Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

Ever since I was a little child I always wanted to learn how to whistle. I think this strong desire set in inside me when I was hospitalised for the first time, aged five. The ward where I stayed for a fortnight was long and narrow with beds propped up against the walls on either side. Humongous Disney cartoons looked down upon the children recovering there and despite the smiling faces of Pluto, Donald, Mickey et al the whole place looked cold, distant and dismal. And yet, what I remember the most was me, standing outside on the balcony of the Pedro Borrás Hospital , or El Infantil as we used to call it, and contracting my thick lips to expel the air inside my lungs. When not sound was forthcoming I would get upset and frustrated. I used to think that the opening my lips formed was too small, or that I had to use my teeth and so I kept trying. But to no avail, I still sounded as if I was blowing on a plate of hot soup.

Most of my friends could whistle. Some of them could produce high-pitched sounds, whereas others had to content themselves with a more chirping one. At least they were able to, but not poor, five-year-old me.

That was why I took it upon myself to learn how to turn my lips into a flute whilst still convalescent in hospital. After breakfast, I would get up from my bed and stand in front of the mirror in the showers and force the air out. And lo and behold, just a couple of days before I was discharged from hospital, a shrill sound came out. Though at first it was a mix between spitting and whistling, eventually it became more distinct and, dare I say, beautiful. I was over the moon.

With the passing of years, I realised that this activity was not just a bit of idle fun, although amusement was part of it. Like singing, whistling could be and had been used as a way of bringing people together. And of course, it had been utilised effectively in what later on became one of my life's ever-lasting affairs: cinema. Who can forget Lauren Bacall in her 'You know how to whistle' scene in 'To Have and To Have Not'? In 'Bridge On the River Kwai' Alec Guinness, playing Colonel Nicholson, arrives in the PoW's camp whistling the famous melody 'Colonel Bogey March', composed by the American Mitchel William Miller. I still marvel at the choreographic perfection of that scene. And away from the cinematic universe and into the musical realm we find the ultimate Piano Man, Billy Joel, whistling his way into and out of 'The Stranger'.

But people don't whistle anymore. I mean in public (I know that we, or at least I, still do it when I am cooking or tidying up around the house). Gone are the days when I would catch a passerby competing with birds' mellifluous singing and the contest would be so close that an Aretha Franklin or Jocelyn Brown would be wheeled in to decide upon a winner. No, nowadays people just make sharp, short sounds through their teeth in a manner that evokes a dog owner summoning his/her canine friend.

That's why my act of rebellion tomorrow when I reach my thirty-eighth year on earth will be to whistle all the way to work and back. A soft pressing of the lips, an instant of spontaneous human musicality (or maybe not, you might say) and a celebration of togetherness. Because as Lauren Bacall said when she defined whistling: 'You just put your lips together and blow'.



Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'What Makes a Good Writer?', to be published on Tuesday 17th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

Living In A Bilingual World (The One About the Robin Hood of Linguistics)

I have an announcement to make, chicos and chicas: linguistics has grown dreadlocks. And it has adopted anarchy as its preferred method of doing politics.

If the idea of defenders of language sometimes brings an image of a bespectacled, middle-age male scholar wearing a well-worn tweed jacket with leather elbows and a tuft of grey hair decorating his body's attic, then kiss that vision goodbye because the revolution, baby, is here and is happening right now.

Pablo Zulaica is a twenty-seven year old Spaniard from Vitoria, the Basque Country. Fed up with what he, rightly, considered to be beyond-the-pale mistakes on billboards and posters, he armed himself with a bag of portable, adhesive accents and started correcting those advertisements with typos on them.


Although Pablo's actions have been mainly limited to Mexico, where he has resided for the last two years, his enterprise caught the eye of other like-minded folk who could not take the spelling gaffes that polluted our cities anymore. And that's how nowadays from Argentina to New York there are human Tipp-Exes marauding the streets looking for those hideous signs that transgress the boundaries of decent linguistics in order to amend them.

Zulaica has confessed that his is not a political agenda. His aim is to change attitudes to spelling in outdoor advertising not to antagonise people. He wants both businesses and politicians to be more careful with language and to use it properly. Not surprisingly he is the offspring of two journalists and as a young child was always interested in the intricate world of letters and accents.

It was hightime that linguistics found its own Robin Hood and Pablo Zulaica is our principled (totally legal) outlaw. And if you live in London and begin to see grocers' signs with the correct apostrophes on them, please, don't turn me in. It's all in defense of language, guv.

Copyright 2009

Next Post 'Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music', to be published on Sunday 15th November at 10am (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (10th Part)

Ha! And did you think that Zadie Smith was going to let us, readers, off the hook? Cracking analysis this week. For parts 1-9, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Note to readers: a novel is a two-way street

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music.The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason.

The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park. What I'm saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. For how many of us feel the world to be as Kafka felt it, too impossibly foreshortened to ride from one village to the next? Or can imagine a world without nouns, as Borges did? How many are willing to be as emotionally generous as Dickens, or to take religious faith as seriously as did Graham Greene? Who among us have Zora Neale Hurston's capacity for joy or Douglas Coupland's strong stomach for the future? Who has the delicacy to tease out Flaubert's faintest nuance, or the patience and the will to follow David Foster Wallace down his intricate recursive spirals of thought?



The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here.

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Living in a Bilingual World', to be published on Thursday 12th November at 11:59pm (GMT)