Should One Make Any Evaluative Comment About Oneself?

1) Bragging is obnoxious, although sometimes it can be endearingly child-like and guileless. I've known a few people who were unabashed braggers and honestly, I sometimes found it endearing. But this occurs in a particular personality type-- like Mr. Toad in Wind of the Willows. Mostly it's just obnoxious.

2) Humble-bragging is obnoxious and it's never endearing. "Oh, I have so many friends and they all want a piece of me, I can never keep them happy, what's a soul to do..." You know.

3) Self-criticism looks promising but it's often just an inverted form of bragging, albeit in a different way to humble-bragging. It's in order to show how much he can spare, as Dr. Johnson said. Or else it's to advertise one's frankness, unfliching honesty, humility, etc. etc. Or to fish for praise.

4) Really brutal self-criticism can just embarrass the people around you. What are they supposed to say?

So my question remains. Is it better form just not to praise or criticize yourself at all?

I would make an exception for comical boasting and self-criticism, if they really are comical and not a stealthy form of any of the above.

Everyone is Conservative About What He Knows Best

That's a fairly well-known aphorism which was coined by Robert Conquest. But is it true?

I often find myself thinking about it. The strange thing is, it seems mostly true, but there are many counter-examples. For instance, Picasso and Dali were undeniably extremely accomplished at traditional painting and drawing, and yet they were revolutionaries. Or-- another example-- Charles Dickens knew the law-courts and government bureaucracy up close, and it made him something of a revolutionary. Another example is Hilaire Belloc, who lost all faith in the party system after becoming an MP. Another example is Bobby Fischer, who is often called the greatest chess player of all time but wanted to radically change the rules (I mean the literal rules of chess) in his later days.

I think it might be nine-tenths true, with one-tenth of strong counter examples.

Two New Ones on Me

I've just encountered the word "lagniappe" in my reading. I'd never heard it before. It means, according to Wikipedia, "a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase (such as a thirteenth doughnut on purchase of a dozen)." I'd never heard that. 

Even more intriguingly, at the end of the Wikipedia article comes this little nugget: "In Ireland, the term "luck penny" (or "luckpenny") denotes a lagniappe."

Never heard that, either!

Classic British Comedies I Never Found Funny

1) Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. (OK, it was sometimes funny. But mostly it was just annoying.)

2) Morecambe and Wise. Give me the Two Ronnies any day. Morecambe and Wise never seemed like British humour to me. They were too zany, they weren't grounded in the real world like great British humour. Granted, I haven't watched much of them.

3) Last of the Summer Wine. Oh, my God. It was SO bad it's almost beyond words. My father used to watch it and defend it as "gentle" comedy. Yes, it was gentle. It was also terrible.

4) Are You Being Served? To be fair, I've never watched an entire episode, but it seemed pretty vacuous to me from the few scenes I did watch.

5) The Vicar of Dibley. Often disgusting, condescending, predictable.

6) Dad's Army. OK, this wasn't terrible-- it had its moments-- but I've never understood why it's so beloved.

That's about enough, unless I think of more.

Fake Liberal Bafflement

Something I've noticed about liberals (and when I say "liberals", I'm never talking about disciples of John Stuart Mill-- you know who I'm talking about) is their tendency to engage in fake bafflement. They regularly pretend not to know what their opponents are talking about, and this is done with a certain amount of theatre.

For instance, they'll ask question such as: "What even is cancel culture"? They express bemusement, and say things like: "How can such-and-such be complaining about cancel culture when he has his own radio show/newspaper column/podcast?". (They presumably wouldn't be impressed by an argument like: "How can this feminist complain about the glass ceiling when she's at the top of her profession?")

They'll talk about "woke" as if it's some elusive concept, one they have to struggle to even comprehend. I mean, what even is woke? Isn't it just good manners? Isn't it just using people's preferred language to talk about themselves? As though it didn't go far, far beyond that...

They will express similar bafflement about concepts such as masculinity, femininity, Englishness, Irishness, the war on Christmas, hateful rhetoric towards men, and so on.

In a similar way, they'll deliberately misundertand any conservative claim of social decline to be an assertion that such-and-such a time was a "golden age". Any evidence to the contrary immediately proves nothing has really changed and it's all in the conservative's imagination.

But I feel a bit stupid now, because after engaging in some research, I realise that lots of people have noticed this. Lots and lots of people. Lots and lots and lots of people. In fact, it's become a meme on the right. I didn't realize this, although I had heard one or two other people make the point in passing.

I may as well post this anyway.

I Love This Picture So Much

 

Coincidence: A Poem I Wrote Twenty Years Ago

Recently, I was going through typescripts and manuscripts of my old poems. In a way, it was like reliving a trauma. I put so much work into these poems. I sent them to various magazines and newspapers and publishers and they always got sent back to me, with a handful of exceptions. (I still have dreams of hearing letters fall through the door of my old flat, and desperately hoping there might be some good news.) It was brutal! This was the main focus of my life for about ten years and nothing came of it-- absolutely nothing.

I've published many of them on my blog over the years. But when I go through my archives I'm surprised how many I've never used. Some of them were not bad.

This is one, I think. It was written before I became a Christian, from a perspective of profound (and reluctant) scepticism. My innate scepticism is what held me back from becoming a Christian for many, many years. I had such a very hard time believing in anything supernatural or paranormal. I was too wretchedly aware of the human capacity for wishful thinking. On the other hand, I loved hearing stories about the uncanny, supernatural, magical, and so forth-- and "hoping it might be so".

The image in the final lines-- of the baby staring into a fire, and imagining pictures in the flames-- seemed to me then like a perfect metaphor for human consciousness, a quirk of nature in a meaningless universe. I still like the image. I like any reference to looking into flames, or steam, or smoke, or water. But especially flames.

Coincidence

The night the club burned down, she wasn’t there;
She’d called in sick for once. A Scottish man
Phoned up his sister’s number, unaware
He had a sister. Some great master plan
In invisible ink lies in a tight-shut drawer
With all our fates marked out in criss-crossed lines

So maybe Scott will make it through the war
Picking his way out through a field of mines.

The voice gets stronger when the cynic smiles:
How likely is it every light was green
As we drove out to the hospital, miles and miles?
And the cynic’s eyes, too softly to be seen,
Light with a gentle longing: Maybe, maybe,
The world is not indifferent to our aims…

Before the flicker of the fire, the baby
Stares wide-eyed at the pictures in the flames.