excursus into the hidden complexities of something the rest of us mere mortals find merely trivial or not a recognisable pleasure at all. Richard Dawkins , for example, reveals his guilty pleasure is 'computer programming': Yesterday's Guardian weekend magazine included an odd filler-article which let a number of 'great brains' let us in on their guilty pleasures. Read it online here . There was a healthy variety of intellectuals assembled, but I get the feeling that they either did not all get the point or else found it impossible not to turn a simple statement of their preferred leisure activity into a deep and meaningfulinto the hidden complexities of something the rest of us mere mortals find merely trivial or not a recognisable pleasure at all. Richard, for example, reveals his guilty pleasure is 'computer programming':

I have now kicked the habit, but every so often the craving returns and I must thrust it down and away. But whence the guilt? Isn't programming useful? In the right hands, yes. But my projects (inventing a word processor, machine translation from one programming language to another, inventing a programming language of my own) could all be done better (and were) by professionals. It was a classic addiction: prolonged frustration, occasionally rewarded by a briefly glowing fix of achievement. It was that pernicious "just one more push to see what's over the next mountain and then I'll call it a day" syndrome. It was a lonely vice, interfering with sleeping, eating, useful work and healthy human intercourse. I'm glad it's over and I won't start up again. Except ... perhaps one day, just a little ...



Such a wag, that Dawkins . Others (Stephen Pinker, say) threaten to turn their chosen pleasure (in his case, rock music) into another domain for their particular intellectual efforts but eventually recognise how odd this would seem. (Martha Nussbaum gives a nice account of why she loves baseball only slightly marred by a gratuitous reference to Marcus Aurelius.)

Popbitch disappoint our expectations if he feels the urge to point out the interesting syntactical and lexical quirks of pop lyrics? (Or, perhaps, rage at My question, reading this, was: What are our expectations, as non-intellectuals, reading this? Would we be comforted if Professor X said she simply loved readingevery week? Or are we disappointed since we want to imagine her relaxing with some challenging Hungarian cinema? Do we want these people do have a life beyond their profession or do we think there should be no possibility of having sensibly compartmentalised bits of a person's life? Does a linguist confirm orour expectations if he feels the urge to point out the interesting syntactical and lexical quirks of pop lyrics? (Or, perhaps, rage at the confusion of two similar verbs ...)

I hope we don't insist that these pleasures should be guilty (a point one or two contributors do make) or else our 'intellectuals' are condemned to be less approachable and less relevant to the rest of us. (There is, of course, the related question of whether we need or want this handy category of 'intellectual', but that's a topic for another day.)