Sometimes I wake up in the morning, think I just cannot go on

I'd rather pull the blankets over me and sleep another day

But as I toss and turn I see, what's staring right into my eyes

My closet gives me strength to live another day, another day

Clothes, yeah, I love the haute couture

Clothes, they make me so mature

Clothes, they are worn most everyplace

Clothes, they can hide an ugly face

Some don't like them if they're bright, Polyester is allright

And be sure the label shows, it really makes the clothes

Clothes, they cover all you got

Clothes, they keep you cold and hot

Clothes, the designer tells no lies

Clothes, they attract the handsome guys

The spring collection's fine, today I'm buying mine

And if the label shows, I surely love the clothes

Clothes, woo oo oo ooo

Clothes, woo oo oo ooo

I start my own boutique, I think my day's très chic

And if my label shows, I sell a lot of clothes

This is my alphabet.

Because time goes on

and things are changing in my world

here is a new alphabet

for the children of my generation.

Of course all these words have a meaning for me

but other generations might find a different mood to their world.

My alphabet goes like this:

A stands for anything 

and B for bionic and Bach

C stands for claustrophobia

and D for dirty old man

E stands for everyone

F is full frontal and friends

G of course, stands for getting a divorce

H now stands for hijacking

and I for a king size ego

J now stands for jukebox and junkies

K is for those who kiss and tell

and leading lady stars with L

Naturally M is for me

and N is for never again

O is for that famous story, mmm

and P for pain and poverty

Q stands for quality which is better than quantity

R stands for rock and roll fan

S is sexy and sad

T drives them totally mad

and U are everything to me

V stands for little voodoo

and W for where and when

X sounds extremely mysterious

Y is a question I keep asking

and Z dear child, for the zero you will get if you don't learn my alphabet.

The business of getting a baby from womb to air is pretty well understood. Out it comes, a dribbling squall. Presently its talents come into the open; they are hunted down, and bludgeoned into insensibility. But Mozart was once a prodigious, prestidigious little monkey.

My father used to say with a mocking smile when things went wrong, which they for the most part did; Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, it might have been. If L comes to good not by some miracle but by doing the right thing rather than the wrong others may profit from his escape; if he comes to bad (as is not unlikely) his example may spare them.

You know, Chris . . . I have a definition of success, and what success is to me is when an individual finds that thing which fulfills himself, when he finds that thing that completes him and when, in doing it, he finds a way to serve his fellow man. When he finds that he is a successful person.

It doesn’t make any difference whether you are a ditch-digger or a librarian or someone who works at the filling station of the President of the United States or whatever, if you’re doing what you want to do and in some way bringing value to the life of others, then you’re a successful human being.

It so happens that in my area, which is entertainment, that success brings with it a lot of other things, but all of those other things, the money, the fame, the conveniences, the ability to travel and see the rest of the world, all of those are just icing on the cake and the cake is the same for everybody.

Before reading this brilliant book I had thought that books should be more like the film The Godfather, in which at one stage Al Pacino goes to Sicily and the Italian is all in Italian. Now I thought that this was a rather simpleminded way of looking at the question.

If you say that in a book the Italians should speak Italian because in the actual world they speak Italian and the Chinese should speak Chinese because Chinese speak Chinese it is a rather naive way of thinking of a work of art, it’s as if you thought this was the way to make a painting: The sky is blue. I will paint the sky blue. The sun is yellow. I will paint the sun yellow. A tree is green. I will paint the tree green. And what colour is the trunk? Brown. So what colour do you use? Ridiculous. Even leaving abstract painting out of the question it is closer to the truth that a painter would think of the surface that he wanted in a painting and the kind of light and the lines and the relations of colours and be attracted to painting objects that could be represented in a painting with those properties. In the same way a composer does not for the most part think that he would like to imitate this or that sound—he thinks that he wants the texture of a piano with a violin, or a piano with a cello, or four stringed instruments or six, or a symphony orchestra; he thinks of relations of notes.

This was all commonplace and banal to a painter or musician, and yet the languages of the world seemed like little heaps of blue and red and yellow powder which had never been used—but if a book just used them so that the English spoke English & the Italians Italian that would be as stupid as saying use yellow for the sun because the sun is yellow. It seemed to me reading Schoenberg that what the writers of the future would do was not necessarily say: I am writing about an Armenian grandfather Czech grandmother a young biker from Kansas (of Czech & Armenian descent), Armenian Czech English OK. Gradually they would approach the level of the other branches of the arts which are so much further developed. Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes, & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese.

At last in despair I said You know the Rosetta Stone.

What? said Liberace.

I said The Rosetta Stone. I think we need more.

He said One’s not enough?

I said What i mean is, though I believe the Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity. You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival.

What we should do, I said is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island. The great thing is that people were put off Greek at school would then have another chance, I think they’re put off by the alphabet but if you’ve learned one at the age of six how hard can it be? It’s not a particularly difficult language.

The fact is that 99 out of 100 adults spare themselves the trouble of rational thought 99% of the time (studies have not shown this, I have just invented the statistics so I should not say The fact is, but I would be surprised if the true figures were very different). In a less barbarous society children would not be in absolute economic subjection to the irrational beings into whose keeping fate has consigned them: they would be paid a decent hourly wage for attending school. As we don’t live in that enlightened society any adult, and especially a parent, has a terrible power over a child— how could I give that power to a man who—sometimes I thought I could and once I even picked up the phone but when I thought about it I just couldn’t. I would hear again his breathtaken boyish admiration for lovely stupidity his unswerving fidelity to the precept that ought implies cant and I just couldn’t.

Amazing: 7

Far too young: 10

Only pretending to read it: 6

Excellent idea as etymology so helpful for spelling: 19

Excellent idea as inflected languages so helpful for computer programming: 8

Excellent idea as classics indispensable for understanding of English literature: 7

Excellent idea as Greek so helpful for reading New Testament, camel through eye of needle for example mistranslation of very similar word for rope: 3

Terrible idea as study of classical languages embedded in educational system productive of divisive society: 5

Terrible idea as overemphasis on study of dead languages directly responsible for neglect of sciences and industrial decline and uncompetitiveness of Britain: 10

Stupid idea as he should be playing football: 1

Stupid idea as he should be studying Hebrew & learning about his Jewish heritage: 1

Marvellous idea as spelling and grammar not taught in schools: 24

(Respondents: 35; Abstentions: 1,000?)

Oh, & almost forgot: 

Marvellous idea as Homer so marvellous in Greek: 0

Marvellous idea as Greek such a marvellous language: 0

Oh & also:

Marvellous idea but how did you teach it to a child that young: 8

I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business.

She said Oh and she said she had seen Seven Samurai though not the other one and what a marvellous film

I said Yes

and she said It’s a little on the long side but what a marvellous film, of course it’s basically so simple isn’t it I suppose that’s the source of its appeal, sort of like the Three Muskateers, an elite band—

and I said WHAT?

and she said Sorry?

ELITE BAND! I said staring aghast

and she said there was no need to shout.

And if ONE GREEN BOTTLE should accidentally fall

There’ll be EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES hanging on the wall

I began to imagine L seeing all kinds of things in the film which would not be incompatible with throwing a person from a plane on orders from a third party

EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES HANGING ON THE WALL

I said politely but firmly I think if you see the film again you will find that the samurai are not, in fact, an elite band. Lesser directors have of course succumbed to the glamour of the eliteness of a band, with predictable results; not Kurosawa.

She said there was no need to take that tone

EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES HANGING ON THE WALL

& I said politely Essentially the film is about the importance of rational thought. We should draw our conclusions from the evidence available rather than from hearsay and try not to be influenced by our preconceptions. We should strive to see what we can see for ourselves rather than what we would like to see. 

She said What?

And if one green bottle should accidentally fall

I said Also, we should remember that appearances can be deceptive. We may not have all the relevant evidence. Just because somebody is smiling doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better off dead.

She said I really don’t think

SEVEN GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL

I said Let’s say A sees his wife, B, burned alive at time t. A survives. Later we see A signing in a local ritual. C, observing the ritual, thinks A has come out ahead. We infer that C is not in full possession of the facts & has been influenced by his own preconceptions since

She said It all seems rather clinical

I said Clinical!

THERE’LL BE SIX GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL

She said & isn’t this rather morbid—

I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks she would not think it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank.

After all we both when it comes down to it we both think it’s a marvellous film, she said pleasantly.

Strange to think Thatcher could work on three hours sleep, five hours & I am an idiot.

His head lay on the pillow, face as I had seen it, skull encasing a sleeping brain; how cruel that we must wake each time to answer to the same name, revive the same memories, take up the same habits and stupidities that we shouldered the day before and lay down to sleep.

I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can’t do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness.