Bent Objects – Terry Border

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I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned a funny little book I once bought for my housemate, and which I flicked through the other day with renewed amusement – it’s Bent Objects by Terry Border.  Border has his own blog here, and is rather ingenious – he takes everyday objects, often food, and uses wire etc. to make them seem animate.  He doesn’t actually animate them, but does give them life – through seemingly simple construction and brilliant placement.  I love him.  What reminded me of the book was the ereader/book debate, and this image:

 Here’s another of my favourites:

It’s a great silly book, and there are a few others in the series, I believe.  It’s not the right time of year to mention stocking fillers, but… oh well, any time of year is good for a laugh, isn’t it?


The World I Live In – Helen Keller

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I was trying to remember who told me about The World I Live In (1908) by Helen Keller, when I realised that none of you did.  This joins Yellow by Janni Visman and Alva & Irva by Edward Carey (both wonderful novels) in being a book I happened upon at work in the Bodleian, and decided to buy for myself.  And, like them, it turned out to be a good reading experience – although rather different.

I had heard of Helen Keller, of course, although I must confess to having thought her British rather than American.  For those who don’t know the name, Keller lived from 1880-1968 and at 19 months’ old had an illness which left her completely blind and deaf.  She spent seven years with barely any proper communication with others; she describes it as a period during which she was not alive – then, when Keller was seven, 20-year old Anne Sullivan became her teacher.  With Sullivan’s patient assistance, Keller used hand-spelling to communicate, and became rather more eloquent than most other young women.  She wrote The Story of My Life in 1903, which I have not read; the essays collected within The World I Live In were written during Keller’s twenties, and make for fascinating reading – and certainly not for some sort of novelty value, but because Keller is, in her own right, incredibly intelligent, something of a philosopher, and entirely an optimist.  Indeed, the NYRB Classics edition I have includes Optimism: an essay written in 1903, which includes this excerpt:

I, too, can work, and because I love to labour with my head and my hands, I am an optimist in spite of all.  I used to think I should be thwarted in my desire to do something useful. But I have found out that though the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless.  The gladdest labourer in the vineyard may be a cripple.  Even should the others outstrip him, yet the vineyard ripens in the sun each year, and the full clusters weigh into his hand.  Darwin could work only half an hour at a time; yet in many diligent half-hours he laid anew the foundations of philosophy.  I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.  It is my service to think how I can best fulfil the demands that each day makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot.
 When I say that Keller’s worth as an author is not merely as a novelty, I mean that she should not be patronised, nor her writing viewed as some sort of scientific experiment.  She is too good and perceptive a writer for that.  But, of course, Keller offers a different understanding and interaction with the world than most writers would.  The sections I found most fascinating were towards the beginning, where Keller writes about hands.  She divides this into three sections: ‘The Seeing Hand’ (how she uses touch as her primary sense); ‘The Hands of Others’ (how hands reveal character), and ‘The Hands of the Race’ (where the explores hands in history and culture.)  Her perspective is not entirely unique, I daresay, but I certainly haven’t encountered documented elsewhere, nor can I imagine it done more sensitively, or with such a good-humoured demeanour:

It is interesting to observe the differences in the hands of people.  They show all kinds of vitality, energy, stillness, and cordiality.  I never realised how living the hand is until I saw those chill plaster images in Mr. Hutton’s collection of casts.  The hand I know in life has the fullness of blood in its veins, and is elastic with spirit.
[…]
I read that a face is strong, gentle; that it is full of patience, of intellect; that it is fine, sweet, noble, beautiful.  Have I not the same right to use these words in describing what I feel as you have in describing what you see?  They express truly what I feel in the hand.  I am seldom conscious of physical qualities, and I do not remember whether the fingers of a hand are short or long, or the skin is moist or dry. […] Any description I might give would fail to make you acquainted with a friendly hand which my fingers have often folded about, and which my affection translates to my memory.

As I say, it is these early sections which I found most captivating; similarly, the essay on smell gave a wonderful insight.  I hope it is obvious that I intend no offence when I say it reminded me of Flush by Virginia Woolf, where the dog’s primary sense is smell, and the world is focalised through this perspective.  Keller does not feel that her experience of life is any less full than anybody else’s – the senses of touch, smell, and taste give her a vivid comprehension of the world and, what is more, a deep appreciation of it:

Between my experiences and the experiences of others there is no gulf of mute space which I may not bridge.  For I have endlessly varied, instructive contacts with all the world, with life, with the atmosphere whose radiant activity enfolds us all.  The thrilling energy of the all-encasing air is warm and rapturous.  Heat-waves and sound-waves play upon my face in infinite variety and combination, until I am able to surmise what must be the myriad sounds that my senseless ears have not heard.
I have to confess that the second broader section of The World I Live In left me cold.  In it, she describes – at length – her dreams, since it is often ‘assumed that my dreams should have peculiar interest for the man of science.’  Well, perhaps they do.  But I am allergic to people describing their dreams, it is utter anaethema to me (as my housemates now know!) and I skipped past this section.  If you have a greater tolerance for dream-descriptions than I do, perhaps it is just as interesting as the first section.
The final parts of the book were added from elsewhere, for the NYRB edition: the optimism essay, mentioned above, and ‘My Story’, written when she was 12, and quite astonishingly mature for that age – let alone for a girl who had only learnt language from the age of seven.
That is what astounds me most about Helen Keller’s book: that someone who came late to language should progress in it so quickly and maturely.  Regardless of the reasons why she could not speak, read, or listen, the fact that she had seven years without language, overcame this, and wrote so beautifully and intelligently  – well, it’s astonishing.  Keller is wise, sensitive, generous, and philosophically fascinating.  I’m grateful to NYRB for bringing The World I Live In back into print in 2003, and would recommend this to anybody interested in intelligent, lovely writing.  Here’s a wonderfully insightful paragraph from Keller to finish:

It is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara.  I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light, but who see nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books.  What a witless masquerade is this seeing!  It were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing.  They have the sunset, the morning skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their souls voyage through this enchanted world with a barren state.

Another book to get Stuck into:

Halfway to Venus by Sarah Anderton
If this were in a thesaurus it would be listed under ‘antonym’ rather than ‘synonym’ – Anderton had one arm amputated early in life, and Halfway to Venus is a very interesting book that combines memoir with an overview of the absence of hands in art, religion, literature, and history.  As such, it makes a fascinating comparison with Keller’s writing on the primacy of hands in the same.

Donkeys!

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I started writing a book review (1908 ticked off the list, if that’s any clue) when I realised I was far too tired.  So, instead, here’s a picture of a donkey!  I dragged my friend Dave to a local donkey sanctuary last Saturday – it’s the third time I’ve been.  After cats, donkeys are my favourite animals, and I could (and do) spend hours stroking them and informing them that they are handsome.

Maybe it’s no surprise that Eeyore is my favourite character in Winnie-the-Pooh?

But I shan’t just show you that gorgeous donkey.  I shall pre-empt my Weekend Miscellany and point you in the direction of two very brilliant blog reviews which have been posted lately.  Claire is just as enthusiastic as I am, maybe more, about The Element of Lavishness: Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Darlene writes a really beautiful, personal post about Nicola Beauman’s excellent book A Very Great Profession.

Hope you’re all well – tomorrow’s another late night, so might be a couple of days before I get to grips with reviewing the 1908 book.  If you fancy guessing, it’s non-fiction, and the author’s initials are HK…

Oh, hello again, Miss Hargreaves!

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I’ve been reading Mr. Allenby Loses The Way by Frank Baker, author of my much-loved Miss Hargreaves, and I’ve even been able to call it work – hopefully it’ll be useful for the chapter I’m writing at the moment.  It’s about a man who is given five wishes by a fairy… but nowhere near as twee as that sounds.  Anyway, this isn’t a review of the novel (not least because I’ve only read the first 50 pages) but something else entirely.  I was merrily reading along, when I came across this seemingly incidental piece of dialogue:

“All snatches of overheard conversation have something of interest in them.  I once listened to an elderly lady who travelled with me in the same carriage from Bath to Cornford, telling her neighbour about a creature called ‘Agatha.’  But who, or what, was Agatha?  I never discovered; I never wanted to discover.”
Does that mean anything to you?

Perhaps, even probably, not.  You haven’t read Miss Hargreaves six times; you don’t love its every word with the passion that I do.  But maybe you do remember that it was set in Cornford; that Miss Hargreaves arrived on a train from Bath; that Norman made up Agatha and was told she was “sinking”, without ever knowing what sort of animal/person Agatha was…

Sorry if that was gibberish for those of you who haven’t read Miss Hargreaves (if you haven’t, I’ll want to know a VERY good reason why you haven’t).  But I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see her mentioned in this novel, published six years after Miss Hargreaves.  It’s my favourite novel, and she is my favourite of all characters – any small sign that she broke out of the bounds of her book delights me.  It was so unexpected, and a treat for those with keen eyes and a good memory.  Or, y’know, a borderline obsession with Miss H.

Have you ever come across this?  A character slipping outside their book and popping up in another?  Not in a series, that’s no surprise, but a brief waft past, like this – a little gift from the author to the observant reader.  Hmm?

Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy

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I wasn’t intending to join in Australian Literature Month, because I didn’t have any unread Australian novels, nor did any of the suggested titles fill me with longing.  I’m trying to be sensible with money this academic year, since I’m no longer funded, and (believe it or not) I’m even being more circumspect when it comes to book purchases!  (Keep that in your mind when you read the following…)

I bought Maestro (1989) by Peter Goldsworthy because I liked the colour of the spine.  Ok, that’s not quite true – it was the minty-turquoisey colour which made me take it off the shelf; when I discovered that it was Australian, and sounded interesting, I decided it was worth £2 of my money.  I’m glad I did – not just because I get to join in with Kim et al, but because it was rather good.

Although it’s Australian – written by an Australian, set in 1967 Darwin, Australia (the location of choice for characters leaving Neighbours, incidentally, if they’re not going to London) – much of the impetus is tied to Europe.  Eduard Keller is a Viennese refugee who teaches piano to fifteen year old Paul Crabbe (already an experienced pianist) whose family have recently moved from South Australia to the dry heat of Darwin.  Except Keller doesn’t teach piano in any traditional sense – he forbids Paul to use the piano for the first few weeks, instead instructing him in the importance of each individual finger…

Keller waggled a forefinger in front of my nose.  It was our second lesson?  Our third?

“This finger is selfish.  Greedy.  A… a delinquent.  He will steal from his four friends, cheat, lie.”

He sheathed the forefinger in his closed fist as if it were the fleshy blade of a Swiss army knife and released the middle finger.

“Mr. goody-goody,” he said, banging the finger down on middle C repeatedly.  “Teacher’s pet.  Does what he is told.  Our best student.”

Last came the ring finger.

“Likes to follow his best friend,” he told me.  “Likes to… lean on him sometimes.”

He lifted his elbows upwards and outwards.

“Those are the pupils.  This is the teacher.  The elbow…”
I have an ambivalent relationship with novels about music.  I enjoyed The Well-Tempered Clavier by William Coles (although I was glad that Maestro didn’t follow it down the Notes on a Scandal-esque path, not least because of the sixty year gap between Keller and Paul, but also because it’s not a very original course to take.)  I loved The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart, which is non-fiction.  But novels leave me cold when they rely upon the ethos that music is the highest of all forms.  I played the piano from the age of seven onwards, and although I later became friends with my piano teacher (the lady who first told me of Miss Hargreaves) and eventually grew to like playing the piano, for many years I passionately hated it.  The best feeling in the world (and my brother agrees with me) was when you rang the doorbell for a piano lesson… and the teacher didn’t answer!  The worst feeling was when you thought the piano teacher wasn’t going to answer, and then, after a long gap… she did.  So, anyway, this has given me an odd relationship with stories about learning instruments, and my dislike of elitism comes into play with musical maestros.

I’m sure it’s possible to be a musical expert without being arrogant and rude, of course, but Keller is not one of these.  He is one of the most rude, supercilious characters I’ve ever encountered – but he is battling his own demons, and the love and respect Paul feels towards Keller are contagious.  Even so, I found it arrogant rather than inspiring when he said things like this:

“Perhaps you could play one of the exam pieces, Paul,” my father suggested.  “A private concert for the three of us.”

“The Brahms?”

“The Beethoven,” Keller injected, “might be preferable.”

I played Beethoven that night as well as I had ever played, and turned afterwards, smiling, ready for praise.

“Beautiful,” my mother breathed.  “Don’t you agree, Herr Keller?”

“An excellent forgery,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Technically perfect,” he said.

He drained his wineglass before continuing.  It was to be his longest monologue of the evening:

“At such moments I always remember a forged painting I once saw.  Each violent brushstroke was reproduced was painstaking, non-violent care.  The forgery must have taken many many times longer than the original to complete.  It was technically better than the original.”

He rose from his chair and walked a little unsteadily towards the door: “And yet something was missing.  Not much – but something.“

At the door he paused, and turned: “And that small something may as well have been everything.”

I find music snobbery intensely irritating – no, that’s not quite true, I feel desperately sorry for people who are only content with perfection, in any field.  Doubtless it is a form of discernment, but if your discernment reaches the level that you castigate and despise almost everything you encounter, you’re setting yourself up for a miserable time.

But Keller is miserable for other reasons… it gradually becomes clear that he was more involved in the Second World War than he originally admits.  I shan’t give the game away, although it isn’t a big twist and doesn’t come as much of a surprise to the reader.  If you’re rolling your eyes at yet another long-shadow-of-war novel, then don’t.  It’s only one element in the interesting construction of the interaction between Keller and Paul – which is the really interesting central focus of Maestro.  Their relationship isn’t romantic or fatherly or even particularly close.  Keller resists any sort of emotional connection, and Paul is far too full of youthful insensitivity to do anything but blunder into conversations in which he is too immature to participate, even if Keller were willing.  But what Goldsworthy builds between Keller and the Crabbes is still somehow beautiful.  The connection between people who never open up to one another; the legacies left behind a relationship which could not even be called a friendship.  Goldsworthy has done this beautifully.

One of the things I’m realising, doing A Century of Books and stepping further outside the interwar period, where I am happiest, is the way a decade colours each novel, even without the author intentionally following the zeitgeist.  A bit like people who claim not to follow fashion, until they look back at old photographs and see how much they were unwittingly influenced by the style of the day.  So Maestro is filtered through the lens of the 1980s, whether Goldsworthy likes it or not.  I certainly wouldn’t read that people ‘made slow, muffled, reckless love’ in the pages of an Elizabeth von Arnim novel, for instance.  Indeed, the whole coming-of-age storyline (although much less irritating in Maestro than it is in some book) is very 1980s, and rather incidental to the main thrust of the novel – but perhaps it’s main purpose is to demonstrate that Keller does not completely occupy Paul’s thoughts.  He is not obsessed by Keller, but their relationship will alter a great deal in his life.

Maestro is a difficult little book to write about – it is wise, original, and rather beautiful.  I would love it a great deal more if someone could translate it into the sensitivities of the 1940s, say, but of course that cannot be done.  It reminded me a bit of Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker and Virginia by Jens Christian Grondahl, but I’m hard-pressed to say quite why – the influence of genius, for the former?  The lifelong effects of a brief connection, for the latter?  Perhaps, truth be told, Maestro isn’t quite like anything else I’ve read before, but does bring together themes and traits I’ve seen in many other authors, writing both before and after Goldsworthy.

As for whether it’s a representative Australian novel – well, of course there’s no such thing.  Goldsworthy conveyed the heat of Darwin very well, but aside from that… I’ll have to see which other novels are picked up across the blogs during what’s left of Australian Literature Month.  Thanks, Kim, for indirectly encouraging to find, buy, and enjoy a novel I would otherwise have left in the shop.  And thanks for helping fill 1989 in A Century of Books!

A quick plea…

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Does anyone have access to US magazine Time online archives?  There’s an article I want to read – the July 28th 1930 review of The Love Child, to be precise – but I can only see the first two lines without paying a big subscription.  Chuh.  So if anyone had access to it and wanted to send me the review in full, you’d have my eternal appreciation…

(Sorry there was no Weekend Miscellany… long day yesterday.  Get ready for Australian Literature Month AND Henry Green Reading Week colliding next week.  I’ve read one for the former, and started one for the latter…)

Adrian Mole

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It’s the 30th anniversary of Adrian Mole today – can you believe it? – and the good people of Penguin offered me their new editions of all the books.  Knowing that my brother Colin is an Adrian fan, I thought I’d suggest him as a more suited recipient.  They sent off a set, and he wrote me a fab review.  Whenever I feature other people’s posts I want to say COMMENT, COMMENT, MAKE THEM FEEL WELCOME!  The new comment system may scupper this, but if it does, go and say hello on Facebook(!)  Over to you, Col.

It is 30 years since Adrian Mole leapt into the national consciousness from the pen of Sue Townsend, and to mark the occasion Penguin are re-issuing all eight volumes of the Mole saga.

Eight volumes? Really? The first surprise to many readers who loved Adrian in the seminal The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾ – even the title is funny – and perhaps Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, which was televised for the BBC, is that Townsend has been quite so prolific in writing about her best-loved creation. If for nothing else, then, this re-issue is a fine reminder that there was life after high school for the poet of Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Adrian Mole is, to my mind, one of the finest comic creations in English literature. The diary format is perfect for exposing his lack of self-awareness, utterly delusional nature and inability to understand the world around him (a trick played many years before in The Diary of a Nobody) but, like many of the finest comic characters, we cannot help but empathise with him and hope that maybe, this time, he’ll get it right. Maybe Pandora, the woman Adrian is pathetically in love with for the majority of the series, will return his affections; maybe one of his literary efforts (Longing for Wolverhampton; Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland; Plague!) will get the respect it so richly doesn’t deserve; maybe his parents will cease to be a constant source of embarrassment and anguish. But then again, of course, maybe not.

As a teenager, Adrian Mole has a few themes that he returns to with unabated zeal: how much he loves Pandora (“Pandora’s father is a milkman! I have gone off her a bit”); his manifold sufferings (“I will be a latchkey kid, whatever that is”) and, unfailingly, the fact that he is an intellectual (“I have written to Malcolm Muggeridge, c/o the BBC, asking him what to do about being an intellectual”; “I am an intellectual but at the same time I am not very clever”). Then, of course, there is the Norwegian Leather Industry, knowledge of which – based on his score in a single school test – Adrian carries around with him like Bertie Wooster with his Scripture Knowledge prize. Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction begins with a reference to meeting Tony Blair at a 1999 conference on the topic.

When the series begins, Mole is – of course – 13 ¾, and by the final volume (so far; Townsend’s only comment about the future is her hope that Adrian go “onward, ever onward”) he is 40 and a grandfather, and it is a great tribute to the series that the child is still recognisable in the adult. From the first few pages of book one you could tell that he is the kind of person who would engage in a lengthy correspondence about the existence of WMDs, simply in order to get a refund on his travel expenses. Some of his traits are diminished a little by time: Mole no longer has such a heightened view of his importance in the world, and is not so blithely unaware of his surroundings as he once was. This is all to the good; a teenager whose reaction to Animal Farm is to ponder becoming a vet (later amended to boycotting bacon) is amusing; a grown man – and father to children from various different mothers – showing such vapidity would just be sad. Townsend is obviously fond of her hero, and he is not designed to be simply a figure of fun; it is genuinely touching when, in Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, ‘The Top Secret Diary of Glenn Mole (13)’ begins “When I grow up I want to be my dad.”

As well as being an excellent character study over thirty years, the Adrian Mole series always has its finger on the political pulse, starting under Margaret Thatcher (“I was looking at our world map. I couldn’t find the Falkland Islands anywhere. My mother found them; they were hidden under a crumb of fruitcake”) and self-evident in The Weapons of Mass Destruction. Just the unlikely fact that Adrian’s only published work (actually ghost-written by his mother) is ‘Offally Good! – The Book!’, the companion to his TV cooking show, is an indictment of celebrity culture in Tony Blair’s Britain. Of course, the most overtly political entry in the Mole canon is The Secret Diary of Margaret Hilda Roberts Aged 14 ¼, which forms part of True Confessions of Adrian Mole.

As the series develops, so do the cast of characters in Adrian’s life (helpfully detailed in the back of these editions). Pandora becomes a prominent MP; school bully Barry Kent becomes a successful poet; Adrian’s best friend Nigel becomes a blind, gay, Buddhist van driver (though not necessarily all at the same time). Townsend also introduces a host of new characters, including the excellently-drawn Flowers family, one of whom becomes Mrs Daisy Mole in Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction. It is at this point that Adrian Mole lays down his pen, saying that “Happy people don’t keep a diary”, only to pick it up again in Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the title taken from the fact that Adrian has problems with his prostate and, true to his nature, is chiefly annoyed by people pronouncing the word with an extraneous ‘r’) to record the fact that “it is two months and nineteen days since I made love to my wife, Daisy”. In the Q&A accompanying this new edition of the books, Townsend says that her favourite book in the series is The Prostrate Years, because she herself had suffered serious health problems and wanted to tackle the subject in a comic manner. I applaud the sentiment, but I must confess that I wish she hadn’t gone down the path she chose; while Adrian’s pursuit of Pandora was always amusing for its hopelessness, his relationship with Daisy appeared to be the true romance of the series, and its collapse was unfortunate. I would rank the first two and the penultimate books as the highlights of the series, but the central character is so strong that I re-read them all with enjoyment.

So that’s the books themselves: what about this re-issue in particular? I feel sorry for Roderick Mills, who was tasked with designing the new covers, because the original cover (the bathroom mirror with a shaving kit and Noddy toothbrush, beautifully demonstrating the dichotomies inherent within a youth becoming a man) is rightly iconic – something that is tacitly admitted by including it on the inside cover of the new Secret Diary. The designer opted for pastel shades for each book in the series, which strikes me as a little odd given that I would normally associate the colour scheme (though not the overall effect, I admit) with chick-lit. Perhaps it is an attempt to emphasise that Adrian Mole can be read and enjoyed by men and women of all ages, and is not the preserve of teenage boys, even given that David Walliams’ foreword to The Secret Diary (in which he finds space to name-check his own book for children) says “boys who were proud to say they had never read a book in their life read this one”.

The new editions also include a Q&A with Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole’s CV and literary CV, the Mole story, a roll call of principal characters and the first chapter of Townsend’s new book (this last I must confess I haven’t read, but having read The Queen and I and Rebuilding Coventry, I can assert that her skill with her pen isn’t limited to residents of Leicestershire). This is a generous set of add-ons, many of which help to give a sense of continuity to the chronicles of Adrian’s surprisingly eventful life and the array of characters who enter and exit it.

When asked if she regards Adrian Mole as a millstone round her neck, Townsend was emphatic in her response: “authors who complain about the success of their most well-known characters are fools”. If she chooses to continue his run, I won’t be complaining either.

Oh frabjous day!

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Over my blogging years (nearly five!) I have spent hours trying to add features that Blogger didn’t offer.  It took me an age to add a third column (now available as standard); I spent a long time adding a search box (now available as standard), but the area I’ve spent the most fruitless hours is in trying to add inline comments.  And it never worked properly.

Until now!  Blogger have FINALLY done something about it, after years and years of blogspot-users begging them to do so.  I spotted on Lyn’s blog that she could reply to comments, and she kindly pointed out where I could do it.  Hurrah!  Hurray!  (The page wouldn’t load, naturally, but I looked at a cached version through Google.)

Now, of course, this is Blogger… so it might not work.  (If it doesn’t, tell me via Facebook or email…)  I had to move comments down to be imbedded, rather than a separate window, which has caused all manner of drama before… but this time I’m hoping it’ll be fine.  No longer will I have to reply to your lovely comments in lengthy boxes far below the initial comment.

Thanks, Blogger.  All is forgiven.

Firefox… Schmirefox, more like.

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I don’t know about you, but my Firefox is being awful.  It crashes every five minutes, which would be really bad in a car, and is also pretty bad (though not as bad) in a whatever-you-call-internetty-things.  Umm… wow.  Sometimes I pretend to be more Luddite than I am, in the curious belief that it makes me seem endearing, but right now I can’t remember what you call IE, Firefox, etc.  Hmm.  This must be how computer geeks feel when they can’t remember if it’s ‘Jane Austen’ or ‘Jane Austin’.  That’s the sort of question which keeps Bill Gates awake at night, I imagine.

So, anyway, I’ve switched to Google Chrome, and I’m desperately trying to remember all the passwords that Firefox had kindly (and probably unsecurely) been memorising for me.  Nymeth helped me over Twitter to put in a bookmarks toolbar and, in lieu of anything else bookish to say tonight, I thought I’d show you a screenshot of my bookmarks.  You might well have to enlarge it somehow…  If your blog isn’t there, it’s not because I don’t love you… it’s because I love these guys more (heehee!)

Actually, I’ve already added someone since I took this screenshot.  So… it’s probably you ;)

Oh, I did have one book-related thing to say.  I’ve got hold of an Australian novel!  I’ll be joining in Australian Literature Month!  Are you?