Pineapple

I was sat alone eating in a booth when to my left Derbyshire Man started to speak to me about the earthquakes we'd been having. I said I remembered one once a long time ago in a small room when I was a different person and used to write like this a lot. His face was the ruddy one of a big time drinker. His wife/girlfriend had amblyopia, she kept insisting he leave and sit with their friends elsewhere, but the man was resigned to keeping his seat. She kept saying he should leave me to finish my dinner. I made British mumbles that implied otherwise and took a sip of water.

On the high ceiling I heard rain, there were no other windows and there wasn’t a whisper of natural light. Across to the left two elderly men sang. After a while one of them took the earplugs out his ears and flicked off the CD player. 'Dildo's, have you heard of those dildos?' The one with his back to me screamed. I kept seeing the future. Kept getting scared. That would be me in thirty years. The way I was feeling it could be three.

Derbyshire Man leaned in and started to talk about how all the ley lines converged on this spot. 'Up on Stanton Moor they make wooden secret totems and they hang them from the trees,' I said.

Eventually his wife returned and they told me a long and rambling tale of woe and desperation as I shoved the cheap, bad food into my mouth. I will surmise it for you: they were broke and broken. An unscrupulous local housing agency a friend of mine had had dealings with had screwed them good and proper and now they were paying for a house they could not afford.

'Have you written them a letter?'

'Friend I’ve got them a letter at home. I'm going to put a pineapple in it, you what I mean? A pineapple. It’s in my garage. And then when they git it in the post and they open it – Boom.'

66.

My father was born when the internet began to bloom. He said he visited the blogs of his favourite bands and it felt special knowing you knew something everyone else didn't. Who they were dating or what flavour Ben and Jerry's they liked the best. A piece of information just for you.

64.

I saw her on the bus most days. She always, always wore the same clothes. She was green legs and ham.

65.

We came out of hyperspace.

Lombard's jumpsuit was half undone. I could see the sweat from his pits as it stained his vest. 

63.

All is beige. A nothing colour. I arrived in the night to an empty ward. Now as the morning comes they wheel through a patient. Clunk click and he’s in. I wake to his screaming litanies. They are biblical nonsense, the murmurings of a madman. How long until we put our crutches away and bury our gods.

62

Lombard comes in daily for his money and I run up and down the stairs like an errand boy to make it happen.

And it happens, everyday as they laugh about Old Lombard from behind their monitors and sign off their little vouchers and open the electric safe and take out the cash.

He takes off and spends his six pounds on smokes and cheap ale. Tomorrow he's back again.

61

‘Bad morning?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it.’

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

60.

As Monica Yan scanned the documents she thought of existential questions. It, by which I mean life, had been running smoothly until she met the bum savant Nigel Quills who by sheer chance had fallen into employment with her good self. He could lift a box and mused about there importance between drinking much tea and gouging out great lumps of compacted paper from the great machine. 

Bit of New Years Inspiration

'I mean, I think Grimes succeeded because I had to discard everything in my life in order to do it. I was so fucking desperate to make it work, I don't think I could have possibly allowed it to fail. I can't stress how powerful the human mind is. If you want something bad enough, you can probably find a way to make it work.'

Claire Boucher taken from her site here

59

Down Coldstream Walk and Youlgreave Way I heard the drunken cries of the broken with skin arms aloft and beer can swinging empty as the mid-afternoon mid-town workers hit the streets and see him as he spits forth satanic notions to buses, cars and pram-pushing ma's who trot quick sharp to see him pass.

58

And as I approached forty they approached forty and climbed to the zenith of their managerial careers.

57

The mere sound of Lombard's employment made her wet. Such were the times.

56

'It's cross-contamination boy, you don't mix the coffee spoon with the tea.' Everyday a new complaint. Then his elephant hands grabbed his stained mug and he took another long swallow.

55

The bus unnervingly swerves around the tight bend of the crossroads before stopping. A group of passengers, of which I am included, lurch forward as we wait to depart. I make my way through the busy streets.

 

It’s a Friday, and I notice the Friday rush as the mole-faced shoppers start to show their faces. On the ground, a light rain has left a film of muddy water which covers the paving slabs. Imprinted are the footsteps of those that have gone before me.

 

Drinkers come here for the cheap booze. Not the decor. The cheap drinks bring out the heavies, the all-day old sorts with nothing left to do with their lives but while away the hours knocking back ale until the doors close. Lombard is sitting in the far corner of the room reading a paper. I walk over.

 

A weathered black guy with a long white beard stares into oblivion. His hat is frayed around the edges. An old boy stands, takes his plastic bags and rests an unlit smoke between his lips. Down an alley a junkie slips away, his chequered shirt hanging limply off his wiry frame.

54

Even over the revellers’ voices you can hear the boats moving on the river. The creaking of ropes as they tighten and snap to take the strain from this November night’s wind.

Buoys clank hollow against empty hulls and untied awnings lash rebelliously as the wind blows in harder from the North Sea.

I remember after nights like this, when my father would a fret and always come down early the next day to check for damage.

52

And where should I start, where? Sweating at the great machine before me as it spits out great streams of unwanted papers. It never asks for small chat, never asks for star-signs in the age of reason or falls foul to fatness and domestic life death. When are they ever caught with one eye on the window? 

51

When a British man sees the great, bright blue sea his heart can do nothing but melt.

50

The more I worked, the less I burned. I was angry at the circumstance and could not sleep. Those fractures in reality began to reopen and what I saw were brief glimpses of the throbbing white world...awe-inspiring, frightening universes inside oneself which longed to be free and waited hungry, no ravenous, on the fringes of conscious thought.

49

Her urban body is tight against my own. Forget the kooky; this is a dementia of rubble-laced gardens and metal-boarded houses. The vision of the city in profile: I watch her skin erode slowly away as planners and money lenders carve her up like a juicy hot steak. A forked fraternity’s licked this town clean like a nightmare. Riddz crew painted on the walls in graffiti. Gangs stand around. Everything is as sweet as a hamburger.

This whole estate is being removed from existence, redeveloped and re-imagined by our civic overlords. Near the gang, a team of builders smash down part of a terrace house. Murdering sledgehammer swings above, ready to cull the space into an image they see fit. The surgeons play their music whilst they work, cover their slobbering mouths and have their sterile instruments laid out in order.

Scapula.