Category: Me

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Culture Me Other

New Theme

I’ve come up with a new design for the site, as I think should be pretty obvious. If you prefer the calmer qualities of the old look, there’s now a theme switcher in the sidebar so you can pick your favourite. The scarab picture is used by kind permission of elina. Fab, innit?

The main problem with the new theme from a design POV is that it looks a bit peculiar if you’re looking at a single post which isn’t very long. But I can’t think of an easy answer to that one. It’s also a wee bit visually aggressive, but hey, that’s what the theme switcher is for – you can take your pick.

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Me Other

Diaries and such

On Radio 4 today, they were talking about the editing process for John Fowles’ journals [you know, the guy who wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman], and I found myself thinking “I’ve never managed to maintain a diary for more than a couple of days”. Which is an odd thing to say, when this blog has been existing since Oct 3rd 2004. But blogging ain’t the same. I’m writing for immediate consumption. Often, consumption by random googling strangers [Hiya, y’all!]. As such, this is a pretty impersonal space, even though I know that, with a bit of fairy dust [i.e. chatty, entertaining prose-style], some soul-baring could help attract traffic.

It’s an odd medium, really. Media coverage tends to concentrate on ways in which blogging competes with the traditional media – political opinion pieces, movie reviews and so on. That seems like a transitional phase, to me. The current bloggers’ term of ‘MSM’ (i.e. Main Stream Media) is equally a result of the newness of the situation – in a few years, a lot of bloggers will be mainstream and it will just be treated like another medium.

But blogging is just a medium, like TV or newspapers or books. What will be interesting is people finding new, different markets for words that would never be viable under the old model.

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Culture Me

Mutant poetry

Ever since I read Mutants, I’ve been mulling over the idea of writing a group of poems around the idea of mutants and mutation.

The human (and indeed animal) stories – poor old Charles Byrne, freak-shows, the Elephant Man, court dwarves, superheroes and so on – are interesting source material; the science is somewhat interesting and provides extra source material by its connection to natural selection, ontogeny, Chernobyl, teratogens; the general idea of mutation has all sorts of metaphorical possibilties; and the word is attention-grabbing.

One possibility would be a set of ‘mutant sonnets’. The baseline of an established form would allow the formal mutation of the poems to be made apparent. Alternatively, the language could be ‘mutated’ in other ways. And the theme doesn’t have to extend to formal/linguistic considerations at all.

Something to consider. Perhaps a trip to the Hunterian is in order.

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Me Other

WordPress upgrade

Well, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0 – despite the fact that they’re probably about to release 2.0.1 – and so far so good. Most (all?) of the changes are things which aren’t visible to you lot. It seems generally nicer to use, though the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t like Safari. *shrug*. The new Admin pages are a bit ugly. *shrug again*.

The main reason I upgraded was because you can now create categories on the fly as you write a post, although you can’t choose a parent catgory for it at the same time. And the post preview actually shows what it would look like on your blog, rather than just testing the formatting. I’ll have to take their word for it that the underlying code is improved.

EDIT: I’ve just trued tried the wysiwyg editor on Firefox. It does seem quite nice, I must admit.

Though it does that fucking annoying thing of automatically putting white space after a newline. Don’t these people write poetry?

EDIT again:

asdsad
sdasda
asdasdasd
sad

At least it looks like the old non-wysiwyg editor still works for single returns.

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Me

random observation

My mother smells of Turkish delight. I assume this is because she’s wearing a floral perfume, and not because she’s been smearing herself with confectionery.

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Culture Me Other

The Poetry Wiki, again

Julie, in the comments a couple of posts down the page, said:

Harry,

I’ve gotten emails from people who’ve checked out the wiki and think it’s a neat idea, though none of them are playing. Yet? I hope so.

I think one reason that The Poetry Wiki didn’t take off in its previous incarnation is that, psychologically, it’s quite intimidating. It’s not quite like anything you’d normally do with poetry, and it’s hard to know how to approach it or where to start. Are you rewriting the poem drastically? Tweaking it? Trying to respect the original intention? Bouncing off it in some other way? Cutting? Adding?

Julie’s idea of posting one of Spenser’s poems as a starting point gets rid of one psychological block, because you don’t have to worry about how the original writer will react.

I might post a similarly unthreatening piece to play with later, although the best thing to do would just be to dive in and edit.