Sinister: on other mews...

[Kieran Devaney]

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

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