picture (not mine) and poem (mine)

George Braque- Still Life: Le Jour















Watching the Windows
He stands there, looking eastward,
in dim praise at your presence.
The rain is falling through the streetlight

from nowhere. His favourite nuisance
is back again. He cannot wait to see
where you’ll meet, accidentally,

so your husband should never know;
your bedroom light a beacon, his sight
is clear: your husband will never know.

But it’s all been cryingly told
this morning, husband found the bills,
the evening ahead is quiet and cold,
the streetlight, for now, his whole world fills

Silly man that i am, i've always hid an inner aesthete (sometimes less inner than bleedin obvious), maybe it's because i fancy myself as a dandy, like our friend on the left. which i'm not, because i'm not confident enough. but i do believe the presentation of a style is important, the presentation of a taste is important, and not merely because its fashionable, but because we are the only creation we ever truly have creative control over. But it isn't about Aestheticism alone, its about tying aestheticism to an ethos too. the personality is a creation as much as a look is. some people, mainly in fashion, have the former and not the latter(yet some still aspire, often with truly hideous results; anyone who's sampled the so-called "dandy" prose of Sebastian Horsley's recent memoir will know what i mean).

Due to the impending refurbishment of my dwellhole, somewhat forced, i've been nudged into a slightly more "Colour!Shape!Form!" state of mind than usual. It is truly amazing the effect a quick scan of a Dulux colour chart, and a flick through a furniture brochure will have. Misty Buff! amethyst! China Blue! Toffee Crunch! Lemon Sorbet! Mandarin Segment! (alright, i made the last one up); suddenly i'm seeing colours in my sleep and some weird synaesthesia when i play a Cocteau Twins album. more bizarrely, my inner William Morris seems to have appeared from nowhere, and is angling me at some very Victorian-looking colours, and some unnaturally Baroque looking tables.

i intend to keep my sensible hat on (not black top hat) though; redecoration is fine, new curtains fine, i may even be pushed into a new carpet, but no furniture. i live in this bloody space, and i can't be arsed to upturn my carefully acquired routine so i have some swankier drawers. i want it to be as brief and painless as possible. The thought of moving the 600-odd CDs and two bookcases worth of books out into the garage has got me semi-teary as it is. the things, the precious things! but i'm getting rather enthusiastic about a new colour scheme after 12 years with this one. i want nice deep intense colours, and a lot of cream or white to make sure it isn't too dark and depressing when slitty-wrist season kicks in. And it's an excuse to get some new posters in; the Ratpack and the Smiths will stay, the rest goes. I quite fancy some art posters: Rothko, Velazquez, Whistler, Hopper, who knows! The fact i'm reading a book about twentieth-century British Art is only contributing to all this frippery. fun though.

Which was what last night was. kind of. Happy drinking in a quiet mood, and then the Three Boozes came in, ripped to the gills, and being generally filthy and loud. The Nag had not seen such wassailing in a while i think; i myself had a gentle knock on the face by a friend getting overly friendly, and a story involving another drunken friend's snapped frenulum (look it up, my dears, and say a loud "ow!"), which may have been told in rebuke for knocking his ghastly shirt. Then to top it all off, when said story is getting bogged down in sketchy medical detail, and certain shouty pissed folk are unsure what is being referred to, OUT CAME THE PENISES. IN THE PUB. IN FRONT OF A LAYDEE!!

i should like to make perfectly clearly i kept my own sword very much in its scabbard. i'm not yet prone to public duels. and the two gentlemen involved should really be more than slightly embarrassed. i laughed so hard (sorry, wrong word) i still look like distant cousin of Cherie Blair this morning. thoroughly disturbing, and neither big nor clever(them, not me)

i was going to do loads of stuff about the Huxley i've been reading, but frankly it'll keep. i'm too busy worrying about my frenulum to bother (apparently, its quite a common injury).

think on this, children, and keep 'Yourself' to yourself.

cheerioh!

Evil lurks everywhere

if you are a NBF (thats non-book flogger) you may jump to the natural conclusion that booksellers and library folk regularly get together on opposing mounds of earth outside yr town centres, and throw book stands and OED's at eachother, all the while waving either cash or library cards in a mocking gesture. well, this may occur in some places, but generally i like to feel we're bound together in fraternal feeling. Two excellent bookloving groups attempting to spread literacy, and reading through the public, whilst sharing in a mutual shrug at the often ludicrous behaviour of our public.

in fact i have friends spread throughout our local libraries; and a marvellous mixture of the kind, intellectual, grizzled, and frankly mad, they are. but love i feel, not the squelchy oozy kind of love, more proud, public spirited, and friendly love. though in the past my yearnings for the odd library gel have become oozy and even fuzzy.

but, brothers and sisters, some changes are afoot at my local (library that is, my pub hasn't changed since Richard III stooped through the door and asked for a pint of Guinness). the local council was stormed by the Infidels (the Tory Party, if you don't mind foul language), and the marvellous person in charge is on record as not really seeing the point of libraries.

now i'm not generally a nationalistic person, but four things get me teary-eyed in shirt tugging blubbing jingoistic pride:

the English Legal System

the NHS (regardless of problems, still the most humane thing ever)

the codification of football

the public library system

the last must be the single most important egalitarian idea ever. imagine: the ability to borrow pretty much any book, for free; the opprtunities for entertainment, education, improvement, self discovery are endless. in the last twenty years this has come under attack, like everything else, from daft notions that everything benefits from a commercial/retail model of practice.

this is, quite frankly, BOLLOCKS.

one need only look at the utilities, the transport system, the postal system to see how much privatisation, and contracting out, ruins the quality of service of areas that need to be run for public benefit. steadily the ideas are invading libraries too.

my library system has hired, for lord knows how much money, a group of management consultants!!! yes, the single most pointless group of people history has come up with so far. a non-job; hands up, who thinks that getting people in from outside is a better idea than consulting the wonderful, imaginative folk who are familiar with particular needs of their customers, and the problems of running the system?? anyone?? i thought not.

the ideas so far seem to amount to self-service (ever been to a railway station? seen how many people use the self-service machines there, and how many still queue for an actual person? miniscule isn't it?), making people do more tasks they aren't professionally qualified to do; and a lot of cosmetic bobbins that almost certainly will have negligible effect on people. i mean, whats better a library that's empty but gorgeously styled, or a library that's old, but has most of the books you could want?

there's a whole industry built up now based on the notion that the "product's" appearance is more important than its quality. the takeover of marketing etc. of course, another reason is the growth of consultancy groups who are obsessesed with relatively cheap cosmetic change over long-term investment. thus investment goes into buildings ( as in schools, hospitals etc), but continuous investment in the necessary things to make these establishments worthwhile is ignored (books, staff, equipment etc etc).

it doesn't take Wittgenstein to work out the underlying thrust of these changes: getting rid of staff. self-service, more computer-based information, less people to help you with your enquiry.

and this stuff gets combined with small beer changes such as telling staff they aren't librarians, they are information scientists. and a spade is not a spade, it is a surgical soil scapel .

to be honest i'm not entirely against self-service, as a principle. but my insiders tell me that any reasoned problem staff can see in the new technologies is brushed aside with a couple of responses, used by business and political charlatans everywhere:

1) "it'll be fine in practice, you'll see" combined with Pollyanna-ish smile

2) "you're just being cynical, and negative and resistant to change". or use of such phrases as saboteur.

New Labour is very fond of both of these practices, especially the latter. points are not answered, plans for dealing with problems not suggested, the questioner merely attacked as being unhelpful, old-fashioned, dogmatic, unmodern. anyone who knows their Gramsci will know this is how false ideologies work, the slandering of opponents and the attempt to convince listeners that their suggestions are radical, forward-thinking, and common-sense. you don't win the argument, you merely paint critics as out-of date.Goebbels liked to do it too.

furthermore, when asked what action would be taken if the public posted complaints, employees were told pretty much that complaints would be ignored. how's that for accountability,eh? so this change is going ahead regardless of employees, regardless of practicalities, and last of all regardless of the public that uses the libraries.

my informants also gave me a link to the consultancy's website. and it's rather as you'd expect: brightly coloured, full of clever and impressive sounding mottoes, and marvellous cosmetic ideas, yet not a single instance of they actually do for the no doubt daft sums of money they receive. lots of stuff about team effectiveness, and trends.

unsurprisingly they also waffle on about Brain Gym, that marvellous mental improvement scheme that seems to be invading schools on the most dubious evidence of success. its a mere step away from Paul McKenna, and one more from Deepak bleeding Chopra. if you want an eloquent discussion of the flaws of the analysis of Brain Gym's success, you should see the brilliant Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column in the Guardian (her's the link: http://www.badscience.net/?p=225 ). the top picture shows you the sort of crap folk like them come up with,; they do love diagrams, pie charts etc

its all guff i tell you. anyway. i shall end this rant here, for now. and maybe the next post will be full of the marvellous ideas and thoughts my current reading has offered me.something more positive. bye for now.