Togas, Cupcakes and Stinkbombs

Shamelessly, I have lifted the following from www.librarian.net, because it made me smile. It is about the great Library of Alexandria, which came into being around 300 BC,and  which was the first known library of its kind to gather a serious collection of books from beyond its country's borders – in fact, was charged with collecting all the world's knowledge:

  " It contained a great repository of writings from all over the world and a lot of fat and happy librarians who got to wear long flowing comfortable robes and didn't even have a need for so-called "casual" Fridays.

The Library of Alexandria had zero public access terminals and no photocopying machine. Life was good. 

It was burned to the ground, a few times, by people who hate freedom.

This was the start of the great librarian scowl, and lousy work clothes.

And, since enemies of our enemies are our friends, we now love the freedom to read."

In fact we don't really know what did for the Library of Alexandria. But I do know that if I was a 2nd-Century-BC author of a Work Of Staggering Genius that reposed there and nowhere else*, and hadn't, you know, backed up...well, I'd have been pretty fed up. And the fact is, WE WILL NEVER KNOW  what was lost, when that library burned down, or whatever happened to it.

Now, some would say that the Internet is our modern equivalent: the ultimate collection of the world's knowledge. And it's true that it is an incredible mind-boggling resource that has revolutionised our lives. But to say that now we have the Internet we don't need books is a bit like saying that now we have cars we don't need wheels. And to be fair, no one's actually saying that – quite. What they are saying – and some of them are people in positions of power – is that we can afford to get rid of libraries.

Well I've blogged about this before, and I make no apologies for doing so again. Less than a year ago, author Alan Gibbons (below) started the Campaign for the Book; already it is making real changes, and we have just had its first ever conference.

But there's much more to do. We are still losing libraries, and as one speaker pointed out, once it's gone, it's gone: "the spider's web cannot be put back together by hand". We heard of at least one new school that has been built with no library in it. Cicero is famously quoted as saying "a room without books is like a body without a soul": well, what does that make a school without a library? Author Beverley Naidoo said "Britain is being barbarized". Coming from someone who grew up in a segregated South Africa, and whose first book was banned there, that is worrying indeed.

Books are your individual window on the world, a prism through which you can interpret it in your own unique way. As was also said at the conference (and apologies, I didn't attribute all of my notes): "reading a book is a creative relationship between one mind and another". The same cannot be said of the Internet. We were mostly librarians and authors at the conference; that's me with authors Bernard Ashley, Lucy Coats and below that, me and Linda Newbery in matching dangly necklaces.  And among the speakers were Frank Cottrell Boyce, Celia Rees and Gillian Cross.  But EVERYONE can do their bit, whether in matching dangly necklaces or not. 

Libraries are the cornerstones of our civilization, so if you know of a school or a local authority that is facing cuts, EMAIL ME ABOUT IT. I will make a stink, and if I know of any authors in the region, I will make sure they do too! Don't stand for this! Seriously. Let's all make a stink together. I'll come round to your house, we'll make stink bombs and then we'll let them off outside the councillor's office. Won't that be grand! 

And there'll be the added bonus of making librarians happy, like those ones in Alexandria before the fire. We can make them fat too, if we want, by making them cupcakes – though I'm not sure we can persuade them to wear togas.

You can also petition the Prime Minister to make school libraries statutory: go to http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/literacy .

I'll leave you with this thought: In 1948, George Orwell wrote a scary futuristic book called Nineteen Eighty-Four. Maybe you've heard of it. Two TV programmes have taken their titles from concepts in this book: Big Brother and Room 101. It's a truly great book that's scary for many reasons, not least because it depicts a world in which there is no freedom of information. And Big Brother, who's watching you all the time, and his Inner Party, use Newspeak, "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." A key characteristic of Newspeak is calling something the opposite of what it actually is; so the "Ministry of Peace" actually deals with war, and so on.  I thought of Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was at the conference, because of some of the official governmental terminology that was quoted:

budget cuts = 'funding prioritisation'

library closures = 'strategic asset review'

And finally there is 'library', which apparently is a dirty word, and so needs to be called something else, like 'learning resource centre'. What is WRONG with "library"??!

So like I say; we need to club together on this and make a stand, before it's too late. Stink bombs, cupcakes and togas at the ready!!

*Quite likely, since in those days it never took less than 200 years for authors to become widely known – and authors complain about publishing being slow now. Sheesh!

The Spirit of the Times


Zeitgeist [tsite-guyst]

Noun

the spirit or general outlook of a specific time or period [German, literally: time spirit]
(Image from artwork for The Smashing Pumpkins' album, 'Zeitgeist'.)

A Facebook friend of mine posts daily updates, giving his favourite word for that day, like 'corpuscle' or 'quango'. Funny how we form attachments to certain words just because we enjoy saying them, regardless of their associations. 'Zeitgeist' is one that has this effect on me – though it's not a word I routinely drop into my conversation, as I suspect that if I did that I'd sound pompous and high-falutin' (two other terms, incidentally, that have a high Fun Factor).

My agent and Orchard editors have often described my writing as 'zeitgeisty', i.e. it embodies the spirit of the times – which is a jolly good thing, I reckon. This is at least partly due to the fact that I absorb huge amounts of daily STUFF, good, bad and indifferent, from newspapers, TV, the Internet, books, magazines...the lot. And lately, events have been occurring that seem like something out of one of one of my books.

Take the Susan Boyle phenomenon. In the sort of alternate-future world of my Silk Sisters books, 'celebrities' have become so disposable that the only way to deal with the has-beens is to dump them all in a sort of Disneyland 'Beverly Hills' pumped full of happy drugs, so that they can go on believing they still have hordes of adoring fans.
Now, Susan still has plenty of fans, but the past week has been something of a nightmare for her. 'Boyle has simply suffered a more accelerated version of a common musical journey, from unknown to Priory in seven weeks rather than the months it takes hardened professionals,' said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. 'Television, most voracious of mediums, just chewed and spat out another innocent,' said Quentin Letts; similarly, a Yahoo journalist said she was 'just another victim of the celebrity machine. It sucks them in, uses them, and then spits them out: used and worthless.' (Incidentally, the best article I've read on the subject of Susan Boyle is by Howard Jacobson and can be found here .) Well folks, you saw it all here first, in the character of Gula in the Silk Sisters trilogy!

In my Lulu Baker trilogy I have, in the character of Varaminta le Bone, another washed-up 'celebrity'; an over-the-hill supermodel, desperate to cling onto the limelight (don'tcha just love mixing your metaphors?) After disappointing sales of her diet book 'How To Be As Thin As Me', she turns to the celebrity magazines in an attempt to gain publicity. Trouble is, she needs to DO something in order to interest them, so she decides to Have a Wedding; all she needs next is to find a candidate for Husband. This is where poor Lulu's dad comes in, the unwitting pawn in Varaminta's game. The role of celebrity magazines (something which didn't exist in my youth) in the lives of some prominent figures (pun intended) is quite disturbing; witness the recent collapse of the marriage between Jordan/Katie Price/Whatever and Peter Andre. Having your every waking moment recorded for public consumption seems to become, for some people, the only reason to do anything in the first place, and the price (oh dear, another pun) of such a lifestyle can be great.
In contrast, I notice something happening in the fashion world that's actually positive; in this instance, a TV programme that carries the same message as The Silk Sisters: namely, can we stop just throwing stuff away, please? Hurray, then, for Mary Queen of Charity Shops! Mary Portas, probably the nearest thing we have to my fictional character Nolita Newbuck in my Silk Sisters books, says 'People are aware of the need for sustainability, the importance of re-use, the greener option. So why are charity shops failing to perform well?’ She's out to do something about that.

I'm grateful to John Lloyd of Bookbag for his very positive and thoughtful review of Tiger-Lily Gold; however, I do have to take issue with one of his comments: 'This could have been a stinging rant against modern celeb-culture...Instead it uses those when it needs to...there is [no] serious attempt to get readers to abandon their weekly shopping trips and think again.' No?? OK, I don't want to give away the ending, but hang on a minute! The public are increasingly at the mercy of powerful corporate machine Rexco, which is robbing them of their identities. This is in part down to the rampant consumerism they generate: you are what you buy. It defines you. So that's the baddy; the goodies are the parents of Rorie and Elsie who, just before they go missing, were on the point of introducing revolutionary Smart clothing technology capable of transforming itself into different styles and renewing its cellular structure, thus dramatically reducing the need for new clothing production. There is absolutely NO DOUBT as to whose side I'm on, and I would hope the dramatic events provoke some thought on the subject!

It's true that I don't want to kill fashion: I love it! Any idea that it should be done away with is preposterous. What I hate is the accelerated consumer machine it has become, the third-world sweat shops producing bargain clothes for decadent westerners to wear for a season and discard.

Anyway, off the soapbox now. My primary aim is to entertain, but if I haven't also made you think a bit about these wider issues, then I haven't succeeded in what I set out to do. It's all very well embodying the zeitgeist, but simply mirroring the world around you is a singularly uninteresting thing to do; you need teeth. So...over to you. Did I succeed or fail? Am I toothless, or do I have bite?