foreign
[Music]
excellent now we have creating a poetry
book with Peter Chubb Peter has
contributed to many open source projects
over the years mostly on low-level
system code in recent years Peter has
been helping to grow the open source
Community around sel4 and contributing
to its ecosystem this talk is far away
from that work however
today Peter will talk about using the
latex type setting system to produce a
publication ready poetry book please
welcome Peter
hello folks
I'd like to start by saying this is
nothing whatsoever to do with my work
it's all on my own time and I do have a
note for my mother to say that I'm
allowed to quote some of her poetry
I'd also like to acknowledge that we're
meeting on the land of the voluntary boy
people
and pay my respects to Elders past
present and emerging and to mention that
most of the poems that I'm going to be
talking about were developed in Armadale
in the aniwan ganawayan people's country
and my mother is actually fairly
involved with the keeping place and so
forth to help maintain Aboriginal
culture
but anyway this story starts when you've
got a whole heap of documents
in some kind of order
possibly bundled and you want to boil
that down into a book
so you have some collection of poems and
some previous poetry books
you want a real printed book
with all of the poems nicely typed set
in some kind of order that makes sense
and with all the other things that makes
a book rather than just a collection of
poems on a website
so let's start by having a look at
what's in a book
the first thing you see when you pick up
a book is its cover this happens to be
an 1865 edition of Banks's Endeavor
Journal
as you can see this particular one's in
boards
which are cloth covered and with a
leather spine but you could just have a
paper spine or you could have leather
leather covers all over
you need to just know that fairly early
on because it involves some of your
later type setting decisions if you open
the book
you see the end papers now when you've
got a book a hardcover
you tend to glue across the spine sheets
of gauze
um like you used with bandages and then
use that to glue the covers on if you
just do that you can see the bits of
gauze and it looks really ugly so what
Publishers do is
put a piece of paper across the hole of
the inside and that's your end paper
traditionally they were plain color
around the 1890s
marbled covers started becoming really
popular and then later on in the early
1900s some Publishers started using
printed in papers
modern
editions tend to be just plain white or
they're printed with something that's
relevant to the inside of the book I
can't show you any of those because
they're still in copyright
after you've gone past the end papers
you come to the half title page the only
thing on this is the title
back in the early days of publishing
before they had really good ways of
cheaply putting the name on the spine of
the book they left that blank and you
were expected to cut out the half title
page and glue it onto the back yourself
when you got home
or if you made a box of the book you
glued onto that nowadays
Publishers quite often leave out the
half title page but there was a period
between about 1810 and 1940 where the
path title was left in it just didn't
didn't show any useful purpose
you then come to the most important page
in the book from the type designers from
the designer's point of view and that's
the title page the only things that are
essential on the title page are the name
of the book
and the author's name
plus if it's part of a series you might
have the name of the series and which
number is in the series
hit a version's got some other
information as well if you're going to
sign a book as a dedication to somebody
else don't sign the title page unless
you're the author
because the title page is traditionally
reserved for the author to sign a
dedication for
the pages after the title page are the
copyright Pages they're really important
from the point of view of asserting your
rights in the book and mentioning any
other people who might have copyright
material that's in your book
in this particular case the copyright
information is who the publisher is
their address and the date it was
published is on the title page and that
was fairly common for early books before
the burn convention was signed nowadays
it's normally on the back of the title
page
you'll also often see in their a line of
numbers starting at zero and starting at
10 in the middle and going out to one at
the left and two at the right and like
that that's for different Impressions
from the same set of printing plates and
what happens there is that
you make your printing run
and that wears out the plates a little
bit
and when you've sold out of that you do
another printing run but before you do
the printing next printing line you
carve off the one on that first page
so you know it's the second impression
of the first edition and so on
um printing plates wear out as they get
used so by the time you get to the 10th
impression it's normally pretty fuzzy
you then come to the forward and the or
the prodigal gnomen or the uh
introduction which is often written by
some of the other than the author they
have their own copyright in that which
needs to be acknowledged somewhere else
then you've got all the tables of
contents figures and so forth and then
you finally get to the real book
all of the stuff before now has been
numbered differently it's been numbered
with Roman numerals now you come to the
bit that's number numbered with Arabic
numerals and that goes to the end of the
book and it contains what the author
vote
right at the end
and you'll see it
here
is the Publisher's colophon
that contains information about the
printer and what you did to print the
book in this case it just got
um some printer's name in Edinburgh
but you can put whatever you want in
there as the person did the printing
we should probably mention book bindings
too there are about four common book
binding techniques that are used and you
need to know this because it changes
what what you've got of your page to
type set onto
one really simple method is the ring
binding or spiral binding the tech books
like this the main problem with that one
as you can see in the top left hand
corner is that the it tears away that
the pages stay away
the advantage is it's relatively cheap
you can do it in an office binding
machine and the book will open out flat
perfect binding so-called you just take
up the stock paper make some narrow cuts
across the top and fill it up with glue
and then if you're using a paper binding
you just put the paper binding directly
Over the Top If you're using a cloth
binding you put your cloth tapes across
the top and let the glue set
the main problems with these is if you
use an inferior quality glue the stuff
breaks and you get broken spines
if you use a good glue then you can't
open the book completely so you can't
open it flat
be that as it may most books nowadays
are perfect bound you can get perfect
binding both in hardbacks and soft backs
I believe no no no I have actually met
softbacks that are non-perfect bound
and the last way to make it is sew it in
signatures now the early printers
what they do is they take a huge piece
of paper and print up 32 pages on the
print thing and then fold it
and then sew that
to all the other ones that were there
and then they would ship that as as the
ball and you'd have to cut the pages
yourself when you got it
later on they did the same thing with
the folding trick but they would trim
off the edges
and that's what most of the high quality
books uh today
you can also instead of using linen
thread which is archival quality use
steel otherwise known as Staples
metal stitched books last really nicely
for about 40 50 years and then the metal
starts rusting and you get vast stains
all over your book
so for archival Quality books you
probably want to use linen thread rather
than metal stitched
um
if you have a binding that is like the
spiral binding or like a perfect binding
or a Japanese stab binding which I
didn't actually mention then you lose
some of your book
on the left hand side on the Inside Edge
of each page so that green line there
everything to the left of that you can't
really use because it's used up by The
Binding and that changes the aspect
ratio of your page when you go to layout
likewise if you're using a Sony
signatures
book the inner Pages sticking out
further than the outer pages
so you have to allow for trimming the
page and every page is going to have a
slightly different aspect ratio you may
want to trim more off than you would
just absolutely have to in order to
change the aspect ratio of the page so
all the a series papers they're all uh
boot two square root of two ratio
between the length and the height if you
wanted to move that more to the golden
ratio which is like one to 1.56
something you'd need to chop it off a
bit more
either way you need to know what that
trim is that you want to do
now when I first did a poetry book back
in 1996 the end of 96 early 97
we were still back at latex version two
and it didn't have any really good ways
of laying out pages
that weren't
American Paper
the A4 A5 Styles really sucked
and they didn't have any really good
verse packages to lay out poetry so I
created my own styles from scratch
that was really really tedious and
really hard to maintain as new versions
of latex came up along
but today in 2023 there's this class for
layout called the Memoir class which
provides really good opportunity for
page layout and it understands a series
paper
the other thing I needed was a good way
of laying out verse the big thing that
the built inverse class verse style that
happens in Memoir class that doesn't do
is that lines if you can see in this
line there's one really long line for
poetry what you do is you take the in
words and map them and align them right
so you can tell it's still part of the
same line because the line structure is
part of the poem it's not just something
that's add it all
so the main the remaining thing is to
build an index so we've got index of the
poems there's Memoir classes built in
stuff for generating the uh input to an
indexing program there's a public domain
uh sorry open source make index program
that you can run on that to generate the
latex to be styled for your index so
we're set
so what have I got I've got three
previous books in the series
I've got a collection of poems in word
or Microsoft Works format plus a whole
heap that I hand written in writing
that's got worse and worse as my
mother's eyesight's been fading
so what I want is firstly to convert
that to plain text Abi word can
understand the DOC format that was
exported from works and Microsoft Word
format so we can generate plain text
from it
so if I take a doc poem that looks like
this
this is a really good poem by the way I
might read it to you it's called 77
trombones
here's how we planned it brass Sprint
linting in bright sunlight kids shouting
clapping waving flags the old is smiling
eyes moist with memories dog straining
at leashes sniffing the air horses
camels monkeys clowns tumblers chucklers
fire eaters men on stilts
girls in Gordy costumes Tableau by the
truckload balloons lofting Into the Blue
Blue Yonder
Lost In The vasel Dazzle of Summer Sun
but
it rained and nobody came
anyway that's an example of my mum's
poem but that's the the DOC format after
you've converted it you get something
that looks like this and you'll notice
that the spacing is a bit weird
um the line break there is that where it
goes moist with memories is just because
I had to fit it on the slide it's not
real
so we had to
mud poems so I could actually style them
and uh at stanza separators and take all
those tabs that Mama put into separate
out ideas and replace them with a cue
quad I wrote an awk script to do that
it's too big for the slide you can get
it from the git Repository
and then you end up with something that
looks like this and all I've got to do
now is write the poem and stands of
classes environments
so we're almost there I'll give you a
slight Tech refresher it's all about
boxes
and a box has a height and a depth and a
baseline when when text
um
is in horizontal mode It lines up all
the boxes on the Baseline when it's on
vertical mode it goes down the page
lining things up on the
um left hand Edge
a character
goes down below the bass line and up
above it and all characters are boxes
so if you've tied a line of type what
text sees it's just these boxes
and it puts them all together and it
keeps on putting them all together until
it gets to a point where it can't put
any more in the horizontal in in the
horizontal space it's got
if you're in the middle of a word then
it says Ah it's really bad to break here
I'll stretch all of the into word spaces
until I've got somewhere I can break
because you've got glue in the between
spaces
going downwards it does the same thing
it goes down until it can't fit anymore
on it then tries to stretch the inner
the into into line space until
everything fits
the Interline spaces or into character
spaces have this
idea of a rubber length you've got the
base length in this case space of nine
and then it can stretch up to three more
units or Shrink up to one unit and you
can put infinite spaces in there too if
you want to
so this thing its natural width is 32
units but it can actually squish into a
29 unit thing or up to a 41 unit thing
so let's look at the Memoir class
it's got Oodles of flexibility
and a huge manual
but what I find is I need a bit of help
to work out what it's doing
so what I do is I use the show frame
package as well what the show frame
package does in this case it puts a red
line around all the major elements on a
page so I can see how what I'm laying
out fits onto the page
the other thing I need to do is because
of that glue I can't always tell where
particular elements end and where the
next one begins because they can overlap
so I've created this tight frame thingy
and I'll show what that means in a
little while in fact the next slide
you can always use if box to put a box
around something but if you just do that
like here you can see that the frame is
bigger than the Box
that it's surrounding and the distance
between the the line and the content is
frame set if box set and the weakness of
the line is
um if box rule if I go back to that one
you'll see I set fbox rule
to one point and say if box set to minus
the if box rule width and that should
give me
a box that goes exactly around the
content and you can use that as you go
along to show how you're going with your
page layout
so what's the basics I want to run on A5
paper so I say Stock A B there's also
stock
V for stock a IV and there's all the b
sizes and there's American sizes and
there's Imperial sizes as well but you
say what the stock size of the paper is
that you're going to print on
we're going to trim six millimeters off
the outer edge and nothing off the top
so our set trims to six millimeters
and that's you can see where that line
is
we're then going to set the upper and
lower margins although first
for some reason
um the Memoir class doesn't actually set
the paper width and paper height options
so I'm going to set those myself
because I'm going to need them later
when I lay out the cover sheet
we're then going to set up the upper and
lower margins these they set up up and
lower set right and left margins which
take either the two margins or one of
the margins in a ratio and the other
argument you put estimate skin in this
case I'm going to want 25 millimeters at
the top 175 millimeters for text and the
bottom part is going to be for the
footer and I'm only going to use the
footer when it's in draft mode so it'll
end up all of that footer space will be
space at the bottom for aesthetic
reasons
uh
we're going to set the headset which is
the distance between the header and the
text to 19 millimeters I want to have
plenty of room there to put the title of
each poem in that space
and then we'll call check and fix the
layout
which checks that all of the all of the
dimensions you've specified can actually
fit onto an A5 sheet and it will
complain bitterly if you can't
now let's have a look at some poems
some poems are just flush left this is a
nice one white stilts wet footfalls
delicately walking through the shallows
towards the house black cat in the
shadow should I shout
but the white birds see the black shadow
and launch into the sky
leaving the cats to the couples
so that one's just on the left but you
can also have poems that just totally
centered like this dog thought
she thinks I'm walking to heal I know
I'm rounding her up
or you could have really really wired
ones I'm not going to read this one too
it's not in my book and it goes a bit
longer than you've only got one verse
or you can have things that are totally
arbitrary and some some things have been
indented in some stances are out or
individual stanzas have lines that have
indented them out
so what I decided to do was create
stanza styles for all the common cases
and then deal with the few that were
totally arbitrary in a totally arbitrary
way
so what I want is a long poem with many
standards I want to put the title at the
top some titles have a tagline which
might be a quotation from something else
it might be a dedication
and then you put the stanza there have
an interstanza Gap then the next stanza
instanza Gap and I want the understands
are gaps to be where you have any page
breaks so you don't break in the middle
of a center unless you really really
have to
so you've got the long poems and then
after we've laid out all the long poems
we're going to put in what mum calls
micro poems which are less than the
Sansa you know four lines like that dog
thought one
and then you've got other ones too which
we can deal with later
so we're going to put the title at the
top in headset just under the header
each poem starts a new page and we're
going to encourage page breaks between
panzers and try and lay things out so
that two-page poems start on a Verso
page
and then after we've put all the poems
in we'll put the microphones into put in
the gaps
so the title poems we want the title in
all caps we want it just below the rule
so I'm going to create a new length
called title drop
and I'm going to start it just being
minus the head separation so minus that
19 millimeters
I'll create the new environment poem
I'll do a clear page to move it to the
top
and then I'm going to skip upwards by
that title drop and put the title in as
you can see
there's this extra space
hang on I've just done something wrong
I've lost my thing here
and that's because when we start
typesetting we've actually one Baseline
skip down there
so we need to add another Baseline skip
in there
what's more if we start putting the
Poetry in it comes straight under the
pipe
under the title so if we put the minus
Baseline skip in there as well
you move up to the title into the right
place but we've still got the Poetry in
the wrong place so we need to put that
poetry into a box
so we put it into a into a vertical box
that's the headset big and then we get
what we want oh isn't that nice
there's only a couple of minor things to
do we need to to do the stanza style now
GM verse
assumes that each stands in its own
verse environment I didn't want to do
that I would have the whole thing in one
verse environment so we can get
consistent type setting for where the
optical center of the line is across the
entire poem
and then have a separate stanza style
that puts things in the right places so
I'm going to new it new environment a
stanza
which has the verse and the inverse
we're going to skip 10 points and then
we're going to put this fill break
instruction in what Phil Blake does is
it puts an infinite fill in and then
says
see if you can break the line here I'm
going to give you a hint this is a good
place and then puts a negative
infinite fill in to go back to where you
were the result is that if there's more
stuff that can fit in there without
really wrecking ticks page breaking
algorithms it'll go in there but
otherwise you'll get a break after the
page break after the uh stanza and that
encourages page breaks between standards
which is exactly what we wanted
you know
how to enter the bit
if I just use the verse environment
it'll try and
align it further to the left and it
doesn't look so good so I'm going to
allow each poem to give a suggested
indent
so we're going to make it a three
argument instead of a two argument
environment I'll come to the second
argument in a little bit and we just set
the verse left skip with that third
argument
and we have alternate stanza an
alternate stands is indented more we're
going to give it another argument
instead of being zero now I've got one
argument by default that argument is 1.3
times the verse lift skip but you can
override it for a particular poem you
can even make it negative to out in the
sensor if you want to
and we're also going to have centered
stanzas and wide stanzas the wide
stanzas takes an argument which is the
longest line in the stanza
in fact what I normally do is give it
the longest line in the entire poem so
that each wide stanza is aligned on the
longest line of the of the LA of the
longest line of the poem
and that works well
we also need to style the microphones
microphones the same as the poem except
that they don't start at the top of a
page
and
you don't want to have the title so far
above it but it's pretty trivial to to
do that so I'm not going to give you the
um
full things
and the final thing we need to do is
there's no a poetry book it's no
goodness you can find the poem so it
needs an index
Memoir class has got functions to save
stuff into the index all you need to do
is add the slash index
command into the poem so we'll do that
the the title The the poem environment
has the title of the poem in in its
argument so we'll just pass it in and
then at the end we type printer next to
print the index
poems
you need something different in the
index and what the title is so we're
going to add an extra
optional argument at the beginning so it
looks like this so the begin poem The
Ides of March but we want either the
March the in the thing that's pretty
straightforward
so this time we're going to make it
three argument for the
um from the poem environment with an
optional first one which is normally
empty we'll Define index item to be that
first argument if it's empty then we'll
use the second argument which is the
title of the poem If it's full we'll use
it for the index
and then we'll use hash two in the uh
in the actual type setting of the title
so that's that done but when we come to
print the index if I just use print
index I get something that looks like
this which looks nothing like the other
pages of the book
I can change the pales page style to
rules like all the other ones and get
the the line and the page number
but it still doesn't look right
and then I can you know do all this
stuff to extra things to style a Pat I
got fed up and just wrote my own
um index style and at that point I get
exactly what I want
you'll notice that this little bit
inside the index thing is exactly what
we saw in the poem thing because it's
essentially the same we want to move
that index word right up the top and
have a skip before the
before the
the the the content
so the cover on the front matter this is
what took me the most time trying to
reproduce this
um Dad did it in some kind of were
Windows drawing package and I haven't
got access to that
so
what I did was I measured I measures
previous covers using a ruler I want the
title page is the same as the coverage
the back page is almost the same but
it's got different content so if I can
do something which will create that rule
and give me something in the middle that
I can put the content in that I've got
the cover
I've got the title page which is the
same as the cover and I've got the back
page all sorted so that's what I'm going
to do
I measured it
and the first thing to do is create a
box that goes to the width of the paper
that paper width thing I saved right at
the beginning
and we're going to put it in a V box to
zero point that's important because it
means it doesn't take up any vertical
space which means you can start at the
top
as opposed to nine millimeters down
we'll start
by skipping nine millimeters minus the
upper margin now the upper margin is
where the text box starts so if we go up
we've out at the top then down by
millimeters we're nine millimeters from
the top so that's what we want
we're going to give this cover page an
argument to say whether it's on the
front
or the back
because on the front we need to adjust
the left margin which is the spine
margin on the back we need to adjust
that margin
which is a different one
so
if we look at this bit
we take 10 millimeters and subtract the
spine margin to get 10 millimeters from
the left on the um on the front page and
on the other page we just go four
millimeters in
there
and that gives us that and then we put
the frame box in there it is and then we
create a mini page and a mini page latex
environment that you put any type
setting you want in it
we give that the size 120 22 millimeters
across which is from there to there and
184 millimeters down which is from there
to there and we put the second argument
inside which has got all the content for
the picture and the title and everything
else and then we've done it
some individual poems did a bit of extra
work
this is a really good poem so I'm going
to read it to you
when I find it
here we go
um and you can see in this one you've
got all these extra Q quads all over the
place
um when you type set it it looks like
that
and you can see it's all over the place
here's how it goes It's called in plain
language
he asked me for a date the hide no way I
thought I have to wash my hair I said
another time he asked thus simpleton
beneath my breath I muttered in your
dreams the nerd no music in his soul I
cannot come I said my granny is sick
that should be plain enough of anyone
however dumb
today he called around with flowers
nothing fancy daffodils and Gilly
flowers not for me for granny and she
raved she reads the sense of flowers as
I the sense of words but wouldn't tell
just govind a cream-filled Cheshire Cat
and now he's got his date with Granny at
the club they won't be back till one or
two and I stay home and wash my hair it
isn't fair it makes you sick
yeah
when you come to the page just after the
title page the copyright page it's one
of the most important pages of the book
because this is where you assert the
rights of everybody involved in the book
the problem is there's at least four
different copyrights in a poetry book at
least
the first one is the individual poems
text the content that I just read out to
for example that belongs to the author
the poet for up to 70 years after that
poet's death
the next is the type setting that's all
the work I've been putting it in that's
going to last for 25 years from the date
of publication so if you get an out of
the out of copyright uh a book of out of
copyright poems that was published
recently you still can't just photocopy
it
the individual poems are out of
copyright so you can retype set them
somewhere else but you can't photocopy
it
The Collection as a whole is copyright
so if you get a collection of out of
copyright poems that's
25 years old more the whole collection
is probably still copyrighted to the
editor if he's still alive or she's
still alive and so you cannot be
produced the entire book in the same
order
and finally
the fonts and the pictures are used a
copyright I use helvetica
as the fonts to typesetting everything
because there's a license for that with
every PostScript printer that's ever
been produced so when I give it to the
coffee shop to print they've got a
license to use helvetica to print the
thing
I could have used an open source light
font but then I would have had to embed
the font and it's unlikely that the copy
of shop would actually print it
correctly it's much better to use a
standard font that's already available
and pictures of course have their own
copyright for 70 years from the date of
the authors or of the painters or
artists debt
in Australia copyright is automatic it
doesn't need a notice
but from the point of view of people who
are trying to work out whether a work is
copyright or not what date it was
copyrighted and where to ask for
information about using the thing having
the copyright in the book is really
really important
laws change from time to time if you're
using other people's work you need to
get permission
and you need to assert your own
copyright
so let's look at this one
first I've got this extra stuff at the
notes at the top that shows where all
the other poems were
published before
mum did not assign copyright to all
these people for anything other than the
particular work they were in so she
retained copyright but it's still nice
to acknowledge that they've been
published somewhere else
then you've got the additional work
in this case the artwork and the photo
on the back and finally you've got the
copyright notice for the author and an
address where that author can be
contacted
if you're going to have a real book it's
got to have an ISBN
you buy them from my identifiers.com.au
it's cheaper to buy 10 at the time you
can buy the book to the ISBN now and
then use it in 10 years time if you want
to so you can buy a batch and as you
publish them fill in the details they
serve to represent a particular edition
of a particular book so if you're going
to publish both in electronic and paper
form you need two isbns
the nice thing about those is they
totally identify a book and they form
the key that everybody in the world can
use for your book
the other thing is that the copyright
acts in Australia says you've got to
deposit a copy of your book with the
National Library of Australia
and in New South Wales you need to send
a copy to the State Library there are
two other deposit libraries University
of Sydney library and the national and
the state parliamentary library for
those don't want all books but you need
to offer it to them and if they say yes
we want this you've got to send off a
copy
now that brings me to the end of my talk
I do want to say that all poetry is
copyright
to Val Chubb that's my mum and was used
but with her permission but that's the
end of my talk have you got any
questions
[Applause]
thank you Peter do we have any questions
for Peter
if you don't have any questions I can
inflicts another poem on you
would you like that okay before you can
I ask a question yeah sure yeah
so you you uh I take it that this is a
a series and you've added a volume to
this series
these are the series yep right when my
dad died mum posted a separate one which
is sort of similar but different that is
not in the series and this one's uh
mostly fairly modeling poems about my
dad and she doesn't sell this one she
just gives it away
so I you mentioned that your dad used uh
basically like a wysiwyg editor yeah
right and but you've you've gone with uh
uh yeah and I was just interested in why
you decided to go down that road because
I know later I can use it I've used
latex since Donald knuth bought out his
Tech book and I was frustrated with
tivoth
right do you have you got any thoughts
on the on the benefits of doing it one
way or the other or is it just that you
knew um the the big thing about using
latex is you can set up the style and it
works for everything and the next time
I've got a book to do which mum's got
another one on the thing I don't need to
change anything it just works
was with the wysiwyg thing you style a
poem and it doesn't take on to the next
poem or the next poem the next poem
you've got to reach all of them
individually and even if you set up a
template the template never quite
corresponds in the right places whereas
with the latex it's just a programming
language and you can program it to do
whatever you need to
uh well if there's no more questions uh
Peter you're gonna get another poem in
fact another two this one's called the
elephant in the room and it's the last
poem in the book because what mum did
was she told me which poem needed to go
first which one had to go at the page
break in the middle when you open it up
flat and which one had to go at the end
and I organized the vest to fit in
between those so this is the last poem
and because it had a bit of space on the
page I put an extra one in the end
anyway this is the pun the elephant in
the room
three days before the world ended
scientists debated whether greenhouse
gas was a new phenomenon or had it
possibly killed off the dinosaurs
politicians legislated against global
warming then returned to the interrupted
Blame Game arguing about who what when
and where but not encompassing the
question of why and totally avoiding the
problem of what to do next
TV philosophers and TalkBack hosts
discussed interesting topics such as how
many multinationals could fit onto an
oil slick and would humans ultimately
develop guilds in order to survive once
ocean levels became critical
two days before the world ended members
of a cult in Middle America followed
their charismatic leader into the sea on
a quest to find Atlantis
they were never seen again
but popular opinion had it that they
were swallowed by a whale whose usual
food source had unaccountably banished
on the world's penultimate day media
Outlets ran Paul's on whether meteor
activity had increased significantly and
statisticians conducted an online survey
of sightings worldwide of the Loch Ness
Monster
Insurance salesmen lowered the premium
on sudden death and or unexpected loss
of life and took on new employees to
cope with the extra business
fairbit australia.com gave odds of seven
to one against the world's demise
on the last day
and the final poem I'm going to read you
I promise it's just called exit it's the
last poem in the book and
I'll read you the poem and then I'll
give you the context
in ones and twos and threes and fours
they all approach the sliding doors
some move slowly some quite first but
speech must go through the doors at last
now the context of that one I mean in in
the cons of the book it sounds like it's
the end of the world and everyone's got
to die right but in the context of the
of my mum's thinking she was sitting in
a in a shopping center waiting for my
sister and there were the other sliding
doors and she was just watching people
going out
that's all the boss
so there you go
very good thanks again Peter
foreign
[Applause]