I just realised I forgot to do a mask on Saturday. I’ve now done over six month’s worth and I’m about to go away for a few weeks, so it may be a convenient time to drw a line under the feature. I’ll see how I feel when I get back. In the meantime, this is the 3M™ High Fluid Resistant Surgical Mask:
“These surgical masks meet ASTM highest level of fluid resistance (160 mm Hg), to help reduce exposure of the wearer to blood and body fluids, large particle droplets and aerosolized fluids.”
I was absently looking out the window and realised that a bit of a kerfuffle was a sparrowhawk taking one of the pigeons. Female this time, so she’s bigger and browner than the last s/hawk in the garden. By the time I had my scope and camera ready, she dragged the pigeon behind a bush, so she was obcured and the light wasn’t great. But at least the photo is good enough to show she was there.
The cat scared her away before she’d finished, and the pigeon flew away too, so there’s a partially plucked pigeon out there somewhere. A pigeon is quite large prey for a sparrowhawk, which is presumably why she didn’t take it very far.
John Barlow has this to say about hardbacks:
Personally, I think hardbacks are a disaster for the emerging writer. Who the hell wants their book out at $25 instead of $15? It’s crazy. How many readers regularly plump for new/unknown writers in hardback? It’s an extra ten dollars that you are risking.[…]
My first book came out in the UK in hardback, and just to cap it all they upped the cover price to a fairly steep £15 ($25ish) just before publication. Who on earth was going to pay that for an unknown writer of short fiction? Even friends winced. The book flopped on the Roman scale, and paperbacks were never mentioned.
(via The Reading Experience)
His comments on the economics of the thing seem like good sense to me (not that I’m a publisher or an economist). But also, on a personal level: I hate hardbacks. I can’t be the only one. They’re heavier, they take up more room in your briefcase/handbag/pocket/luggage/bookshelves/bedside table, they have pointy corners, and the dustcovers go missing or get ripped. Offered a choice of paperback and hardback at the same price, I’d take the paperback every time. Having to pay an extra tenner for the hardback just makes me feel ripped off, and I only do it if I’m very very eager to read something. Far more often, I see something that looks good, decide to wait for the paperback, and never get around to buying it. It is, basically, a fucking stupid system, and the sooner publishers make paperback originals standard the better.
Ros Barber is annoyed by the use of the term ‘performance poet’ in a disparaging way and “can’t see the sense in perpetuating the page/performance divide”. George Szirtes thinks the distinction is useful, and makes a good point about the intimacy and privacy of reading poetry from the page.
One-to-one reading is like reading a letter. Its context is concentration, direct address, detachment, the sense of being alone with experience, language and little else.
I basically agree with Szirtes. I think of poetry as a written medium that should work orally, rather than an oral medium that happens to be recorded in writing. A good poem should have been painstakingly written to get everything the poet wants into the words themselves, and the very idea of ‘performance’, with its implication of adding something to the poem, offends my sense that the words should be everything.
Of course if a poet is going to give readings, they should try to do them as well as possible; but for me, that means a careful, thoughtful reading-aloud of the poem, rather than an attempt to make it into a microdrama. I find poetry readings by actors are often unbearable for that very reason – they tend to use the poem as the script for a performance, rather than effacing themselves and trying to do the best possible job of communicating the poem.
Three pieces of music that are hot enough to drag the northern hemisphere kicking and screaming into spring. I wish. From memory, I think they’re from Mudd Up!, Funky16Corners and gabba.
both from wmmna: