanimate<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-45-the-insolence-of-the-inanimate/glanglish%2045%20the%20insolence%20of%20the%20inanimate.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-45-the-insolence-of-the-inanimate/glanglish%2045%20the%20insolence%20of%20the%20inanimate.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Amidst the urban hubbub, the watchword for survival is serenity.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />I am stuck in a gridlock traffic jam, an insignificant element in a huge matrix of static cars and frustrated drivers: what of it? Things will wait, and if they will not, there is little point fretting: never regret what cannot be amended. I am swamped by shipfuls of fools whose every act seems calculated to cross me. But these are simply more of those amusing impediments, part of the burden we bear in living. Besides, who is to say that in other's eyes I too am not that obstructive fool? </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />So in the world of impersonal forces and of all-too personal men and women I contrive to pass my days without infusions of adrenaline to fray the fabric of the heart, grind down the molars or teach the creases of my face new lines of ugly anger. But there is another, co-incident world where, in an instant, by a nothing, I am effortlessly reduced to insensate tantrums of volitional apoplexy.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />I close the door on a kitchen cupboard. I listen appreciatively to the faint click as the catch engages. Then watch with annoyance as the door swings back. I push it closed again, with more forcefulness; the door swings back again, only more rapidly. Now I am slamming the door. Not once but repeatedly. I know full well why this door will not close: some object inside is pressing against it, forcing it open. But I will not give in; I continue smashing the door against the lock until the contents are sufficiently disturbed to allow the catch to hold.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />I need a wire coat hanger. I remove one from my wardrobe. It is surrounded by tens of other coat hangers, all suspended at slightly different angles. As I withdraw the coat hanger, its hook snags on one of the others. I shake it, which produces a pleasant tintinnabulation; but no coat hanger. I shake it more manically, and in more directions. Still no coat hanger. By now I am pulling and tugging insanely; coat hangers cascade over the floor of the wardrobe, until enough have been dislodged to free the one I hold.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Why do I do it? In every case I know what the problem is and how to solve it. Instead, I am determined to continue as I began; I shall not be defeated. It becomes a matter of honour: I refuse to let a mere object thwart my will. If necessary I resort to violence to teach it a lesson it will never forget.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />But it does. Because there is an obstinacy to the inanimate which is not to be tamed. It is almost as if objects conspired to act in this way to remind us that although we appear to have dominion over the visible world, it is a poor and superficial thing. When doors stick, locks jam, and bow ties don't, they are like rebellious slaves proving that their spirit is unbroken, and unnerving us with the thought that one day they may rise up against us and cast off their servitude. We feel as sadistic torturers must feel when confronted by glorious indomitable heroism - hollow, pathetic stooges. The insolence of the inanimate ought to be a salutary reminder that violence is never a solution.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-45-the-insolence-of-the-inanimate-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-25821597752153517022022-11-11T08:12:00.000+00:002022-11-11T08:12:42.306+00:00God in the body<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-44-god-in-the-body/glanglish%2044%20god%20in%20the%20body.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-44-god-in-the-body/glanglish%2044%20god%20in%20the%20body.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">To say that a musician's style is cantabile is one of the highest forms of praise. We mean by this 'singable' that it is as if the instrument were an extension of the player, another voice through which can be expressed plangency or exultation as directly as human sobs or shouts of joy might.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />At the root of this phrase is a recognition of the primacy of the voice, that all music continues to aspire to its original condition of singing. And rightly: if playing any instrument is a marvellous undertaking - producing infinitely subtle gradations of sound from mere wood and metal - how much more miraculous is the process whereby the singer's body itself becomes the instrument, both player and played.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The vocalist's pre-eminence is hard-won. Unlike flutes or pianos, no two bodies are the same; learning to sing means gaining intimate knowledge of the body's deepest recesses and cavities, for it is these - in the chest and the head - that lend the weak vibrations of the throat their character and their impact. The situation is complicated by the fact that singers rarely hear an accurate representation of this sound: conduction through the skull to the ear means that in singing as in speaking we are always listening to an internal impostor. Hence the perennial disbelief we feel upon hearing our unfamiliar external voice relayed by a recording.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The coincidence of the vocalist's body and instrument means that in our inevitable identification with a singer - as with any artist - we feel the notes doubly within us: both metaphorically as the ersatz performer and literally as a physical object responding to the waves of varying pressure we call sound. No wonder, then, that the voice dominates every musical culture - ethnic or eclectic, from the most cravenly populist to the most disdainfully high-brow: all are hopelessly and helplessly swept up by the imperious power of the the singing body and its resonance.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />This explains in part the pull of grand opera, even for those who are otherwise quite unmusical. Aside from its seductive glister, its residual social cachet and its blatant display of privilege, the real draw of this deeply implausible form is the concentration of good voices singing music designed specifically to show them off to the best advantage and to move us as directly and shamelessly as possible. And just as the voice seems to be a stage past that of any mere instrument, so there are singers whose vocal gifts seem to exceed all human norms. These are the voices the sheer sound of which send deep, delicious shivers down the spine, the voices everyone recognises as supremely great simply as voices. They are the names which are exempt from ordinary fashion; they are the Carusos, the Callases, the Pavarottis.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />We worship them not just for this frisson; we recognise something beyond their artistry or our pleasure. In their singing they transcend their mortality because they are living triumphs over their bodies. They have turned muscle and bone and sinew into a divine machine that seems to deny the brutish facts of life. In the sublime sound they produce we sense something that surpasses the mundane: we hear the god in the body. In this greatest of singing we bear witness to a redeeming theophany. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1990)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><div><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-44-god-in-the-body-1990" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file.</div><div><br /></div></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-8228182632272893912022-11-05T08:58:00.000+00:002022-11-05T09:26:18.602+00:00Antics<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-43-antics/glanglish%2043%20antics.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-43-antics/glanglish%2043%20antics.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">As objects age and break, we throw them out. In most cases, the decision is unequivocal: nobody thinks twice about discarding a blown light bulb, or smashed plates. But some classes of objects can survive everyday knocks to win through to a new lease of life. Furniture, for example. A broken chair may be repaired, a scratched table re-polished. Eventually they cease to be old and broken, and become instead, in some mysterious way and at some ill-defined point, loved and lived-in antiques.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The antique is a relatively new concept, and is still in a state of flux. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, antiques meant the same as antics: something odd and ridiculous. In England's Augustan age, old objects were prized if they were Classical - that is, thousands of years old. The later, Gothic craze made medieval fashionable, and with the Victorians came a delight in collecting anything older than a century or two. As the decades of the modern era have rolled by, so has the temporal margin required to elevate an object to the status of antique shrunk. Today we teeter on the brink of finding last month acceptably ancient.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />This increasingly frenzied rush to canonise the past seems to be a result of the accelerating pace of life, of the sense that nothing is fixed and stable anymore - and hence that history, even of the most recent vintage, is a rock worth clinging to. What is also remarkable is that almost anything is potentially a venerable antique, even the most ephemeral of bygone objects - everything, that is, except people.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />People never become antiques; instead they just become old. As a result, we never accord them the spurious honours that even the tawdriest and tackiest light-fitting of twenty years ago receives. At best, we offer the previous generation indifference, and at worst outright contempt.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />There may once have been some justification for this rejection of an unwanted burden. If every day was a continual struggle for survival, exposing on mountaintops those too old to work had a certain callous logic: it was them or the tribe. For a society characterised by gross overproduction and shameless overconsumption, there is no such excuse.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Why are we not appalled by the shuffling old men swaddled in their multiple layers of jumble sale cardigans, by the hump-backed and skeletal old women picking among the leftover vegetables? How can we allow their last experiences of life to be so bitter? How can we forget that in a very few years, though cardinal now, we too shall be an abandoned people?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />We forget because we have to; because to remember would be to acknowledge that our short era of power and plenty will inevitably end, that we also will age, and will one day perish. We ignore the old because they are our mirror of tomorrow. The irony is that we all come to realise the shabbiness of their treatment - but only when we ourselves become cast-off and impotent. By then it is too late to stop the antics of the succeeding generation to whom we set such a pathetic example, who have mislearnt too well - and now proceeds to pay us in the same coin, and to store up for their own sad and unthought-of future.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-43-antics-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-95478624129131522022-10-29T08:56:00.000+00:002022-10-29T08:56:54.451+00:00Three sciences<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-42-three-sciences/glanglish%2042%20three%20sciences.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-42-three-sciences/glanglish%2042%20three%20sciences.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">For many, science is the central achievement of the twentieth century, displacing the arts as the primary expression of mankind's creativity. As a result, we tend to believe science's myths, notably those about its essential unity. We are told that science proceeds by consensus, and as a result offers a uniquely integrated and unified domain. But this view, written by the mental victors, conveniently ignores the fact that there are really three sciences, not one.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The first is what we normally mean by the term, and what might be more exactly called universal science, if only because of its pretensions. It is Big Science, embracing the crowd-pleaser theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology; it is the root of all our treasured modern technologies - computers, non-invasive surgery, space travel; it is the defining cultural influence of our epoch, and informs not just the rhythms of our daily lives, but our whole world-view.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Universal science is a construct of the last three or four hundred years. It supplanted two earlier kinds of science, one a historical relict, now rightly defunct, the other a tradition which endures. The former was based on Aristotelian physics, and represented the sclerotic legacy of the Middle Age's Scholasticism. The latter is often called folk science, but is more truly parochial.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />It embodies the tribe's knowledge about the larger forces in life - the weather, the tides, the movement of animals. Today its quaint vaguenesses have been largely superseded by the apparent certainties of its brash younger sibling, universal science. But it persists in those areas, notably the weather, where modern science flounders hopelessly when confronted by a system whose complexity defies simplistic analysis. Lore such as 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight, red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning' clearly proclaims its pastoral origins; it also offers an empirical truth still beyond modern science's ken.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The last of the trinity of sciences might be called personal. It is the solipsistic knowledge that we all have about ourselves, but which has no claim to validity beyond that arena. This science embraces our specialist cures for colds, requirements for a sound night's sleep, ways to avoid hangovers, and combinations of foods and circumstances that are guaranteed to give us indigestion. Just as parochial science is almost exclusively concerned with the local external world, so personal science is about our body, that most intimate internal space.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The progression from personal to parochial to universal therefore represents a constant expansion of knowledge's ambition, from the body, to the village, to all creation. It thus also tracks science's historical rise to power, and its claim to increasing sovereignty. The reverse movement from universal to personal also defines science's limitations. Its theories of sub-nuclear matter and galactic cosmogony are so deep and abstract as to be scarcely refutable; but its feeble and flawed explanation of the weather is a constant reproach; and its ignorance about our purely subjective body-knowledge is near-total.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-42-three-sciences-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html" style="background-color: white; color: #997f4d; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Contents</span></a></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-75695040665809372382022-10-22T08:50:00.000+00:002022-10-22T08:50:15.444+00:00Dire diary<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-41-dire-diary/glanglish%2041%20dire%20diary.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-41-dire-diary/glanglish%2041%20dire%20diary.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Outsiders labour under a basic misapprehension about corporate hierarchies. Their image is of poor drudges at the bottom engaged in the mindless repetition of boring, meaningless tasks, with no scope for initiative or independent action. Top executives, so this wisdom goes, are epitomes of free-booting free will, deciding on a whim the fate of thousands as they lounge around in boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany, or glide silently and effortlessly in their chauffeur-driven tinted-window limousines. Nothing could be further from reality.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />It is true that the ordinary office worker has a circumscribed range of functions - but also a concomitant freedom of when and how to carry them out. An essentially undifferentiated role has no natural time-scales, no unique, imperative pattern: jobs can be moved around, substituted, lost even, with little overall effect. However pressurised the situation, repose can easily be found - and kept: for into the vacuums and interstices which are created between tasks, there is nothing to flow.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Middle managers enjoy no such luxury. Theirs is a constant battle between running the business and organising others. The latter involves meetings, time's weeds which sprout in every available diary gap. Arranged by a secretary or personal assistant, they are huge milestones mapping out the manager's week, obstacles dumped on the road to real work. Where office staff paddle docilely in a business's routine backwaters, middle managers must swim hard against buffeting waves of problems simply to remain where they are. Meetings soon pass from milestones to millstones, threatening to drag them under. But through them, managers have the first inkling of a truth that will blaze all the more brightly the higher they ascend: that it is the diary which rules them, not the other way round.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Top executives live and breathe this axiom. All of the week is meetings, meetings involving so many other people, and so complex to set up, that the most senior managers find themselves totally impotent in the face of their day's hijacking. Now, they can only flow with the overmastering tide, and join the corporate flotsam. Because top bosses are meta-managers - they run a business not by managing it directly, but by managing those who do - they find themselves in thrall not only to the clashing diaries of their immediate juniors, but through the corporation's pyramidal structure to those of their underlings' underlings too. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The enmeshing diary becomes a prescriptive book of their entire lives. Such are the demands on their limited time that business appointments spill over into evenings and weekends - the company functions, the client outings, the overseas travel. Far from being mighty corporate warriors cutting a swathe through the financial thickets, they are huge pin-striped puppets without a puppet-master, slaves of the system which they sustain and which sustains them. Trapped as they are by the very power that they wield, many a senior executive must have snatched a precious moment during yet another meeting in those boring boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany to envy the simple, untrammelled life of the worker; just as kings and queens have ever envied the uncomplicated, idealised bucolic existence of shepherds and shepherdesses; and just as forlornly.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-41-dire-diary-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-14790520568098848462022-10-13T15:43:00.001+00:002022-10-13T15:44:54.851+00:00Counting the cost<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-40-counting-the-cost/glanglish%2040%20counting%20the%20cost.mp3"></source>
</audio><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-40-counting-the-cost/glanglish%2040%20counting%20the%20cost.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Life is full of strange numbers. But mostly we ignore the subtle groupings and structures that shape the way we think our world. How many of us are aware of the effort of putting 60 individual seconds into each minute, or of the seven-dayness of the week? Has no one noticed that four always seems to divide into 12 but never 13? As our daily acquiescence in the world's fictive homogeneity shows, by learning to count so glibly we have lost the rich granularity of existence. We are numb to numbers.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Anthropology lets us retrace the gradual erosion in awareness which took place as civilisation evolved. The simplest societies count one, two, many. Earliest humans probably found only one. Each object in their world was unique: it did not surrender its specialness by being rudely classed as like another. The pebbles on a seashore were not numberless; instead, they were individual components of an immense experience we have now forgone. Instead, we see only a beach.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />As society progressed, the successful warriors and rising merchant classes demanded bigger numbers to cope with more cattle, more bags of wheat. Already the sense of what five or fifty entailed was bleeding out of the words: fifty became a rich man's flock. By the time a hundred thousand Persians marched against Greece, the concept of a soldier, a man, one, had been hopelessly damaged.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The loss of the purity of numbers went hand in hand with the rise of money. Objects were converted to values which soon had only a weak and arbitrary sense of quantity: one shilling was twelve pence, but how many is a penny? With money came the need to manipulate figures by themselves; hitherto they had been regarded as incommensurable entities rooted in real things. Mathematics was born the day six sheep first equalled six goats.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The Roman number system proved hopelessly inadequate: you cannot multiply DCIII by XLIV. The logic of the Arabic system which supplanted it led to revolutionary concepts like zero and negative numbers. With the arrival of a notation for less than an absence of cattle, the last links between numbers and their origins in the external world had been cut.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Commerce was quick to seize the opportunities opened up by this untethered arithmetic. Freed from any grounding in physical objects, numbers became amoral. The abstract intricacies of double-entry book-keeping allowed ingenious frauds - literally unthinkable for the Sumerian clerks drawing up their inventories in cuneiform. Present-day trading in currency futures is only the latest manifestation of counting's promiscuity and perversion.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />In the computer, the neutral number attains its acme. The whole world - its sights and sounds, our thoughts and emotions - can be reduced to a seamless string of 0s and 1s. Paradoxically, there is now no sense of number in anything, even though everything is a number. And ironically, the hidden figure that lies at the heart of all experience is 1, just as it was at the very beginning. But on the way back we have lost entirely the richness of that original, particular vision.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1987)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-40-counting-the-cost-1987" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html" style="background-color: white; color: #997f4d; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Contents</span></a></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-51475937219512518012022-10-08T09:53:00.001+00:002022-10-08T09:54:14.880+00:00Corporeal integrity<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-39-corporeal-integrity/glanglish%2039%20corporeal%20integrity.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-39-corporeal-integrity/glanglish%2039%20corporeal%20integrity.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">In Michelangelo's 'Last Judgement' in the Sistine chapel, the damned fall to the left while the saved rise to the right. Amongst the latter is St. Bartholomew who, following the ancient iconography, bears his identifying emblem - in this case the flayed skin of his martyrdom. In a sardonic touch, the features the artist has given the slack skin are his own.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Death by being flayed alive seems particularly horrific. Not just because it must be slow, lingering, and presumably excruciatingly painful, but also on account of its metaphorical stripping away of a protective outer layer that we take so much for granted - indeed, that we mostly take to be nothing less than ourselves. Doing so reveals the truth about our bodies: that we are not the neat flesh and blood we call ourselves, a sturdy frame of bone swathed in a substantial and homogeneous muscular wadding, but rather a thin sack of skin in which myriad organs and mechanisms knock about in an uneasy and fragile equilibrium.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Medicine acknowledges this explicitly in its treatment of the skin as a single organ in itself. But we do not like to think of an organ on the outside; in fact we do not like to think of organs at all. The kidneys and livers and hearts of animals that we eat seem gross and disturbing when raw, their bloody details exposed. Once the body loses its undifferentiated consistency, and begins to be perceived as made up of disparate entities, with functions like parts of a machine, we begin to feel ourselves the ragbag of offal and lights that we truly are.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Most of the time we contrive to ignore this fact with the ready connivance of society. The images of bodies that greet us everywhere emphasise their hardness and compactness - the slim, svelte figure of the athlete and model - or their smoothness and evenness of colour. Human nakedness is disturbing partly because it confronts us with the reality - that most bodies are nothing like these idealised images from magazines and hoardings, that they sag and droop and bulge, that they are blotchy and rucked; in a word, that they are just so many lumps of stinking meat.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Nakedness we can ignore. But there is a more brutal revelation of our body's terrible secret. The horror of physical violence is born of its power to tear open the bag of our body, to show us with shocking explicitness the seemingly random mess that lies within. This is partly why blood is so disturbing: spilt, it is a gory emblem of the body's lost closure, of the fact that far from being firm flesh we are mostly liquid - by definition, a state of matter that can offer no resistance to force. The irruption of violence into our lives frightens us because it says we are weak and helpless in our circumstances - superior numbers will always overcome us; worse, it says that we are weak and helpless in essence - that our very structure is irremediably flawed.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Violence leads to wounds, damages to the system. Wounds are illness, the negation of health. And health means literally wholeness. Corporeal integrity is a kind of health beyond the absence of sickness, one we desperately need to hold in not just those bloody, squirming organs, but our entire sense of being.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-39-corporeal-integrity-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-23754099600166648852022-10-01T08:30:00.000+00:002022-10-01T08:30:28.388+00:00Windy City<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-38-windy-city/glanglish%2038%20windy%20city.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-38-windy-city/glanglish%2038%20windy%20city.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips. Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power. With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done. An enormous silence hung over the whole building. Outside, there was a clear blue sky.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong. The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead. Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack. No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity. Everywhere there were scenes of destruction: huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road. Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement. People milled around, some taking photographs. There were no trains and few buses. An occasional ambulance flashed by.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said. And the radio itself was strangely different. Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes. The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped. Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee. A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave. It felt like the end of the world.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />It was the Great Wind of '87. 'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'. The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature. Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable. But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable. A case of presque-vu.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London. No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power. Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently. Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death. After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave. That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable. In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze. Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1987)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-38-windy-city-1987" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-85629140870138440782022-09-24T08:07:00.000+00:002022-09-24T08:07:50.934+00:00Cacography<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-37-cacography/glanglish%2037%20cacography.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-37-cacography/glanglish%2037%20cacography.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Although writing is an ancient invention, the Western tradition of personalised handwriting is essentially another product of the Renaissance's implicit agenda of subversive individualism. Before that time, the main writing establishments, the medieval scriptoria, allowed no latitude in letter forms: to learn how to write meant to learn how to reproduce exactly the local variant of the uncial script, for example. Variations were errors, not expressions of personality. For this reason palaeographers typically talk of schools of writing, centred around a particular monastery, rather than of scribes.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Gradually, as writing became more widespread through an increasingly secularised Europe, the Church's grip on literacy - hitherto one of its jealously-guarded mysteries and sources of power - weakened. With this centralised orthodoxy gone, personal writing styles began to evolve.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The teaching of writing in present-day schools mirrors this process. At first, we are shown precisely how to produce each letter: there is a premium on exactitude. Once the basic shapes have been learnt, though, there is a shift away from studying letters to using them. Thereafter, provided the handwriting style is reasonably unobtrusive children are judged on what they write, not how they write it.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Through constant practice we can bypass the mental mechanics of writing. Because the focus is on content not form, the latter evolves almost spontaneously and according to deep personal laws. Mostly the process is a gradual evolution, but it can change quite dramatically and disjunctively. One day as I was writing I watched with horror as I formed an 'x' not from a 'c' and its mirror image, placed back to back, but from two straight diagonal lines slashing through each other. I have never relapsed, and I often wonder what terrible psychic shift occurred then.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The Surrealists were therefore almost correct when they saw in automatic writing - words written without thought - a revelation of the soul's innermost nature, but they erred in regarding what was written as important; in fact, the shapes of the letters tell all.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />People's handwriting, considered purely graphologically, seems so revealing in its diversity; the big, brassy letters of the extrovert, the tiny, self-effacing embroidery of the recluse; the extravagant curlicues, the vertiginous slants - both forwards and backwards - the bizarre open dots of 'i's - all seem to be such manifest and true expressions of their writers' personalities.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Frightening, then, those handwritings that seem almost typeset, with effortless and sensuous curves, balanced shapes and a neatness which suggests obsession. Such calligraphy bespeaks a perfection outside humanity, either angelic, or demonic. Frightening, too, those hands that look the product of a deranged mind, illegible, ill-formed, spastic in their irregularities, now a series of jagged edges, now meaningless waves. And doubly frightening for me who writes in just this way, exposing to the world the terrible implications of that blatant cacography.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-37-cacography-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-83571639617771925952022-09-17T09:35:00.000+00:002022-09-17T09:35:09.228+00:00Spot the similarity<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-36-spot-the-similarity/glanglish%2036%20spot%20the%20similarity.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-36-spot-the-similarity/glanglish%2036%20spot%20the%20similarity.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">It has happened to all of us. From a distance we see the back of someone's head; it looks familiar. Unsure, though, we move closer, trying to take a better look. They walk with a gait we know so well; we see their body with all its characteristic rhythms and tics. We catch a glimpse of their face: yes, it is them, that old lover we have not seen for years. The electricity is still there, the faint trembling, the ache in the pit of the stomach. And yet...is the shape quite right? And surely they never had that mole...? Or: we see a face across a room; is that old Johnnie? We stare, half-indiscreetly, half-covertly, caught between a desire to make contact and fear of the mistake. The eyes and the mouth are the same, the way he lifts his glass identical; and yet...</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />It is disconcerting to see these impostors - doubly disconcerting because they are so good. We were right to be wrong: they do look almost identical. Our confidence is shaken, not only in our ability to recognise - old age and fading memories alone would account for that loss - but also in the uniqueness of the people we have met. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />When we see these simulacra, especially if we encounter more than one of them, we begin to realise that perhaps there are only a limited number of permutations of eyes and noses and chins, the results of a genetic Identikit. The details may differ, but then so have the details of their lives to this point; the underlying bone-structure, flesh cover, and colouring are in essence the same.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Physical repetition is worrying enough, but what if this circumscribed range of possibilities extended to the mental sphere too? The characters of friends, family and lovers - those wonderful qualities that seemed so unique and so uniquely given to us - they too may be closely matched by other look- and think-alikes. What then of our special relationships - special with respect to what? To an entire class of matching people?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Worse follows. When we spot these coincidences of form in other people, we concede readily that sometimes the resemblances are startling; but if for a moment a friend or colleague suggests a similar correspondence of a third party - an acquaintance, a stranger even - with ourselves, the defences go up. The suggestion is preposterous, the proponent is clearly a fool or a knave. We protest overmuch because what applied to our loved ones applies equally to us: that we might not be unique in outward form or even in what, or in who, we are.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />We can truthfully deny these parallels because we better than anyone know our superficial details: no one else has seen us so often, gazed at us in the mirror so much. For the same reason we spot supposed likenesses between friends and passers-by: we know the one reasonably well, the other not at all; we are ready to note the points of contact, and are blind to the tinier clashes. In its most extreme form, this knowledge mismatch accounts for the Westerner's inability to tell some Chinamen apart: to do so, the language of their faces must first be learnt. In other words, whether we or our friends really are duplicated by others comes down to a question of degree. How similar does similar have to be to matter?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-36-spot-the-similarity-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-58009014989046074922022-09-10T08:12:00.002+00:002022-09-10T08:53:53.912+00:00What masterpiece?<audio controls=""><source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-35-what-masterpiece/glanglish%2035%20what%20masterpiece.mp3"></source>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-35-what-masterpiece/glanglish%2035%20what%20masterpiece.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">On December 22, 1808, a small private concert was held in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. It was bitterly cold, and as the under-rehearsed musicians sat in front of the sparse audience they rubbed their hands together and blew on their numb fingers. The concert that was about to begin consisted of the following programme: the sixth symphony in F, the recitative and aria 'Ah! perfido', the Gloria from the Mass in C, the fourth piano concerto, the fifth symphony, the sanctus from the Mass in C and the Fantasia for piano, chorus and orchestra. All of them were conducted and performed by the composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. All the works were receiving their first public performance. It would be the greatest concert in the history of western music.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Did that audience know this as they sat shivering through the long and gruelling programme? It seems hard to believe that they could have failed to be overwhelmed by works such as the fifth symphony, whose opening unison challenge has now burnt itself into the collective memory of the world. And what of the first performance of the ninth symphony, some years later? Surely the audience then realised they were listening to the zenith of orchestral and symphonic music?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />It is too easy for us naively to imagine ourselves at those first nights, and too difficult to appreciate the music's full pristine impact. For we would come with our ecstasy and adulation ready prepared; our ears would not be innocent. As a guide to what those early audiences heard and felt, we have to look for analogues in our own experience. How often, for example, have we attended the first performance of a modern work, and known - as certainly as we know now that the ninth symphony is a towering achievement - that we are part of a unique and important occasion, one - like that day in 1808 - that will go down in history?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />I have attended at least one such historic occasion. It was at a Promenade concert, during a long hot summer several years ago. It was the first British performance of Tippett's 'Mask of Time', a work he had been labouring over for many years, and one which promised to be the summation of all that he had attempted in his richly creative life. I had assumed that since it was a contemporary work I would be able to turn up just before the start and buy a good seat. In fact, the concert was sold out when I arrived, so I went to the back of the long queue of promenaders. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Eventually I reached the ticket desk; by now, even the arena was full, and so I was forced up to the gallery. There promenaders wandered like lost souls across the echoing floors and through the deep gloom. Down below me in the auditorium the choir and orchestra looked like toys. At last the music began. The sounds seemed to reach us minutes later. My feet soon ached, it was hot and stuffy, my head hurt; the music was clearly the work of a madman. I left after about a quarter of an hour.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />A couple of years later, I listened to the work on records. From the first chords it gripped me: I knew it instantly for one of the twentieth century's greatest masterpieces. I also knew how that audience of 1808 had probably felt.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1988)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><div><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-35-what-masterpiece-1988" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</div><div><br /></div></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-1059229243279996112022-09-07T08:48:00.002+00:002022-09-10T08:47:35.947+00:00The profit of the beard<audio controls="">
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</audio><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-34-the-profit-of-the-beard/glanglish%2034%20the%20profit%20of%20the%20beard.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Why do men grow beards? </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Passive acquiescence apart, we have at the very least the Everest explanation: because it is there. Growing a beard is unanswerable proof that you can grow a beard; until then, however hirsute you may be, your beard is only potential, and therefore possibly feeble and risible. And since time immemorial weak beards have by association been equated with those unable to grow them at all - the eunuchs, whose smoothness, that terrible facial absence, is their sad badge of manly dishonour. To grow a beard is to wear a blazon, to throw in the world's face your face with its manifest masculinity.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Beards are not pure machismo. On the contrary, there is a strong element of coquetry to them, a concern with the minutiae of appearance that in other contexts would be tagged dismissively as effeminate. Men affect to despise such pre-occupations, but in reality they simply have less scope for them than women. Given that make-up for Western men remains without social sanction, there are only two elements of the male visage that allow any latitude for acceptable personal flamboyance: cranial and facial hair.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> <br />Ordinary hair theoretically offers endless possibilities, and a wide range of tonsures is indeed found. But here Nature plays a cruel trick on millions of men: their very masculinity, as measured by the hormonal rush of testosterone which courses through their veins every adult moment, undermines the premise and promise of the proud mane with a dreaded condition sometimes hidden under that terminological toupee, alopecia. Or, to put it baldly, baldness. Where women may express themselves with awe-inspiring concoctions of hair until late dotage, men are often reduced at an early age to shiny-pated skulls, fit only for phrenologists' models.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />But even the headiest brew of the body's chemicals seems to leave the beard unscathed. Hence the hordes of bearded, balding men: the one compensates for the other. It also allows them the luxury of variegated styles: their hair may be gone or going, but they can still choose from a glorious gnathic gamut. There are bushy beards, beards of stubble, beards combed up or down; Charles I beards, moustachioed and moustacheless beards; goatees, mandarins, beards to the chin and beards down the neck; long, white wizard beards and curious little beards shaved like an 'O' about the mouth. And beyond these, there are shapes and styles without a name, marvellous idiosyncratic variations on the theme of bristles.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />With this variety comes the possibility of change. It is striking how women are re-animated and even re-juvenated simply by an alteration of hair-style; with the new image comes a sense of new possibilities, of a sloughing-off of old cares with old looks. A beard gives a man the same luxury, that of re-making himself, of surprising the world.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Finally, there is the supreme treat - one denied to all women however well-endowed they are with gorgeous, silken tresses and a pampering panoply of attendant hairdressers - available only to the man who has grown a beard: the simple, unforgettable experience of shaving it off.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><div><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-34-the-profit-of-the-beard-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</div><div><br /></div></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span><br /></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-9088862792980285502022-08-29T07:45:00.001+00:002022-09-10T08:36:58.460+00:00The contingent apple<audio controls="">
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</audio><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-33-the-contingent-apple/glanglish%2033%20the%20contingent%20apple.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Somebody gives me a fruit, an apple, say; I take it. I look at it: I notice that it is a very special apple, because it has taken a unique and extraordinary journey to reach to me. A journey so extraordinary, in fact, that the chances of it occurring were one in a billion.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />First, it had to be selected from those on offer before I received it. Before that, perhaps, it was among several chosen from the stock of the local greengrocers. The greengrocers in turn had first to include it in their selection from the wholesalers at New Covent Garden, who had previously bought it among many others from the importers - assuming it is foreign - who earlier had included it in a batch from some country's national apple growers association. Earlier still, that same apple had somehow managed to be chosen by that same association's buyer among lots sold by local apple growers; to reach that lot, the apple first, by some miracle, had been picked at the right time and at the right place. Out of the billions of apples that I could have taken, is it not marvellous that this particular apple made it through against all the odds?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The answer, of course, is no, because I never specified months before that I wanted to receive that apple and no other; in fact more or less any apple would have done, making its appearance in my hand rather unextraordinary. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Thus speaks the pedant; and yet it is rather wonderful to imagine all those foods I have eaten, all those clothes I have worn, all those books I have read, coming from plants and animals and trees which existed long before I knew I wanted them, almost as if they knew before I did. The same goes for people: all my friends were apparently preparing themselves to be the right person at the right moment.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />This logic carries us further. For it implies that everything I shall want, everyone I shall meet, is already in preparation: the fig I shall eat next year is already growing on the tree; friends-to-be are at this moment living, carefully developing their personalities and manoeuvring themselves into suitable situations so that we shall meet and shall hit it off. At least so it will appear in retrospect; and so it must appear to any gods watching the curious confluences of people and of things. Able to see where everything comes from and where everything is going, to them the world must look like a huge, carefully orchestrated courtship ritual with objects and people marrying up despite the most extreme of obstacles.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Viewed in this way, we can imagine lines flowing back from the future, like threads ending in our hands; as each second advances, we pull in the cords a little. When the string runs out, a something or somebody appears in our life, and we in theirs: for they, too, have been pulling on the cord, reeling us in across space and time through the nexus to come.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />And so, as I contemplate the apple, I can imagine that one day, at the appropriate moment, there will be another apple that somebody will hand me, another miracle at the end of its journey towards me. And with this knowledge, I eat.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-33-the-contingent-apple-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-36352697544942102712022-08-06T12:19:00.001+00:002022-09-10T08:33:08.522+00:00Silly farts<audio controls="">
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</audio><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-32-silly-farts/glanglish%2032%20silly%20farts.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Farting is not a subject polite society ever considers. It is one of those inconvenient little reminders - like death - that we are not gods, however smartly we may dress and talk. As a result, farting has become a subject colonised by children - who are in any case rightly fascinated by all the mysteries of the human body - secure in the knowledge that no adults will come along and start asserting their superior experience in this field as they do in most others.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />When the fart occurs - in life or in literature - there is always a shocked pause, as if leaving space for it to pass. In society, the instinct to pretend that the unpleasant never happened manifests itself as usual. With art, which habitually comes freighted with explanations and interpretations, this is not so easy. For example, in the thirteenth century round 'Sumer is icumen in' - a virtuosic essay in double canon, one of the earliest in music - there occurs the line which is usually translated as "bulls leap and bucks fart." Despite valiant attempts at emendation, the phrase still crops up in books on medieval music and poetry. Because of the work's historical importance, its text must, of course, be glossed - a task which leaves the rigorous but prim scholar appalled and red-faced. At moments like these, art seems to be blowing a raspberry at the world and its prudishness. And aptly: raspberry in this phrase is short for raspberry tart - cockney rhyming slang for a fart. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />But imagine for a moment a world which does not have this rather queasy Victorian attitude to what is, after all, just another bodily activity. In this world people would be free to fart in public without embarrassment just as they might at home. There would be nothing unusual about entering an office to be greeted with a rich and overpowering melange of such odours which would linger in your clothes and hair for days. Sometimes special rooms would be set aside specifically for those who wished to indulge themselves in this way, and areas allocated in restaurants for those who felt the need to fart during meals. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Because of the social acceptability of farting, we can imagine that organisations dedicated to widening the constituency of farters would mount advertising campaigns in magazines and on hoardings to encourage more people - and especially the young - to fart in public as well as in private. There might even be fads associated with the activity: for example young men might consider it particularly cool to fart in a loud and demonstrative way, while the most refined and soigne of women might take up farting not for the pleasure it gives them, but purely as a sign of sophistication.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />The idea of such a world is plainly ridiculous. And yet we live in that world. Substitute the word 'smoke' for 'fart' in the above description, and the fit is perfect. Or nearly. It must be conceded that for all the superficial similarities, there is one crucial difference between farting and smoking: breathing in someone else's fart, unlike breathing in someone else's smoke, does not give you cancer. It is an interesting question as to who are the sillier farts in this situation: those who selfishly inflict their loathsome and lethal smoke on others, or those who let them.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1988)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-32-silly-farts-1988" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-88198160507545635342022-07-30T12:42:00.001+00:002022-09-10T08:28:20.780+00:008.8.88<audio controls="">
<source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-31-8.8.88/glanglish%2031%208.8.88.mp3"></source>
</audio><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-31-8.8.88/glanglish%2031%208.8.88.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">'Now, who can tell me today's date?' I remember the teacher standing in front of the class; a female teacher, so perhaps it was Miss Pinkney or Mrs Sutcliffe - but not Miss Grogden or Mrs Day. I am at the back of the class to the right, next to Angela - but this may have been the following year. I half remember sitting next to my best friend, Neil Campion, at some stage, which must have been around this time, towards the end of my infant schooldays. Perhaps he sat in front of me. I suppose I should be amazed at how easily I lost touch with him. I never saw him again, though I do remember being told how his brother - who had a withered left arm with a rather disturbing hook-like device he clipped over it - was killed a couple of years later when he rode his motorbike into an unlit skip late at night. Apparently his girlfriend riding pillion was also killed, but none of this touched me in the slightest.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />'And what is special about today's date?' Our double desk - whoever it was that shared with me - consisted of a top with a kind of rectangular cavity underneath. In it we would keep all our text and exercise books, along with pencils and rubbers and set squares and the like. I remember that I arranged mine in two neat ziggurat forms, one in each corner.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />'And when will be the next time that that happens?' Outside, in the sunlight, lay the grass playing area bounded by a high wire netting fence. At the far end this gave on to the forbidden sports fields of the secondary modern school next door. I never knew anything about this place, except that it was where most of those at my primary school ended up. It never occurred to me to wonder whether I too would go there. Not that I assumed I would automatically go to a grammar school, because I would not have recognised the concept; it was more that I spent my childhood in a strange kind of volitional and experiential haze.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />'Yes, Glyn?' But I did know what the date was, what was special about it, and when it would happen again. The answer seemed obvious, and that I should know it, natural. Like my desk, like the sunshine that poured in through the high windows, like the steady progress through the junior school towards the 11+ exam and beyond, everything in my world seemed perfectly ordered and perfectly right. My schooldays were hardly the happiest of my life, but they were totally stress-free, insouciant, and frictionless. I scarcely felt them pass at all. Time flew by in standing still.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Thus it is that I have few memories from that time, just the odd, flickering image from each year. But the question that opened that June morning has remained with me ever since. Eleven years, one month and one day after hearing it, I wrote on my 1977 desktop diary for 7 July: '(remember 6.6.66?)'. And I did.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />And I do today. The anniversaries are moments of punctuation which come round with a quirky regularity, as if governed by sunspot activity. Like strange, temporal vortices, they exert a complex force. All my life, I know, they will give me pause for thought: thought for what was on these dates in the past; and thought for what might be in the future.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1988)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-31-8.8.88-1988" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2254110883772058443.post-16974743632598723852022-07-23T09:48:00.001+00:002022-09-10T08:26:44.347+00:00The finite brain<audio controls="">
<source src="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-30-the-finite-brain/glanglish%2030%20the%20finite%20brain.mp3"></source>
</audio><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/download/glanglish-30-the-finite-brain/glanglish%2030%20the%20finite%20brain.mp3" target="_blank">Download</a> audio file read by Glyn Moody.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">We do not like to think about our brains. When we look at the world we conveniently gloss over the sensation that the living person who sees seems to be located behind our eyes, in that cranial bowl of inert, grey paste. Our niceness in this respect even shows itself in our eating. The idea of eating brains is repulsive to most, which is strange given the other glands and organs we dine off - what are kidneys used for? But eating it would confront us with the fact that the brain really is an organ, and physical. From the inside it feels neither of these things.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Unfortunately the advent of computers has given us some troublesome metaphors and analogies. In earlier days of pre-lapsarian computer innocence, we might accept the brain's workings as mysteries too deep to fathom, or even comprehend. Now, though, we are almost forced to articulate concerns which were perhaps better left unspoken.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />For example, all computer users know that you can never have enough memory. When you run out - as always happens - you either upgrade your capacity, or you throw away old files to make room for new data. The brain too stores data, though how is not clear in detail. An obvious question poses itself: does the brain ever run out of memory? Or, equivalently: just how finite is the brain?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />As we blithely go through life, experiencing, learning, remembering, we assume that this state of affairs will continue until we die. The idea that the brain might at some point become full, become incapable of learning or remembering any more, is terrifying. But not ridiculous: the brain evolved in hominids whose life expectancy was around 35 years, not 70, and who moreover led a relatively simple and uneventful life. Today, people probably experience more new sensations and ideas in a month than their distant forebears did in their entire lives. Has the brain enough spare capacity to cope with this excess? </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />If it hasn't, what will happen - given that there are, as yet, no upgrades for the brain? The best we can hope for is that the brain will dump old memories and knowledge just as we delete old files. We might lose treasured moments and hard-won skills from the past, but at least we would have room for the future. This does, in any case, clearly happen: nobody remembers all their childhood, and the older you get, the less you recall from long ago.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />Worse would be the situation where we simply forget everything we see or do or learn beyond a certain time. If this were proved to happen, our whole attitude to life would alter. No longer would we thoughtlessly be hungry for new knowledge and experiences; we would need to ration them, to apportion them year by year. We would become parsimonious with our brain, costive with its valuable capacity. Of course just as some poor fools now smoke and drug themselves heedless of the eventual damage, so we would have info addicts who gorged themselves on facts today, reckless of tomorrow. For the rest of us there would be anti-education programmes, even government mental health warnings on books, art, music, on everything offering a new idea or experience. It makes you think, doesn't it?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br />(1989)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/glanglish-30-the-finite-brain-1989" target="_blank">Download</a> CC0-licensed text file</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><a href="https://glanglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/contents.html">Contents</a></span></div>Glyn Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04436885795882611585noreply@blogger.com0