Fifty-six seconds into Joe's version of Radiohead's No surprises - which is about Theresa May and the last three years of her political life [2016-present] - there is a great line which at first when I heard it the week before last I believed I had hallucinated it:
Negotiate my sacrifice
Then in context there was "Handshake with Jeremy Corbyn"
and the chorus Not so strong and not so stable now.
Joe is an incredible, indescribable team of political satirists who I had got onto when I was looking up Common People which was the satire of 2010 - there is a terrific Rees-Mogg version talking about that whole Etonian attitude.
And Clive James died towards the end of November 2019 - I thought I would pass on writing about that until I sounded and felt less like a self-centred three-year-old. Unmoored and abandoned, you know, was probably the core of that feeling. James, of course, was an Australian expatriate, who went to Pembroke College, and demystified oh so much with his unique take on life. He had spent the last nine years living with leukaemia. Yes - from roughly 71 to 80 years old.
I have two of James's critical anthologies: The crystal bucket and In the land of shadows.
And in November 2007 - the Big Kahuna - the Cultural Amnesia.
Then there was the whole Marie Frederiksson tribute. She has just died too. So good to know her Swedish songs from the 1990s as well as all the awesome things she did with Roxette.
The Grand Final of Child Genius happened on the Special Broadcasting Service.
Our four genii were Karin whose mother is a doctor; Mahesh and Aidan who both attained perfect scores in the anatomy round [15 points is what you need] and Callum who was doing it for a young lady in the competition - Cecilia - and also has a phenomenal knowledge of the human body.
Callum was the one who said the brain did everything. His brain does a lot - 145 and more in the Intelligence Quotient stakes.
Karin is very very confident and she had 14 all up; Callum had 10.
The genii spent time with a University mentor and showed off their skills.
As there was a tiebreaker and 10 questions were required the last 5-10 minutes were intense!
Turned out to be all the general knowledge.
I yelled out that there were twelve stars in the European Union flag - this is something that will always be; no matter how many countries enter or leave. That is a form of strength and stability I do appreciate very very much. [Aidan answered that question too very quickly - speed is Aidan's big thing - Mahesh has a good memory which is not necessarily photographic/eidetic - but fortunately that kind of memory is not the only one which will succeed in gifted land; whether under pressure or not].
Also the Swedish flag. Love the way they described it.
I will always remember about fibres as the thing that holds the body together when your body makes clots. Some people thought capillaries or celluite or another connector beginning with C.
The first three questions in everyone's set were relatively easy. This was usually because of missing letters like portmanteau...
And the spelling - I got none of them correct at all.
The mathematics - I kept my distance [would have to do the sums backwards and/or sideways].
Mahesh made a wonderful acceptance speech - thanking his Mum for helping him study and Aidan for being such a good competitor and keeping him all the way down to the wire - and his whole Sri Lankan Tamil family and friends and community.
Aidan shone when he received the silver medal.
Remembering how very big the trophy is for 12-year-old Mahesh - it must have taken up his whole middle.
Thinking of how Callum lost confidence after about question 10 and promptly had the next four go wrong.
Karin - well, Karin! She shone on the stage and her mother and father and brother were there.
So happy to see all the genii and their families in the audience as well as everyone who has been interested in this competition's 2019 iteration - people like Susan Carland and the people of Mensa and the universities.
And really, The last leg? HUGH GRANT is "the prime minister Britain needs right now?" ;*).
No, afternoon sleeps do not make elections go any faster - though they may well be needed and desired after a tussle at the ballot box.
In July 1995, on a doctor's visit, I read an alphabet which said I for if only in reference to learning differences like reading and writing disorder [known as dyslexia and dysgraphia] - 'If only' are the saddest words in the English language.
It was in a women's magazine/general interest magazine - probably something like Better Homes and Gardens.
Now we are in October 2019 and Hoagie's Gifted have done a blog hop known as If you only knew. I only got into Hoagie's Gifted again after a long break in May 2019 when I was really starting to explore Mix.
And alphabetisation and literacy? Aren't those going to be important in some way?
There is a wonderful book called If youth but knew which I picked up one day some time between 2009 and 2014 and finally had myself read in 2014. It seems to be a romance of multigenerations and I hope it introduced healthy communication among the generations and within generations.
And I know who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2019! I read Olga Tokarczuk this year [had to check twice to get it right - I had only just read her Flights over Christmas and again a few months later] and I do not know if I have read Peter Handke. He seems like a film person.
Narrative power and linguistic integrity - these are big things, and things that I have "pleased to strive" over my whole literary life.
This Monday Michaelmas Term began - it is supposed to begin around the end of September of any year and it is after St Michael and all the Angels.
For me Yom Kippur is all about repentance and confession - something that I understand both in the religious and the mental health worlds.
I explored repentance a lot in Rivals of the Collegiate through the actions and words of a sensitive young woman who is Gifted and has many Gifted friends. She is moderately gifted [or only just over bright] - her friend is profoundly gifted.
They do this over the spring term [March-June].
The students - like Holly McCutcheon - explore repentance too.
During Michaelmas Term there are a lot of set pieces and people get to know one another, or know one another again. There is always - always - hope!
This is the first thing I want to concentrate on in this If youth but knew post.
A lot of people do not feel hope in the first place; or have it taken away or stolen from them for some reason.
Or they invest a lot of hope in things which may or may not happen.
It is all a matter of probabilities and of trust.
The thing I wanted to repent hardest during this Yom Kippur season was intellectual arrogance.
Over this season I had said some hard and harsh things to Astrid and some flippant things to Emma in the This is the very definition of rain.
Relaxing or slacking with our fellows means so much. Especially if we have to maintain high standards in public life and we hold ourselves to high expectations. We can forget that not everybody does this; nor desires to do this; nor has to do this.
We think misleadingly that society is so much more cruel than we could ever be individually and we forget to #choosekind.
Or we believe that humility is a form of oppression and we tend to believe our own publicity.
And we forget that we too are vulnerable. Or we are too/overly conscious of our vulnerability in the face of audiences real and imaginary.
At the Ray Chen performance I had the opportunity to meet a lot of gifted youth and youth with all sorts of gifts.
I remember too how I studied intellectual virtue.
In the Funk and Wagnalls 1997 year book [events of 1996] which did not come to me until the early 2010s as the result of the death of a grandparent there is a reference to Bennett's The book of virtues.
Midgley and Murdoch [Iris] did a lot to teach me about virtue too.
And there was Stephanie Tolan and a great website about intellectual virtues, which I was able to explore through a case study of Justin Chapman.
The story of Chapman is a very tragic one at least as I perceived it in early December 2001.
There were strong implications of fraud and imposture.
Eighteen years later I hope Justin is being good and doing good for his own values of good and finding harmony and decency and dignity.
The way gifted people live is not always very pretty - especially scrabbling along with the 99%.
One thing that really helps me is that three times as many people measure as intellectually disabled as do within the range of the gifted.
This keeps me more focused on grit than on glamour.
Grit is a very good thing and a very undervalued thing - especially if one is intolerant; impatient and used to quick results.
The consequences grind more slowly in relationship than in behaviourism or some other ideology.
My own intellectual virtues are curiosity and openness - those are the two I achieve consistently.
The others are spottier.
One of the others is intellectual courage. I consider it to be one which is not so spotty.
I thought courage to be a big virtue - and I was able to read a wonderful article on a trip about physical courage and moral courage. This was some time in October 1995.
In my own life I find they are intertwined. I can show moral courage by physical courage and vice versa.
That whole keeping on keeping on - intellectual persistence.
Here is some of the work of Leia Zhu who lives in the United Kingdom. She is a violinist and I discovered her through Ray Chen and his performances of Waltzing Matilda and Paganini. Zhu has some wonderful things to say about her craft which developed over her European trip with a friend.
I had first thought of contributing to Hoagie's Gifted seriously in September 2019 when the topic was Anxiety and Perfectionism and using Natalie Portman's BLACK SWAN - Darren Aronofsky is a legendary director who gets a lot into and out of his women. The things Ms Portman's character puts into Swan Lake being Giselle. I had also read Meredith Danman's biography of Margot Fonteyn.
Australian Ballet is really good too. McAllister is leaving.
Love Zhu's spiritual and wise words here. And the glowing purple.
There is Wiesnaski also.
Two years ago of course there was the mainstreaming of #metoo / #balancetonporc [Bring your pig/abuser to account]. In 1996 Tamika had a young lady at camp who testified against her abuser and Tamika felt she wasn't doing enough.
I think too we can often feel like we are not doing enough.
Or we have done too much too wrong at the wrong time.
I keep a Kim Wilde song for times like this. It is called You'll never be so wrong.
When YouTube and Quora and Twitter are not behaving themselves it can make my work and play very difficult!
Two lovers in a city cafe - what a great beginning.
In late 1999-early 2000 I wrote a scene which was set in Portsmouth, Hampshire. I reflected last Tuesday that these are some of the scenes I am proud of as a writer - yes, among the overall text. And to think that five years before at the earliest I had barely started my writing life.
School stories were only supposed to be a side hustle and amusement. I am sorry, but it is true. This was a fairly recent reflection.
Some final notes on courage from We bought a zoo:
B Mee says "You need twenty seconds of courage" to his son Dylan.
I believe - every twenty seconds there is a moment or ounce of courage. And if you find that at least once you are doing pretty well.
"The joy of professional exchange is a curiously unsung hymn"...
"For great practitioners of the art, whose lives are at the mercy of a vocation" ...
"Such people are wedded to the endless rigor of the search and perhaps the most ultimate union an artist can ever forge will be with someone who shares not his bed, but his dreams". [Daneman 2004].
Margot Fonteyn would be 100 years old if she were still alive.
And the Rugby World Cup is going well. Still in the second half 10-3 Australia - Georgia.
Abiy Ahmad won the Nobel Peace Prize! Yes!
So I wanted to say something about my literary godfathers - Jeffrey Archer; Ian Serralier and Miroslav Sasek. And there was this Latvian guy who wrote Little Bibie the Turtle.
