Tongues

 

TONGUES

I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all --

glad my reading of Mr Gloucester in Mr Shakespeare's play was liked so much by that paper --

yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding,

I'd rather read 5 words that would go in a flier about throwing bottles away,

that by my voice I might teach others also,

if this will help others understand,

than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue --

than 10,000 in the tongue of 400 years ago.

(Bible reference 1 Corinthians 14. 18-19, Authorised Version; other lines made using Up-goer Five Text editor http://bit.ly/1lfezKI )

This poem is another written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  The prompt, by guest author Philip Gross, was for a macaronic poem -- one written in two or more languages, or two or more registers of English.  So I took a direct quotation from the Authorised Version of the Bible, and rendered it into the 1000-word vocabulary of Up-goer Five.  I wrote more about Up-goer Five in February 2013.

The poem has now found publication in the Indian magazine RIC.  The magazine title is an acronym for Red In Corner, one of its tenets being "No sublime human creation is perfect; it’s the little failed detail, the RIC, that turns it into a masterpiece."

Shadowing people who use book houses

This post has me doing two things I've done before: writing what would be my entry in a competition, if I weren't disqualified from entering because I'm the organiser (cf. this post from January 2012), and restricting myself to the thousand commonest words in the language, using the Up-Goer Five text editor (as in this post from February 2013).

The competition in which this new work will not be entered is for accounts of any aspect of the libraries@cambridge conference 2014.  Frankie Wilson's presentation was entitled 'Quality in libraries -- it is all about people'.  The presentation itself is password-protected, so I won't link to it from here, but if you go to Twitter and search on #lac14 that'll give you some idea of its content.  Note that the #lac14 hashtag has since been used for another conference as well, so you'll need to look for the tweets around 9 January, the day of libraries@cambridge itself.

The Up-Goer Five list of the 1000 commonest words does not include the word 'library'.

Why don't you have a go?  Email me your entry by 23:59 on Friday 31 January.  Prizes include wine voucher from Cambridge Wine Merchants and cake made by Clare.


SHADOWING PEOPLE WHO USE BOOK HOUSES

This is from the talk Ms Wilson gave to the meeting of people who run book houses. The talk was all about how to make book houses better by taking notice of the people who use them. I was much interested in one idea -- to ask people who use book houses if we can shadow them and watch them at their using.

Ms Wilson was clear that this shadowing would have to be different from following people to hurt them. We would have to ask people if they would like us to shadow them, and asking could be done with cups of coffee. This might make people happier to be shadowed.

Shadowing people was only one of the ideas Ms Wilson put forward, but it was one of those that most hit me. I took it back to my own book house and talked about it the next day with the other people who work there. They could see things I would have to think about before trying it in our book house.

One was the question, would shadowing people in this way be much different from the kind of standing behind them, in order to see how they look for books and other things, that work in book houses often needs you to do? Another was the fact that many people who use our book house do their looking for books before they come to the book house. Would we be asking to shadow them in their offices?

Another person in our team told of an idea he had heard in another part of the meeting: instead of shadowing people, ask them to write down, with a phone, what they are doing at some set times of the day.

Shadowing could be set up more easily than asking people to write things down with their phones. I know its picture of how people use the book house would not be complete. But I work most in an office away from the people who use the book house, and shadowing might show me things I had missed. I think it's an idea to keep at the back of my mind. And maybe ask Ms Wilson how she does it!

Music about fighting

In 2006, I entered a competition for a piece of writing in Easy-Read English -- the adaptation of language for people with learning difficulties.  My entry didn't get anywhere in the competition, and, not seeing any other market for it, I let it stay in the depths of filespace. 

Recently, however, I came across an opportunity to revamp it.  The Up-Goer Five Text Editor enables you to type text using only the 1000 commonest words in English.  I copied my 2006 piece into Up-Goer Five, and was told immediately that many of my words fell outside that thousand.

The list of prescribed words is indeed an amazing one.  Block, blonde, and blood are in it, all in a row, but not sing, clap, or war.  Does anyone know how far Up-Goer Five matches the vocabulary used by practitioners of Easy-Read?  Where I didn't find synonyms, I set about excising passages rather than writing longer explanations. This operation shortened the thing from 674 words to 479.

The result is below (and on Up-goer Five here).  Easy-Read and the constraints of Up-Goer Five can be likened to txtspk, Twitterspeak, and the Victorians' telegramese -- adaptations of English for a particular purpose, and most unlikely to be the future of English prose.  But constraints can be stimulating.  Think of the 14 lines of the sonnet!

I must give credit where credit is due.  My coming across Up-goer Five was thanks to Dixe Wills' article in the Christian magazine Third way.


MUSIC ABOUT FIGHTING

We are working on a big piece of music.  It is by Mr Britten.

We start working on it in the cold.  The music seems strange.  Parts of it are not what we expect.  We go wrong.

I look over my music book on trains.  We are getting there.

As we get closer to the date, we work harder.  One evening, we try the music with the band and the kids. We go wrong in new ways.  Is it because we are not used to the band?

I ride home very fast.  The music feels like the ride.  It is under control.

Then we try again, in another building.  The stars join us for the first time.  I go wrong in more new ways.  The ride home is shorter.

On the date, we try the music in the afternoon.  Many of us come by car.  They are late because of road works.  I go wrong in parts of the music that were all right before.  The music feels much harder now.

The time comes.

We give the music sitting down to begin with.  The music starts quietly, with deep notes and bells and us.  We get through the first part and don't go too wrong.  But by the end of the second part we have gone wrong in places.

The music has six parts.  The last part is the hardest.  We know we have gone wrong in many places already.  Can we get through this hard part?

We struggle.  We know we are struggling.  Lots of people have come to hear us.  Do they know we are struggling?  Will we have to stop?  The man waves his stick to lead us.  His waves get bigger and clearer.

The music ends as it began.  It ends quietly with bells and us.

After our last note the man puts his stick down.   Then everyone is silent for a long time.  The music has made us all want to be silent.

Then someone makes a noise with their hands.  The noise means "We like the music."  Then others join in.  They make a loud noise with their hands for several minutes.  The stars lean forward.  Leaning forward means "Thank you for liking us." The kids and the band and the small band all lean forward.  And we too get asked to lean.  Thank you for liking us.

We walk off the raised floor.  My wife comes to meet me with a friend of ours.  They tell me how much they liked the music.

Other people are saying the same thing to their friends.  They did not notice we were struggling.

We know we were struggling.  We know we could have done it better.  But the music has worked.  It was beautiful.  It has made people think about what fighting is like.

Listen to Mr Britten's music if you can!