Pretty Words

Pretty Words
By Elinor Wylie
Poets make pets of pretty, docile words:
I love smooth words, like gold-enamelled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish,
And tender ones, like downy-feathered birds:
Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds,
Come to my hand, and playful if I wish,
Or purring softly at a silver dish,
Blue Persian kittens fed on cream and curds.
I love bright words, words up and singing early;
Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;
Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees,
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog
(Alicia Ostriker)

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God's love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended skirt

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other
dogs can smell it

A Town With no Cheer.

The town is Serviceton, some 440 miles northwest of Melbourne, near the border between Victoria and South Australia. It used to BE the border until a surveying error was discovered, putting it wholly within Victoria. It was at Serviceton that two different states' respective railway systems met, and at one time, passengers would exit one train, and embark upon another. In the in-between time, they would refresh themselves in the station's grand refreshment rooms, the largest such on any australian railway outside a major town, Serviceton itself is a tiny place, a hub of rural activities, but it has few inhabitants. The border was truly a border, a place where two colonies met, where laws were different, taxes too. Customs officers levied duty on freight, smuggling was rife. On an Australian tour, Tom Waits picked up a newspaper with a story about Vic-Rail's decision to pass trains through Serviceton without stopping, and the effect a closure of the station bar and restaurant would have on an already struggling small town. The refreshment room closed in 1981, the station closed in 1986. "The arrival of the station spurred the development of the town. Over the next two years a post office, several general stores, a boarding house and hotel were established and a butcher, hairdresser, plumber, chemist and bricklayer set up premises. The National Bank rented a room at the hotel and a creamery opened in 1891. A fence was erected along the entire length of the border in 1888-89 to keep rabbits and dingoes out of South Australia. The station was closed in 1986 and is now in a state of some disrepair and today there are about a half dozen remaining residents." 'Patterson's Curse' is the name for a blue-flowering plant, Echium plantagineum, introduced to Australia as a garden plant. The common name for it in Australia is said to derive from Jane Paterson, who in the 1880s planted this in her garden, only for it to spread uncontrollably over all the pastures. The plant produces a toxic alkaloid, sheep and cattle can tolerate it, and in drought years, it may be a valuable source of feed for them, but it kills horses and other non-ruminant livestock, by severely damaging the liver. Cutting it only makes it more vigorous. Australia considers it the worst threat to agriculture outside of drought. After bushfires, it is often the first plant to reappear, to the detriment of all others.

"Town With No Cheer" Tom Waits

Well it's hotter 'n blazes, and all the long faces-
there'll be no oasis for a dry local grazier,
there'll be no refreshment for a thirsty jackaroo,
from Melbourne to Adelaide on the overlander
with newfangled buffet cars and faster locomotives
the train stopped in Serviceton less and less often.

There's nothing sadder than a town with no cheer
Vic Rail decided the canteen was no longer necessary there
no spirits, no bilgewater and 80 dry locals
and the high noon sun beats a hundred and four
there's a hummingbird trapped in a closed down shoe store
This tiny Victorian rhubarb
kept the watering hole open for sixty five years.

Now it's boilin' in a miserable March twenty-first
wrapped the hills in a blanket of Patterson's curse
the train smokes down the xylophone
there'll be no stopping here
all ya can be is thirsty in a town with no cheer.

No Bourbon, no Branchwater,
though the townspeople here
fought the Vic Rail decree tooth and nail.

Now it's boilin' in a miserable March twenty-first

wrapped the hills in a blanket of Patterson's curse
the train smokes down the xylophone
there'll be no stopping here
all ya can be is thirsty in a town with no cheer

By Request: (Adullamite wanted to see the trains)

It's a Library, Jim, but Not As We Know It.

Royal Ordnance Factory Number 9 was built at Thorp Arch, near Wetherby, in Yorkshire, opening in 1940. Its purpose was as a place where all manner of bombs, shells, cartridge casings, mines, (anything the war effort needed to go bang) were filled with various kinds of explosives. As you can see from the picture above, it was situated on flat farmland, with its own railway links.. From 1940 to the late fifties, it was a closed and secret site. It did not appear on maps. When it closed, a local businessman bought most of the site, which became home to a myriad of businesses. It's still a pretty strange place. Railway lines disappear into blast revetements, many of the buildings are still earth-bunded, or buried. Back in wartime, of course, this would have been a very high-risk zone. Earth-bunded stores were there to contain and limit the damage that an explosion would cause. An explosion in a store not surrounded by thick earth banks would spread horizontally, killing all around, and setting off neighbouring stores in a chain-reaction. The idea of the earth was that the horizontal shockwave would be strongly attennuated, sending the main force of the blast mostly skywards. 

One part of the site, however, the part that held the site's main offices and administration was retained by the government, and became a national scientific library.
It was the National Lending Library for Science and Technology, the largest such establishment in europe.
It was said that the Russian section was the largest russian language library outside Russia, and the Chinese section....ditto.
Way back, in the early seventies, I worked there, in a year between school and college, and in my student years, I returned there during college vacations, in order to earn money to sustain my student beer book habit.
I wrote this in an earlier post, promising I'd one day write more. Not that anybody requested me to, or even wanted me to, but....
"Years ago, after I left school, before university, I took a year out.
The main reason was that I had been severely ill in the period leading to my final exams, missing a lot of school, revising time, in hospital for six weeks, hooked up to oxygen, and coming close to death a few times.
So when I was released to take those vital exams, I was definitely not at my best, and confidently expected to fail them, and go back to school to retake my final year.
So I didn't apply to further education, I was too busy just staying alive. In fact I passed them all, comfortably, including an extra one thrown in by my headmaster, for which I had not studied at all. That's a story in itself.
So then I had a year to fill, before further education. And not for me, the resources so often taken for granted now, to go travelling around the world, no gap year for me, a work year was predicated.
I did a short stint in the social security office, posting envelopes deliberately late to miss the post.
My boss required this.
There was a legal ruling that social security claimants be notified of an inspector's visit, so cards had to be sent out...
However, my boss required those cards miss the last post collection, and thus arrive after the inspector.
If say, you were a single woman, and the inspector saw a man's shirt in your home, your claim for rent payment would be disallowed, as it would be deemed evidence you were cohabiting with a man, and therefore he could pay your rent.
The whole aethos of the Department of Health and Social Security (or Stealth and Total Obscurity as we called it) was confrontational, its mission was to withhold , pay nobody, and generally obstruct claimants. I obstructed the department by altering the case notes of my school mates, ticking boxes and passing claims.... and warning them of intended visits. I hated being a part of that machine, so i asked around for other jobs. A friend said he'd heard that the library was hiring.
The Library-
The National Lending Library For Science and Technology. A vast unlibrary-like place, situated in a wartime munitions factory, full of clanking conveyors, shelves of secrets, not open to the public, although there was a reading room.
I applied...
Signed the Official Secrets Act, became an Assistant Scientific Officer (unestablished), and gained entry to a treasure chest."

I was (haha!) designated "Assistant Scientific Officer (unestablished)". My grade was pretty lowly, but the department I worked in was of a flexible and nebulous nature, Officially we handled donations to the library. (Crates of, truckloads of books, university theses, magazines, scientific journals), but we also were used as a pool of persons to fill gaps in other departments, and to do jobs for which there was no prior protocol.
Much of the place was in the old single storey wartime buildings, some was in a modern (in the early seventies) multi-storey concrete building. Throughout all this site, an overhead conveyor ran, carrying trays everywhere. If a request was made for an item, a worker would retrieve the item from the relevant address, then place it on a conveyor tray, pulling a series of pegs on the suspension arm, to code the destination. Off the tray would go, when the coded pegs met the corresponding key station, the tray would be tipped onto a roller conveyor to  the person who would handle the request.



In the years since, it became the northern site of the British Library. It supplies documents to libraries and universities, and researchers around the world. Visitors may go to a reading room on site, and request books and documents, which are brought to them. Unlike in a conventional library, you can't, as a reader, browse through the stacks. You don't see any of it. Just the reading room.

Fairly recently, I had a chance meeting with somebody who works there now, and he emailed me details of an Open Day  planned for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding.
And I applied for and recieved an invitation to it.
Little of it is as at was back then. New buildings have arrived, and new tasks. Digitisation rather than photocopying. Emailing files where we crated books. Imagine.
We sent, as I recall, fifteen tons of crated books and scientific periodicals to the University of Ulan bator in Outer Mongolia.

Good to see new tasks emerging. One is an internet archive, attempting to record web pages, blogs, all manner of ephemera which otherwise would be lost without trace.

The most interesting part of the trip, to me was seeing the new document store, opened this summer. The rest of the place is a library, but not as we know it, but this new bit?
Well. imagine a controlled environment, where the aisles are too high and narrow for humans, the atmosphere is controlled at oxygen levels which will not sustain fire, or microbes....  This obviously isn't too good for humans, and thus the librarians are robots. They work in darkness. No human knows where to find a book. The computer remembers each book's position, the robot cranes zip along, up and down, back and forth, in darkness, when a book is called for, the robot retrieves the plastic crate holding the relevant volume, and delivers it to a conveyor, which, shades of a bygone era, takes it to the waiting human, out in the light, with oxygen.
When the book returns, it will not go to the place from which it was plucked. Robots don't need our familiar ordered dewey decimal, or alphabetic library shelf tags. Gradually, the robots will re-sort their charges, and the oft called-for tomes will be stacked nearer the front, rarely used ones will go to the  back. The library will constantly learn and reshuffle itself in its quest for efficiency.

 Not my pic: During the building phase.

As you see, not very library-looking!

 So, here's a little bit of conventional library. Wide aisles, lights, human-height shelving.

A scanning station. This frighteningly expensive machine, which will be dated and then obsolete in the blink of an eye, turns pages automatically and scans pretty much as fast as it can turn a page. humans are still needed to check it's doing it right.

Just some of the stuff the document centre handles.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Courier, May 7th 1892

A letter, from Samuel Cooper, of Boston, to Benjamin Franklin, dated 17th septembere1773, the day after the Bosto Tea Party, which it describes.

Second world war era buildings repurposed.

1970s

Overall, an interesting afternoon for me. We weren't allowed tp wander indiscriminately, alas, but chaperoned around the site in groups of ten or so. I didn't meet anyone I knew.

 On leaving the site, I turned into the Thorp Arch Trading Estate, and had a look at the old bunkers. Some are still in use as explosives stores, others are underground retail stores. The photos aren't good. It was rapidly getting dark, and brrr! it was cold.

The end.

Donkey Thought Bubble

"Like wow, man, I'm buzzin'!

She just gave us mushroom-cookies, and now look at him, making like star-trek, man.. 

Hey Wow! the colours! Wow, my eyes! Wow! Oh look! The planets! Fuck! This is weird!"

Oops:Apology for error, I posted this via Picasa, and  Picasa displayed an error message but the post seemed to be all present in the drafts folder.... But not quite. The pic I was seeing was not uploaded, the html still pointed to 'localhost'

Whimpering in Inner Space.

I'm swallowing antibiotics in capsules big enough to travel in. I think I'll fit one with a seat and an intergalactic propulsion system.
Over the last week, my left ear has been gradually  tuning in  to the cosmos,  registering strange popping sounds, clicks buzzes, gurgles, and general white noise. The tuning was really crummy, I never got to hear a full sentence or identifiable sound, but on sunday it started to be painful, not just annoying. On monday I went to work and was extremely wobbly, my balance was definitely odd and touching in front, behind or under my ear really hurt. Oh. And I was working twelve feet up, on a scaffolding tower. Or I was trying to. By 9 a.m., it was obvious that anything requiring balance or concentration or bending down, or turning around, was a bad idea. I decided to do the sensible thing, and call my doctor. Unbelievably, the receptionist said "Can you get here for ten-thirty?", instead of the "Earliest appointment I can give you is next thursday", which I'd been expecting.
So I wobbled into the office, told the boss I'd be gone for a while, and went to see the doc, who peered in my ear and said "You're fine, no sign of..... Ooh?" meanwhile I was gripping the chair with white knuckles and attempting not to squeal.
"Oh" she said. "Nasty. I'll give you some antibiotics, you might  need some over-the-counter pain relief."
What! Might? AAAAAAOOOOOOOW! She prodded my ear, which made me levitate with screwed shut eyes and thought I might... MIGHT need pain relief?
Anyway, I went to the pharmacy with the prescription, picked up a carton of space-capsules, and some ibuprofen, and went back to work. Whimpering (more like a whipped mouse than a man).
By yesterday evening I was seeing purple sparks and wondering if I could mix ibuprofen with vodka and pour it into the ear. Or clove oil. Or burning jet fuel, anything, anything.
I ended up just going to bed and trying not to move my head at all. I did eventually  fall asleep, and dreamed all sorts of horrible dreams. The mad doctor had my head clamped in a vise and was trying to drill into my brain through my ear, in order to implant a controller and turn me into a human robot.

This morning, the pain was subsiding a bit, and strange noises had resumed. The capsules make me nauseous, but it's preferable to the alternative.

This has been a shamelessly self pitying post, and unabashed trolling for sympathy. I know you're thinking "Stand up, man,  don't be a spineless, snivelling wimp!"
But today, that's me. Spineless as a jellyfish.

It's the Eighties....

Occupy? The City?

Sup up your beer and collect your fags,
There’s a row going on down near slough,
Get out your mat and pray to the west,
I’ll get out mine and pray for myself.

Thought you were smart when you took them on,
But you didn’t take a peep in their artillery room,
All that rugby puts hairs on your chest,
What chance have you got against a tie and a crest.

Hello-hurrah - what a nice day - for the eton rifles,
Hello-hurrah - I hope rain stops play - with the eton rifles.

Thought you were clever when you lit the fuse,
Tore down the house of commons in your brand new shoes,
Compose a revolutionary symphony,
Then went to bed with a charming young thing.

Hello-hurrah - cheers then mate - it’s the eton rifles,
Hello-hurrah - an extremist scrape - with the eton rifles.

What a catalyst you turned out to be,
Loaded the guns then you run off home for your tea,
Left me standing - like a guilty (naughty) schoolboy.

We came out of it naturally the worst,
Beaten and bloody and I was sick down my shirt,
We were no match for their untamed wit,
Though some of the lads said they’ll be back next week.

Hello-hurrah - there’s a price to pay - to the eton rifles,
Hello-hurrah - I’d prefer the plague - to the eton rifles.

Hello-hurrah - there’s a price to pay - to the eton rifles,
Hello-hurrah - I’d prefer the plague - to the eton rifles.