…to what is important. The more they hit us, the more they try to frighten us, the tighter we hold on to it.
What do we hold so tight?
Peace, dear people.
…I’ve joined the Establishment.
Yesterday (July 4th) was the day we were all worried about in Edinburgh, the day the anarchists planned (?) to rally in advance of the G8. Being anarchists, of course, they didn’t exactly file for a parade permit.
The Carnival for Full Enjoyment was intended to protest against the capitalist system, wage slavery, and pretty much everything the G8 has ever done. The attendees (can’t use the word organisers; they’re anarchists) suggested some fun things – clowns, acrobatics, and drumming. The gist of the protest – as described – was to demonstrate that there is another way to run the world than the current capitalist doctrine. I’m in full agreement there.
Unfortunately, their proposals for “not this world” didn’t include a lot of group self-control (yeah, yeah, anarchists, said that already), and not all of them were that keen on just enjoying the drumming. Some of them wanted to do the whole smashing and fighting thing. It didn’t come across as a good advertisement for the alternatives to the current system.
The current system was represented, in this little drama, by the police.
Now, the policing strategy in Edinburgh for the G8 has focused on letting people have their say, where they want to say it, if they can do so safely and without collateral damage. They let almost a quarter of a million people dressed in white encircle the city centre1 on Saturday for the Make Poverty History march. Saturday went off peacefully2.
On Monday, the police were using the same approach. I saw the carnival as I went home that afternoon. The police were letting people have their fun, if they could do it safely. Sadly, things turned violent3. The protestors blamed the police for provocation4; the police blamed the protestors for throwing paving stones, benches and staves.
And I believe the police side of the story.
I saw the operation as I passed by, saw the cops using horses and walls of riot shields to control and slow crowd movements, to keep the groups from massing too greatly. I also saw them letting uninvolved civilians get across the public spaces and through the guarded gates, so our lives weren’t too disrupted. I saw them letting the party go on but keeping the mob small. I saw that only a third to a half of the police had riot gear on; the remainder were wearing stab vests and flourescent yellow over their ordinary uniforms. And, of course, they were not carrying guns. I didn’t see the fight begin, but that was what it was like before the trouble started.
And in the aftermath, even pro-protestor sites like Indymedia are struggling to find a lot of photos of police violence, or accounts of serious injury. That’s because there wasn’t much, for all the breathless press reportage about “baton charges” and “pitched battles”. About 40 people were treated at hospital, with broken bones as the worst injuries. This in a confrontation where people were throwing park benches5.
So given the choice between anarchy, with drumming and clowning and no one asking the violent types to cool it down, and the current system, with police who let the peaceful speak and dance, but control the violent, I’m afraid I pick the current system. And that makes me Establishment.
I even stopped to thank a couple of police officers I saw on the street today. They did well.
I’ve had the same conversation with three people lately. These things happen, either because it’s a coincidence or because we all go through these same things at the same times in our lives.
The conversation is about identity. As they get older, my friends have begun to feel fragmented, as though they are more than one person at a time. I know the feeling. And matters of identity have always fascinated me. This is not the first time I’ve thought about this issue.
I wrote this in 1989, but was motivated to dig it out again by the synchronicity of these recent conversations.
When I sat below you on the floor, in that shirt which gives my eyes the colors of a forest and my hair the hints of a fire, unbraiding that hair and playing with the tendrils, watching you with my arboreal eyes, and asked, “Who are you?”, you answered with fifteen minutes of words beginning with “In”. I do not deny that the man you described is yourself.
But what if I had been standing, or sitting on the chair with my feet on the table, or curled up beside you, or stretched out on the bed? What if my shirt had been blue, or black, or a color that turns my eyes to mahogany and my hair to oak? What if I had left my hair in its braid and turned my piece of jade in my hands as I listened, and gazed at it, or at the rain on the window? How would you have begun, and what would you have said? I believe the person you would have shown me would bear little resemblance to the one I heard about.
The problem, of course, is that I actually sat above you on the hammock, swinging slightly, in my white shirt. My brass-tinted hair lay tangled about my shoulders, for I had left it loose all day, and I folded my hands in my lap as I listened. I did, however, look at you with my hazel eyes, and because of that, the man whom you described in twenty-five minutes of discourse beginning with the word “I” is somehow familiar to me.
(Pretentious, yes, but I was nineteen.)
I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of it, but I’m enmeshed in a neighbourhood dispute about the hole in the fence near our house. It may be closed for a time in the near future, between the contracting company’s visit and the vandals’ revenge.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
It’s a major inconvenience, and the means by which it may be done a source of deep anger. But I will remember my Frost and try to take the long view.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
And I must remember to be charitable to my opponents. 😉
Followers of the Gum Fence Saga will recall that in Episode one, your heroine found over three hundred pieces of chewing gum stuck on the points of the wrought iron fence by her employer’s car park. Episode two found our narrator with delusions of grandeur bemused by the activities of said employer’s fence painters, who appeared to have primed over the gum rather than removing it. I’m sure you, dear readers, joined our viewpoint character of very little real significance in wondering what would happen next.
I can now confirm that our most cynical expectations have been confirmed. They painted over the gum.
Taken 19 April 2005
Rick Horowitz at Unspun “tagged” me with a questionnaire about books. He thought it would get me blogging again.
The reasons I’m not blogging much aren’t ones that a questionnaire will address. I’m simply too busy right now. I’ve committed to a large number of bindings by early August, for Interaction, the World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Glasgow this year. I bind in spare bits of time, in evenings and weekends, and this time was formerly blogging time. I will answer the questionnaire, but it won’t get me blogging much again.
My relationship with books is a little more complex than Rick’s. For me, a book is not just a box of words (which is a special enough thing in its own right). I am a bookbinder as well as a reader. Books are things I make, physical structures I love for their own sakes, as well as containers for stories and knowledge. Some of these questions will therefore get two answers, one from me as a reader and one as a binder.
Incipit
Like Rick, I’m going to take this as “total number of books I own.”
Over the years, Martin and I have acquired and disposed of thousands of books. At one particular point in this cycle, we concluded that we could not shelve all of our books at once, and moved to a “catalogue and store” approach, with most of our books boxed up in our loft. I have some doubts as to the accuracy of our catalogue with regard to physical location, but the quantity listed is about right.
According to our catalogue, we have 2255 books between us. I would estimate that there are about 45 books on our shelves that are not catalogued, either because they are recent purchases or because they are bookbinding books (I’ve never got round to cataloguing that collection).
The next question is whether I divide the aggregate total by two, since the books are community property. But we believe that books are shared wealth – we even have a separate budget in our accounting system for book purchases, which do not come out of our personal funds. So I would contend that I own in the region of 2300 books.
The last book that I bought to read was the Penland Book of Handmade Books. It bills itself as a technical book, but most of the things that it describes the makings of are “artists books”, which frequently do not really match my definition of a book at all.
The last book that I bought at all was a Folio Society edition of The Hobbit. I have been rebinding a HarperCollins edition of the book (for the Worldcon art show, at which the evilrooster bindery will be an exhibitor), and I bought this one to compare the bindability. I suspect that I will not love it as well as I do the HarperCollins one, but as a binder, I learn by doing.
Atypically, it’s a self-help book. (Usually, I’m too contrary for self-help books). My line manager at work recommended that I read Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzer as a book that had had a strong impact on him.
My reaction to the book was mixed. I already do much of what the book recommends, in particular the effort to understand where the other parties in a heated dispute are coming from. It goes on to discuss the ways to find and highlight shared goals between the parties, in order to find common ground. I see these techniques as part of my goal to be a peacemaker, though I don’t use the cheesy business-speak acronyms that the book does to describe them.
So on the one hand, the book gives away my trade secrets. If everyone follows it, then one of my key skills becomes a commonplace. On the other hand, I’d love to see a lot of those techniques applied to the American political scene, where the victory of one party over another seems to have superseded the goal of improving the common good.
I value this book both because I am a Christian, and because I am a member of the Western intellectual tradition. I don’t blog about my faith (not directly, anyway), and if you don’t realise the Bible’s influence on Western culture, I can’t start explaining it here.
Most of the time, I prefer the New Jerusalem Bible, which is one of the Catholic translations. Part of my preference is because it renders the text in a clear and comprehensible way, and contains all of the “apocrypha” that I want in the book. But my other reason for liking it is that JRR Tolkien was one of the original contributors, and that’s just cool.
For the Psalms, Wisdom and the Song of Songs (and, on some days, the Gospel according to John), I find that I turn to the King James Version. Some of the Bible is best read as poetry, not prose, and KJV has never been equalled as a work of art. In short, Shakespeare trumps Tolkien.
And sometimes, when I need to really understand a passage, I go back to the Greek. I have an Oxford University Press edition of the Greek New Testament that is of use at times.
As a binder, I have a standing policy of not rebinding Bibles. They’re rarely well-bound, because the majority of them will never be read much, and it would be too expensive to bind a 1500-page book on tissue-thin paper in a durable fashion. Add to that the emotional impact of messing up someone’s dearly beloved family heirloom, and you can see why I’m just not keen.
(Having said that, I did do a repair on a colleague’s reading Bible, but on the explicit understanding that it might be ugly as long as it preserved the life of the book. He just didn’t want to recopy years of marginal notes if he could avoid it.)
My parents read me some interesting books when I was a kid. Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel was one of them. It’s from the 1960’s and 1970’s trend toward intellectual and philisophical science fiction, and is (in my opinion) the best of the breed. As a meditation on gender, alienation, friendship, and politics, it’s always got something to say to me, after over twenty years of rereading. Having a strong plot and good characterisation is a bonus. Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, one of the two main characters, was probably the first literary figure I ever really loved.
Many people don’t like the book, particularly ones more rooted in the action and war trends more popular in science fiction now. Takes all kinds, I guess.
I’ve never bound the book, but if I did, I think I would design a binding showing a night time snow-bound landscape (it takes place on a world gripped by an ice age). The shapes of the land would echo the double curve of a yin-yang symbol, which is an important image in one scene of the book.
The book is also the source of one of my favourite recipies for dealing with problems: When action grows unprofitable, gather information. When information grows uprofitable, sleep.
Donna Tartt’s first novel describes a Californian Classics student who travels to an East Coast university, where he becomes caught up in the activities of a close-knit clique. Since those activities include a recreation of a Greek bacchanal, which culminates in a murder, his social life gets a bit complicated.
Tartt knows her Classics, and her Classicists. Many of the fine touches of the book ring very true, from the students’ spurious pedanticism to their use of fountain pens. The characters have clearly been changed by their knowledge of Classical languages, as I was deeply changed by the study of Latin and Greek. And the author herself shows signs of those same changes, in that the book’s plot works equally well in the ancient Greek cosmology as it does in the modern one.
I haven’t bound this book either, nor thought deeply about how I would do so.
This was a gift from my friend James, the first Christmas that I knew him. We were both twenty at the time, and the poet’s angst and faintly defeatest style suited us. He is the master of taking away almost all that he gives the reader, with lines like this from An Arundel Tomb
…the stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love
Another example of what I mean is from Talking in Bed:
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Although I’ve grown up since then, some of what Larkin says still works for me. His poem The Importance of Elsewhere is one of my two favourite mediations on being an expatriate. And I often reread No Road, usually as a counterweight to Robert Frost’s Mending Wall.
This book, by Manly Banister, was the bookbinding book that got me into the craft. It was one of two that Martin gave me one Christmas, and it was the one that convinced me that an amateur with woodworking skills could bind books and make bindery equipment. It also showed the difficult parts of binding, unlike many beginning books, which never get past the “learn this in half a day” level of techniques.
It was only later that I discovered that Manly Banister was a pulp science fiction author and fanzine editor.
I’m not comfortable doing this, because it feels like placing an obligation on others. I’ll tag one person: Mark, we’ve already discussed this. Can you put a link in the comments section when you’ve done it?
If any of my other readers (whoever you are) feel like doing it too, again, put a link in the comments.
Finit
In my last blog entry on the Gum Fence, I didn’t mention my employer’s fence-painting program. Even while I was photographing lumps of chewing gum on top of every spike at the back end of the property, painters were priming (grey) and painting (black) the fences round the front doors.
I wasn’t clear on the ownership of the land, so I didn’t know whether the painting program was going to reach all the way to the gum fence. I wondered, when I did think about the possibility of the workmen getting to that section, what they would make of it. What would they think of the thankless task of picking all those bits of gum off of the spikes?
Well, the priming effort reached the gum section a few weeks ago. The weather was windy, cold and snowy until just recently, so I didn’t particularly rush to investigate their progress. It’s only now, with the sun out and the temperatures up, that I’ve gone to check. Quite frankly, I hope our property people do so too, because it’s not impressive.
Fact one: the rails are primed but not painted, and have been for over a fortnight. This is a drastic change from the speed at which they did the railings at the front of the building, where there was a 3-day turnaround from ugly to painted.
Fact two: they haven’t removed the gum. They’ve just painted the primer on over it.
Taken 2 March 2005
Really – who paints over a lump of chewing gum? Who primes 300 lumps of chewing gum? Surely if you want the paint to stick (which is why you prime) you should remove any extraneous substances?
Taken 2 March 2005
On the plus side, if they ever finish painting, the black enamel will preserve the gum for the edification of future generations.
Somebody has a marker pen and too much time on their hands.
Taken 25 February 2005
Someone has stuck a piece of chewing gum on top of each spike on a fence near my office.
The fence runs along Fettes Row, separating the road from the slope down to my employer’s car park (or, more properly, the piece of waste ground on which my employer permits its employees to park their cars; it’s a tax distinction). The pavement here is narrow and uneven, made up of old cobblestones, imperfectly pointed. Shrubs grow through the railings, and cars park close beside, making it an awkward side of the road to walk on.
The chewing gum starts beside a long-disused gate. Taken 12 January 2005
Whoever is doing it missed a spike, buried deep in the ivy. Taken 12 January 2005
They put dabs of gum on the stubs of broken-off spikes, too. Taken 12 January 2005
Even when the uprights were broken off quite low down. Taken 12 January 2005
The gum continues over 17 fence divisions. Each fence division has 20 spikes, so even allowing for the 5% or so spikes that are missing altogether, someone has put over 320 tiny dabs of chewing gum on pointy bits of iron. Assuming that each dab represents a third of a stick of gum, someone has chewed over a hundred of them before methodically sticking a piece on each spike.
It makes me wonder. How long did this take? Did they walk by, one day at a time, sticking dabs of gum on spikes? When did they stop, and why?
(Have they stopped, or will I find two or three extra spikes covered the next time I walk that way?) Do they now have such well-exercised jaw muscles that they can bite through a walnut?
And, most importantly, Why?
Fiona turns one in 2 1/2 weeks. As always, being a parent, I feel two mutually exclusive things. On the one hand, it seems just yesterday that I was sitting at this same table, doing a jigsaw puzzle, when the first contractions started. On the other, I can’t imagine life without her.
That second thought – the inability to even contemplate a life that didn’t include her – is a particularly poigniant one these days, as we watch the families torn apart by the tsunami try to find their loved ones and, too often, discover that those loved ones are dead. What parent doesn’t picture themselves on the beach with their children, with the wave coming, wondering how to save their precious lives? Who can’t empathise with the survivors afterward, wondering where the family members they lost in the maelstrom will turn up? And for the locals, with no safe home to go to to deal with their grief, things are even harder.
So, since Fiona is too young to notice whether she gets a present at all, Martin and I would like to ask her friends and family to give her small gifts this birthday. She’d enjoy a rattle made from a box and some split peas and taped shut as much as she would some Super Magic Whizz-O Gadget with bright sparkly lights. So give her a small toy and a big hug, and give the money to the tsunami victims this year. She’ll never notice the difference, because the hug is what really matters.
And she has lots more birthdays to come, where we can all splash out on gifts for her. Would that the families of the tsunami victims had the same.
Thank you.
