Quiet in the Library

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

The sport supplement stayed surprisingly inert as it watched the front and back pages make their bid for freedom. Displeased with their previous state of unity, the center pages quickly rebelled from their loose binding making a blind dash across the road in front of the oncoming cars.
A swift gust of wind had mugged me for my newspaper and embarrassed by my own pathetic attempt to rescue the various pages from the busy road, I slinked off to the nearby library in search of less elusive reading material and some much needed peace and quiet. Libraries, after all, are places of quiet where reading, thinking and learning are encouraged and any unecessary noise will be met with a sharp "Shhh!" from the nearest librarian.
My image of the library as being a safehaven for bibliophiles and lovers of peace and quiet was hastily shattered however. Newspaper and destitute, I trawled the downstairs floor in search for something to read, choosing to ignore the man who had passed out in the entrance. I was immediately struck by the constant murmur of voices and groups of people carrying out conversations in raised voices. The familiar noise of clashing cymbals was overflowing from personal headphones, mobiles were ringing loudly and being answered with yet louder conversations ensuing.
Perhaps I might sound petty and slightly misanthropic for criticizing people carrying out their normal lives in what is essentially a public place, but for some the library is the only refuge for reading, working and gaining some much-needed quiet time.
Should library staff not be persuaded to do more to reduce unecessary noise levels in our public libraries? To stop people viewing distasteful internet content on the library computers and using mobile phones?
Next time you find yourself in the center of any town or city aimlessly chasing a rogue newspaper, I suggest that you visit the library so you can see for yourself. But be armed with some ear-plugs.

In Praise of Being Nice

At school we were told to avoid nice. Nice is a lazy word. Nice is unimaginative and uninteresting. Nice is boring. There is a whole plethora of better adjectives waiting to be plucked from the linguistic fruit bowl, why chose the first that comes to mind? At the front of my classroom, as in many, there was a large poster emblazoned with the legend “Never Use Nice!” with a list of more savoury suggestions below just to discourage kids from ever using that filthy word again.
But all this primary school vocab bullying doesn’t seem to have done much good for any of us. We still seem to pick nice to describe just about anything. We go on holiday somewhere nice every once in a while, and if we’re lucky, stay in a really nice hotel with a nice view. Perhaps meet a nice couple who live in a nice cottage a few miles south of Somewhereshire (which is very nice this time of year I hear). All very nice. Is our vocabulary so stinted that we have to resort to recycling the same adjective over and over? Or are we perhaps in fear we’ll run out of words altogether?
Sometimes however, nice is needed. People may think nice is wishy-washy, but to me it’s meaning is very specific. Nice is friendly, nice is unpretentious, nice is humble and unassuming, nice is childishly innocent, it certainly won’t change the world but nice is - when it comes to it, just plain nice. And that’ll do nicely.
People trample all over the good name of nice everyday. Gordon Ramsey, Jeremy Clarkson, Sir Alan Sugar, and Simon Cowell to name a few who grumble and snigger their way onto our televisions every week. All these people for one reason or another have lost the ability to be nice along the way.
Anyone who’s made a name for themselves shouting at, intimidating and belittling others, posturing and being self-indulgent, self-loving and downright selfish should take some time out to consider just being nice.
But all this complaining sort of defeats the object of what I was saying in the first place, so I’ll keep quiet. But hopefully someone reading this article will have dropped the magazine in shock, knocking their skinny latte over their be-suited knees in the process, then swiftly dialled up Margaret from the office to apologise for shouting at her earlier on.
Or maybe someone will take a deep breath before moaning to the waiter that his or her food hasn’t come yet, or to the girl behind the till that they can’t get a refund on their latest purchase; it is after all not their fault. Probably not. But of all the things I can’t stress enough, please: if you can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

The Observer's Book of Butterflies

In search of the Little White Dot

"In the future", said Andy Warhol in 1968, "everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." He has been quoted and re-quoted on this as celebrity culture has grown exponentially ever since. These 15 minute celebrities certainly seem to find their audience in Britain as the average household owns 4.7 televisions, and the average Brit spends 26 hours a week watching TV. We are a nation of sofa louts and channel flickers, slaves to the remote controlled deity. We spend more time watching television than any other activity other than sleeping.

What makes this statistic even more worrying is a brief flick through the tv guide. It is packed with shows like X factor, Dragon’s Den, Popstars and The Apprentice which all seem to follow a common theme. What people really want to see at tea-time it seems, is someone else being the victim of a tirade of abuse and insults from someone richer and more succesful than themselves.

Elsewhere Jimmy Carr lingers menacingly over the telly schedule like a moon-faced harbinger of the cultural apocalypse, quiping one liners in between counting down the public’s 100 favourite films, comedy moments, car crashes and high-school shootings.

And at the very bottom of the tv guide in small print is perhaps the most sinister of all, the late-night game show in which the only contestants are those gullible enough to ring in for a pound a minute. The presenter (who is the love-child of a Butlins redcoat and Lucifer himself) nervously fills time as he or she waits for the winning caller, telling unrelated anecdotes and repeating the mantra "it could be your lucky night! Dave from Staines phoned in earlier tonight and won £500".

Poor Dave from Staines, lonely, bored and brainless enough to phone in, but lucky enough to escape with the cash. Spare a thought for those poor dejected others sitting alone in glum hope, their phones on constant re-dial, the pale glow of the tv illuminating their faces, bent with the torment that they know the glaringly obvious missing word in the pyramid, but are unable to get through.

This is the sad truth of television in the infancy of the 21st century, it’s all about making the most money, spending the least and assuming every viewer is an ADD sufferer with an IQ of 49. With a few hidden treasures, movies and sports programmes aside, the programmes above or ones of a similar ilk constitute the majority of the sceduling. The rest is simply panel games, property shows, programmes telling people they’re wearing the wrong clothes, programmes telling people they eat too much, aren’t fit to look after their own children, their house is filthy and they drink too much, but strangely enough none telling them they watch too much television.

It has become a cliché to criticize the Hello and Heat culture of celebrity kiss and tell and reality tv, but there is something terribly wrong with a world in which people with ideas to change things for the better and people who can educate and enliven others are overlooked in favour of people who are famous simply for being famous, or famous for being related to someone famous or famous for once having brushed past Jodie Marsh in a nightclub toilet. With this century comes the death of ideas and content. With the technology of YouTube and widespread digital tv comes the saturization of of what got people watching in the first place.

Maybe there’s a better way to spend those 26 hours a week, reading, going outside or dare I say it coming into contact with other people. So please remember to switch off your set, and for added fire protection, unplug it from the socket. Good night.

Beard of the Month

If I ever started my own magazine. It'd be called Beard Monthly. This has been so widely discussed that people I don't know have already started sending me candidates for "Beard of the Month". Here is my favourite.

A story

Notes from Underground Review

Я человек больной... Я злой человек. Непривлекательный я человек.


First published in Art and Soul Magazine 2006

In Dostoyevsky’s most popular novel, Crime and Punishment, the anti-hero Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawn-broker for his own selfish gain lead by his Übermensch-esque philosophy and a hunger to extricate himself from his impoverished surroundings. The vivid detail and chillingly accurate psychological potrait of a killer shocked an 1860s audience and secured Dostoyevsky’s fame worldwide. But the much over-looked prelude to Crime and Punishment, "Notes from Underground" premiers the character of the embittered, out-cast intellectual that would later become Raskolnikov as well as marking Dostoyevsky’s transition from semi-autobiographist and Gogol inspired novelist, to a mature writer of timeless literature in his own right.

Notes from Underground is a darkly comic novella, it follows the unamed main character (often refered to as the Underground Man) firstly through his own cynical life philosophy, and then through a serious of annecdotes (The Story of the Falling Sleet), which explain what lead him to take this unpleasant and bitter worldview, what he calls living his life "Underground".

An Underground Man is intelligent, but out of touch with his animal instincts; he would rather write a withering short story about his enemies than barge past them on the street when he is annoyed. The polar opposite of the Underground man is the "Spontaneous Man of Action", who when faced with a problem, charges at it head first like a bull. The Underground Man’s struggle to decide which role is better peppers much of the first half of the book, but a reading of the second half makes it quite clear who generally comes out on top.

Like Dostoyevsky’s short tale, "A Nasty Story", where the main character gets blind drunk at a wedding party and ends up sleeping in the bridal bed, Notes from Underground is filled with embarrasing and cringeworthy moments that make the reader’s toes curl. Although the main character is an anti-hero, you grow to sympathise with him as he decends deeper and deeper underground and into his own negative mindset.

Notes from Underground is a masterpiece in outsider literature which in Jessie Coulson’s colourful translation seems just as cogent today as the day it was written. Unlike some of Dostoyevsky’s other novels, not a single word is wasted, every end is tied up, and every idea explained. It is the first modern Russian novel, the first piece of existentialist philosophy, it is a sobering fable for any would-be melodramatic tortured artist and most of all, it is simply a brilliant book.