Twitteretter

You may think the title is misspelled, but it is not. We live in difficult times, when the pace of technological change is threatening the livelihood and place in the World of many, sending them adrift, victims of the system, devoid of agency. It is easy to feel that this is unprecedented, that humanity has never found itself at such a perilous and precarious crossroads. Andrew Keen, in his excellent and well researched ‘How to fix the future’, however, draws an interesting analogy with the early XVI century, when medieval man’s World was collapsing under the drive of Copernicus and Luther and their demolition of the belief system of the Middle Ages. At this other perilous time, Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, a must read, reminded humanity that we are the pilots of our destiny, that we can achieve almost anything, use circumstance to our benefit, when we choose to collectively steer, rather than drift. This More’s Law is crucial and relevant to understanding how to navigate our World today Le...

This is a Spanish word, coined by one of Spain’s most famous writers, Don Ramón María del Valle Inclán, at the start of the XX century (its first appearance, I believe, was in the great ‘Bohemian lights’). It is not easy to translate to English, something like distorted caricature of reality would be as close to the money as I can get. Valle Inclán used a metaphor, concave and convex mirrors, to describe what he perceived as the deformity of Spanish society at the time. It was brutal and beautiful. I can only imagine what he might have come up with, what metaphor he may have elicited, had he witnessed the events we have in the last few years. The systematic, short sighted destruction of the environment by many governments. The systematic, short sighted destruction of US democracy by its ruling party, the GOP, as they call themselves. The destruction of UK society and social rights by the Conservative government, with the complicity of UK workers. I somehow feel mirrors would not cut it...

I’m concerned by the disappearance of normality. Not the actual quality. That is, indeed, disappearing. If you need convincing, take a look at the range of characters in costumes that assaulted the Capitol the other day, or review, say, the video of a rampant, clumsy Boris Johnson aggressively running through five year olds in what was meant to be a mock rugby game. But today’s post is concerned with the disappearance of normality, the word. A perfectly good word, in perfectly common, dare I say, normal, use. And then, a few months ago, it disappeared from American reporting, suddenly and unexpectedly replaced, everywhere, by the much less common ‘normalcy’. Those of us who have been speaking English with normality for years, suddenly had to guess what we might be returning to when returning to normalcy as promised after the coronavirus pandemic or Trump’s presidency, and checking dictionaries to confirm the word is not the figment of a febrile, COVID afflicted, journalist’s imaginatio...

This seems to be a new MS Word feature, or maybe one I had not noticed before. Word is now not only helping writers with orthography, but braving the much more complex realm of vocabulary, grammar and sentence building. And here, I must say, it still needs significant work. I do not normally encounter the title message when writing professionally, but I often do when writing Twitteretter. Word is not being trained, I guess, on the nuances of turn of phrase and artistic use of language, but on its much more prosaic utilitarian use. This is logical. Whilst I would be willing to accept help when writing for strictly utilitarian purposes, and I am happy for others to receive it when doing the same, I think writing for pleasure, one’s own or that of others, is a very personal pursuit in which any help received must come from others equally artistically inclined, and not from machines. This may change one day, but the perfection that may be achieved may kill the beauty of near perfection...

This week saw the annual prize giving of a literary competition in memoriam of my late father, a subversive essay tournament for those in college age. It is easy to underestimate the importance of such an event in today’s World, in which we surround young people with domestication tools, sapping their nonconformity with a myriad of time killing, distracting assaults through their mobile devices. Our market-based society encourages young people, unwittingly but unapologetically, to observe instead of act, to passively like instead of uncompromisingly protest. In this context, subversive essay seems more important than ever. Gone are the days when being young was synonym of being, indeed, subversive, when conformity to society’s norms came only with the experience, or defeat, of age. I confess I had not paid enough attention to the importance of this initiative but, if we can get our young to write subversive essay, and applaud them for it, we still have a chance to build a better World...

It is so slender, so light, so visually unobtrusive, that it is easy to miss the great contribution the apostrophe makes to our language. Its elegant economy reminds you of Seb Coe’s gait or Hemingway’s prose. Just ‘, instead of ‘of the’. Such a saving! Most of us likely to go our whole life without ever noticing its contribution, missing, in our distraction, its power to simplify. Some of us may notice, at some point, but fail to grasp its importance. Probably use it sparingly, randomly alternating it with its much heavier, clumsier cousin. It is not until you start a project like Twitteretter, until every single character counts, that you come to appreciate the apostrophe in its full glory, its full power. I could not have kept my bargain, achieved my self-imposed limit whilst keeping my entire meaning, without its invaluable help. I know not how it came to be, or to whom we owe this magical resource. Even this small, inadequate homage, would have exceeded its length limit without it...

It is my observation that lesser literature - entertaining fiction, as compared to erudite essay and classic novel - is easier to read and rewards with quicker pleasure. By this I don’t mean bad literature, but rather, good run of the mill fiction, with less lofty aspirations. I am currently reading Glen Duncan’s entertaining, and well written ‘The last werewolf’, during a break halfway through Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’, which followed a re-read of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ and a first read of Popper’s ‘The Poverty of Historicism’. The latter three elicit extensive thinking. Concepts barely understood at first reading are slowly developed in one’s mind, turned over and regurgitated until one is confident one has sufficiently understood and, further, developed one’s own thinking. The former requires nothing other than page turning, entertained by the story and enthused by the occasional, genius turn of phrase. Balance between both is important as, in fact, it is with everything in life...

I’ve already introduced JJ Rousseau and his The Social Contract in previous Twitteretters. He is not only a very renowned philosopher, but quite possibly the most influential political author of our history. His work set the basis for the advent of modern democracy, providing the ideological backbone to the constitutional assemblies of the French Revolution and, nearly at the same time the other side of the Atlantic, to the American Revolution and its development of a sophisticated parliamentarian republic. However, and unlikely as it seems, Rousseau was hugely influential also by writing what is credited by many as the first romantic novel, La nouvelle Heloise, opening the floodgates of a genre that has produced incalculable pages and book sales of a volume unthinkable for philosophy works. Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Rousseau both gave us the tools to challenge our social and political environment, to possibly improve it, and to evade it, reducing the urgency to do so...

  Have you read Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘The Last Question’? If you haven’t, you really should. I came across it after it was referenced by Michio Kaku in ‘The future of humanity’. It is a beautiful story, and it may have the best ending I’ve ever read (I may be a bit biased as I just read it, and it is much more present in my mind than others, but it is truly stand up and clap spectacular). If you wanted to get an idea of what it is about – and I really advise against this, you should just read it, it is only 15 pages – you could do it by reading my Twitteretter number 10, ‘On God and Evolution’. At the time I wrote it, I was struck but what I hoped may be an original thought, inspired by listening to a Richard Dawkins interview. A couple of years later, I discover that Asimov, at least, beat me to it by a number of years. The feeling is bittersweet. Is it better to be original, or to share an idea with someone of Asimov’s stature? Both are good and, since it is the latter, I t...