District Line

District Line is a waggish reflection of a recent post Central Line about a serious iatrogenic problem in US hospitals. Colour coding as per the iconic London Underground Map [see below]. In 2013, Penguin Books published a series of short books in conjunction with (subsidised by?) Transport for London, the body which maintains the arteries of the largest city in Western Europe. 100 years ago, London was the biggest city in the World at 7.5 million, but has hardly grown since: now 8.7 million in Greater London, which is dwarfed by Moscow 12.3 million and Istanbul 14.7 million. Indeed, on the global scale, London has slumped to position 25 in the city-size league tables. But I bet you couldn't in 2 minutes name half the conurbations that are larger.
The 2013 Penguin series was launched to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground aka The Tube. Penguin have chose authors to write to / about / on /inspired by / each of the lines in the current network. John Lanchester has written 90 pages on the District Line: What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube. It was brought into the house by Dau.I who was visiting from England, and I knocked it off in a few hours over the weekend. The title is un hommage to the writer's short-story writer Raymond Carver's 1981 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. You probably haven't read that book but you can can a flavor of Lanchester's writing in Short Cuts an essay in the LRB, which echoes the title of another Raymond Carver collection - the one made into the famous 1993 film by Robert Altman.

Lanchester's Penguin 150 book is nostalgic and analytical and personal. Much is made of the fact that, even after 25 years of living in London and commuting daily on the Tube, he still gets all claustrophobic, especially when the trains stop between stations. He also asserts that most people suffer in the same way - without the least shred of evidence for this statement. Not me, I spent my teenage years living near Ongar when it was the end of the Central Line and would regularly go into town to hang out or find films with subtitles. Another interesting observation he makes is that, for all the use that's made of the Tube, it features very little in literature or film. Which is extraordinary considering that at peak morning rush hour there are 600,000 people on a London Underground train going somewhere. The District Line alone carries 600,000 people a day. That's more people than live in, say, Glasgow and lots has been written about Clydeside. He seems to argue that this absence is due to the fact that commuters treat their journey as a sort of limbo - not really being there, they derive no inspiration from the process.

The London Underground is a triumph of Victorian engineering and vision which was instrumental, maybe essential, to making London the centre of the known world in the second half of the 19thC. Perhaps the only comparable infrastructural engineering project is Sir Joseph Bazalgette's sewer system which is still working because its capacity was over-engineered. You could imagine London doubling in size with the existing transport system but the sewers probably couldn't hack it. I've written about local failures in the sewers. The Tube, however, continues to work bringing the plain people of London, rich and poor, where they need to go.

Books about book-people

Que si j’eusse esté parmy ces nations qu’on dit vivre encore
souz la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, je t’asseure
que je m’y fusse tres−volontiers peint tout entier, Et tout nud.
Ainsi, Lecteur, je suis moy−mesme la matiere de mon livre.
. . . Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (1533-1592)

If I had lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature’s primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my blog. Bob the Scientist (1954 - not.yet).

Although The Blob has a tendency to range widely over time and space (including a glance at Michael de Montaigne), it might be said that its point is to record everything I can remember of my own life built up in 600 word blocks. Biography in metaphorical Lego. It is nit-pickingly detailed about the last 11 years (because recorded within a few hours of each event) and sparse indeed for earlier times. My family groan when I trot out one of my well rehearsed anecdotes for company. Jakers, Pa, did nothing else happen in 1971??

Thus, it's all about meee, but two recent ear-books have also been what do we talk about when we talk about readers [phrase tip Lanchester, Carver]. 

① The Secret Lives of Booksellers & Librarians : True stories of the magic of reading, ostensibly by James "Churn 'em out" Patterson and Matt Eversmann but actually a compendium of authentic voices of those who work in the book-trade. Several of these workers at the coal-face of literacy have a version of the Blue Book meme (Customer: "I wonder if you can help me re-find a book I enjoyed at a teenager? . . . it had a blue cover") and many of them have heart-warming tales of getting the dispossessed into the world of books. I'm guessing that the named authors thought up the idea and corralled the several dozen narrators into getting something about their lives down on paper. Probably bashed some of the less coherent tales (you can love books, read a lorra books, but still not be a natural writer) into shape.  And several have benefitted from Patterson's Page Turner scheme to use his million$ to support independent bookstores.

② Shannon Reed's Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out.. This is more cohesive and long-form because, like The Blob, it selectively samples the life and times of a single teacher of Lit at Pitt. If you're quick <link-rot, paywall alert> you can snag an excerpt of Reed's musings about Lincoln in the Bardo filtered through the lit-blog of George "Lincoln in the Bardo" Saunders. Which really is as recursively back-scratching louse-riffling as it sounds but nevertheless gives you, dear reader, an appetizer for the style of Why We Read - cw: can be larf out loud funny. As you should expect from a book by Reed about who / how to Read, it reads easy but offers insight into the hard graft involved in proper writing. Not the easy one-time-pass gab of The Blob, but something which has been drafted and copy-editted and redrafted . . . and redrafted [and shared and feed-backed] until the document is living its best life into posterity. One of the nice anecdotes is when students at a creative writing class get to realise that they are not cut out to be a writer but will so be a much better, more critical, less superficial, reader for having taken Reed's course.

I've returned both these books to the Borrowbox available bin; but you'll have to get in line behind Dau.I the Librarian who tag-teamed them after me.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Fulfillment?

In any other week in the year, the answer to that conundrum might be - job satisfaction - meaningful work - successful completion - winning match - matching accessories. But in the week running up to the Feast of St Mammon it's all about Fulfillment Associates FAs: the minimum wage workers who do the Bezos bidding in Amazon hives. Those guys are working all the hours that Bezos sends, subject to the limits imposed by labor law. Here's Greg Zielinski, general manager of an Amazon warehouse in Dupont WA, an hour south of Seattle, talking about the process on Cyber Monday last year. Between Black Friday and 2359hrs on Christmas Eve is the busiest time of the year for retail. You can hunt up lots of criticism of the way Amazon treats its workers, and several members of my family won't use Amazon for that reason. But they have changed the way we shop: ruthless efficiencies and brutal negotiation supply-side, gives buyers goods 'n' stuff, and delivers them real cheap, real fast. Lots of sellers ask Amazon to do the final packing and shipping because they can apply economies of scale. Economies of scale means boredom, stress and repetitive strain injury in Amazon Fulfillment centers. But that deal saves smaller retailers from paper cuts, hernias and storage costs. But you have to pack your shit up properly or the ever smiling, secretly exasperated, Amazon Problem Solvers will come down the aisle and take your box to the sin-bin. So no peanuts!: keep the dunnage [packing material] large. Only one visible bar-code . . . not covering the box-opening. If you've sold your soul to Amazon Prime you can get your Instant Gratification Needs IGNs delivered to your door less than 2 hours after you make the last tap on your smart-phone. You can now chain-eat Ben&Jerry's ice-cream from your sofa.

Zielinski's warehouse in Dupont is a million sq.ft. in size: that's 10 hectares or 50% more that our farm. We warehouse 30 sheep . . . seems like a waste of space. We pay our workers less than the minimum wage, indeed they are like homeless people "will work for food" especially the sheep muesli mmmm good! which we are eking into them during the cold, and grassless, winter. The Amazon workers may be on the min.wage but at least they aren't kneeling on a concrete floor stacking shelves in Lidalditesci. In the more modern fulfillment centres the people are packers: the fetchers are robots. Amazon acquired Kiva Systems in 2012, quickly making it a wholly-owned subsidiary. Kiva makes the little heft-robots that bring shelf-stacks from the far corners of the warehouse so that the FAs can pick product and pop the whole order into the box. FAs need tea-breaks, smoko, t'ilet-breaks, a sandwich occasionally; Kivabot only need to be battery charged for 5 minutes every hour. Amazon time&motion geeks must have decided that it is inefficient to have people getting lost in the rectilinear jungle looking for Fad-tastik shockin' pink head-phones, Barbie the Tank-driver, and a gallon of strawberry ice-cream . . . and that's just the pink stuff.  Amazon does random stow with their inventory: everything is bar-coded but the dozen available Amazon Echos [wha' dat?] are shelved all over the shop. This means that consolidating an order requires fewer footsteps (or Kiva seconds) than if all the Echos were in one location. Engineers again!

All those Kiva bots whizzing around the floor would seem to be a recipe for a collision or a trip-and-fall as ankle-height bot meets FA carrying large box. But all the units are chipped up with WiFi collision avoidance software.  Regrettably no such software was present for the inaugural run of a new rail route through Dupont WA earlier this week. For reasons which will come out in the investigation, PTCS Prevention of Train Collision System software wasn't installed. PTCS is what it says on the tin: each train is wirelessed and GPSed up, as are all the hazards along the track. If the 'engineer' is doing something foolish or having a heart-attack, or there is an earthquake, then the train is brought to a halt on the tracks. Rather than coming round a 30mph corner at 80mph and leaving the tracks. I may have more to say on this later, but I'll leave it to Juan "Oroville" Brown for now, It is a weird coincidence that The Boy is a railway engineer and named for Hapag-Lloyd because that's the first thing I saw after hearing about his birth. The Dupont train derailment met the Interstate right in front of a Hapag-Lloyd truck [evidencial pic R]. An omen for the End of Days, maybe?

The Post-title is un hommage to Raymond Carver's book of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which has been blobmaged before about John Lanchester and the London Tube. You can buy a used copy on Amazon for £853.31 !