ARMSTRONG EXPERIENCES A SHIVER OF HOPE IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

 
In the heart of the country
Armstrong is ailing.

Beside the Tesco
in the marketplace

last week he lay
across a trolley's

path, screaming:
We have no betters!

Music is ours!
His allergies get

worse. He talks
in honey-nut loops.

His paranoia
makes him fear

the squirrels
in the woods.

But, just the other
day, as he was browsing

through the large print
books, he saw a

woman at the done-for
public library desk

get up on tip toes
like an agile cat;

and peering over
piles of burnished

paperwork, she took
him in her eyes

and smiled, and gently
she began to say

(with Polish words):

Loneliness
will not last.

OPEN SKIES

 
"A worldwide television service, with genuinely open skies, would be an enormous gain to the peoples of the world, as short-wave radio, bypassing national controls, has already clearly been. Against the rhetoric of open skies, which in fact, given the expense and sophistication of satellite technology, would be monopolised by a few large corporations and authoritarian governments, it will sound strange to defend national autonomy. But the probable users are not internationalists, in the sense of any significant mutuality. The national or local components in their services would be matters merely of consent and publicity: tokenism. In most countries, if these systems gained control, independent productions would become very difficult or impossible. Most of the inhabitants of the 'global village' would be saying nothing, in these new terms, while a few powerful corporations and governments, and the people they could hire, would speak in ways never before known to most of the peoples of the world."  

Raymond Williams, Television (1974)

NEW BLOOMSBURY, OLD TORIES

My review with Steve Ross of Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists, and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper.