Devenish

No, this isn't it—the last post, that is—but perhaps it should be. After Scott Walker, I thought it would be a while before stumbling across another great singer-songwriter. And then via Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush (duet) , another great talent is unearthed: Roy Harper in a 1978 Rockpalast live recording. There goes the next hour of my potential sleeping time..! ...She really needs to say: "I loved you once a long time ago, you know Where the winds on forgetmenots blow But I couldn't let myself go, not knowing what on earth there was to know. But I wish that I had, 'cause it makes me so sad, that I never had one of your children."

In the spirit of American soaps, this trailer is to announce that the next blog entry will probably be the last, more considered, piece before September. There may be other random picture updates, and family news, but that's about it until the autumn. The summer season is upon us, and I've just realised that I do have to write a new paper for a workshop on polarity emphasis in Ghent at the end of September—see Inishmacsaint—as well as finish the first chapter of the Vietnamese monograph. Not to mention teaching, and exams, and booking a ticket. All before the end of July. So, if after the end of this week, there is no more activity, it's not for want of material, but for lack of time... Up next then: why Shakespeare and Chomsky were wrong, and Elvis (or rather, Shroeder/MacFarland) may just have been right. To get in the mood, click to play .

Yesterday, while walking to my place of work (aka Starbucks in Okamoto) I saw a group of three Down Syndrome children in school uniform with their carers, waiting at the JR station. They were about 12 years old, and they seemed to be quite happy and—as we say in British English—'relatively together.' (It has not occurred to me before what a strange expression this is). It should have been a hopeful scene: instead, tears welled up; I had to turn away. Sometimes, realization does not so much dawn, as poke you in the eye. After nearly eight months, I believed until that moment that I had accepted Justin's condition, and moved on to work through a present and a future quite different from the one we had imagined before his birth. This belief was encouraged by the excellent physical progress he is making—he is only a month or so behind his typically-developing peers—and by his evident happiness and contentment: he really is a wonderful baby, and I love him quite as much as I d...

The reason I haven't followed up on Shakespeare yet—or even done the decent thing in posting family pictures, though here's one (!) to be going on with—is that I've been busy thinking about linguistics, for a change. If you're a linguist, or feeling masochistic please have a look at this , and give me your feedback (if you think it's worth it); if you're not, normal family service will resume shortly.

It was only a matter of time, perhaps, but it took me too long to discover that the English-speaking world has its own Brel: from Tim Hardin...to Scott Walker: click to play . The little clock's stopped ticking now We're swallowed in the stomached rue The only sound to tear the night Comes from the man upstairs

Click to play Do you have a 'Grasshopper Mind?' When I was around 12 years old, there was a recurrent advertisement—Japanese readers, think A/XA Direc t!—placed on the lower right column of the front page of the Daily Telegraph , one that caught my eye whenever I would pass it on the news agent's shelf. (At the time, I had no idea of the conservative politics of this paper, which I later shunned, and now accept as not much worse than the best British print journalism can offer, and a damn sight better than most—God protect us from the Daily Mail : all I knew then was that it was English politics and therefore moderately foreign: for the same reason—my xenophilia started early—I was attracted to the paper, and especially to its advertisements. I also read the Irish Times for good measure, but never the local papers, on either side of the sectarian divide, even though my own father had started his career as a journalist on the Belfast Telegraph , and would, I believe, h...

Click to play (Amazon—No YouTube Available) It's Julian's birthday today. Hard to credit that five years have gone by: a scrap of early middle age for me, an unremarkable quinquennium for the world, a whole lifetime for him. My raison d'être —these three children, each providing their own annual well-spaced milestone (January, June, November), measuring out our lives together. Birthdays mean more than presents and cake*, or the mere passing of time, as Yves Duteil points out in his beautiful song Les dates anniversaires : they connect us those we love, wherever they are, and remind us to look out at the passing countryside... J'ai un profond respect des dates anniversaires Ces portes que le Temps dispose autour de nous Pour ouvrir un instant nos coeurs à ses mystères Et permettre au passé de voyager vers nous. ... Il existe en tous cas dans les anniversaires Une part de magie qui fait surgir d'ailleurs Les visages ou les mots de ceux qui nous sont ch...

Click to play ...Salesman says this vacuum's guaranteed, it Could suck an ancient virus from the sea, It could put the dog out of a job, Could make the traffic stop, so Little thoughts can safely get across... It's the rules, it's the rules Guaranteed or not, it's the rules. Tragically Hip, The Rules (Phantom Power) This piece is a placeholder, and will disappear, I expect, whenever I have time to develop the previous post on life in Japan, and to expand on the second of the two 'little thoughts' I've had today that have nothing to do with reviewing linguistics abstracts, revising a syntax paper and trying to prepare three midterm examinations before next week. (Incidently, if you are a linguist reading this, please have a look at the Inishmacsaint piece, and let me know what you think; if you're not, you probably don't want to go there). It's Poets' Day, effectively the weekend in a couple of hours' time, from the time that ...

Click to play It's been over a week since the last post, and so there is a lot to catch up on. What I want to talk about in this post are cultural variation—those Japanese-English contrasts that have amazed or repelled me recently—in particular, in what is regarded as acceptable driving style and desirable living, and this is what I shall do, presently. But I know that what most people who read this want to hear about are the children—it is a family blog after all (in fact, for those interested in less domestic concerns, there are a few new posts on the Inishmacsaint blog). So, the first news is that the children are all fine. Everything is as dyfunctionally normal and ridiculously noisy, raucous and untidy as a family with three boys—one not yet even crawling—can be: despite the impression of cozy fraternal affection that may be suggested by certain photographs on this blog, Sean and Julian have now moved sibling rivalry and gratuitous bickering up to a level familiar only to...