Monday, 17 August 2009
Saturday, 15 August 2009
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
Sam Selvon - The Lonely Londoners
Monday, 10 August 2009
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Kurt Vonnegut - Palm Sunday
'Are we foolish to be so elated by books in an age of movies and television? Not in the least, for our ability to read, when combined with libraries like this one, makes us the freest of women and men - and children.
'(That is such a strange word on a printed page, incidentally: "freest -f-r-e-e-s-t." I'm glad I'm not a foreigner.)
'Anyway - because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next - and how we should think about it. We can fill our head with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis - at any time of night or day.
'Even more magically, perhaps, we readers can communicate with each other across space and time so cheaply. Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper- at a cost of less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.
'Think of that.
'Compare that with the budgets of Cecil B. DeMille.
'Film is simply one more prosthetic device for human beings who are incomplete in some way. We live not only in the Age of Film, but in the Age of False Teeth and Glass Eyes and Toupees and Silicone Breasts - and on and on.
'Film is a perfect prescription for people who will not or cannot read, and have no imagination. Since they have no imaginations, those people can now be shown actors and scenery instead - with appropriate music and all that.
'But again, film is a hideously expensive way to tell anybody anything - and I include television and all that. What is more: Healthy people exposed to too many actors and too much scenery may wake up one morning to find their own imaginations dead.
'The only cure I know of is a library - and the ability to read.
'Reading exercises the imagination - tempts it to go from strength to strength.
'So much for that.
'It would surely be shapely on an occasion like this if something holy were said. Unfortunately, the speaker you have hired is a Unitarian. I know almost nothing about holy things.
'The language is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holy things.
'Literature is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holiness.
"Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a thing we give to ourselves.
'Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads.
'And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.
'By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.
'This is to me is a miracle.
'The motto of this noble library is the motto of all meditators throughout time: "Quiet, please."
'Thus ends my speech.
'I thank you for your attention.'
excerpt from speech, "The Noodle Factory" (opening of new library at Connecticut College; October the 1st 1976)
Friday, 31 July 2009
Mark Hodkinson - The Last Mad Surge Of Youth
"But maybe that's what's given us both the edge, especially you with the music, having to fight for things and not getting them on a plate".
"Possibly, but I could have done without it thank you very much. We were a long time in that fucking school. As it happens, we were OK, we made it through, but what about the ones who didn't? The kid who killed himself on the railway line, others that had the shit kicked out of them every day. Do you remember the psychopath Robert Smithson who used to hang kids off the bridge over the motorway? While we were suffering all that, other kids elsewhere, rich kids, were being told that they were great, kept away from the nutters, and, lo, they're now running the country. Most of the top blokes at record companies went to public schools. Fancy that, they're even running rock 'n' roll, the branch of the corporate family business that's supposed to champion the underdog and provide a dissenting voice."
"Do you ever get accused of having a chip on your shoulder?"
"Of course I do. That's how they disempower you. They're clever. They have ways of discrediting arguments that get too close to the truth. Do you know what is our greatest weakness, the working-class? We want to be liked. They don't have that problem, the middle-class. They like themselves enough as it is. We're always seeking approval, doffing the cap. We're too easily hurt and put off doing anything."
Monday, 27 July 2009
Paul Kingsnorth - Real England
The question and now is: what can be done to help them succeed? How can we save the Real England? Firstly, it seems to me, we all need to take back control of our own lives. We need to break that dependency on the Thing and take responsibility for our own places. If we care about small shops we need to stop going to Sainsbury's. If we care about farms or orchards disappearing, we need to support them. If we care about our local area, we have to stand up and be counted. Blaming everyone and everything else won't cut it. Societies are made up of people - people like us. It's people who make cultures thrive or die. Blame the government, if you like, and blame Tesco too: they certainly deserve it. But don't think that is a substitute for looking in the mirror and asking yourself what you have done, and what you can do.
Sunday, 26 July 2009
Edward Lear - The New Vestments
There lived an old man in the kingdom of Tess,
Who invented a purely original dress;
And when it was perfectly made and complete,
He opened the door, and walked into the street.
By way of a hat, he'd a loaf of Brown Bread,
In the middle of which he inserted his head;--
His Shirt was made up of no end of dead Mice,
The warmth of whose skins was quite fluffy and nice;--
His Drawers were of Rabit-skins, -- but it is not known whose;--
His Waistcoat and Trowsers were made of Pork Chops;--
His Buttons were Jujubes, and Chocolate Drops;--
His Coat was all Pancakes with Jam for a border,
And a girdle of Biscuits to keep it in order;
And he wore over all, as a screen from bad weather,
A Cloak of green Cabbage-leaves stitched all together.
He had walked a short way, when he heard a great noise,
Of all sorts of Beasticles, Birdlings, and Boys;--
And from every long street and dark lane in the town
Beasts, Birdles, and Boys in a tumult rushed down.
Two Cows and a half ate his Cabbage-leaf Cloak;--
Four Apes seized his Girdle, which vanished like smoke;--
Three Kids ate up half of his Pancaky Coat,--
And the tails were devour'd by an ancient He Goat;--
An army of Dogs in a twinkling tore up his
Pork Waistcoat and Trowsers to give to their Puppies;--
And while they were growling, and mumbling the Chops,
Ten boys prigged the Jujubes and Chocolate Drops.--
He tried to run back to his house, but in vain,
Four Scores of fat Pigs came again and again;--
They rushed out of stables and hovels and doors,--
They tore off his stockings, his shoes, and his drawers;--
And now from the housetops with screechings descend,
Striped, spotted, white, black, and gray Cats without end,
They jumped on his shoulders and knocked off his hat,--
When Crows, Ducks, and Hens made a mincemeat of that;--
They speedily flew at his sleeves in trice,
And utterly tore up his Shirt of dead Mice;--
They swallowed the last of his Shirt with a squall,--
Whereon he ran home with no clothes on at all.
And he said to himself as he bolted the door,
'I will not wear a similar dress any more,
'Any more, any more, any morre, never more!'
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
George Orwell - Such, Such Were the Joys
There was the joy of waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour's undisturbed reading (Ian Hay, Thackeray, Kipling and H. G. Wells were the favourite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit, sleeping dormitory. There was also cricket, which I was no good at but with which I conducted a sort of hopeless love affair up to the age of about eighteen. And there was the pleasure of keeping caterpillars — the silky green and purple puss-moth, the ghostly green poplar-hawk, the privet-hawk, large as one's third finger, specimens of which could be illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in the town — and, when one could escape long enough from the master who was ‘taking the walk’, there was the excitement of dredging the dew-ponds on the Downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies. This business of being out for a walk, coming across something of fascinating interest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the master, like a dog jerked onwards by the leash, is an important feature of school life, and helps to build up the conviction, so strong in many children, that the things you most want to do are always unattainable.
Passport to Pimlico (1949)
Frederick Albert 'Fred' Cowan: You can't push English people around like sacks of potatoes.
Jim Garland: English?
Connie Pemberton: Don't you come that stuff, Jim Garland! We always were English, and we'll always be Englsh, and it's just because we are English that we're sticking up for our rights to be Burgundians!
Monday, 20 July 2009
Sunday, 19 July 2009
Alan Sillitoe -The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner
By the time I’m half-way through my morning course, when after a frost-bitten dawn I can see a phlegmy bit of sunlight hanging from the bare twigs of beech and sycamore, and when I've measured my half-way mark by the short-cut scrimmage down the steep bush-covered bank and into the sunken lane, when still there's not a soul in sight and not a sound except the neighing of a piebald foal in a cottage stable that I can't see, I get to thinking the deepest and daftest of all. The governor would have a fit if he could see me sliding down the bank because I could break my neck or ankle, but I can't not do it because it's the only risk I take and the only excitement I ever get, flying flat-out like one of them pterodactyls from the 'Lost World' I once heard on the wireless, crazy like a cut-balled cockerel, scratching myself to bits and almost letting myself go but not quite. It's the most wonderful minute because there's not one thought or word or picture of anything in my head while I’m going down. I'm empty, as empty as I was before I was born, and I don't let myself go, I suppose, because whatever it is that's farthest down inside me don't want me to dig or hurt myself bad. And it's daft to think deep, you know, because it gets you nowhere, though deep is what I am when I've passed this half-way mark because the long-distance run of an early morning makes me think that every run like this is a life--a little life, I know--but a life as full of misery and happiness and things happening as you can ever get really around yourself--and I remember that after a lot of these runs I thought that it didn't need much know-how to tell how a life was going to end once it had got well started. But as usual I was wrong, caught first by the cops and then by my own bad brain, I could never trust myself to fly scot-free over these traps, was always tripped up sooner or later no matter how many I got over to the good without even knowing it. Looking back I suppose them big trees put their branches to their snouts and gave each other the wink, and there I was whizzing down the bank and not seeing a bloody thing.
photo: © John Hedgecoe
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