Thursday, September 30, 2004
My listening this week on my lonely perambulations to and from work at The Closed Library has been Madness - The Business, a three disc set of all the singles, including b-sides. Those of us either old enough to remember them in their prime, or with a link to VH-Classic or Magic TV will remember the videos, replete with Monty Python-style cross-dressing, people in animal costumes and normally someone flying around in the air. But the thing that brings me back to them time and again is the melancholy that fills the songs. For me 'Our House' is an incredibly sad song and always makes me think of a man, somewhere in his late-twenties/early-thirties who, completely by accident finds himself in the street he grew up in. He moved away, tried to deny his working class roots and reinvented himself, only to find himself back there. He looks for the house he grew up in, onyl to find it's in the process of being demolished. The song, to me, is a wish to return to simpler times through their invocation,
Father wears his Sunday best
Mother's tired she needs a rest
The kids are playing up downstairs
Sister's sighing in her sleep
Brother's got a date to keep
He can't hang around
For me the key verse is in the middle, as he remembers his mum:
Father gets up late for work
Mother has to iron his shirt
Then she sends the kids to school
Sees them off with a small kiss
She's the one they're going to miss
In lots of ways
She's the one he is missing, in lots of ways. Have they moved away? Are they dead? Too late he regrets loosing touch.
Something tells you that you've got to get away from it
A very curious line. To dwell in the past is not a good idea for your mental health. Yes he could have stayed at home but in many ways that would have been as bad as moving away. You've got to stand on your own two feet eventually.
However, on Monday, The Closed Library becomes The Reopened Library. We've been slaving away like good'uns to try and get it all ready but we're facing failure. Not abject, miserable failure, but more 'we could have done with another week' failure. We've got most of the stock in, but the problem is that I've spent a lot of my time in the room where most of our non-fiction books are going to be, I've been discharging and shelving stock (an oddly meditative act I've found, though it leads to boring dreams) and what I've been getting hasn't been a fair proportion of what we've been ordering. So we have loads of computer books, or car maitenance manuals, or recipe books, but we've got about two dozen books in total for our 200s, world religions, compared to probably two hundred or more books in the 300s, social sciences and politics. Lots of art books but not much in the 800s, literature, and once you get past English literature you can pretty much forget it. We knew it was probable we weren't going to get everything in by the opening date but if that was the case I wish we'd had a more even spread of what we did get, so it doesn't look as though there were areas of stock we forgot to purchase. Unless of course someone else thought buying foreign literature was a waste of time? ;) We've got quite a nice little collection of Bush-bashing stock, Stupid White Men, Lying Liars, Bushwhacked... I can only claim in our defence that we do have some older works like Hitchen's attack on Clinton but it seems that somehow Ann Coulter's work doesn't seem to have been properly published over here.
Meanwhile Bird on the Moon is the hand that points to the moon that is this odd Flash scrap of film with Burroughs, Gysin and Ginsberg discussing cut-ups. [via toddius]
Father wears his Sunday best
Mother's tired she needs a rest
The kids are playing up downstairs
Sister's sighing in her sleep
Brother's got a date to keep
He can't hang around
For me the key verse is in the middle, as he remembers his mum:
Father gets up late for work
Mother has to iron his shirt
Then she sends the kids to school
Sees them off with a small kiss
She's the one they're going to miss
In lots of ways
She's the one he is missing, in lots of ways. Have they moved away? Are they dead? Too late he regrets loosing touch.
Something tells you that you've got to get away from it
A very curious line. To dwell in the past is not a good idea for your mental health. Yes he could have stayed at home but in many ways that would have been as bad as moving away. You've got to stand on your own two feet eventually.
However, on Monday, The Closed Library becomes The Reopened Library. We've been slaving away like good'uns to try and get it all ready but we're facing failure. Not abject, miserable failure, but more 'we could have done with another week' failure. We've got most of the stock in, but the problem is that I've spent a lot of my time in the room where most of our non-fiction books are going to be, I've been discharging and shelving stock (an oddly meditative act I've found, though it leads to boring dreams) and what I've been getting hasn't been a fair proportion of what we've been ordering. So we have loads of computer books, or car maitenance manuals, or recipe books, but we've got about two dozen books in total for our 200s, world religions, compared to probably two hundred or more books in the 300s, social sciences and politics. Lots of art books but not much in the 800s, literature, and once you get past English literature you can pretty much forget it. We knew it was probable we weren't going to get everything in by the opening date but if that was the case I wish we'd had a more even spread of what we did get, so it doesn't look as though there were areas of stock we forgot to purchase. Unless of course someone else thought buying foreign literature was a waste of time? ;) We've got quite a nice little collection of Bush-bashing stock, Stupid White Men, Lying Liars, Bushwhacked... I can only claim in our defence that we do have some older works like Hitchen's attack on Clinton but it seems that somehow Ann Coulter's work doesn't seem to have been properly published over here.
Meanwhile Bird on the Moon is the hand that points to the moon that is this odd Flash scrap of film with Burroughs, Gysin and Ginsberg discussing cut-ups. [via toddius]
