remuemenage

a poem for my British friends on here who always seem to inspire me

The British Museum Reading Room
-Louis Macneice-

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers
Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge -
Honey and wax, the accumulation of years -

Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.

Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,
In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
And cherishing their hobby or their doom
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
This is the British Museum Reading Room.

Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting,
Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
A sun-bath at their ease
And under the totem poles - the ancient terror -
Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

--------------------------

I'm excited by the guerilla entrepreneurial spirit of handcraftsman and artists these days - among members of this community, in fact

go here for examples of such:urban_faerie_assault

jade_mond

there seems to be a growing marketplace for hand-crafted food, hand-crafted clothes, as well as all of life's accessories - sweeping in as an alternative to mass production

I'm reminded of Brooklyn Industries - a small clothing company whose products are all small-batch single-run and exclusively designed and manufactured in Brooklyn ...

perhaps these are natural market forces - and I'm just another crass American materialist ------->but it makes me feel tingly

.... in a redistribution of wealth from the top ---------->down, kind of way

individualism is as American as bare-knuckles capitalism - and nothing has democratized the marketplace like the web