intertext

Our Blogging Challenge has made the Camosun website: on the School of Arts and Science and the English pages.

Some encouraging words for writers by Neil Gaiman

Velvet Verbosity, who dropped by to comment on my 100 words post yesterday, has more 100 word prompts, and tips for writing word portraits.

Bloody CBC will keep on dredging up news clips of my last visit with bloody Diana. So jolly to be here with my darling Camsie.

Note to self: must remember not to refer to people in the north as Eskimos.

Still not King.

Walking to work this morning, and noticing the autumn leaves, thinking that one serious winter gale and they'll all be gone...

Worrying about friends. One I feel is drifting away, stretched almost to the limit. All I can do is keep making rather footling offers of help, of rides in the car... stupid, useless, politely refused. But what else can I do? I have nothing else to give except care and thoughts, but this friend is intensely private, self-sufficient.

Then, there are my old friends, who are now facing the death of a son. Unimaginable.

Marking. Dear student: if you think that uploading a file with the name "send that shit" is in any way appropriate, I have news for you. No love, ... me.

Taking the dogs for a walk this afternoon in almost-darkness. Realizing that winter is really almost here




nablopomo #2

I've created a monster. I was doing a photo-shoot for a Flickr group this morning and thought I'd let Tabs out on the deck because the light was better. I didn't think she'd jump off, because it's pretty high. After a short time, though, I decided not to risk it, because she was captivated with the birds in the garden and showed every sign of wanting to leap out into space despite the 20 foot drop. I did get one or two good shots, though, including this one.

The second world war is very real to me. My parents were both around 16 or 17 years old when it started, and I grew up hearing stories about it. How it was a blazingly beautiful day on the day that war was declared, and how neither of them would ever forget clustering around the radio to hear the announcement, and how the announcement was almost immediately followed by air raid sirens. My father was living in Teddington, one of London's suburbs, and my mum and grandmother were in a small village in Essex. My father was too young to join up, but was in the Home Guard, which was not quite as silly as it sounds when you talk about old men and boys wearing tin hats and carrying buckets of sand to help put out fires from incendiary bombs. My mum wanted to join up, but ended up working with the children evacuated from London. My dad became a wireless operator and remembered his Morse Code all the rest of his life.

My grandfathers fought in World War I. I have letters from my mum's dad to my granny from the front. They don't say much, because they couldn't, but help fill in a picture of a young man desperate to keep a stiff upper lip and present a brave face to his young, rather silly, wife. They hadn't been married long, and I think Granny was already pregnant with my Aunt Joan when he went away. I never met my mother's father; he died of a heart attack when my mum was sixteen, just before WW2 broke out.

My mum used to tell me about Armistice Days when she was a child. She said they were always terribly sad and solemn. The whole village where she grew up was affected - so many young men who didn't come home, or who came back, like my grandfather, shattered and changed. My grandfather was very quiet and reclusive, and couldn't bear loud noises; we realize now that he must have been shell-shocked. One of his letters has a poem about wearing poppies - it sounds as if there was some controversy about it, and I'd love to know more.

They are all dead now, except my Aunt Joan, but she is enclosed in the mind-prison of dementia. "Lest we forget" is very real, now, too. There can't be many WW2 veterans left, and I know there are only two, possibly only one, WW1 vets left in Canada. What shall we do when all those minds fall silent? All those witnesses to history, gone? It is up to us to keep their memories alive.

Lest We Forget.

lady_schrapnell wrote a post the other day about how so many books about Roman Britain are bad unless written by Rosemary Sutcliff. In a comment, I recommended Between the Forest and the Hills by Ann Lawrence, and was reminded not only how charming that book was, but how she's a subtle and often overlooked author (not to be confused with the Ann Lawrence who pops up if you Google the name - that one's the writer of bodice-ripper romances).

The lightest, and most amusing, of her books is Tom Ass or The Second Gift, which tells the fairy-tale story of young Tom, convinced he was going to Make Good, but too lazy to do anything to make it happen. A Fairy Godmother with a somewhat astringent sense of humour, gives him the magical gift that whatever he starts doing in the morning he will do until sunset. When he complains, after finding himself housekeeping all day long, he ends up in the form of a donkey. How he makes his fortune anyway, with the help of a sensible and enterprising young woman, makes a most enjoyable tale for middle readers.

Dealing with much more serious themes is Mr Robertson's Five Hundred Pounds in which a young apprentice loses the titular amount to a confidence trickster and then travels with his master to try to retrieve it. Set in Elizabethan Europe, it concerns itself much with the religious intolerance of the period; Mr Robertson and his apprentice travel to Spain, where the apprentice's drawing skills become useful in the service of the Queen. It raises many important questions and doesn't provide any easy answers, but does give insight to the complicated and complex loyalties of the period.

My all-time favourite, and one of my most reliable "comfort" novels, is The Half Brothers in which Ambra is the Duchess of a tiny kingdom adjacent to one ruled by four half-brothers. If one of them marries her, he will gain enough power to become the High King; which one will she choose? Each of them visits her; each presents his suit; each one offers her some new interest: music, learning, intrigue. And then there's her own delight in gardening... It's a lovely book, with a charming romance at its heart but full of thoroughly _nice_ characters. If you get a chance to read it, try it.

Ann Lawrence sadly died in 1987 at the age of only 45. In the great Heavenly Library that we'll all get to some day I'm sure there are many more of her unwritten books. But she has left a collection of subtle, humane and charming books that are well worth seeking out.

nablopomo 9

And I couldn't be more pleased!

Through a fluke of class schedule and the Remembrance Day holiday, I do not have to be at work again until Wednesday afternoon. No meeting today, for only the second time this term. I did help things along by cancelling my Monday night class, this because my other section of English 150 was losing Tuesday and I didn't want to get out of sync.

What bliss! I have marking to do, but it's not an extreme pile, and if I get it all done I'll be completely caught up.

Other plans: to get my hair cut and refresh my streaky bits this evening. Hopefully meet classics_cat for coffee or something tomorrow, when she visits Victoria. Return and exchange library books today. Grocery shopping. Maybe shopping for some new fall/winter clothes, because all mine seem about 20 years old (slight exaggeration, but you know what I mean). Play badminton again on Sunday. Work on processing and sorting some photos. Play with Tabitha. Go somewhere nice with Robinson. Oh, and yes, I'd like to bathe and thoroughly groom Robinson. Work on my pocowrimo writing project.

Somehow the days don't seem quite so empty!! (how can anyone be bored with life?)

nablopomo 7

(with a kitten in the room)

She keeps taking my pen and trying to fling it around the room

She is nibbling on the file folder where I am recording the grades

She jumps on my keyboard and risks either erasing my comments before I post them or making them unintelligible except to other kittens

She is just so damn cute that I keep stopping to play with her and am not getting any work done...


nablopomo 5

(nablopomo 3) A friend from UVic asked "would you like to go play badminton"? This is not something that I'd ever considered doing, really, but I'm always up for a lark, so I agreed. We went to a drop-in session yesterday afternoon and it was GREAT fun. The irony is that my friend had to stop after one game because her neck was hurting, and I enjoyed it so much that I stayed for three. I was very tired afterwards but I feel okay today. This may become a regular thing, who knows! (I still haven't looked in my hip owner's manual to see if badminton is on the approved list; indeed I have a sneaking suspicion that it may not be...) Strangely, my hips and shoulders are pretty much okay, but my back is sore.

I'm taking up the challenge.

I've also joined picowrimo, which is for those unable or unready to face the challenge of Nanowrimo but want to get in on some of the action. My goal is to finish a story I've been working on.