Anger-Terror

As I went about earning my daily bread a few years ago, I ran into this young man several times. He always had an attitude; is English wasn't very good but it was clear that he was particularly upset at women wielding authority. Though he might have ended up on the wrong side of the law in any case (and that is not a foregone conclusion) the destruction of Somalia gave him a huge banner to ride behind; and that destruction was allowed passively, at least, at the very top levels of this country.

That fact is documented in The Family: the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power, by Jeff Sharlet.

You need to know what your country is up to, if for no other reason than that the blowback loop is larger and faster now than it's ever been.

Financial Realities

The Revolutionary War was a middle-class endeavour. If you look at the catalogues of certain university libraries you will see the Acts the Colonies passed, raising money and men – at one point a million pounds from Rhode Island alone. I doubt the corporations have done that research; or perhaps they have. In any case, by greed or luck, they have produced a real stratagem.

Destroy the middle class and the revolution is forestalled.

The Gibbon and the Mirror

I saw a documentary once about the effects of western tourism on places environmentally unsuited to coping with it – specifically national parks in Africa. A hundred yards from the tourist hut, which was nicely constructed in the local style, was the smoking midden, which contained the remains of used tampax, metal food cans, broken kettles and mirrors. At the edge of the midden was one of the native gibbons with a fragment of mirror, changing the angle of the mirror, looking at his face edgewise, side-on, frontally, changing expression…

That's us. The world a non biodegradable midden, and ourselves watching mirrors, lenses, screens, our personae and reflections.

Tools, Tasks

For most of human history the task – flaking a stone, stirring the soup, welding steel – has pre-dated and determined the shape of the tool.  Ever since they escaped from Xerox Park, computers and their applications – the net, web 2.0 – have been tools in search of tasks.

In 1978, when I was working for a large documentary film library, Xerox produced a series of 8 films to introduce word processing. Though I didn't appraise the whole series, which we did buy, I remember the films aimed at management emphasizing the money companies could save – fewer secretaries / administrative assistants, smaller typing pool – because the new technology was so much more productive. 

Saving costs through layoff or hiring fewer workers was, in fact, the only selling-point for this convoluted new way of creating business letters.

The films aimed at the prospective staff emphasized promotional openings: those lucky, snappy, serious administrative assistants! 

The typing pool, renamed I forget how, all male, in an open-plan office with floor-to-ceiling panels angling light from the building's glass wall, was supposed to be happy with its gadgets. The guy who wasn't being interviewed, the one out of focus, the one in the seat in the background, looked miserable, resentful and trapped. I knew then the scenario would produce a rich harvest of lawsuits, but thought the grounds would be sensory deprivation and mental cruelty. In 1978 nobody knew that salvation, such as it was, had lain in the trip to the filing-cabinet, the manual carriage-return, the interleaving of the carbons, the winding them around the platen.

Beyond word-processing, for which they had been invented, computers languished as a mass-consumer item until email. That was their killer app, the reason so many people decided they had to have one. Email and computers would strengthen community by improving communication.

Web 2.0 is a series of tools in search of tasks.

My local library has embedded Homeless / Mental Health / Food Resources information on the its website. It's a good idea. This information needs to be made available.

But it occurs to me that putting it on the Library website points to a basic problem: most of the homeless don't have access to computers. The homeless have to go to the library and ask for the info, if they think to do it or are told to; having the info on the website instead of in a filing cabinet behind the desk is a distinction without a difference when it comes to answering the question.

The fact that this information will be coming from a website instead of from neighbours / social workers / churches / the immediate community, doesn't mend our social divisions  It makes them crystal clear.

Tools of the Trade

Pencils

My mother always kept a Copperplate pencil on top of the penny-box by the phone in the kitchen. The pencil was perennially, unalterably, essentially, transubstantiatedly blunt. The only paper we had to hand were the rectangular, bent, sweet, waxy, recursively-scented liners from Palmolive  soap. (Those dark brown, oval, translucent bars of glycerine, Pears  soap, didn't have paper liners. The white wrapping was all there was. Pears  was special; Pears was the soap you couldn't get during the War.)

The waxy side of a Palmolive soap liner was impervious to the very blunt pencil; the other side was not. I did preschool doodles. My mother wrote grocery lists.

The first thing I wrote with at school was a stone stick. I wrote on a slate. We wiped the slate clean with a damp rag, waited for the surface to dry, and began again. I don't think I did this very long; my memories of this are soft and fleeting. My next firm memory is of one of the pencils my father brought home from work – another blunt point, but the lead was a kind of redbrown brick. He brought a small pad of oddly-lined paper, too. I took it to school and used the pad and the pencil to learn addition, and also to learn that the page wasn't used up when I'd drawn a very small circle enclosing a cross in the top right-hand corner. I didn't want to go back to those pages, but did; filled them with arithmetic. 2+2=4. 

Blunt. Brick. (Shouldn't be. The lines on the pad too dark, too close together blunt, shouldn't be,  looming tall black shape, looming, smelling of a different kind of breakfast, yelling.)

What did we do yesterday?

That was when I began lodging knowledge in the corners of the classroom where the ceiling met the walls, finding it there the next day in my panic, in the pressure of the questions, using it to ward off the horror that followed failure to answer. What did we do yesterday? – Two and two are four. – What are two and two? – Four!

Great pencil-makers of the 1950s... Australia: Copperplate; Germany: Staedtler; England: Derwent. (Oh those tiered rows – 72 colour-graduated Derwent pencils, how they promised to reproduce reality,  make it something you could take with you in your pocket and have - How I wanted one of those boxes. How vastly it would have been wasted on someone who still can't draw…) My cousin mentioned recently that you couldn't reproduce a South Australian sky with Derwent colours. (Oh... Of course. They match the English landscape.)

Staedtler pencils had a profile of a Spartan soldier in a helmet near the top of the shaft. They seemed very stately. Copperplate pencils were pointed; the pointed end was painted black, separated from the thinner red paint on the shaft by a thin white stripe. The pencils were hexagonal; comforting to run along your lips in moments of happy inattention, chunky and satisfying when chewing your pencil was all the protest you could make.

Pens

We began to use ink in grade 3, and ink meant ink in bottles and pens with separate, curved, replaceable nibs – wooden or plastic nib-holder, steel nib – and you could get them at places like the local greengrocer, along with sheets of glittery pictures to stick into scrapbooks with glue made from flour and water –

Great varieties of nibs, fine, medium, broad – nothing as broad as an broad American calligraphic nib, nothing like; it was the kind of nib a bank-clerk would have used during the Boer War, that kind of pen-holder, also. Dipping the nib, draining it against the side of the bottle, achieving the balance (too much ink vs. having to re-dip too few letters later)…

The pale aqua pen-holder that eventually got chewed so much that its point broke off – oh, how miserable it was, how unlovable, the shaft with the Mt St Helens-sized shear, and the balance fatally affected –

My father's pen, mid-brown wooden with the dark Quink-coloured ink-stain. I think it must have hailed from the early 40s, if not his night-classes in the late 30s –

Mapping-pens from Sands and MacDougall, Stationers, of King William Street, tiny, between a 10^th and a 16^th of an inch across, intimidating because Indian ink is indelible –

And the rest of the stationary store: concentrated cordial-colours of protractors and set-squares looked at edge-on; the slightly repellent light from the cheap and stiff and difficult brass compasses; the oddness of the slightly marbled plastic Australias – sometimes the same colours that laminex came in (one long wandering slit for the Murray-Darling, complete absence of other holes signifying sizeable bodies of water, the borders long, slotted lines); the unstable, toppling plastic Britains with their slotted borders, nearly snapping at Scotland –

Ink

At home we used Skrip – a mid-royal blue; the bottle had a small well built into the side of the neck. You tipped the whole bottle upside down (with the cap on) and the well would fill. You used that for dipping the nib – it kept you from dipping into the bottle itself and getting ink above the metal section that held the nib (and making your pen look horrible). My father was a chartered accountant. His books were perfect: pale, marble-edged folio-sized pages, columns of copperplate words and figures in Skrip mid-blue.

As you opened the bottle the slightly sharp smell, the deep and vivid liquid, the clear glass containments, the sense of great possibility –

The main ink favoured by the girls at school was Quink, a darker, greeney-blue ink make by the Parker company, which also made fountain-pens. Among the girls in grades 6 & 7 the trick was to add water to the ink to make it paler. The palest ink didn't necessarily win – ink could, unbelievably, be too pale.

The worst thing you could do was use the school ink – greeney-black gunk, made at the beginning of the term out behind the tuck shop, older boys using funnels and odd rubber tubing and clear glass demijons, the green component standing thin and separate on the glass above the dark mass of the black and more sedimentary sludge –

At mysteriously-determined moments the designated boys poured it – demijons from the sliding-door cupboards at the back of the room - into the black inkwells built into every desk. The inkwells were plastic, got stuffed with blotting-paper, got filthy. I think cleaning them – at the end of the term – was somebody's punishment.

Ink at highschool became Skrip in the fountain-pen (Platignum, dark goldey-black leopard-coloured stripes), replaced in Leaving by the Bic – Australian for ballpoint – you could write faster with them and you had to write fast in those hot, sweaty, mind-blank exams, 1, 2, or 3 hours, invigilated in a sandstone hall in the city.

Latin in 2^nd Yr, 1963. Hot afternoons, your head nearly level with the desk while you wrote with your fountain-pen, slight smell of wet ink, hot bright green leaves through the window, and the inkstain working its way into the callous on the knuckle near the fingernail on your third finger, the callous that went away only after you stopped writing all day every day. After Uni.

The Death of Thomas M. Disch

Thomas M. Disch died on July 4^th, 2008, of suicide. His house in upstate New York was infected with mould (the pipes had burst during the winter). His partner had colon cancer and the illness had bankrupted them both. His partner, dead, was the official tenant of their rent-controlled apartment. The landlord won the case he'd brought to evict Disch, who was not the official tenant. Disch himself had diabetes.

He shot himself.

(The last line of 334)

It would be nice to say that my horror was civilized outrage at the mistreatment of another. It wasn't. None of the horror throughout the SF community was. We all made that swift reptilian calculation – if this can happen to Disch, the genius, how can the rest of us do any better? (How many times have I joked – seriously – about shooting myself because that's my only retirement plan? How many times have I thought of murder-suicide when the partner's diagnosis hits, as it must – or even mine, God knows I worshipped at the tobacco-flame long enough – because we have no means of paying for long-term care?)

I nearly emailed my old SF buddy, but had a feeling he was aghast at the same understanding: this is the legislatively-mandated murder of people like us.