Here are the videos of my talk at the London Long Now meetup on May 27th. Thanks to Paul for organising the event - and to Vinay for filming it. To find out about future Long Now events in London, go to their Meetup page.
Tony Sephton is the founder of Desksurfer.com, a new site that gives businesses and organisations a simple way to sell spare desks on an hourly basis - and gives freelancers/etc a way to find temporary desk space. The site just launched in London and is currently looking for more offices to offer desks.
I was keen to talk to Tony because Desksurfer is a really simple example of making use of slack space/time. In fact, it's an idea that several people have floated around the Space Makers Network, so it's great to see it put into practice.
I'm also interested in how this could develop in other directions - Desksurfer provides cheap deskspace, but are there also circumstances under which you could provide free deskspace through a similar model? (Having a Freecycle version as well as an eBay one?) And how about home-based co-working, as Jelly are doing in New York?
The event was a screening of Pasolini's 'La Rabbia', but the lights above the entrance to the Curzon cinema spelt out the main attraction: JOHN BERGER IN CONVERSATION. Inside the foyer, the weight of expectation was uncomfortable. For many of us, this was a rare - perhaps a once-only - chance to be in the same room as someone whose life and work had mattered to us deeply. In such situations, the asymmetry between reader and writer always reminds me of a teenage crush.
He looked uncomfortable, too - escorted by the organisers, seated on a stage, enduring our applause. There are writers who seem to relish these occasions, the literary festival or the staged conversation, as if it is payment in fame for the loneliness of their trade. These are not, generally, my kind of writer.
And yet he looked very much himself. Unimpressed with the sound of his own voice, answering slowly as if all his thoughts were work in progress rather than polished objects, and politely declining to answer where he felt he had nothing to add, which was often. It was good to hear him speak. Yet there was little flow to the conversation, the questions or comments from the audience, the host's rephrasing and Berger's response or lack of it. There seemed on many sides a desire for something more or other.
His most animated response was to a questioner who wanted the film to have been more explicitly a call to action (of a dogmatically socialist sort?). His response was to defend the room for imagination and less explicitly political work, yet there was a greater sense of a shared energy between him and the questioner than when others asked about Pasolini's technique or the film's place in the history of cinema.
I should mention his voice. It was not a surprise to me, because I have heard or watched a number of interviews with him, but it is still strange. After thirty-some years in France, he no longer speaks like an Englishman, but with foreign cadences. (He says that nearly all the contemporary poetry which has mattered to him he has read in translation. Now, at this end of a long life, he speaks his native language as if translating himself.)
The other extraordinary thing is his age. There is no way that anyone who didn't know would guess that he is eighty. Physically, he could be twenty years younger, and even then his vigour would be remarkable. (Having been with my elderly grandmother a few days earlier, I struggle to reconcile the fact that they were born in the same year.)
It was a strange evening, too short, but lengthening it would not have helped much. How would I organise it differently? A different venue, for a start, and a different format - one in which the fact that we were gathered around this man and his work was acknowledged, but also the possibility that this shared focus meant we had much to learn from each other. I am sure there were many people present who I would have gained from meeting. What if we had been gathered into smaller groups, to talk with each other, with John joining each group for a while, then moving on to the next?
That's only a thought. There was another meeting the next night, organised by the Institute for Race Relations and held at the London School of Economics. Perhaps it came closer to my idea of how a writer like Berger could be "in conversation" with his readers. I don't know, because the organisers informed me that they had run out of places - and, on the night, I wasn't feeling up to gatecrashing.
Has anyone else had the same experience of the awkwardness of these kind of events? Is it inevitable? Is there, I wonder, something unhealthy about the intensity of the relationship some of us develop with a writer like Berger? Have you been at events which worked better? Or am I being unrealistic? Let me know.
(Berger's essay on La Rabbia is published in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. A version of it is available online here.)
It was like a sequence from the opening minutes of a disaster movie, that day last winter when a whale swam up the Thames and past the palace of Westminster. Two Leviathans, ominously juxtaposed: Hobbes' force of the state and this ancient, biblical force of nature, disorientated now and dying painfully. As in a film, the story played out through TV reporters and crowds gathering along the riverside, excited and amazed, yet oblivious to the significance of what they are witnessing. If only they knew, they would run for the hills...
Well, maybe not. But sitting in a concrete bunker on the opposite bank of the Thames the other night, listening as Iain Sinclair recalled that extraordinary event, it seemed to me that here was another example of the signs of the times I wrote about last month.
Climate change may be implicated in the death of the Thames whale. Colin MacLeod of Aberdeen University, who carried out the autopsy, believes changes in water temperature may have altered the distribution of her normal food, the marvellously named "gonatus armhook squid", driving it southwards into the North Sea. "If the whale then followed its natural migratory instincts to go south and west it will find all its pathways blocked by coastline."
Whether or not this is what happened, the whale in the Thames was a powerful symbol of a world out of joint. I guess this kind of eschatological tea-leaf reading could seem a poor use of time, given all the practical stuff to be done to raise awareness and limit the impact of climate change. Yet I believe that without such ways of thinking we will fail in more dangerous ways than we are likely to fail anyway.
As individuals, if we respond to our present circumstances with the ways of thinking currently respectable, we are likely to end in despair. Just yesterday, Paul Kingsnorth - one of Britain's most dedicated environmental journalists - demonstrated this tendency:
Imagine you are a visiting alien from another planet. Appraise the situation for yourself, and give me an unbiased and honest account of how likely you think it is that this species, at this time, in this situation, can do what is necessary to prevent potential climate disaster. What is the answer you get? Not good, is it?
Collectively, worse fates than despair beckon. There is a real danger that the application of existing ways of thinking to the circumstances of climate change will lead to the intensification of structures of domination, violence and oppression so as to preserve our ways of life - and that good people will actively support this in ways they would not ordinarily conscion.
In this context, the few voices which seem both hopeful and not obviously deluded belong to people able to operate outside the ways of thinking generally regarded as "grown up" in modern western societies. For example, one of my heroes, the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping! Now, I've met people who think the Reverend Billy is simply satirising religion. It's certainly true that he spoofs the hypocrisies of Christianity, yet he does so from a deep understanding of what religion can be at its best. (Very much in the line of Ivan Illich, in fact - that other turbulent priest and hero of mine.)
Anyway, I was struck by the difference between the despair towards which Paul Kingsnorth's article points, and a recent epistle from the Reverend Billy. He seems to be saying something I've been edging towards myself, that the force of nature which is starting to hit us is also an experience of the sublime, and may offer our last best chance of escaping the ways of thinking which have contributed to the mess we're in:
All activists are aware that we must take our strategies now from a more powerful partner in activism. Call it the Fabulous Unknown. We know that we are no match for the activist powers of this cataclysmic force.
We are all activists, or we think we are. We have searched for a theory of change. The apocalyptic Christians have their pillar of fire, war as a permanent weather system on their horizon. The liberals believe that change comes from some form of advertising, the industrial persuasion that they call democracy. People who claim to be changing the world are constantly offering alternatives for our lives which encourage a strict gradualism.
Western leaders, from Bush to Bono - they all have an idea for change, but they fear sudden change like a Puritan fears the sexual act. Arnold Schwarzenegger committed one of his four Hummers to a stern diet of veggie fuel. Glamorous gradualism. But our more powerful partner is both Fabulous and Unknowable, and has no fear of suddenness.
Last night, a friend of mine from "The Theater," shouted to an entire restaurant, "My art form hasn't changed the world since 'Angels in America' in 1995! I'll start the North Pole Theater. Yes, we'll go up there and... we'll raise our curtain on our play, and perform until our stage melts, and then we'll go down into the black freezing sea, and it will be a triumph!" I liked hearing this. She senses that now we must be extreme to be kind.
(Read the rest here.)
As seen above a urinal in the gents of a west London pub:
I am struggling here. I can't seem to find anything beyond the single entendre. Or even much of a connection to poker. Unless the message is: "Gamble on our site and you can win enough to pay for a prostitute."
And this is the 'diverse, vibrant and innovative industry' which Tessa Jowell believes holds the key to regenerating our towns and cities.
