Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Reading, Writing and New Technology

Just time to squeeze in a quick blog before watching the second part of Silent Witness. Talking of TV, it's quite interesting to see that people still share and comment on programmes that they have all watched together - for example, Downton Abbey - and of course the same applies to radio - i.e. The Archers, where the majority of fans are horrified at the gratuitous death of character, Nigel, actor Graham Seed.

I haven't posted since December, but I feel as if I've been in limbo for a large amount of that time. Somewhere or other, I have more photos of the second lot of snow that fell and kept many of us marooned at home, for a second time. What with Jan/Feb last year and then Nov/Dec, 2010 has to have experienced the worst winter weather for a very long time. Somewhere in the computer are some photos I took a few weeks ago, which may be unearthed and posted tomorrow.

It's difficult to say what I did during the enforced imprisonment, except order things on line for the kids and send out cards. Fortunately, we were able to get to neighbour parties on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve and to bro-in-law and to friends for lunches on the hols. The Son&Heir arrived with the womenfolk on 28th Dec, for a couple of days, after a 10 hour trip from the Lake District, which had not been much fun.

When I saw how many pounds I was putting on through lack of activity and surfeit of cake and chocs, I was motivated to take the odd walk - and even get out my old Rosemary Conlan aerobics video (yes, it's that old.); we couldn't take many walks in the cold weather due to ice, and the OM actually slid over and landed on his back, en route to the neighbour party. (Fortunately, no damage done.)

I bought a special present for the OM - a Swiss Army Knife. Don't you think that someone who was in the Scouts should have had something like that, always on his person? The main reason was because I have three kitchen knives without the pointed top - because his Lordship invades the kitchen drawers when looking for an implement. Now he will have his own little toy for those occasions. We also bought a Satnav and a digital recorder - but I haven't been brave enough to try out this new technology yet.

I heard again from Untreedreads that they are accepting a second of my short stories, (The Obsession) and today, I had an email from them, saying that they were making some changes to submissions for the coming year, and adding that they were now closed to full-length fiction submissions EXCEPT from existing Untreed Reads authors and a few other exceptions, probably until June, because they had a large number of full-length works. They added that they were putting a heavy emphasis in 2011 on short stories and novellas. I was quite pleased with that, as I have a number of short stories I'd like to submit. So all of you with new Kindles, I'll be reminding you when my, at the moment, two stories come out. And of course, I also have, Have Wine, Will Travel as an e-book to be downloaded from Virtual Tales.

Though I haven't done much writing, I have read the current reading circle book, Nice Work by David Lodge, and these are my comments:

I read Nice Work before, a long time ago, but I still found that the humour tickled me on the first couple of pages: the wife’s bedside reading – Enjoy your Menopause – and her pride in her en suite are two gems. I loved the fact that one of the loos was avocado – a joke that was possibly lost on me, twenty years ago.

Nice Work is an intelligently written novel, the conflict between the two main protagonists being a sort of representation of right and left politics of the UK. But Robyn and Vic don’t fit so precisely into those roles, for as time passes, you see more subtlety in their personalities. Vic wants to run his own business and create his own products, rather than being MD of a company, and Robyn begins to see the flaws in some of her own arguments, and to realise also how very privileged she is to be in academia – in fact how very privileged are the academics with, at that time, their security of tenure in the universities. There are some nods to Postmodernism and Modernism and literary criticism. I found that interesting, since I studied the former two briefly as a module in my degree course about ten years ago. I have to admit, though, to having failed to comprehend some of these references totally, though I don’t think that mattered too much.

There were interesting parallels to be drawn with today’s student protests, and Robyn’s dream of the university being opened up to everyone reminded me of a scene from A Very Peculiar Practice – a TV drama probably from same era. When I completed my degree, made up of various modules, through part-time study at the Department of Continuing Education at Surrey University, I felt that it had achieved that dream, but I believe this facility is no longer available.

I did feel it was a clever novel and enjoyable with lots of ideas contained in it, that made you think carefully about these conflicts, and lots of humour too. Just at the end, I thought the prose deteriorated a little, almost as if the author was impatient to be finished now that he had exhausted the ideas, and was eager to wrap up the story, which he did by some very tidy tying up of loose ends. Perhaps a fraction too tidy.

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