The future according to David Byrne in the eighties

These are the lyrics to David Byrne's song 'In the Future' from the album 'The Knee Plays' which was the soundtrack to an opera:

In the Future

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes.
In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet..
In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat..
In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed.
In the future men will be "super-masculine" and women will be "ultra-feminine."
In the future half of us will be "mentally ill."
In the future there will be no religion or spiritualism of any sort.
In the future the "psychic arts" will be put to practical use.
In the future we will not think that "nature" is beautiful.
In the future the weather will always be the same.
In the future no one will fight with anyone else.
In the future there will be an atomic war.
In the future water will be expensive.
In the future all material items will be free.
In the future everyone's house will be like a little fortress.
In the future everyone's house will be a total entertainment center.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very happy.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very filthy.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very healthy.
In the future TV will be so good that the printed word will function as an art form only.
In the future people with boring jobs will take pills to relieve the boredom.
In the future no one will live in cities
In the future there will be mini-wars going on everywhere.
In the future everyone will think about love all the time.
In the future political and other decisions will be based completely on opinion polls.
In the future there will be machines which will produce a religious experience in the user.
In the future there will be groups of wild people, living in the wilderness.
In the future there will be only paper money, which will be personalized.
In the future there will be a classless society.
In the future everyone will only get to go home once a year.
In the future everyone will stay home all the time.
In the future we will not have time for leisure activities.
In the future we will only "work" one day a week.
In the future our bodies will be shriveled up but our brains will be bigger.
In the future there will be starving people everywhere.
In the future people will live in space.
In the future no one will be able to afford TV.
In the future the helpless will be killed.
In the future everyone will have their own style of way-out clothes.
In the future we will make love to anything anytime anywhere.
In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it.

The power of books in Roald Dahl's 'Matilda'

We went to see Matilda the musical in London and it was an unexpectedly overwhelming experience. There's something about a musical, with all the group choruses and explicit emotion, that can be very moving, and for me the story of Matilda is especially powerful. Roald Dahl's characters are so polarised: either nasty, terrible people or magical, intelligent and generous. When the good people win, it's so universal, so resoundingly comforting.

Matilda is about books. She reads and reads as her parents watch TV and lie and insult her for her pursuits. Books give her the emotional and intellectual education her parents and television have failed to give her. Books give her imagination and a thirst for knowledge, but also a strong sense of morality. She is taught right and wrong by the narrative cadences of the stories she reads. (and if take a step back, we see that Roald Dahl is also performing the same role to children everywhere in the real world by writing this very story) Irrespective of her corrupting parents, Matilda grows into a generous girl with a fierce sense of morality and justice. She helps her teacher, Miss. Honey to reclaim the house the evil Trunchball stole from her (by murdering her father) and Matilda even learns Russian so she can read Dostoyevsky in the language it was intended to be read in, which ultimately helped her to stop the Russian mafia from killing her family.

The magic of books is made literal in Matilda, when she finds she can use her mind to move objects. The implication is that books can give you magical powers, or perhaps that when extreme intellect is nurtured by books, magical powers of imagination and telekinesis are produced. These powers are also probably a result of the psychological hardships Matilda has endured throughout her young life. A latent power builds in her, an extreme bottling up of emotional energy, until it bursts out supernaturally. Roald Dahl was such a great writer. There are so many levels to Matilda, and all good art should be both profound and simple at the same time.

___________________________________

Matilda the musical made me think about whether our relationship with books has changed since Roald Dahl wrote the original story, i.e. are books still such invaluable sources of knowledge and culture to those who are not granted proper upbringings? In a first world country, does the internet provide just as ably this knowledge, or is the internet becoming the equivalent of the television Matilda's parents so insistently praise in place of books? 'Why are you reading those awful books when we've got the internet?' I could easily imagine a lazy parent saying that to a child, 'I'm not buying you books, just go on the internet.' And perhaps it does become difficult to argue with that reasoning when money is tight.

The internet is a beast of varied goodness - though it holds vast information, vast educational potential, we spend most of our times idly on it. And this can of course be said for the television Matilda is so forcefully encouraged to consume: television is not all bad, it has great potential to educate. I suppose the point (one of the points) I'm making is: books are far less corrupting than other media because of the effort it takes to read them. Though they have the potential to corrupt, I think insidiousness thrives in ease of consumption. That books have great power for good is undeniable; whether or not that power is reliant on them being physical objects remains unproven.

Jay Rayner: Ebook adventurer

On June 1st Penguin Books released a book by Jay Rayner, Observer restaurant critic, called 'My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways To Have A Lousy Night Out'. It's a collection of some of his most virulent bad reviews of restaurants. This book will only be available as an ebook.

Speaking on Radio 4, Mr. Rayner said releasing it as an ebook only had various advantages: the whole publishing process was bypassed and what is a rather slight collection can be brought out quickly and also it means he can sell it for only £1.99, 'the price of an expensive bag of crisps'. 

This is the first mainstream instance I have encountered of an ebook only release. I should imagine this will become more common and who would argue with that kind of value: £1.99 for an entertaining little compendium?

Hooked on Books

'Hooked on Books' is a second hand bookshop in Dover. When I was a teenager I used to go there a lot on my aimless wanderings through the town, to buy the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy books and Virginia Woolf novels. As well as the wall-to-wall shelves, subsidiary racks and tables in the centre, there are teetering piles of books on the floor and the counter waiting to be sorted, though the staff never seem too keen to order them. It's a dense concentration of books.

Today I went back to Dover for a few days, and on my way from the station to my childhood house, I thought I'd go to Hooked on Books and buy something. For a moment I had a fear that last time I was in Dover the shop hadn't been there, but I was relieved to find it still there, still facing the town hall across the pelican crossing. 

I bought two books: 'The World of Chess', a technicolour hardback exploring the many beguiling byways of the noble game 

and 'Epitaph for the Elm', a book written in the seventies about how Dutch Elm disease was killing all the elms. 

The owner of the shop commented that he hadn't seen me for a while. I was quite surprised that he recognised me. We talked about Dover and how it has got worse since I left.

Every time I go back to Dover there are more shops and houses boarded up. London Road is like the main street of a ghost town. There's nothing here anymore. Everyone goes through the port and on up the Jubilee Way to London or Canterbury. It makes me happy to see Hooked on Books still going after 15 years. Along with the snooker hall in the Working Men's Club and Best Deals, stolid purveyor of second hand CDs, DVDs and musical instruments,  it's one of the few champion cultural highlights of that ailing street.

Ventnor Rare Books

We recently went to Ventnor on the south coast of the Isle of Wight. It’s a small seaside town with one main street. We spent some time wandering down it and into the charity shops. I went to have a look in the old bookshop at the bottom of the street, but when I got there I discovered it had been shut down. There was a note on the door saying they couldn’t afford to keep it open anymore, thank you for all your support, and so on, we still collect old books and if you are interested in trading, phone us on this number. They said they had been open for fifty years or something.

Last summer we went to the Isle of Wight and I bought two books from that shop: a pocket guide to wildflowers and a worn copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems printed in the twenties or thirties, I think. (Tennyson lived on the Isle of Wight and hung out with the grieving Queen Victoria as her poet laureate). It was a singular outpost of history and information in that town, but nobody wanted it: Ventnor Rare Books.

Chess book

On the road from the station, just under the bridge, there’s a man who sells books. When I was at university he sold them there as well. I once bought a copy of Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych from him. And then more recently I bought ‘Wolf Solent’ by John Cowper Powys from him. I had been searching everywhere for books by John Cowper Powys quite unsuccessfully after visiting his native Dorset. I spoke to the bookseller about him. He said he knew of John Cowper Powys and that he was hard to find. The bookseller is from Dorset and at heart he is a Pagan, he sympathises with the Pagan aspect of John Cowper Powys’ writings.

On our most recent encounter I bought a chess book from him: ‘Batsford’s Chess openings’, a collaboration between Gary Kasparov and Raymond Keene, British GM, a combination described on the cover as ‘a real coup’. The page are full of chess notation. It’s like code. It’s like maths.

I decided against buying this book once. I thought ‘I don’t need this. I’ve got enough chess books already.’ But below that thought deeper, in my unconscience, was the thought: ‘you can never have enough chess books.’ And this thought asserted itself later on when I passed the street bookseller, one Saturday and all it needed was for him to offer me 50p off, for me to offer him the cash.

He’s getting old now. His curly hair is grey. His face is lined with wrinkles now. And he drinks. The sight of a can of special brew resting among the books, I realised was a familiar one, as is the sight of him in a nearby pub in the mid-afternoon. As I was buying the chess book he was talkative with the alcohol. He told me that when he was young he was bright and he played chess. He, and he told me this as if he was imparting a singularly interesting anecdote, magnified by drunken expansion and the soft tints of the past, he played someone five years older than him in a tournament and two of the games were stalemates – that’s how close it was. It’s like war, chess, he said, he always liked the bigger pieces, but he hasn’t played for years.

I told him how I always play chess on my phone – that way I can always be playing, wherever I am, and that’s how you get better – by practising. I play on the internet on my phone. I always have about six games going at once.

I buy the Batsford Chess Openings Encyclopaedia with columns and rows of notation. If I concentrate on one opening then I can learn all the variations and my opponent will be at my mercy.

Questions of purity

My generation and the previous generation have all necessarily built up collections of media objects: CDs, books, records, cassettes, videos, DVDs. They feature in almost every house in the world, certainly in the West: bookshelves full of books, piles of DVDs near the television, stacks of CDs near the stereo, all lovingly sorted into alphabetical order.

These media collections take up space. They are displays, exhibitions, large in size and content and colour, objects assembled together in one space for people to see and use.

Though these collections are treasured and often beautiful, it makes one think about how so much space is being taken up by these things, and then it makes one think that it’s actually rather strange how we collect physical manifestations of what are unphysical things to begin with.

A film, for example, though it must be recorded on something to be communicated, is not a piece of film, it is an experience, you watch it happen on a screen. The pictures you see are not physical, they are projections of events, pretend or otherwise, which have been captured and communicated via a medium. Let us remember that the obsolescent media we are investigating and writing about in this project are just that: media, mediums, through which messages, pictures, musics, travel to our sense receptors. There has to be a medium, but the medium is not de facto necessary and indeed with the new digital technology, the media through which art travels are thinning out and in the process it is a purer communication. The vinyl record or the CD was only necessary because there was no other more direct way of getting the recorded music to the listener. It is not the shiny disc that matters and it’s not the artwork in the plastic case that matters, this is just a by-product. Musicians are musicians. They have chosen their method of communicating their expression. They are not visual artists. The artwork in CDs or vinyl is a welcome addition, maybe, adds meaning maybe, but it’s someone else’s meaning, the visual artist’s meaning. Everything except the music is extraneous. An mp3 is the purest version of the recording of a musician’s expression because there is nothing else to distract from the listening and consumption of the music.

With books, it’s slightly different because to absorb the words you must physically interact with something. You are actively involved in the process of consuming the writing. It takes effort to read a book, you don’t just watch it or listen to it passively, and as such, the physical medium of the book is more important to preserve, but not essential, and could also be said to sully the author’s intentions with added meaning: cover art, blurbs, fonts, etc.