If you follow a pencil carefully, from the moment it is created from the wood of a tree that grew by a Czech lake which you once saw through the train window while on your way to Vienna where a waiter then used that pencil to write down your order, to the moment when that pencil rots hidden under other garbage in a landfill, the pencil will have accumulated a rich biography which might include lying on a shelf, copying  totals from utility bills and passing into the hands of a businessman flying to Seattle by plane, where it is picked up by someone who in his childhood used to swim in a Czech lake.

Each object has its own narrative, connecting to the world at different junctions. John Baldessari once said that everything is connected in some way. In one of his word chains, he asked someone to construct a story from a single photograph. The words in the story were then written down consecutively in a chain and finally replaced with images. While following each chain, I wondered what story led to the links between each consecutive word. Some links were obvious: “grass, cow, fence”. Others such as “cucumbers” followed by “phone numbers” were not self-evident, as if prompting one to create connections between them.

Out of curiosity, I wrote my own word chain, selecting words through association. I starting out with dust that’s settled on top of my computer screen and writing down the first association that came to mind as quickly as possible. The list is limited to 100 words:

dust

fluff

cloud

fog machine

strobe lights

beat

high-hat

bell

tower

Rundetarn

pancakes

spotlights

velvet

darkness

dawn

dungeon

Wagner

chords

tent

acrobat

Wings of Desire

grafitti

train

Berlin

Alexanderplatz

station

stationery

ink

glue

honey

tea

pot

melting pot

land

construction

crane

sea

bird

Columbus

ship

cargo

night

noise

window

lamp

hotel

painting

Impressionism

frame

museum

lions

steaks

Coca-Cola

billboard

traffic

highway

Route 1

Atlantic Ocean

oil

explosion

Zabriskie Point

desert

skull

bones

Space Odyssey

waltz

chandelier

Adolf Loos

cobblestones

wheel

carriage

lantern

fire

water

drop

sink

kitchen

geranium

clay

mud

swamp

Vietnam

bodies

stacks

paper

crates

piles

warehouse

factory

reactor

My link from “dust” to “reactor” extended to 98 words, whereas in another chain it may take none. If I were to start another chain with the same word tomorrow it would follow a different path. Tapping into the vast network of invisible connections, each word chain records passing associations and fleeting thoughts.

As things are bound to be connected even if in very circuitous ways, the above list of words can almost be seen as a set of clues in a detective novel in which their connections are discovered. Did architect Adolf Loos ever visit the Rundetarn, a former astronomical observatory in Copenhagen? What did Alexanderplatz in Berlin look like in 1968, the year when 2001 Space Odyssey was made? Where can one find geraniums nearest to Zabriskie Point, a location in Death Valley National Park in California?

It seems easier to find the answers to the above questions to than to draw up questions about other more oblique connections, which can sometimes become manifest through images

Dust in the Arizona desert

The cubic facade of the Villa Müller designed by Adolf Loos in 1930

The Rundetarn, built in the 17^th century as an astronomical observatory, has a 7.5 turn helical corridor leading to the top.

Scenes on board the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey were shot by moving the film set into a giant ferris wheel, which would rotate while the actor walked in tandem with its motion.

The building of the Alexanderplatz in 1968, the year when 2001: A Space Odyssey was released.

Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, California.

A film still from the famous finale in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, showing a spectacular explosion that occurs in the imagination of the main character.

So it emerges that Nick Clegg has been a Samuel Beckett fan all along. I couldn’t help wondering what an election scripted by Beckett would look like:

The stage light slowly illuminates a rocky plateau. Buried in pebbles up to their necks are BROWN, CLEG and CAM.

BROWN. Finished, all finished now. Old Brown’s gone down, down to the ground.

CLEG. The old parties.

CAM. Yes, the old parties, the old times, just as it was back on the playing fields, the old times, boat rocking slowly under Magdalen Bridge, the old times, the old days. Why can’t things be like they used to be?

BROWN. Finished, all gone, a disaster.

CLEG. There they go again.

CAM. The old days, the old times, the old parties, tra-la-la-la-la. Why can’t I be Prime Minister?

All three sink further into the stones. A spotlight reveals a hung parliament, festooned with paper MPs.

BROWN. All is lost. Woe, woe!

CAM. Why can’t I be Prime Minister? I want to be Prime Minister!

Enter VOTERS.

VOTERS. Let’s go.

Nobody moves.

Beckett’s endings provide us with a range of possible responses to electoral outcomes. The novel The Unnameable ends with the resigned but ambiguous ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ from the unnamed narrator. This is rather more stoical and less hysterical than the Tories’ ‘We can’t go on like this’. At the close of Endgame, all Hamm can be certain of is his handkerchief - the ‘old stancher’ - which survives. Dry your eyes, Dave. You too, Gordon.

With all the uncertainties of the current political environment, Beckett leaves us, like poor Winnie who still sings while buried up to her neck at the end of Happy Days, to face the music and be grateful. As the wise (or not) journalist said, ‘The only certainty here is that everything is uncertain’.

I really enjoyed reading Julie Rafalski’s last blog on the flagship site, Henningham Family Press. I liked how just one overheard word on the tube led to such a flow of information. The whole subject of how one writes or composes was foremost in my head yesterday as I tottered along Invalidenstrasse on a beautifully warm spring afternoon in Berlin. I’d just got back from a hectic schedule of visiting family in Edinburgh and Accrington which had laid me up in bed for two days with a virus on my return. The 48 hour wipe-out had cleared my head enabling me to think about what I would write about in this month’s blog. And I realised for the first time that when I write anything I always start with a solid picture in my head which I then describe; so really the story already exists, I am just noting it down.

Berlin has changed so much in the few days I have been in the UK. The remaining snow, ice and grit has gone and the concrete grey sky of nearly four months has given way to the blue of Giotto’s Padua frescos. On Wednesday morning I sat at the kitchen table looking out at this blue and the 3 Poplar trees standing tall in the Backhof. Accompanied by cacophonous birdsong and drinking the first coffee of the day I leafed through a book I’d bought up a couple of weeks earlier.

The World I Live In is Helen Keller’s second book, she wrote it in 1908 at the age of 28 some five years after her first book, The Story of My Life. At 19 months a mysterious illness had left her totally deaf and blind. Until the age of 7 she was cut off from the world, when a half blind teacher, Annie Sullivan joined her in Alabama and together they began an intensive course of learning. Helen Keller’s hunger to be in the world speeded her learning and by 1904, with the aid of Annie Sullivan, she had not only written her first book but had also completed a degree at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts.

In the first chapter of the book we are introduced to Helen Keller’s primary source of contact with the world, her hands; the right one to see with and the left one to read with. She puts forward a fascinating point for all sighted people to consider:

Physics tells me that I am well off in a world which, I am told, knows neither colour nor sound, but is made in terms of size, shape and inherent qualities; for at least every object appears to my fingers standing solidly right side up, and is not an inverted image on the retina which, I understand, your brain is at infinite though unconscious labour to set back on its feet. A tangible object passes complete into my brain with the warmth of life upon it, and occupies the same place that it does in space, without egotism, the mind is as large as the universe.

Some chapters on, there is a photo of Helen Keller; a young woman pressed against a tree in a wood. The caption reads; “listening” to the trees. Looking out at the 3 Poplars, I wonder what she might have heard from them?

I am not very good at judging heights but I live on the 4th floor and the trees shoot up with straight trunks high above the window. Due to the extensive bombing of Berlin in the later part of the second World War, and the extreme shortage of firewood following, I would guess that they are about 60 years old. They are impressive structures and provide a habitat for a variety of birds and wildlife including the odd red squirrel (or Eichhoernchen, a fine German name). Back in November their leaves withered away, naked and stoic they have waited out the harsh winter. In March things began to stir again and in the freezing cold mornings I sensed them at work, farming and distributing whatever nutrients they could find in the sleeping soil and absorbing anything they could from the pale daylight. It was as though with every sinew they where hauling up new life from roots to the furthest most isolated tips high above the roof tops. A couple of weeks ago new buds in muted tones of lizard green and cherry lips red began to show. I would predict that if the young lady was listening to these trees she would experience something akin to that of the straining trembling body of a power lifter, drawing and gathering strength for the final push. And perhaps the joyous almighty scream, that any day now will accompany the burst into bloom, will be big enough to throw her backwards onto the forest floor?

I heard an altogether different scream a day earlier when I reached the Hamburger Banhof - Museum fur Gegenwart. My walk in the sun had purposely led to the free admission afternoon of Berlin’s largest State collection of, Art since 1960. Of all the City’s Museums this one distresses me the most and not only because of the €12.50 entrance fee (the highest I know of in Berlin). The problem I have is with the automatic placing of work within a museum context, of many works which directly question their own positioning. The general feel of the place is of a curator’s/ DJ’s playground, resulting in acres of space (over 13000 sqm) strewn with large blocks of Joseph Beuys’s lard and broken bits of detritus from Fluxus performances. The most disturbing section is the never- ending Rieckhallen, the former Lehrter Banhof goods depot which now contains works from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection. Here we find Gordon Matta- Clark and Robert Smithson, forever cutting up a house and running over a spiral jetty and yet another large Dieter Roth installation looking lost and abandoned. The check list of important names continues; Richard Artschwager, Marcel Broodthaers, Sol Le Witt, Rodney Graham and Duane Hanson. Actually Duane Hanson’s shopper at least seems to have made the decision to try and get out of there, although the hopeless expression on her face indicates just how far away from the exit she still is. A typically light and throw away gesture from Roman Signer of a hack-sawed spray paint can (Arbeits Platz.1999), is sealed off in a claustrophobic cell with a semi roped off entrance to make doubly sure no fun can escape.

Oh yes, and the screaming. This begins about halfway down the Rieckhallen close to work by Lawrence Weiner; a mildly defiant statement of his, under the circumstances reads, LEFT HERE - PUT HERE - FOR A LIMITED TIME (#426. 1976/2004). And a glass fronted case displays some of his collected publications, all mounted like butterflies. Walking on the screaming gets louder giving you a sense of being trapped in some conceptual madhouse. Before finally reaching the source of the yelling there is one last detour, as you enter one of Absalon’s completely white cell structures. In a very short life (he died at 28) Absalon made many of these odd live/work pods. His artistic career was developed through a steady stream of commissions and exhibitions encouraging the further design and building of these minimalist structures. So perhaps it is not too surprising to discover it is Absalon who is screaming. This we witness through a short film made in the year of his death, Bruits 1993. With hindsight the film is really disturbing and not only for its imbedded frustrated madness. One can’t help also seeing a jarring between the disciplined, reductive practice of the artist and the space that has been allotted and constructed by the gallery to show the film. I realise that there must be sound proofing concerns, but when considering that Bruits was made by such simple means; man in front of camera screaming for 3minutes and 28 seconds, then one has to question the chapel size box made to house it?

The third and final scream that I’d encountered in the last week was on the early morning return Ryanair flight to Berlin. I had managed to sit in an aisle seat with my right ear next to a very unhappy baby and my left positioned far too close to one of the cabins speakers. The combination of the child emptying its lungs and the continuous drivel of pre recorded advertising made Absalons efforts at screaming look very amateurish by comparison. The poor distressed child persisted through taxiing, takeoff and well into our journey and was evenly matched by the chirpy Irish and Scottish brogue belting out of the speaker. Perhaps after 45 minutes the child passed out only I can’t say I noticed because by then the soundscape had become one. As my 3.30am start that morning mercifully began to kick-in, I was still being assaulted by offers of smokeless cigarettes, exclusive perfumes, surprisingly bright Chardonnays and an excellent full bodied red. Screaming, screaming, screaming!

On the sedate S Bahn journey back into Alexander Platz I began to reappraised the baby’s screaming as that of an astute critic. Perhaps even one so young knew it was going to be subjected to an epic reading of a script written by the Fast Show’s Swiss Tony and had responded accordingly.

Did I really have all that in my head?

Ian McMillan’s ‘the Verb’ on BBC Radio 3 has accompanied my news blackout of the last few months. I quit listening to or reading about current affairs after I realised it was mostly bad news, not ‘bad’ in the gloomy sense but rather the ‘inaccurate’. So it was fun to realise while listening to the show that he was the man we would be workin with on the London Word Festival official poster for 2010. We’re very pleased with the result.

Here is a review of his work by Lauren Romano:

We all shuffle up and take a pew as the proceedings begin. First up, specially commissioned poet Ian McMillan takes to the stage to perform the festival’s official Chip Shop Poem. McMillan gets things off to a flying start as his thickly laden Yorkshire glottal stops spurt out from his mouth at break neck speed. By the time we actually get to the Chip Shop poem, The Epic Friday Night Travels of Norman McNorman I am in a mild state of hysterics and so unfortunately can’t recall the finer details, but it’s very funny, ingenious and has something to do with a man called Norman and a late night trip to the Chip Shop. Hats off to Ian who manages to get the words ‘pigeon’, ‘fusspot’, ‘crepuscular’, ‘incandescent’, ‘hopscotch’, and ‘jump’ along with other maverick mots into a well-rhymed jumble with a particularly good last line involving the word ’spatula’.

Copies are on sale from the London Word Festival.

I was asked to add a sculpture to a brief exhibition held by our good friend Jim Hobbs, in his studio in Peckham. The reception last night was a great fun occassion. I loaned this:

It is about 170mm long. We were also asked to respond to a list of numbers found on one of the shelves that I took to be syllables and lines 5/6, 2/5, 2/5, 5/2 which gave the structure to this poem about storage:

One-hand piano piece

In the wake of Trench War.

The first Xerox machine,

It needs no fine tuning.

An assortment of nails.

(Lost book hound on the

Franco-Spanish line;

Thesis on Lost Time).
Art storage/haulage;

Forage

Homage

Carriage

Storage

Dotage

ankuendigen – to announce

achten - to respect

anblicken - to look at

aufarbeiten – to reappraise

- to look at again………………………………………………..

Over the last few months I have been keeping a word book; noting down all the new German words I come across. Before the book, which is really 3 notebooks joined together to make something that looks like an alphabetically ordered phonebook, I had been writing everything down on bits of paper. However, having hundreds of scraps of paper lying around flat was too over whelming; can there really be so many German words? Now the book keeps all the words in one place and makes the flat a little tidier, although it has brought to my attention just how many I am forgetting; when I read or hear a familiar word, I say, ah yes I came across that word last week and logged it in the book. Only, I haven’t got a clue what it means, let alone its gender, if it’s a noun (very important in German) and its conjugation if it is a verb. It feels like stacking a shelf with books from one end and as you add more the first ones you put up, are being pushed off the other end, disappearing behind the sofa or through the cracks in the floorboards.

Christmas brought a new batch of books and DVD’s. Two have been of particular interest; the Bill Douglas Trilogy and the writings of Ian Jack; The country formerly known as Great Britain.

The 3 films by Bill Douglas are a wonderful retelling of the director’s difficult early life growing up in the East Lothian mining village of Newcraighall. I first saw the films in the 1980’s and remembered them as pretty dark, certainly My Childhood and My Ain Folk. Watching them again, I’m struck by their direct beauty, economy and intelligence in telling a story. Perhaps my awareness of the filmmaking of Bresson, Pasolini and Fassbinder in the interim has helped me to view them afresh, but there is no doubting, the power of Bill Douglas’s own forcibly silent voice throughout. The Trilogy is a gently epic composition, from darkness out into an intense euphoric light, leaving me with many of the film frames burnt onto my retina. In recounting his past Bill Douglas often makes a rich painting from something otherwise very ordinary; I note here one particular view of a bend in the road, which I take to be the one leading out of Newcraighall. The view goes far beyond one found by a location finder; we are looking at memory, a brotherly bond of image and storytelling embedded within the landscape.

My good friend Keith Grant who gave me the Ian Jack book for Christmas, thought I may find an interesting link with the Bill Douglas Trilogy, he was right. Ian Jack also grew up in a Scottish Mining village, Hill Of Beath in Fife. The opening piece is about the writers childhood there, and indeed that of his parents; raising a family, growing old and dying in and around the same location. I am enjoying dipping into the various essays which I tend to read just before bed. The 12.10 to Leeds, written in 2001 following the Hatfield train crash inquiry, has reminded and re-appalled me of certain social/political changes that occurred in Britain during the 1980’s and 90’s,changes which confused and angered the public then and have continued to do so. Whilst reading I sensed it oddly melding with another lengthier book I was working my way through, Isaac Deutscher’s third volume biography of Leon Trotsky.

Before moving from London to Berlin I got rid of so many books. Most of them I gave to the Oxfam bookshop on Kentish Town Road. Over several months I sorted out the ones I would part with and once a week, take a couple of carrier bags full of them to the shop. I found it difficult not to look at the other books they had on sale; reminding myself I already had too many unread books and if I just took those to Berlin I would be enough reading for several years. On the last trip I saw the biography in the window. I knew next to nothing about Trotsky; something about his death with an ice pick in South America, but had a strong feeling I should know more. Although my packing was 3 thick books heavier, it’s been a purchase I’ve not regretted.

Throughout 2009 I was gripped by the first two books – the Prophet Armed (1879-1921) and the Prophet Unarmed (1921-1929) last week I finished the final book the Prophet Outcast (1929-1940). In all, over 1,500 pages filled with facts, figures, names, events, politics and Ideologies from a pivotal point in modern History. Unlike the Bill Douglas Trilogy, Trotsky’s life (in terms of his years alive) begins light and leads into a central point of extreme brightness which fades abruptly to complete darkness. By Christmas 2009 I was wading through the darkness of Trotsky’s descent from political power and Stalin’s ascendency.

Ian Jack’s essay, also packed with facts, figures, names, events, politics and Ideologies from another pivotal point in modern British history, runs to just 40 pages. In these pages he sticks to a type of investigative writing, advocated by Katharine Whitehorn; that is to give voice to someone who is member of the concerned public and not that of the know it all authoritarian. Having said that he does come across as a rail enthusiast and this we can sense in the brief history of The Railway he tells; from Babylonia 2245 BC, through to the national rail chaos in Britain at the time of his writing. I was drawn into the story through his notes of conversations with various engineers and how they illuminate the subject of the Permanent Way; how a track is laid and fixed. Likewise, how the steel track was produced and developed. One engineer refers to this as a living thing, due to the skill and care needed in making, laying and maintaining the track.

Piece by piece we are given information making us appreciate just how complex a thing, a rail track is. Perhaps a lot of people know this? I have to confess I didn’t. However, what I do know and what I had forgotten before reading The 12.10 to Leeds is that one day I sat on a train and the announcement referring to me and fellow travellers as Passengers had over night changed to Customers.

From about half way his writing explores how this change came about. From the policy of the Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher to privatise the nationalised industries of Gas, Water and Telecommunications (the author quotes Harold MacMillan, who called this selling off the family silver) Responding to criticism of the first sales not being competitive enough, the next, Electric, was broken up into smaller units. This increased competition, produced a highly successful sale and by doing so, secured a rosy future for popular capitalism in the UK. After the fall of Margaret Thatcher, Railways became John Major’s baby. In spite of rail privatisation being highly unpopular with just about everyone, he was determined to see the sale through. Following the example set by the sale of Electric, it was decided the railways would be carved up into smaller units. New controlling bodies appeared:

TOCS, (train operating companies) 20 of those.

ROSCOS,(Rolling stock companies)3 of those.

And RAILTRACK, was to over and under-see: Signalling, the Permanent Way, Bridges, Tunnels and some larger stations.

Leading up to privatisation, it was noted that the emphasis switched to an operators rather than an engineer’s railway. This strikes a chord with a comment from one of the disillusioned Permanent way engineers who Ian Jack interviewed, he said that most people where only interested in trains from the wheels up. He emphasized the upmost importance of what goes on below. Operators were also dominant in management; of the 13 board members of Railtrack only 2 had any previous railway experience. The confused and chaotic privatisation rumbled on:

6 Transport Ministers in 7 years.

British Rail, carelessly and cheaply sold off for £5 billion

Profits: for the private shareholders as share prices rise sharply.

Track Maintenance: under pressure from efficiency savings, leads to work being put out to competitive tender.

Resulting in: fragmentation in knowledge of the Track, the Living thing.

Accusations fly: putting profit before safety.

At Howe Dell, The 12.10 King’s Cross to Leeds express enters the curve at 115 mph- the maximum speed for that stretch of track – and comes off the rails. Four people die.

From the offset of rail privatisation we, the public had been bombarded with facts, figures, names, events, politics, Ideologies, scandals, sackings and deaths. We have been informed of everything and more through a flood of media reporting. And with bewildered disbelief we repeatedly witnessed the chaos at first hand.

(It should be noted that The Labour Party, then in opposition, made the appropriate, vote winning noises to the public; Tony Blair, the then leader of the party said, They (the trains) should be run for the public and stay in public ownership for the people of this country, while his shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown was privately saying to colleagues that, Privatisation will make the Tories unpopular and will save us from having to do it).  [taken from the 12.10 to Leeds text.]

To say exactly how the Trotsky Biography and the Ian Jack article merge is difficult; both writers strive to inform the reader clearly about their chosen subject and I believe they achieve this while never resorting to hindsight. But the melding I feel is something else and appears on another level, in contradiction to the black and white compositions that tell each story. I felt my role as a reader activated the text and brought me closer to the events described. At times becoming the everyman, a participant and witness of the period being described, one who is struggling to remember and process the mass of information being thrown in my direction. In such a position and in spite of my determination to maintain a clear picture, very often my view would cloud over into a very murky and inactive grey hue.

Here is a particular section from Isaac Deutchers biography of Trotsky. At this point (1928) Stalin has already had Trotsky forcibly removed from Moscow to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, severely restricting his political activities and that of thousands of his supporters. (pg 457, The Prophet Unarmed )

He [Stalin] still shrank from sending the killer; he did not yet dare even to throw his enemy into jail. The odium would have been too heavy, because, despite all that had happened, Trotsky’s part in the revolution was still too fresh and vivid in the nation’s mind. He therefore planned to expel Trotsky from Russia. He knew that even this would shock; and he carefully prepared public opinion. First, he put out rumours about the new banishment; next he ordered the rumours to be denied; and, finally, he gave them fresh currency. In this way he blunted public sensitivity. Only after rumour, denial, and recurrent rumour had made the thought of Trotsky’s expulsion from the U.S.S.R. familiar and therefore less shocking could Stalin carry out his intention.

erinnern – vr: sich ( an akk etw) to remember

vergessen – vt to forget

Names, smells or tastes that we remember from childhood and have since kept locked away somewhere in the vast storehouse of memories sometimes appear suddenly, like people who we take to be strangers before we slowly begin to recognize them. Coming across a name or a smell is the perfect recipe for a Proustian madeleine moment, when long-forgotten past experiences are suddenly brought out of the vast memory storehouse and begin replaying in our minds. These triggers of the memory remain so closely entwined with the past that when they are recalled, they drag with them whole reams of other, forgotten, seemingly unrelated events and experiences. Particularly those memories that remain hidden for years and then suddenly surface, seem to retain some of the intensity of the original experience.

I experienced such a madeleine moment when overhearing a word that escaped from a conversation between two Polish women on the tube. The word that would in my mind trigger a an avalanche of long-forgotten memories was the Polish word for “jar’: słoik. (pronounced swuh-eek). It was spoken under the train carriage’s fluorescent lighting, which cast a bluish glow on the passengers. Into this bluish glow, from “słoik” spilled minute snippets of experiences like beads scattering into all corners. For me this word remains linked to my grandmother who used to live in Warsaw and with whom I spent summers when growing up. She was probably the first person I had heard say that particular word and since then, it seems that the only voice in which the word “słoik” can retain its true identity is my grandmother’s voice. Her voice made the jam jar a true jam jar. She pronounced the “s” more slowly and then lingered on the “o” longer than usual, as if following the slippery curved surface of the glass with her voice. Any other incarnation of the word pronounced by anyone else seems just a poor replica, not to mention incarnations in other languages. “Jar” seems too far removed from “słoik,” even if only because of its meaning as a verb. On another level, “jar” is too shallow, incapable of summoning a specific set of associations. Of all spoken appearances of the words “jar” that I’ve come across - those in grocery shops, kitchen tables or paint supply stores- none retains the essence of a “słoik”. This essence though seems to be made of a diffuse web of associations, which shape a “słoik” in my mind.

“Słoik” reminds me of a stack of empty jam jars that would be brought out of the damp cellar every summer, when my grandmother would make apricot jam. She would assemble all the empty jars on the kitchen table whose tablecloth had a geometric tulip pattern. These tulips would deform into strange organic shapes when looked at through an empty jar. If the jar was positioned in a particular spot, a blue tulip petal would become a giant lake.

“Słoik” also brings to mind my grandmother buying strawberry jam, which usually had a white label printed with bright blue letters and pictures of strawberries which had pink halos as a result of having been misprinted. This grocer was located on a square whose square pavement stones were laid out in a diagonal pattern. Some of these stones were a different colour and gave the impression of a large chessboard, although one on which the black and white squares were distributed randomly.

“Słoik” also summons an image of a tall pickle jar filled with water and a single flower, usually a rose, that stood by the ticket window at a train station in Warsaw. The ticket hall at this station was painted with a pinkish beige glossy paint that reflected the bluish fluorescent lighting, which was ubiquitous in the public spaces of Poland in the 1980s. Bookshops, bakeries, pharmacies, jewellery shops and fish mongers were all subject to this uniform lighting. The light bathed bread, cans of herring, geography books and syrup bottles in a pale bluish glow, draining the surroundings and the people in them of colour.

When I overheard the bits of conversation between the two women, under the pale glow of the tube carriage’s lighting, this particular combination of elements: this other pale bluish glow, the paint in a train station hall, chess-like pavement stones, my grandmother’s voice, blue tulips and misprinted strawberries all intersected suddenly, briefly summoned by a single word.

The other week I gave a lecture (the subject of which is not the subject of this blog) at the Universettee. As its name suggests, the Universettee is interested in shifting the seat of learning from the academy to the home – university to universettee. It’s a university of the comfy chair, and takes place in various people’s houses and flats around London. Lecturers are not paid, and neither are those who host the lectures.

Later on in the same week, I attended a concert. We arrived at a house in Hackney, deposited our coats on top of the bed as we would at a party, and were serenaded with Dvorak, Brahms and Schuman in a downstairs room. Interval drinks and nibbles were informal. Again, the event was free. Both evenings had the feel of a party, and involved the free and easy exchange of thoughts and culture in a homely setting.

It seems to me that these groups, events and projects are forming a new kind of public space – or, perhaps, are drawing our attention to the potential of the public space. For the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas the ‘public sphere’ could be a space for the radical renewing of democracy. Free from the atmosphere of oppression and coercion or the pressures of the bourgeois market, the ‘public sphere’ might be an exciting clamour of voices and ideas.
Perhaps – and only perhaps, because I teach in a university and see their essential value – the removing of the pressured culture of the academy can renew a practical and impassioned curiosity. Perhaps the ability to see a concert outside of its normal context – a context that to some extent is historically conditioned and not absolute – allows listeners to truly grapple with the music.

In other words, there may sometimes be a weight of expectation and rarification that hangs in the air of university halls, concert auditoriums, art galleries and the like. This isn’t a call for dumbing down, nor for a kind of hideous mercantilising of all cultural activity, as Peter Mandelson seems intent on pursuing. His proposals to tie university funding to some sort of basic economic performance indicator will kill scholarship, which thrives on the obscure.

What I am saying is that grand spaces – big institutional public spaces – sometimes terrify or oppress. We don’t want to and shouldn’t get rid of these spaces. But sometimes, just sometimes, shifting the centre of gravity can re-energise our engagement with ‘culture’.  Bringing the ‘public sphere’ into the private space once in a while may just enable us to re-evaluate the place and role of ‘culture’ in contemporary Britain.

On Friday I finished an 8 week block of German Language learning and with that my head for the first time in two months has begun to clear a little to formulate a few thoughts.

Last year when I began to try and learn the German language I looked at a few course introductions on the internet. Only one has remained in my mind. The name of the course, I have forgotten but the essential question it proffered I have not; first and foremost, ask yourself seriously why you want to learn this language.

I can’t hide the fact that somewhere in my imagination I had fancied myself sometime in the future at an elegant dinner table flitting effortlessly between English and Deutsch with a suave cosmopolitan air. This fantasy I imagine came from watching films and also from having observed in awe certain friends doing this. One year on however, I am still formulating my answer to the question and this may be playing a part in the slowness of my Learning. Before going any further I must state that I would dearly love to be able to speak German in order to communicate on a day to day level with people in Berlin. Apart from anything else this shows good manners while being a guest in another country. Indeed this may be as good a reason as any and the only one necessary to focus all my energies toward blinkered learning of German. But for another inescapable factor; I am an artist with an inbuilt sense to question.

So sitting in my class 5 days a week other thoughts and observations have been coming to the fore taking equal precedence to sentence structure and to determining the correct case of speech. Having my attentions divided in this way can on occasions make the subject of German language secondary; as a mature student, the classroom set up is of equal interest. For here I am being given a mini-re-run of my school days; you know the ones that hit you like a herd of stampeding cattle and spew you out badly trampled somewhere in your late teens. From my perspective with a 27 year gap, although learning in classroom has got no easier, I am occasionally able to stand back from what is going on and consider things that I hadn’t had the space or words for the first time around. This may have been typified the other day when the teacher (meine Lehrerin) noticed me struggling through yet another exercise and in a gentle conciliatorily tone said, you know this is not about the substance and interest of what you are trying to say, this is about getting the Grammar correct. What came first, the chicken or the egg?

I would like at some stage to broaden this out a little more and not just be me, me, me , but too many of the thoughts I have on this subject are based on personal experience so for now and with apology, here is more about me.

I have been both cursed and perhaps blessed throughout my life with being dyslexic; even as I write this blog I know that I will have to check and re-check it a thousand times, before then handing it over to a grammatically competent friend to make a final check. All this in order to make it readable, acceptable….. Normal. To me, it is not just about recognising the necessity of taking such steps but it is also important to stop and consider how much of the original thought one had in the head is shaped and compromised to achieve this…. normality.

So what does a dyslexic have in their head? The official response to what I had in my head whilst at Primary school was to remove me from the normal class and place me in a remedial class. ( although the term dyslexia appears to existed since the 1880s, in Britain in the late 60s, it seems, certainly in the state school sector to have been unknown.) The removal from my class came about from being found by the teaching staff to be a slow learner. The irony of this is that due to my slowness of grasping the foundations of accepted learning, this dyslexic learnt very quickly a multitude of ways to protect himself from being humiliated every day at school. I used a combination of fading into the background and going on the offensive. From this hostile and chaotic foundation my schooling continued; the commitment to self preservation used up most of my energy and left only a fraction of time to vaguely note there were other things called subjects that I should be paying some attention to. Learning through this makeshift filter forced me to develop a system of discovery which occasionally touched on the official syllabus but very often went off at a complete tangent. As a result I wonder if I use any other parts of the brain that that normal learning doesn’t require or if I am just hopping frantically around within the regular channels, which I am told represents a depressingly low percentage of the brains capacity. Whatever that may be, I would say that the effects of a rigidly enforced system of education that presented itself to me as completely illogical, pushed me into finding alternative ways of gathering information from the world.

A while ago, I spoke to a good friend, a retired University lecturer, who had for several years been helping invigilate exams at Edinburgh university. He told me that dyslexic students were now allowed half an hour extra to read through the paper. This I told him was missing the point; all they would get from these students is an average attempt at being normal and answering the questions in the way that was required, when if throughout their time at University they were allowed to expand in their own way they may come up with something truly unique and complimentary to the overall subject. He was very interested in these comments and said that at no time in all the academic planning meetings he’d attended had he ever heard this point muted. And such is the academic world, in which education is now a massive ever expanding industry funnelled through an ever narrowing gate, rigidly governed by statistics and percentages that in my opinion continue to ignore the potential for real learning and instead target the fool’s gold pinnacle of the well paid job.

It is little wonder then with these thoughts igniting in my head that my regurgitation of the endless tables of German prepositions are taking their time to spew forth. To try and make room for both I had to expand my waking day to fit around the class which ran from 9.30am till 1pm, five days a week. This would not only mean staring at and fiddling with incomprehensible homework exercises in the afternoon, evening and into the early hours, but also falling out of bed at 6am every morning to stare and fiddle some more before the next class. Around the 4^th week I began to seek refuge from this cyclical madness and found some from the writing of A S Neill in his book Schoolhill and perhaps more surprisingly the electric and Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. Both sources were well known to me; the chapters of A S Neill tolled an obviously comforting chime connecting directly to my difficulties with formal teaching, the solace found in the sound scape generated by the blues musicians was a little less obvious though.

Straying onto you tube one night from the online language translator I sometime use I found myself spellbound by a particular recording of Muddy Waters’ Hoochie Coochie man. From the early 1980’s when I first discovered this music I quickly moved on from condemning the songs as sexist crap; the lyrics soon become nothing, one must take in the whole abstraction of sound and performance to discover an uncompromising struggle for humility and dignity. The film of Muddy Waters does exactly this, encasing it in a muffled, bleeding; an inexplicable audio beauty of his Chicago electric Blues from that period.

Both of the Howlin’ Wolf performances are incredibly raw documents of an uneducated man who knows everything and nothing and whose vulnerability allows you to see it all. Why was I drawn to these performances? I would find that difficult to say exactly, but in the context of my current thoughts they illustrate how a human being without a recognised and accepted useful ability can find their own form to directly communicate and articulate something incredibly rich and complex about the world. I would strongly recommend you take a look at them yourself.

Man has always been quick to exploit the world of its resources and to a certain extent this may have become his be all and end all. I would ask (and I know I am far from being the first) why can man not take advantage of huge technological advances to begin to seriously look more closely at himself? The perpetuation of this destructive cycle stands little chance of being broken when the main generator of innovation and insight is inextricably linked with behaving correctly within a strict formal education. And I would venture to suggest that the so called, outsiders, misfits, freaks (not my terms but ones widely used) collectively present a natural resource through personal experience for our civilisation to consider other ways of being. Not to be just creamed off, colonised, enslaved, exploited and wasted within an already failing system, but to be learned from and to help to develop a wider all encompassing mind-rich civilisation with unheard of and un thought of possibilities.

Now where was I……

brechen (to break) – hat/ist gebrochen

fahren (to drive) – hat/ist gefahren

fliegen ( to fly) – hat/ist geflogen………………….

The function of the child is to live his own life – not the life his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows what is best. All this interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots.

You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist.

Extract from A.S.Neill Summerhill ( a pelican book) 1962

Laurence fondles the leather-effect binding of his complete works of Shakespeare, ‘a part of our heritage’, simultaneously using the volumes to display his refinement and his guest’s lack of taste. If the book goes digital, perhaps it makes this act of snobbery performed in Mike Leigh’s ‘Abigail’s Party’ less likely.

A couple of new technical advances have made the newspapers recently. Amazon can turn your i-Phone into an e-book  for free with their Kindle software. 300,000 books are available. A swipe of your finger re-enacts the turning of paper pages digitally. The Nintendo DS also now has a ‘game’ that allows you to read hundreds of classic novels, while the speakers emit the crackle of a mimetic fireplace. The irony is that this sound-effect will actually consume energy created by the burning of coal many miles away. Sound, but no heat. Do paperbacks store more CO2 than online books constantly consume - backed up in several locations at once and always open? But the wastefulness of paper books wasn’t the only assumption in the print and radio discussions prompted by these announcements.

Panels, such as on Radio 4’s Open Book, could have explored the properties of these inventions logically; their benefits and defecits compared to paper books. Instead we witness a sort of ‘conversation re-enactment society’, general assumptions uncritically repeated in programmes dominated by nostalgia. It occurs to me that what is lacking in these commentaries is a precise analysis of the properties of each kind of reading platform.

The most obvious misconception is that paperback books such as Penguins perform an archival role. In fact they strip out many parts of the book-machine to make them competitive in price. This was the Penguin revolution; quality texts at an affordable price. An archival book has hard covers, lifting the pages above the acidic shelf. The paper is acid free. The pages are folded and stitched. There are endpapers that act like a doormat for the fingers. Bands support the book block itself. The spine may be arched to support a thicker book as it hangs above the shelf. The edges may even be gilded with stainless gold leaf. All these processes are removed in the paperback. But this is not a complaint. One might even argue that most paperbacks last too long. Will a Dan Brown be read and re-read? Will it have notes scribbled in the margin? Possibly by conspiracy theorists, but they probably use pile upon pile of notebooks instead.  Many American journals and academic books continue to make use of the more enduring features; we should not imagine that a paperback and an academic tome are the same machine because they both use paper. They don’t even use the same paper.

In academic research the electronic book brings many advantages, especially in note-taking, cutting and pasting, live-searches of the text better than any index. Hyperlinks to other texts and information… However, this brings to light other possibilities routinely overlooked in the media. Our regard for texts as concrete and unchangable and our definitions of authorship are shaped by the fact that a book is printed and then that is that. If another edition is made, minor changes occur, but with the text remaining live, what stops the reader intervening? Why shouldn’t I re-write one of my own books one morning, even after publication? A physical restraint has become a matter of etiquette. Is this the constant positive refinement of the evolutionary process or the constant revisionism of the Totalitarian view of History? All history adopts the needs of the Party. But I suppose for a panel talking for twenty minutes about the joy of sniffing pages, the territory of the ‘exploded book’ would have caused seizures.

The problem with the e-book is that it is not going far enough. It does not threaten the book, be it the archival machine, the disposable paperback or something inbetween. Obsolescence merely frees these formats up for new purposes. This is also the formative time for the form of the e-book, but it is nostalgia for the paper reading experience that is threatening to make e-reading inadequate. Manufacturers should stop trying to make e-readers look like books, with corny page-turning animations. If they are convenient we will use them. But book design is a phenomenological tradition that takes careful evaluation. Traditionally the central margin of the left page is set and then the top, outside, and foot margins increase in size as you go round by 20%. The opposite is the case for the facing page. This double spread has been around since Medieval times and forms part of the reading experience. It gives room for your thumbs. Yet electronic readers are often single column affairs. What does this imply? Design is not just a matter of paper vs. screen glare.

The reality is that the possibilities for publishing, text composition, and authorship are so radically different that we can’t even see them. We’re even doing some of them already without realising.  This period is a massive opportunity for small presses. Without the confusion of the paperback as primary text-delivery platform, people are grasping that there is a particular place for a well made paper book with original content; they are actually seeing what a book is for the first time. This is the opposite of nostalgia, it is the grasping of the relevant place for a technology in our time. In the same vein we should jettison the nostalgia for paperbacks and ask ourselves which features do we not want to lose in the next generation of electronic reading technology, making it a superior format to the paperback for the quick read. If we continue to encourage the crude approximations of page turning and dog-earing instead of platforms equipped for a transfigured compositional and reading industry, we are losing the essence of traditional book technology. It is like saying you will buy a car, but only if it looks like a horse and is limited to four miles an hour. And it’s not like we shot all the horses.

Laurence returns the complete works of Shakespeare to the shelf saying, ‘Of course, not the kind of thing you can actually read…’ I suspect he is the intended audience for the Nintendo DS Classics Library. It probably won’t be long before someone is showing me theirs and demonstrating how it re-creates the sound of an actual log-fire. Or is it the gentle crackle of a book-burning?