A letter to the Second World War

A LETTER TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Dear Mrs War,

the one middle-aged Britons hanker for,

you happened, so you're not there any more.

Why do we lack, 

seeing your legacies, the will to hack

them for our own day and not want you back?

What should I say?

Not being there, you cannot go away.

Please fade.  Napoleon's did. They had their day.

This poem was originally written in response to one of the prompts in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  It was for number 20, to write a poem in the form of a letter. 

It has attained no publication higher than self-publication as part of a social media conversation.  I tweeted it in response to colleague Clare Trowell's disquiet, working from home on a rainy day, at the sound of a Spitfire beyond the clouds.

Disclosure

DISCLOSURE

"And you must never, ever, ever disclose 

price information, even if it's rough --

saying they'd charge about a pound still shows

enough to compare."  This bit loud enough

for the next Costa table.  Harmlessly --

an induction, with no such information,

and no one would have heard much of what she

said. If you were hot on pronunciation

you might have caught the haitches.  This was work,

hospital contracts.  The haitch-shibboleth

disclosed in this mall nothing worth a lurk,

no tribal loyalty of life or death.

Further (accents disclose no changeless natures),

it's enn aitch ess, it seems, even from haitchers.

The poem dates from October 2017 and, like so much of my recent work, it arose from a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  Chapter 8 asked for something about a street.  I chose Cambridge's Grand Arcade shopping mall, and the Costa Coffee outlet there, and a thing overheard at a neighbouring table.

It has dipped its toe in publication.  In January 2020, the broadcaster James O'Brien tweeted

"I’d back the scrapping of HS2 just to stop people saying ‘haitch’ on the news"

and I threw the poem's final couplet in among the replies -- not the first time I have rendered a poem ineligible for most competitions by partial self-publication in social media.

Thing 5: Twitter

I have been using Twitter enthusiastically since April 2009, not only from my own account but in tweeting for the Haddon Library, the Cambridge Philharmonic Society and Global Justice Cambridge.  What has changed since I blogged about Twitter in my coursework for those earlier rounds of 23things in 2010 and 2011?

Advanced search: this facility had dropped off my account, perhaps because of some Twitter re-setting.  I've now reinstated it, though I think in a slightly different form that requires me to open Twitter and search proactively rather than expect updates delivered to my email.  But the amount of material this search seems likely to retrieve is as small as I found it in 2010.

Twitter ban at work: in March 2010, I imposed a rule on myself that I should avoid Twitter at work when anything remained in my email inbox. I haven't had Inbox Zero since 2011.  My rule therefore now amounts, for practical purposes, to a requirement that I should not use Twitter at work.  I've kept to this pretty rigorously, and Twitterfeed continues to post to the Haddon Twitter stream from our blog.  Additionally, now, acknowledgment of some of the books we receive as gifts is made using Facebook and Twitter as well as email.

And what about Twitter's potential benefits to research?  It will do for sharing research once published, or semi-published: you can tweet links to journal articles, conference presentations and blog posts.  Searching Twitter will give some idea of what kinds of opinion are doing the rounds.

I did a few searches just now, to support amateur curiosity not research.  I wanted to find out if the inventor(s) of the 1935 Notificator, often likened to Twitter, had lived to see or support later developments in communications technology.  I wanted to know if other people were as much troubled by the sight of misplaced solicitude as I am.  I wanted to know if pre-emptive criticism, which I think we should all avoid, was a thing that troubled others.  I'll spare you blow-by-blow accounts of the search strategies I used, but I can say that I got no answer to the Notificator one, that tweets incorporating the phrase "misplaced solicitude" had been written by me alone, and that pre-emptive criticism is a thing.  Further research needed.

The ring

This is another poem of mine that's followed my classic pattern. It was my entry in the 2011 National Trust Landlines competition, had no success there, and has now found publication in CILIP East of England's Sunrise magazine. The quoted tweet is one that I posted using a dumb phone in the summer of 2010.

And yes, rain really was leaking into the carriage around the lights. The sort of thing one doesn't expect, and resonating in my mind now with last night's dream of a high-risk (tracks in the water? train overloading rickety boat?) train journey to an island in the Indian Ocean.


THE RING

Nature to see: nature that stands,
nature that spreads, nature that glows.

Nature to work with: nature that shines,
nature that grows, nature that blows.

Nature to fear: nature that drowns,
nature that tears, nature that burns.
Nature has nature's ways to kill.
Appeasement's temporary. Nature will.

From train I saw wind turbines across miles of rainy fen, flashing in cloudlight at each turn. In the carriage rain fell between lights.

And that was a tweet, and a tweet is small,
but it was made from the ring of them all.

Cam23 2.0: Week 10, thing 18: Reflection

What I have gained from this programme so far

Rejuvenation and extension of the things I learned last year: new widgets to fit to my blog & Twitter feed, knowledge of what one actually does with a Creative Commons licence, tricks for editing screenshots.

Opportunity to measure, and reflect on, my changing way of using Delicious and bit.ly . My subjective perception had been that I was now using bit.ly in preference to Delicious. But, after counting posts from equivalent months in 2010 and 2011, I came to see that my ratio of Delicious use to bit.ly use had been roughly equal in both years, and that my use of both had declined to roughly equal degrees. A valuable corrective, as statistics often are.

The question those figures can't answer by themselves is "Why?" Yes, I know. On that I am still thinking, and maybe I'll find some hypothesis that can have statistics thrown at it.

Which thing I particularly liked or disliked

Oh I did enjoy showing off what I had found about Google Calendar! Almost as much as if I had invented it myself. And demonstrating it with LightShot & all.

Which of the forthcoming things I really can't wait to try

QR codes. I have been using them increasingly at the Haddon, picking up scraps of technique as I go along, and I look forward to reading how to handle them properly.

Cam23 2.0: Week 2, Extra thing: Twitter, extended!

I have been a Twitter enthusiast for a couple of years now. The applications I have most used with Twitter are these:

bit.ly -- the site that shortens URLs. Many of my tweets are for the purpose of flagging up my own blog posts, or linking to other things I've found online; there's an obvious point to a service that will shorten the web addresses of those things to fit within Twitter's 140-character limit. Will bit.ly become redundant now that Twitter has taken to automatically shortening URLs that appear in tweets? Not for me: I like to see how many characters are left while I'm still preparing the tweet; and another thing that bit.ly does, besides shortening URLs, is generate QR codes from them. I'm glad to see that 23things will be getting on to those later.

Twitterfeed -- the site that turns blog posts into tweets. Or rather, that generates tweets including links to new blog posts, together with as many characters from the heading and the top of the post as it can fit in. I have found this invaluable for the Haddon Library blog. I rarely get to see Twitter when I'm at work (in truth, my rule is to avoid Twitter at work unless my email inbox and 'Received' folder are completely empty), and, as I'm the only tweeter in the Haddon Library team, that means that the Haddon Library's Twitter stream won't get updated from the Haddon Library. But now, it doesn't need to be. I can update the blog, and, thanks to Twitterfeed, the blog will do the tweeting for me. For help in teaching the blog to tweet I must thank Niamh.

For my own personal blog, I've gone for the opposite effect. Instead of making the blog update Twitter, I've set up my Twitter account to put my latest tweets on the blog (see right). But that uses a widget I found via Twitter itself, so presumably not as adventurous as some other external applications. Many of those applications require the user to share Twitter login details, and I'm reluctant to do that more widely than I have to. And my tweeting, up to now, has been from the standard Twitter page on the web, or even from a dumb mobile, rather than from more elaborate clients.

Perhaps that's a personal idiosyncrasy. My teenage enthusiasm for distant radio stations was gratified using the most basic equipment -- portable or even pocket-size, medium wave.

Lines

On Wednesday 29 December it will be thirty years since the onset of my imposition-writing phase.

I had been working three months as a library assistant in the Inter-Library Loans office at the University of Sussex. I have forgotten most of the gaffes I made during that time, and cannot say which of them triggered the imposition. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of gaffes made in the whole length of the autumn. But on 29 December 1980, having been presented for Christmas with an erasable ballpoint pen, and knowing therefore that I could minimise the waste of paper involved, I set myself the task of writing out, one hundred times:

I must not show off in the Library.

It cannot be said to have worked. I have memories of gaffes that resulted from showing off in Sussex University Library, and even in adjacent libraries, in the spring of 1981. Indeed, the imposition story itself came in time to be a sort of calling card. And the practice of writing impositions began to be habitual. In general they were a hundred lines long, but my most ambitious effort in this genre was five hundred lines, after missing a plane, on the subject of punctuality.

The phase ended as abruptly as it had begun. In 1987, I was involved in 'Walk for the World', an awareness-raising event run by the World Development Movement and, I think, fifteen other agencies. This involved a lot of local media work, and letters to celebrities, and co-ordination of walkers. After it was over, it seemed to me that some action was necessary if I was to come back down to a realistic view of my importance relative to the rest of Cambridge. An imposition seemed to be the very thing; and a text suggested itself:

I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.

I found some paper, and a pen, and settled down to write the above sentence, with 99 repetitions:

I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avo

-- at which point, quite unexpectedly, I found the situation so comical that I couldn't hold the pen, and had to admit that I had kicked the imposition habit.

I would like to mark its 30th anniversary in some way. I have toyed with the idea of using it as a fundraising opportunity, perhaps with a sponsored imposition (asking friends to pledge so much line) or a sponsored anti-imposition (pledging to tweet the text of an imposition one hundred times less the number of sponsorships received, so that 33 sponsors wd lead to the text's being tweeted 67 times). But I have not got my act together as regards a fundraising pitch, and so any donations made on 29 December will have to be wholly unconnected with this eccentricity remembered from my twenties. Maybe it's a project to consider for the 25th anniversary of the end of the phase, in June/July 2012.

Thing 7: Twitter

I have been using Twitter enthusiastically, with a personal account, for over a year now. For cam23, I've created a new account for the Haddon Library and compressed a photograph to fit it.

I have three main uses for Twitter.

Firstly, I respond to other people's tweets, if only to thank them for longer messages that their 140-character tweets have led me to. Many of the articles I have saved to my Delicious account, or noted in my CILIP revalidation log, are things I first heard of via Twitter. With a lot of these things, of course, even the URL is too long to fit into a tweet, and the tweeter's had to use a shortener such as bit.ly . Some people claim that that by itself shows that Twitter doesn't work. I'm afraid I don't agree. For me, part of the beauty of Twitter is that it points outside itself, and doesn't say it provides everything.

I admit that responding to tweets may afford opportunities for showing off, e.g. with quotations that seem apt, and at times this will misfire. But those around me are used to that by now.

Secondly, I tweet announcements about things that are inherently public: concerts my choir is singing in, Haddon Library closing times, &c. I think the biggest buzz I ever had from Twitter was of this kind. Shortly before the closing date of the 2009 Haddon Library poetry competition, I heard a poem read on Radio 3 and recognised it as one that had been commended in, and quite possibly written for, the Haddon's previous competition, three years earlier.

It seemed to me good to announce the poem's accession to the airwaves, by way of encouraging potential entrants in the 2009 contest. This was a Saturday morning, and I hadn't had breakfast. I raced into work by bike, opened the files from the older competition to check details, and put out the news on the Haddon's blog, in an email to the list of people interested in the competition, and in a tweet. Actually the information needed a couple of tweets; I don't know if the buzz was doubled.

Having got that out of the way, I went & had breakfast at Eat, and -- yes, we need to keep swatting a persistent misconception about Twitter -- not one word about that breakfast ever appeared in a tweet.

My third use of Twitter is to keep a constant advanced search, with an RSS feed tied to it, of local tweets that might be relevant. My inital hope was that this might give me some idea of what people were saying about the Haddon Library. Be it admitted, the reader feedback I've had that way has been very small; but this search has shown me a steady number of archaeologists and anthropologists to add to the people I follow.

Brown-bag 2 June 2010

The brown-bag discussion was lively. It's not in the nature of brown-bags to produce structured minutes, with resolutions and actions, and this one didn't. But the discussion never flagged, and I didn't have to throw in any of the prepared questions -- either to restart things or to get them back on track.

Highlights:

• an amazing cadenza from a school librarian, frustrated at the poverty of provision in school libraries and the effect she saw this having on youngsters' literacy
• speculations about what provision for online voting might do to re-invigorate CILIP's democracy
• disclosures about the number of backchannels of communication, within CILIP and within the Cambridge library world
• frankness about the need for librarians to learn new skills, especially programming skills
• pleasure in the progress of Cam23, one organiser and several participants being of the party

Ten people were present. I had perhaps placed too much faith in Twitter -- indeed, I can be said to have fantasised about the likely effect that announcing the event there might have on attendance. I had not ignored other channels, but I suppose what I had put out through them was either too early or too late. A fruit of Cam23 is a burgeoning of individual blogs by Cambridge librarians, including this one; it'll be interesting to see how far we come to communicate as a result.

Next brown-bag will be at 13:00 on Wednesday 7 July, hosted by Libby Tilley in the English Faculty Library. See you there!