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And yet someone had to make toy sand-shovels for the world. What, in a just society, could ever induce someone to do that sort of work? Should all youths be conscripted to work in factories for a year? Should plastics-factory labour be reserved for the punishment of white-collar criminals? Finally I decided that salaries should be determined by a factor that averaged the arduousness, tediousness, futility and imbecility of a job. The richest people in the world then would be coal miners. Injection-moulding machine operators or tenders would fly to work in their own planes, and competition for such work would be stiff. Having had the experience, I would be quite content to be poor.
[...] In 1890, after new tariffs were introduced by the United States, the velvet workers at Lister’s were told to expect a cut in their wages of up to twenty-five per cent. The velvet workers did not have a trade union. They called for support from the Weavers Association, but Lister and his directors refused to budge and on December 17 a strike began at Manningham which lasted for nineteen weeks. At first only the velvet workers came out, but by March the dyers and spinners had joined them and almost 5,000 workers were on strike. There were violent confrontations between strikers and the police, but the strike was defeated and the production of velvet resumed. This had a large, lasting and unexpected consequence, because, by drawing attention to the lack of union organization inside the Yorkshire textile industry, it helped cause the formation of a political party to represent the interests of the working classes. The Independent Labour Party, later the Labour Party, was founded in 1893 and one of its first branches was in Bradford.
cool bit of history!
This brings us back to Mario Buitrago, who slept outside Lister’s on that very cold night. The day before the opening, the staff of Urban Splash found him freezing on their doorstep when they arrived for work at seven in the morning. They invited him in and gave him a cup of tea. It made a wonderful story for the local papers. He spoke little English but was ‘all smiles and handshakes’, according to the Yorkshire Post reporter who interviewed him. He explained that he wasn’t waiting to buy a flat for himself. He had been paid to queue on behalf of an anonymous client, thought to be a private investor from London and staying in a Bradford hotel, who was keen to secure a particular flat and willing to pay somebody else to sit out in the cold to do it.
christ
[...] Hilary couldn’t believe that they sounded just like girls at school, scurrying in the rat-run of learning and testing, trying to outdo one another in protestations of how little work they’d done. Not once did any of them actually speak seriously about their subjects. Hilary now felt so deeply disappointed in university life that on the spot she made up her mind to dedicate herself to something different and nobler, although she wasn’t clear what. Neil and Julian were concentrating upon sticking a brown lump of something on a pin and roasting it with a match. From her indifferent distance she supposed this must be drugs, but she wasn’t frightened of that now.
pano vibes
An extraordinary thing happened today - I saw Richard for the first time since he left. I was out on the beach for my morning jog when there he was, sitting by himself under an umbrella. He looked very tanned and healthy, but much slimmer. He calmly told me a preposterous story about the entire Canaries being developed by the governments of Western Europe, in collusion with the Spanish authorities, as a kind of permanent holiday camp for their unemployables, not just the factory workers but most of the management people too. According to Richard there is a beach being built for the French on the other side of the island, and another for the Germans. And the Canaries are only one of many sites around the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Once there, the holiday-makers will never be allowed to return home, for fear of starting revolutions. I tried to argue with him, but he casually stood up and said he was going to form a resistance group, then strode away along the beach. The trouble is that he's found nothing with which to occupy his mind - I wish he'd join our theatre group, we're now rehearsing Pinter's The Birthday Party. Diana.
this genuinely sounds plausible to me lol
The fugues came so swiftly, time poured in a torrent from the cracked glass of their lives. The previous summer, during their first excursions into the desert, Trippett's waking periods had lasted at least half an hour. He had taken a touching pleasure in the derelict landscape, in the abandoned motels and weed-choked swimming pools of the small town near the air base, in the silent runways with their dusty jets sitting on flattened tyres, in the over-bright hills waiting with the infinite guile of the geological kingdom for the organic world to end and a more vivid mineral realm to begin.
flows over me like a cool stream
For Franklin, and the tens of thousands of fellow sufferers, the fugues had begun in the same way, with the briefest moments of inattention. An overlong pause in the middle of a sentence, some mysteriously burnt-out scrambled egg, the air force sergeant who looked after the Mercedes annoyed by his off-hand rudeness, together led on to longer stretches of missed time. Subjectively, the moment-to-moment flow of consciousness seemed to be uninterrupted. But time drained away, leaking slowly from his life. Only the previous day he had been standing at the window, looking at the line of cars in the late afternoon sunlight, and the next moment there was dusk outside and a deserted parking lot.
drained away, like brackish water from a disused swimming pool?
Franklin liked the abandoned gambling resort. The other physicians lived within a short drive of the clinic, but Franklin had chosen one of the half-empty motels in the northern suburbs of the city. In the evenings, after visiting his few patients in their retirement homes, he would often drive down the silent Strip, below the sunset facades of the vast hotels, and wander for hours through the shadows among the drained swimming pools. This city of spent dreams, which had once boasted that it contained no clocks, now seemed itself to be in fugue.
god what an image
I lived in a town called Altadena in California. It was north of a town called Pasadena. Altadena means "higher dena," as in Pasadena. I do not know what Pasadena means. Apparently no one does. There are many things that no one knows, which is comforting, up to a point. At the time of this writing, I do not know whether I will live much longer, and you don't know what I"m talking about. I was led to this point by a simple note, marks on an odd scrap of paper, words that could have meant nothing, that I could have allowed to mean absolutely nothing. But that's not really possible, is it?
meta-commentary on writing as a practice? i was led here [broadly speaking] by marks on an odd scrap of paper
"If I was flirting, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I didn't realize I was."
"Okay."
Her "okay" was so flat, so distant, so blaming, that it actually did make me angry, and so I said nothing else. Instead I fought the urge to say something mean under my breath,not that I could have come up with anything, and stared through the open window until I believed I was asleep.