More delays (What a good boy/Smooth Operator)

It really is coming soon. Should have been now, but the distraction of gnat bites, plus the need to find 15 multiple choice questions on Child Language for a makeup midterm tomorrow morning, have combined to delay this effort for one or two more evenings. In the meantime, two trivial notices from a day spent taxiing children around Kobe:

Click to play
The first is that one insect bite may not be a bad thing—even if it's not John Donne's Flea—since the itch reminds you forcefully that you are human with a real body, and not a brain in a vat. (Or at least that you were human once—it's hard to exclude the possibility that you are now an envatted brain with a recollection of having been bitten. But then I realise that in my memory, I was much younger and fitter than this, and my flesh a good deal more perfect, so this itch must be real, for better or worse). The same principle as a hairshirt, I suppose, without the self-hatred. However, though one bite may be sobering, several—all performing a complex symphony of irritation—conspire to become a very bad thing indeed. Eeyyaaaa!

Click to play
Second is the observation that for as long as there is Starbucks, Sade (the 80s singer, not the 18th century aristocrat) will not want for a royalty check (cheque). I'm not sure how many times it is now that I have drunk a tall cappuccino—which is neither one nor the other—to the tune of Smooth Operator, as again today. And yet, how marvelously apt, for this is a marriage of souls 'as dreams are made on', the café and its song: both professional, innocuous, welcoming; both transcending national and cultural boundaries with ease and poise, pleasing to the senses, contemporary yet 'established', devoid of class, yet studiously bourgeois; both ultimately as unsatisfying as they are inauthentic—the places where we pass our lives while aspiring to something better...

Tot straks/à bientôt.

For German speakers looking for an antidote to Starbucks, click to play

Comments

Turbulence (Thanks for all the fish, and more)

[Note: this piece is not about about my family, nor does it involve literary or musical criticism. I’m not anticipating any attractive illustrations or other lures, and no musical accompaniment either. So if that’s what you came for, look away now. There will be more such articles in the future, I hope, but this is not one of them. You have been been warned.] Tokushima Naruto Whirlpool (Shikoku Excursion) Events of the last few days have left me, both literally and figuratively, in a painfully disordered state of mind. In plain English, I’m stressed, and my head aches. Actually, it twinges, rather than aches, but the precise description matters little; at all events, the pain ‘comes and goes’, as they say. (Where pain goes to, when it goes, is a puzzle in itself. I have this anthropomorphised image of Pain, like some peripatetic poison dwarf, doing the rounds of the neighbourhood: “Hi, Nigel didn’t want me this hour, so I’ve decided to drop in on you for a while. Don’t worry thoug...

What's love got to do with it?

Click here to play the first track [Youtube] When I was young/My father said Son, I have something to say And what he told me I'll never forget Until my dying day... ( Cliff Richard, Bachelor Boy, 1963) Since just after Justin's birth, I have tried to be positive and optimistic about our future, and particularly about the challenges presented by his condition. Sometimes, as will have been clear from other posts, this positivity is aided by an ostrich-like refusal to contemplate future eventualities, but mostly, it's because I feel we've been really lucky: he had no postnatal medical complications; he's loved and accepted by his brothers, he's growing well; there's even a hint of a smile on his face... There are some days, though, when optimism seems like an overwhelming challenge, days when I almost lose the will to move forward, and when I look around for a large tub of sand (something, like litter bins, that is in desperately short supply in u...

Cambridge Blues ('Foundationed deep')

"I" Staircase, Trinity Hall, Cambridge This weekend past, I returned to Cambridge with Ayumi, Julian and Justin for the first time in seven years. The occasion was a college reunion dinner, marking approximately 40 years of life since matriculation (1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 entrance years): about half of us (~50) from each annual cohort turned up to compare notes, reminisce, squeeze our sagging frames into formal evening wear, and report biographical highlights. It is worth noting that this was a self-selecting group: those with sufficient time, opportunity, income (it wasn't a cheap weekend break), self-regard and retained affection for their alma mater to trundle up; as bushy tailed and 'Hail fellow, well met', as age and misanthropy might allow. Sic transit gloria iuvenum. I didn't have a great time, nor yet was it a disastrous waste. This is hardly surprising, since the curse of middle age is profound ambivalence about almost every extra-familial event or ...

Devenish

Search This Blog