Lucy Brazier is the author of PorterGirl: First Lady Of The Keys, a zany trip through mayhem and chaos as Old College suffers it’s first ever female Deputy Head Porter.

It is frequently remarked that “the only things certain in life are death and taxes”. While this old adage contains much truth, one may, perhaps rephrase it to read thus, “the only thing certain in life is that poets will write about death”.

One of the finest poems concerning mortality is, in my opinion Ernest Dowson’s “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam”:

“They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

*

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream”.

Life’s pleasures are brief (as is Dowson’s poem). Wine and roses (the pleasures of food and love) pass and our existence ends “as in a dream”. (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/vitae-summa-brevis-spem-nos-vetat-incohare-longam).

In…

It has almost been a law that technological advances create more jobs than they eliminate. This, however, appears to be changing. It is predicted that nearly 15 million jobs will be created by advances and deployment of automation and artificial intelligence by 2027. On the downside, it is also estimated that technological change will eliminate about 25 million jobs. Since the future is not yet now, the reality might be different—but it is generally wise to plan for the likely shape of things to come. As such, it is a good idea to consider how to address the likely loss of jobs.

One short term approach is moving people into jobs that are just ahead of replacement. This is rather like running ahead of an inextinguishable fire in a burning building—it merely postpones the inevitable. A longer-term approach is to add to the building so that you can keep on…

I am pleased to announce that I shall be appearing on Vancouver Co-op Radio (http://www.coopradio.org/), on Thursday 4 May, to talk about my soon to be released collection of poetry, “My Old Clock I Wind and Other Poems”.

My interview will also include me reading a selection of my poetry. To listen please tune in at 1:10 pm Vancouver time (9:10 pm UK time).

For my previous interview on Vancouver Co-op Radio’s The World Poetry Reading Series, please visit http://worldpoetry.ca/?p=11413.

My thanks to Ariadne Sawyer of the World Poetry Reading Series for enabling my appearance.

Kevin

Svalbard, Bellsund, Tundra by Jerzy Strzelecki, Wikimedia Commons, 2003.

People like to prepare for end of the world, and sometimes they use libraries to do it.

There is, of course, the Survivor Library, a digital collection of over 7,000 freely available PDFs intended to help humanity rebuild after a cataclysm. It contains information about “[h]ow to make water safe to drink. How to build a weather proof shelter from available materials. How to build a fire….[And how] to build a new infrastructure which can eventually replace what was lost.”

It all sounds a bit melodramatic, but the Library Index with its sections on accounting, livestock, and welding is interesting to peruse if nothing else.

However, I am more of a romantic about the end of the world. (Or perhaps just more of a historian.) I worry about preserving books that I love. Luckily folks in Norway share similar concerns.

by Mark Sweney at the Guardian

Consumer sales down to £204m last year and are at lowest level since 2011 – when Amazon Kindle sales first took off in UK

Britons are abandoning the ebook at an alarming rate with sales of consumer titles down almost a fifth last year, as “screen fatigue” helped fuel a five-year high in printed book sales.