Most religious groups have a winter festival, and I wish all my readers joy in whatever their’s is. If you’re not religious or don’t have a festival coming up, I still wish you a happy winter-time.
The whole world gets a New Year in a few days. I hope your celebrations go well and that 2015 is all you want it to be.
I probably won’t have time to blog between now and January, but I will make time to read your posts.
Perhaps we could learn something about ageing from the trees: they do it gracefully and don’t make a fuss.
I’m grateful to Leaf and Twig for posting this lovely photo and poem.
I’m not a great fan of stamps and would never consider collecting them, but I found this description fascinating. I never realised that there were special stamps for Antarctica. The pictures are very evocative – in some ways more so than straightforward photos.
Delivery by Design: Stamps in Antarctica, opening at The Polar Museum on Thursday 12 June 2014, will explore the history of stamps used in the British Antarctic Territory, Antarctica. A recent gift of stamps, printing proofs and original artworks made by Crown Agents Limited, with the assistance of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to the Scott Polar Research Institute will accompany its already exemplary collection of stamps from the Polar Regions.
On display will be stamps, artworks and printing proofs that highlight Antarctic flora and fauna, depicting unique images of penguins and huskies; others commemorate many of the British expeditions that have undertaken Antarctic exploration to further science, detailing ships ploughing through ice and planes flying over frozen sea.
The British Antarctic Territory, the region where the exhibition’s stamps are from, includes all the lands and islands in a wedge extending from the South Pole to 60° S latitude…
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Congratulations to Eimear McBride for winning the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction. It’s nice to read about someone pushing the envelope of the novel out and being rewarded for their courage.
Also announced yesterday was the lower-key but still important HWA Debut Crown shortlist. The Historical Writers Association has decided that they too should have a range of awards similar to those given by the Crime Writers Association (CWA).
It’s lovely to read about these successes. But I still wonder about those who don’t win them. Does the existence of a prizewinner affect other people’s sales? 
As a reader I also wonder if all the hype and publicity skews what I read. While wandering round a bookshop I’m likely to pick up books I’ve heard of, even if I can’t recall why they seem familiar.
Does winning a prize affect a book’s long term sales? Or does it fade from popularity as fast as it would without the prize?
We seem to live in a world of awards and competitions. Is this a good thing? bad? totally irrelevant?
I don’t know much about the book scene in Australia, so I’m grateful to Booktopia for this information.
I recently discovered that our language is full of obsolete words, threatened with removal from dictionaries and other places where words gather to be noticed.
Aren’t they still needed? Can one write a historical novel without frigorific or charabanc? And how about the poets? Michael Symmons Roberts recently won the Costa Prize with a book called Drysalter, another threatened word.
I wonder sometimes how this rationalisation is managed. Perhaps the dictionary editors call the words into the office, one at a time, and tell them quietly, with overtones of regret, that they are no longer needed. Redundant! Having experienced the shock of the ‘we don’t need you’ moment, I can sympathise with those lackadaying words.
What sort of payout do they get? I’m not sure what the current requirement is, but if it’s a week’s pay for every year of work, then after a few centuries jargogle is going to get a good whack.
Does he have a leaving do? Or does he rush home and invest his money becoming self-employed, with an ad in Yellow Pages? Later he’ll send out flyers to historians and poets offering his services as a scene setter or a new rhyme. He’ll mention his hourly rate:
Anent this bargain price; ’tis discounted if you twattle me on Twitter.
Cover art from Goodreads.
The BBC website today has an article about the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Among the numerous rich and/or famous people buried there is John Keats, who died at twenty-five.
It is so sad that he didn’t live long enough to know how popular his work would become and how his genius would be appreciated. He felt he was leaving no mark on the world.
Never one to deny what he saw as truth, he asked for this epitaph on his gravestone:
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Reading that made me wonder how we could describe those of us who write electronically. ‘On water’ doesn’t quite cover it; ‘on ether’ is a bit fanciful.
I do sometimes wonder what will happen to the billions of words written daily in websites, blogs, social media and others. Will they withstand any test of time? Does material stored on a hard disk slowly fade, first to a stuttery whisper and finally to a white hiss? Will the future be saddled with inaccessible diaries and letters on unreadable DVDs? If so how will future biographers manage?
Now that some of the material has taken to radio waves I picture it floating around the world and out into space to eventually saturate the galaxy with the thoughts of people who will be millenia dead by that time. Will future historians leap into faster-than-light spaceships and pursue the words of the famous across interstellar emptiness?
Keats’ works have proved durable, but part of that is that they were committed to paper.
Public domain picture from Wikicommons.
An interesting literary festival in a lovely setting. I’d never heard of either the village or the festival before stumbling onto this blog. It just shows what can be found if one looks around.
The writer in residence idea pops up in very varied places. I’ve just come across one for ‘residence’ on a train.
The US rail company Amtrak has begun a writers-in-residency programme, offering free or low cost trips for those wanting to use the unique environment created by a train journey to help get inspired. (Quoted from BBC report.)
For a full report, including a discussion from crime writer, Julia Crouch, of how a similar residential went, go to the BBC website or Julia’s site.
Although I often travel by train and enjoyed it, I’ve never tried writing on one. After listening to Ms Crouch’s description of her experience, I might just try it.
e a m harris 
Post-Christmas thoughts
Today is twelfth night (at least where I come from) and as I was taking down decorations and sorting cards, I was stopped by a lovely picture of poinsettias.
It occurred to me that the holly and the ivy (and I have several nice pics of them this year) are very well established with poems and carols to call their own, but what about poinsettia? These days it’s found its way into Christmas big time – on cards and wrapping paper; for sale in florists and supermarkets; but it doesn’t crop up in the choirboys’ repertoire.
A bit of googling found me a number of websites with short poems and one with a charming legend as well. One surprise was from Queensland, Oz which shows that poinsettias aren’t just for December (although what they’re doing in Australia in June I’m not sure).
None of these poems are as well-known as the holly and ivy ones and, as far as I know, none has been set to music, but at least the flower’s contribution to our Christmas iconography has been recognised in print.
I decided to add my own two pence worth to the recognition.
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