Grit in the Gears

I am the grit in the gears, the missing bolt, I am the poker of sticks into spokes. I like to know how things work, but sometimes when I take them apart and rebuild them, I have a few pieces left over. I am a man, so I tend to leave reading the instructions until after it goes wrong. And like all men I have a comprehensive mental map of the world and never need to ask directions. I never get lost, only sometimes I'm late, or end up in the wrong place entirely. It's what we do.

Sunday, 18 March 2007

Oh no! the record industry, that bastion of.........

The recording industry, that bastion of good taste, honesty, and fair distribution of costs and profits thinks file sharing is a crime!
Well, we saw it with the book industry too.
Once, nobody outside a monastery had the skills to make a book. Then along came that damned Gutenberg, inventing printing presses, and any fool could duplicate books.
Even more worrying. Peasants eventually learned to read and write, putting literally dozens of scribes out of work.
What really worries me though, is libraries, and the growing trend of book owners to lend books to others to read, thus depriving the publishing industry of profits and throwing the families of jobless monks into the street.
A further worry to us is the open availability of pencils and pens. Using these, it is possible for criminals to copy whole sentences, and, with that other item, whose posession we'd like to see controlled, or restricted, paper, these people can pin up illegally copied words, sentences, even whole Paragraphs in public places for all to see.
Furthermore, in a recent visit to an academic establishment I was horrified to find students being encouraged to learn and memorise, for instance, whole poems- even formulae, and songs. I saw plays performed where actors and actresses had memorised the lines, not a single one carrying an authorised text.
I tell you, unless the perpetrators are given punitive fines and prison sentences, the book publishing industry is doomed.

Friday, 16 March 2007

Sloth -Fairport Convention

Fairport Convention - Sloth

Chorus)

Just a roll, just a roll

Just a roll on your drum

Just a roll, just a roll

And the war has begun



Now the right thing's the wrong thing

No more excuses to come

Just one step at a time

And the war has begun



(Chorus)



She's run away, she's run away

And she ran so bitterly

Now call to your colours, friend

Don't you call to me



(Chorus)



Don't you cry, don't you cry

Don't you cry upon the sea

Don't you cry, don't you cry

For your lady and me



(Chorus)

(Chorus

From the 1970 album, Full House.
I'll be at Fairport's Cropredy Festival in Oxfordshire, in August....

Poetry......

Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea-Garden
by Keith Douglas

As a white stone draws down the fish
she on the seafloor of the afternoon
draws down men's glances and their cruel wish
for love. Her red lip on the spoon

slips in a morsel of ice-cream. Her hands
white as a shell, are submarine
fronds sinking with spread fingers, lean
along the table, carmined at the ends.

A cotton magnate, an important fish
with great eyepouches and a golden mouth
through the frail reefs of furniture swims out
and idling, suspended, stays to watch.

A crustacean old man, clamped to his chair
sits near her and might coldly see
her charms through fissures where the eyes should be;
or else his teeth are parted in a stare.

Captain on leave, a lean dark mackerel
lies in the offing, turns himself and looks
through currents of sound.
The flat-eyed flatfish
sucks on a straw, staring from its repose, laxly.

And gallants in shoals swim up and lag
circling and passing near the white attraction;
sometimes pausing, opening a conversation:
fish pause so to nibble or tug.

But now the ice-cream is finished, is
paid for. The fish swim off on business
and she sits alone at the table, a white stone
useless except to a collector, a rich man.