Pseuds Corner

In the satirical magazine Private Eye there is a column called ‘Pseuds Corner' which pokes fun at pretentiousness in the arts and the media. There have been such gems as Sir Paul McCartney's poem - ‘BLACK JACKET':   Sadness isn't sadness; it's happiness in a black jacket   Death isn't death; it's life that's jumped off a tall cliff   Tears are not tears; They're balls Of laughter dipped in salt.     However, the one which took my eye was in the 21 March 2008 issue from Guardian feature writer Laura Barton, who wrote -    "we (women) are just as obsessed and infatuated as men. We love music just as hard. It's just that we don't exhibit that obsession, that love, through an alphabetised record collection. You want to know how I store my records? I put the ones next to each other that I think would be friends. I suppose that you could call that emotional; I call it womanly."   I guess that you could say that it's unlikely that Bach would have much in common with the Arctic Monkeys, although I would imagine that Schoenberg and Shostakovich would have quite a lot to talk over.   Obviously though this idea has much wider application. And, as such, it calls into question the liberty of our woman librarians who, despite being in the majority must, one assumes, have been forced by their male colleagues into filing books in alphabetical order rather than placing together books which would feel comfortable with each other. One could for instance imagine the works of Molière and Shakespeare having discussions late into the night about the difficulty of using verse in plays or, maybe, the books commenting on gritty contemporary life written by Emile Zola and Charles Dickens discussing whether publication in weekly episodes was the way forward to maximise profits. Religious books would certainly need to be classified by religion, but also by the sect they represented, otherwise there would be war on the shelves, with books attempting to burn others of contrary view. Works by narcissistic academics of whatever subject, who had been sworn enemies for years, would need to be kept forcibly apart to preserve the peace and tranquillity of the library. The Mills and Boon books, however, would go away together in pairs for romantic week-ends and then would come back, some still together, perhaps with their newly-born short stories, and others not speaking to each other. And so the shelves would need to be completely re-organised every week. This same idea could equally apply to many other things in life. Why do we have houses numbered in strict sequence? Why not group numbers according to the colour of the woodwork or whether the windows have been replaced with double-glazed units? Now, I appreciate that we men have the reputation of being obsessed by lists much more than women. After all, there are very few women who engage in train-spotting, and how many are able to recite all the winners of the FA Cup for the last 40 year? Or indeed would want to. But there are also many men for whom such activities are not central to their lives. And there are just a few women who are obsessed by other things, such as their handbags or fashion in general and the lives of the stars. So I don't think that I am going to worry about the order of my CD collection. Indeed, the collection itself is becoming less and less important as even more advanced technology takes over - everything now can be on your iPod. And that is good for both men and women of whatever persuasion. For although it can list the music in alphabetical order, pieces can equally easily be grouped together - to feel good about each other. Or, for those anarchists who wish to lose all order from their lives, there is always the shuffle option - where pieces are played completely at random. Take your pick, it's your life.

 Home      Caro Diario     Philosophy     Who am I?      Links     Photos of Annecy