Alice in Texas

Going live...

2005-08-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

I have moved. Wait two seconds for the automatic redirect, or click here...

Now, at last, a blog that does not exclude the half of my readers uninterested in either domestic details or heavy moral sermonising!

Actually, two blogs.

like a tea-tray in the sky: politics, philosophy and general pontifications

down the rabbit hole: the real life of me

Please adjust your bookmarks to whichever you prefer. They each have links to the other, so there is no need to bookmark both.

See you over there...

Watch this space...

2005-08-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

The new place should be ready later today. There are just a couple of final tweaks left and then I think I'd better write a post or two, otherwise you will be going over there and finding a big empty page. Back in a while...

yes, it's another update...

2005-08-25T08:44:00.000-07:00

Well, I only have sixteen more tons of things to do and my new blogohome will be up and running. It's being a very interesting experience. The state of web design seems so dreadful to me, I am thinking of setting up in business. The trouble with web design is it is all done by geeks instead of designers. For instance, I have been going through colours so slowly you would think I was Martha Stewart selecting a hundred different carefully-coordinated shades of grey for her new house. Not because I think my blogohome has to look like a stately home, just to avoid it giving me eye-damage.

I'm off to do that now once more, in fact. The practice template I am working on at the moment has a background which looks exactly like a paper bag I once got given in a gift shop somewhere in England years ago. I remember it distinctly because it is an especially annoying design example- mauve and flowery and looks like it should be quite nice, in a traditional kind of way- but instead it's badly done and horrible. There are a lot of 1980s sofas with the same sort of pattern. I think they thought they were updating floweriness to make it slightly art nouveau (the 30s were big in the 80s) and a little bit Millais. What they actually produced was the sort of pond full of vague blurry organic matter that probably accurately represents the last vision of the traumatised dying Ophelia. (OK, that's not a great conceit, but I like it.) If I ever go back in time, I will tell the fabric designers of the 80s that it is impossible to combine traditional English floral with modern edgy, you just have to choose, blurring it up does not work.

Thanks Connie and Sean, I do indeed intend to come back fired-up and full of things to say. Meanwhile I am having great fun doing this designing. I have wanted to have a Proper Blog for years now, but not managed to do it the way I wanted. This time I think I've actually got all three things I need, which are the look, the right twiddly gadgets, and the right blogging identity, which is a thing like a "story" in marketing. Not that I won't be me- I will be more me, which is what these things are about. But that's quite a big subject, I will have to blog more about it once I'm up and running.

another update...

2005-08-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

I really am sorry about the wait. It is of course taking longer than expected to renovate the blog, which always happens. In the meantime I am very excited about my new format, which will make possible all sorts of different and more in-depth writing without the accompanying problems that have been bugging me ever since starting blogging a couple of years ago. The changes are quite minor in themselves, and the reasons they are important to me and my writing are a bit complicated to explain, but I think you will like the results. Whatever you have liked about Alice in Texas or my other blogs before that will be back bigger and better than before, and whatever you are not interested in will be away in the background (but easily accessible to those who are).

As there is no way of knowing exactly how long this is going to take, I will endeavour to keep posting a few things here, although they may be somewhat minimal due to my energies being directed mostly towards the next stage. I asked before for feedback and only got one taker, but if there is anything you want to see more of please feel free to say so here. As you were, once again!

update

2005-08-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

I am still working on the new improved blog/s. It is taking longer than I expected, as I should have expected. Ongoing apologies for the fact that nothing is happening here in the meantime otherwise I would never get round to moving blogohouse at all. As you were.

news

2005-08-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

I've been working on blog updating and redefining ideas, and am learning a new blogging system. The main issue is how to get rid of the picture of the two whales crashing through a car windscreen at the top. Anyway, it will take a while, so no blogging here for a couple of days. Please enjoy the holiday and be ready to readjust your sets on my return.

In other news, we have tickets for this. Three cheers! Cheaper than a summer holiday and with more obscure 1930s kung-fu movies! Actually I don't know what the movies are going to be, they don't tell you. But there are a lot, and they are sure to be incredibly obscure, and we have tickets for every single one. Gulp.

bleh

2005-08-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

This is worrying me. From Dov Bear via Mirty.

However, luckily my horoscope says not to worry today but simply to do whatever seems easy. We all know that horoscopes represent unfailingly accurate moral advice, therefore I shall be following this one's. Back with something frivolous later.

cookies and computers

2005-08-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

I am still green but now using a different computer, as you can see. My usual one got a virus which destroyed a small but apparently significant part of it, "windows" I think the thing is called. And now it won't turn on at all anymore. So I got a lot of piano playing done yesterday afternoon. Every now and then I wonder why I am doing all this piano playing. It's not as if I am going to become a concert pianist at my age. But maybe there doesn't need to be a reason for everything a person does with their time.

I also baked chocolate chip cookies. Not having made American-style cookies before, it is taking me a few goes to get right. The first time, I used salt instead of sugar. Yes, I know. Post-house-moving mistake, things got mixed up. The second time, I made the mixture too runny and the cookies fused into one giant sheet. The next time, I tried to make them double chocolate flavour, so substituted cocoa for some of the flour, but then they weren't sweet enough. This last lot was quite close to perfect, but cookie baking is definitely nothing like the English baking I am used to. I want to get it right though, as really good cookies are my absolute favourite biscuit-type thing to eat.

They take eight minutes to bake so I had to keep checking the oven and doing things. In between I was practising the candenza-type bit from the end of the last movement of the Moonlight Sonata. So I was alternately sitting there in my floury apron going DA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA!!! loud enough to give your granny a heart attack, and popping into the kitchen to change around baking trays.

Well, you probably had to be there.

feedback please

2005-08-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

While I slowly work on moving out of the blogger apartment complex (again), this seems like a good time for a general overhaul of the blog. Do you have any comments/ suggestions/ ideas? What do you like and not like? Any feedback welcome.

link

2005-08-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

Gush Katif.

all keywords

2005-08-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

texas, alice, depressing, 2005, speak, bigger, native -
raindrops, business, sonata, custody, comes, song, joe -
meaningless, and, ever, women, most, battle, songs -
campisi, older, beauty, when, country, bachini, deaths.

beautiful, laws, winning -
spa, food, big -
notes, things, august -
piano.

bigger pictures

2005-08-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

When we lose a great battle which we still believe in, it seems incomprehensible that any good can ever come of it. Even if somehow things might one day get back to where they should have been- and sometimes reality makes this impossible- the loss can never be made good. The time and effort it took to recover cannot be recovered. The learning we gain from dealing with the problems thrown up by the experience will never be equal to the loss. We are not merely mourning what has gone, but the fact that it was taken away. We don't want the world to be the kind of place where this can happen. We want justice to be real, not arbitrary. So at exactly the time we have to struggle for survival in the face of our real personal loss, we also find ourselves without the old sustaining laws we used to believe in. Nothing makes sense anymore. Anything can happen. There are no limits, no expectations, there is nothing to rely on.

This is when faith becomes a necessity instead of a happy luxury. Some people call it opimism, and think that meaning is hidden in the molecules of the universe, and other people call it G-d. But when nothing makes sense any more, we still have hope. When we reach the end of the road we are on at the moment, and can look back, there is a chance that the journey itself will finally make some sense. How much of a chance depends how much faith you have; not because people delude themselves to whatever level they choose, though sometimes one might wish to be able to do that, but because faith is the energy that gets you down the road.

There are many things happening at the moment which I do not understand. But knowing the limitedness of our current understanding is exactly what provides hope for the future. Given how much we do not know, there is every chance that a bigger picture that makes sense of things exists, beyond what we can see right now. And there is every chance that we can learn to see that picture, that it will ultimately emerge from the individual marks we make in the sand each day.

the garden

2005-08-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

The garden (yard) of this house is enormous and very beautiful because it is full of trees, like an orchard. I assume it was planted like that for shade, when the little wooden house was built in the 30s. It is also full of animals and insects, which is very interesting for something to watch out there. They all fight over the fig tree and make a lot of noise. I am not a nature expert, I can tell the difference between a butterfly, a squirrel, a bird and a creepy-crawly that might bite me, and that's about it, so I may have to invest in a nature book sometime to find out what everything is. "Wild and dangerous creatures of Texas", something like that.

My plans for the garden are as follows:
1. keep the grass alive,
2. get round to doing something with the overgrown herb patch where one plant has grown into a huge bush and is smothering all the rest to death,
3. occupy the land.

This last part means using the outside space as if it was an indoor space, for recreational purposes. As I said before, there are two (more or less) insect-proof tents out there now, one near the house on the grass and one at the bottom of the garden on mud for using when the grass in the other tent needs a break. There is collapsible furniture for the first tent and the second tent has contents that don't need to move, consisting of an old two-person sofa, a small wicker coffee table, an ancient wicker chaise-longue which I found next to someone's dustbin (I found an identical less ruined version for sale nearby at the moment, for $150, which was cheering) and a tree-stump with side-roots acting as a table/plant-stand.

We decided to make a deck to go under all this, otherwise the rain gathers in puddles, which would destroy the sofa not to mention the big rug under it. So we spent quite a while in Home Depot arranging long pieces of wood on the floor and doing sums, before noticing a ready-made deck leaning up against the wall. It was a big pallette thing for transporting planks, and they said we could have it for free. Apparently people quite often take them and make things out of them. Unfortunately we did not have a truck, and it was ten feet long and weighed several tons. So we bought a saw, cut it in half plank by plank and managed to get it home on the roof of the car. This was fine, as its original shape was wrong anyway, and the two pieces went together sideways to make the right sized deck for the tent.

It is all brilliant, basically, and I love it. At the moment huge citronella candles are mostly taking care of any mosquito problems not covered by the tent, and at relatively mosquito-free times of day I plan to have other things to do in the garden that keep you moving around and therefore less of a target. These are:

1. A trampoline. I have always wanted a trampoline, although what the neighbours will think seeing grown adults bouncing up and down I do not know. (It will be collapsible, to save the grass)
2. I thought about a ping pong table, but a better idea is a net that can be used for either badminton or volleyball. I like this kind of game too. So that is two forms of official exercise, which is good as I don't do any except play the piano at the moment.
3. A hammock. There are two trees in just the right place and the right distance apart for a hammock, although it may need a mosquito net over it. I wanted a Mexican one, but when we went to the only Mexican import shop I could find it was empty.
"We haven't been to Mexico for a while," said the Mexican lady, now living entirely on her fortune-telling and psychic healing skills. "It's too dangerous, people are getting shot down there." Oh well. I used to have a great hammock, but it got left behind in England.
4. A picnic table, to go with the tiny little barbecue which sits in a hole in the ground at the bottom of the garden by tent #2. There is no grass round there, just old logs from a cut down tree and the ground is dry earth. I am calling it the encampment because it is like a clearing in a forest. You can sit on tree-stumps and cook burgers then dash in the tent to avoid any more mosquito bites.

There is also a three-line washing line which could be used as another instant tent for any random children who happened to turn up wanting to play, and a big patch of plants in the middle of the garden that will turn into flowers in the spring. And the last potential plan is to put another tent on the side of the house, and turn it into a washing room with a washing machine and a dryer, because we don't have any in the house as it's too small. Not urgent at the moment though, with just the two of us. Also, going to the laundrette is not unpleasant because it is next door to no less than four different cafes plus an independent supermarket. So that's a coffee for the wash cycle then an ice-cream for the drying cycle, or something similar. I have actually missed out on the pleasantness of this arrangement so far, from being either ill or in a bad mood almost every washing day so far, but hopefully that will not continue.

So, that's all about my garden. There are few things as beautiful as well-designed nature for restoring the soul, so we really lucked-out with this one.

good news for your eyeballs

2005-08-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

Hurrah! The blog is not going to stay looking like this. It will be becoming a whole new blog, with fancy things on like expandable posts, and a search facility that traditionally completely fails to find anything you try and search except the title of the blog because it ignores common words and can't find uncommon words, and a pop-up-toaster, and a matching Paddington apron and tea-towel... you name it, it will be on the new blog. Oh yes.

Alright, maybe not all that. But it will be moving in a while, and there will be less green, I promise.

I am staring at the people-counter, aghast. About ten people an hour come here, if the last 3 hours are representative. Taking into account they are probably all American and sleep during the night, that could add up to an entire hundred people every day, which is far more than three and well worth writing for. But then, those hundred people probably each read three times their weight in blogs every day too, and comment on approximately one every fortnight. So that means the number of comments here is actually extraordinarily high, and is probably even due for a nosedive.

This green is actually giving me nausea, it's just that the other blogger colours are even worse. Time for Bach.

another piano playing post

2005-08-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

Well, I hit upon how to strengthen my fingers without having to play Hanon exercises. The Bach prelude in C minor for both hands, last movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata for right hand and Chopin study #12 for left hand. In other words, semiquavers. Or fraction notes (sixteenths? eighths? whatever) if you are any other nationality than English, including American as I was amazed to discover.

So, after a while of breaking down and rebuilding those muscles, a la Uma Thurman repeatedly punching that board of wood, my fingers are now doing things more similar to what I want them to be doing, and this is very pleasing. More pieces are a case of learning the notes and fewer pieces are a case of physical impossibility. However, I bought Beethoven's Appasionata sonata (nice rhyme) which is apparently still impossible, and for some reason I still can't play Chopin's study #5, even though I used to be able to 20 years ago. It's mostly on the black notes and my fingers just keep sliding off.

No idea why this is, but the more I play now, the more I become aware that I am doing it in a completely different way than I did when I was younger. In the olden days, I picked up more things on instinct, but I also seemed to have to fudge through more things. Now, I have to consciously program in every note, but I can do more difficult things with greater accuracy. For instance, I doubt that my hands have grown, but I can now play in octaves much better than I could then. It's because I think about it differently.

That's right, I'm old. The interesting question for me is, can a person learning something later on in life really ever be as good at it as they would have been had they learned it earlier? Not in terms of missed years, just from the same amount of work-time but at a different stage in their lifelong learning. I can't think of any reason why not, but I never heard of anyone becoming a professional violinist in their forties. Why is that?

changes

2005-08-16T07:52:00.001-07:00

I will be making some changes to the blog today, do not be alarmed.

later: OK, I know this blog is not exactly beautiful but I wanted a change and it's easy enough to put back like it was before.

I have added a tracking machine because I am firmly convinced that all you readers have gone away, and if that is the case then it would be time to give up, or at least restart in a totally different way. This is not a big-time blog designed to pull in lots of readers, but I don't believe in writing a blog for just three people, at that point you have to ask yourself why you dislike your only few friends so much you're not having them round for dinner every week instead, which would be better.

Hmmm.

link

2005-08-15T15:18:00.000-07:00

Read this post by David Bogner.

I am absolutely sick about it all.

classical education

2005-08-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

I was quite lucky with my comprehensive state secondary (high school); we did Latin. But we didn't do proper Latin, with declensions and grammar. We did trick-Latin, for getting good grades in the exam. The teacher was quite open about this, and it worked pretty well, and I got an A. But it wasn't real Latin. However, I still count myself lucky, because I went on later to do English Literature at university, and at least I could roughly recognise which words were likely to come from Latin. Understanding where words come from is important if you're going to study English. As part of my degree course, I also studied French literature, a fair chunk of history, and Middle English. Done properly, English is supposed to be a very big serious academic subject indeed.

It was painfully obvious at Cambridge which people had been to decent independent schools and which people had been to bogstandard comprehensives. Those of us in the latter group (I wasn't exactly at that stage, but effectively I was, having boarded at a non-academic music school) had a lot of extra reading to do. We might have good exam grades, but we didn't have a sound classical education. Having grown up thinking that my mostly state education was no way inferior because my grades were just as good, this came as quite a shock. Having taught in the independent system I can confirm this impression all the more. There is almost no comparison betwee what a good independent school and an ordinary state school can teach, and exam grades are only tangentially related to that fact.

It is one reason why, when they are a bit older, I do not want my children attending a bogstandard comprehensive school. I want them to have a proper, wide-ranging, classical education, or at least the opportunity for one; and that opportunity does not exist in the state sector. It doesn't even exist in most of the private sector. It is very expensive indeed. (I am tempted to blow my own trumpet here, of course, but current family circumstances would make that a bit of a sick joke.)

Not all kids are cut out for the kind of education I'm talking about. There are other more vocational ways to learn, and we all know that Latin is a dead language. I have never had a problem with vocational education for children who don't have the ability to learn in an abstract way. The world will always need carpenters. But a broad knowledge of history, literature, the classics, foreign languages and the arts opens the mind, and gives you more than just "ideas"- it offers different ways of thinking. And one thing I am quite certain of is that children who can acquire this knowledge should have it made available.

Even in the home educating community there is a materialistic, functional attitude to learning in many quarters. Education is not just about facts, tests, practical skills, or (as some crackpot homeschoolers do) arrogantly dismissing "academics" as if the true value of knowledge could only be guaged by how often it appears on the Discovery Channel. Not everything valued by tradition is therefore evil, and conversely sometimes traditions grow to neglect and undermine what they were originally designed to protect. As far as I can tell, enormous chunks of institutional education are heading exactly that way at the moment.

The least we can ensure is that our children have the opportunity to be at least as well educated as we are ourselves. I am basically an optimist, in fact I have been accused many times of deluded head-in-the-clouds idiocy, but when it comes to state schools my opinion is that they are worse than they have ever been. Bright children may knuckle under and get their A grades, but that doesn't mean they have learned what they could or should have learned during the many years of childhood they were supposedly being educated. On the whole, but not always for an intelligent child, institutionalised schooling is more of an incredibly boring waste of time than it has ever been. The trouble is finding something better.

judging motives

2005-08-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

I found this article on Chabad.org, about putting on your own oxygen mask before helping children (my bolds):

I don't believe there is any absolute way that any specific action can be judged selfish or selfless. The very same action could be completely selfless in one person, completely selfish in another. What it boils down to is not whether you're doing something for yourself or not, but why are you are doing it. Are you doing it for yourself at the expense of another, or are you doing it for yourself for the benefit of another?

If I do something for myself before I take care of my children, and it is because I care more about myself, my needs, my desires--then that is selfish. If by taking care of myself first and keeping them waiting only I gain, then it is wrong. However, if I am doing something for myself first so that ultimately I will be able to help my children, and they will benefit, then it is not only not selfish, perhaps it is essential, both for their health and my own.

Now we can take this analogy even a little further. Because, after all, the oxygen we need to survive is not just the physical oxygen. Each person has his or her own individual needs in terms of the space, time and circumstances required to feel healthy. No one can judge that for someone else. And a person must first fill his needs before he can help another. Notice that I said, "needs" and not "wants." We are talking about what is essential--what is required to live and be healthy. These are not luxuries, these are necessities, though my necessities may vary greatly from yours. The important thing is that we both figure out what it is we need to ensure that we acquire it.

That's why I came to Texas and got married despite not being able to bring my children. I do not expect those who choose to judge to stop regarding my motives as selfish, but I do wish they would read articles like this one and understand that it is impossible to read other people's minds and know their motivations.

Of course, our attempts to understand the motives of terrorists are also doomed. None of them are going to admit, "It's because I am a spoilt angry brat with a pointless life largely of my own devising and the only act of ego I can manage is to get on the big stage of jihad." Or just, "because I can." What counts is their actions, not their inner worlds. Terrorism will be defeated when the balance of power shifts far enough from terrorist-supporting political groups towards peaceful ones. For this reason, Saddam was exactly the right first target.

The concept of judging motive as well as actions was introduced into the legal system by the ancient Greeks, and is still with us today. The best example is that killing someone in a drink-driving accident is not considered as reprehensible as murder planned in advance. Is this morally right? I don't actually think it is. Why can we not simply judge people for their actions?

The Greeks were trying to solve the problem of having to execute someone for murder because they walked past a rock that started a landslide that killed someone at the bottom of the hill. My hunch is that they confused moral motive with the knowledge inside a person's head, and/or their logical sphere of influence at the time. I might come back to this later. Maybe some of you (if are any of you still reading- are you?) know more about the establishment of modern western legal systems than I do. I just picked up a few vague notions in passing while studying Aeschylus years and years ago.

unimaginable

2005-08-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

I'd had this particular what-if on my mind. Then I found a direct reference to it in the Telegraph from Scott Burgess' blog:

An extremist Islamic cleric based in Britain said yesterday that he would support hostage-taking at British schools if carried out by terrorists with a just cause.

"As long as the Iraqi did not deliberately kill women and children, and they were killed in the crossfire, that would be okay."
Mr Mohammed, 44, who lives in Edmonton, north London, but is originally from Syria, also claimed that the Chechen rebels were not responsible for the deaths of more than 350 people - at least half of them children - who are so far known to have died in Beslan.

"The Mujahideen [Chechen rebels] would not have wanted to kill those people, because it is strictly forbidden as a Muslim to deliberately kill women and children. It is the fault of the Russians," he said.

Those are my bolds.

If it is strictly forbidden to kill women and children, Islamic religious fundamentalism is not the problem. Evil people capable of dishonestly twisting their own "religious" beliefs into justifying breaking every actual law going is the problem.

This man is now apparently being thrown out of the UK. Which for some reason I do not find reassuring at all. I had forgotten about the Chechen school massacre, which I unwisely read all about at the time, and now there are pictures of horror in my head again. Time for another, stricter news blackout, methinks.

ethnic cleansing

2005-08-14T19:08:00.000-07:00

Here is an article that relates to my post below about the disengagement. A quote:

Those who advocate the dismantling of the Jewish communities in this territory are advocating a policy of ethnic cleansing.

Is there any general consciousness of this at all?

A depressing weekend all round. Back tomorrow.

the sins of the mothers

2005-08-14T18:46:00.000-07:00

You know how, when you have your first baby, people say to you, "Ah, now you will finally appreciate what your mother had to go through when she had you!" ? Well, there are some people who have this experience, and there are some people whose experience is closer to that of the inestimable getupgrrl of Chez Miscarriage. As she does not have archives due to people stealing her writing, you will have to click that link super-fast, but here is a brief quotation for posterity:

A number of you have asked, where is my muh-thuh? Why is she not helping? The answer is, she's right here, and she's not helping because she's not helpful.

Example: last week, Gefilte had a stuffy nose. So I calmly attempted to administer some saline drops, until my muh-thuh came over and suggested that OH MY GOD WE HAVE TO GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM IMMEDIATELY - HIS NOSE IS STUFFY!

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

There are certain advantages to blogging anonymously, and one of them is the ability to explain that actually thinking about your first baby and your own mother in the same equation only inspires a deep, intense terror regarding what unimaginable damage your own psyche went through in those early weeks and months when you were still a little stuffed ball of fish yourself. And in case my mother suddenly learned how to use a computer and read my blog- it's a joke. And hello, how are you?

Hopefully getupgrrl will publish her archives in a book sometime. It's a guaranteed bestseller, and if publishers aren't hounding her with large cheques right now then they are all crazy.

disengagement

2005-08-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

I was listening to the radio about the disengagement. They interviewed a very ordinary, nice-sounding Arabic gentleman who lived next door to one of the settlements. Then they gave us a bit of a prayer from a rabbi giving a service in a Jewish graveyard. It was impossible not to notice that while the Arabic gentleman had lived next door to Jews for twentysomething years when they were in charge, Jews are not going to be allowed to stay in the area when Arabs are in charge. The Palestinians have demanded their removal. So if they want to visit the graves of their dead relatives ever again, they are going to have to dig them up and rebury them elsewhere in Israel. Which is obscene.

Palestine will be Judenrein. According to Wikipedia, about 20% of the population of Israel is Arab. To me, the issue is not so much who owns the land as whether they use it to run a racist, fascist state. If there is competition there, I can't see where it is.

I have been thinking about the disengagement for months of course, although I choose rarely to write about politics on this blog at the moment. Nobody has to agree with my opinion, in fact I would rather they decided it was rubbish and felt comfortably superior than tried to get me into an argument, because I do not have the energy or the inclination. Whether they realise it or not, many many people are irrational, extremist, ignorant and bigoted on this issue, just as about everything to do with Israel. But for what it is worth, which I cannot put too low a price on frankly, my view is that Israel should be keeping the land rather than handing it over to the kind of people they are handing it over to.

It would be nice if the disengagement led to peace, absolutely lovely, but where is the reason to expect that? The only possible good I can see coming out of it is if Jews get better at talking to each other. I recommend David Bogner's devastating post on this subject.

Hard lessons may be good for us. They may even be the only way we ever learn what we need to learn. But that fact in no way justifies evil actions. As human beings, we have the choice of vowing to extract every drop of new truth and knowledge from every difficult situation that is forced upon us, and to use it to become better people, capable of doing more good, perhaps even doing enough good that such evil things never need happen again. We may even find it in our hearts to forgive those who commit evil against us- if such perpetrators exist, which is not always the case. The people I most admire are the ones who act like that. The people I have to work hardest not to loathe are the ones who just (apparently) blame everyone else instead.

But evil will always be evil, and good will always be good, and no amount of rationalising, justifying, trickery or self-deception will ever alter which is which. I have no idea who to blame about the disengagement, but I will never believe that it was, in itself, a good thing. The most I can do is believe that good can come out of evil. If we work at it.

note

2005-08-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

The post below was edited in the few minutes after first being published. I tend to read things over on the actual blog after publishing, and sometimes only then decide they need improvement, so if you notice something changing this is because you found it right after it was temporarily published in an unfinished form. However, this habit of mine could be confusing so I will try to avoid it in future.

more things, Horatio

2005-08-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

(Note: If you read this post as a defence of religion, you will be missing the point. It is actually about what to do when arguments are stuck at both poles going nowhere. The answer is to broaden one's mind, listen more attentively and create new common ground that can lead somewhere. Of course we know that already- we just don't know it well enough. It's a vast school of knowledge, not a fact.)

Theo Hobson asks in The Spectator:

how do you know what other people mean when they use a rhetoric of heaven, or of a godly realm? How do you know the difference between literal belief, metaphorical belief and social convention in an unfamiliar tradition?

Quite so. There is a reason why the term "backseat driver" is derogatory. Anyone who knows little or nothing about a bunch of ideas can pick a few out and criticise them at their leisure, but whether or not they have any real idea about what they're saying is another matter. It is a basic logical error to assume that every group of ideas can be criticised from the outside. Any group of ideas that constitutes an institution is likely to contain inexplicit knowledge which may not even be easily accessible to people who have been studying it for centuries, never mind newbies.

Experience gives us the opportunity to learn that inexplicit knowledge. It is not a method of learning, but a place and a time, and there may be no other place and time that makes it possible. Plenty of people with experience still learn next to nothing about the thing they are experiencing, of course, but even if your mind is closed, when you are physically surrounded by new things it is difficult not to pick up a few details of truth in the process of refuting every new idea that comes along. Details don't provide meaning unless you link them up with other details, but over a sufficiently long time a person can gather so many details that putting them together like a jigsaw becomes quite easy.

Anyway, experience is the necessary environment/ pre-requisite for learning certain kinds of inexplicit knowledge. So if you just stand outside and criticise all your life, you are never really going to learn anything at all. And chances are, your backseat driving will annoy the driver, making him perform less well and probably throw you out in the end. Because you're not helping, only hindering. This is the time to book driving lessons for yourself.

I wrote about this a while back on my previous blog. It's the soup idea- that if you want to understand some things, the only way is to try them. However, it is something of a Catch-22. The only answer to the question, "Why should I try the soup?" is that if other people you admire or respect, or who seem to know more than you, are eating soup and saying it is wonderful, then why not try it yourself? The only reason not to try it is that you still think it could be poisonous, and for that you must have a reason. But there is no "pro-soup" argument, no reason for trying the soup, only the apparent effects of the soup that you can observe in the soup-eaters, and yes, those might be false. You can, however, analyse your anti-soup arguments, and if they don't stand up there will be no reason not to try the soup.

Those who want to argue for specific institutions because they contain valuable inexplicit knowledge have no rational way of doing so. Those who want to attack those institutions have no motive for criticising their criticisms. The only way forward is reasonable dialogue. The worst mistake we make is in responding to (perceived) aggression or diversion with further aggression or diversion. If you think someone is taking something out on you, offering them helpful psychological analysis of their problems is going to make things worse. So is insulting them and their family for their terrible behaviour. It may seem obvious to you that the soup is poisoned and the drinkers of the soup are all sick, but if they think they feel just great then telling them they are sick and trying to poison everyone else too is not going to help.

We seem to be stuck. If you regard a person as worthy of only contempt and derision because they are "left" "right" "religious" or "G-dless", you cannot communicate with them effectively. As well as sharing your most deeply-held ideas and considered beliefs, you need to establish the right style of dialogue. These days, everybody is in some kind of "camp", probably the majority of them having been put there by their interlocutors rather than going in voluntarily. But yelling over perceived trenches is not going to work, especially when the other person is actually standing right next to you on neutral territory being painfully deafened.

The answer to the question at the top of the page is that we cannot know what is inside other people's heads, ever. We are not psychic. And when it comes to their most deeply-held convictions, we are less likely to have any understanding at all: where those convictions come from, the precise quality of them, the balance of different ideas within them, all create something unique. The sum total of a person's lifelong thinking and experience is not that they acquire an accurate label. What counts is their relationship with the world, and that knowledge is different for every person. It is an unimaginably huge place to look for progress, but if we all did it, we could get there. If we can't bring ourselves to try their soup and they don't want any of ours, then at least we can start trying to create other soups that can be shared. And by "we" I do mean all of us. Standing there declaring how great your soup is and that everyone should like it is not enough. You have to understand and work with consumer demand. Nobody ever sold an idea by telling the customer he should appreciate it better, still less by laughing at him.

We have a bunch of different shops, each one catering to a niche market. The first person who invents a product everybody likes will make a fortune. As everybody is human, it is not unlikely that there is something everybody likes, but you have to start small before you can get big. Every little counts, as they say on the Tescos commercial.

Guardian home-education-watch

2005-08-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

It is a common concern that home-educated children will become less adept socially, but experience shows quite the reverse. (...) Most home educating parents make sure the school playground is replaced by richer social contact with a wider age group.

More in the Guardian about home education. The article is about a recent survey which found bullying to be the main reason parents are taking children out of school. Given that bullying has been leading to so many suicides, that's not surprising, but there are lots of other parents who home educate from scratch whose motivation for home educating may not be reflected in this survey as they never "removed" their child from school.

The Guardian article also mentions this study, which I remember from when it was first published:

A 2002 Durham University study, which surveyed 400 families and tested nearly 200 children, found extremely good standards of literacy in children up to the age of 10 and good maths results for seven year olds. This study by Paula Rothermel also concluded that home-educated children demonstrated good social skills.

Interesting that the liberal press should be so interested in private education. I think this is because, like some other kinds (Montessori, Steiner-Waldorf) home education is regarded as "alternative" in the UK. I suppose this shift is similar to the one in medicine, where the same people are spending money on non-traditional forms of healthcare rather than going to their NHS GP. I don't think labelling these trends "left-wing" works at all. Intriguing.

things I have learned #2 random stuff

2005-08-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

1. If you want 50's vintage clothes or furniture, buy it in America. If you want anything older than that, buy it in Europe. Then bring it to America.
2. It is better to spend twice as much on chemical hair-dye than half as much on the same colour henna, unless you like massaging mud into your hair then trying to get out every grain six hours later when it has finally worked.
3. Play either the piano or the guitar. There is not much solo repertoire for the oboe when you decide not to pursue it professionally and just want entertainment in your later life.
4. Get good at cooking. Microwave food is rubbish and even the best restaurant food will be substandard once it has been delivered to your home.
5. It is better to let the mosquito drink your blood while you get a good aim than to risk letting it live.
6. Plants die and it is not your fault. They just die.
7. The same outfit worn in a different part of the world will look completely different.
8. The most expensive gadgets have the most built-in obsolescence.
9. The lesson of The Incredibles: hiding is the most dangerous thing you can do.
10. The lesson of Batman Begins: if you're going to be a target, keep moving. And learn to fly. And if you are Katie Holmes, stay single.

things I have learned #1 dry philosophical stuff

2005-08-11T06:57:00.000-07:00

1. People can decide to be happy. There is nearly always tons and tons to be happy about, if you think about it, far far more than there is to be miserable about. But your state of mind is not hardwired to your circumstances anyway, you have free will and can change it.

2. Nearly all our unhappiness is linked to fear. This requires thinking about as well. There are probably millions of best-possible-outcomes for almost every situation, but we think it safer to imagine the worst ones and emote about them in advance. It doesn't really help at all. If a good outcome happened, wouldn't you feel silly for having wasted your happiness being so negative before?

3. Regret is a total waste of time. It is always better to make mistakes and learn from them than to do nothing, and those of us who actually live our lives instead of hiding behind anxieties and social conventions should feel good about that.

4. Goodness does bring rewards and badness does get its come-uppance. For instance, a good financially comfortable person will be enjoying every aspect of his fortune, while his bad equally financially comfortable will be miserable, unappreciative and drinking himself to death. Also, actively living a good life maximises your health.

5. A life well-lived is full of challenges. The harder the challenge, the more you learn by working through it, even (or especially) if at the time it seems dark and impossible. Happiness comes from mental fitness, whereas avoiding challenges ultimately leads to mental and physical stress, boredom and unhappiness. The fitter you are, the harder your challenges need to be in order to get you fitter. Anyone can seek and find a challenge when they need one.

6. Theories are just theories. They can help you a lot, but real knowledge is in the nitty-gritty, often sub-verbal, detailed information that comes with experience. Of course, experiences are often misused and misinterpreted, and many experiences are dangerous and sub-optimal. But the less you act, the less it is possible to learn.

7. People can be incredibly stupid, wrong, arrogant, objectionable and irrational. Expecting anything more from a person without good reason is silly and doomed to failure.

8. People will dismiss your most heartfelt, deeply-held, principled convictions out of hand. They will condemn ideas they know little or nothing about. They will pick apart your morals on a whim, and assume that everything you spent your life learning is similarly just a whim, only an even lesser one. None of this matters. They are only damaging themselves- if your knowledge is good then it will serve you fine whatever they think or do.

9. Life is good.

10. Life in general is getting better, because we are making it better. Individual lives can always be improved, but only through the efforts of their owners.

rain and vampires

2005-08-11T05:45:00.000-07:00

We are having a very very wet summer. Texas rain is not like English rain. Mount Olympus style thunderbolts and lightning (very very... um, forget that) are the norm rather than the exception, plus the raindrops are five times bigger and more plentiful. All this is good, because it means:

1. the temperature is less hot than normal, and
2. not having to water the lawn every single day or watch it bake to a crisp.

But it is still weird, because it's supposed to be summer, when nothing but blistering heat comes out of the sky, it is not supposed to be The Monsoon Season. Also there is also one annoying thing about the high-water relatively-low-temperature weather, which is:

1. more mosquitoes.

I still cannot get over the general idea of an near-invisible insect-vampire that temporarily anaesthetises you. Intelligent design, yes, and also evil.

No, I did not really mean that. Actually they are better than wasps, I just I wish there was some simple magic way to scare them off such as garlic, staking them through the heart with cocktail sticks is becoming exhausting. You can get expensive machines, I don't know what they do, fill the air-waves with terrifyingly loud noise at mosquito-frequency or something probably, but they are expensive. Maybe they'll start doing MP3s of them eventually. I don't suppose anyone has more tips? Oh well.

reminiscences

2005-08-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

The school where I taught had very good facilities for the staff. There was a staff room full of desks, one per teacher, built in rows with shelf space above and below, in which one could work when not in the classroom. There was also a common room with comfortable chairs, where one could work from one's lap in more spread out fashion, but which was mostly used during morning break and the lunch hour for people to relax and chat over cups of coffee, everything punctuated by calls from outside that Annabel so-and-so wished to see Mrs so-and-so.

I used to sit in the smokers' corner, at the far end of this vast double-sized room, a privilege which disappeared not long after I left. Here I would drink my coffee, smoke and organise my lessons for the day from a big hard A4 folder on my lap. There were a couple of very senior members of staff who sat in the same area, and although I did not know them well it was an interesting place to sit. Also the geography was different to the more clique-oriented chair arrangements through the rest of the room, with people coming and going because of the smoking designation. Sometimes (non-smoking) friends would sit there and chat, but other times it was possible just to get on with some work and not have to be part of a group, which suited me fine.

One day a senior colleague nearby began talking to those around about her life story. She was a very unassuming, very lovely person whom everyone including the girls respected and liked, and this day, completely surprisingly, her photograph had been in a major national newspaper. This was because she was with someone more notable (but still not particularly notable, there wasn't much news around at the time) when they were pictured. I am changing all the details here because the conversation was relatively private, being among colleagues, and I wouldn't feel right about revealing her identity. I shall call her Margaret.

So, Margaret spoke about how she knew this papparazi-worthy person, from a very mundane connection, and this led onto something else and something else, and more and more people were being drawn into listening, because the life of which Margaret spoke was so far from the assumptions one would normally make about an ordinary-looking middle-aged schoolteacher. There were several marriages, one involving a conversion to Islam and one to a millionaire American businessman. The millionaire businessman was later on, and the marriage had collapsed as the financial empire grew. But the interesting one was the Islamic marriage.

Margaret had married her Islamic husband in England, but after a few years he decided to divorce her and at the same time return home to his country of birth. When he did this, he took her three small daughters with him. In his country divorced fathers always had ownership of the children, so there was nothing Margaret could do except accept the situation. However, this was all a long time ago, and since then her daughters had grown up and they had established a good ongoing relationship.

While they were growing up, the girls had not been allowed any contact with their mother, but Margaret said whenever she went on holiday, or just from time to time anyway, she would send them a postcard of where she was, with some writing on the back. She didn't know if they ever got these postcards, and never heard anything back, but it seemed like a good thing to do. Years later, Margaret was able to visit them in their home. I think this was when they were teenagers. She said it was a bit strange because they didn't really know her, but in their bedroom there was something surprising.

Every one of Margaret's postcards had been saved and stuck up on the wall. The entire collection was there, I don't remember how big it was but in my head there is a picture of hundreds of small pictures lined up in rows to make one huge diverse collage.

After that I expect the conversation turned to reminiscences about wedding arrangements, which was always a popular subject in our staffroom, as there was generally at least one younger female teacher getting married. Not many male teachers tend to work in girls' schools.

announcement

2005-08-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

Long-time readers of this blog probably deserve to know that I no longer have legal residency (the new British term for custody) of my children.

I am sure that many of you will consider my position on this completely and even disturbingly wrong, but it is an absolute moral principle of mine that I refuse under any circumstances (other than child abuse) to enter a courtroom in order to fight over the possession of my children against their other parent. Aside from the fact that it would mean separation from my new husband, spending thousands I don't have, living back in my former home for months on end and who knows how much upset and stress for the children that doesn't bear thinking about, I just find the whole idea utterly, repulsively, wrong.

Anyone who thinks this means I do not care about my children, do not want them spending half the year (or more!) with me, am happy for them to go to school instead of homeschooling with me, or in any way tacitly condone the actions of those who have acted against me, could not be more wrong. The fact is that being able to look my children in the eye for the rest of our lives is more important to me than anything else, including how much time I spend with them while they are young, and that is my decision to make.

As well as refusing to fight in court, I also refuse to return to my former home in the UK as a condition of visitation. So I have no idea whether there will be any or not. It is shocking that other people can regard these principles of basic freedom as "neglecting the children", but they do. However, to compromise would be to support evil ideas. I cannot do it.

Being a non-residential mother, especially an unwilling one, is a kind of social tabboo. It's like being recently bereaved, or having cancer: everybody's worst fear, so they try to stay away from it. I am sure none of you will stop reading this blog just because you found out I have a lurgy, although if you think there is no higher good than fighting-for-ownership-of-your-kids-with-all-your-might, as is very much the secular cultural norm, you will obviously find my position immoral and possibly even unbearably pompous. Sorry about that and please feel free to leave.

Lastly, I can tell you that we are all fine and there is no need to worry. Nor is there any advice you can offer me. I am completely confident that, G-d willing, everything will ultimately be for the best. Truth always wins eventually, and evil always dies; it can take a while, but time is one thing I am not at all worried about, G-d willing again.

Comments closed for this post. You are welcome to email me at aliceintexas at hotmail dot com. If you email criticisms, I may not be nice but I will do my best to be sweet :)

Fear of food

2005-08-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

I recognised what Mirty was talking about in this post:

I don’t completely understand it myself, but the fear was real. Perhaps because food is something you take into yourself: You are what you eat. I wanted to take in only what was pure and clean. A stick of celery, carefully rinsed. Lettuce, each leaf examined and washed. Perhaps it was the only control I felt I could have in my chaotic world.

Except for this part:

I never had this problem before, when I ate at home. Of course, I completely and implicitly trusted my mother’s cooking. I knew that the man from Baltimore brought the kosher meat and chicken and it was all stored in the downstairs freezer. I had watched my mother prepare our meals. At home, food was safe.

I've had a similar problem all my life, and it didn't start when I left home, it started when I was younger than I can remember. I would like to put it down to not being brought up in a kosher home, but that is somewhat implausible as an explanation, what with semi-protestant gentile families not actually being obliged to practice kashrut, and all that.

As I have got older, my diet has expanded, but as a child it was extremely limited indeed. So I am always interested in stories such as that of "jam sandwich boy", the British teenager who had rarely eaten anything but jam sandwiches throughout his life ("I just really really like jam sandwiches") and was found to be perfectly healthy as far as any doctor could tell. Then there is chocolate lady, a thirtysomething mother of three who was forced to eat food she hated as a child, and has eaten nothing but different kinds of chocolate bar and a bowl of mashed potato a day since she grew up and left home, and is also apparently healthy, and definitely not overweight.

I am not interested in judgements about whether such things are unnatural and dangerous. The truth is, nobody knows. We have perfectly reasonable theories about what a healthy diet should be like, based on perfectly good and tested theories, but that doesn't mean we can be sure that they apply with equal rigour to every individual. If your child has a limited diet, you are very likely right in thinking that a more varied one would be better. But if you force it, he could end up like chocolate lady anyway.

I love (good) food, and always have. But the food of 70s and 80s England that surrounded me when I was growing up was for the most part utterly dismal. I'm not surprised it repulsed me. Another thing worth noting is that plenty of babies and small children are resistant to solid food, and the way it is forced down their throats is very often unnecessary. As a culture we are completely neurotic about feeding babies. But that's a long subject for another time- although I would like to request that more people treat their tiny ones like the intelligent people they actually are, and respect their eating instincts and preferences, rather than trying to obliterate them and get stuff down at all costs. Taste is supposed to develop gradually. "I'll eat anything!" is not a badge of honour, it is a lack of discrimination.

Anyway, this fear of food is not all about being traumatised. You can have two different children brought up in exactly the same way, nursing on demand, late weaning and no pressure regarding solid food, and one will turn out to be an adevnturous gourmet eater and the other will be a completely conservative creature of habit who refuses to branch out in the smallest little direction for years. And maybe later on, they will swap roles, who knows.

I'm used to being an oddball in this area now. One thing that helped was noticing how incredibly resistant to new food apparently "normal" eaters can be. There are thousands who won't travel to a foreign country because they "don't like the food" which they have never even tried. I will find the things that look "safe", try those, and work outwards from there, anywhere I go. But it is definitely the things with unidentifiable ingredients that I won't go near, especially if they have a strong smell. No doubt such things are supposed to repulse babies, because they actually make sense- strong smells might be concealing up unhygienic contents, and a mixed-up stew could contain almost anything. Rats, spiders, stewed cabbage, who knows?! Anyway, babies and small children also have undeveloped digestive systems and it is very important to allow them to mature in their own time, so gourmet pheasant stew followed by truffled caviar may well not be the way to go with a one year old.

So I say, just how rational is it really to eat everything anyone who happens to be around decides to stick under your nose? Not very. On balance, I think I would rather have a healthy uncertainty about potentially unsafe food than fearlessly consume everything someone else thinks I should eat. Overeating, whether followed by weight-loss programs or not, seems to be the closest thing we have to a dietary norm in our culture, and I think this points towards a lack of discrimination: either an excess of high-calorie foods, or too much food all round (most likely either fat or carbohydrates) and neither of those options is objectively as enjoyable as a balanced diet that satisfies you perfectly.

Of course people use food to fill the "G-d-shaped hole". When desperately trying to fill a deep emotional void, they will use just about anything you care to mention- alchohol, television, work, other people, their stuffed bunny-rabbit collection. But you would think a person urgently in need of inner salvation and given a choice between ice-cream, cocaine or G-d, might more logically choose G-d, if only because the Torah is more likely to tell you how to live happily than the back of a choc-ice wrapper. I conclude that there is truly no accounting for people.

strange news of the day

2005-08-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

What is the best way to celebrate discovering that you are Jewish? Tattoo some Jewish sacred text on your arm, of course. That's what David Beckham apparently did, on tracking down his birth mother's heritage recently.

I am trying to think of something else less appropriate. And failing. Maybe this story is just made up, it seems more unlikely than anything else I've heard for at least weeks...

From Hatshepsut.

another big homeschooling post

2005-08-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

(Actually this post is so long you may want to save it for a rainy day. There's another new one down below it though. Here's a link, to save you half an hour of scrolling.)

I said something lately, can't remember where, about homeschooling not being the right choice for every family. Although my opinion of institutionalised schooling is not high, I would not have all schools or all government schools closed down tomorrow. School can be the best most valuable thing in a child's life, depending on the circumstances. It can be their only practical option for making progress in life. A good teacher can be the most inspiring, caring or helpful mentor in a child's life, and the school curriculum can offer the most exciting learning path a child has available. And depending on what other opportunities the child has for meeting people, the social life of school may be a treasured gift.

Merely taking children out of the classroom does not in itself provide them with better opportunities. Children are entirely dependent on adults to provide opportunities for them. They cannot leave home, get a job and run their own lives without support. There is no point in removing the limits on learning and growth that institutionalised education imposes if you are not in any case going to provide better opportunities for your children that even aproach those limits, never mind going beyond them. If you're going to home educate, you need to be able to provide something better than what the school has to offer; not necessarily in all specific areas, but definitely overall. You may feel, for example, that your child is not suited to learning literacy at the age of four. You may be right. But if he is also learning and enjoying English, art and science in the classroom, and you are not willing or capable to provide him with similarly productive activities from home, school may still be better for him.

Even the social skills children pick up at school may be better than the ones available at home, depending on what the parent has to offer. Kids can learn about the value of team-work, the importance of respecting others, non-violent communication, simple moral philosophy eg. from Bible stories or moral fables, in the classroom and the playground. Of course, they may also pick up the very opposite. It depends what they know already and what kind of knowledge they are looking for. But to argue that no school is better than the absence of school for any pupil is simply irrational. It should be obvious to the most vehemently passionate home educator that for many kids, school is as good as it is going to get. Removing your child and leaving him to his own devices alone in the house all day is obviously worse. Hanging around in the house all day with him while still leaving him to his own devices is also worse.

For home education to be better than school education, the parent must take an active and involved role in the child's educational and social life. If your children love learning, are highly motivated to set themselves challenges, and actively seek out and tackle new fields of knowledge with enthusiasm, you will be working hard trying to provide those new challenges. What do you do when all the textbooks in the library have been read? What if they need hands-on help with complicated chemistry experiments? You don't just give up and let their fascination with science die a death. You have to go a few extra miles than a teacher needs to: find a local expert interested in helping your child learn more, read up yourself on the subject, spend all night surfing the net for discussion groups and further research.

On the other hand, if your child is more passive, and needs help getting motivated, then you have to take an enormously active role in inspiring him about learning in general. Your enthusiasm will infect him too. An apathetic child will be quite happy to do things if someone else makes them happen. I do not think any child is born apathetic, but quite a few end up that way after a while for one reason or another. If you homeschool, then it is your job to turn things round. Life is full of fascinating and exciting things to learn and do, and you are the one who must demonstrate this to your children with your own energy, and get them excited about it too.

Either way, home educating is a lot of work, and the fact that good home educators enjoy this work does not make it anything other than work. Just taking your kids out of school does not immunise you against doing this work inadequately, even if you call it "unschooling". (There is unschooling and there is unschooling: totally individualised child-motivated learning can be fantastic for exceptionally mature and brilliant kids, total neglect is useless for any child.) At one end of the spectrum, there have been homeschoolers who sit their children down at a desk all day with breaks only for meals and chores, and basically threaten the kids into doing what they say. This is worse than school. At another end of the spectrum, there are unschoolers who apparently regard any activity a child chooses to do as inherently valuable, even if the child has lost all interest in challenging his own mind due to near total lack of anything interesting to do, and can only beat up his little brother or watch cartoons all day.

Of course, when schools fail kids, they fail them far worse. This fact is very important to bear in mind. Home educated children are not committing bullying-induced suicide every other week. Homeschooling the institution/ phenomenon is far better than state schooling, in my view.

However, both homeschooling parents and everyone else needs to understand that homeschooling is only better in the generalised sense, and that whether it is better for specific kids depends entirely on the specific family. They also need to understand what makes it better when it is better, that this is the actual educational life it offers to the child (obviously I don't just mean academically, I mean all round).

Now, the educational life of the child is very difficult to measure. Examinations only give you limited information about a child's knowledge and problem-solving abilities. School reports consider the dedication and general wellbeing of the child within the school environment too, but are also very limited. Home educating parents don't have control group comparisons consisting of their child in a school, by which to see how well they are doing. But I am not suggesting any of those things.

The main thing is simply that we need to be aware of the fact that just because something is difficult to measure, that does not mean it doesn't exist, or that we can safely assume we are doing well just because evidence is not either obvious or flawlessly presented. Home education can be very daunting, and parents often decide against it or limit their own enjoyment and success because they don't feel as confident as they should. Competing with big old institutions supported by most of your community can be daunting. However, I think if some people took the bull by the horns and developed a few better ideas for seeing how well we are actually doing, those who are doing fine but not feeling confident would feel better and more relaxed, which could only be a very good thing. And those for whom home education is not the best choice could send their kids to the best available school, and stop feeling guilty about it.

So here is my checklist of signs that your homeschooling is working:

1. Children will concentrate for extra-long periods on educationally demanding activities they enjoy, in entirely self-motivated way, and produce remarkable results for their age.

2. They will constantly ask lots of questions, and be seeking out new ideas institutionalised children tend not to seek out, again advanced compared to what you would regard as average for their age-group.

3. If you are doing your job well, they will enjoy trying out your new suggested activites/ fields of research.

4. They will turn mundane situations into learning activities. For example, while cooking a pancake a younger child might want to know the chemistry of how butter melts, what burns when, what hotness is, and so on. They don't just passively accept the world around them and their learning is not limited to "lessons".

5. Socially, they have a small circle of friends they are quite close to in the way normally associated with adults/ possibly teenagers. They get to know individuals well, don't just hang around in groups for the sake of activities or impressing peers. They are uninterested in impressing peers, and take pride in their own special talents and uniqueness. They have a kind of inner confidence that is very valuable, and they don't have any need to compete or impose their will on others in order to assert it.

6. They are polite and respectful to everyone, but especially polite and respectful to those they respect the most, which means their parents. Think about it: if they don't respect you any more than a local schoolteacher, then either you're not actually doing any better than the schoolteacher would or you're being taken for granted. If you're being taken for granted, then why would they get motivated about learning, if there's a convenient workhorse there to do everything for them?

7. If they are relatively "behind" average on some educational subjects, they are also far ahead in others, because the different is from specialised learning choices not overall growth.

8. Yes academic subjects do have some knowledge and meaning in them, and cannot be dismissed out of hand. But while thinking of areas of learning, consider also the following:

- sporting and physical prowess
- emotional maturity, ability to learn through adult-style conversation and solve difficult problems by thinking about and discussing them
- aesthetic sensibility- developing a good ear/eye for aesthetic meaning and beauty, creating original and interesting art work, having reasoned thoughtful ideas about different artistic genres, familiar appreciation of demanding genres such as ballet, classical music.
- practical life-skills like cooking, household management, DIY, all those useful things adults learn out of school which contribute to our quality of life. These often overlap with academic disciplines (science, chemistry, design technology), and tend to embody various kinds of learning mixed together, also they are inherently valuable. Many can be developed into careers later on.
- critical thinking skills. This does NOT mean being able to argue the toss about whatever first came into your head about the next-door-neighbour's cat. It is quite possible to be great at arguing like a dog with a bone in its mouth, without saying anything remotely enightening or reasonable. Signs of critical thinking skills are:
a) changes mind about things through considering them, admits previous mistakes and misapprehensions, entirely happy to do so,
b) develops new ideas over time that are often the opposite of the old ones
c) learns something in a discussion, and gives other people new things to consider as well
d) relaxed, unemotional, unloaded approach to learning- not defensive, aggressive, insecure or rude
e) follows through ideas, even when wrong, to find out exactly where they went wrong- doesn't just drop things when argument is "lost"- not arguing to win but to learn
f) open-minded, doesn't dismiss other people's ideas, however crazy or ludicrous they might seem, willing to learn about the bits that are valuable and which they don't know yet, for the sake of learning

There must be more, but this post has gone on too long. One thing though- all of the above apply to all ages of children. Children are inquisitive in all these areas from the day they are born. Our job is not to plant those qualities, but to keep them alive and help them grow. But it is possible to find the tiny surviving sprout in a disaffected child and start feeding it at any time. And it is possible for a child to thrive in school that way too. I am sure I can think of at least one wonderful girl I had the privilege to work with when I was teaching who had the most enormous love of learning, incredible insight and was a thoroughly lovely person all round to boot. She was fairly quiet and most popular in her small group of like-minded friends, just as her home educated peers would have been, and not at all the prom-queen type. Some of the aspirations offered by educational institutions really are very bad indeed.

an insect lesson

2005-08-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

There are now two mosquito-proof tents in my back garden. One to enjoy the garden without being bitten to death, and the other to let the grass in the first one recover. Tent mark two went up fine yesterday, and was working really well until we went out there after dark and found it was full of little beetley insects that had apparently come from nowhere. They had probably slept in the ground all day, then woken up in the evening and attached themselves to the inside of the tent trying to get out. Unlike mosquitoes, they were very polite and well-behaved insects, and they were lined up in neat rows along the top edge of the net-windows, and gathered in small groups round the ceiling air-vents. They made no fuss, and when we came back a bit later to try and get them out, they plopped quite calmly into a big plastic cup and agreed to be deposited outside on the grass.

I don't know what they were, but that's my kind of insect. It is very encouraging that not all insects go about biting you a few times under false anaesthetic then running away before you notice the great itchy lump growing on your leg. It is also notable that even insects can line up in an orderly fashion and wait for further instructions. One might explain this as mere dumbness, but does panicking and being aggressive denote intelligence in moths, flies and mosquitoes? I do not think so.

I have been watching various animals out there. We have a resident comedy-squirrel who does daredevil tricks in the trees and sometimes naps draped over a branch with all four legs dangling. There are a lot of cicadas, I've been collecting their old shells. There was a huge butterfly flapping around near tent one last week, with some kind of military airplane pattern on its back. And I've been meaning to look up what the red birds are. There are two, one is brighter than the other. All the animals like figs anyway, they've been helping themselves liberally to the tree. I wonder if the walnuts will be next.

note

2005-08-05T08:15:00.000-07:00

I' m temporarily closing down new comments on posts below while sorting out a technical problem. Hopefully back to normal soon.

Quote of the day

2005-08-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

I'm not telepathic, so I really don't know - or care - what Bush's motives are. -Amritas

dealing with difficult people

2005-08-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

Sharon's comment below on dealing with a certain kind of person critical of homeschooling reminded me of a useful tip I once got from one of those "How to be successful" books you find in thrift/ charity store/ shops. First of all, you have to be able to identify the difference between a person seeking an honest debate and a person trying to force their idea on you. The first kind will be interesting to talk to, one of you will learn something and most importantly neither of you will have an axe to grind, you will both be perfectly happy whether or not you "win" the debate, and aware of this right through it.

The second kind is persistent, repetitive, and makes you feel exasperated, cornered, unable to leave without overstepping your own boundaries of politeness, or sometimes flat-out bullied. If you identify that they are talking at you and not taking your ideas seriously early on, the best thing is to end the interaction. The way to do this is to be clear, firm, friendly and smile broadly. You can't do it just by saying you want the conversation to end, however. You have to communicate two different things effectively, by enacting as well as referring to them:

1) your position is different than theirs,
2) you are entirely comfortable with that fact,

To communicate and enact them you do this:

1) state your difference as clearly and concisely as possible.

Don't state your position, just the difference. Slight inaccuracy due to the restrictions of summarising is not a problem. Don't aim for watertight argument- you're not trying to convince or win a debate, just stating difference. Directly contradicting achieves this perfectly: "No, I don't want to buy cable TV," "Actually homeschooling provides more diversity," "No, children make fewer real friends at school than homeschooling," or whatever. It doesn't matter if you can't back-up your argument flawlessly: the idea here is to disengage from argument.

2) Smile, say nothing more, do not respond to scepticism or further attacks. If your interlocutor continues ranting, occasionally repeat what you said in 1) above. Each time you repeat it, so so more quietly and disinterestedly, until the dynamic of the interaction has wound down to nothing and the other person loses interest in it.

The only thing that can hijack you here is questions. The success book I mentioned didn't say anything about those. However, the ranting person will ask a particular kind of question that is more of a demand for attention and engagement than an inquiry into your ideas. They will often ask things that don't make much sense and puzzle you if you stop to think about them, because their questions are based on false assumptions.

dealing with questions:

1) don't say anything- often they will wait two seconds and then go onto something else anyway,
2) say you don't know, or don't understand the question (and repeat in the style of 2 above until they lose interest)
3) "Hmmm, I'll have to think about that".

But many questions are just disguised statements, so you can just contradict as in 1) above, "What about all the sports she will miss out on?" "No, we do lots of sports," or "we do far more of everything than schools can," or restate your underlying position: "We feel homeschooling is the best choice."

It can be tiresome dealing with these situations, but it is only to be expected, and these days far more people are positive and encouraging than ever before, which usually outweighs the negatives, as Sharon said. Of course, what one would like to say is, "It's none of your business how I choose to bring up my children," or, "While we're setting each other straight here, how dare you wear such a disgusting lime-green hat, Mrs Jones? Don't you realise its ugliness impacts on the spiritual wellbeing of us all?" But, you know. One has to set a good example.

divorce ethics I: whether, when and how

2005-08-04T06:57:00.000-07:00

As I always say, divorce is neither good nor bad. It's like chemotherapy. You wouldn't do it for fun, but sometimes it is necessary. Our ability to recognise that things are so far gone that only divorce will save the patients is in a pretty dire state these days, but this incredibly important issue falls right down by the wayside, because we've been having the wrong debate since about the beginning of Christianity, namely, "Divorce- yes or no?" This is the "whether" debate. But generalisations like that cannot be ruthlessly applied to the infinitely variable relationships that can exist between two people. Like most kinds of agreement, marriages can be perverted and abused by one party at the expense of the other, and anyone with an ounce of humanity should at a bare minimum allow the victims in such cases to get out. A blanket yes/no argument does not deal with the reality of human life.

Jewish law is very clear about this reality; there are certain circumstances under which divorce, like abortion, is actually mandated. This removes responsibility from the victim for their own victimhood, in a way that is impossible under Western law. Here, you have to take it upon yourself to divorce someone, and it can be a very difficult battle. Jewish law also sets out in some detail what kinds of settlements should be made after divorce, which removes a great deal of the potential for vicious conflict during and after the divorce. However, I'm not going to discuss Jewish abortion or divorce laws here, because I am not knowledgeable enough and do not wish to open up discussion on either subject. What I want to point out is that the yes/no debate is meaningless, and distracts us from the real issues which are when and how, and that other systems than the modern West do actually acknowledge and try to get to grips with those issues. Whereas we have few good standards and very limited knowledge on those things, because we are too busy wondering yes/no and crossing our fingers in the hope that it won't happen to us (or sitting in our marital towers looking down on those lesser mortals who didn't get such a good spouse). And this is a serious problem which needs remedying.

When and how. Is there any way we can develop a realistic and humane understanding of when divorce should occur, for ourselves and our children, and to help us better support those around us in the midst of bad marriages and bad marital breakdowns? Can reasonable general rules about what should happen after divorce ever be established, and how would they be applied and cultivated?

The system of the West is currently based on adversarial debate. People are motivated to improve their ideas in order to win battles. For example, fathers who were not winning custody (now called residency in the UK) developed the idea of shared custody, which had more chance of success. At the same time there have been moves by the authorities to encourage mediation before legal contests, an improvement no doubt designed to limit the time-wasting pointless mud-slinging and emoting that has dominated family courts for years. Adversarial court proceedings are all those things, and also extremely destructive to the individuals concerned and any future working relationship they may need to have for the sake of their children. They are a brutal kind of chemotherapy when a more humane one would work better, the people administering it are exploiting us for thousands of dollars worth of medicine (and we seem often to want that- which doesn't mean the doctors should be allowed to give it to us!) and we should certainly not be relying on this whole thing as the system which will lead to improvements for the future! We can do better.

But we will continue to do sub-optimally as long as we stay stuck in the yes/no divorce debate. Yeses are in no position to help, and nos actually like the difficulties and regard them as necessary deterrents. Divorce is never actually going to be easy, because it is not just a matter of filling in some forms and walking away with everything you regard as rightly yours. "Just walking away" from the bed you made and surely ought to lie in forever, then, often means leaving behind many things that you care about and value. Actually, nobody is entitled to stay in bed forever: we do things, sometimes we fail, we clear up the damage as best we can, take note of the lessons, do our best to help others involved in the disaster, and go and start in a new place with a hammer and a few planks of wood. That's more what life is about than clinging forever to Titanic wrecks. But the difficulties of divorce are not about whether you can file right now or not. They are all about what happens after that. The ease of divorce we tend to discuss is the ease of being legally allowed to do it: but diagnosis is only the start of the unpleasant treatment that actually constitutes divorce.

Giving chemotherapy on demand to drug-addicts would be as unethical as punishing cancer patients for having treatment. Both causes unwittingly fail to notice the real obligations on which their judgements should be based. The first, in denial about the need for informed expert diagnosis, in practice enables healthy people to kill themselves. The second, in denial about the existence and dangers of cancer, used to kill sick people when it had the upper hand, and now attacks people in their hospital beds for trying to recover. Both are stuck on whether. Neither has got to when, never mind how.

I will come to those in my next post.

unwell

2005-08-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

I have been suffering for the past week or so, with the kind of persistent and recurring illness that one needs to tackle partly by removing all stressful factors from one's life and building up health in general. It's a bit annoying because a couple of months ago I managed to knock my allergies on the head, partly by research and effort and partly by miraculous intervention, and had been thinking that my health was now extremely optimum. But clearly there is more to be done before I reach total George Bush levels of fitness. (I have no words of disdain strong enough for those recent claims regarding the president's obesity- ignoring the evidence of common sense and simple eyesight in favour of ludicrous pseudo-scientific poppycock should not be the business of news stations. But then I think most of us have given up expecting the media to be sane.)

Anyway, all of the above is good, because it means if anyone asks me to do something stressful now, such as, stand on my head for eight hours or something, I will be absolutely obliged to refuse even to discuss it, for the sake of my long-term bodily wellbeing. I'm not going to stop blogging because it is a good distraction from physical discomfort. And now it is time to put mosquito-proof tent number two up in the back garden. We've been having a very rainy summer, it saves on sprinkling the lawn but I think it encourages the little nasty ones.

on going home

2005-08-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

When I left England, some people asked when I would be going back. I don't know, I said, thinking it seemed a bit premature to be thinking about such things. I was more concerned with how on earth to get the suitcases to the airport with no car than the unimaginably distant possibility of a return visit. Because, I'm not coming to visit you over there, they said. Charming! If I'd had this conversation once it would seem within the range of normal, but I kid you not, the exact same conversation occurred on at least three or four occasions. Anti-Americanism is my best explanation.

At the moment, it's practically impossible anyway. If I got on a plane tomorrow, I would be going right back to the beginning of the visa process that has taken eight months and several thousand dollars so far. We are waiting for a letter from the tax office, which does not seem especially motivated about such things, before filing yet another set of forms. After that, I don't know. More forms, probably. But at least I am actually here now. And I even have an ID card! Most people use their driver's license, which also has a photo on it, but I don't drive. You need photo ID everywhere you go. I don't understand anymore what the fuss is about in the UK on ID cards, it's far worse here. But no, doesn't bother me at all, unless I leave my card at home and can't get a margarita.

Anyway, the suitcases did make it with us, somehow, and now I have been here a while and amazingly I still have no inclination to think about going back. It even (shrink in horror at my desecration of the god of social convention!) occurred to me that I might not ever go back!! (Two exclamation marks fail utterly to do justice to the sheer selfish evil of the very thought!)

So it looks like if any of my British friends or relatives want to see me in the forseeable future at least, they are going to have to suffer after all the dreadful experience of sitting on a plane being waited on hand and foot all day, followed by landing in the horrible Texas sunshine and having a boring deprived holiday not enjoying everything wonderful this place has to offer. Tragic yes, but could be worse- think of all the children starving in Ethiopia! as my generation was brought up bizarrely being told all the time. Did I tell you about our primary school lecture about the ethiopians ever?

horror stories

2005-08-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

Not ever so long ago, I was informed by a person who shall remain nameless that children are better off at school "because then they can make some friends". This was after quite a lot of years of home-educating, and the person concerned had actually known my family for the whole time. Of course I explained that making friends was no problem at all, gave a brief outline of the social situation at the time, etc etc.

The problem with people like this is, they then just shift the argument. If I recall rightly, something like, "but it's not the same as friends you make at school- school friends share a unique experience which makes their bond unmatchable!" Something like that. But more implicit. Because saying it explicitly would sound ridiculous, obviously.

So even if I had memorised this (found on Wikipedia) it wouldn't have made any difference:

ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center of the U.S. government, has published multiple articles on homeschooling. Here's an excerpt from one which examined several studies on homeschool socialization:
"According to the findings, children who were schooled at home 'gained the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to function in society...at a rate similar to that of conventionally schooled children.'
"The researcher found no difference in the self concept of children in the two groups. Stough maintains that 'insofar as self concept is a reflector of socialization, it would appear that few home-schooled children are socially deprived, and that there may be sufficient evidence to indicate that some home-schooled children have a higher self concept than conventionally schooled children.'"

Sometimes people just do have half-baked ideas they don't feel like thinking about properly, and they try to force them on others when they feel like they can get away with it, because that just makes them feel better. It's a common phenomenon that occurs whenever a person does anything out of the norm, which challenges people's preconceptions (uncomfortable) and threatens their existing frameworks for making moral judgements. People cling like limpets to their frameworks, because it helps them avoid dealing with difficult issues and often personal or emotional problems.

When you home educate, you get used to this sort of thing and learn to stay away from it. However, when big changes like divorce occur and things are temporarily up in the air, people see an opportunity to stir and steer things in their own direction. It's a sort of unconscious instinct, they don't actually know that's what they're doing most of the time, but, it happens. On the other hand, it sorts the sheep from the goats, so to speak. I can't honestly say that I feel great about having discovered in the past year exactly what various people really thought of me and how I'd been spending my life, but in general truth is good, so hopefully the knowledge will somehow prove useful eventually. In the meantime, should one initiate communication after such events, or merely appreciate the stony and/or embarrassed silence?

Anyway, my advice to people who know someone who is getting divorced is this: offer help, but refrain from the personal and moral judgement. Telling someone where their kids should live and who with, how they should be educated, what they are doing wrong and how they have been going wrong for the previous decade is not a good idea. It's also not a good idea to complain behind people's backs about what you see as their catalogue of irresponsible failures. None of those things help your case, and when the dust has settled you might find that seizing on what looked like a free-for-all has left you embarrassed, compromised and cut off from people who still matter.

It's shameful that adults still act like this, really. What any kids overhearing such behaviour are going to make of it in years to come one can only shudderingly imagine.

P.S. On the subject of school friends being the best most unique kind, how many of your schoolfriends do you still know? Were you able to make friends from different environments than school, as a child- and was there any difference, in your view? I imagine the main factor is that most kids spend more time with their school friends than any others.

stuff for kids

2005-08-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Clarkson, capitalist British folk-hero, in the Sunday Times on how children don't want toys:

Today’s children have outgrown what you and I would classify as a toy by the time they are five. And before that, as you know, they’d be quite happy to receive an empty cardboard box just so long as it was covered in pretty paper... it is only nostalgic parents that are keeping the toy market alive, endlessly buying their kids stuff they don’t want.

The main reason he gives for this childhood ennui is that kids are constantly being given huge quantities of stuff, and work their way through toy-ness extra fast these days. In my experience he is right. It's a difficult problem for parents to control, too, even when they aren't part of it. How do you tell all those well-meaning friends and relatives not to shower your little cherubs with fifty different kinds of unwanted garbage throughout the year? Don't ask me, I've never done any such thing. Anyway, it usually is the parents, as Clarkson says.

Unwanted gifts aren't a favour, they're annoying. If your husband bought you a brand new item of clothing from the Marks and Spencers Polyester Editions range every day, you wouldn't be grateful. There is only so much plastic a child can enjoy before their optic nerves start filtering out any kind of smooth surface altogether. The way to give a child an appropriate gift is to find out what they really like and are interested in. If they don't really like anything especially much, something's gone wrong already. I don't know, read a parenting manual or something. Usually there is, if enough a) consultation, and b) thought, has gone into identifying it.

Obviously I am also assuming some degree of reasonable judgement here on the part of the adult. More Clarkson:

My eldest breezed into the kitchen the other day and momentarily removed her iPod from her ears to announce that she’d saved up £15. “Is that enough to buy a car?” she asked. “Of course not,” I replied scornfully. But you know what? If all she wants is an old banger, it is.

Some old favourites will always work for children. But kids only need one bicycle, and the competition to be the first one to buy it that goes on these days is unsightly, and results in premature purchasing. Three year olds do not need mini-mountain bikes. They may barely be able to cope with a woolly sheep on wheels. I think a bit of imagination is in order, however. An old banger (note to Americans: Mr Clarkson is talking about a very old automobile, not a sausage, which can also be called a banger), if you have lots of private land and good car-maintenance skills as he does, is a pretty cool idea. Here are my ideas for things to give kids that might actually be appreciated. If not, just don't bother. (I made them up, have only done less than half so far myself)

1. trip to a really good museum
2. weekend camping in a tent, kids love camping
3. huge block of ice (I don't know, try the yellow pages, borrow a big chest freezer) to carve (for fun, not great art!)
4. second-hand ping pong table (for the garden, fold down and cover with plastic for the winter)
5. teach them a skill- embroidery, knitting, whatever (yourself)
6. really old record player, with fun old vinyl discs (wow!)
7. old black and white movies
8. trip to the ballet
9. seeds to plant plus ongoing lessons on looking after them
10. sit down and eat with them every evening, find out their concerns, listen to them.

Any more ideas? The idea is to be creative instead of just spending a fortune on things that are really aimed at your own Inner Child instead of the actual kids, which is a missed opportunity, wasteful and also very rude.

Interesting. Again.

2005-08-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

More on the growing home education trend, again from the Guardian (Observer):

Parents sign up to 'flexi time' at schools
Trend to split lessons between class and home grows

'Eden is learning so much at home and I fear school might knock the enthusiasm out of her,' [Mrs Sedman, mother of Eden] added. 'There is no way she can get the one-to-one time she gets at home in any school, however good it is, and I feel strongly that it is better that she learns at the pace she wants to learn.
'On the other hand, I don't want her to lose contact with all the friends she has made at nursery, and believe that school offers valuable opportunities that I can't match at home.'
Mrs Sedman is among a small group of parents who have negotiated part-time contracts with the school and local authority, but she is one of the few willing to speak about it publicly. Others fear opening the floodgates to applications from other parents, causing their school to renege on the arrangement.

More:

Paul Butler, inclusion and access manager at East Riding of Yorkshire Council, was initially cautious about Mrs Sedman's request.
'The idea was completely new to me but I realised the assumption that education either happens at school or at home is out of date, and there's no longer a one-size-fits-all approach,' he said.

More again:

Combining schooling and home education is legal due to a loophole in the Education Act 1944 that enables schools to register a pupil 'absent with leave' in periods when he or she is being educated elsewhere.

I think the word "loophole" is insulting. It sounds like common sense to me.

If schools, local authorites, parents and extended family bothered finding out what the laws actually are, there would be a lot less ignorant prejudice flying around about home education. Articles like this please me because they help, somewhat.

how tortured is your soul?

2005-08-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

Why are we so obssessed with celebrities? Are they false idols in a heathen modern world? I think it depends how you look at them. In one sense it is phenomenally difficult not to regard the rich, famous and Versace-bedecked as superior, because that is the prevailing social convention: celebrities are to be looked up to and adored! The are success, brilliance and everything aspirational all rolled into one! Everyone would be like them if only they were good enough!

Which is patent abject nonsense, of course. Personally, I find them sometimes passingly interesting because they have the zeitgeist reflected on them more than other people. They are like mirrors of the culture, reflected in the face of individuals. The way celebrities live today is the way we are all going to be living tomorrow, in many ways. They often do what most people (not necessarily you or me, but that's the cultural zeitgeist part) would do if they had the money, the contacts and the other material powers. But at the same time, they are human, which is constantly revealed in their embarrassing failures, and they pay for their material freedoms with a near-total loss of personal freedom. To maintain a private life as a celebrity, you have to work extremely hard indeed and be very clever, whereas nobody is in the least interested in most of us living on Mere Mortal Street.

As for idolatry, it is my view that human beings are capable of idolising just about anything and everything if that is what they are determined to do. Nobody's first priority in life should be fast food, television, socialising, or any kind of obssession for its own sake. People idolise their children, each other, and being religiously observant is not a guarantee against it. You can idolise your own religious practices, by using them in games of one-upmanship over other humans, inside or outside your own group, instead of anything to do with any actual G-d. Although I would rather people obssessed about covering their hair than plenty of other much worse things, obviously.

Which brings me to Tom Cruise. I went to see "War of the Worlds" yesterday. Very scary film, very cleverly done, and you will be glad to hear that good triumphs over evil. And there is something very wrong with Tom Cruise at the moment. It was easy to see that the whole movie was a projection of his tortured fuming soul, he barely needed to act at all, and right at the end when he was supposed to have achieved safety and relaxation, all he could do was stare into the distance with his eyes twitching maniacally. I don't think Scientology is helping this fellow very much. He should read The Trail to Tranquility instead, that would sort him out.

2005-07-29T15:26:00.000-07:00

There is quite a lot in the online versions of the mainstream media about home education.

Here is a Guardian review of a new children's novel about a home educating family.

domestic business

2005-07-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

food

Although renting a house is financially completely pointless compared to buying one, we have no choice other than to rent, due to the fact that we each own half a house already, and the other half of the owners are still living in them. However, there are some advantages to renting. Today, a nice man is mending the back door and our landlady is repairing the bathroom sealant. We do not have to pay for this, so it feels like free repair-people, which is quite luxurious. I am getting (I think) slightly better at returning the traditional friendly Texan greeting,

AND HOW ARE YOU TODAY?!

I say, "good, thanks," in as bright and sunny a way possible given that I am still in recovery from spending the last 37 years on a cold damp island in the middle of the North Sea.

Anyway, speaking of Texas, I am very glad to see that the Manolo approves of the boots of the cowboy. It's far too hot to wear them in Texas for most of the year, but maybe I'll get some for the 3-week winter.

I bought some fresh basil in Central Market the other day. It's my favourite herb, and Central Market is my favourite grocery store. The bread area is gorgeous and they have everything European you could possibly want, even Maltesers, white chocolate buttons and Hungarian paprika. My travelling days are over. Anyway, now I am thinking what to do with the basil. I found this Martha recipe for tomato tarts, it doesn't say basil, but I might add basil and take out the cheese, but I thought it would be better on puff pastry, so I got some of that from Central Market too. Which means my plan bears no relation now to Martha's recipe except being allowed to be called a tomato tart, really.

Anyway, does anyone have other delicious suggestions for the use of basil, at all?

Interesting

2005-07-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

Perusing the Guardian's Sunday newspaper, the Observer, I was surprised to find this in a readers' letters to the resident psychologist section.

Q We thought we had a bright spark (not a genius, but clever and curious) and then my son (now five) started school. His teacher says something is not quite right but she can't put her finger on it (poor handwriting compared to verbal skills, daydreaming, tripping and bumping into things). I have looked into conditions like dyspraxia, but am concerned about labelling children at a very early age. I'm surprised at how many other parents admit to similar concerns. Alternatives like Montessori or home educating are suddenly very attractive. Or should we just be grateful that the school is picking up on a potential learning difficulty early on? (name withheld)

A A large and rarely referred to body of evidence shows that school destroys the enjoyment of learning in the vast majority of children by the age of nine. I doubt very much there is anything wrong with your son; there is plenty wrong with the goals and methods of our education system. What is a parent to do? At the least, I would try and delay schooling until seven. If you think you would function well doing home ed, then go for it.

I wasn't expecting to find that idea in that particular place at all. I wonder how much more mainstream homeschooling is going to be in another few years' time.

Sometimes I think I should collect such articles, copy them and send them to everyone I know. Maybe a yearly folder with their Seasons Greetings card would be a good idea. But can I be bothered, though?

another piano-playing post

2005-07-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

music

Well, Emma asked for it...

The problem with my piano-playing is, all the music I want to play is just a bit too hard for me. I need to work on it. And I need to do exercises, so my fingers can actually get round the notes, and exercises hurt. They don't bore me like they did when I was a teenager, I quite like the repetition now (patience or brain-damage, I do not know), but it's like any exercise, you're not building your strength unless there's a little bit of the burn. Owwww.

At least I have discovered now that you're not supposed to just suffer terrible pain indefinitely, only exercise to where you can feel some effect and know the muscles are making an effort. I won't be like that famous composer who destroyed his own digits on a home-made rack-like stretching machine (anyone know who that was?). But unfortunately, I am a complete wuss. I don't like hurting my own fingers, even slightly. And before I am ever going to have a hope of playing the last movement of Beethoven's Moonlight sonata anything like up to speed, I will have to make my fingers hurt slightly for probably months on end.

That's the other thing, if you do exercises for a few days then give up in a pathetic huff, your fingers go right back to being as feeble and banana-like as before.

So, it's regular pain, or... well, I don't know what else. Suggestions? Miss Kitchen used to tell us if we kept up our Hanon exercises we'd be able to play anything we wanted. She never mentioned that if we didn't keep up our Hanon, we wouldn't be able to play anything we wanted. I wonder if Vladimir Horowitz ever had this problem.

Britishness

2005-07-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Telegraph today here and here goes into British values, a survey asking people what Britishness was about, and a new rise in positive self-identity among the Brits stemming from their refusal to be afraid of terrorism.

Fairness and fair play, the right to say what you think, politeness and tolerance, that sort of thing. Good sportsmanship, honesty and decency, calm confident moral assertiveness, standing up for what is right, King (or Queen) and country.

If only everybody over there actually enacted those values, instead of just talking about how much they like the idea of them. In my experience, it is perfectly possible for outrageously obvious wrongs to take place in the UK without anyone ever mentioning that it is "unfair". The standard response to having a great big injustice stuck in your face is to keep your mouth shut and walk away. But it's not enough just to demand that everybody else plays fair; the ball has to start rolling somewhere.

I'm talking about social conventions and the general culture here. Politics has only itself to blame.

Not convinced. Sorry.

Personal challenge

2005-07-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

Today, I will be going round the blogosphere trying to make as many (relevant, not completely rubbish) comments on other people's blogs as I can. Then I will link the blogs here that I have commented on. Not so you can go and read my comments, although obviously any stalkers might feel inspired to do that, but as a way of recommending blogs to you. Although I cannot help suspecting that anything I recommend you will already know about. So if you find somewhere new as a result of following one of the links, please do say so, as that kind of thing is nice and encouraging.

Stacey's Shmata From Texas. What more recommendation do you need? Very good blog, too.
Jen- Bat Noach Her headscarf is cute, but she also has excellent choice in hair-colour.
Seraphic Secret Robert Avrech's tale of how he met and married Karen is great, and you should read it (look up past chapters), unless you are a bitter old cynic, in which case, good luck.

Manolo mentions Gerard Depardieu in passing, which reminds me of my latest game. Which is, to work out which film actor is the Depardieu of his country. After seeing Rodriguez's Mariachi trilogy, I decided that Antonio Banderas is the American one. Javier Bardem is the Spanish one. The basic idea is that they have to be rugged, masculine, and ugly. And good actors. Not the kind of actors that just play themselves or their own fantasies, like Tom Cruise. Speaking of ugly, also see Manolo's brilliant comparison of Donald Trump and the emperor Nero. Uncanny.

Can I just note yet again that I am NOT a far-right, gun-slinging, racist evil redneck dimwit, and despite these extraordinary facts DO regard Texas as the best place in the world and my spiritual home? Actually, I am a quietly conservative, no-gun-yet, socially 85% liberal**, non-denominationally theistic Cambridge (UK) Master of Arts. Just saying.

Ooops, forgot not to blog... more links soon.

** in the real sense of the word, not the one where "liberal" means "over-emotional Marxist".

exciting news!

2005-07-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

I corrected the spelling of Penrhyndaedraeth, the small town in North Wales, on a page of Wikipedia!

Ah, fame and glory...

apology

2005-07-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

I have been wondering what to blog about, and felt obliged to reject pretty much all my own ideas. It is quite annoying. I am hoping very much to be able to open up more subjects here soon, but right now I feel like Martha Stewart under house arrest in her leg-irons or whatever they've put on her. All I can post about without risking upsetting someone or inspiring trouble seems to be playing the piano and politics. And I still have a personal embargo against politics. Argh.

Anyway, I apologise for the dullness of this blog in the meantime. G-d willing, I'll figure out a way to solve this.

it's not what you think, it's the way you express it

2005-07-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

This is the essential difference between a suicide bombing homicidal terrorist maniac, and a reasonable, peace-loving citizen. I don't care whether the average Muslim genuinely wants or believes in worldwide Islamic law: what I care about is whether they seek to achieve it by humane persuasion or by blasting innocent people to smithereens.

I think we need to get away from debating what is best, and get down to debating properly. Peaceful protests are fine by me. Civil disobedience in democratic countries is not: the solution to coercive government in those places is already enshrined in the system. Get involved in party politics and influence it, spread good ideas and influence public opinion, stand for president yourself and at least raise awareness so the other parties shift in a good direction: it's a tough job, but if it needs doing why should other people be responsible and not you? And if you believe in G-d, then pray. The government does not owe us everything- it's our job to take responsibility from the bottom up for the people we choose to represent us. We are as powerful as we want to be. Only cynicism prevents people from using their own freedoms to do good.

Which is why I agree thoroughly with David Bogner's post here. What is more, I don't think the war on terror or the quest for world peace (same thing, depending on which side of the argument you look at it) will be won/ achieved until we all understand the basic concept. The biggest divide in the world now is not really about who should be in charge of whatever country or piece of land or what they should do once in charge: it is about how a reasonable people should go about furthering their ideas on such issues. Democracy is the first step. Respecting and making responsible use of the democratic system is the second. Terrorism is the world's least civilised way of trying to further ideas. War is better than terrorism because it does not target innocent civilians and has specific measurable ambitions, such as, reducing the number of innocent people killed per year, as has been successfully achieved by removing Saddam from power in Iraq. And neither is any way to deal with a democratic government or its people.

Islam is not going to be wiped out, neither is Israel and neither is the Western concept of freedom. Terrorism is doomed, but the rest of us need to live with each other. I think David's sentiment about Israel here applies to the rest of the world as well:

What this country needs is a couple of years of marriage counseling to learn how to fight amongst ourselves. Both the right and left need to learn that at the end of the day we will all be sharing this big lumpy bed called Israel with 'those people' (meaning those with whom we are presently angry)... so everyone needs to fight fair and not say too many things that can't be taken back.

Terrorism works not merely by scaring people, but by relying on this fear to reduce them to acting in uncivilised ways. It makes them turn in rage against each other, fight amongst themselves and target the wrong external enemies with unjustifiably sweeping and inhuman judgements. It seeks to bring everyone down to its own sub-human level of unreasoning. It wants us to give up being human. It will never win, but we will hasten its end by refusing to compromise our moral principles. No standing by to allow fascist dictators to murder thousands of citizens a year when such a thing can feasibly be stopped at significantly lower cost of life. No sacred book burning. No dismissive judgements of Muslims, Jews, Westerners or religion in general, including atheism.

Only evil acts should be condemned, only according to their degree. If all the major newspapers could just understand that one, we'd be a long way further forward.

Martha and the 80s

2005-07-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

I paid far too much for Martha Stewart's 1982 classic, "Entertaining", in the thrift store the other day, but I'd been wanting it for nearly twenty years without knowing what it was, and was too excited to check out the Amazon price as I should have done. On the other hand, it is a first edition, and judging from ebay those are worth the extra. To those who want them. Which is not me. Oh well.

It is a great book, from a time when being completely over the top extravagance was just about to become more socially acceptable than it has ever been since (the 80s), and I wish Martha had just continued right into that stratosphere instead of becoming more small-scale domestic, but then everyone else downsized too, so one can hardly blame her for that. "The most sumptuous book on entertaining ever published" says the back cover, and when I read it as a teenager teaching myself to cook it seemed entirely fantastical and extraordinary: who were these people who threw "A sit-down country luncheon for one hundred seventy-five"in their back garden? Who would make eleven kinds of tiny weeny cocktail snacks for fifty guests? A gingerbread mansion for "The holiday party", complete with pediment, finials and cupola plus internal lighting? The mile-high lemon meringue pie- "My mother and I baked it when we had extra egg whites on hand, and made a meringue as high as the oven would allow"- went on my mental list of lifetime ambitions, along with plenty of other things nobody in England had heard of in 1982- pissaladiere, tabbouleh, filo pastry, tempura, and on and on.

Anyway, it is a work of genius, and it sums up something incredibly exciting and creative about the eighties that I didn't think about at the time, but which I think is now due for a revival. I don't mean shoulder-pads, brassy jewellery and merchant bankers waving fistfuls of cash, and I definitely don't mean striking miners and recessions. It's more the way people were willing to stick their necks out and be extreme and extravagant, go over the top in pursuit of an idea without having either to insult all and sundry or kill each other. There were new amazing things happening all the time and it wasn't predictable, it was fun. Well, that's how it seems/ed to me, hindsight notwithstanding. For instance, all that fuss in the press about the avant-garde fashion movement, along the lines of "could anybody actually wear these clothes?" These days, designers make wearable things. Then, even normal shops were full of bonkers outfits, the kind of things that today would be considered ugly and unflattering. But that's partly because today, "flattering" means skin tight and revealing.

Then there were other cultural tidal waves, and it was over. Well, when the tide turns once again and we go back to sack dresses, flat shoes and baggy jumpers, I will be whipping up one of Martha's small dessert parties for fifty, even if I have to eat it all myself. Maybe I'll hire a few episodes of "Dynasty" to go with that.

what I love about Texas: #1 manners

2005-07-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

People round here have excellent manners. After living in England forever, it is truly wonderful to hear people calling each other sir and ma'am. It's not just shop assistants and waiters etc calling the customers those things, it's a general form of respectful address for people you don't know in any kind of public setting.

There is a difference between good manners and perfect etiquette. Etiquette is about fussing around with your cutlery (silverware), whereas manners are about treating people respectfully. Americans sometimes go over the top with the etiquette because they actually care about good manners and are trying hard. Personally, I think it is wrong to leave your napkin on your seat when you go to the bathroom in the middle of a meal, in case someone pops over to chat with whoever you were next to and parks their behind momentarily on your mopped-up old gravy. Folding your napkin inwards to keep crumbs inside then leaving it beside your plate seems fine to me. However, at least American people actually think about what constitutes good manners. The general view in Europe these days seems to be that "airs and graces" should arouse deep suspicion and rudeness, cynicism and negativity are sure signs of wisdom, whereas kissing everyone you meet is a sign of spontaneous heartfelt affection (pah).

Hooray for sir, ma'am, helpful friendly shop assistants and waitstaff (waiters and waitresses), and helpful friendly people in general. Hooray for people shaking your hand and introducing themselves (although I could do without the hand-shakes personally, but they are well meant).

So, in summary:
Q Why do you want to live in Texas?
A Because the people here are friendly, polite and respectful.

I will continue this series, but in the meantime I ask you- is there a better reason than that for living anywhere?

Thank you for shopping at Alice in Texas, we hope you enjoyed your visit and will come again soon.

crockery versus the Mona Lisa

2005-07-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

art

I am never happier than when making something. Give me a lump of clay, a bag of flour or a ball of wool, and I'll be busy till the next one comes along. Hitherto, I have preferred making things with a Useful Purpose: "people will always need plates" as Maureen Lipman once said in the memorable British Telecom "ology" advert. It's the one where she's the Jewish grandma on the phone to her grandsom hearing about his GCSE exam results. He says he failed everything. Everything? she asks. Well, I passed pottery... That's good! she says. People will always need plates!

Then he admits he also passed (I think) sociology, and she says, "An ology! He gets an ology and he says he failed! You get an ology, you're a scientist!"

Actually, plates are really quite difficult. I made the rest of pretty much a complete dinner service years and years ago (it's all lost and broken now), but not plates. Too hard to get them off the wheel without causing them to fold up, ripple-style.

So, some time ago, I decided that the world did have enough plates already, and put a lot of thought, work, research and general singing and dancing into formulating some idea of how to produce actual art, as opposed to plates. Because it seemed to me that if Leonardo had painted the Mona Lisa on a great big turkey-server, well, it would have been less good rather than more so. And I came up with a way of making pictures that I enjoy and find aesthetically acceptable, which for me means original in its format as well as content. Because I agreed with British artist Tracy Emin when she said something like: there are hundreds of people painting the seaside, but that's not art, what I do is art.

It doesn't matter whether you think Tracy Emin's stuff is art, or good art: she is right that another bunch of watercolours of the seaside are not art. It's been done. Art has to say something new (and, I would hasten to add, valuable and good) to count as art. Otherwise we may as well all paint copies of Van Gogh's sunflowers. There is no point in that, because machines could do it for us. What no machine can do is create the next Mona Lisa.

Incidentally, last time I went to IKEA I saw that they were selling a giant-sized painting with real thick paint and brushstrokes. Behind it was another, and another, and another, and another. All the same scene, with the same identical thick brushstrokes. Machines are making 3D brushstroke copies now. It wasn't VG, but I'm sure they could now do a Van Gogh sunflower, and it would be indistinguishable from the real thing. What value will the original end up holding? Weird.

So, as I was saying, I am now making these pictures, but there is still a nagging voice telling me they are not useful, and should be plates instead. However, I am ignoring it. My best opinion is that my pictures are good in all the ways I believe art should be good, in other words I like them. They mean more to me than plates. I guess I'll keep at it.

FWIW

2005-07-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

Well, I predicted the US election right, so here's my tuppence-worth on the London bombings.

I think the first set of bombers were not suicide bombers, I think they were tricked into getting killed. There are arguments to this effect in various quarters, but my main one is I think the average disaffected British young man would be perfectly happy to murder other people but extremely unlikely to kill himself at the same time. I just don't think they would have wanted to do that. One of the arguments supporting this theory has been that suicide bombers strap bombs to themselves, they don't put them in rucksacks. Quite so: they need to be sure they will die instantaneously, and their superiors need to ensure they can't change their minds. But I also think it is irrational to assume they meant to die just because they did die, when their deaths were most convenient for the co-ordinating group rather than themselves (and their families).

The second set of attempted bombs was very similar to the first set. I think this indicates it was the same group organising things. But the second set of bombers threw their rucksacks then ran off, whereas the first set got killed next to their rucksacks. This is because the second set were avoiding death more carefully than the first. Luckily, they also avoided other people's deaths, by having useless bombs that did not go off. Which is quite funny, really.

My prediction is that whatever UK-based group made all this happen will be discovered and dismantled fast. It doesn't matter who is in charge, the co-ordinating centre will be taken out, representing a big defeat for terrorism to add to the utterly humiliating failure of today's damp squibs. They are on their way out.

Good afternoon from Texas

2005-07-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

It is now the afternoon, and I had a very nice slice of pizza from lunch, from a New York-style pizza place where you can get one proper slice, instead of having to buy a whole substandard pizza.

David Bogner has an interesting thread going on, inviting you to suggest the most depressing song lyrics ever. I was going to say Paul McCartney's Frog Song, on the grounds that this is the writer who produced such greats as Eleanor Rigby previously, but while looking for the lyrics of the Frog Song (actually I'm not sure it has any lyrics) managed to get my computer infected with malaria or something, which caused some amount of trouble for a while.

Surely country music does have the most depressing lyrics ever, but this is because it also has the jolliest tunes. You always feel with country music that everything will be OK in the end, because the happy harmony communicates that subliminally. And this is exactly how country music can be so outrageously negative and get away with it. Country music is also the funniest music ever. I never really understood country music until I came to Texas, but now I love it. It sums up all the totally brilliant things about America that Europeans so often sneer at. There is nothing so fun as a hyperactive country band like the one we saw by accident last week (consisting of young studenty-looking people with nose-rings and tattoos, not what you would expect). The moment they began their act with a great big "Yeee-hawwww!" it was impossible to be miserable in the same building. Then they sang lots of songs called "Why I like to drink" (because his life was so miserable, obviously) and suchlike. Personally, I do not believe it for a moment. They looked like very cheerful young folk to me, and why not.

The continuing hatred of the rest of the world for all things Texan absolutely baffles me. It's always people who have never been here, too. Texas is surely the best place in the whole of Europe and North America at least! OK, so you may not agree, but I am fairly old and fairly well-travelled, so please concede that my opinion is worthy of respect at least unless you have been here yourself. I am not saying there aren't horrible ugly bits of this state, because there are. But there are also fantastic bits, the area where I live is brilliant, and the countryside is fabulous. And people are NOT raging right-wing racist crazies who shoot everything in sight, actually. They are incredibly well-mannered and very friendly. And if you want to live in a vegan chemical-free household with no air-conditioning because it is bad for the environment, I can point you in the direction of the advertising wall of my local laundrette. There are loads.

Also, I have discovered Big Lots (that isn't Texan, it's everywhere). Big Lots is the shop that answers the question posed by Wal Mart. Whereas Wal Mart seems to have cheap handy stuff, it it depressing and miserable. But Big Lots is fun because it has all sorts of rejected discounted stuff from other places. If you want a giant pretend light-up electric palm tree right now, Big Lots is the place to go! It doesn't look anything like a palm tree, and I don't know where you would put it, but it is definitely a bargain if you like that sort of thing. Go America!

Good morning

2005-07-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

It is a beautiful, dull, un-sunny, cooler-than-average day here in Texas. I love the hot weather, even 100 degree heat is a treat when you've lived in the UK as long as me, and I love the rain and any slightly cooler dips as well because they are a nice change, and it means the lawn sprinkling is already done for me. After a good storm, when you go outside it can be like stepping into a sauna.

The sun is out now, so I will go and have my morning coffee in the garden. See you later.

Business-speak

2005-07-17T17:37:00.000-07:00

When I used to work in marketing/advertising, which I did for an extremely short time ages and ages ago, I was once at a job interview being asked what recent commercial I thought was good, and why. It was a washing powder which was new at the time, but has now vanished. Very big in the early 90s, this powder was, and now it's gone. Maybe you can remember it, because it had neon adverts that were very in your face, and frankly that is absolutely the sum total of what I can recall. The ads were what you would describe as "post-modernist", which is another way of saying they insulted the consumer. Neutron, it was called, something like that, or Neuron. Whatever. I checked, and it is nowhere to be found: all the powders in supermarkets now existed well before this newcomer that cost all that advertising money then died a death. Maybe you know what it was called?

Anyway, they were famous at the time, so I explained that I thought they summarised the values of efficiency, effectiveness and lack of made-up nonsense. Something like that. Whatever. I set out the messages I thought the adverts were communicating, how they did it, and why I thought it worked alright.

No, said the interviewer. You are wrong. The reason those ads are good is... (drum roll) BRANDING!. End drum roll.

OK, I said, and my brain switched off from then. What he thought he was saying was, "the best thing about those ads is the way they stick in people's minds." To me, this was a meaningless interpretation. They only stuck in people's minds if there was some kind of content that people could hang onto, that they actually found meaningful, in the sense of being valuable.

Well, there was not. The washing-powder died. So that way, he was right: the people who designed its public image went for "branding", without content, and that's what they got. And it died. To me, however, branding without content was a meaningless concept not even worth considering. I still think I was right there, and I still think the 80's power-exec interviewing me was totally wrong. Because he went on:

"What is the motivation of agencies like this one?" he asked me.
"To sell things," said I. That's obvious, right? Advertising agencies sell things?
Wrong.
"To win awards," he said. "Agencies design ads in order to win awards from the rest of the industry. Awards get them contracts."

So that was my rude awakening to the business world, because I found these ideas completely nuts. Marketing, in my view, was about selling stuff, not about getting more marketing contracts by winning awards for doing whatever the advertising community regarded as good. And a good commercial, in my opinion, was one that expressed the precise characteristics of value clearly and specifically, not merely one that "imprinted" identity on people's minds.

True, there are sensible innovatory people out there who treat the customer decently, believe in their product and sell it by showing off its good points. But there are also hangers-on in the business world, who may be doomed in the longer term but succeed in getting by for some time through no good or even realistic deed of their own, companies as well as individuals.

No conclusion- that's it.

piano playing update

2005-07-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

I wrote a long post about Beethoven, Mozart, and Romantics (Choping and Rachmaninov, specifically), and which appealed to which different age-groups. Blogger ate it.

Oh well. I could have just summarised it thus anyway:

"Although I used to think that Romantic music was kind of Teenaged (accessible and sentimental), I now wonder if it isn't actually quite Grown Up (straightforward and honestly expressive)."

Of course, all the great composers mentioned above are great, therefore it is rather trivial to compare them in this kind of way. But it means something to me, despite being more of a thinking-exercise than anything applicably true.

Any opinions welcome, and also any recommendations of piano music I should be playing next. No concertos please: I don't have a spare orchestra to accompany me locked away in the closet. On my list already: Bach preludes and fugues, and English suites; some Brahms but I don't know what, and I do also have Debussy preludes. Thank you.

the tyranny/ loveliness of having stuff

2005-07-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

life

I haven't done much cooking lately, mostly just fajitas (chicken ones, fish ones, and ones with just the vegetables) because moving house takes quite a lot of your time and energy for quite a few weeks, if you insist on having everything perfect like me and going through each individual book and replacing each ugly plastic thing from last time round with just the right yet also bargain better version, which means also spending a lot of time researching your shopping in order to get everything cheap. We did really well though, I found a really nice wardrobe a hundred years old (which is unusual in America) for fifty dollars, it just took a lot of small-ad research, a long drive out to the people who owned it, and then some more drives back and forth to hire a truck (Home Depot hires trucks for I think about one hour for about $19, which is very good) and all the time it took to do all this and the moving. Then multiply that lots of times, because similar work went into buying all sorts of other things.

Sometimes people sell things because they are moving, and you can tell that really they don't want to, they just think they have to. Every time I look at the nice pot-plant on the sideboard, I think of the chap who really should have just taken it with him to Boston- it's only a plant, he could have carried it on the plane, surely? I hate the way people accept unnecessary loss and distress as part of everyday life when all they need to do is make a bit more effort and hang onto the things they care about. Not just pot-plants, obviously- the good stuff they believe in. In my view it is morally imperative to be as cheerful as possible, and anything that makes your mouth curve down in dismay must be changed or conquered. If you really can't take the pot plant, come to terms with that. Sometimes, it is true, you really can't take the pot-plant.

On the other hand, I prefer people who move and grieve their pot-plant to people who refuse to move because they think they can't take their pot plant. It's just a pot plant. But stuff can be a great tyranny, which is why I wrote that post on the last blog called "Crap in the attic".

Today I am going to try and buy a large rug for the living-room floor. The floor is very old hard wood which needs some protection. There is an old half-price rug from Wal-mart down at the moment, which looks acceptable but there is something wrong with the colours. People seem to think that if they make sure rug colours are dingy enough, they will go with anything. The opposite is true, they just drain the life out of everything around them. Rugs should either be nice colours, or neutral. There are plenty of acceptable cheap neutral rugs in Home Depot, but I would rather have something more alive. Target has a bright orange one which looked good on their website, but in the flesh it is rather nasty. Large oriental rugs cost a fortune even at IKEA, so if there is nothing in the rug shop we are visiting today, the Wal-mart one will stay for the time being. Or I might end up making one myself from plaited bits of fabric, but that would take about a year, with the distinct risk of turning out bad in the end anyway.

Dilemmas, dilemmas. People tend to think it is "superficial" to concern oneself with such things, no doubt because their every waking second is filled with far loftier things, what they are I know not but I am sure they are most impressive and include voluntary work at the local soup-kitchen. I will probably be doing that too soon, though, because once the house is perfect it will be onto the next thing. I'm not changing anything else ever again, too much hard work.

oh, never mind

2005-07-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

I am so fed up with procrastinating about my blogroll, the embarrassingly short list you see there on the right. Of course, there is nothing more ludicrous to blog about than the dilemmas of blogrolling, but now I know I am not the only one who obsesses about such things, because in his return to blogging Brian Micklethwait mentions the same sort of dilemma. I am very glad to see that Brian is back and also "unplugged", as it were, from the specialist disciplines (culture and education) that previously defined his writing, and newly determined to sort out my own blogrolling problem forthwith. Tonight is a good time to begin because my (was going to put an adjective here, but frankly none are good enough) husband is working all night from home, which means I will probably be up for ages too.

So, I have decided just to link everything I ever enjoy reading, whether or not I agree with everything it says, and in no particular order, because categories are just impossible to organise, and there it is. And I think I will probably be blogging more often from now on (yes yes, more ludicrous self-referential blogging about blogging, I know) because, well, I just feel that way.

Expect random variations on all sorts of themes in no particular order. And, happy Saturday.

TV

2005-07-14T12:37:00.000-07:00

I have to tell you, I have completely given up watching TV these days.

To put it more accurately, I have completely given up trying to find anything on TV worth the effort of watching it. People think watching TV is easy, all you have to do is turn it on, sit back and play around with a few buttons. This is completely wrong. Actually, you need either the patience of a saint of the encylopedic knowledge of an astrophysicist in order to find anything fractionally interesting or entertaining. You can flick channels for hours, but every time you do that there are minutes of observation to be done before you can tell what is actually on, including waiting through commercials. You can look up the TV guide, which is work, and unless you know the shows already won't help tell you if they are any good, so you can read reviews of shows, and then you need to know which reviewers are half-sensible, so, more research work.

Even with the best possible research, you can still get to the end of a show (this also applies to movies) and it can be a great big letdown, maybe the conclusion makes no sense or there are stupid bigoted ideas that cause you to reinterpret the entire thing and realise it was terrible, and then you have wasted your time.

Of course, if you like watching other people suffering, or if you are obssessed with food, or something similar, then it is easy. TV satisfies people's material obssessions quite well. But if that doesn't get boring after quite a short time too, there is something wrong with you. I spent some time a while back watching all the DIY and cookery shows, but then I finished watching them because there wasn't anything new to see. Cook books are much better, plus you can take them in the kitchen and follow the instructions at your own leisure. Same with gardening, home decorating etc books. And if I absolutely have to know what is going on the world I would rather read it on the internet than watch hundreds of people on TV weeping and protesting and so on, which is distressing and does not teach me anything.

I have been watching one DVD only, lately, and it is a sci-fi series called "Farscape". A small minority of the episodes are extremely duff, and they occasionally have completely excruciating (but not explicit) romantic scenes, but on the whole it is very good and very meaningful. The episode I saw the other night was absolutely brilliant, all about how metaphorically blind people crave the thing they do not understand, and will lie, steal and exploit others in order to get what they don't know how to achieve for themselves. Yet they never do get it, they just get closer to it, and crave it all the more, causing ever-increasing trouble until they are stopped. And at the same time, they only get away with this for as long as the people being exploited fail to trust their own good moral instincts, and allow them to get away with it. And this episode contained some of the funniest drama I have ever seen in my life, I was literally crying with laughter. Some of this comes from knowing the characters well, probably, as I have seen every episode in order from the beginning.

But I have also seen some terrible movies in the last year, and I take it personally when this happens. The idea that you can "just switch off" unpleasantness is false. When you start watching a dramatic work, you enter into a deal with the makers of it. You trust them to tell you something useful, good and/or entertaining. And sometimes all they do is trick you into getting involved with their convincing, sympathetic characters, before murdering them in gross ways for no morally comprehensible reason whatever. I think this is exploitation of the audience. Quite a lot of films exploit the audience, and if the audience doesn't mind then that is just depressing. There comes a time in some movies when one just wants to join in the murder of the totally appalling lead characters, or when one wants to take revenge against the author for their meaningless exploitative suffering. The energy that some people put into proving that the world is a pointless, arbitrary, death-driven place is evil and disgusting. We would not want to go and see a movie that turns out halfway through to be secretly arguing that the Nazis were right. We rely on the judgement of the moviemakers, audience and reviewers who have gone before us to make sure that doesn't happen to us. But it does happen, and when it happens we generally just accept the evil worldview as another version of truth.

I am sure there are some good things on American TV. I just don't have a long or boring enough life to want to invest the necessary effort in locating them. Please do not suggest the Tivo: all my favourite shows of the past, I happened upon by accident. That is the joy of British TV, where there are only four channels worth watching, it is very easy to spot something new and good and the quality is very high, there is probably one show most days of the week that I would want to watch. Which is about half of one per cent of the entire terrestrial TV output. Massive.

the end of fashion

2005-07-14T09:03:00.000-07:00

clothes

Here's a good way to lose half my remaining reader (actually, there could be hundreds of you for all I know, as I haven't bothered adding a sitemeter): I am now going to talk about fashion.

The significance of clothing to the world as a whole is obvious- witness the hijab and the burqua, the black hats of the Chassidim, and the staggering amount of time, effort and money that goes into producing clothing in the West. We even have a Western kind of clothing "ethic" now, in organic, ecological clothing lines. But the idea of fashion, always changing and based on nothing other than moneymaking for its own sake, is inherently offensive, or at least boring, to a lot of sensible people; and for very good reasons indeed.

However, from this churning mass come up occasionally good ideas, and as a person who believes it is the good ideas that will ultimately stick, I find this encouraging. You might think, walking down the street, that such optimism is utterly bonkers. What about all that uncovered, wobbling, unappealing flesh? Why do young people these days all model themselves on Shaggy from "Scooby Doo"? Only the other day I saw someone cycling along in a t-shirt bearing a legend that would have had him arrested for obscenity not so many years ago. And it is obvious that the idea of exposure has never been more extreme than it is now, what with the pants (yes I mean trousers)-falling-off-to-show-six-inches-of-underwear phenomenon, the clinging tracksuit (surely the last thing you need to cling?), the RSJ push-up cleavage bra, and so on and so on.

So I will not blame you for a moment if you do not share my optimism that lots more people are going to be looking stylish, decent, pleasant to the eye and overall undisturbing, in a year or two's time. But that is my prediction, based on a slowly emerging new line of thought in the fashion industry (slow emergence being in itself highly unusual in this field of thought). Fashion trends are always about reacting against the last trend, and this one, I think, reacts against the entire idea of fashion, which makes it pretty radical. It is, instead, about beauty. Not the beauty of the female sexual form, but the beauty of the clothes, which complement the female form rather than just revealing it or obliterating/overriding it.

If you don't mind looking like a slob, then fine. But the ideal clothing, in my opinion, is comfortable, practical, easy to wear (which means not revealing), and also beautiful in itself. Beautiful clothes should make the person wearing them look beautiful, but not in an artificial way, merely because they do not interfere with the wearer's inherent, or natural, beauty, by distracting from it with either attention-seeking of their own, or jarring ugliness.

And I think when we get these clothes, which will happen not just when they are available but when we "get" these clothes, it will be the end of fashion as we understand it now. There will still be new shows and new collections, and there will still be people wearing horrible things, and so on, but these will be insignificant. Whereas, throughout the history of fashion so far, trends have had a huge influence on what we wear and how we perceive clothes, far stronger than most of us are aware of. We are more aesthetically sensitive than we think, and our opinions often change simply because fashion dictated it. How many female readers once wore black leggings and baggy tops all the time, and now regard them as horrendously awful, ugly, dreadful things? They seemed comfortable and attractive at the time. What happened? Fashion changed, that is all.

But if I am right, the next set of trends to come in will stick forever, and never be regarded as ugly. We know that this happens with clothes: plain old-fashioned jeans will never be ugly (although low-rise flared ones shortly will); straightforward t-shirts will be worn forever; and the relatively recent "vintage" trend is the most significant beginning of the end of fashion- some of us have been wearing decades-old things for twenty years, because really good clothes can and do stay beautiful. Not that people will stop buying new clothes, there will always be room for positive change in an individual person's life- but the constant perception-shifting that is caused by fashion's latest trends will stop.

Not many people notice this in themselves, because no-one likes to think that their aesthetic perception is subject to their cultural environment. But perhaps if I suggest that the clothes you have to see other people wearing might well dramatically improve in the next year or two, that could sound like good news. And maybe if I suggest that there will be lots more nice, good, non-dating, "classic" clothes for you to buy and wear, that would sound like good news too. Personally, I am very excited, because nice clothes make me very happy, but I can't wait all that time so I may have to get a sewing machine soon.

Next post, I will talk about examples of actual clothes.

home-grown terrorism

2005-07-12T17:04:00.000-07:00

So British politicians and important people are shocked and dismayed that the London bombers hailed not from the mountains of Afghanistan, but the United Kingdom itself.

Well, obviously. Homicidal maniacs are supposed to be the product of poor, deprived, miserable countries such as "Palestine", otherwise why would they want to do something like that? Some kind of lesson to be learned here, methinks.

Luckily, some other people are being a bit more emotionally resilient. You have to look at this "We are not afraid" photo gallery. The people who photographed themselves ages ago apologising for the war in Iraq really started a handy meme there. There's always something good to be got out of something bad, if you look hard enough for it.

orange

2005-07-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

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ORANGE
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motives of terrorism

2005-07-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

A further level of difficulty in the attempt to fathom the mind of the terrorist is the question of whether, in fact, there is anything much there to fathom.

It is often said about the serial killer Harold Shipman that we "may never know" what his motives were. As if it is possible to explain rationally why someone would murder hundreds of innocent, irrelevant, inoffensive victims in cold blood; in his case, without anyone even noticing at the time.

However, surely the real point is that Shipman's crimes were exactly as evil as they were motiveless? The other example of "I did it because I could," that springs to mind is obviously Bill Clinton. We accept that people will take bad things that make them feel good if they think they can get away with it, in the case of adultery. But in the case of murder, it is also true. Murdering makes people feel good. Particularly evil, messed-up people really will do it simply because they can.

Some human beings are capable of doing horrific things just for a "hit". We expect murderous dictators to have underlings tortured to death just for fun. Because they can. Well, non-powerful non-dictators can too, sometimes. Shipman did. So did Al Qaeda. Millionaire Bin Laden perfectly epitomises this rule. He could, he did, and so far he has got away with it uncaptured.

Motivelessness is inexplicable: except if you accept that murder is something that makes some people feel good, and that plus the opportunity and maybe sometimes a bit of encouragement (and Palestinian suicide bombers often get a lot of "encouragement") is the only motive some people need.

There are two kinds of motives. Rational motives, of varying degrees of logical, come from conscious reasoning. Sub-rational motives are instinctive, and they often direct you towards doing things that make you feel good. If it seems to you trivial or harmless, you don't care about the consequences, and it makes you feel good, then you will very likely do it. This is very common indeed. There are a lot of people who engage in petty, trivial meannesses and so on, for the sake of making themselves feel more powerful, and who have practically no emotional attachment whatsoever to the idea of being or actively doing good. This is why evil is often described as "mundane". But the idea of motiveless evil does not, in itself, require explanation. It's an everyday occurrence.

Some terrorists are perhaps sincere religious fanatics, taking certain passages in the Koran literally, and trying to follow instructions. Others simply enjoy killing, and assert the above belief so they can be in on the next big spree. Neither has an identifiable "motive" in the right-or-wrong-but-still-identifably-done-by-reasoning sense, because their internal goals are met in the action, not its outcome. We aren't going to get anywhere by looking for "motives" in the usual way. "Are they perhaps being reasonable?" is the kind of question only a self-absorbed egotist would bother asking about a bunch of people who blast innocent commuters to smithereens, a bit like asking, "Did the Jews bring the Holocaust on themselves?" Well, if they had been armed to the hilt and gone and occupied Israel in large numbers fifty years earlier, they would have avoided the Holocaust perhaps. If the people blown to piece in London had become millionaires and not needed to use the tube or bus anymore, they might have avoided being murdered. But neither brought it on themselves by not "doing better" at something else.

We may eventually end Islamist terrorism with a combination of measures such as establishing democracy in terrorism-sponsoring dictatorships, through temporary occupation or international pressure, and the progressive distancing from and ending of support for Islamist terrorism by Islam itself. But we have a lot of motes in our eyes. The idea that terrorism can ever, under any conceivable circumstances, "win", is the most notable. I think it comes from our own sense of failure at not understanding "why" they want to do this to us. Although we are not "bringing it on ourselves", we need to understand this before we can get more confident and assertive in the directions that might help.

We have power. We just don't realise it. Under democracy we surrender freedoms for one reason only: we decided to. That's not loss of freedom, it's plain stupidity. When people care enough to do something constructive about their problems, democracy responds to their demands. The problem right now is that, almost inevitably in the information-age, the people with the loudest mouths are the ones with the worst ideas. The complacent ones seeking what Mark Steyn calls the "quiet life option" are not antiwar marchers but their fearful political opposites, who sit silently at dinner parties for fear of upsetting the somewhat over-emotional other side.

A march against terrorism is being planned for London, and I hope other people join Jackie in attending. It's a start. Freedom is not going to support itself. The most powerful force in the world is inertia.

goals of Islamism

2005-07-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

I am interrupting my embargo on all things depressing and political to write something about the London attacks. Being British and having lived longer in London than any other part of the UK, it feels necessary to gather some thoughts on the subject and share them here. But I want to do it properly, which means putting some thought in. I want to say something about the "what do they want?" question.

This article in the Times sets out quite clearly that while the Islamist strategic goal is clearly defined:

With the advent of Islam all previous religions were “abrogated” (mansukh), and their followers regarded as “infidel” (kuffar). The aim of all good Muslims, therefore, is to convert humanity to Islam, which regulates Man’s spiritual, economic, political and social moves to the last detail.

... there are differences within the movement on how this should be achieved. The three main approaches are:

1. Dialogue, leading to the world willingly converting to Islam. (I do now know enough about Islam to have an opinion on whether it can be consistent with a live-and-let-live approach to other religions, but in any case if all religions stuck to mere dialogue no trouble would be caused between them).

2. Tactical land war, as espoused by Bin Laden's
... supposed No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who insists that the Islamists should first win the war inside several vulnerable Muslim countries, notably Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

3. Pure terror, or ghazavat:
... others, including Osama bin Laden, a disciple of al-Maudoodi, believe that the Western-dominated world is too mired in corruption to hear any argument, and must be shocked into conversion through spectacular ghazavat (raids) of the kind we saw in New York and Washington in 2001, in Madrid last year, and now in London.

And indeed, Westerners are rushing out in their droves to sign up at the nearest mosque. Erm, not. Shurely there is shome mishtake here, and I intend to pin it down a little more in my next post. Feel free to make suggestions in the meantime, if you are still reading this blog.

London attacks

2005-07-07T05:07:00.000-07:00

Instapundit says,

One hopes that the British authorities will respond to these attacks by cracking down on the rather large number of Muslim extremists who have set up shop in London.

I agree with that. I also think these attacks are a great big Al Qaeda failure. Not enough dead and not enough of a political excuse/ "connection" to hang them on. I think there is simply so much hatred brewing in certain mosques, it was going to spill over eventually unless stopped in advance. But people will continue working in London, and I doubt there will be any identifiable outcome for the terrorists a la Madrid. They should have timed it with the General Election. Bunch of hopeless incompetents.

Poor London. When will the bombings end for good.

Mozart

2005-07-03T14:17:00.000-07:00

One sure sign of getting old is deciding you prefer Mozart to Beethoven. Young people always prefer Romantic music to Classical music, because they are so full of emotions swirling all around inside themselves and appreciate the discovery that they are not the only person who ever felt that way. But when you get on a bit, calm down and start involuntarily noticing mundane things like the beauty of everyday plants, all that emoting becomes rather exhausting. Even worse, you begin wondering suspiciously if it isn't occasionally a little bit... sentimental? Not that I would say Beethoven is sentimental at all, but when one is having a nice life appreciating the sunshine and discovering beef hot-dogs, wallowing around in feelings of death, doom, depression and (alright, I'll say it) deafness, does seem somewhat inapropriate.

Anyway, I am finding that whereas I only feel like playing Beethoven sonatas once or twice a day, the Mozart one I am learning (in C, k306) is completely addictive and impossible to put down. It is both very very catchy, almost in a pop-song sort of a way, and at the same time constantly surprising so you never get bored of it. (Well, I never get bored of it, but I don't know whether the next-door neighbours feel the same way. They can definitely hear, the houses round here are just little wooden boxes).

The other uncanny thing about this sonata is, there are many many bits which are exactly like the Beethoven I've been playing (number 17). I don't know if the Mozart one is quite late, but it has suddenly loud, dramatic, quite chromatic passages, chromatic broken chords in octaves in left and right hands, happy-tunes that are slightly less innocent than they sound, and lots of other very Beethovenish characteristics. So I suppose Beethoven really does follow on from Mozart in a smooth kind of a way. The only problem is, after getting so into the Mozart it can seem like Beethoven is less good, really milking the ideas rather than keeping them concise, clever and under control. (And that's enough alliteration for one day.)

On the other hand, I played through the super-famous first movement of the Moonlight sonata today, and it is definitely nothing like Mozart at all. Beethoven's pianistic genius really produces a completely different sound from the instrument than anything Mozart probably even imagined was possible on one of the more basic pianos they had when he was writing. Apparently, crescendos were only invented in the middle of Mozart's time, when they became possible on a keyboard. Before then, you had to pull out stops to make definite dynamic changes. My piano teacher, Miss Kitchin, once told me that when Mozart first played one of his compositions with this newfangled crescendo thingie in it, people were so scared they ran out of the room. I expect they thought if the piano got any louder it might explode, or something. These days it is practically impossible for any kind of artist to frighten anybody. We are scared of nothing except death, and our own phobias. Or so we say, but I am not entirely convinced that we are telling ourselves the truth.

do what you have to do

2005-07-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

life

I think this is possibly the best advice anyone ever gave me.

Note that it does not mean:
- do what you feel like doing
- do what makes you feel good
- do what you can justify
- do what you can persuade others to go along with
- do what you can coerce others into going along with
- do what you want.

Sometimes there are things we have to do even if it means being rejected, loathed and despised. But it seems to me that if you do what you have to do, things will very likely come together eventually: whereas if you don't, then they never can.

my kids are the most wonderful people

2005-06-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

life

It doesn't compromise their privacy, and it's worth saying. Their calm resilience and determination, their incredible optimism and enormous appreciation of everything fun and good in their lives, their deep consideration and caring for other people, and perhaps most of all their ceaseless quest for new challenges, new learning and new experiences, in different but never less than impressive ways, all make me feel incredibly lucky to be their mother.

Lots of parents regard their own kids as exceptional geniuses, of course. But also, lots of people unconsciously try to snuff out extraordinariness in children. One anonymous person suggested to me that my son and daughter needed "levelling out"- to have their weaker educational spots improved (nothing wrong with that, obviously) but also to have their strongest talents quashed. Fortunately, I never take in that kind of information till hours after the event, or I would have been completely dumbstruck and unable to continue the conversation. But I don't think it's as uncommon an attitude as one might expect.

Anyway, kids- well done, you're doing great, keep it up! (They won't read that, but I tell them whenever I remember anyway :-))

a post on a horrible subject

2005-06-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

(I will be returning to happier subjects immediately following this, which needs to get out of my system.)

Can you name the world's worst ever serial killer? I have only heard of one person who, working entirely alone, murdered a minimum of two hundred and fifty innocent people before being detected. His name was Harold Shipman.

Or, to give him a full description, as the Guardian does on the bottom of their obituary after he committed suicide in prison:

Harold Frederick Shipman, general practitioner and murderer, born January 14 1946; died January 13 2004

Erm.

"General practitioner and murderer." Does that sound a little contradictory to you?

Of course not.

"Shipman was excellent doctor," say colleagues.

There is currently a professional misconduct case running against those colleagues, without whose co-operation Shipman would not have been able to get so far, and who are claiming innocence on the grounds that he had an excellent professional reputation, and appeared entirely trustworthy. My guess is that they are speaking the whole truth as they see it, and there was no collusion, just collective blindness, which is not a criminal offence.

What kind of blindness? The blindness that accepts evidence at face-value and dismisses incongruities and dissonances that ought to be clues as trivial and not worth pursuing.

One example given of Shipman's exemplary professional character/reputation is his willingness frequently to visit his patients at home, and his involvement with their lives and needs.

Dr Dirckze added that Shipman would often go "beyond the call of duty" to help his patients and would visit people "two or three times a day" when they were ill.

"That was his way of giving them more appropriate care than just sending them to hospital," said Dr Dirckze.

He added that Shipman was a popular doctor among patients because he gave them "a more personal approach".

Dr Dirckze said: "He came across as very caring and would go beyond the call of most GPs' duty.

"Very often we heard stories of what he was doing that the rest of us wouldn't dream of doing.

To point out that we now have the benefit of hindsight is beyond an understatement. However: I personally find this exemplary behaviour immediately and obviously the opposite. Let me just illustrate how the above might have been written:

Dr Dirckze added that Shipman would often visit patients far more often than was medically necessary, using his authority as a doctor and their vulnerability as old, sick and needy people to ingratiate himself into their lives.

"Very often we heard stories of what he was doing that the rest of us wouldn't dream of doing. It never seemed odd to us that despite regarding Shipman as admirable, not one of us ever sought to emulate his example. We took for granted that other doctors obviously worked much harder and better than ourselves. Now we know that actually, the rest of us were getting on with our jobs, while he was using his medical authority to gain access into people's lives and murder them with morphine overdoses. But then our scepticism was blocked by our own complacency."

I have written before about how to tell the difference between genuine people and frauds, niceness and creepiness, common decency and charming manipulation. I don't feel like going into it all again. So in response to the inevitable question, "But how could those doctors have perceived that Shipman might be a fake?" (because a little suspicion is all it takes to start checking someone out, and uncovering the evidence if there is any) I have only one reply.

Were they looking?

And also, are we looking?

The fact that Shipman was a doctor still, to this day, excuses him in people's minds. "Maybe those people wanted to be put out of their misery..." But they were not, as it happens, terminally ill. Shipman's victims ranged in age from 41 to 93. Yet the "But he was a good doctor..." refrain continues, and Shipman is somehow regarded as not so much a cold-blooded serial killer as an unfortunately disturbed grief-stricken victim himself, as the abovementioned obituary illustates very well. The fact that good doctors do not murder hundreds of their patients seems irrelevant. One must wonder what people do regard as a "good doctor" these days.

Terrible lessons are still waiting to be learned. Anyone still not 150% clear on this should go here, and read the whole thing.

It takes a bit of scrolling.

flavours of the month

2005-06-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

This might become a regular thing, with "month" applying to whatever time period I see fit.

food

chips and dips. I finally figured out why American potato crisp flavours are so dull (no cheese and onion, roast chicken, sun-dried tomato with four types of cheese and freshly picked thyme etc etc, as in the UK). It's because you're supposed to dip them in things. Having discovered this, I am now having a potato chips and French onion dip (home) and tortilla-chips and salsa (away) phase. This will be a short-term thing as proper cooking is likely to supplant it when the new house gets more organised, so please do not fear for my health or sanity.

places

here.

art

Shiny chrome 50s bread-bin from Room Service Vintage. I would like to recommend this shop, but I can't, because you will all rush over there and buy everything and then I won't be able to, and that would be a disaster.

music

Beethoven's piano sonata #17 in D minor. It sounds so amazingly famous I can't believe it doesn't have a nickname like the famous other ones. Although I am often tempted to call most Beethoven piano sonatas "The Penelope Pitstop sonata" because, you know, they are quite da-na-na-na-NA!/ da-na-na-na-NA!/ pom- pom- pom- pom-/ pom- pom- pom- pom- (repeat).

reading

This lecture series by the Chief Rabbi, which I have mentioned before, but I find absolutely grippingly interesting, as well as lots of fun.

clothes

red and white spotted fifties headscarf

life

The way human beings are able to ponder a difficult problem, say for several days, find ten or twenty different perspectives and insights, explore them all in effortful depth, then just stumble upon an amazing totally unpredictably original solution. Of course, I didn't create the universe and can't take credit for the existence of this phenomenon, but I do find it extremely cool.

big junk

2005-06-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

places

I visited some old friends in Switzerland not too long ago, one of whom had just been to North Korea and told us about the same tall empty building that Harry Hutton mentions in this post. Apparently it's a bit like the World Trade Centre used to be, only there aren't actually any rich trading businesses in North Korea so nobody wants to rent the offices. I wonder if Kim the thirteenth or whatever he is called thinks this actually looks good. You would think he would make government officials move in or something. If he doesn't care if it looks good, why bother building it in the first place? I guess His Greatness thought it was a good idea then lost interest. Why bother with tall buildings anyway if you've got nukes.

It reminds me of the man in the vintage shop yesterday trying to buy an old Star Wars plastic lunch box for fifty dollars. Believe it or not, that is their actual "value" according to ebay. When human beings gain enlightenment, it will transpire that all those who bought beaten up ancient Star Wars paraphenalia, not to mention brand new Louis XV wood-laminate-look plasterboard-and-compressed-sawdust DVD display cabinets, for hundreds and hundreds of dollars, were making bum deals. For now, they are feverishly inflating their own markets in a joint ritual of of willing money-burning. South Sea bubbles still exist. They are just less obvious now that we all have so much more money.

I know, you think Star Wars lunch boxes ar beautiful and will only grow in value. Well, best of luck.

I would now reveal the Kim Jong building/ superinflated lunch box connection, but alas, it slipped my mind. Maybe you could try it yourself, as a sort of quiz? If I recall later, a suitable addendum will appear.

silliness

2005-06-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

life

One of the things I find hilarious about human beings is how radically different their self-image can be from their real identity. Of course, often this phenomenon is a very long way from being amusing. But sometimes, when a person is harmless, it is really quite impressive and that's why we laugh: at the awe-inspiring ability of the human brain to accomplish the apparently impossible.

Children, especially young children, specialise in this skill. Many a three-year-old boy decided he was controlling the universe through a team of small robots in the corner of his bedroom, before the arrival of bedtime burst his bubble, for the next few hours anyway. And adult characters who routinely misperceive themselves as being successful, skilled, intelligent people while actually bumbling through life breaking every piece of china in the shop are the stuff of many a comedy series. We regard the Frank Spencers and Del Boys of life with affection, even though they may arouse us to rage when it was our china. We can't be angry for long, because despite their total lack of self-awareness, these characters are endlessly optimistic and well-intentioned, and most of all they keep on trying. If they weren't trying, the mistakes wouldn't happen. So we cannot but forgive them.

On the other hand, ill-intentioned or egotistical characters in drama etc are often bumbling idiots too, very often cut down to size revealing their true bumblingly idiotic selves by the triumph of good over evil. And that's funny too, because it's a revelation of truth. Not that their wicked deeds are bumbling errors- quite the opposite- but that despite doing bad things, they remain obviously awkward and silly at the same time.

That's why evil characters they are often portrayed with nervous twitches, bizarre obsessions and awkward, stammering modes of expression. Brecht's play about Hitler, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, makes full use of the comic awkwardnesses of the Nazi dictator, and the way he turned them into those threatening expressive trade-marks: the stiff gait, the nervously feminine tightly folded arms, the Chaplainesque protective moustache that hides the upper lip and therefore any unwanted display of quivering emotional vulnerability. By contrast, Churchill's extremely relaxed and ponderous style of speech, familiar friendly V sign and great fat pleasurable cigar demonstrated the kind of deep, calm, moral authority that is simply impossible for bad guys to fake. So it was very easy for the Allies to make fun of the utterly inane and ridiculous Hitler, thus keeping up their morale and ensuring the outcome of the war.

We can tell from Hitler's body language that he was a highly self-conscious person, and from everything else about him that he had no self-awareness whatsoever. This is common because self-consciousness and self-awareness are pole opposites. You can have a little of both, but too much of one renders the other impossible.

Luckily deluded people are far more often "Ooooh, Betty!" than WWII. But probably the reason I found Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em scary as a child is that it describes a phenomenon that characterises evil as well as well-intentioned dumbness. I still don't really think it was funny. But growing up and earning your freedom changes things. I do laugh a lot at the real Frank Spencers in my life now - including any bad ones.

sounds of the spheres

2005-06-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

music

Music is the divine language. It speaks to our emotions, which are our physical sense of the universe, and tells us of humanity. It is beautiful, because the world is beautiful.

Obviously I'm not talking about heavy metal here. Some "music" is designed not to express truth but to block it out by making your ears hurt so much that if anything else ever mattered you can't remember it. Perhaps there is good heavy metal music, I wouldn't know. Where one person hears embarrassing sentimentality another person identifies with simple feeling. But people can and do use music to obliterate reality and affirm their worst ideas, which is a terrible way to treat the wonders of the world, and yourself.

Of course, harmonomelodical abuse crosses all genres. There are classical afficianados who wallow in Beethoven and Verdi for all the wrong reasons too. Music can be used like an addictive drug, for perpetuating the avoidance of unsolved problems and a troubled conscience.
It provides an illusory kind of emotional experience when a person is in retreat from their inner reality. It gives them the impression of having lived, integrated and resolved feelings they were merely observing from a comfortable distance. It's not appreciation, it's appropriation.

The calming effect does not last long, so they go back and repeat as needed. A person who is totally emotionless, insensitive and uninterested in intimacy in their real life, but who listens regularly to heart-wrenching great music at one end of the scale, or thumpingly simplistic and repetitive sentimental nonsense at the other, is probably a serial killer. If they can listen to Mozart's requiem and not be inspired to live better afterwards, or play the same 80s power-ballad sixteen times in a row and not actually smash up both the record and the record player by the end, then there is definitely something very wrong and potentially dangerous going on. Stay away from them.

I am enjoying my new piano more than I can say, but I fear that my piano teacher of yore, Miss Kitchin, may have been right when she said that the secret to lifelong pianistic fulfilment was keeping up one's Hanon exercises. Whereas my violin playing improved just from a change in mental approach, my piano playing is stuck because my hands won't move as fast as my brain is telling them. This seems to be a much bigger issue on the piano; because each individual note is easier to play, you have to do far more of them and quicker.

A lot of people trained as children give up music later on because they don't see the point in playing at all unless for professional performance. You're not being paid and you're not contributing anything new to the world's musical culture- it's too much hard work to be enjoyable just for one's own ears, and/or there are just more important things to put one's creativity into. For me, it is an opportunity to experience the divine one step closer than by listening. I said "opportunity" because it's not enough to bash out the notes- you have to make them into the real music they should be, which is very difficult. But as far as I'm concerned, there is vastly more spiritual truth and beauty in Beethoven, Bach and Mozart than most things one is likely to hear on the average religious music TV show. Like I said (and I had to make this word up because there isn't one in English for the physical nature of what music is, so, sorry) harmonomelodical abuse crosses all genres.

G-d is in the details

2005-06-24T09:36:00.000-07:00

life

It's the fabulosity of all sorts of things in and about everyday life that I am loving at the moment. My piano. The cleverness of having lots of shady trees in a Texan garden. Antique kitchen cupboards vastly more sensible and helpful than modern kitchen units. Wooden floorboards. My piano. Also, my piano. On the other hand, I am finding supermarkets unpleasant, ugly and repulsive, with their wall-to-wall second-rate contents. And I have developed total TV intolerance. It's the adverts. They are like being SHOUTED AT BY IDIOT STRANGERS RIGHT IN YOUR EAR. It got turned on the other week for about five minutes before my protests resulted in a successful and ongoing TV embargo. Whew. The adverts, and also the shows. MORE IDIOT PEOPLE SHOUTING. However, my piano is great. And the neighbours like it too, luckily.

If you seek out beauty and disregard the vulgar and repellent, you may start to notice how they correspond with goodness and its opposite too. Or maybe those qualities are the same things. In the eighteenth century, people used to think that aesthetic appreciation was a matter of wisdom and education. Aesthetic value wasn't assigned to anything that happened to turn you on; it was the music of the spheres, a deep kind of perfection only detectable to human beings who took great pains to become aware of it. This phenomenon was known as "taste". It was a refined kind of wisdom, one which only morally sound people were considered capable of acquiring.

Well, I've been buying furniture lately, and I am here to tell you that taste still exists, along with its opposite, horribleness.

Apparently, attraction and repulsion are the first emotions human beings become aware of. This makes sense to me. They are the most basic instincts of relationship to the rest of the world. We should be drawn to what is good and repulsed by what is bad. And I don't have time for anyone who deludes himself that these instincts can be rightly completely overlaid with reasoning. Nobody is clever enough to get that right.

On the other hand it is mind-boggling folly to decide that anything you instinctively find attractive must be good for you. So how do we go about improving our instincts, informing them with sensible new information, tuning up our taste-o-meters?

It's an active process. We need to get out there, take risks, make mistakes, learn from them and build our mental muscles. We need to find and listen to good advice, then try it out, and learn from what happens consequently.

Everyone's path is unique, but one guarantee for all is that if you don't make the effort, it definitely won't happen. That seems like the biggest risk of all, to me.

And on the other hand, there are things like this. I'm not writing about politics currently, but I have to state one time that the whole Gaza withdrawl thing seems so obviously wrong to me it's pretty much beyond debate. The detail Robert Avrech blogs about entirely reinforces my views, as if they needed any reinforcing. I cannot imagine where this will end. If people don't seek enough of the right lessons, those lessons will seek the people out anyway before too long.

Time to play the piano. All the creative and entertainment benefits of a video games system, only more so.

women and work

2005-06-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

life

Snippet of conversation overheard in a public place yesterday:

"What does my mother know? She never worked in her life!"

Um.

Here is the truth. Stay-home mums (and/or dads, of course) don't get paid a salary. They don't get sacked if they are remiss or negligent. And there really are stay-home mothers who do not work. There are even "homeschooling" parents who do not work, barely lift a finger round the house and totally neglect their children. Take it from me, these people do exist.

The thing is, the young lady I overheard almost certainly did not mean this:

"What does my mother know? She was a completely irresponsible and neglectful parent who never bothered taking care of us kids or the house or anything to do with our lives!"

Almost certainly, she just thought running a household, having babies and bringing up children did not constitute "work".

I have to say that, having spent quite a few years earning money followed by more years at home with kids, the latter is vastly, infinitely harder work as far as I'm concerned.

That is, if you actually attempt all the jobs you are truly responsible for.

I say "attempt" because there are a great number of home-based parents for whom getting everything done, as you would in paid work, is basically impossible. For many, the most that can be done is simply to work incredibly hard and get the most done that you can do.

One of the characteristics of a brilliantly talented person is that they do amazing things while making them look effortless. If you think your mother "did not work", but your house was warm, welcoming and cared for, and if your childhood was happy and relaxed in general, and if you are in no doubt that your parents loved and cared for you (one good measure of that is- did they do considerate things for you based on a detailed knowledge of your preferences?), then I have some news:

All that stuff doesn't come out of the sky and just land there on all of your heads. It has to be created, maintained and looked after. Someone did it. Doing things is work.

How easy do most people find that kind of work?

On the other hand, some people manage to achieve almost nothing while making it look like they are dragging a truck up Mount Everest. But I think they mostly work in offices.

Anyway, we need to update our definition of work. It can be invisible to its own beneficiaries. It can be fulfilling, wanted and enjoyable, and it isn't measured by the monetary outcome. I don't know what it is measured by though, except perhaps one's conscience.

one burger is not like another burger

2005-06-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

food

I am never going to Macdonalds again. What is the point in paying too much for terrible food stuffed with chemicals when you can pay the right amount for good food of the same kind? There is no point. Last night I had a plain beefburger that was made from beef ground up and grilled, and it tasted exactly like that, beef, ground up and grilled. Meaty and charcoaley. And it came with french fries made from actual potatoes. Some of them even had skins, proving they were made from actual potatoes. I do not smother my burger with processed cheese, and I do not wash it down with melted ice-cream/ milkshake. Nor do I generally eat pudding (dessert). Nor do I have any spare weight to lose. So the entire meal was very healthy indeed, as well as delicious.

A meat sandwich with salad and some potatoes chopped and cooked in oil is a good plain delicious low-fuss meal.

new and old

2005-06-21T07:57:00.000-07:00

life

We are in the middle of moving house to a different part of town which is very quiet with lots of trees and yet within walking-distance of shops, cafes and other good things. I don't know whether such places are common in America, but evidently they do exist (unless this is the only one). Anyway, this is very good news for me. There are also buses that go to other useful places, and they are regular, air-conditioned and very very cheap, so hooray to that too.

Also it is old, which means 1930s by US standards, which would be quite modern in most of England. However, 1930s houses here are more old-fashioned already than 1930s houses in the UK- Waltons-style wooden houses with gardens and often porches on the front for your swinging bench, probably much the same as houses from the century before only they didn't get eaten by termites. Nothing like those functional semi-detached homes with bay windows on the front that sprouted in the UK between the wars.

Who knows if one day I will change my mind, but for me the idea of living in a modern residential area of the kind that seems to be most popular with most Americans still fills me with horror. Being near shops etc is not, for me, about going carless- it's about feeling civilisation nearby. That is what I am used to, and it makes me feel at home. Modern American family homes are very impressive, with their double-height ceilings and enormous rooms and so on, but I grew up on a modern housing estate as a child and it gave me nightmares, and clearly I haven't got over that yet. I have to say that there is no comparison between the two- for one thing, American homes are nearly all detached, with garden all around, and each house different than its neighbour. But they still freak me out, and presumably other people too or Desperate Housewives and American Beauty would not have been invented. (Those are both metaphorical tales of architecture, right?)

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot lately about how both moral and aesthetic decisions are very often determined by one's situation and knowledge-base, rather than being blanket goods and bads that can be applied to everyone regardless of their uniquenesses. You often have to know yourself before making the right decision: will I realistically cope with adopting seven children at once, or am I going to mess it up because I just don't have the skills or the desire to learn them properly? Should I really eat another giant bowl of tater-tots with extra melted cheese and lard topping, or will the prison-guards start bringing us low-fat broccoli salad in the next few days? Adopting homeless kids is generally good, and junk food is generally inferior, but either can be fine or terrible depending on the individual circumstances.

Coming today: new fridge, bottom of the line, no ice-maker as the plumbing for it doesn't exist here. And the piano. It's a medium-sized upright about 25 years old, made by Baldwin, and it will be the first piano I have owned. Which is ridiculous. Still, life begins at forty so I am actually a few years ahead of the game.

fundamentalism

2005-06-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

life

In the online etymological dictionary, I found this:

'Fundamentalism' ... appears to have been used first in connexion with the (American) Northern Baptist Convention of 1920 to describe the more conservative delegates who desired 'to restate, reaffirm, and reemphasize the fundamentals of our New Testament faith.' ... Now 'Fundamentalism' ... appears to describe the bigoted rejection of all Biblical criticism, a mechanical view of inspiration and an excessively literalist interpretation of scripture. [London Times, Aug. 25, 1955]

Lots of words change their meanings over time. My favourite one is "presently". It used to mean "now" and now means "sometime later when I get around to it." Words change to fit the ideas people are using them to express. They do this without anyone deliberately meaning them to. It happens because there is no way of fixing their meanings absolutely except in a historical context. This is why nobody can claim that a word absolutely means something specific unless they know its etymology. Which is why the old version of "fundamentalism" is based on a good idea. Unless you know where ideas come from, you're skirting around the surface of things instead of understanding them properly. It's impossible to criticise something unless you know what you're criticising in the first place.

Atheists can be fundamentalists in the modern, bigoted sense of the word, too. So can scientists. But they rarely get accused of this except by religious people, whom they then call "fundamentalists", thereby locking the argument. To some atheists, a "fundamentalist" is just anybody with any religion. No doubt some religious people think the same of anyone who thinks science is worth pursuing, also.

Anyway, we all have values which we are "fundamentalist" about in the good sense that we regard them as essential basic ideas on which to base other higher-level ideas. And most of us are also "fundamentalist" in the bad sense that we have dodgy ideas which we regard as essential and beyond criticism when actually they are deeply flawed.

What are you fundamentalist about- what do you regard as essential, base-level truth that needs to be reaffirmed?

sidebar links

2005-06-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

food blogs

It's been tricky getting started on my sidebar links. The problem is, I want to categorise them but am not sure how. By frequency of reading is too dodgy- it changes all the time. By blog topic doesn't work for the interestingly wide-ranging ones, which is nearly all of them. By nationality doesn't cover "Jewish" very well. I once had "Friends/ Romans/ Countrymen", which sounded good, but implied that countrymen could not be friends, and involved the misnomer "Romans" for all foreigners. "The good/ the bad/ the ugly" sounds cool and amusing, but insulting two thirds of my blogroll for the sake of sounding cool and amusing seems less than optimal.

Basically, trying to fit the strange and fascinating selection of human beings whose ideas I like to read into labelled boxes feels like trying to fold up Texas and fit it in an envelope. Perhaps alphabetical order is a better idea.

On the other hand, perhaps complete randomness would be even better.

I'll start with food blogs.

Gastroblog is a wide-ranging food blog with recipes and food stories, as well as good writers, who have opinions about all kinds of food. They are absolutely down to earth and sensible, and can even write about foie gras without a hint of snootiness. Gastroblog also has a handy sidebar from which to go food blog surfing. When I decide what my favourite food blogs are from their sidebar I will probably add them onto mine.

The kosher blog doesn't seem to be updated very often, but it's the only one of its kind I have found, and has useful links to Jewish recipe places. The Jewish tradition of eating is unlike any other, with its combination of religious laws that can be applied in any time, place or cookery-style, and its huge stock of very distinctive recipes that still seem to maintain their popularity. I am planning to learn some soon, watch this blog.

Though small, it is tasty seems to be the new name for "Let's eat with Meg and Ted", which title I personally loved, but never mind. They are in Dublin, don't update especially often, but write a good, no-nonsense, interesting food blog.

I was just really very hungry is going up because it includes posts about cookery and food books, and I love reading about food. And it is good.

If you are wondering now whether reading and writing about food is such a great idea, I refer you to Maki's post about what the whole enterprise means to her. I am definitely going to buy and read the book she raves about. Food is more interesting to me than, say, fiction, these days; it can be immensely significant (which brings to mind this post by Google Hador about the significance of the family table in Judaism. I found GH at Mirty's place, which I also mentioned the other day). On the other hand, some people treat food like it is religion, or like it is art and art is like religion and they are the High Priest Maestro, which is quite sad. But you knew that already.

More links later.

"My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence..."

2005-06-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

(note: it was difficult to think of a decent title for this post, which is why a bad one was up for a while before I gave up and used this quotation instead.)

art

"... and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness." - Helen Keller

You will have to read the Chief Rabbi's whole "faith" lecture series to find out what he thinks about the Greek visual worldview and the Jewish auditory one; I can't summarise it. Although I am currently totally engrossed in these lectures and definitely recommend them. Lots there explaining how people make the mistake of dismissing things they don't understand because they think they understand them due to linguistic-conceptual miscomunications. I suppose that is another one of the many roots of all human failure.

One of the points the rabbi makes is that the Jewish people tend to produce different kinds of achievement than other people, because their culture is less about what you see and more about what you hear. There is a sense in which sound represents meaning and consciousness, in a way that sight does not, because sound represents language and communication and therefore human consciousness and the search for meaning. That is a very vague, poor and inaccurate summary. But I can think of more Jewish scientists and musicians than Jewish playwrights and artists.

Modern art tries to be more than physical. It wants to be invested with meaning beyond the beauty of what you see, hence the term "conceptual art". Sceptics argue that this enterprise is futile, but I think it is necessary and worthwhile, although its ambitiousness dooms it to failure most of the time. There is little point in art that just looks nice, because nature does that better already. In good art, you see the workings of (good, effective, enlightened) consciousness, which is something else altogether. For instance, there are stacks of old portraits in galleries around the world, but the Mona Lisa is popular because it is a picture of someone thinking. People are drawn to that. Of course, people will always be drawn to bad stuff too, but their generally greater instinctive attraction to what is good is visible in the greater popularity of Mozart over Salieri.

In King Lear, Gloucester famously begins to "see" truth only when his eyes have been put out. There is a similar theme in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, involving the Johnny Depp character. The message is obviously not that blind people are better than sighted people, or that hearing is better than sight. It is much more general and metaphorical than that; the observation that the forced removal of one's familiar relied-on systems, while threatening total breakdown of the human spirit, can also inspire a person to do better than they ever did before. Eyeballs are undoubtedly very useful, but the most important achievements of human beings are dictated by something greater than their individual physical senses. Having stuff, even having useful stuff, even having useful bits of your body, is not what counts: it's what you do with it all. Loss can raise our awareness of that truth more powerfully than any other challenge we face in life. Or it can indeed lead to our ruin, or leave us alive but crushed and struggling and regretful for the rest of our days. It depends how we deal with it. And sometimes we are useless and just have to keep struggling to find better ways of doing the dealing. That's fine.

I googled the Bach chaconne I have been attempting to play, and found a legend that he is said to have written it to commemorate the death of his wife and intended it to represent "the cycle of life". There are also lots of transcriptions for other instruments, including a piano one by Brahms for left hand only. Ravel wrote a whole piano concerto for left hand only. You can't do as much with only one hand, but you can do what you can do, better; it's the meaning that counts. The greater our awareness of that, the further we can go. Truth is not a one-phrase theory, it is a practical reality which we never stop learning how to live.

native v. foreign food update

2005-06-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

food

And on the subject of local authentic fare, we had the most amazing tortilla chips and salsa last night, and what is more it came free with the Mexican beers. Big huge crunchy slightly warm chips and home-made spicy tomato stuff. You are supposed to scoop up great dollops of salsa with your chips. I dipped the corners of my chips tentatively in the salsa and even then thought I was burning my mouth. Perhaps this will change.

We also played darts. They opened the whole upstairs bar specially for us. "Darts isn't so big anymore," said the landlord. The reason being that they banned smoking in the darts bar. Austin recently passed a law banning smoking in all public places (ie, privately-owned public places) although it has not come into full effect yet. There are a lot of smokers in Austin and the ban on indoor smoking is going to be bad for some people's businesses. If you don't have an outdoor seating area you could lose all your customers to somewhere else that does. There hasn't been a revolution in Ireland yet, which also recently imposed this kind of ban, but the weather there is less good. I imagine smokers would rather sit unsmoking in the warm than spend their evenings shivering outside, even if there is a beer garden.

Personally I prefer sitting outside anyway if possible, unless it's the hottest part of the day in summer. What is the point in being somewhere so sunny and spending all your time indoors? Pizza, coffee and tortilla chips are all better in the open air. They just need to fix up some al fresco dart-boards next.

Fact of the day: cilantro is Spanish for coriander leaves.

in search of halloumi cheese

2005-06-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

food

I like nearly all cheese, and grilled halloumi is one of my favourites. Berlin has a large Turkish community, and when we were staying in the middle of it in Kreutzberg the other month, we bought three packs of halloumi for five euros from one of the local Turkish food shops. It's a little more expensive in Texas.

This place could not be more different than the little Turkish shop in Kreutzberg. It is so vast it even has its own classroom. The website explains their ethos thus:

Remember what it was like to visit Grandma's and walk into her kitchen?

Um, yes, but to be honest, my grandma's kitchen was more of a tiny overflowing place than an aircraft-hangar-sized showroom for All The Poshest Food In The World. While in search of halloumi, possibly for making this Nigella Lawson recipe, we helped ourselves to of the free cheese sample of the day. I only had a tiny crumb because it was solid old cheese that looked like dark Parmesan, so I thought it would be very strong.

Ten minutes later, I couldn't stop thinking about the cheese. It was five-year-old aged Gouda, which doesn't sound very impressive, but it was so deep and mysterious I think it was made in the Brothers' Grimm fairytale woods, around the time of Cinderella. Bought some of that, and some other exotic foreign fare as well: a baguette, some Italian cheese, an empty cigar box for putting things in, and a curly-wurly. Which is a bit like an American going to Fortnum and Mason and buying a Twinkie bar. Although I bet you can actually do that, at least in Selfridges or Harvey Nicks.

Some time ago, an American beer company decided to call itself by the same name as a Czeck beer company which had the name first. When the Czeck company tried to reclaim their name, they failed. Ever since then they have been called Budvar- the original Budweiser in Europe. But in America, as I know since seeing it yesterday in the fancy shop, they go by the dreadful name Czeckvar. Bought some of that too.

Which concludes my shopping journal. There is no food better than absolutely brilliant bread with absolutely brilliant cheese and maybe an apple. I can't believe how easy it is in life these days to eat like a king. Best supper I've had since the last one. Amazing.

built-in obsolescence

2005-06-13T05:59:00.000-07:00

nail varnish

When women all over the world went bonkers about the famous Chanel rouge noir nail varnish worn by Uma in Pulp Fiction, it was the beginning of a nail varnish trend that led eventually to the establishment of "nail bars" on every street corner all over the place. These days manicures are as common as haircuts. If you want to smarten yourself up and feel pampered, they cost much less, can be even more colourful, and don't involve sticking your head in a sink. They are also less touchy-feely. Not everyone likes touchy-feely, and hand-shaking is definitely less involved than a head-massage.

Actually, I conjecture that an aversion to general touchy-feely (as distinct from intimacy with your closest loved-ones) is less weird than Jackie Danicki might suspect. In particular, the recent Western custom of hugging and kissing everyone you know every time you meet and greet them is, I think, due for a major backlash. It has become extraordinarily difficult to avoid, but I am quite certain that a large number of people find this practice quite unpleasant.

When rouge noir happened, so did short nails. Previously, most nail varnish but especially strong colours were expected to be worn on long, impractical ones. I recall trying to grow mine as a teenager, and horrifying my viola teacher. It was the blue nail varnish that shocked her the most, though. You can't wear blue nail varnish and play the viola. It is distracting for the audience and looks out of place in the orchestra. Something like that. I don't know whether things have changed now or not.

Blue was more or less unknown then, I would guess it was a tiny new-romantic spinoff, as those people were heavily into make-up generally. But after rouge noir, there was a big colour explosion in the nail-varnish world. Rouge noir was the ultimate in red. Red could go no further. But the nail-varnish box had been opened, and women wanted more. So they got everything: gold, blue, chocolate brown, all the metallics, and it hasn't stopped since.

Short nails staked their claim, but long nails came back soon afterwards and have sat quite happily next to long ones ever after. Because length doesn't matter anymore: nail bars do fibreglass extensions that last a few weeks, if you even want them for that long, because long nails are impossible to live with. Hair extensions, fake sun-tans and fake nails are all temporary, which is just how we want it.

Which is a long way round to saying I have decided to buy an acoustic piano. Not that there is anything wrong with digital ones- but I don't want an infinitely-variable instrument, I want one that stays the same so I can get to know it properly. I will never get "bored" with a piano that has a beautiful sound I love. I'll just keep learning more music from the huge and amazing repertoire that has already been written and which there is no hope of my ever exhausting. If digital pianos are like a nail-bar in your own front room, then acoustic ones are a simple bar of soap. There is definitely room in the world for both rainbow colours and the natural look. What really matters is what you do with your hands.

Anyway, if there had been digital pianos when I was a child, I am fairly sure my Great Aunt Mona would have used headphones while playing Chopin at night the time my sister and I were staying, so as not to disturb us in bed. And then I would never have had the chance to hear her at all.

quiche

2005-06-10T14:19:00.000-07:00

food

Quiche is good, because you can vary it lots of ways and use up things in the fridge. Today I am using up three kinds of cheese (American Parmesan, Mexican Panella and orange American Cheddar). I'm also experimenting with the dried tomatoes that came in a bag from the fruit and veg section of HEB. They're not in oil but seem pretty much like Italian sun-dried tomatoes.

I am the kind of puritan cook who still instinctively feels that cheeses named after Parma or the Cheddar Gorge should either be made there, or choose other names. However, Wisconsin seems to produce quite a variety of different cheese-types now, so they could not all practically be called Wisconsonian, and anyway another part of my puritanism is about cooking in a way appropriate to wherever you are. Which I'm not doing. But cooking with imported cheese would be even worse.

But I like quiche. And I did figure one thing out before coming back to Texas this time, and it's a thing that applies to more than just the kitchen; America is not about learning and becoming part of the culture in the way that, say, moving to Poland or Italy or rural Spain would be. In those places, you slowly pick up the language then adopt everyone else's habits and routines. But in America, there are no habits or routines. Everything is open all the time and you do whatever you want. So the best thing is to bring the positive national identity you had already, and build on that. Being yourself is more American than anything else you can be. And that, paradoxically, is why I am an Englishwoman in Texas.

Quiche, of course, is French. Because British food, of course, is mostly Italian, Indian, French, Greek and Middle Eastern, among other nationalities. Small world.

notes in D minor

2005-06-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

music

My violin playing has improved more in the last week than it ever did during years of study. I can actually make a decent sound now, when I know the notes well enough to stop thinking about fingering and just listen instead, and have decided that the Bach Chaconne from partita #2 in D minor is playable. Not that anyone would want to listen to me playing it quite yet. But still, great strides.

Here are some lines from Once Upon a Time in Mexico:

Piano teacher: Music is pure, from one's soul. If the soul is pure, the music flows free.
Barillo (bad guy): And if the soul isn't pure?
Piano teacher: Then you must practice like a (censored)

Of course most of us need both. We can't learn to play the violin or the piano (or the guitar, the central metaphor in Rodriguez's movie) without lots of practice. But the sounds only become music when one's mind is in the right place.

However, the piano teacher is also right. Practice for its own sake is useless. If all one does is repeat things, mistakes as well as skills will be reinforced. My violin playing is improving because of the way I have been practising, not just because of the fact I have been practising. Unlike when I was a music student in my youth, I have been playing for the sheer enjoyment and beauty of it, and only music I love a lot. Not one negative thought about lack of innate talent or comparative lack of skill has passed through my mind. I feel incredibly lucky to have the knowledge I do have, and wanted only to use it to make and enjoy music.

I haven't bothered with technical exercises, set fingering or bowing markings, and I haven't got hung up on the fact that two of my strings are poor quality and need replacing. Most of all, I have been feeling confident. I am pleased and happy with what I am doing, instead of regarding it as pointless because there are plenty of other "proper" musicians who could do it better.

And my newfound sensible positive attitude has vastly improved my playing. I have made lots of technical adjustments without thinking of them as such, just from being more aware of what it's all about. Instead of trying to wipe out obstacles and difficulties, I get insights about where better to aim, and they very often work. Because, where I'm aiming at is making music, which is over and above notes, fingerings, triple-stops and bowing techniques. The music is not contained on the page of notes, waiting to be liberated: the page of notes is only part of the music. The music is the sounds, and the listening, and the dynamic relationship between the two. Listening is the key to making better music.

I have more to say about listening and seeing in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, King Lear and a speech by Dr Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations
of the Commonwealth (go here then click on "faith" and it's the fourth lecture down), but my ideas will have to distill somewhat first.

By the way, I don't necessarily recommend the movie to everyone. It's very violent. The most violent scene, though, comes directly from King Lear. Score ten bonus points if you know which scene I am talking about.

covering up

2005-06-09T17:13:00.000-07:00

clothes

The Manolo, he is absolutely right. Of course most people look abominable with their jeans falling off, their bellies wobbling about all over the place and their chests popping out like half-set jello. And judging by the commenters on his post, women are more than ready for some more decent clothing trends now. And by "decent" I basically just mean "reasonable" as opposed to "utterly ludicrous".

(Note on the latest wide-belt-under-the-bare-belly trend: do not do this. It makes you look like an all-in-wrestling champion. Thank you.)

If I knew where to find factories to make them, I would set up my own Dignified Clothing company right now, starting off with swirly cooling kaftan dresses for the Texas summer. There are many advantages to covering up when the temperature is high. Lawrence of Arabia would not have got as far as he did in a pair of baggy shorts and a t-shirt, because sunburn, heatstroke and various snake and insect bites are not good things to have in the desert.)

Anyway, it seems like everybody and his favourite Spice Girl can design clothes these days without having acquired sixteen years tailoring and pattern-cutting experience first. So watch this space.

Also on the subject of apparel, some of you may not yet have seen this very useful ebay product- protective cat helmets. Of course we must all ensure the safety of our domestic animals from the threat of government-controlled mind-rays these days. And ourselves as well- I wonder if there will soon be a human protective tin hat, that could be worn discreetly underneath one's stetson or kippah? Perhaps those in the know have been building anti brain-scan technology into their headgear for centuries already. Hmm.

digital or analogue?

2005-06-09T16:14:00.000-07:00

music

I will be buying a piano sometime soon. This is good because I haven't had one for many many years, and will now finally be able to learn all the Beethoven sonatas, which will be very useful advance preparation for if I am ever shipwrecked on a desert island with only a piano and the complete Beethoven sonatas as my luxuries.

So I went to a piano shop to look at pianos. It was slightly embarrassing because I didn't know the answers to any of the shopkeeper's questions. No, we didn't have a budget. I couldn't explain what kind of music I would be playing (what does he think I am, psychic?) I had no idea how "brilliant" (there is a knob for it) the digital demonstration piano should be turned up to. Should have asked if it went up to "Vladimir Horowitz" level, he was pretty brilliant. Then I couldn't tell if I liked it anyway, not being used to hearing the thing through headphones.

"I'm used to normal pianos," I explained. They had a couple of those there too, but I didn't like them either. Maybe something will turn up in the musical instruments for sale section of "craigslist". This is an online free local small ads place. It's great. Apparently they are everywhere, just google for your town. People give things away free there. Like this:

FREE ~ TV, only 2 years old, picture does not work, must go today as I am moving tomorrow, thank you.

Don't ask me.

Anyway, I am tending towards the analogue at the moment, partly because I don't want to have to read an instruction-manual just to play the piano, partly because I am not convinced that replicant music is truly the same thing as real music and partly because it's probably going to be cheaper. But do tell me any advice you may have.

Here I go again...

2005-06-08T15:31:00.000-07:00

life

Back in Texas, life is good.

Not even real summer yet, and some of the day the patio is too hot for sitting outside already. And the air-conditioning in the car has broken down. And a new one costs about twice what the car is worth. But it's still unhot enough for open car windows to do an OK job. So far.

We are moving next week, to a lovely little old wooden rented house, with a nice garden, with trees, and shops and cafes in walking distance, and buses to places good to go. This is brilliant because my brain did not grow up in America and I can't do Car Culture because I don't want to do Car Culture. Not saying I'll never get around to driving a 2CV. Or a Cadillac. But I still don't want to have to jump into it and start burning gas every time I run out of milk.

There is a mumps epidemic in the UK. We brought it back with us. I don't know if it's true mumps, but it has some of the symptoms and seems to go on for weeks. I nap in the afternoons, wake up a little more energised, then bash out Bach partitas on the violin until it's too hot to go on.

I avoid the supermarket. It is too confusing and full of rubbish and gives me a headache. The TV stays switched off. I prefer quietness. When I move house I will order some books from Amazon so they go to the right address.

I'm cooking this Nigella Lawson chicken recipe, right now. I'll let you know if it was any good, but it definitely smells great already.

Today I read this and this (latter hat tip Rishon Rishon ). Ah, the pitfalls of logic that sees not its own flawed premises... I also found this, which made me happy as it combines several of my favourite Jewish bloggers in one place (namely, Treppenwitz, Renegade Rebbetzin, Mirty and A Simple Jew).

The smell from the kitchen is getting better and better as I write.

Life is good. Did I say that already? Oh, yeah.

Test

2005-05-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

books

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 25
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

T.S. Elliot

Tests underway

2005-05-26T07:23:00.000-07:00

I am currently experimenting with this blog. Expect nothing and perhaps you will be surprised eventually.

Contact details

2005-04-28T05:12:00.000-07:00

This blog is currently inactive, but if you want to contact me, please email

aliceintexas at hotmail dot com

Good afternoon.