Dwelling at the end of the line bestowed me a brace of boons. Firstly that I always secured myself a seat, much to the spreading satisfaction of my gluteus maximus. And second, that usually I'm able to wade into my current reading book to good effect.
Now I grant that reading on a train and in public, is not the same as reading in the splendid isolation of home. When one feasts on words, one cannot but help take a mental pause for digestion and paying silent compliment to the literary chef. On a train, when hoisting the eyes up from the page thus, one has no recourse other than to scan the carnival of humanity, which also happens to be in transit between one worldly carousel and another.
Within my little cloister of four seats, there is usually some permutation of persons cutting themselves adrift. Be it through earphones; hiding behind a freesheet newspaper; slumped asleep; women applying make-up gathered into a compact; and innumerable folks predictably having words chiseled for them on their mobile phones and grinning inanely to themselves. Occasionally, just occasionally, I am abutted or adjacent to a fellow bibliophile. My heart cannot but help skip in such circumstance. Our eyes craning to read, not the face, but the title of their book which will enlighten us one to the other, into an instant familiarity.
So imagine my unalloyed delight when today all three other berths were filled by men with volumes held out in front of them, supplicants like myself. My eyes were pinging about in their sockets, unsure quite where to alight first. Etiquette determines that it is unseemly to swivel your head to the left towards the man seated beside you, so I was faced with the two diametric, either of whom could be engaged with minimal canting.
I plumped for the man directly opposite me. I snaked my eyes above the paper periphery of my book. To be confronted directly by his, staring straight at me, with his book lowered into his lap. In point of fact he was staring straight through me. As if he was trying to burn through to the Virgin Trains' logoed antimacassar behind my head.
I saw that his lips were moving. Possibly a student reeling off his rote learning for the ordeal of a test. Though he seemed a touch on the old side for a student, even an eternal one. Also the rhythm of his recitation seemed to be so rapid as to preclude an itemisation of facts.
People who read not only moving their lips, but actually vocalising their words had always struck me as rather limited readers, yet this chap was belting through his text of choice with compelling fluency. Though cupped in his lap, he wasn't actually reading it per se, unless it was written in braille...
I ducked my eyes down to squint at his print. It wasn't pointillist, but neither could I apprehend its alphabet. Of course, this man was praying! Intoning words not only taken into his heart, but inscribed there.
Does one have to be reading a text for the first time in order to fulfil the prerequisite to be a member of our impromptu book club? He wasn't even strictly reading his damned book anyway! I'm not sure therefore we could count him as a fellow traveller through the printed word. Our full house might just have become a busted flush. Oh sweet fraternity, I had imagined today to be so very special, what with these portents lined up this way.
Still, that left two other kindred souls. I veered my glance slightly to the left. The features were partially obscured behind the cover of his book, but I could deduce that he wore spectacles. Time to see what was being reflected in his lenses.
"Sociolinguistics". Well now, I knew what 'linguistics' meant and I had a fair idea what 'socio' presaged in the main, but I'll own putting the two together left me floundering a tad. Patently an academic text of sorts. To wring all the life out of language and literature no doubt. The burst blood vessels in his hand seemed quite appropriate somehow.
Then he lowered his book and I chanced look at his face, but only saw myself dimly outlined in his reflectors. Clearly he wasn't looking through the glass and seeing me. His eyes never left his text as they dipped downwards. Socio-gymnastics, seeing as his hand was fumbling in the pocket of his corduroy jacket. It resurfaced, brandishing a dayglo fluorescent pen.
Still adhered to his reading, he inserted the pen between his lips and levered the lid off with his one free hand. And then the great desecration descended as he proceeded to underline , or possibly block-fill sections of the page. This man had no respect for the holy sacrament of print. I drummed him straight out of our honorary members club and in my mind sliced off his corduroy shoulder pads with - no, no I am a man moved by things of the mind, not violence.
As to the third, well I will not even bring myself to utter.... It had pictures in it. An art book of some kind ? No lush plates of photographic reproductions, but line drawings if you please. Of a man, with a beard and a woman. And this bookworm too was imbibing the text with his vermicular tongue stuck out at the corner of his mouth. But it wasn't any sounds it was keeping time with...
Oh woe to be compartmentalised with a breviary, one textbook and singular manual. Fickle fate has mocked me with a mirage of monographs.
As the train pulled in towards the buffers, it was then that I realised I hadn't even progressed to the end of even a single line in my own book. Today, I couldn't even call myself a reader.
Showing posts with label London Commuters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London Commuters. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Friday, 6 June 2008
Free Sheets To The Wind
I'm on my fag break. Exiled from the kingdom of pub. I’m suspended over the rail. Not quite reckless teetering as it might sound. After all, my feet are still in contact with the ground. My sternum is braced across the metal tubing, a handrail by the ramp for wheelchair users to propel themselves into the saloon bar like a low slung gunslinger. What the nanny state takes with one hand it bestows with the other – enabling me to pivot the top half of my torso over the bar. My hands are clasped together on the small of my back, removed from the balancing equation.
My gaze is levered down the street. If this were a boozer in Soho, it would be pimps pandering their white slaves. If it were Leicester Square, it might be scantily clad girls on roller blades importuning you to dance the night away. Pressing flyers into your pockets, subsequently to lie crumpled all over the Square. Oxford Street, and some sloganed sweat-shirted youth tries to wheedle money from you for a worthy cause. Bearing nowt but a manic grin, as if they are in a cult. Which I suppose they are. Far worse, is when a gaggle of them spread out across the breadth of the pavement like old fashioned British Bulldog, armed with clipboard questionnaires, stock blandishments and recruitment targets. And a barrel-load of guilt they are all too happy to try and ladle out smilingly. But here, apart from the odd artist trying to peddle postcard examples of his garreted wares, in the main it’s dicky bowed waiters, beseeching passersby to come dine with them. Quite endearing really. Food rating higher than sex.
As I perch perilously, both the London flimsy free newssheets spill from my outer pocket. I'd claimed them earlier in the afternoon from sellers (?) chartreuse clad or violaceously caparisoned, roving from their stacked stalls, though presumably tethered by an invisible chain so as not to stray into a rival’s terrain. Commission is all, after all and what all are after. With myriad copies perched like a multi-limbed Hindu deity, the vendors strike like fanged vipers, snapping a copy at your exposed flesh. The City’s commuters meekly accept them to unfurl against not rain, but further dealers down the road, til they reach the sanctuary of the Tube interior where their manteaus are cast off. Yet despite these throwaways paving London’s streets, not with gold but tissue paper and unfixed ink, these paper piles never seem to diminish at source, Like a promethean liver, they are self-regenerating inside their metal trolleys. What proof of free sales can these poor saps offer ? There must be some method, otherwise they could just duck out of sight, dump the pile, then return at the appointed time having seemingly sold (?) out their stock. What's the difference between dumping them en masse, or getting their customers to dump them by proxy one at a time ?
It was in this vein that I witnessed only the other day, a striking highlighting of the economic principles at play here. Some denizen of our fine metropolis, took it upon himself to conduct a spot of impromptu industrial sabotage. I’m conjecturing here, but I don’t think his outrage was either ecologically nor aesthetically motivated. Incensed at any deluging of London, beneath cheap newsprint and scuzzier merchandising offers. I think he was plain and simple bigoted and keen to seize the opportunity to pounce upon a recent migrant to our shores. For initially he passed a stall, in somewhat of an belligerent manner, batting through the wedding arch of papers canopying his path, before intentionally wheeling around, returning to the unguarded dispensary and ducking down beneath the meniscus of its perky parasol. The vendor, with seeming sunny disposition gave him a brief backward glance, before chalking him up to a self-server and returning to his marks. I suspect the aggressor was emptying lighter fluid on to the stack, for the next thing we know, a serpentine coil of flame dances upon the top of the stack and the edges of the parasol start drooping. With a whoop the arsonist darts backwards out of range of the licks of fire, his horribly contorted visage lit up to cameo his malevolence. Prometheus’ liver burned to cinders. A man’s labours gone up in smoke. Where there should have been a sold-out void, instead would rest ashes, once they had come to earth. Hot press, cold clinker.
The Unread Sea might have parted that day, but the mechanism is self-righting. I can see them back in their usual force. Their habitual numbers. Manning ziggurats of undigested editions. Identical copy layered on top of one another. Truly a press of words, but one that can’t hold a candle to the swathe cut through by the internet. For I ask myself, what need of newsprint and pulping trees, when you can just go online and track down the same words archived on the ether ? Single strata and yet simultaneously accessible to a boundless number of readers. Instantly translatable into any language of the world too. One set of words, not innumerable mimeographed hard copies. It’s a strange allocation of resources, creating a need for lightweight newspaper chain mail suits and inverted keel paper hats, purely in order to head off those selfsame people handing out the newspapers in the first place. The snake that eats it’s own tail.
But I’m dissembling. I know why a proper need for newspapers still exists. And I don’t mean these catalogues full of advertorial. My old man used to discourse with his daily. Well why not, if a Columnist can editorialise and opine, then does not my father in the putative audience not have a right of reply ? For indubitably they had built up a relationship, albeit at one remove. Over all the years and no matter the change of personnel at the paper, the two had yoked themselves together, though the harness was a tad lopsided, as the journalist always led and my father unfailingly took the bait. But it had to be said, my father knew each columnist’s views like the back of his own hands that were holding them up to daily scrutiny. Everyday I would scan them signalling how the land lay. For it always started with a ripple of non-verbal broadcast. The inhalations and exhalations of abridged passing comment. Appreciative whistling, stupefied insufflation, or censurious clucking. The emotional bulletins weren’t so much worn on his sleeves, but radiated down them to resonate the leaves of the gazette itself. A Richter scale of seismic stirring, from rustling with tremulous dismay, all the way through to a cracking detonation along the faultline of the fold in utter disbelief. But among all these reverberating reports, would also be an outpouring of words. When the tissue of the paper was no longer sufficient to contain the discharge. He actually conversed with it. To be sure, expostulating to no one in particular, other than the monochromal flat plane in front of him. He literally aired his views, perhaps so as to smell refreshed to himself. Did he ever write in to the letters page ? I don’t think so, the imbibing of the paper was a private realm, a domestic tipple. Though the arguments might later be decanted down the pub or over a dinner party, it was never discussed with others at home during the day. Though we were at liberty to pick it up and read it ourselves, subsequent to Dad finishing with it. Once he had dismounted from his moral high horse. Once his blinkered gallops were over for the morning.
Having occluded your face, the paper forms an extension of yourself at the end of your arms. That windblown tablet of wood pulp, no more substantial than a reedy reflection in a mirror. A membrane imprinted with social dialogue. Seeing as you might engage it in debate, or at least be provoked into response by its contents, it represents another torso. One you might entreat with, as if grabbing the correspondent’s forearms, or even his shoulders and giving them a good shake. Grappling with the issues, the very size of the broadsheet making you have to work for your nuggets of enlightenment. Of course, with the recent trend towards tabloids, this aspect has been somewhat denuded. However, all this is to say, you can’t possibly recreate this with via a computer screen. A desktop monitor remains resolutely detached from the rest of you. Even a laptop is perched no more intimately than a cat who deigns to sit on your lap and let you run your hand through its fur. Yes your fingers might palpate the keyboard, but only the steady tips, the farthest margins of your being, get to express any contact. The rest of you remains haughtily upright and perpendicular. There is a dearth of interaction at the nexus of a computer monitor. It remains steadfastly an altar upon which we leave our offerings and hope to be rewarded with oracular wisdom. We do not converse with it, but only through it, like a walky-talky. Scrolling down does not render it parchment. The computer remains little more than a swifter, cheaper form of telecommunication. A slightly more updated version of the penpal. Other than its one boon. Its sole opportunity for interface directly on to the screen. Being the free sheet edition of what the Soho pimps offer at extortionate cost. I'd like to say more, but my dog end has counted me out. I leave the freesheets to the wind as I recrudesce back inside the drinking establishment.
My gaze is levered down the street. If this were a boozer in Soho, it would be pimps pandering their white slaves. If it were Leicester Square, it might be scantily clad girls on roller blades importuning you to dance the night away. Pressing flyers into your pockets, subsequently to lie crumpled all over the Square. Oxford Street, and some sloganed sweat-shirted youth tries to wheedle money from you for a worthy cause. Bearing nowt but a manic grin, as if they are in a cult. Which I suppose they are. Far worse, is when a gaggle of them spread out across the breadth of the pavement like old fashioned British Bulldog, armed with clipboard questionnaires, stock blandishments and recruitment targets. And a barrel-load of guilt they are all too happy to try and ladle out smilingly. But here, apart from the odd artist trying to peddle postcard examples of his garreted wares, in the main it’s dicky bowed waiters, beseeching passersby to come dine with them. Quite endearing really. Food rating higher than sex.
As I perch perilously, both the London flimsy free newssheets spill from my outer pocket. I'd claimed them earlier in the afternoon from sellers (?) chartreuse clad or violaceously caparisoned, roving from their stacked stalls, though presumably tethered by an invisible chain so as not to stray into a rival’s terrain. Commission is all, after all and what all are after. With myriad copies perched like a multi-limbed Hindu deity, the vendors strike like fanged vipers, snapping a copy at your exposed flesh. The City’s commuters meekly accept them to unfurl against not rain, but further dealers down the road, til they reach the sanctuary of the Tube interior where their manteaus are cast off. Yet despite these throwaways paving London’s streets, not with gold but tissue paper and unfixed ink, these paper piles never seem to diminish at source, Like a promethean liver, they are self-regenerating inside their metal trolleys. What proof of free sales can these poor saps offer ? There must be some method, otherwise they could just duck out of sight, dump the pile, then return at the appointed time having seemingly sold (?) out their stock. What's the difference between dumping them en masse, or getting their customers to dump them by proxy one at a time ?
It was in this vein that I witnessed only the other day, a striking highlighting of the economic principles at play here. Some denizen of our fine metropolis, took it upon himself to conduct a spot of impromptu industrial sabotage. I’m conjecturing here, but I don’t think his outrage was either ecologically nor aesthetically motivated. Incensed at any deluging of London, beneath cheap newsprint and scuzzier merchandising offers. I think he was plain and simple bigoted and keen to seize the opportunity to pounce upon a recent migrant to our shores. For initially he passed a stall, in somewhat of an belligerent manner, batting through the wedding arch of papers canopying his path, before intentionally wheeling around, returning to the unguarded dispensary and ducking down beneath the meniscus of its perky parasol. The vendor, with seeming sunny disposition gave him a brief backward glance, before chalking him up to a self-server and returning to his marks. I suspect the aggressor was emptying lighter fluid on to the stack, for the next thing we know, a serpentine coil of flame dances upon the top of the stack and the edges of the parasol start drooping. With a whoop the arsonist darts backwards out of range of the licks of fire, his horribly contorted visage lit up to cameo his malevolence. Prometheus’ liver burned to cinders. A man’s labours gone up in smoke. Where there should have been a sold-out void, instead would rest ashes, once they had come to earth. Hot press, cold clinker.
The Unread Sea might have parted that day, but the mechanism is self-righting. I can see them back in their usual force. Their habitual numbers. Manning ziggurats of undigested editions. Identical copy layered on top of one another. Truly a press of words, but one that can’t hold a candle to the swathe cut through by the internet. For I ask myself, what need of newsprint and pulping trees, when you can just go online and track down the same words archived on the ether ? Single strata and yet simultaneously accessible to a boundless number of readers. Instantly translatable into any language of the world too. One set of words, not innumerable mimeographed hard copies. It’s a strange allocation of resources, creating a need for lightweight newspaper chain mail suits and inverted keel paper hats, purely in order to head off those selfsame people handing out the newspapers in the first place. The snake that eats it’s own tail.
But I’m dissembling. I know why a proper need for newspapers still exists. And I don’t mean these catalogues full of advertorial. My old man used to discourse with his daily. Well why not, if a Columnist can editorialise and opine, then does not my father in the putative audience not have a right of reply ? For indubitably they had built up a relationship, albeit at one remove. Over all the years and no matter the change of personnel at the paper, the two had yoked themselves together, though the harness was a tad lopsided, as the journalist always led and my father unfailingly took the bait. But it had to be said, my father knew each columnist’s views like the back of his own hands that were holding them up to daily scrutiny. Everyday I would scan them signalling how the land lay. For it always started with a ripple of non-verbal broadcast. The inhalations and exhalations of abridged passing comment. Appreciative whistling, stupefied insufflation, or censurious clucking. The emotional bulletins weren’t so much worn on his sleeves, but radiated down them to resonate the leaves of the gazette itself. A Richter scale of seismic stirring, from rustling with tremulous dismay, all the way through to a cracking detonation along the faultline of the fold in utter disbelief. But among all these reverberating reports, would also be an outpouring of words. When the tissue of the paper was no longer sufficient to contain the discharge. He actually conversed with it. To be sure, expostulating to no one in particular, other than the monochromal flat plane in front of him. He literally aired his views, perhaps so as to smell refreshed to himself. Did he ever write in to the letters page ? I don’t think so, the imbibing of the paper was a private realm, a domestic tipple. Though the arguments might later be decanted down the pub or over a dinner party, it was never discussed with others at home during the day. Though we were at liberty to pick it up and read it ourselves, subsequent to Dad finishing with it. Once he had dismounted from his moral high horse. Once his blinkered gallops were over for the morning.
Having occluded your face, the paper forms an extension of yourself at the end of your arms. That windblown tablet of wood pulp, no more substantial than a reedy reflection in a mirror. A membrane imprinted with social dialogue. Seeing as you might engage it in debate, or at least be provoked into response by its contents, it represents another torso. One you might entreat with, as if grabbing the correspondent’s forearms, or even his shoulders and giving them a good shake. Grappling with the issues, the very size of the broadsheet making you have to work for your nuggets of enlightenment. Of course, with the recent trend towards tabloids, this aspect has been somewhat denuded. However, all this is to say, you can’t possibly recreate this with via a computer screen. A desktop monitor remains resolutely detached from the rest of you. Even a laptop is perched no more intimately than a cat who deigns to sit on your lap and let you run your hand through its fur. Yes your fingers might palpate the keyboard, but only the steady tips, the farthest margins of your being, get to express any contact. The rest of you remains haughtily upright and perpendicular. There is a dearth of interaction at the nexus of a computer monitor. It remains steadfastly an altar upon which we leave our offerings and hope to be rewarded with oracular wisdom. We do not converse with it, but only through it, like a walky-talky. Scrolling down does not render it parchment. The computer remains little more than a swifter, cheaper form of telecommunication. A slightly more updated version of the penpal. Other than its one boon. Its sole opportunity for interface directly on to the screen. Being the free sheet edition of what the Soho pimps offer at extortionate cost. I'd like to say more, but my dog end has counted me out. I leave the freesheets to the wind as I recrudesce back inside the drinking establishment.
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