Old songs

Yesterday I cautiously embarked upon that most worrisome of expeditions into the past: listening to an old favourite album.

First things first. I returned alive. The natives were restless; their incessant drumming was more foursquare than the old reports had suggested, and a great deal seemed a little repetitive, but no serious harm was done and nobody ended up in a pot.

Of more interest, why was this a dangerous expedition?

I’m tempted to think that it’s something to do with the time travel involved. By my best guess, it must be nearly 15 years since I last listened to this music (terrifyingly, the album itself is getting on for 20 years old). The past as a foreign country: I did things differently there. Perhaps listening to the soundtrack of me 15 years past I would be bringing back events, people, problems from the past. Endless hours locked into meaningless journeys with only a cheap blue plastic Walkman to provide a pretend overlay of meaning. A lanker, paler version of me occupying a lanker, paler world.

Alternatively, perhaps I would be overwhelmed by a sense of loss at those 15 years having whipped past like the tail of a kite, lively in the breeze, impossible to hold fast. Those old songs should bring back a younger, wiser me, less cluttered by the bricabrac of living, merrily cluttered with possibilities.

Was either of these true? Almost certainly both of them. And yet, and yet.

I think there’s something more visceral, something more universal to the listening of music once intimately known. I would rarely feel the same way rereading an old favourite book, or watching again one of the movies that meant so much to me in my film-a-day youth. These stand identifiably separate from you, no matter how closely you identify with them. They stand before your eyes. It does make a difference.

Music, that either most bastard or most perfected of the arts, insinuates itself in always from the sides. How can you trust it? It does not occupy your field of vision, it sits on your shoulder, passing constant comment on the world as it passes by. Devil and angel whispering in your ears, it colours everything, tints the very sky in its favoured colours.

Clever music, insinuating music, walks with you pretending to be your friend. As when re-opening an old friendship, you find yourself approaching cautiously, wondering silently just why it fell into abeyance in the first place.

The sensation of hearing those songs again is disruptive. It’s both familiar and strange. This is the excitement, and the fear.

I think there’s a pretty simple explanation. Much of musicality is prediction; like comedy, music satisfies by fulfilling expectations in often unexpected ways. The perfection of Bach is best appreciated when the listener is teetering on the edge of fully understanding the pattern. Things are clear without being obvious.

Old songs are obvious without being clear. You know moments perfectly, but can’t recall how the patterns go together. The moment one song finishes I know the opening of the next, but I don’t recognise the song itself for a while after. Everything is backwards. Songs are shorter than I recall, but the album longer. Worse. The songs are the same in their finest detail, but utterly different to their memory. It’s like waking up having fallen asleep on your arm. There is something there completely of you, but totally alien.

There’s something strange going on tonight. But I feel fine.

Hello hello

Professor Allen Koenigsburg:

When Bell invented the phone, Alexander Graham Bell, he didn’t use ‘hello’ at all. He used ‘ahoy.’ He used it twice, ‘Ahoy. Ahoy.’ And apparently he was the only one that used it, because I’ve never heard anybody to this day say, ‘Ahoy.’ And Bell was not even in the Navy, so I don’t know why he insisted on using a call that way. But if you study the origin of the word ‘hello,’ which may come from ‘halloo,’ is the call of a ferry boat operator, and you call them over when you want a ferry boat to come to your doorstep. And you say, ‘Halloo.’ So the word may have come from that. Hello just began to be used all over the place, and by the 1880s, it was fairly popular.

(from All Things Considered, NPR, 19 March 1999)

All Things Considered helped to keep my brain ticking over during a long, cold year in the USA. Odd little things like this, the semiotics of answering the phone, are the reason it’s so good. I well remember a story about how shredded motor tyres were being used as fill for roads in the USA. The presenter noted that, to date, only two such roads had caught fire.

Disambiguating 'Disambiguating Hamlet'

I just wanted to make clear which Hamlets I wasn’t talking about in the previous post about different Hamlets.

I hope it’s clear that I wasn’t talking about Dashiell Hamlet, the well-known author of hard-boiled existential thrillers such as The Thinking Man, in which the murderer typically bottled out at the last moment, and who coined the utterly memorable phrase “A hit. A goddam hit.”

I also wasn’t talking about the fashion designer Katherine Hamlet, best known for her iconic “Choose Life…Or Maybe Death” t shirts.

Thank you for your understanding during these confusing times.

Disambiguating Hamlet

Bless the Wikipedia and all its funny little ways.

I was chasing an allegation that the term ‘hamlet’ refers to a village which is supported by orchards (Wikipedia disagrees, stating that it is, in Britain, purely an ecclesiastical distinction). Of course, on my way I passed throughHamlet disambiguation, which led to the Hamlet legend, which led to Saxo Grammaticus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which led to…

I forget where it led next, or indeed where I thought I was going in the first place. I have to admit, though, that the encyclopedia is the one type of labyrinth in which one enjoys getting lost more than finding the way.

Soft soap story

File, as Dennis Norden would put it, under “whatever happened to…?”

When did shop fitters (or, as I always misread it, shop lifters) stop soaping up windows? It used to be a common sight on the high street, I’m sure. Moreover, does one use yer actual soap, or is there a particular shop fitters’ soap that covers with just the right level of opacity, and washes off like a dream?

Maybe the soap in question is that universal panacea, sugar soap, the use of which to clean walls is as alien as a faery charm to some of my more bewildered contemporaries. I swear I only know about it because the name appeals.

Definitions

defaulty adj.

Of two possible options, the one you didn’t want.

Ringing the changes

Somewhere deep in a stately home a bakelite telephone insistently rings. The equally stately butler walks the length of a corridor and picks it up.

The way that we use telephones has changed as a result of the different ways in which telephones now communicate. Most of the focus in the last few years has been on those evil little pillboxes that people carry round in order to fry their heads more rapidly. However, the changes in our use of the home telephone are at least as interesting as the new issues presented by the mobile.

Back when mobile phones were new and the size of a small dog, Umberto Eco merrily distanced himself from smug mobile users on the train by noting that they were not, as they thought, displaying their importance, but rather showing only that they were forever at the beck and call of their work. He gloried in the thought that not having a mobile meant that his time was unequivocably and uninterruptably his own.

The curiosity is that home telephones have gradually taken on behaviours that reflect this issue of intrusion and interruption. I think that these new behaviours are not necessarily to our benefit.

Let’s take the main changes in order. First, answerphones meant that you could take a call even when not at home. This, I recall, seemed little short of earth-shaking and (in acknowledgement of all the Douglas Adams nostalgia at the moment) almost as cool as digital watches. Because phone answering behaviour had no particular pressure to change, answerphones were simply used for taking messages when you were out. People even switched them off until they were leaving the house. The notion of not answering the phone because it wasn’t at that second convenient would be considered as little more than sheer naughtiness.

The second change was Caller ID. I suppose that Caller ID is still filtering through, but I notice that ever more phones are capable of telling you who is calling before you answer the phone. Ask yourself: what is the point of this if not to enable you to not answer the phone? A phone rings, you answer. That is the function of the ring. You cannot possibly increase the effectiveness or efficiency of phone-answering through knowing in advance who is calling. All you can do is enable the phone user to select when not to answer. The effect of Caller ID is therefore to have fewer phone calls answered.

Of course, Caller ID interacts with answerphones. If you don’t answer (if you are for instance, as I was repeatedly last night, up a ladder with a brush loaded with some extremely pungent oil-based paint), then your answerphone will do it for you. I have even heard tell that some people don’t answer the phone if they recognise the number and don’t wish to speak to that person right now.

Well, true or not, the idea of selective answering has taken hold, and has eroded the validity of the answerphone. Callers (myself included) now call, hear the answerphone pick up, are unsure whether there is anyone there or not, and are consequently caught in an uneasy no-man’s land. Does one say “Hello…are you there…hello?” before hanging up, as seems to be the current fashion? Does one launch into a precise and inevitably complex rendition of the exact timing and necessity of the call so that it will still be relevant and make sense when picked up hours later? The latter option is frustratingly likely to be interrupted by a breathless callee who then chooses to pick up rather than face an interminable message followed by the need to call back.

We are left in a state of almost permanent telephonic uncertainty. Calling (or answering a call) becomes an ever more subtle game of bluff and counter-bluff. Is the callee really not there? If I leave a message, am I committing myself to being here to answer the return call? What if I’m up a ladder? What if I’m genuinely inconvenienced, but don’t wish to give the impression I’m call-dodging (I do this a great deal; rushing to the phone in a spray of paint or water)? How do I not answer the phone in such a way as to communicate that I really, really don’t want the caller to try again in a minute ?

Because this is the ultimate issue of telephonic uncertainty: more unanswered calls means more calls. More calls means more unanswered calls. The logic is, well, unanswerable.

That’s why I’m thinking again about the butler walking, slowly, to answer the phone in the corridor. The image seems anachronistic because there’s an idea there that it’s something to do with large houses. It’s not; at least, not now that we have portable handsets.

No, I think the anachronism here is the length of the ringing. In the persistence, the patience, of the ringing there is not just a generous acknowledgement that answering the phone takes time, but also a rather insistent element of communication. If the caller holds on for 10, 20, 30 rings, it’s an indication of how much they want the phone to be answered. An off-chance caller (did we have such things?) would ring off after, say, five. A persistent ring, uninterrupted by an over-panicky
answerphone, allows you to come to the phone at leisure, knowing that if they’ve rung off by the time you’ve got there, it was, by definition, not urgent.

Now, there’s only one problem. A loud, persistent ring is deeply annoying. So how about this?

On your home telephone, you can identify a list of numbers as known. When they call, they can, while the phone is ringing, press ‘1′. This will change the ring from standard to loud (insistent, alarmist, however you care to set it). This means that important calls from known people can always be identified as such.

The corollary of this is that, for the rest of the time and for the rest of the world, the ring can be set to something inoffensive. Something soft, burbling, unobtrusive. Something that can happily ring for a minute or two without causing you to look for a handy screwdriver to jam into the mechanism. Something that asks you to answer without insisting upon it.

I suspect, finally, that the less insistently the phone demands to be answered, the more polite it is, the more it will be answered.

OEDILF

Sometimes the web turns around and not so much bites your ankle as nuzzles your knee with an unexpected affection. An unbriefed visit to OEDILFcertainly feels like a large animal of otherwise uncertain behaviour placing its paws on your leg and purring. For at OEDILF a tremendous amount of time, energy and passion is being harnessed into rewriting the dictionary in limerick form.

That last phrase demands to be rewritten. In italics. Instead, I suggest going to look at the site itself, because otherwise the overweening nuttiness of the project can’t be sensed. A college of limericists (ahem) are working their way through the alphabet, offering definitions for every word in limerick form.

They are, naturally, still on the letter A. If you ever want to see them hit the middle of the alphabet, you’d better go and offer them some help. They’ll need it.