Yesterday i made pretend candles out of strips of white cardboard and shiny paper for the frames. Why? I didn't really have much choice to be honest, we were making a Harry Potter display at work, to go in the childrens library section. I only managed to get a bit part in this charade which was making the cardboard candles, which are to hang from the big frames suspended from the ceiling. I imagine the effect will be most underwhelming, but thats beside the point. I've told them often enough that we shouldn't be jumping on this Harry Potter bandwagon; i wont pretend it was me who wrote that the books leap into the mainstream is "symptomatic of the infantilisation of a semi-literate culture" and i wont pretend i disagree either. I know i'm taking them too seriously, but the reason i like working in the library is because most of the time it's a step aside from the heady worlds of advertising a profit making, a haven from commercialism. But not anymore it seems, the library where i usually work has recently started getting copies of Q magazine, nintendo magazine, vogue and other staples of the WHSmith diet. Not good at all. Anyway, i was in for the whole day on saturday, so at about quarter past nine i settled down to do some checking (which is just making sure the books are in the right order), on the adult fiction section. I love doing this because i can take my time and have a look at books that interest me and decide what i'll read next and so on, but i had only got as far as the b's when i was churlishly dragged away and instructed to make candles for the Harry Potter display. "Can't we do a Jeanette Winterson display instead?" I should've asked. But i didn't. I don't know what you'd put on one of those anyway, some oranges certainly; but what else? Another thing that annoys me about Birmingham Libraries (and i'm unfortunately ignorant as to whether this is the case in other places) is the way fiction which is deemed 'gay or lesbian' (by whom? is there a panel?) has to be separated from the rest and hoarded together and put on a display shelf under the cringeworthy title 'Loud and Proud'. Surely segregating it in this way is missing the point of such literature? Ironic indeed, and as Ms Winterson herself wrote "...what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people's." Enough of that anyway, back to Saturday and making candles. I had found a failrly satisfying method of card candle production, and the end result was rather nice, considering the frankly shoddy materials i had to work with. But apparently there was a much faster way of making them, and the girl i work with (who occasionally sports a Harry Potter tshirt of all things) showed me something that could quite easily have been cobbled together by a 5 year old. "oh" i said, because at least my candles looked vaguely like candles and had some semblance of artistic credibility. I likened my plight to that of so many, where speed of production, mass production takes precedence over creative endeavour. I felt like the caring small business owner being elbowed out by the multinational. I'm worried too because i don't think i saw one book i knew to be of literary merit being checked out or in all day. A few explanations present themselves, perhaps i only served the mills & boon/western/detective novel reading dullards (a generalisation if ever i saw one, but one i wont lose any sleep over having made) and the people who were borrowing the good stuff were served by the other staff, or the people of yardley are reading lost classics that i haven't heard of yet. These both seem unlikely. There are romantic notions attatched to working at a library are there not? And perhaps if i worked at central library in the middle of birmingham i would regularly be approached by intellegent articulate people about interesting subjects. But local libraries are not the centres of culture and learning they might appear to be. When i was there during the summer a girl asked me if we had any books on lino printing, "i don't think so, there might be something in one of the brittanicas tough." there wasn't. But, since i know how to do lino printing i offered to tell her, "haven't you got any books on it?" she said "no" i said "but i can tell you how to do it, i'll draw a picture if you like" "it's ok" she said and left. I tend to get that a lot. This is starting to sound whiny now, but i do really like working there, being surrounded by books and so forth. And the pay is quite good. It's just that sometimes, and this happens to all the other staff too, you try to help someone find information and they throw what you've found back in your face because it doesn't exactly match what they asked for, even though it might be just as good. But as i said, no more whining. Or maybe just a little bit more. On Friday there was an awards night at my school. They call it speech night, and it happens every year. What was unusual was that i was there. I didn't want to go, in fact i only went to appease my parents. And it was truly terrible, but you will require some background to understand quite why: The school i go to is unusual in that it is a grammar school - you have to pass a test to get in. There aren't many of these schools left in England and they're quite unpopular in certain educational circles anyway (the opinion that they're elitist and generally a bad thing is one i've been agreeing with for quite a while now... but there wasn't any chance of me leaving at all). It's also an all male school. These are facts but the rest of what i'll say is just conjecture. Because friday night will undoubtedly be heralded as a success even though it was a dramatic failure. My prize was for french, the Scott memorial prize in fact. I didn't ask who Scott was, in fact i tried to turn down the prize, because i didn't want it at all - not just because the exam result which got me the prize wasn't reward enough in itself, but because the whole idea of having to collude in that back-slapping ritual was not an attractive one. But i wasn't allowed to refuse the prize... such is the price of success. Or perhaps it isn't even success, i know i hardly felt elation when i got my exam results (AS levels by the way), in fact i just felt empty. Exams don't really mean much to me, even when i do well in them, they are too shallow an artifice for me to pin my hopes upon. Back to friday though. The school i go to is part of whats rather dauntingly known as 'the kind edwards foundation' made up of some of the grammar schools in birmingham. Every school in the foundation has one of these evenings at around this time of year, and theres a 'healthy rivalry' between all the schools in it. The headmasters of these other foundation schools were all there on friday. What this boils down to then, is simple competition - which school has the best award ceremony, and the winner is... Well nobody actually. The whole principle of the evening works on the basis that everyone looks as smart and uniform as possible, everyone smiles when they get their award from the smug looking bailiff. The bad jokes in the speeches get laughs - laughs tinged with a nervous edge i might add. It hurt me to have to participate in this awful show, i felt like crying - we had to sing he national anthem, and the terrible school song, and people did, with put-on vigour and passion. And thats what was so sad about the whole charade, none of the feelings expressed in the speeches were entirely true, they were fabrications - the truth stretched to fit in with a hundred year old ideal that no one could hope to meet. The school captain, vice captain and the headmaster all spoke of what the school had achieved, as if this could be pinned down and quantified, as if a school can be summed up in ten minutes. They thought it could, and they tried to. That they failed is irrelevant, it will be heralded as a success... history might be written by the victors, but what defines victory? The people who proclaimed victory the loudest in some cases. And on Friday there was no case against the school, no moment of protest at the ridiculousness of this stroking of the schools ego, this propagation of all the stereotypes about old boys networks and arcane ceremony that surround grammar schools. Unfortunately these stereotypes are true. I'll shut up about that now. Belle and Sebastian were fab on Jools Holland, even if Jools didn't particuarly look like he enjoyed them. The first "Hey! Cut me loose" sounded a bit shoddy, but it was all uphill from there. I'll agree with everyone else in saying that three songs wasn't nearly enough though. I found that link i was on about in my last mail by the way: http://www.framleyexaminer.com/ It comes highly recommended, a good way to use up an hour or so of your time. This mail has been remarkably self contained and whingy. For that i can only apologise, but i hope you got something of vague interest out of it. peace and love - kieran _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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