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Here is a Sup—I mean repository of the texts of my together with some readings of them. The essays were broadcast by WXXI 91.5 Classical of Rochester, NY on Salmagundy each Saturday at 9:35am Eastern Time, from the beginning of time (1985) till May 2009 when Entropa (evil Goddess of Change-for-the-Worse-or-Possibly-the-Worst) troubled the minds of the WXXIites and they retired Simon and Salmagundy, and Rochester went into a terminal decline---for ever.
I continued on that brilliant bastion of all that's good and kultured, WCLV's syndicated Weekend Radio on many (mainly NPRish) stations traditionally on the first and third weekends of the month, though weekendage varied, till the horror crept ever onward and that too was devoured (in August 2023, a date which will live in infamy or at lease mild irritation)... and only I remain, defiant though wimpering.
Richard Howland-Bolton
There are pop-up pics and links all over the place here. In text they are indicated by a double underline like this:
mouse-overing brings the pop-up up and clicking (usually) goes to the link |
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  This essay is entitled Kiss Rocks, and it might be of interest to see why I chose that particular title. You see the sentence ‘Kiss rocks’ is open to two wildly different interpretations, depending on whether the hearer was around and conscious in the early 70’s and was more at home with the pet rock or with the glam rock crazes. If I say “Kiss rocks”, with perhaps no particular emphasis on either word, it means one thing; and if I say “Kiss ROCKS!!”, with a lot more on the last one, it means quite another: the former no doubt encouraging a perhaps inappropriate intimate interaction with your lithic pet, and the latter an equally misapplied enthusiasm and a total misunderstanding of pop musicology. The beauty of these conflicting construals being that the noun in one becomes the verb in the other and vice versa and doesn’t that just make one absolutely ...glad that English is not a more synthetic language!
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You will see in a moment how much it pains me to admit this, but I have to tell you that the other day I traveled by ... um ... public transport; though, I hasten to reassure you, it was merely on a DART railway train so it isn't as bad as it could have been.
And so it fell out, that other day, on the most decidedly non-U Dallas Area Rapid Transit, and whilst pausing in the relative quiet of one of their stations I heard an American girl talking about going, as she described it, 'horseback riding'---now this immediately piqued my interest because in England, where we very much subscribe to the theory that 'less is more', if you do it, it is always just 'riding' (I mean you pretty-well know what part of which animal is involved!) While our young Americanette was perhaps trying to be pretentious about her activities (she was talking unusually loud, even for an American) our English term way outdoes her efforts because it is a perfect example of a particularly English form of aggressively anti-pretentious pretentiousness: a form which is to other sorts of pretension what passive-agressive behaviour is to kicking the ... well whatever out of whomever.
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"You leave the Pennsylvania station
'Bout a quarter to four,
You read War and Peace
And then you're in Baltimore.
Dinner in the diner,
Nothing could be finer
Than to have your next six meals in Carolina.
When you hear the whistle blowin' eight to the bar
Then you know the goods ahead has derailed a car.
Perhaps if they shoveled coal in
They could get the bloody thing rollin'.
Boo! Hoo! I think we're staying right where we are..." [scratch]
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First of all, to start out right and to tell you the complete truth: I am an avowed atheist.
... Well
... actually that's not a good start and in fact it's a downright lie; I haven't yet taken my vows and so I'm merely a postulant
... and, Oh! Dear, now this has inadvertently given you a possibly wrong impression of all atheists, and in highly divisive addition, has set us up to come over all Epimenides, with one of those interminably boring ancient philosophical Greek paradoxes: 'RHB, who tries to make us believe that all Atheists are liars, claims he is an atheist; therefore ... therefore I could potentially go into a logical loop with this and use up the whole essay without having to waste any more time thinking.
Wow! that would be wonderful---[sigh] ... but only wonderful for me so let's plough on...
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I run most mornings starting at around 3:45 local time (and that doesn't sound quite so crazy if you convert it to my birth time zone. Then it works out to be 9:45 in the morning British Summer Time; so just imagine that I never bothered to change my watch when I came here and you won't have to look askance at me---well at least not for that). As you might imagine, at that totally non-crazy and indeed cool time of the morning my run is just a dull repetitive forty-five minutes of pumping legs and elevated heart rate and sweat---and nothing else much. I don't meet many people who aren't whizzing past in cars (nor, really, that many who are). In fact I still think fondly of the time, three months ago, when I passed an hispanic man who said hello to me, and the time, maybe a couple of months before that, when I saw a pretty girl walking with a cell phone to her ear who didn't.
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It's got really bad, and I'm appalled. No one cares about words any more apart from me and (presumably) those money-grubbing swine over at the Oxford English Dictionary (and they, the dastards, expect you to pay a whopping $500 a year 1 for the privilege); or even if they do care just a bit no one seems to want to be bothered to look up new-to-them words in their $500 dollar a year dictionary--and at the OED's rip-offy gouging price who can blame them, nor even, sad to say, can they be bothered to use something free and online like Bartleby or Wikipedia. |
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As I've observed here from time to time, absolutely no one is any good at all at observing things. And they are especially bad when they enshrine their observations into a saying or aphorism or gnome (or even, for that matter, in an essay) you can bet that large sums of money can safely be wagered that the words 'diametric' and 'opposite' are much less included in that saying or aphorism or gnome or even in that essay than they should be.
Take the observation "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" espoused by Mothers, or at the very least by Grandmothers, everywhere.
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To start with I should warn you that there are absolutely no offensive words of any sort in this essay, so you have been warned: and anyway even if there were, when it comes to language and the meaning of words Humpty Dumpty was undeniably right, but only for large values of himself---You know, like the mathematicians' "two plus two equals five, for sufficiently large values of two".
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People at work have, of late, developed the very strange and rather troubling habit of sending me examples of those emails that float about the æther vigorously (and presumably hilariously) suggesting that English, unlike all the other languages in the world, has culpably erratic, foolish (and presumably hilarious) spelling and grammar. Why they do this I have no idea, because I don't think I've ever done anything to encourage it---I mean, you'd think that the way that when I get one of those emails I print it out and go into the cubicle of the sender and then carefully place the print-out on the floor and then jump up and down on it whilst screaming would give them a clue to my feelings about the genre...
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I had a really great run this morning--It was one of those increasingly rare (rare, of course, as we race, here in Texas, down towards the hell of summer), rare mornings when it wasn't too hot or too humid and, as a bit of gilty gingerbread, for my part I didn't feel too old and decrepit and over-sweaty as I ran: and so it's not surprising that (after my shower and a pretty-well stress-free and traffic-light friendly drive) I was singing quietly to myself as I walked from the car park to my office. I was, in fact, singing...
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