Lines to live by

I like a good aphorism.  I have a collection of them on post-its festooning my (ye olde) PC at work, and I added one today that I thought was worth a mention, though Google hasn't yet provided me with a source. Anyway it's this: “Live not for things but for the meaning of things.” I liked it because I think it describes my natural habit of mind as well as the way I want to live.

Just because, here are some of the others:

“Well begun is half done.” - Horace. Very useful for getting me to start things.

“Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself.” - Milton. A good reminder to keep it real.

“Nothing is more human than a book.” - Marilynne Robinson.  How true.  

“A faithful study of the liberal arts humanises character and permits it not to be cruel.” - Ovid. Take that, science!

I also have a fat book of Quotations on my desk from which I regularly refresh myself.  Pearls in the tea of my working life.

A new leaf

Welcome to the new look! Beautifully designed and hand-coded by Ben, who knows how to do these things. Nice, isn't it? And the last change for a while, I promise. Ben tells me the new format is more readable, in part because it's less visually cluttered and in part because of the larger font and spacing. I like it because it looks a bit like a book.

I find it interesting that, in the midst of angst about the death of the book, websites are increasingly imitative of bookish textures and typefaces. There's an attempt to recoup what's lost by simulating tactile, dimensioned, textual artifacts; that old reach for authenticity that ends in still greater artistry. Like many another, I'm attempting to make my website as attractive and interactive as a real book. Nostalgia? Homage? Swagger? Not sure, but either way I think it means books are, and will be, best.

Closing borders

Here’s a nice little piece about the closing of Borders bookshop. I confess I’m in the same guilty boat of reading far more books than I paid for in Borders over the years. It’s always, always cheaper to get your books online or secondhand, but if you just want to hang out in a bookish atmosphere, (especially when you find yourself in a busy shopping mall with a rising sense of hysterical misanthropy), Borders is best. Indeed, it’s the place to be, if not the place to buy. Unfortunately that’s not a sustainable ‘business model.’

Retailers can complain all they want about business moving across (actual) borders and online, but let’s face it, that’s the way the great human herd is migrating. Same with music. ‘The artist formerly known as’ can storm and hiss about the digital music economy, but ultimately it’s the artists who really change, who morph their business model, that survive: to wit, Radiohead. Retailers have to go where desire is, and for now that’s online. But what about the unmet desire for a place to meet with books? I think it’s time for the public library to morph.

We that are hedgerow folk

In the wake of alarm about Britain, here is CS Lewis with two alarming (and alarmed) poems. Lewis' poetry is little regarded now, but he produced some very clever and inventive verse, much of it celebrating what seems lost or leaving and lamenting what's arriving or arrived.

Lines During a General Election

Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear
All that; it is their promises that bring despair.
If beauty, that anomaly, is left us still,
The cause lies in their poverty, not in their will.
If they had power ('amenities are bunk'), conceive
How their insatiate gadgetry by this would leave
No green, nor growth, nor quietude, no sap at all
In England from The Land's-End to the Roman Wall.
Think of their roads - broad as the road to Hell - by now
Murdering a million acres that demand the plough,
The thick-voiced Tannoy blaring over Arthur's grave,
And all our coasts one Camp till not the tiniest wave
Stole from the beach unburdened with its festal scum
Of cigarette-ends, orange-peel, and chewing gum.
Nor would one island's rape suffice. Their visions are
Global; they mean the desecration of a Star;
Their happiest fancies dwell upon a time when Earth,
Flickering with sky-signs, gibbering with mechanic mirth,
One huge celestial charabanc, will stink and roll
Through patient heaven, subtopianized from pole to pole.

The Condemned

There is a wildness still in England that will not feed
In cages; it shrinks away from the touch of the trainer's hand,
Easy to kill, not easy to tame. It will never breed
In a zoo for the public pleasure. It will not be planned.

Do not blame us too much if we that are hedgerow folk
Cannot swell the rejoicings at this new world you make -
We, hedge-hogged as Johnson or Borrow, strange to the yoke
As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.

A new scent troubles the air - to you, friendly perhaps -
But we with animal wisdom have understood that smell.
To all our kind its message is Guns, Ferrets, and Traps,
And a Ministry gassing the little holes in which we dwell.

Cut, cut

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read this story.

‘The Business Council of Australia has urged the Government to consider making cuts to the disability pension to pay for flood damage in Queensland and Victoria.'

The BCA represents the top 100 companies in Australia, and they seemed to be advocating taking money from disabled people (and from foreign aid) to pay for flood damage, rather than pay the proposed flood tax themselves.

A closer look at their budget submission suggests that this was a crude representation of their actual proposal. In a 136-page recommendation on general fiscal management, there is one paragraph which suggests an overhaul of the welfare system as part of broader economic reforms. In his radio interview on ABC’s AM, BCA chief Graham Bradley was betrayed into some oversimplifications and misapprehensions of a system which he probably has little need to understand, yet his remarks were still more moderate than the storm they feulled implied.

Nevertheless the thrust of the BCA’s submission is an exhortation to the government to fulfil its promise of a return to budget surplus by 2013, and to do this through decreased spending rather than increased tax.  Like the coalition government in the UK (Margaret Thatcher with a green rinse) and the school-closing Republicans in the US (things really were better before civil rights), many in Australia would rather the government used our taxes to pay our debt (which is comparatively low) than to pay for things we need.

Compassionate spending, where there is little return on the dollar, is the privilege of a generous and humane society – and one of the low-hanging cherries easily plucked when rigour is de rigueur. But even if disability pensions and foreign aid fall into this category (they might not), surely schools, libraries, clinics, post offices and trains don’t? Aren’t these basic to our civilisation? As Ross Gittins argued last year, “Everything comes at an (opportunity) cost. So successful has Costello been at demonising all government debt - state and federal - that we've failed to invest in enough economic and social infrastructure. Our debt level is minor, but we're living in the worst house in the street.”

I wonder how long the experiment will last (here, there, and anywhere) before it fulfils Margaret Thatcher’s dark vision of society: that there is no such thing.