I bought some books in Hampton-on-Sea (at the other end of
Herne Bay) today which is the local resort development that was mostly washed away
by the sea. This is a story in itself and we do publish a book about it, so
for anyone interested – one to browse; next time you’re in the bookshop. Alternately
a link to the buy it now wosisname
http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/adventures_in_oysterville.htm
Having filled the Volvo estate with books we went down to
the seafront and took a few pictures, link later.
On to Margate for lunch at Turner Contemporary, the café has
started playing muzak, with the level of chatter, clinking of cutlery and god
knows what the muzak is supposed to sound like in a quietish environment – I really
couldn’t tell; well I now have the secret weapon. This is my third set of noise
cancelling headphones, the first two didn’t do much in terms of cutting out the
background noise, good makes, JVC and Sony but honestly not much better than
ordinary headphones, but my new ones Bose QC25 cut out nearly all of the background
sound.
So, I sat in Turner Contemporary Café listening to TS Eliot
reading The Waste Land – some say it’s the most depressing poem in the English language,
but compared to the muzak mixed with the noise it’s reasonably jolly.
I then went around the exhibition and wondered how many
people encountering the exhibition would connect it to The Waste Land if they
were just plonked in it unlabelled – the exhibition, that is; not them silly.
It was good see the gallery so busy on a March weekday, and
while the exhibition is growing on me I think it is becoming less connected to
the poem for me.
The trouble with something like this is that if you have a
poem, and in many senses a great poem, if you have known the poem for years,
then you have a wosisname? Set of mental images, ‘s not quite right. Perhaps an
idea of what your set of images would be like if you had them. And I suppose the
exhibition just isn’t like, as Eliot says, doesn’t connect, to what’s in my
head.
There wos this geezer called Kant who said something like,
the framework in your head does more to tell you about what you see than your
eyes do. So if you go into a kitchen, what you know about water coming out of
taps and Cornflakes being in boxes it far more significant than what your eyes
see. So with the exhibition I have a sense of opening a door labelled “kitchen”
and arriving in a bathroom; that said it’s a pretty good bathroom.
I am not knocking the gallery here, putting on an exhibition
associated with a famous piece of writing like this is a brave step and if you
are interested in the poem or the poet it’s a must visit.
Photograph wise I have put the content of my phone camera
card on the internet, here is the link
and the content of my camera’s camera card on the internet,
here are the links
Onto bookshop, do you call it advertising with bookshops,
libraries, art galleries, theatres? Advertising would suggest something
associated with making money. Where do you draw the line?
I was rather taken with the Margate Hospital fundraiser
An interesting thought here is the Tracey Emin book, on sale
in Turner Contemporary at £55 and I would expect the trade price i.e. what the
gallery shop would have paid for it would have been in the £33 ballpark. Now you
can buy it from Amazon for around £35, that is new and including P&P.
Obviously we pretty much all like to have shops, like that
gallery to have a shop, like our local shops to be there. I think the price
that Amazon would pay for the book would be about the same as a book wholesaler
would pay, around £22 and the old world where as a shopkeeper you bought the
book from the wholesaler for £33 who had bought it from the publisher for £22
and sold it to you the customer for £55 well it’s gone.
Another side of this, is that given the general decrease in
activity and associated rise in retail supply chain costs, if the demise of the
independent bookshop hadn’t occurred the shop price would have been around £35 anyway.
