Hello darkness my old friend

Down here the first week of November has been suitably wild and stormy, with a sharp, bright, beautiful full moon occasionally visible, hanging low over the trees in the darkness, and casting its quiet, implacable glow against the scudding clouds blown across its face. A view like an old negative held up to the light, ethereal and mysterious.

What to do with all the extra darkness? Embrace the intensity.  That’s the message of two excellent articles in the ‘Guide to the Night’ supplement with the Guardian and Observer last weekend – Sarah Hall on night swimming and Jeanette Winterson on evenings by candlelight – ‘when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing …  in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling’ – and making love in the afternoon:

To begin as the afternoon light is fading, to wake up, warm and heavy, when it is completely dark, to kiss and stroke the shared invisible body, to leave the person you love half asleep while you go and open wine … then the moment of standing barefoot in the kitchen, just a candle and two glasses to take back to bed, and a feeling of content like no other.

and concluding

Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have.

On night swimming Sarah Hall brilliantly describes the visceral shock and the intensity of physical sensation as you enter the water:

At first the sensation is electric, almost unbearable, yet bearable. Lung and nerve and blood mechanisms go into shock. Your body enters an elation of rage, because an extreme thing is happening. An andrenaline supernova follows, a burst of emergency energy. After a second or two your system recalculates, adjusts; there is a brief physiological acceptance.

And then you are swimming. There may only be a minute’s worth of swimming … but that minute is a rare, certain period in life. You are extraordinarily alive during it.

Inspiration enough to join the OSS swim at Parliament Hill lido on 5th Dec. It’s daytime, but it’s a start. See you there.

I had hoped to link to the full articles, but couldn’t find them on the net. You’ll have to make do with Sarah Montague’s interview with Will Self and Ralph Steadman on the Today programme. It becomes increasingly surreal and hilarious as Steadman gets involved.

 

Cities of the mind

The Invisible City of Musistella/Invisible Cities)Second View, originally uploaded by magic fly paula.

The inter-city train that Harvey (Taylor of HBT) set in motion in his incisive and characteristically exuberant presentation at the recent Shires BusinessXchange meeting has been running around my mind ever since and prompting searching questions –

Have I got the balance between Domesti and Auda right; Am I in Nebulo, when I should be in Specifi; And what about the balance between Complexi and Simpli (and here he gave us a wonderful quote from Einstein ‘Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler’); Most important of all, am I living in Authenti…?

And thinking about Harvey’s cities got me thinking about, and then re-reading, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, that extraordinary book of imagined cities, of states of mind and experience, of dreams and desire, of images and ideas. The world, parsed through an infinite series of possibilities.

Take the ‘grey stone metropolis’ of Fedora, for example, in the centre of which ‘stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room.’ ..

These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.

…

On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.

[Cities & Desire 4, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian from William Weaver, Picador]

And then I found this series of ravishing images, inspired by Invisible Cities. The image for Zora is above:

Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced.

See the whole set, by magic fly paula, here.

If you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.

Poem on the month – e e cummings

e.e. cummings is one of my favourite poets; his poems celebrate life, love, sex and manage to be sexy and joyous, yet unsentimental . This love poem I read at Mick and Deborah’s wedding last year.

Adding value through technical communications

Those within technical communications have long argued that product documentation provides significant value in terms of customer satisfaction and ongoing savings in customer support and service.

A new investigation, by leading US business researchers The Aberdeen Group, gives strong support to this view, and those who tend to view documentation simply as a cost centre are likely to be losing out to competitors.

Aberdeen’s analysis of data gathered from 165 participating companies demonstrates that the contribution of good product documentation and technical communications to enterprise profitability is far more significant than many realise and, when leveraged effectively, stands to contribute as much as a 42% increase in customer satisfaction and an associated 45% increase in product revenue.

Aberdeen’s research found that as a result of their simultaneous focus on operational efficiency and documentation quality, Best-in-Class companies were able to realize significant customer-facing value through technical communications, including:

• 41% decrease in volume of inbound calls to customer support
• 42% decrease in time to resolution with customer support
• 41% increase in customer satisfaction score

Aberdeen’s data clearly indicates that Best-in-Class performers have found the means to leverage technical communications to influence customers’ experiences with a marked impact on business profitability, and that whilst all too often regarded as a cost centre, technical communications and documentation are actually key profit generators.

The report identifies key factors used by the ‘Best-in-Class’ companies to maximise the performance of technical communications, such as:

• Commit to reusing content
• Measure the operational performance of technical communications
• Capture customer feedback
• Increase the personalization of documentation, customizing documentation to specific customer orders and needs
• Engage and educate customers with rich media – for example, interactivity to enable the customer to control progress through training or documentation

Factors which I suspect this blog will be returning to in the future.

‘Technical Communications as a Profit Center’, David Houlihan, The Aberdeen Group, September 2009, Boston, Ma.

Free access to the report is available via this link to Technical Communications as a Profit Center (until 27 November 2009).

Travels

Heading south, and just time to note this, from  Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski, fresh in my bag. Opening the book, this wonderful quote from Seneca:

I am like one of those old books that ends up mouldering for lack of having been read. There’s nothing to do but spin out the thread of memory and, from time to time, wipe away the dust buiding up there.

two thousand years just melt away. Feeling lighter already.

untitled

There’s an argument, and a good one, that we are becoming swamped by anniversaries. But we are still living with this defining moment of the first decade of the new millenium, and it looks like we’ll be living with it for a long while yet.

What’s left to say about it? I have chosen a poem, by Wislawa Szymborska which, although

although the event described varies in the particular, brilliantly succeeds in evoking the chilling aspect of

There’s an argument, and a persuasive one, that we are becoming swamped by anniversaries. But we are still living with the aftermath of this defining moment of the first decade of the new millenium, with no clear end in sight.

I’m writing this at the same time as, eight years ago, I had stopped work, transfixed by the pictures unfolding on the TV; that day when out of the same clear sky everything was suddenly different.

What’s left to say? What needs to be said. For which I have chosen a poem by Wislawa Szymborska. Although the action it describes is tellingly different in one key aspect, I know of no other piece of writing that more brilliantly captures the chilling randomness inherent in acts of terror, and cuts through to the humanity of its victims. Read The Terrorist, He’s Watching.

50 up

We have just published the 50th issue of Tears in the Fence, magazine of poetry and prose.

Published 3 times a year, we have editorial bases in England, France, Australia and the USA and subscribers around the world. David Caddy is the Editor, with associates Sarah Hopkins and Tom Chivers; I am responsible for the design and production.

At 164 pages, the 50th issue is the largest yet and features poetry and fiction by, amongst many others, Elizabeth Cook, John Welch, John Kinsella, Peter Riley, Sarah Connor, Alexis Lykiard, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez, Todd Swift, Rupert M Loydell, Lucy Lepchani, Jeremy Reed, Juliet Cook, Adam Horovitz, Gerald Locklin, Lynne Wycherley, Donna Hilbert, Martin Stannard and Iain Sinclair.

There is also a ‘hand’ from Loose Packed by Lee Harwood and John Hall. Loose Packed is a set of 52 related fragments, with no fixed order for their reading. They are planned for publication as a pack of playing cards by Acts of Language,  and have been exhibited in 52 different 6 x 4 inch frames, in four differently coloured suits.

Here’s a bit from ‘Take Stock Now…’ in the latest TITF:

Under a vast sky

This restless house

That road

(these tiny objects)

♣

Things to cling on to

For more information and subscriptions, see (and join) Tears in the Fence on Facebook.

50th issue celebration

To celebrate the 50th issue there is a free event on Saturday 5th September, 3.00pm – 8.00pm at The Bell, Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX.

Confirmed readers include Elizabeth Cook, Brian Hinton, George Ttoouli, Sarah Hopkins, Todd Swift, Ian Brinton, Hannah Silva, Vahni Capildeo, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, James Wilkes, Tom Chivers, David Caddy.

This event is in association with Penned in the Margins.

On walking

Well, that was different. Trying to combine as many tasks and

‘things to do’ into one visit to Bomo, and trying to remeber to

take all the things I needed, I left home without my walking stick.

I only discovered it when I parked the car, got out, and reached

for the stick. No stick. Walking felt weird, but I only had a short

way to go to the nearby cafe for a small (as it turned out)

networking meeting. I immediately launched into telling two people,

who I had never met, how weird it felt walking without my stick.

They looked at me… quizzically. Then found a way to change the

subject.

Next, it was on to my shoe man (even he doesn’t call himself a

cobbler; where have all the cobblers gone?) who is situated in what

can only be described as the scuzzier end of town, next to a sex

shop (he increased the number of Baptist and other religious

leaflets on his counter after the sex shop opened) and opposite a

car showroom which used to be full of exclusive, high end marques

but now stocks the kind of second hand motor that has clearly had

more than one previous lady owner, who was not that careful a

driver either. Sign of the times I guess.

Anyway, I digress. He is the best adaptor of shoes that I’ve ever

found. Despite the fact that he himself has no legs. (Yes. It’s

true).

when I first found his shop we got chatting and I was telling him I

experienced a fair degree of pain after walking. He advised having

the leg off; “Best thing I ever did,” he maintained. And indeed he

is looking fairly sprightly at the moment. But, happily, I didn’t

take his advice. My problem – by that time – was not medical, but

simply down to the fact that my shoe was raised to the wrong level,

using the wrong material (which made the shoe very heavy). After

finding Sole and Heel Care, the problem was solved.

My pair of boots deposited for repair I returned to the centre of

town to try a bit more walking. Weird. That’s the only word for it.

But not without appeal, especially having two hands free to flick

through the books in Borders. Hey, you guys may be on to something.

Well, that was different. Trying to combine as many tasks and ’things to do’ into one visit to Bomo, and trying to remember to take all the things I needed, I left home without my walking stick.

I only discovered it when I parked the car, got out, and reached for the stick. No stick. Walking felt strange; like something was missing, but it wasn’t immediately obvious what.  I only had a short way to go to the nearby cafe for what turned out to be a very select networking meeting, and straight away launched into telling two people, who I had never met before, how weird it felt walking without a stick. They looked at me… quizzically.

Next, it was on to my shoe man (even he doesn’t call himself a cobbler; where have all the cobblers gone?) who is situated in the more, er, downbeat end of town, next to a sex shop (he increased the number of Baptist and other religious leaflets on his counter after the sex shop opened) and opposite a car showroom which used to be full of exclusive, high end stuff but now stocks the kind of second hand motor that has clearly had more than one previous owner, and not a particularly careful one at that.

Anyway, he is the best adaptor of shoes that I’ve ever found. When I first found his shop* we got chatting and I was telling him I was experiencing a fair degree of pain. He advised having the leg off; “Best thing I ever did,” he maintained. And he didn’t stop at one; he had both off.

Happily, I didn’t take his advice. My problem – by that time – was not medical, but simply down to the fact that my shoe was raised to the wrong level, using the wrong material. After finding Sole and Heel Care, the problem was solved. Amazing the difference someone who knows what they’re doing can make.

My boots deposited for repair I returned to the centre of town to try a bit more walking. Weird. That’s the only word for it. But not without appeal, especially having two hands free to flick through the books in Borders. Hey, you guys may be on to something.

*Sole and Heel Care, 333a Holdenhurst Road, 01202 309430

Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk…

It was 40 years ago today … I remember the excitement and the grainy black and white ‘ultrasound’ from another planet as Armstrong emerged from the lunar module. Buzz Aldrin took this photo (above) of his own footprint. And unlike a footprint in the dust and sand on Earth, with no wind to blow them away, the first human prints on the moon can last for a million years.

Just months earlier:

Earthrise, the first picture of the earth, taken by the Apollo 8 crew from the far side of moon, December 24 1968

“Tiefer, tiefer, irgendwo in der Tiefe gibt es ein Licht”

(remember Hounds of Love (?) Hello Earth - ”deeper, deeper, somewhere in the depth there is a light.”)

Possibly bizarrely, what comes to my mind as a feat of similar beauty and daring is Philippe Petit’s walk between the twin towers. This, a footprint in air, and as evanescent – but unforgettable as a perfect gesture, and in the extraordinary series of images of the event.

Moonlight slanting by Matsuo Basho

Moonlight slanting

Through the bamboo grove;

A cuckoo crying.

Philosophy

A C Grayling is amusing and sharp, as a writer and philosopher. His ‘This much I know’ in the Observer last Sunday was witty and thought-provoking. Here are a couple of the best:

A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.

I recently retraced on foot a famous journey that William Hazlitt made from Shropshire to Somerset to visit Wordsworth and Coleridge. I spent two weeks slogging through nettle beds before I realised the bastard had taken the coach.

Life is all about relationships. By all means sit cross-legged on top of a mountain occasionally. But don’t do it for very long.

OK, three. Read more here.