Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Smart filtered by a dumb brown shirted computer

I work in a public community library which I find to be quite a joyful place where people come to learn, read and enjoy their community and one of its finer churches.
As librarians we seem to be valued as almost shamanistic care-takers of a public place which is safe and and interested in sharing knowledge, and literature and providing a happy venue in which the local community can feel at home and enjoy its public manifestation.
Naturally the best of us like to show off our almost psychic powers in being able to find the authors of books following the single clue that "it has a black cover."
The library is also a place which is not hell bent on relieving people of their money.
It has long been the mission of public librarians to allow people a freedom to read. We seem to value this.
We also keep such gems as Lolita and Henry Miller's The Tropic of Capricorn. These are two of the funniest books I have ever read.
Nowadays, I suppose as a salute to that great librarian from Hull (who spent a long time on the cull), Philip Larkin, we also keep Adult graphic novels and Mills and Boon and "Black Lace" fiction and various nordic updates on the Karma Sutra which seem to be favourites with the How to Get Pregnant Without Really Trying reader. These readers invariably show up later in the library with their chldren to hear my sage advice at children's storytime when I sing "If you're happy and you know it wash your hands; if you're happy and you know it clean your teeth". If they are lucky they will hear me read Dr Heinrich Hoffman's Little Tom SuckaThumb or Augustus.
(Augustus was a chubby lad, fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had and everybody saw with joy the plump, and healthy, hearty boy
But one day, one cold Winter's day he said oh take the nasty soup away I'll not have any soup today...
final line of the long poem and after a week's worth of whingeing:
the next day he was dead!)
Nowadays we librarians also have an interest in "information literacy" and literature and its evolving forms.
We have a professional interest in the nature of the new media such as blogspot, facebook etc as discussed in my previous blog where I have indicated a little disquiet about the censorious tendencies in these media.
(I notice that the father of the internet Tim Berners Lee has also expressed some disquiet as to the information silos of of the Facebook wide web in today's press.)
But imagine my surprise, dear reader, when I emailed a copy of my post on these issues that it was "smart filtered" by my work place "dumb filter". I was denied access to the email because, according to the my censor the dumb filter, it contained offensive material and profanities!!!
Jesus Christ!!!! Was it Henry the Eight who said "when I break wind all of Rome hears the news."
Naturally I pursued the censors which I know to be machines that look out for words that contain the letters "fukcing" and maybe "nude". I found this censor's minders turned out to be a pair of eighteen year old computer nerds whose duty it was to report the liberation of profane communications to "security" while at the same time relieved that at last there was something interesting for them to read.
Oh the rise and rise of the censorious and easy possibility of brown shirtism in our oh so clever electronic world.
What hope for Otto Dix?
What hope for Henry Miller, Raphael et al...

Friday, November 19, 2010

The motivation to blog; the conversation of literature; fond friends.

I am very fond of some people and I enjoy the conversation of literature.
I also like to do a little of the "talking" in that conversation.
My conversations of late have been less in the field of published stories, plays and films and more in the medium of the emailed letter and assisting fond friends with their "literatures".
I am also aware that in the publication of literature most of it disappears into the ether and that it is primarily for the satisfaction of the writer and the few dear readers. I remember a story about the visit of Xavier Herbert the author of Poor Fellow My Country visiting an australian University which taught Australian literature. The faculty had to look under dormitory beds to find any teacher or student at the Uni who had read his literature. One was found I believe.
I am drawn to publish in the google/gmail/ blogspot medium by the relative purity of the page. Facebook's insouciances and agenda-ing of my relationships I find a little taxing; but the illustrated email, the public radio video channelling and their rainbow coloured "White Pages" do have merit.
The Murdoch News Ltd aligned Myspace too is a little cloyed with ads reminding me of my once greatly dear old friend Paul Brosgarth's story after he had been employed at the Manning River Times. He was told by the newspaper's editor: "You're not here to write literature son; you're just here to fill the space between the fucking ads!"
I am also aware of the snake oil salespersons' banditry of our present media. I learned in a book subtitled "How Rupert Murdoch lost a fortune in China but found a wife." that these media companies are vying to have access to a holy grail: the installation in patrons houses of "open wallets" for easy pilfering.
The commodification of sport is something that particularly riles me where sport is no longer broadcast without selling of snake-oils and where that sport itself is more soap opera than sport. Kerry Packer's spell binding wizardry in subjecting Australia and myself to the inherently vicious game of cricket, where fine swingers of the willow and athletes of great grace are invariably and eventually crueled by the shystery of the hoickers of the hard cherry or the battered pink ball, has also caused me regret.
Anyway back to literary things; I did catch up with one of my dear old mates on Facebook who I thought in my youth was a swell gel. (Was it she who illustrated a magazine I wrote for with the most provocative of nudes? To this day I remember the fauvist drawing and text and it still sends a shiver through my loins which have been girded long years since in the savage but sexless game of cricket) (And would that beautiful drawing and exclamation and urging, oh so bohemian, fauvist and pure, now be deemed unsuitable for Facebook and the like, the new purveyors of our "literatures"?)
My sweet young friend (we have aged nought since we last saw each other forty years ago) has now led me to this literary platform the blogspot. I am inspired by my old friend's blogs where she reflects on an almost daily basis and I can enjoy once more our conversations and share again our comprehensions in literature. Maybe from here we can share a view of the art of Otto Dix and continue to plot the good marriage of our children.
It was this dear old friend or one of her other swell friends or indeed both these two and a third alluring creature who made me switch campuses and decide to study Arts at the Australian National University in the 1970s after being given by my greatest patron Gough Whitlam access to a free university education and an allowance to do so after working in his government for two years.
Had I been a few years older I would probably have been called up into the army like my father had thirty odd years before and been employed to kill people from my wife's country. How the world can turn.
Now, after twenty years work cleaning the Augean stables of public and University libraries in Brisbane I am ready to seek refuge again in the arms of a place that values a place where the creation of literature can be pursued. I am not sure if I will be able to find any place that will offer me any where near as good a deal as Gough offered me in 1972.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Called home from Library


6.05 pm Thursday November 4 2010 I am at Mt Ommaney Library but am called to come home by wife Quyen and sons.
I am unable to continue with this blog.