February 22nd
The Doors to Freedom
educere (Lat.) = to lead out
Pollok Public Library 1949
Looking at a book of old photographs of Pollok where I grew up I came on this 1949 photo of the first Pollok Library which opened that year, the same year as I was five years old and therefore of age to join.
Also online I came on a photo of a 1905 postcard of the Elder Park Library in Govan, the photo taken two years after that library was opened. It is as it looked fifty years later when I used to sometimes travel to it.
Elder Park Library Govan
Follows two relevant paragraphs from my introduction to the 1990 anthology Radical Renfrew.
The place where a democratic freedom of encounter with Literature has occurred is in the free public libraries. It is not that they haven’t operated censorship, but the public libraries have remained the one place where anyone can build his or her own relation with the literary world. It was in the public library in Pollok that I built mine. The Five-to-Seven department, just a green tin cupboard with about eight shelves, and the books facing out the way. You had to wrap your books in newspaper, and you had to show your hands. Then the day when I could use the Junior Department for the 7-to-14 year olds, a whole wall under the window. Real books at last, that wouldn’t be finished as soon as you got home. Of course the time came when the Junior Department wasn’t what I wanted, but I wasn’t old enough yet for the adult. I got to know the names of the A to C authors in the adult section that adjoined the Junior wall at the far end. The adult fiction went right round two walls of the building, with non-fiction in standing shelves between. What a day that would be, when you could get into that. My mother let me take the bus to Govan to use the Junior Department at Elder Park. It seemed enormous, as big as Pollok’s adult section; it had a very quiet atmosphere I’ll never forget, with really heavy stone walls, and the pillars you went in at the entrance. It was there I got to know Dickens. Then the adult section at Pollok. Then the Stirling, the Mecca of them all.
The public libraries gave me the education I wanted. Like most Scottish writers I know of my generation, I went to School and got British—mainly English—Literature. I went to the library and borrowed American, Russian and European. And these were the ones that mattered as far as I was concerned. When the hero of Crime and Punishment ran down the stairs of a close after the murder, I knew what it was he ran down. All the poetry that meant anything to me in my middle teens when I first got to like poetry—all of it that meant anything to me, I got out the library. You could choose what you wanted there, read it in your own house, say exactly what you wanted about it, or —most precious right of all — you could say absolutely nothing about it whatever.
February 20th
February 18th
Seeing my sea-word Finlay "homage" online a few entries ago, Tom Raworth privately emailed me these two “variants”, so I asked him could I put them up.
dichten = condensare.
February 16th
February 14th
Part of the New Labour re-branding of Glasgow in the 1990’s was to name a revamped city centre area “Merchant City”, a new home to luxury studio apartments and exclusive shops. It was part—along with the City of Culture promotional torch handed from city to city annually— of a Europe-wide dumping of working-class history as representing so much negative “macho workerism” that had nothing to offer tourism. Tourism was the name of the game for the shells of what had once been heavily industrialised manufacturing bases, whose manufactories had now moved overseas. “Culture” was part of the city tourism smörgasbord on offer, along with a duty placed on artists to be “forward looking”, “upbeat”, “celebratory”. The working classes were now something to be “celebrated” in their quaint salt-of-the-earth ways and their (not-too-offensive-please!) lingo, but not in their struggle for better conditions historically, not as having been engaged in anything remotely touching on that awful concept “conflict” let alone that macho workerist shibboleth of shibboleths, that risible taboo of all taboos, the notion “class conflict”. Nay, that was the past, revealed to all as the era of potbellied workingclass males who beat up their wives and buggered their weans; now we were a confident people, a diverse people, a forward-looking people. Forward with New Labour. And all the rest of the new visionaries of a dumped history.
My own take on “Merchant City” at first was that it should properly have been called “Slave-merchant City”, Glasgow like so many port cities in the UK having been so irrevocably bound up, in its growth, with that trade in exploitation. One only had to look at the names of city centre Glasgow streets—Jamaica Street, West Indies Street, Kingston Bridge—for a whiff of the slave trade to be seen still hanging in the city air. But it was not the slave merchants apparently we were supposed to be thinking about: it was those worthy tobacco merchants, we were told, who were at the heart of the city’s rise to greatness; and who once could be seen taking the air, in all their finery, on the broad plainstones near the Trongate.
As instance of the humanly forgotten, I put up on this journal recently, and without comment, an extract from a report to Parliament of 1857 in which a woman of no given name was described living in squalor in the town of Callander; the woman had lost possession of her faculties, and was seen rubbing her own faeces in her hands, in her abstraction. This was passingly observed in the report to parliament by commissioners asked to investigate the state of provision in Scotland for “lunatic and fatuous people” of the time.
Another of these nineteenth century UK Parliamentary reports of commissioners sent into the populace, this time in 1843, is on the condition of children in Britain working in mines and factories. And here we get a glimpse of what this “merchant city” of Glasgow, in the very district where the tobacco factories were based, and from where children were daily recruited to work in them, actually looked like at the time of the report:
This is the reality of “Merchant City”, this is the past which parliamentary politicians and city councilors would rather bury, and forget. That burial is linked to and part of ongoing destruction of public welfare facility, and the usefulness of institutions such as trade unions that the descendants of these poor people described above fought to establish on their own communal behalf. What is instead going on now is not just an attack on these people’s descendants in the present; it involves a fullscale cultural attack, “Merchant City” and all, on the available meaning of the past.
February 9th
This is a double-page scan taken not quite at random from Tom Raworth’s newly published 35-page booklet of his poems Pleasant Butter. Newly re-published, that is, in that it’s a re-publication of one of forty years ago long since unavailable.
I love Tom Raworth’s work especially in these small publications that have appeared over the fifty years of the man’s publishing. The 600-page Collected in the Carcanet edition is absolutely necessary; but the spirit, the breath, the dash and the elegance are always more keenly felt by myself in the sundry little publications that are not far from the poet’s hand. Carcanet is a corporate publisher, and it shows. If ever there is everything in a poet that is outside the corporate, it is in Tom Raworth. That non-corporate entity is intrinsic to the poetry’s intelligence.
Pleasant Butter is available online for £5 plus postage from Lulu distributors here
February 8th
Homage to that cunt Finlay
February 6th
In howsoever obscure a magazine, a gossiping toaly has been launched into the public conduit, and gossiping toalies have a tendency to surface unexpectedly in farflung tributaries once so launched. A return-to-sender mechanism can be opportune, and the following article is given to function as such, should occasion require. In other words, should someone ever bring up, as it were, the gossiping toaly in my presence, I will simply refer them to my web journal entry for February 6th, 2012. And I will have nothing further to say.
I only do add to my readers that I am in as sparkling good health as ever, despite my lungs which as readers know, are fucked—but kept in good order thanks to the free British National Health Service, which still in 2012 exists; and my heart still pumps along up to the mark with its three stents, similarly acquired.
February 4th
Technical note: When I chose to restart this journal after a couple of months necessary rest, I altered the webpage url ending from /blog.html to journal/html. This I unfortunately forgot meant that people who were using a link to tomleonard.co.uk/blog.html would no longer find it working. When this finally dawned on me I asked my son Stephen who does any complicated fixing required, and he has now fixed it so that any old /blog.html link will now redirect to this page here.
Have decided that my collection of prose to come out later this year will be called Definite Articles.
February 1st
How to Run Your Democracy — Part 4,832
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January 28th
An update of one put up 18 months ago.
January 27th
Currently typing up prose pieces for the projected anthology this year. The following was published in 1991 after I was asked to contribute an article to the Scotsman for a series in which people wrote under the heading "What I Hate About..." It was republished in my Reports from the Present in 1995 but I had forgotten about it. As for internal references: in 1991 Ally McCoist was a player with Rangers, not as he is now, its manager. Paul Dazinger was a member of the American golf team which beat Europe in the Ryder Cup. The report from the war in South India you might recognise from Orwell’s 1984.
What I Hate About the News is its Definite Article
It’s one thing to have wide-angle spectaculars of twelve-rockets-at-a-time whooshing upwards into a dark desert sky, patriotic flag somewhere on screen; it’s another to have wide-angle spectaculars of what happens to the conscripts on whom the over eight thousand disintegrating “bomblets” fall from each salvo. That is taboo. It is also apparently taboo for party conferences in 1991 to discuss what has been—and is—the suffering, destruction and death caused by “the largest bombardment in military history” for which MP’s trooped through the Aye lobbies in the time since the previous party conferences met. It really is quite extraordinary. As someone born in 1944, I was reared in the slightly comfortable belief that there was something peculiarly wrong in the behaviour of a German nation whose people apparently never saw—or never bothered to find out—what was happening in the camps during the war. Now I know only too well that my own country can be firing Cruise missiles into foreign cities whilst the only topic hanging over Glasgow whilst this is going on, is whether or not Ally McCoist will be on the bench or on the park that afternoon. True there has been a deal of self-congratulatory public sympathy, for a convenient while, over the plight of the Kurds; convenient in that for over seventy years no-one cared twopence about their repression by several countries, and convenient in that the present oppression can be laid at the door of Saddam Hussein. Even more to the point, the forces who had laid waste so much within the country of Iraq from which the Kurds had fled, could be portrayed to the public at home as angels of mercy.
Every time a report is about to appear describing the horrendous state that Iraq has been left in after the bombing, another He-Wants-To-Take-Over-The-World story swamps the TV channels with another revelation. In fact, as a TV show, the “war” and its aftermath has been a great success. Witness when there was talk of the bombing getting under way again recently: the Sun even carried the headline Gulf War II. They’d got the semiotics spot on. George Bush announced he was thinking of releasing a sequel to the original video. Unfortunately we in Britain can’t expect to share every triumph with the Americans: as the American golfer Paul Azinger put it, “We went over and we thumped the Iraqis and now we’ve won the Ryder Cup.” Azinger was expressing a truth about how both events have been handled for domestic consumption. The PR firm which John Wakeham hired to handle Gulf War marketing can take pride in the commodity it persuaded the public to consume.
Of course they did have precedents to guide them. There was the famous TV broadcast—I can’t remember if it was BBC or ITV—“A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorised to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.” And there was the daily hate-sessions on TV with The Beast, that Demon from the Deep who is son of Scargill and Khomenei and Gaddafi and Hitler and Benn and Stalin and Red Robbo, all fused into one and stretched from Saudi Arabia to Turkey. But we bombed him! My goodness how we bombed him! Napalm and fuel-air-explosive, multiple rocket launches (the “black rain” as the Iraqi conscripts called it), Cruise Missiles fired from ships, B-52s carpet-bombing Basra, thousand-pounders in the daily routine of two and a half thousand planes. And the helicopters that can hover just over the horizon and fire these rockets that take out the tanks though they don’t even know they’re there! Kapow! Zap! And then there was the bulldozers and the earth-shakers that could just bury them all alive in their trenches as you charged through the desert! Crrrunch!
A landscape with nothing but bodies and vehicles that looked as if they had been in a tandoori, which is maybe what a fuel-air-explosive bomb is, in its way: but we won. We won. And it’s been worth it. Now we can make sure The Beast never uses weapons of mass destruction, he’ll never get using the chemical weapons such as we’ve been making and stockpiling for decades, he won’t get any nuclear weapons like the Israelis, he won’t get any napalm, or fuel-air-explosive bombs, or Stealth Bombers, or F-111s, or Cruise Missiles, or any other of the things we need in order to further the Peace Process in the Middle East. So we can sell more and more arms to the Israelis and to those Arab family dictatorships that will keep the good old petrol tank away from the “Empty” sign, and maybe one day when somebody nice to Mr Bush replaces The Beast, we can organise pop concerts the like of which you’ve never seen to help the poor starving and dying Iraqis who will all officially have become Human Beings again. Then and only then can we maybe think about bombing Iran. Or maybe Syria. Or do you think it will be Cuba? Or finish the Libya job as an hors-d’oevre? One thing you can be sure of: it will all be part of the Peace Process.
January 26th
January 25th
January 24th
January 23rd
In the dark; the space that is at least your own.
January 19th
If I want to become depressed, I only have to read not the latest war plans in the media's spot-today's-villain PR baloney of the Nato-UK-American-Israeli-Gulf monarchs’ alliance; I only have to read the feature called “Today’s Poem” in the local paper the Herald.
It isn't the formally safe poem with its safe "poetic" content that necessarily depresses. It’s the brief pious homily that precedes the daily poem, instructing the reader How To See What The Poet Sees. It's a time warp, Scottish Certificate of Education Higher English circa 1962.
Whatever the poem, old or contemporary, it's a Herald pinkie-in-the-air dose of daily "cultural" medicine, day after day deadening the spirit with a wee warm glow. The wee warm glow that tells the reader “This is what poetry is;” and the wee warm glow that tells the reader that an “expert”—albeit, like most reactionaries, an impregnable snob—is holding them in the safe hands of the uplifting wee warm glow that is poetry.
January 18th
Upcoming public readings:
Tuesday January 31st Reading the Waves event Street Level Gallery Trongate Glasgow 7pm Poet and songwriter/singer Linda Jackson’s annual evening showcasing some of her College of Glasgow creative writing students’ work, finishing with a reading by guest writer, this year myself. (I did it two years ago, it’s a good night with music as well as the words).
Thursday February 23rd The Stand 5 York Place Edinburgh 6 – 7 pm A reading mainly of work on my CD launched in Glasgow in November. As then, CD’s can be bought at the event for £8 instead of the usual £10.
January 12th 2012
December 31st 2011
Sirte, Libya November 2011. Deserted, formerly a city of 100,000 people.
December 28th
The artist Stephen Skrynka is choosing and designing text being cut into a steel fence to surround a new public building in Bridgeton. The finished fence will include the names of the six local Calton weavers shot by troops during the weavers’ strike of 1787; some poems from local schoolchildren, a poem by Edwin Morgan, and my own poem from Six Glasgow Poems “The Miracle of the Burd and the Fishes”.
Stephen has sent me from his iPhone this picture of the sheet containing my own poem newly cut at the welders.
December 25th
This year's card.
December 24th
December 22nd
Start again, in the theatre of war that is language UK plc.
Cameron is bombing his own people! But that's ok. So is Milliband, and Clegg.
My mother was bitten by clegs a few times when she was out the back garden. She had an allergy to their bite, and her legs would get blisters like the yolk of an egg. It was quite serious. She hated clegs.
This from the Dictionary of Scots Language online:
