joe moran's words
type: channel
description: on the everyday, the banal and other important matters
date: 2024-03-02T13:27:46Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: wordpress.com
items: How to Know a Person
items: More Than a Game
items: Academic tribes
items: Class of 2023
items: Imagination
items: Awe
items: Fans
items: Noli timere
items: My idea of happiness
items: Gen Z and Me

How to Know a Person
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2024-03-02T13:27:46Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I reviewed David Brooks’s How to Know a Person for the TLS: David Brooks was raised in a Jewish family whose motto, he says, might have been “Think Yiddish, Act British.” He learned to be awkward and reserved around strangers, but also inherited a disputatious streak that saw argument as “a form of prayer”. The … Continue reading How to Know a Person
encoded: I reviewed David Brooks’s How to Know a Person for the TLS: David Brooks was raised in a Jewish family whose motto, he says, might have been “Think Yiddish, Act British.” He learned to be awkward and reserved around strangers, but also inherited a disputatious streak that saw argument as “a form of prayer”. The result, for many years, was disappointing conversations, stymied by his tendency to either clam up or overperform. More recently, though, he has been working hard on being less inhibited. Now he actively seeks out conversations with strangers and looks for ways to make those conversations an act of joint, gentle, enriching exploration. We should all try to do this more, Brooks argues, in an increasingly fractious and divisive public sphere where millions feel invisible and excluded. Adopting a favourite word of Generation Z, he suggests that we have lost the ability to make others feel “seen” — to let them know that they have been understood. When beholding someone fully, he writes, we see “the richness of this particular human consciousness, the full symphony – how they perceive and create their life”. He agrees with Iris Murdoch that we can “grow by looking”. The trouble is, most of us are really bad at it. Our default view of the world is naively realist. We assume that the way it appears to us is what others also see. Our brains, locked in what Brooks nicely calls the “dark, bony vault” of our skulls, offer us a highly edited, partial reading of reality. People with different life circumstances literally see different worlds. Even partners and intimate friends misread each other, because they lock in some earlier version of the other person, and that version stays set while the person doesn’t. The solution, for Brooks, is not some vague exhortation to be empathetic and kind, but learning how to perform small, concrete social actions well. Some of his suggestions about how to do this – pay full attention to people, ask open-ended questions – are fairly obv…

More Than a Game
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2024-03-02T13:24:49Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I wrote this review of David Horspool’s More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain for the TLS. In his classic book Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket (1994), Mike Marqusee writes about falling in love with the sport as an American newly arrived in the UK in the … Continue reading More Than a Game
encoded: I wrote this review of David Horspool’s More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain for the TLS. In his classic book Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket (1994), Mike Marqusee writes about falling in love with the sport as an American newly arrived in the UK in the 1970s. Watching TV in the long hot summer of 1976, he saw the West Indies blow England away in the Test series, and became captivated by the spectacle: thirteen men in immaculate whites, moving in intricately choreographed patterns on perfectly mown grass as if obeying some ancient religious rite. “The change at the end of the over, when I first saw it, struck me as magical,” he writes. “It was so arbitrary, yet so precise, like a sorcerer’s trick.” This, Marqusee learns, is what makes cricket such a handy conveyance for its peculiar brand of racial and class politics: its pointless beauty draws us in first. Britain is not the most cricket-mad, or football-mad, or golf-mad nation on the planet. But as David Horspool writes in this ambitiously conceived new history, “the sheer variety of games and the complex history of sport in Britain are unparalleled”. Britain has a unique talent for inventing and codifying sport and then sending it round the world as “an agent of empire and a spreader of soft power”. Meanwhile, on home turf, sport has generated endless social anxieties and panics, concerning its supposed encouragement of idleness, Sabbath-breaking, violence, unruliness, foul play, corruption and greed. These fears often bring to the fore the British genius for the botched compromise. When betting shops were finally legalised in 1961, they had to operate behind blacked-out windows. Rab Butler, the Home Secretary responsible for the legislation, later reflected that they had been so “intent on making betting shops as sad as possible, in order not to deprave the young, that they ended up more like undertakers’ premises”. In 1986 a concession arrived: they were allowed to serv…

Academic tribes
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2023-09-15T16:25:23Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I wrote this for Times Higher Education a couple of weeks ago: The people who work in universities are made up of two tribes: tragedians and comedians. These tribes view each other with bewilderment across a seemingly unbridgeable mental and cultural divide. What makes things worse is that the tribes are not named as such, … Continue reading Academic tribes
encoded: I wrote this for Times Higher Education a couple of weeks ago: The people who work in universities are made up of two tribes: tragedians and comedians. These tribes view each other with bewilderment across a seemingly unbridgeable mental and cultural divide. What makes things worse is that the tribes are not named as such, and no one ever declares or even knows which tribe they belong to or why. All they know is that there is a whole bunch of people in universities with whom they have little in common. Perhaps, in the interests of collegiality, it would help if I introduced these tribes to each other. In his pioneering work of ecocriticism, The Comedy of Survival (1974), Joseph Meeker discusses two literary-philosophical modes of thought that people have used to make sense of the fragilities and vagaries of life: tragedy and comedy. In tragedy, the (almost always male) hero exists in a state of conflict with some force – nature, the gods, fate, death, his own self-defeating desires – that will ultimately overthrow him. He tries to escape his human limitations and fails. The audience feels both awe and pity for him as he follows this doomed project to its end. Tragedy concerns the human search for aggrandisement, the need to feel we matter in an uncaring, meaningless universe. It sees our efforts to transcend our animal nature as heroic, even if that heroism ends in death. In tragedy, the gods care enough about us to squash us when our pride and defiance angers them. Tragedy puffs up our species pride, our delusion that the universe gives a fig for human ideals. Tragedy is a human invention – of the Athenians in the 5th century BC, and of cultures inspired by them, such as Elizabethan and Jacobean London. Comedy, by contrast, exists everywhere, even in nature. It grows artlessly out of life’s biological realities. Plants and animals live what Meeker calls “the comic way” in their pragmatism and pliability. Evolution for him is like a comedy, its aim being to allow li…

Class of 2023
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2023-07-25T10:38:22Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I wrote this, about the graduating class of 2023, for Times Higher Education a couple of weeks ago. The class of 2023 will soon graduate. When they walk across that stage in their black polyester gowns and mortar boards to shake the vice-chancellor’s hand, it will feel different from previous years. This cohort is unique … Continue reading Class of 2023
encoded: I wrote this, about the graduating class of 2023, for Times Higher Education a couple of weeks ago. The class of 2023 will soon graduate. When they walk across that stage in their black polyester gowns and mortar boards to shake the vice-chancellor’s hand, it will feel different from previous years. This cohort is unique – and, hopefully, will remain so. When they began university back in September 2020, this celebratory moment seemed a long way off. I knew them then only as shifting pixels arranged into headshots on my laptop screen. I was quietly freaking out. Covid cases were rising again and most campus buildings were shut, obliging students to log in to Zoom classes from their family homes or the shared accommodation at which many had already arrived, expecting to be taught face-to-face. When I clicked on the button to start my first seminar with the first years, I spent a horrible few minutes alone in the virtual room, looking at the webcam image of my tired, haunted face, wondering how it had all come to this. Then I heard the reassuring pings that signalled students waiting to be admitted. I let them in, and their faces popped up one by one. Some were in their bedrooms, with their posters and photo walls behind them; others were sat at kitchen tables filled with everyday clutter. They looked friendly, if a bit dazed, and ready to roll with this surreal state of affairs. Within a few minutes, I thought: “This is going to be OK; we can do this.” As the weeks went by, we grew more at ease with the technology and each other. I had conversations with them about their lives that I would never have had in a classroom. One of them, newly branded a “key worker”, was getting up at 3am each day to stack shelves at Asda. Another had lost all his income because bar work had dried up. All were struggling gamely with the practicalities of the new normal: competing over the family PC with home-schooling siblings, running errands for grandparents, doing the shopping and cook…

Imagination
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2023-06-17T13:17:16Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I reviewed Albert Read’s The Imagination Muscle for the TLS: This book about the imagination begins, aptly enough, with a story about telling stories, inspired by a serendipitous find. Just out of university and doing a job he hated selling advertising space from a Soho office, Albert Read was browsing at lunchtime in the second-hand … Continue reading Imagination
encoded: I reviewed Albert Read’s The Imagination Muscle for the TLS: This book about the imagination begins, aptly enough, with a story about telling stories, inspired by a serendipitous find. Just out of university and doing a job he hated selling advertising space from a Soho office, Albert Read was browsing at lunchtime in the second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He saw a book, The Secret Language of Film, by the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and bought it on a whim. In it, he discovered that Carrière and his long-time collaborator, Luis Buñuel, would set each other a challenge at the end of a day on set, by spending half an hour inventing a story to tell to the other. This was their way, Carrière wrote, of “training the imagination, the muscle which makes the essential breakthroughs”. Ever since, Read has clung to this idea of the imagination as a muscle – something that can be stretched and developed “through the regular pulse of movement and exertion”. Engaging it fully might feel weird at first, as with “an unencountered glute muscle”, but it will become stronger and suppler when “prodded into the rhythm of action”. Most of this book’s chapters are themed around some way of training this “imagination muscle”. The training tips seem fairly obvious: free yourself from unthinking habit by taking a different route to the train station on your way to work; adopt a “beginner’s mindset”; be at ease with risk; keep a commonplace book; seek out collaborations and have better conversations; make leaps across disciplines; embrace the “joyful absorption” of observation, by taking out a magnifying glass to study a yellow meadow ant. All sound ideas, but none of them very imaginative. Gradually, though, a more original take emerges. The imagination works best, Read finds, when it meets the constraint of structure or has to otherwise rub up against the real world. Its sweet spot is the “meeting point of intelligence, acquired knowledge and observational wonder”.…

Awe
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2023-06-17T13:14:22Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I reviewed Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder for the TLS: Over the centuries, the word awe and its derivatives have suffered what linguists call semantic bleaching: overuse has weakened their intensity. The Old English awe meant a feeling of terror or dread. From this kind of awe-full derived awful, an adjective attached … Continue reading Awe
encoded: I reviewed Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder for the TLS: Over the centuries, the word awe and its derivatives have suffered what linguists call semantic bleaching: overuse has weakened their intensity. The Old English awe meant a feeling of terror or dread. From this kind of awe-full derived awful, an adjective attached to anything deemed unpleasant or abysmal from the late 18th century onwards. From the early fifteenth century, the terror and dread associated with awe came to be mixed with reverence or wonder, usually inspired by the divine. Awesome meant arousing this kind of awe, until it came to mean merely breathtaking, and finally turned into a vague term of approval, meaning “cool”. The other day, a student on one of my courses sweetly exclaimed “awesome!” when I gave him a copy of the module handbook. Dacher Keltner wants to revive the old sense of awe as an intense, life-altering feeling, but not its earliest associations with terror or dread. Nor does he subscribe to the common belief that awe can be so overpowering as to deprive us of our critical faculties, leaving us prey to dogma and demagoguery. Keltner, a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has conducted experiments which suggest that, in a state of awe, our thought is more probing, rigorous and energised. Awe, he writes, “awakens the better angels of our nature”. Keltner defines awe as “the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand”. His book begins with a moving account of watching his brother Rolf die. As Rolf, terminally ill with colon cancer, took opiates to end his life, Keltner sensed “a force around his body pulling him away”. Watching life leave another person is an awe-inducing experience. It makes us aware of the great mystery and preciousness of being alive and the dignity and solidarity of death, and connects us with forces much larger than us. Keltner’s work forms part of ongoing effort…

Fans
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2023-06-17T13:11:17Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: I reviewed Michael Bond’s Fans: A Journey into the Psychology of Belonging for the TLS: “Fannish devotion,” Michael Bond writes, “is a gregarious impulse.” As the subtitle of his book suggests, he is interested in fandom as a shared experience that gives people’s lives meaning and purpose. In the course of the book, he joins … Continue reading Fans
encoded: I reviewed Michael Bond’s Fans: A Journey into the Psychology of Belonging for the TLS: “Fannish devotion,” Michael Bond writes, “is a gregarious impulse.” As the subtitle of his book suggests, he is interested in fandom as a shared experience that gives people’s lives meaning and purpose. In the course of the book, he joins fans at online meetings and conventions and talks to collectors, cosplayers, fanzine writers and “aca-fans” (researchers who are fans of what they study) to try and understand what forms of belonging fandom takes. Fans begins by framing fandom within the social identity theory pioneered by the psychologist Henri Tajfel. Tajfel’s experiments, conducted in the late 1960s, showed that people require minimal prompting to categorize themselves with others and to favour members of their own group over anyone else. Group identities are an inevitable fact of social life, one of the key ways we position ourselves in the world. Fandoms, Bond argues, suggest that in-groupishness does not have to lead to intolerance towards those outside the group. They offer “the pleasures of tribalism with less of the harm”. After this opening chapter, the social theory takes something of a back seat and the book settles into a diverting tour around the more eccentric shores of fandom. “Fans,” Bond writes, “exist in places you would never think of looking.” He talks to one academic psychologist who is a “Brony”, one of the thousands of British and American men who gather in online communities to celebrate the characters in the toy line and media franchise, My Little Pony. These men are drawn to its themes of friendship and compassion, and enjoy upending expectations about the kinds of things men should be interested in. This same psychologist is also a “furry”, one of the large subgroup of cosplayers who like dressing up as anthropomorphic animal characters such as Bambi, Sonic the Hedgehog and the Lion King. He sometimes lectures dressed in his fursuit, and reports that …

Noli timere
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2023-06-11T11:30:20Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: [Published in Hinterland magazine, issue 12 (2022)] On 13 November 2020, a leaving do was held at No 10 Downing Street, in a room so crowded that people were perched on each other’s laps. Later that evening, Abba’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’ was heard coming from a party in the prime minister’s flat. On … Continue reading Noli timere
encoded: [Published in Hinterland magazine, issue 12 (2022)] On 13 November 2020, a leaving do was held at No 10 Downing Street, in a room so crowded that people were perched on each other’s laps. Later that evening, Abba’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’ was heard coming from a party in the prime minister’s flat. On 11 December, No 10 took delivery of a new drinks fridge for the regular ‘wine-time Fridays’. On 18 December, around fifty people attended a Christmas party, with cheese and wine and the exchange of Secret Santa gifts. Meanwhile my closest friend was dying. In those months, my only contact with her was a series of ever more desultory phone conversations, when she was either worn out and dreamy or high on steroids. At her funeral, in early February, I was one of exactly thirty mourners. Everyone wore masks and no one hugged. At the end we briefly milled around outside, before the next thirty mourners from the next funeral came out. It was so cold that, when I looked down at my hands, I saw that my knuckles were bleeding. When news of the lockdown parties broke, the most enraged were the bereaved – the ones who had been forced to say their farewells through windows in care homes or on iPads, or watch funerals on live streams on their laptops. Those defending the parties didn’t understand, or pretended not to. People had been working hard, they said, and we needed to maintain morale. * Ever since our ancestors first sprinkled ochre on bodies 40,000 years ago, and buried them with favoured objects and adornments, we have needed rituals for the dying and the dead. Gathering round the bed to accompany those in their last hours on their voyage into the unknown, then cleansing and purifying the body, holding wakes, keening, eulogising, taking turns to shovel dirt into the grave, sitting shiva, breaking bread. The rituals wash over us and relieve us of the duty to think. They help to fill the void of unmeaning left when someone we love simply, shockingly, ceases to exist. We sh…

My idea of happiness
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2023-04-02T09:06:45Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: A poem made out of the headlines to Adrian Chiles’s articles in the Guardian I recently saw something in a petrol station toilet Southbound on the M1 that I can never unsee. I spent an afternoon writing my own name. It was lovely until I started overthinking it. What is an app? I honestly have … Continue reading My idea of happiness
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Gen Z and Me
type: item
creator: mccjmora
date: 2023-02-26T10:00:37Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: This is a longer version of the piece I wrote on Generation Z for the London Review of Books: On the walk from the car park to my university building sits a red telephone box, classic K6 model. The other day, out of curiosity, I pulled at its heavy cast iron door, stepped inside, and … Continue reading Gen Z and Me
encoded: This is a longer version of the piece I wrote on Generation Z for the London Review of Books: On the walk from the car park to my university building sits a red telephone box, classic K6 model. The other day, out of curiosity, I pulled at its heavy cast iron door, stepped inside, and let the door thud behind me. It must be fifteen years, at least, since I last experienced that strange dampening of the sounds of the street and that smell of stale urine and old takeaways. For a moment, the phone box became a TARDIS and I was a homesick student ringing my parents again, harassed by the pips that demanded more coins and the lonely finality of the purring dial tone when it cut me off. It reminded me that I am a digital immigrant, raised in a clunkier, analogue age, when long-distance communication felt fragile, precarious, interruptible. I was an early inhabitant of the online world. I remember using Netscape Navigator, one of the first web browsers, in a computer room at the University of Sussex in autumn 1994. I have been an Amazon customer (its website reminds me) since 1999, longer than most of the students I teach have been alive. With mobile devices, though, I was on the other side of the adoption curve. No message seemed so urgent to me that you had to carry round the mailbox in your pocket. I bowed to the inevitable in 2004, with one of those entry-level Nokias, all rounded plastic and chunky buttons. I still had it three years later when I saw that film of Steve Jobs at the Macworld Expo, showing the audience his new phone. No one will want to search the web on something as small and fiddly that, I thought. It will never catch on. Even now, I get so few messages on my garden-variety smartphone that I forget to charge it, or don’t look at it for days. Being mildly dyspraxic and very myopic, I prod at it ponderously and with great emphasis, as if expecting it not to respond. Often it punishes my lack of faith by disowning me, refusing to recognise my thumbprint an…