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Down the Mole Hill Hole
Jun. 21st, 2010 07:49 pm1) ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
idioticpoet mentioned on Facebook how his town's library had created a "quiet room". It struck me as a very Borgean notion: add a quiet room within a space that's already meant to be quiet. Then imagine that quiet room needing a quiet room once all the noisy and affronted left outside decide to go in (because we know they'll be the first ones through that door.) The same noisy people I see when I visit Tower Hamlet's Idea Stores (the Borough's version of libraries) in search of a book: mothers that let their children run riot and think libraries are daycare centres, teenagers giving lip to security guards, adults chatting to each other over coffee. The quiet rooms within the quiet rooms' quiet rooms can only go downwards, eventually - chambers and alcoves underneath East London.
2) The Saturday papers carried news of the search for a heir to Hackney's "mole man" William Lyttle. He died this month and left behind a Victorian home worth £1million. The catch: he was known as the "mole man" because of the tunnels and rooms he built underneath his home, prompting a battle with Hackney Council to evict him when they discovered everything with the help of ultrasound scanners. I like how he cheekily claimed to have just a big basement.
3) The papers have also recently carried stories on the explosion of the mole population due to a ban on poisons used before to kill them. Perhaps this was the inspiration for Big Brother's producers when they randomly selected a contestant to go inside the house dressed as a mole (an outfit he wouldn't be able to remove until he completed certain secret tasks in behalf of Big Brother) and sleep in a mole hill in the garden. Some of the tasks involved him scurrying around tunnels inside the Big Brother house which the other contestants were not aware of.
4) While I was writing this post, I went to my bookcase and grabbed one of Wink's books, Creators on Creating. It's a collection of essays by various writers, thinkers and artists. I flicked it open and landed on Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. The first paragraph goes like this:
idioticpoet mentioned on Facebook how his town's library had created a "quiet room". It struck me as a very Borgean notion: add a quiet room within a space that's already meant to be quiet. Then imagine that quiet room needing a quiet room once all the noisy and affronted left outside decide to go in (because we know they'll be the first ones through that door.) The same noisy people I see when I visit Tower Hamlet's Idea Stores (the Borough's version of libraries) in search of a book: mothers that let their children run riot and think libraries are daycare centres, teenagers giving lip to security guards, adults chatting to each other over coffee. The quiet rooms within the quiet rooms' quiet rooms can only go downwards, eventually - chambers and alcoves underneath East London.2) The Saturday papers carried news of the search for a heir to Hackney's "mole man" William Lyttle. He died this month and left behind a Victorian home worth £1million. The catch: he was known as the "mole man" because of the tunnels and rooms he built underneath his home, prompting a battle with Hackney Council to evict him when they discovered everything with the help of ultrasound scanners. I like how he cheekily claimed to have just a big basement.
3) The papers have also recently carried stories on the explosion of the mole population due to a ban on poisons used before to kill them. Perhaps this was the inspiration for Big Brother's producers when they randomly selected a contestant to go inside the house dressed as a mole (an outfit he wouldn't be able to remove until he completed certain secret tasks in behalf of Big Brother) and sleep in a mole hill in the garden. Some of the tasks involved him scurrying around tunnels inside the Big Brother house which the other contestants were not aware of.
4) While I was writing this post, I went to my bookcase and grabbed one of Wink's books, Creators on Creating. It's a collection of essays by various writers, thinkers and artists. I flicked it open and landed on Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. The first paragraph goes like this:
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thoughts - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a "certain Chinese encyclopaedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies."
