One of the unexpected benefits of comment moderation has been that I’ve picked up on some comments on old posts that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen – including some spam from China.
So, it seems that my titanic struggle with Writers Bureau wasn’t quite the success I had thought judging by the new comment. I’ll see if I can get a copy of their brochure – but does this count as advertising? And thanks to Thomas for his comment on the ways people try to get more money out of us.
It’s a never-failing indication of creeping old age when icons of your youth die. I’m old enough to have been enthralled by Simon Dee’s tea-time show on TV. To an adolescent in grimy Moston, he seemed effortlessly cool, roaring off into the sunset in his E-type as the credits rolled at the end of the show. He was one of the first people who were famous for being famous- he had no discernible talent other than handsome features and a pleasantly unforced television manner. He seemed at the time to epitomise the new youth culture, as it took over the bastion of the establishment, the BBC. What happened after his flop at LWT is quite shocking. There were a couple of comeback attempts, but essentially, this man spent half his life on the scrapheap.
So I’m in the local Co-op buying a bottle of wine. Spotty youth at the checkout is trying to scan it but it won’t scan. He asks his camp co-worker why it won’t. “Well, it’s obvious”, he says. “This is an evil bottle of wine – it’s not Fairtrade, so it’s probably produced by enslaved North Korean children!”
“Er… it’s Italian,” I say.
“Yes, probably produced by Mussolini’s descendants” he says, and flounces theatrically to serve someone else.
I love this. It proves that, as John Shuttleworth wisely opined, “Shopkeepers in the north are nice.”
Just a quick post to say that I’ve enabled a new widget called Apture, which should produce lots of multi-media links at the click of a mouse, as MC Desmo says.
I suppose blogging is a kind of vanity publishing. There’s no quality control – I can write what I like. But the main difference between Topsyturvydom and some execrable self-published collection of poems is that I can, to some extent, control the reaction to it. After all, an author publishing in the usual way is open to criticism and has to take it. On the interweb, however, my space (someone should use that as the name for a web site) is my castle, and I can repel boarders if I wish.
In four years of blogging, I’ve never attracted the kind of malicious commenter designated a troll by the internet geeks. Until now, that is. Thanks to a friend who understands how these things work, I have been able to use my sitemeter to identify the troll’s IP address- not that I really needed to, as I know who the person is, but you never know when you might need proof. Having a colleague who is an expert in forensic linguistics is useful too.
The upshot is that comment moderation is now in place. It won’t trouble any genuine commenter, beyond having to wait a matter of some hours perhaps before their comment appears. But I really don’t see why I should give cyber house-room to people who simply want to insult me. So I won’t.
You would think I might get these all right. No, I got 6 / 7. I even got the question on To Kill a Bleeding Mockingbird right. What I got wrong is the question on The Charge of the Light Brigade, where I was invited to declare why Tennyson had used certain verbs. All the answers were reasonable, but only one is right, apparently. My respect for GCSE examiners has increased exponentially, as it is clear they can communicate with long dead poets laureate to ask footling questions about their poems.
“Alf, are you there? Can you tell us why you chose the verbs “volleyed” and “thundered” in that long poem of yours?”
“Certainly: it’s to reinforce the danger faced by the soldiers.”
“Righto. Sure it’s not to reinforce the noise of battle, what with those verbs being vaguely onamatopoeic and all?”
“Nope. Reinforce the danger.”
“OK. Thanks Alf. Is Charlotte there by the way? Got a couple of questions for her.”
Authors routinely complain about boorish punters at book signings, but I don’t think any of them tried the Uttley solution. The formidable children’s author apparently didn’t like the prospect of dealing with real children:
Dimly, she perceived an overwhelming mob running at her and with British pluck she unhesitatingly grabbed her duck-handled umbrella and waded into the attack, felling infants right and left. The kiddies paused, briefly regrouped, then broke up and ran off, screaming in terror. Uttley strode among them, lashing out freely.
I’m warming to her and her rabbits….
In the brave new world of education, a “voluntary” contribution to the cost of a child’s education is actually compulsory.
Sample:
It read like a letter from a debt-collector. “Our accounts indicate you have not made a contribution,” it stated. “Our records indicate you have not contacted us.” In fact, it was a letter from a state primary school. And it was asking for “voluntary” contributions of £40 from parents to its annual fund.
“I recognise that you may feel unable to pay the full amount,” the chair of governors went on. “We always invite parents to write to us to explain their circumstances and propose an alternative.”
The mighty Normblog has a nice post about the way the notes in classic editions of novels give away plot details, assuming we have all read it before. Norm cites Nick Hornsby’s neat line about this:
Even the snootiest critic/publisher/whatever must presumably accept that we must all, at some point, read a book for the first time. I know that the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even James Wood and Harold Bloom read before they reread? (Maybe not. Maybe they’ve only ever reread, and that’s what separates them from us. Hats off to them.)
I remember teaching Jane Eyre to a first year group a couple of years ago. We were in the final week of the unit, so all of them should have finished reading it weeks before. I was trying to get them to think about the ending, and to compare it with conventional endings a la Jane Austen. I mentioned the classic line “Reader, I married him” at which one member of the class exclaimed “What? She marries him! Stupid cow!”
To the Lloyd’s Hotel, downtown Chorlton for a book launch by my friend and former colleague Robert Graham. His new collection of short stories, The Only Living Boy, was the main event, and a goodly crowd enjoyed his witty and self-deprecating chat, and his sensitive readings.
I was moved to write a review on Amazon:
This collection of stories, written over the last quarter-century, showcases Graham’s talent for the fine detail and the telling turn of phrase. Many of the stories are set in (to me at any rate) very familiar locations, and one of the strengths of these stories is the sense they exude of being grounded in the real lives of the believable people who inhabit them. That’s not to say that whimsy doesn’t have its place here- one story in particular, “Playing Gershwin” has that almost magic realist quality one finds in, for example, Paul Auster.
What strikes me most about these stories is their wit, not just in the sense that they are often witty, and funny, but in the old – fashioned sense of the word: they display a high degree of verbal dexterity. There’s no room in the short story for the wasted word, and Graham wastes none.
If you want to be entertained, amused, intrigued, and occasionally challenged to reflect on life’s iniquities, this volume will suit you well. Here’s an author at the top of his game.
