Marbury

say hello to io

This is the reason (at least, the primary reason) that Marbury has been so quiet for the last few weeks.

This is Io (pronounced "Eye-oh" - Greek nymph, mistress of Zeus, Queen of Egypt, moon of Jupiter - it's quite a resume for one so young).

Less than a month old, she does very little except sleep, cry, and excrete. Yet somehow, despite this limited repertoire, she is utterly, irresistibly loveable. One can read all the evolutionary biology one wants and still find this a mysterious and beautiful thing.

We begin our lives convinced of our own omnipotence. Io is a chubby tyrant: driven, hedonistic, imperious - and constantly, violently disappointed in her staff (that is, her parents). I love how impervious she is to her own helplessness - a little Napoleon, marooned on Saint Helena, commanding armies in her mind. She hasn't remotely come to terms with the way things don't happen exactly when and as she wants.

Even if I could, I wouldn't tell her that this is about as good as it gets.

o hear ye

Like most people I find the whole Leveson debate about as exciting as Slough, but when the government published its draft royal charter last week my interest was aroused by its opening declaration:

TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME, GREETING!

Isn't that terrific? I'm thinking of introducing all my emails like this, e.g:

TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME, GREETING!

Shall I get something for dinner tonight?

Of course, the whole idea of a Royal Charter is jarringly anachronistic, which is why I like it (this works as a rough summary of my view on the survival of the monarchy) but even putting aside what we might call the macro-anachro, that ringing phrase is really something. It takes us right back to the Middle Ages, to a time when the very act of writing things down felt new and strange.

In the twelfth century, when literacy was an arcane skill, a secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury called John of Salisbury attempted to explain what writing was for: "Fundamentally letters are shapes indicating voices...Frequently they speak voicelessly the utterances of the absent."

As James Gleick puts it (in his excellent book, The Information), at that time "the idea of writing was still entangled with the idea of speaking." It was disorienting and confusing to think that words, meaning, and ideas could leap free of temporal constraints; that there could be such a thing as utterances of the absent.

When we're adapting to new technologies we use the habits of the practices they're replacing or modifying as comfort blankets (it's why we still click on images of paper on a "desktop"). So it was with writing, the medium through which more and more legal and governmental business was being conducted when John was alive. Those composing formal documents like charters or deeds felt the need to address an invisible audience as if they were there, in the room. Hence phrases like "Oh! All ye who shall have heard this and shall have seen!" and, of course, the one above, whose resemblance to a town crier's call is enhanced by the use of capital letters and an exclamation mark. The words "these presents" refer, not to gifts, but to the physical presence of the document in which the words being read are contained. Many charters even ended with the word "Goodbye" - a convention that the government's Royal Charter doesn't follow, sadly.

on digital etiquette and not being an asshole

Nick Bilton is a technology reporter and author of a book called I Live In The Future and Here's How It Works (which sounds a little like something Chris Morris would say to introduce a report on The Day Today). He's written an interesting but flawed piece for the New York Times about the etiquette of digital communication.

In brief, Bilton's message is, "Don't waste my time". Email and text, he argues, demand brevity and economy, and the culling of all superfluous gestures like saying "Hello" at the top of an email. As for voicemail - well, don't even bother:

My father learned this lesson last year after leaving me a dozen voice mail messages, none of which I listened to. Exasperated, he called my sister to complain that I never returned his calls. “Why are you leaving him voice mails?” my sister asked. “No one listens to voice mail anymore. Just text him.”

My mother realized this long ago. Now we communicate mostly through Twitter.

Presumably Bilton includes these charming glimpses of his family life to reinforce the perception that he lives in the future, because they don't inspire great confidence in his communication skills, or indeed in his not-being-an-asshole skills, in the present. Anyone who proudly boasts that he taught his father a lesson in communication by consistently ignoring his attempts to communicate, or that he has successfully reduced his conversations with his mother to 140-character text bursts, may not be the right person to advise on how to make friends and influence people.

One of the things Bilton objects to is people asking others for easily searchable information, such as what the weather is like where they are. He interviews a like-minded acquaintance, Barratunde Thurston, to reinforce his point:

[Thurston] said people often asked him on social media where to buy his book, rather than simply Googling the question. You’re already on a computer, he exclaimed. “You’re on the thing that has the answer to the thing you want to know!”

Yeah, like duh, what an idiot for asking me about my book! I suppose there are people who genuinely think like Thurston, but most of them are adolescent boys and aspergy adults. Most of us would feel flattered that someone had asked.

The problem here isn't just that Bilton unintentionally comes off as rather rude (in real life, I'm sure he's perfectly lovely) but that his argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of communication. Writing about computers a lot, he assumes communication is all about the transfer of information from one hard drive to another. That being so, the more efficient the transfer is, the better. Superfluities must be ruthlessly rooted out.

But of course, humans are not hard drives, and our communication is about more than information transfer. Often, the non-informational component  of a message is much more important than its content. Linguistics refer to phatic expression: expressions whose social function is more important than what they actually say. Those annoying questions ("Where can I buy your book?") aren't information requests, they're attempts to connect. As a British person, I know full well that conversations about the weather have very little to do with the weather.

Here's Ian McEwan, writing movingly about his mother, and how he used to get irritated by the silly things she said:

"Look at all them cows." And then later, "Look at them cows and that black one. He looks daft, dud'n he?" "Yes, he does." When I was 18, on one of my infrequent visits home, resolving yet again to be less surly, less distant, repeated conversations of this kind would edge me towards silent despair, or irritation, and eventually to a state of such intense mental suffocation, that I would sometimes make excuses and cut my visit short.

"See them sheep up there. It's funny that they don't just fall off the hill, dud'n it?" Perhaps it's a lack in me, a dwindling of the youthful fire, or perhaps it's a genuine spread of tolerance, but now I understand her to be saying simply that she is very happy for us to be out together seeing the same things. The content is irrelevant. The business is sharing.

Exactly.

german-american tune

I've done a little piece for Intelligent Life blog on Bach and Paul Simon:

On Sunday I took part in a performance of Bach's marathon masterwork, the "St Matthew Passion", with the London Concert Choir, at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea. 

I didn't know the piece very well before we started rehearsals. I knew it to be music of immense grandeur, complexity and length (did I mention that it's long?) but I hadn't quite appreciated how gloriously irresistible its melodies are until I sang them, week after week.  

In the weeks leading up to the concert, one tune in particular became my constant companion: that from the chorale, "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden", the stately form of which recurs throughout the work in subtly different forms. I was singing it in the shower and over breakfast until one day my wife said, "That sounds like 'American Tune', by Paul Simon". 

Read on.