against ‘the life of creative (paid) leisure' (the cranes may soon be gone)

horsemouth missed a love supreme day (last saturday) and is up the library, donkey portage work has cancelled for the day, , friday - in all probability - he works, there may be some smidgeons next week - now read on).

reading is important (horsemouth opines) - reading the back cover of photography (garden wall, near victoria park, free) horsemouth discovered that the author, architectural photographer eric de mare, was descended from huguenot's and a longtime advocate that 'with machines to toil for us, a new age of creative (paid) leisure for all should be our aim'.

similarly in his latest acquisition (university of cyprus in docklands slushpile - free) like shaking hands with god: a conversation about writing - kurt vonnegut and lee stringer - horsemouth discovers a previously unknown mark twain story -   an extract from captain stormfield’s visit to heaven. the great writer (who worked his whole life as a tailor) is never read (but in heaven he receives his honour).

before he became a writer lee was homeless and crack addicted and using a pencil to clean out the mesh in his crack pipe when he ran out of crack. to kill time (when he'd run out of crack) he began writing with the pencil... five hours later he stopped (but he was hooked). this may be because, as kurt says paraphrasing psychoanalyst edmund bergler, writing allows us to treat our own neuroses, by writing.

horsemouth is against the life of creative (paid) leisure in part because at the moment they are currently only proposing it for citizens. vonnegut is attentive to the losses that computers bring - in going out and wandering around and meeting people - this is a loss in experience, this is why he still uses a typewriter (and then annotates it in pencil).

  ‘the skyline west of whitechapel was spiky with construction cranes’ - the difference engine, gibson and sterling, p.16

‘they were the faithful witnesses, the social recorders...’ writes eric de mare in his book photography of the street photographers whose career was made possible by fast acting film, better lenses and the improved portability of cameras.

but the cranes may soon be gone - replaced by jump factories that merely put together from prefabricated units and service ducts assembled off-site. these are then delivered in containers just-in-time and winched up to the factory atop the tower block that adds a floor a week to the structure - horsemouth was wrong about the drying speed of concrete being the only limit to gentrification (there’s always prefabrication - as widely used on the city island project). of course part of this removes the need for skilled builders - the construction of the fabricated components can take place on an assembly line with similar gains in de-skilling (if that makes sense) and allowing skills-shortages (the kind of thing that causes wages to rise) to be circumvented.