Aaargh! Library fail

From the Brighton and Hove Library website:

Reservation charges from June 1, 2009 - From June 15 2009 there will be a reservation charge of 50p (concessionary rate 25p) for items in stock in Brighton & Hove Libraries. This will apply to people aged 16 and over. Reservations for people aged 15 and under will remain free. The charge will go towards the administrative cost of reserving items and will help us to deliver a better reservation service. This administrative charge will be put on your account, to be paid when you collect the reserved item.

Well buggeration! I love my libraries, from the big and sleek Jubilee to my lovely little local Hangleton, but this is a kick in the groin and no mistake. I usually reserve between four and sixteen books a month (and I read them too, I’m a librovore) and a charge like this is going to cold turkey my library reservation habit as of right now! Instead of reserving I shall just browse the catalogue and go and collect the books from the relevant library myself, on the basis that a £3.60 bus fare would take me into town for coffee, meeting a friend, and collecting half a dozen books in comfort and pleasure, rather than giving 50p per book to the library service to do it for me. I know I should support the system but honestly – I spend a good part of most of my workshop time exhorting people to use their libraries as a magnificent and free resource, and then they do this!

Drat.

Literature, outsiders and welcoming them in

Thanks to the excellent Baroque in Hackney my stuporous misery has been punctured by the reminder that it is Refugee Week. Hurrah! Following the Griffin pelting, which still makes me smile despite my long-standing conviction that even symbolic violence is wrong, I am motivated to do something. On the Refugee Week website there are 20 simple acts that any of us can undertake to show that we welcome people of any and all culture, religion or ethnic group to our society.

Many of our greatest writers are exiles from their homes, whether voluntary or involuntary. Literary history recognises the value of the outsider, and the outside view, the shift of context that comes from observation of cultural difference and the strength of common bonds: family, love, loyalty, loss. In other words, refugees have been both a resource and a depository of literary culture. One of my greatest loves is that amorphous body of writing called ‘diaspora literature’ and refugees and the refugee experience are the bedrock of that particularly bittersweet genre.

My current condition precludes playing football with a refugee, or with anybody for that matter, and while I’d love to take tea with a refugee (or with anybody, for that matter) there don’t seem to be any Brighton based tea-related events. So I’m taking the tribe (ha, we’re a tribette if we’re anything, too small to even be nuclear!) to the Pav Theatre to see a refugee-led performance of dance, drama and discussion (and it says food too, my cup runneth over and hopefully my plate as well) on 14 June. What will you do to show the BNP and their unlovely ilk that they are just plain wrong?

And if you think it’s none of your business, remember that a bit more egg-pelting and a bit less recession thinking might have stopped Hitler before he was able to begin implementing the Final Solution. If Vidal Sassoon could put down his scissors in the late 1940s to fight fascism on the streets of London, we can all find a couple of hours to do the same, and we don’t even have to fight, we can enjoy ourselves in the process.

Refugee tot in Afghanistan courtesy of tracyhunter at Flickr

“The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated”

But not utterly exaggerated …

Yes I have been absent on more dramatic terms this time. Two hospital interludes: the second one planned, the first an impromptu response to something (virus? bacterium? body attacking itself out of sheer boredom?) that left me so weak I was almost unable to walk.

What fun. Not.

Convalescence is not much fun either. I wish I was the lounging around in elegant pyjamas and looking interestingly languid type, but I’m the grumpy, creased, intolerant and shuffling type instead. And I currently have the attention span of an ill-tempered gnat.

That means that my book pile has been whatever it is when you reject nine out of ten—not decimated which means rejecting (or actually, killing) one out of ten and it drives me mad when people use it to mean more than that—in three days. I’ve just chucked out any novel that didn’t grip me halfway through the first chapter and most didn’t. It would be invidious to name them, I’m sure you all have your own list of ‘writers who have disappointed’. What has made it through the winnowing so far: The Corrections and The Girl Who Played With Fire – nice substantial books with nice substantial themes too. My review pile is looking denuded too: I had to email one publisher and say that, kind as it was of them to send me a novel to review, I wasn’t going to be able to recommend it to my readers. No reply. Still on the pile are two books that interest me but that I haven’t got around to reading yet: The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger and Hashish, Wine, Opium by Baudelaire and Gautier.

The latter is attractive to me for an odd reason. When I first moved to France, as a non-French speaker, I found exactly two books on the shelves of the place we were staying: Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger in French translation and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. I tried both, French dictionary in hand, and found the Baudelaire more palatable than the Fleming … so my first foray into French literature in its native tongue was hand in hand with one of France’s more disreputable sons. Thus are associations formed and it is a fact that I have never been able to finish a James Bond novel in either language …

Hospital bed courtesy of A. www.viajar24h.com at Flickr under a creative commons licence