A seasonal one. Krampus is one of the Companions of St Nicholas.
![[Krampus pic]](https://www.luehrmann.at/BildderWoche/2002/02-12-04-krampus.jpg)
I found that photo via Google Images. I don’t know where on the site it is, but the domain is that of the only naturist hotel in Austria.
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Month: December 2005
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England vs Pakistan
I turned on the radio in time to hear the last ball before lunch, and was pleased to hear that England hadn’t lost a wicket and it was 201 for 2. Four overs later, it’s 220 for 6.
Bugger.
EDIT: 227 for 7, now. Somehow I think we’ve lost this series.
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the coolest use of Flickr EVER!!
Sorry for the exaggeration marks.
But it is pretty cool. It seems to be this guy‘s idea, but this is the recipe I’m most tempted to try:
You need to click on either the link or the photo above to see why it’s such a fab idea. I’m almost tempted to try doing one of these myself.
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So why blog against racism anyway?
Two questions really – why did *I* choose to take part, especially since I didn’t have much to say, and why have a B. A. R. Day at all?
The first question is easy – I think it’s an interesting and potentially valuable exercise, and I wanted to support it and help spread the idea. I don’t imagine it’s going to change the world any time soon, and there’s a risk of it being an exercise in right-on self-congratulation. But what I like about it is that it’s not asking people to sign a petition, or wear a badge, or buy a wristband – it’s asking them to think about the subject and articulate something – an opinion, an experience. And many of the responses are interesting, like this one on race in romance novels.
And that’s good enough for me.
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Blog Against Racism Day
I find other people’s overt racism deeply offensive. On the other hand I score rather badly on the race version of the Implicit Association Test which is supposed to measure unconscious bias.
I don’t think the test result means that the offended reaction is any less genuine, but it does suggest it’s not the whole story. A strong social taboo against overtly racist behaviour is a good start, but it’s only a start.
I’ve just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which I found a bit disappointing. My problem, I realised after a while, was that I was expecting literary fiction and it was actually genre fiction.
Which is a slightly difficult statement to justify. It’s not literally true – there is no genre the book neatly fits into. It’s about people doing magic, so I guess you could call it fantasy, but the real-world setting (Regency London) means it would be just as fair to call it magic realism, in terms of subject matter. It doesn’t have a happy ending. It has some rather literary quirks – the whole thing is presented as a C19th text, complete with footnotes.* Certainly none of the (glowing) reviews quoted on the cover suggest it is anything but literary – though they’re only excerpts, of course, and may say more about the publisher’s marketing strategy than anything else.
It’s quite difficult to put my finger on why it reads the way it does. Prose style? Characterisation? It’s not straightforwardly a quality issue – there are plenty of bad books that are clearly literary in intent, and JS&MN is competently enough written. It’s something to do with the approach to storytelling, perhaps.
I should have checked Amazon; not the reviews, which are full of idiots comparing the novel to Austen and Thackeray, but the bit where it says:
Customers who bought books by Susanna Clarke also bought books by these authors:
J.K. Rowling
Terry Pratchett
Jonathan Stroud
Jasper Fforde
I might actually have enjoyed it more if I’d picked it up with different expectations – I do read plenty of non-literary fiction, including Pratchett and Rowling. Though I suspect JS&MN really needs to be cut down by a third, literary or not.
* I found the footnotes were pretty tedious, on the whole.