Friday, 14 November 2008
Mike Hart
He joined the staff of Camden Town's now legendary independent Compendium Bookshop in the early 1980's and remained there until it's sad closure almost twenty years later. A familiar, avuncular and friendly presence usually at the front of the shop saw him for years provide advice, friendship and much-needed support for Scottish literature, independent publishers and alternative presses, and he ran the poetry, music and literature sections of Compendium with a relaxed attitude to commerce but an acute appreciation of the timelessness of good writing. Here, he established lasting friendships with many writers from the onset of their careers, organising readings and events and was himself a regular presence at book events throughout London and not just at Compendium.
When Compendium closed, I was pleased to be able to offer him a position at Murder One, where many of his previous customers gladly followed him and he made a new set of friends amongst the crime and mystery community and colleagues. He was here two years until generalised cancer was detected in the summer of 2002 and he returned to his native Glasgow where the end came mercifully quickly and he died in his sleep on 15th November with his son, brothers and sisters present.
Mike Hart was a bookseller of the old school who treasured human contact and handselling and communicated the joy of books (and his other great love, blues music) like no other. He will be sorely missed.
Maxim Jakubowski - Murder One
Mike Hart
Bohemian bookseller and champion of new fiction
For 20 years, Mike, a stocky Glaswegian, presided over the fiction and poetry department of Compendium bookshop in Camden Town, north London, which from its opening in 1968 until its closure in 2001 was Britain's pre-eminent radical bookstore. Whether you wanted books on anarchism, drugs, poststructuralism, feminism or Buddhism, Compendium was the place to go. Under Mike's supervision, its modern fiction department was its greatest strength, and the tradition of bohemian bookselling was carried forward into the 1980s and 1990s.
When Mike took over the department in the early 1980s, British fiction was in a dismal, class-bound rut. Mike helped to change all that. His enthusiasms included then unheralded American thriller writers such as Elmore Leonard and George V Higgins; London writers from the forgotten Patrick Hamilton to the unknown Iain Sinclair. A new Scottish writer called James Kelman was also a favourite, as was the great African-American writer Chester Himes. If these writers have emerged from the margins to become major players in the literary landscape it is in no small part due to Mike's efforts.
To walk into Compendium, survey the novels on display and ask Mike's advice was to enter a new world of fiction. The shop became the haunt of an unlikely mixture of more or less literary luminaries, from Nick Cave to Ben Okri, Ivor Cutler to Kathy Acker.
Thanks to Mike, and others, Camden Town in the 1980s became a kind of counter-cultural nexus: a place where you could drift from record shop to caff to Compendium and thence to the pub. There you would find Mike at the heart of a group of autodidacts, musicians, writers, lowlifes and drunks whose house band was the Pogues and whose cultural heroes were Jim Thompson, Hank Williams, Tom Raworth and Little Willie John.
A GP's son, born in Clydebank, Glasgow, Mike was the eldest of four children. After local schools he went on to Glasgow Art School, before moving to London in the early 1970s. He did odd jobs and then took a history degree at North London Polytechnic, where he met his wife Angela. They split up in the late 1970s, but he maintained a close relationship with his son. He combined working on building sites with running a Camden Market stall, before Compendium in 1982.
As the 1980s moved into the 1990s, Camden became a magnet for the world's teenagers and Compendium underwent a facelift. Mike formalised its literary scene by initiating regular readings in the bookshop, something of an innovation at the time. Visiting Americans, from old beat heroes like Lawrence Ferlinghetti to new literary lions like Walter Mosley, read there; so too did the London writers Iain Sinclair, Martin Millar and Derek Raymond.
By the end of the 1990s, Camden Town was thoroughly commercialised, its last remaining outposts of bohemianism swamped by endless leather jacket stores, and it was with a sense of bowing to the inevitable that Compendium closed its doors.
Mike moved to the independent crime specialists Murder One. With his death, the literary world lost a sweet and genuinely unselfish man who freely gave of his vast knowledge and delighted in the achievements of those he influenced so profoundly.
He is survived by his son Stephen.
· Patrick Michael Hart, bookseller, born May 20 1948; died November 15 2002
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Still as relevant now
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
John Perry Barlow looks at the manifesto again in 2006 here.
Palin Offers To Help Obama (!)
And then you went on to say: "Someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."
PALIN: Well, I still am concerned about that association with Bill Ayers. And if anybody still wants to talk about it, I will, because this is an unrepentant domestic terrorist who had campaigned to blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol. That's an association that still bothers me.
And I think it's still fair to talk about it. However the campaign is over. That chapter is closed. Now is the time to move on and to, again, make sure that all of us are doing all that we can to progress this nation.
Keep us secure, get the economy back on the right track, and many of us do have some ideas on how to do that and hopefully we'll be able to put all of that wisdom and experience to good use together.
BLITZER: So looking back, you don't regret that tough language during the campaign?
PALIN: No, and I do not think that it is off-base nor mean-spirited, nor negative campaigning to call someone out on their associations and on their record. And that's why I did it.
BLITZER: I just want to sort of footnote, was that your idea or did somebody write those lines for you?
PALIN: It was a collaborative effort there in deciding how do we start bringing up some of the associations that perhaps would be impacting on an administration, on the future of America. But again, though, Wolf, knowing that it really -- at this point, I don't want to point fingers backwards and play the blame game, certainly, on anything that took place in terms of strategy or messaging in the campaign."
Planned Internet Censorship In Australia
(click on image to learn more.)
"...There are free-speech concerns.
Although the initiative is intended and marketed as a tool to help protect children from the dangers of the Internet, this paternalistic scheme raises some troubling issues that affect all Australians. As a source of daily information, the Internet increases in importance every day. Do we really want the Government of the day deciding what Australian adults can and can't see? Do we want Australia to join a censorship club in which Burma, China and North Korea are the founding members?
* The list of prohibited sites will probably be secret, so it will be hard to know what content the Government has effectively banned.
* Filtering will be compulsory in all homes, even where there are no children.
* It is unknown whether there will be any way to have content removed from the prohibited list.
* How far will the list go, now and in future? Will it filter out material on sexual health, drug use, terrorism... even breastfeeding? Euthanasia and anorexia have been touted by Government MPs as topics worthy of filtering."
More here, here and here.
'Nevermind' now
'Now 17, Spencer Elden is a high school student, who says that "it's kind of creepy [to think] that that many people have seen me naked — I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star." Elden recently re-created the iconic album's cover in the same pool at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center in Pasadena, California, where it was originally shot — only this time, he was wearing shorts. It remains unclear as to why Elden decided to shoot this new photo.
(MTV)
