Podgrams

That's just a great word - trust Stephen Fry to come up with that! I just wanted to share this with you - I've been listening to his Podgrams on and off since he started them, gosh, a year ago. Last night, while cooking (risotto - and very nice it was too!), I finally got round to listening to his most recent one (from last December), about language - the joys of language, and how sad it is that the enjoyment of language should be considered somehow elitist. Among many many other things. That doesn't even begin to do it justice. The risotto was done and I just had to keep standing in the kitchen listening until it was finished. I swear, I actually felt more intelligent afterwards. How wonderful to have the intellect massaged so sweetly by Stephen's dulcet tones and thoughts! I am going to have to listen to it again and again to get the full benefit - if only this blog could be so aspirational and inspiring! I loved his phrase, "I linguify for a living!" And the following passage struck home with me, having been someone who grew up on the Classics, and even has a degree in it, would you believe. On language being a defining part of who you are, he says:

In my case, it's in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun, along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus, not because I was a Classical scholar, but because I was taught by Classical scholars, and grew up on poets, dramatists, and novelists who knew the Classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me.

Brief book update: Chapter 1 exists in an almost-complete draft, which I have decided to put to one side for a while before sending it off to my readers (I will have to have another sneak peak at the end of the week to reassure myself it's good enough to go), and this afternoon I have made a halting start to Chapter 2. Writing Chapter 1 was not just a process of getting the information down, but of understanding quite what this book is, and refining what I am going to be able to say in it: i.e. not, as I naively had in the back of my mind since the beginning, the last word survey text on Islamic Arts from Spain, which simultaneously meets a general and an academic audience. The format is just not long enough for that. I have had to cut out swathes of interesting thoughts, because fundamentally we have nothing in the collection that makes them relevant to the book. These thoughts - and probably even these texts - will get used elsewhere, but Chapter 1 was also a process of learning the art of compromise. Soon I will have to become proficient at the art of condensing thoughts into as few words as possible. So it's not an entirely positive feeling at this point, and makes starting on Chapter 2 harder than it should be. Anyway, tomorrow I am just going to dive in anywhere and get writing.