First and foremost I have managed (finally!) to make time and get the new release of Chyrp! since it was revitalised and moved onwards from “benevolent dictatorship” to proper GITHUB open sourcing…. But I deviate.

What this means effectively, and the driving force behind it, is that nonesoblind.net has ALMOST gone live!  And at the same time in exact parallel I am moving to “eclectic.me” where I am of course able to beta test any changes Annie asks for.  However there the similarity lies, because the feathers and themes of the two blogs are likely to differ quite wildly and I (will be) very proud if the nonesoblind blog is (eventually) completely accessible.  On which note Chyrp! did not fare so badly as I feared, SO LONG as it is being used to post - the admin side is tough one to crack (and I shall not be trying, just feeding back to development community where it is weak).

If I have any readers with me so far they may be yawning at the geekery - and maybe I should make posts over on Mainframeguy’s geeky blogspot blog…. but I think I can only spread myself so thin.  What will happen is that I shall “winnow” every single post from here that is not lit. crit. - they shall all form the seed posts for eclectic.   It should have been ever thus.

AND NOW for the explanation of the title - I do not really think I am quite so handsome nor marvelous, but someone else does and has asked me to come up with an online pseudonym or “handle” for them to blog under….

And so I reveal my oh so cryptic ideas….

I think they could go by the name of: AERO (not to be confused with the Mac skin, or chocolate bar!  However it is something occasionally heard on a tandem as the Captain may warn the Stoker he is about to slipstream low over the bars (exposing the stoker to sudden and dramatic buffeting if they do not follow suit and the slipstreaming is lost)

And furthermore I have an idea for a possible name for our tandem - which is: TANTALUS

I am feeling a bit clever about that, and therein (maybe) the rub?  We’ll see, maybe a comment will reveal if it has been taken up?

for now - that is all - and if you come back and find the blog entirely literary, well you will know why and where to find anything different (Thinks.. if I didn’t want to be mistaken for a “Python nutter” I could make the strap line on my new blog “and now for something completely different…”!

I think there really should be a post on my blog that discusses Holiday reading and books.  In fact there ought to be one whenever I take a holiday.  The last was probably for going to Wales, but this was only a weekend and Dylan Thomas remained untouched!

This time it is a week and it is in Northumbria.  Reading seems a more likely proposition.  My Ereader is loaded with “White Tiger” which is this months choice for the Brixton urban bookgroup.  And I have “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”  on load from my library which is the choice of the reading group there this month.  I also have the unabridged audio book of the same work for the car journey, which I am almost certain we shall manage to fit in since the drive is over six hours long, from London to Northumbria.

That gives the context, and I shall be especially interested to compare my experience of the three media forms, audio, Ereader, and paper.  I shall either make additional posts or edit and expand this one to give an update, assuming I am online whilst on holiday.  Should I be offline the posts will appear on my return, in June!

Well - for once a post which is not directly a book review as such.  I’m a little miffed because my sidebar choice to say what I am reading at the moment has suddenly decided to throw strange MySQL database errors when I try to update it,… so although it is correct that I am currently reading Proust (and only the first volume at that, goodness knows when if ever this will be completed, a few years at least!) similarly the diaries of a justified sinner is somehow languishing on my E-reader mid-read.  In fact my “active” current reading is “Mother’s Milk” by Edward St Aubyn - more of which in the next post I make after next months reading group at the library.

Which brings me to the another sticky subject I am grappling with, that of accessibility and my blog.  Chyrp RC2 has been released as a proper Version 2 since I first set up this blog, and with it comes another “add in module” called Readernaut which (hopefully) will work and allow me to reinstate the current reading feature in my sidebar.  Also since the inception of the blog I have met and fallen in love with a wonderful partially sighted woman.  So it would please me to make the blog work better as a fully accessible site, which I realise is far from the case.  And to complicate matters the geeky friend who hosts my blog has moved servers.  All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I am planning a revamp of the site design and so forth, hopefully transferring all of the content in tact also.  This was a traumatic vent involving almost a week downtime and some shakiness last time.  Hopefully it will go more smoothly this time.  Memo to self - remember to implement the “readmore” link feature and ensure it is accessible with blog redesign.

One of my big hopes is that with the redesign here might be more comments. I know from my own blog reading that a blog does not really “come alive” without comments. Whilst I am aware the traffic is very low I also know I have made posting a comment as easy as I possibly can so I cannot help being a bit miffed at the lack of them. Ok end of pity party. One thing I really know is that bleating on about wanting comments seriously does not invite or encourage them!

Anyway, before that I am moving house and the desk on which the computer will sit to do this wondrous work is yet to be made even - plus I am slated to redesign the website for my local quaker meeting… so I reckon I’ll be lucky to achieve these changes this year however much I am itching to get ahead with them and indulge in a little geekout fest all of mine own.  Second memo to self - must prune my blogroll and check it references current sites and ones I can cope with keeping up on too!  OOOooh did I mention in my blog that Dovergrey Reader got a mention on “Front Row” on BBC Radio Four?  Well I have now… and apparently she is very widely read and respected by publishers, no less!  I felt a strange mix of respect, envy, and rubbing shoulders with celebrity to hear this.  More power to her blog I say!

And to conclude on a more literary note, last night I heard that Mark Haddon has apparently written a play on the subject of bipolar disorder which I may well be interested to see.  I shall actually be somewhat prejudiced when I do though, for two or three reasons.  The main one is that I loathed his follow up to “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” and despite trawling through my blog archive (embarrassing days when it was full of drivel with no focus on literature!) I cannot find reference to it.  I know we did it for the library reading group and I vaguely remember reasons I disliked the book, which I would warn the squeamish to steer well clear of because there is a gratuitously grating description of someone piercing themselves for reasons that escape me.  Anyway life’s too short to review it now and I am losing the point(s).  The second is that although I liked his most successful work I am not at all sure it was especially accurate in offering any insight into Aspergers (although it may have had some points I think it did not get across how Aspergers has such a very broad spectrum at all and made it seem more disabling than it truly is).  Which brings me to my greatest misgiving, which is that I myself live with “bipolar light” as Stephen Fry describes it.  So if I reckon he did a poor job of portraying Aspergers I’ll be the most critical person and arguably qualified to judge how he manages as a playwright.  Who knows, we may yet have another post here under the “drama” category!

Three books in one bog entry… for me there is one common theme to them too, which is race and the way it is approached in literature.  I should almost like to include Coetze’s “Friday” here, but I think that work deserves consideration alone and in any case four wouuld be, I think, a book too far!

“Home” is a sequel or follow up to “Gilead” which was highly successful for Marilyn Robinson and the January choice of my reading group.  Although I did not make it to the reading group in February it did get to feature on their new blog and I have made a comment there, one which I expect will stand alone since this book group are definitely a fan of the printed page a proper meeting.  There are plenty of other online reading communities and active blogs out there, some in the blogroll to the right.  But back to “Home” and as you will have seen if you clicked through to my comment there is one thing I was left puzzled by, which likely would not have happened to me had I started reading the works with the highly acclaimed “Gilead”.  I had formed the impression the family at the centre of the narrative were black, African Americans to be exact.  It is largely this which gives the common thread to this post so perhaps I stretched the connection.

Gilead is the name of the small, rural Idaho town where the Broughton family home is.  They are a large family and the narrative is told by the youngest daughter who returns home to care for the aging patriarch of the family.  There is a touching portrayal of the return of one of her brothers, perhaps the black sheep of the family.  What I liked best was the exploration of things they shared despite being obviously quite different siblings with different life paths.  The simple fact they had shared the same family allowed them to make connnections they would never have managed as people who were not related.  This was actually the only hopeful part in a rather bleak novel, but only bleak in a realistic sense.  There was plenty touching and encouraging and very beautifully portrayed within that.

Ms Robinson has left herself plenty of scope for another sequel exploring how life goes on for Rosalind, the youngest in my opinion.  Everything we learn about Jack is presented obliquely and in a shadey manner which is a cunning way to paint him since this is the sort of character he is.  A drifter and destined to leave the novel as he arrives, from the street with not a penny to his name and a drink problem that haunts him along with a past relationship.  It was this relationship that finally meant i Had to accept this fammily is white and not black, because Della is the daughter of another minister and definitely coloured.  I did get a little tired of the way Jack’s father tended to dominate the novel, but perhaps that was a reflection of Jack’s life too in that he always felt he had not done enough and was destined not to make his father proud of him.  One could make an interesting criticism of the novel exploring the question of predestination.

You could not say the same of “ Mudbound” the firstl novel by Hillary Jordan which is very directly concerned with the quesiton of race in the American past, but also has a strong element of family drama and patriarchy.  This time the patriarchy is rather less benevolent, althought the elder son of the family whom our “heroine” narrator marries does present a more positive image, perhaps.

Set between the wars in the deep South of America this has many historical scenes directly concerning race - I should love to know if the auther os black and if not I am impressed by her research an ability to portray things convincingly fromt he point of view of Ronson and his family.  She did seem to me to have a very convincing way of speaking from a male viewpoint and understanding his friendship with the younger brother.  I commonly admire it when a male author can convincingly write from a female viewpoint, so here is a counterpoint for a woman author.

Last but not least Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman is a ficitional work of a very real hisorical event.  The reading group by large had not heard of the eventpersonally I was also surprised that it has faded from modern consciousness.  So as a work that reminds one of the historical sweep of the case and the historical background perhaps this book has some merit.  But as a work novel in it’s own right I found it extremely lacklustre, the characters felt very thin, almost to the extent of being cardboard cutouts.  We are only really presented with two protagonists, both female.  Everyone else is a walk on character and it seemed to me there were few and far between strong male roles here, which somehow seemed a lack when the tragedy of Scottsboro is the prejudice and biggotry leading to the wrongful arrest of nine black men whose lives were effectively ended thereafter.  I found myself far more interested in how events may have affected those men and frustrated by the way the novel would not go there.

If you are interested in the journalistic process and dilemmas it throws up then perhaps this book my hold more for you, since the leading lady is presented almost solely in the light of what was no doubt quite a pioneering career for a woman in those times as she works for a left wing journal covering events.  The role of the communist party is mildly interesting too and no doubt informed somewhat by the figure of Ruby Bates who seems really rather a stereotype of underclass suffering an dmakes me feel the book is almost parodying the liberal feelings of our protagonist.

All in all I did not really enjoy it, although the story if made somewhat compelling.  Others might get more form it though and no doubt it suffered coming after other books all of which had involved race to some degree….

I think I have also learned not to break off a posting in the midst of writing it (these last four paragraphs were written some days after the main substance).  I shall try to avoid doing that in future and hope this posting has not suffered as a result.

Readers or random visitors might notice there have been less writings here of late.  At first this did not mean there was any less reading on my part, it was largely due to my new job with community technology.  Lately though I have actually been reading less, and not because of any shortage of quality writing which I wished to read.  I guess it is just the way life goes sometimes.

In any case the most recent choice of my library book group was “Fascination”, a collection of short stories by William Boyd (writer).  I am thoroughly enjoying the collection, which seem to have a common theme of sexual obsession or misbehaviour.  Needless to say it is the leading men who are shown in the worst light, by and large and there is plenty of sexism in the work.  There also seems to be an interesting subplot connected with brain damage and similar dysfunction.  The stories are a varied bunch exhibiting many forms of writing, as one of the group members commented sometimes it feels a little as if the author is “showing off”.  I’m still enjoying them thoroughly though even though I had only read the first three when the group met yesterday, and I’m also happy to say that I made a modest saving by purchasing the book online for my ereader, which was also more convenient and has enabled me to carry them around with me more easily too.  Ideally the library should have had enough copies, but sadly that seems a rare event with our more interesting and contemporary choices.

The previous selection was a contrasting work by Carol Shields whom I mistakenly believed to be a Canadian (apparently she was actually American).  Arguable the choice is one of her best known works, The Stone Diaries.  This book I failed to finish entirely despite renewing it three or four times.  Someday I shall return to it because it is a fantastic read.  I had not realised it was a book I had not read, thinking I had already enjoyed all her works, this made it feel really special.  Another interesting fetaure of the book is that it includes a set of illustrations and one is never entirely certain if one is reading a work of fiction or not.  During book group I found that it really is fictional and the photographs are of Carol Shields own family and suchlike, included with their permission.  Parts of the book take the form of diary entries, btu this does not spoil the narrative flow in the least as it charts the life of Daisy Goodwill.  One of the unforgettable images in the book is the one where as a newly wed her husband, somewhat intoxicated, sits at a window in France on the first evening of their honeymoon.  He suddenly sneezes and, without any pause, falls from the window to his death.  She never talks of this except to her best friend years later, and even then she does not tell how she reclined on the bed for a further minute or two before moving and allowing things to continue.

I found the character of her father fascinating, he was a man who lived a life with many changes, from his beginnings as a mason to his later success as a magnate and businessman supplying quarried limestone across America.  I guess this is partly where the books title comes from.  It’s possible I shall return to make a brief blog entry on this work whenever I finish it, but that may not be for some time.

Since it is the summer the next months meeting is one where we shall have a poetry selection, each member bringing several to read and discuss.  I guess this time reading will nto be a problem, so I have another month to finish the short stories.  I am hoping that going forwards I shall not allow a dry patch in my reading to cause a further bearth of Blog entires.  The next one may well be something on a Spiritual theme, which I have not made for a while, or perhaps drama if I can get to the theatre.  In any case, I enjoy making these posts and should hope the intervals between them are days or weeks rather than months in future.  So watch this space for developments.

I know aalready my chosen poems for the month shall be by Gerard Manley Hopkins because he is the favourite poet for the woman I love.  Perhaps this time she will chose to pass comment too!

One of the unexpected outcomes of my nanowrimo experience last year was a conversation with my father where he was insistence that my novella was an expression or reflection of my own life and myself.  Since I had intended to write something of an anti-hero and a character I would feel sorry for and ridicule I took issue with him and was not particularly pleased!  But trying to take an objective perspective and after talking with others and reflecting I can see there is a lot of truth in what he was saying.  I would qualify it by saying it can never reveal the whole person, rather aspects.  Sometimes only background.  Perhaps it depends how open the person is?  Perhaps it depends how much they have taken to the old maxim “write from what you know”?  But having met one or two authors in person when I have read their works I can see it seems to bear out.

Perhaps it is obvious to readers.  But as a writer and in this context I was quite unprepared for this, and have to admit it has given me pause for thought.

I recently “discovered” a new author I enjoy; Tobias Hill.  I first read “The Cryptographer” and enjoyed it enough to go on to read his first novel (“Underground”).  When I check Wikipedia I certainly discover many biographical details that tie into his first work.  Which makes me think that just maybe the extent to which one reveals of oneself is especially apparent in early works.  Perhaps it is a feature of being new to fiction writing, and as one becomes more adept at spinning out a tale of fiction one can remove more of the personal and write more that is truly imagined?  I’m not sure I have more writing in me, at least not right now.  But when and if I do I shall perhaps return to consider this.

I really like Tobias Hill’s style.  I’m not surprised to read he has a background as a port also.  One fo the little details that caught my eye was his take on technology in “The Cryptographer”, I loved the near future setting and the corelation with the “credit crunch” phenomenon.  Also his coining of the term “Soft Gold”.  As someone with a fairly good knowledge of information technology some writers ill-informed use of the subject as a fictional device can really grate on my nerves, but not in this case.

On a personal side note - the reduction in post activity can partly be attributed to simply beign busy with “real life”.  But I have to admit the other main reason is a complete absence of comments and an awareness that not many read my blog.  So it is a little like talking to myself.  Please do not get me wrong, this is not a “pity posting” whining for comments.  I am also fully aware that comments are largely made by other bloggers and it requires me to be reading and commenting for the favour to be returned.  I’ll confess to a nice feeling when I found someone on my blogroll has also added this blog to theirs.

I have made this blog extremely easy to comment on - I think I just want to say that any comments passed will be very well received and if you are a reader of blogs and you have enjoyed that you read a comment is probably the best way to encourage the author to write more.