That should have been factory extension into home, since the houses would have sprung up around the factory.
Since the boom we’ve seen housing push housing away from jobs into commuter belts and now with jobs disappeared … the commuter belt becomes what? The Terrain Vague of the burst bubble?
***
In Walter Benjamin’s essay he talked of the time of Louis Phillipe and the following shift for the bourgeoisie:
“For the private individual the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work…
…The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all more pressing since he has no intention of allowing his commercial considerations to impinge on social ones. In the formation of his private environment, both are kept out. From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior-which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theater of the world.” (PARIS. THE CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY)
***
Last night I had the strangest dream of a council flat or house in a place I’ve never been that accommodated generations of my family who are dead. There they were enclosed and co-habiting in an unremarkable, minimal yet somehow adequate space. I just walked about amazed and they were terribly animated but only in their corner. The ones who are still living were their actual age and the ones who are dead were just how they look in pictures, stalled at that pictorial age. They drank tea, all of them, sans exception. It was kinda like a museum exhibit.
Speaking of the inside/outside and habitation I recall something in the “Colony” video piece about the crumbling Bata shoe factory where a woman interviewed in Scotland (was it?) about another of the Bata shoe factories described how the factory would have an alarm, a bell (?) that would ring to wake everyone in their houses up to tell them to come to work.
I talked at length to my 80 year old Aunt about her experiences in the mills in Lancashire and she described something similar: in my notes I found this:
“The knockerup would come with a high pole tapped on bedroom windows to wake the workers up.”
and another reference:
“She would hear clogs clattering as women went to the factory.”
It fascinated me when I first watched the Bata piece how the factory extended into the home. So much so that I returned to watch the piece a second time when it showed at Western Front to ensure I had heard right.
There’s been some words in the medja about sexual harassment in Canadian publishing. Now the talk has turned a strange bend, on the one hand a self-congratulatory not me says the Duck, on the other an alarming portrait of young women tolerating creepy male writers they’ve no need to and so why do they?
It’s clear the male writers concerned target these women because they’re impressionable, which is a reflection of how weak such men are. We all experience people enamoured to an idea of us, rather than who we are, but why the need to actively proceed and profit off this when it is clear you’re trading on power and a sense of entitlement? How about having some middle-aged cop on?
Also if it is endemic in publishing culture, well the culture is not very old in this country, so when did it start? In the early years it appeared to run on a fiver and hand printing press, so did the onset of this kind of exploitative behaviour correlate with the 90’s spate of pillow case sized advances?
While I was shifting two tonne of shite with my ma in rural Ireland last week I found myself humbled by her extraordinary physical strength and resilience. A mere 5 feet nothing she dug and lifted and broke apart the huge pile and I sweated profusely trying to keep pace, opting instead to tackle the wheelbarrowing and removal of the manure away from the barns before we scored two barrows and there was no escape from the digging! That was only the start of it.
After hours of back breaking work on the Bog one of the days, we arrived back (I went into a collapsed state and could only cook sausages) and straight into the barn and out down the fields she went to bring up the cows for milking and so, 4 hours later her chores were finally done. This after the identical morning chores, working on the turf and then back for more. Jesus wept !
As I watched and listened to her navigate her world I was reminded of the practical feminism she represents and lives. This isn’t no book bound theory and comfortable verbal advocacy it’s hands into the muck and hold your own as well as any man. Her sister, younger, who we also spent time with, is similar, possessed of a practical and pragmatism that gets on with things. My Granny was the same and they’d be the first to say she was mightier.
There’s an interdependence between the women, and for that matter the men and women in this environment.
***
The scent that remains with me from my recent time in Paris is that of the urinal.
The stench of piddle overwhelmed The Seine.
It was in the corner of the RER B train.
So pungent you could practically taste it in the 32 degree roasting air.
A Mexican pensioner, fresh from the Camino del very long walk place in Spain, consulted me on it before hitching his garter up to the Palais Royal.
Just did a fairly patchy reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay: Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, which I came across while searching my files for a Sontag essay. Anyway parts of it intersected nicely with my ruminating on space, and strangely, somewhat irrelevantly but why ever the heck not, the question plagued me afterwards as to why terraced housing never took off or even showed up in Vancouver? Why did houses insist on detachment?
I know from Paris arcades to terraced houses, the mind does its scotch-hop.
A common sight, becoming crowded mind you by the “ghost estate”, across rural Ireland is the “pile of stones”. The pile of stones are original two room houses either abandoned or fallen into absolute disrepair in a field, or beside a more sizeable newer maison, or failing that, used only for the storage of turf, or farming related gear.
The houses consisted of two rooms only with a fireplace at each end. There were usually no bathrooms (these would have been added). What’s interesting about them is/was the one floor, two room approach. They’re utilitarian on many levels include the containment of heat, or generating of heat (not an easy undertaking believe me). Undoubtably people would dismiss them as an example of the limitations of poverty, but within that very restriction practical things were addressed. Overcrowding wasn’t one of them obviously, but perhaps the demarcation between inside and outside and the interaction between those two lives and provision of one for the other.
I was watching a Prime Time piece on the right to cut turf and something of a war is errupting that further underscores the rural/urban divide in Ireland. The Green lobby argue for preservation of the remaining bogs, the other side remain militant over the continued right to cut turf.
My ma switched to an oil fired range in her kitchen some years ago, while yes there was immediate heat, the price of oil soared and the fumes of the range were, on the last inhale, dreadful. I regretted her dismissing the previous solid fuel range, which needed some pretty serious repair because the smoke was overpowering. The oil fired range refused to work during the worst of this year’s winter there and she was without heat (and water) for some three weeks waiting on a man to come and fix it in perishing cold temperatures of -12. Whatever of the solid fuel seal being gone, at least she could have fired in a few sods and got some heat from it. I don’t entirely see how this “turf war” will pan out. You’ve such a reliance on the turf in that part of the country for heat, and what exactly is the worst of the two evils: continue to destroy the bog or fund oil fueled invasions of foreign countries.
The irony isn’t lost on the matter that this now is an urban/rural quandary, since when I lived in Dublin we were all burning Bord na Mona briquettes!
At this point we should be able to generate a solid fuel from the other waste we create. No government seems willing to tackle the plastic monopoly. Produce etc is fired into plastic and the plastic is fired into the landfill and that equation remains a daft one.
On the topic of public space it occurred to me that a hospital emergency room is also public space, occupied religiously by the pubic and having the public move through it. Yet for all our public space the main hospital ER in the city really is quite a squashed affair. I was watching the staff squeeze by each other, share screens and make ample use of that space all night, but why is it contracted into such tightness?
There’s a house in the neighbourhood significantly smaller than those around it, it sits rather like a dolls house between and below the gutters of its neighbours. It’s a dotey affair. It struck me as kind of ridiculous that people inhabit these much bigger houses when the doll’s house would meet most peoples needs. Yet housing as a private enterprise is so concerned with expansion, tax breaks for renovation, add another layer, extend, expand, rather unsustainable as an urban model.
Due to some restrictions they faced, friends built their dwelling around a series of garden sheds. (The walls were enhanced for insulation with a sheet of plastic, thick wadge of polystyrene, another sheet of plastic and plywood) When you are inside you’d have no idea they are sheds, it’s only when step away up the garden that you can see they are simply garden sheds. I don’t know if they’d stand a hundred years, but were cosy and adequate.
“He (Joyce) acted on the brazen assumption that his book would not defer to the current taste of the public but serve to invent a new sort of reader, someone who after that experience might choose to live in a different way. He wanted to free people from all kinds of constriction, among them the curse of passive readership. ”
“Although Ulysses is a book of privacies and subjectivities, an astounding number of its scenes are set in public space – libraries, museums, bars, cemeteries and most of all the streets. Its characters enjoy the possibilities afforded by those streets for random, unexpected meetings. ” Ulysses and Us. Declan Kiberd