Milk

 

Nowadays I drink milk called Heart Active. This is how much milk has changed over a lifetime of years. The alternative is not Heart Active. For decades my daily intake of milk has been frothed by an Italian machine until warm. Softly brownly brewed starts the day, the addict’s delight beneath a round cloud of milk. Sfumato is another word for the effect. A breakfast cup takes time. Habit it is, truly, to press the top crest of a milk carton to open. Open Other Side is one of those haiku moments in modern life we never stop to notice. I remember my grandparents laughing at this procedure. Like me, their lives until that moment had been all glass bottles. Glass bottles clinked. Glass bottles clonked at the front gate early in the morning. Milk in glass bottles lasted longer. You had to shake the bottle because there was an inch of cream in the neck. The transition from glass to carton came to school as well. If we didn’t tear the corner of the triangular carton cleanly, we’d learn about it as milk sputtered out on shirts. The whole thing was a novelty but nowadays we have grown old enough to learn the expression one-use. We despise disposables and want a return to glass. Recently, a friend bought a large container of malt. He lamented the days of malted milks, alas no more, or at least not much available, though then there’s the smoothie. To recreate his youth it is a plan to perfect the malted milk. This is not much of a nostalgia drink for those who are Heart Active. I asked if he liked Strawberry, or Blue Heaven. No, he replied, his favourite is Pineapple Malted. Malteds, like milk shakes in general, are still served in tall glasses that are parfait, or in aluminium shakers – preferably with authentic scratches and dints and preferably cool from the fridge. This reminds me of another drawback of milk cartons Open This Side: the Big-M Drop. A minor detail of delinquent behaviour is to drop their opened carton of flavoured milk into the Post Box. This is easy with the red hatch boxes and is universally the action of carton half-empty not carton half-full people. Librarians are trained from an early age to deal with Big-M Drops in the Returns Chute, staying calm and replacing the damp literature that has turned a sickly caramel. Civilization is a fine line. At an early age I was taught to respect those who have milk in the tea first equally with those who prefer the milk after the tea is poured. This set me up for life and I’m fairly much intact. Meanwhile, growing up in a dairy town, we would go out to the farms for lunch sometimes. Later in the day we would watch the milking and gauge the level of the great lake of milk rising and swirling slowly and quietly in the vast stainless steel vat. Drinking a glass of that creamy rich milk from the nearby jug was enough to make your heart feel full.  

Sin

 

Iso-mandala No. 153 (October 2020)

Although many today regard sin as an old-fashioned word, everyone’s daily conversation spends any amount of time talking about sin. For some reason the bad things people do seem to be of as much interest as the good things. Our ways of talking about sin are spontaneous, gossipy, knowledgeable, and quite often factual. It is open to question though just how much we are aware that our main topic of conversation is sin; the word itself is rarely used. Scripture finds all sorts of means of breaking in on that conversation. 

Genesis employs story. Whatever we make of the individuals cast up in the Garden of Eden, they are caught in a process. To be tempted is part of life, even to doing the very thing you were warned not to do, eat of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. Having done so, the outcome for those involved is very different from what they expected, the world has altered in dramatic ways with the knowledge brought on by transgression. Once done we think, so here we are, then. If this is a process, what next? 

Matthew employs lessons. Each of the temptations of Christ is met with a rejoinder that ups the ante and defuses desire, offering an alternative to sin. Christ rejects all worldly power by returning to a greater power, that of God. This lesson in humility is also a lesson to us: we can and will find an alternative to temptation, when we ask. Christ also shows that at the time of trial we will be ready, if we are attentive and prepared. 

Romans, on the other hand, gets conceptual. It employs logic, reading Scripture through time. Although sin occurs through the sin of the First Man, it is through faith in Christ that “abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness” is made available. Death and sin are overcome by the free gift of grace, but how may that be expressed? 

Psalm 32 employs personal expression, a prayer collected into song. “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven.” The words follow the process of heaviness and depression brought about by sin, the acknowledgement of this state, confession then and appeal for others in community to do likewise, before forgiveness “preserves me from trouble.” 

There are many modes of talking about sin and sometimes we spend hours of our time going through them. The same can be said of forgiveness, always one of the options in a situation. Whichever way we talk about these things each day, the process is not static. It is opening up to God, made out of need for restoration, alive in the spirit. 

>> Weekly reflection for the First Sunday of Lent, the 26^th of February 2023. Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

 >> Genesis 2.15–17; 3.1–7; Psalm 32; Romans 5.12–19; Matthew 4.1–11

Sensitivity

 

Publishers of Roald Dahl, the author famed for mentioning unmentionable things, are employing sensitivity readers to alter some of the unmentionable language in his children’s books. This is language deemed offensive. The unmentionable is one of the reasons readers read Roald Dahl. The publishers stand by “the irreverence and sharp-edged spirit of the original text,” so how much that changes after the sensitivity readers get to work is a fair question. ‘Fat’ and ‘ugly’ have been cut, with the result that Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”. Physical appearance is a main concern behind hundreds of changes. Then there is “Aunt Sponge who is terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” which has been changed to “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” leaving one to wonder if the sensitivity reader is not guilty of ageism, also revengism, but more to the point a co-author of the work, given the new couplet alters the meaning of the story and may not be what Dahl had in mind at all. The full job description for Sensitivity Reader is not readily available, but obviously extends to skill with gender neutrality, as the Cloud-Men in ‘James and the Giant Peach’ have become Cloud-People. How this alters the meaning of the story itself (cf. Aunt Sponge) is not up for discussion. Yesterday, Finnegans Wake Reading Group reached page 120: “…those throne open doubleyous (of an early muddy terranean origin whether man chooses to damn them agglutinatively loo-too-blue-face-ache or illvoodawpeehole or, kants, koorts, topplefouls) seated with such floprightdown determination and reminding uus ineluctably of nature at her naturalest…” Would a sensitivity reader alter ‘man’ to ‘people’, thereby ruining the rhythm of the passage? Can anything be done to hide the fact this is a description of defecating, when the author of ‘Finnegans Wake’ has already gone to such indulgent, overwordy trouble doing the same? Is this any way to talk about a letter in the Book of Kells and how many sensitivities must be overcome before the young reader appreciates the author’s ornate way of explaining the natural activity of going to the dunny? Like Roald Dahl, the offending passage becomes more meaningful and more funny the more times it is read, the reader becoming complicit through the humour. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is rife with interest in the problems faced by Roald Dahl. For example, the words we use now, even quite common words like ‘fat’ or ‘man’, will mean something new to another generation. Well-meaning editors alter the ur-text to suit an agenda or a readership or an in-house prescription, thus inventing a new book. Changes can turn meanings into their opposites, just so a tragic ending can be a happy ending, a comic phrase becomes a neutral mundanity, a taboo becomes a permission, and vice versa, tangoing with wobbily doubleyous across the page.

 

 

 

The image by Quentin Blake is of Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker in ‘James and the Giant Peach’ by Roald Dahl. Here is the inoffensive article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/18/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-to-remove-language-deemed-offensive          

Social

 

At home in private you pursue a life of various, as distinct from vicarious, interests. You decide it’s the hour to take early computer time and catch up with friends on social media. One friend has launched on a tantrum rant with Hydra-like complaints that spring up double each time other friends lop off the head of a previous grievance. Another friend posts unfunny cartoons intended to cheer your day, leaving you disconsolate with questions about is the human race heading in the right direction. Another has discovered an infatuation for red pandas, sharing this infatuation by disseminating most available pictures of red pandas, whether restricted by copyright or not. So cute, to the max. Routine rubbish ads and demands to sign petitions for obscure causes drive you to go outside for a walk, where the familiar shapes of streets and trees restore a sense of normality. It is understandable why you long for the age of servants. One or two servants whose daily chores primarily entail handling the overload of your social media posts, is a proposition with merit. Their job description includes deletion of all multimillionaire politicians, garish gambling enticements, and chocolate wrapper wordles, before you have opened your accounts for the day. You have slept at night knowing you also have a diplomatic corps on regular shifts, fobbing off transparent scams, sending a curt yes or no to nosy parkers with trick questions, discerning the non-troll from the troll and dispatching the latter to a Moldavian salt mine using a mix of outrageous decoys and fey non sequiturs. As you stroll along your street enjoying the layout of native gardens and smiling at locals rushing to work, you further construct this editorial entourage, there to resolve what has become asocial media. Employment of psychologists will enhance your day by figuring out warm friends from stormy friends, fair weather friends from false friends. Your day can be spared of despair, or simple dismay, by sensible advice from your psychologists about who to respond to in the present state of upheaval, and who to treat with circumspection, for now. A couple of espionage agents would be useful on your books, employees able to distinguish the blessed from the dodgy. They can send troublemakers off the scent by posting ludicrously nonsensical answers to posts intended to ascertain your age, your favourite form of clothing, and other targeted advertising ploys. Their main job is to scramble your algorithm. Instead of sitting alone being all of these people at once, after employing them you may enjoy daily conversations over tea and cinnamon biscuits, the kind of sociability that took centuries of socialising to perfect, the purported purpose of your morning hour of social media.

Antilibrary

 

The entry for ‘Antilibrary’ on Wikipedia exposes the pitfalls of Wikipedia. The term ‘antilibrary’ is said to be coined by Umberto Eco: “A collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read.” But the paragraph following that claims antilibrary was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, inspired by an idea of Umberto Eco’s. Books may have to be opened to resolve the coinage question. Homework so far indicates that Taleb takes his lead from Eco who, listening to visitors to his private library (thirty thousand books) either went wow have you read all these books, or else said they get it, it’s not an ego trip, a library is about research. This is where the non sequitur occurs. Taleb jumps to the conclusion that read books are far less valuable than unread books. “The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books,” Taleb conjectures. As a concept this is valuable, we ought to be open to the unknown. As a statement about our history of reading, it denies the extraordinary value we have already gained from the books we have read to this moment in time. I do wonder if this is what Eco had in mind. As well, where is the knowledge we have lost in information? as T.S. Eliot asks. That said, Taleb then introduces the word antilibrary, which is precisely the sum of the books we have not yet read. The prefix is being employed in a positive sense, anti- being the books available to us that we have not yet read, whether at home or away. It offers promise. For some of us, this is in fact the feeling we have any time we enter an actual library, a place that contains more books we haven’t read than books we have read, so maybe our local library is an antilibrary anyway. This is not abstruse thinking but has become fashionable, at least while ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ (21 February 2018) assures us not to worry about the piles of unread books mounting on all sides because they represent “curiosity, potential learning and inspiration.” Who can disagree? Stop and smell the roses. All of this becomes complicated by Wikipedia’s statement that the concept that antilibrary describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku. This turns out to be a narrow definition (“Books that have been purchased but not yet read”), if our broad definition of tsundoku is “the practice of buying more books than you can read.” Oddly, this only serves to describe the world most of us inhabit most of the time: a world where for every book we have available there is a related book we have yet to read, more than likely close to hand. It is this antilibrary of everything we have yet to read that tests our intellectual and emotional lives, if we are readers. Time will always be making available a book we cannot resist, a book that will improve or expand our awareness and enjoyment of existence. Though how we got to this point has much to do with the books we have already read, not the ones we haven’t.

Importance

 

It’s worth getting earnest about importance. Our personal libraries are the accumulated result of acquiring books we find important, even if others think differently. The effectual and ephemeral reside nearby with equal distinction. The vital and the vapid sit about the place in charming tsundoku positions. Surrounding ourselves with the objects of our satisfied desire is to remind us of this mutual value. Sentiment is one reason our books stay where they are; emotional attachment is another. Some books are important to keep because we will visit them again, sometime or other. The intellect is at play. Some books get us through a rough patch. Then, the tsundoku principle kicks in, we acquire these books to read some time, just don’t ask when. Some must have signed first editions, or anything in their area with a good review but always in hardback. Collectors of pop-up books call it a thing, as the latest acquisition opens with a hand standing on the page, made from origami card; this practice can get out of hand. Nothing can be more important to a reader than being in the midst of the book they cannot put down. Riveting, absorbing, engrossing, and other words involving physical connection are used to explain the feeling of a book they simply devour. The cool, calculating librarian can only guess from afar these private experiences of getting physical. They who can only rely on circulation statistics for meaning, the fortune wheel of the zeitgeist, or judging the book by its cover. Private collectors will surround ourselves with more of that which promises connection, thus at some future time turning these works into the importance of being important. If we manage a public library, the complexities proliferate. The importance of a book is tied existentially to its potential reader. This is why the latest edition of a textbook will only be important until the next edition comes along, while the uncut rectangle of yellowed pages dated 1923 can be the sole copy in existence, the lynchpin of a researcher’s construction, the missing link in their thesis. Which one do we cull first? Research libraries embrace, sometimes in an all-consuming way, their role as institutions of tsundoku. They give thanks daily for the privilege of having what no one else has and making it available, sometimes long after the book seemed to have lost any sense of importance. Our disposable, one-use society will keep relearning as if for the first time how importance has very little to do with sale and demand, the flying fickle finger of fashion, how its essential meaning is between the hand that wrote the page and the reader for whom this is the hit, the it and a bit, the rivet, the holy grail. Such a reader may visit the library sometime next week; or they may not yet have arrived at this our fretting stage of existence.

Thesis

 Another responsibility of the durable librarian is to assist a researcher in finding citations for their doctoral thesis. If their doctorate is on the history of tsundoku, for example, the primary source material is well-known to them, if no-one else, set out in their study space in randomly appealing piles. Our work begins with new literature on tsundoku, of the kind unattached to Amazon; articles in online journals with foolproof firewalls; the impossible-to-get pamphlet on Tsundoku Masters reportedly at the other end of a broken Wikipedia link. The would-be doctor pursues these fugitive obscurities with all the enthusiasm of a GP needing to know about a new pharmaceutical. The paper chase extends to microdots and wanton websites of extraneous opinion. Digital has only expanded the stacks of tsundoku exponentially. But then actually, reading all of this secondary literature is less important, it seems, than having (as researchers put it) seen it. Having seen it, it can then be added to their bibliography, a bulging balloon of citations at risk of growing larger than the thesis itself. I sometimes think this resources section should be headed ‘Tsundoku’, in the interests of complete honesty with their supervisors and examiners, as their bibliography fits the definition of collecting more books than they can read. Tsundoku creates the impression the citations have probably all been read, only which ones? Have they all at least been gleaned or skimmed? How many citations have been seen but not read? Anyway, once the searches are successful, the librarian has done his, her, or their work, retiring to help the next researcher, and leaving the pre-doctor in tsundoku heaven. That a librarian’s work entails a modicum of tsundoku is a realization that comes with time in the job. Although our purpose is to provide books that people will read, how many of them are actually read? Circulation records cannot give an answer. The library is a living, breathing model of tsundoku, which is just as well because it is that unread book ordered five years ago that come next Monday morning will be the one book a visiting scholar has to read now. This is true even of thesis collections, whether the thesis be ‘The History of Tsundoku’, or on some other subject. One chapter of that thesis has the heading ‘Surfeit’, a book arrangement that draws anxious sighs from an aesthete of book arts, a nervous clatter of spectacles with the scholar, but from the librarian a request at the next committee meeting for a double extension of the building, preferably yesterday. One person’s surfeit is another person’s surprise. One scholar’s pulp is another scholar’s grail.      

Tsundoku

 

Today I attended a university librarians’ day, an annual get-together of amongst the most vital people in the institution. Several sessions   saw recurring discussion of the now issue of digital and print resources, sometimes thought mistakenly as digital versus print resources. Asked how many e-books the university currently holds, our IT person guestimated four hundred thousand, and counting. Some would call this a professional example of tsundoku, the practice of buying more books than you can read. Now to be asked how many books in the library, I can reply nonchalantly, oh over four hundred thousand. The word emerged in the Meiji era (1868-1912), that is after Western culture took its kind of books into Japan. The pleasure of acquiring books overruled all sense of the time taken to read them, but then what are libraries for? And with the Japanese, aesthetics plays a leading part, tsundoku too possessing the meaning of leaving books lying around or stacked up to be read later, a visual delight all their own. It has not the connotation of hoarding, but rather of collecting for use in some unspecified future moment, maybe tonight, maybe next year, maybe never. Looks good. What’s in there? Read on. Bibliomania is an excessive end product of the practice, the superlative of tsundoku, because tsundoku itself is surrounded with an air of innocent discovery. I don’t have to be a librarian to find myself off the street magically in a bookshop curiously inspecting every new title on display and studying jackets and unquestioningly purchasing two three let’s make it five new books for that future moment when they can be either read, or left impressively scattered on level tabletops or set against others for mutual support on the latest shelf for that future unspecified moment. For many of us, the practice started young. It was necessary, even then, to have every book that we would possibly need to have read in the next twelve months. Which book was less the question than, which books? The solidity, the immediacy, the presence of the print book inspired tsundoku, too the unknowns within any one of those unread discoveries. This is to be surrounded by possibilities, things heard of, worlds and words heard about, to embark on one fine day. Much as e-books save clutter, they must be subscribed to, inscribed electrically on a page that tomorrow may be blank, their platform dropped, their space unreplaced. As I jotted down during the librarians’ day session, only print books exist in perpetuity. Which came first, librarians or tsundoku? A house of opened and unopened books is the home of interested existence.

Humbug

 

‘Humbug’ by John Hughes is the new multifaceted novel by the notorious Sydney rip-off merchant. Once again Hughes has successfully launched a puzzle-book of spot-the-author, without listing all the answers at the end. Whole paragraphs from famous American novels and Nobel Prize essays rub shoulders with original writings by his former students and unusual uncredited passages from people’s blogs. Asked to explain himself, Hughes replies smilingly that there is nothing to explain. He is paying homage to all the favourite creative artists that make up his patchwork quilt. Acknowledgement is superfluous, given the words are Hughes’s once a few alterations are made and, as Charles Dickens once put it, “the ink has dried.” An important aspect of his method is the technique he calls “without realising”. This involves copying sections of ‘A Christmas Carol’ without realising at the time that’s what he’s doing. This is quite an imaginative feat, completely beyond the scope of Artificial Intelligence, or most other authors. The artistic realisation of ‘Humbug’ requires Hughes to be not realising what he’s doing. How this technique would work itself out in a court of law is an open question; it may be the test case. After all, as T.S. Eliot says, “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal, but plagiarists don’t realise what they’re doing.” How does he plead? Recent generations of poets across languages have developed the found poem, a poem made entirely of text written by someone not the poet, altered and edited in arrangements to make new effects. Citing the source of the words is an essential factor in this literary game. It’s possible that John Hughes has accidentally invented the found novel, an achievement that he could be celebrating as a first for Australia. This is not going to happen on the evidence of the book in hand. ‘Humbug’ is absent of any author’s name other than that of John Hughes, its contents rounded, firm-lined, and shiny like a jar of hard-boiled peppermint lollies. Nor are prospects promising while Hughes makes asides in interviews that his next novel is another homage to his beloved Dickens. ‘Great Expectations’ by John Hughes is a realisation of the book of the same name in which all the adjectives have been altered. It is unclear at present if “without realising” is being employed, but it sounds suspiciously like rewrite by thesaurus. Yet ‘Humbug’ is potentially destined to become a hallowed work of Oz Lit, a cult classic. The full set of sources for this Christmas cracker of favourite quotes has yet to be established. Once completed, readers will be able to read with unalloyed enjoyment ‘The Annotated ‘Humbug’’, admiring its synthetic composition, collaged story development, and range of references,  a work written by about 50 (and counting) authors, and arranged by that fox, Hughes.