Old Monk’s Habits Die Hard

Today’s scheduled tale – Story 2039 “A Newsworthy Photograph” – shall appear out of sequence on February 6^th 2021, as I want to say some stuff for today’s posting!

Thing One – A Passing Shower

I am delighted to report that Iseult has reviewed my novel – A Passing Shower – and given it 4 out of 5 stars! Thank you Iseult! The review can be read HERE – and from there to Iseult’s many other book reviews.

I presume everyone’s mother at some stage – at least in Western European Civilization – created some coconut ice. It’s usually half pink and half white. Well, once upon a time there were 5 pieces of coconut ice and I got 4 of them! To want all 5 would have been greedy, and I would have got smacked by Mother, and 5 probably would have made me sick anyway. So I am thrilled to bits with getting 4 stars! If you haven’t read my novel then you don’t know what you’re missing out on. It can be accessed HERE for free.

All sorts of important (and intelligent) people have reviewed my novel apart from Iseult, such as Uma, Yvonne, the late Cynthia, the late Pauline, Lisa, Ian, Andrea, Bianca, Chris. The high percentage of reviewers who have since passed on could well be a hint to you to get cracking before lateness catches up!

I realize that the novel is post-modern and not to everyone’s taste. The narrator is unreliable – in fact she’s a total chaotic mess (try writing a narrator like that! – in fact try reading a narrator like that!) As I said in a comment to Iseult, I once sent the first 50 pages to an agent asking if he would be interested to which he kindly replied with something like, ‘’I think after the first 50 pages I’d get totally pissed off.” The choice is yours!

Thing Two – No More Can Fit Into the Evening

I had said to an editor (THE Editor of Editors – ahem – in fact there are two of them) that I would do something I’m no good at and write a review. Well, here we are although I don’t have any social media network connections to flay about in except for this!

The book is called No More Can Fit Into the Evening: An Anthology of Diverse Voices. This volume of 369 pages by 39 poets from all over is edited by Thomas Davis and Standing Feather for Four Windows Press based in Wisconsin.

There are a number of poets featured you would possibly know from the blogging world. There is Bruce Goodman (who appears far too often on my blog and has six poems), the late Cynthia Jobin (who has 8 poems), John Looker (who has 10 poems), Ethel Mortenson Davis (who has 11 poems), and Thomas Davis (who has 9 poems). Other poets within the volume probably frequent the blogs but I’m not that good at spotting mountain lions in long grass. Having a decent lot of poems from each writer is a brilliant way of getting the flavour of each poet. Rather than simply sip a single martini one gets to hog the whole bar.

My personal poetry-writing voyage is a little chequered. When I was a kid at school – around about aged 15 in 1965 – a “famous” (still famous in New Zealand although dead) poet – James K. Baxter came and spoke to us. He said “Practise writing poetic forms for twenty years and then write your poem.” I attacked poetic forms with a vengeance. And then a couple of years later I showed a poem to another “famous” poet (who shall remain nameless) who pronounced that the poem was a load of crap. I didn’t write another poem for fifty or so years, and then my blogging friend, Cynthia Jobin said “Why not?” So I started writing poems again, and again resorted often to traditional poetic forms.

I am not too good at always comprehending contemporary poetry – and as the title of this volume says, it is “An Anthology of Diverse Voices”. So what I am doing is taking a poem a day – in no particular order – and reading and pondering it each morning. That way I think I am learning to see what each poet is doing and also coming to some understanding of how some contemporary poetry works. It is rather rewarding! A bit like a monk doing half an hour’s meditation each morning.

So I am nowhere near finishing the volume and feel a bit rude recommending it before I’ve finished reading it. However, I can’t wait a year. I should really chat about some of the poems I have pondered, but won’t because you can do it yourself! The voices/styles/concepts/methods in this anthology are so varied and wonderful that I think it’s an ideal book to take a poem regularly and ponder. After all, of course, it’s not a novel! It is a meditation book of modern poetry – even for those who are not too much into poetry. I can really give it no better recommendation than that. As the poet Robin Chapman says in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1946 (p.102):

It’s the morning of the world
I want to tell you about…

Available at Amazon and all sorts of other places. Four Windows Press is HERE.

Finally, by inference, a story: As one of my students years ago said – he was the captain of the school’s top cricket team and a fairly solid sort of bloke – “Thanks for making us read Wuthering Heights. It was bloody good.”

1510: Savoury Muffins

Review 1: This muffin recipe is not my favourite. I made the muffins because the recipe was given five stars out of five. I left the sugar out because quite frankly there is no place for sugar in a savoury recipe. I usually detest garlic but I used it here because of the five stars. It destroyed any redeeming features the recipe might have had. I can still taste it. Yuk! I also omitted the mozzarella cheese. It’s not the type of thing the average household keeps in their fridge so naturally I couldn’t use it, but I replaced it with blue vein that was about to go off, so it was good to find a use for it. An elderly aunt had left the revolting stuff here when she visited last Christmas. All in all, a big disappointment.

Review 2: What a delightful recipe! I left out the flour because my son has an allergy. I also omitted the rosemary and the baking powder, but I added a well-beaten egg white to a packet of marsh mellows and baked it like a meringue. This muffin recipe is so light and airy.

Review 3: Your recipe called for two teaspoons of baking powder. I was out of baking powder at the time so I used baking soda instead and increased the amount to four tablespoons. Does the person who runs this recipe blog ever try the recipes before they are posted? This one would have failed the test. I might as well have had a fizzy drink. It’s pathetic. And to think the recipe has five stars.

Review 4: I began with your recipe, but this recipe website runs so many popup ads. I didn’t realize that another recipe altogether had “popped up” and I used that to make the things. Hubby loved them, although he did wonder why there were so many chicken bones in the muffins.

Review 5: Honestly, we should have been warned. My son came home from school and asked who had been vomiting. It was that Parmesan cheese in the muffins cooking in the oven. It flooded the house with its stench. The whole family refused to even take a nibble. I don’t blame them. The chickens loved them, although I noticed that one or two of them seem to have gone off the lay.

Review 6: Why are people so negative in their comments? When I was brought up my parents demanded respect and courtesy. These days anything goes. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see swearing used in some of the recipes these days. I had an uncle who swore like a trooper but he’s dead now. His wife, my aunt, has since remarried and lives in Anchorage. They have terrible winters in Alaska. I wouldn’t live there if you paid me, and nor would my daughter who is finishing off her degree at university.

1301. Don’t judge a book by its cover

Today’s story marks a departure in all directions at once. It is a book review; which is something never attempted by this blogger before. Secondly, the reviewer has still to read the book – but that’s not unusual. And finally, the book hasn’t been written yet.

It doesn’t have a title as such but I thoroughly recommend it. Here is a good reason not to judge a book by its cover. This epic trilogy is basically a whodunit. It is full of interesting suspects.

Philomena Gettysburg gets herself murdered. A whole string of people possibly done it. There’s the butler, Ned, who has cerebral palsy, but that wouldn’t stop him from shaking a fist at Philomena. There’s Myrtle the village transsexual, who has every reason to dislike the philandering Philomena. There’s Mervyn, the loner, who threatened not only to burn down the local church, but declared his abhorrence of everyone, including Philomena, who attended. Dyslexic Murray doesn’t know his right hand from his left, but Philomena possibly could’ve been stabbed by a knife in either. The list goes on.

If you don’t want a spoiler, stop reading. Who done it then? Here lies the author’s originality. After three volumes of spell-binding insinuations, the murderer is revealed. It was no one in the book. Isn’t that exciting? Who would have thought it? It was almost impossible to guess.

This then is an ideal book to take to the beach if you don’t want sand in your swimming trunks.

1077. What’s the story?

What’s the story? Well, the story is this: I found a book of stories. I thought, why be predictable? Why not do something I’ve never done before, and that is review a book! The book is available through Amazon, and although a review could be posted on Amazon, I thought if the net is cast on the other side of the boat it might catch a couple of fish hitherto uncatchable.

Wuthering Heights aside, there are very few books I would like to say I had written. One such book is Sarah Angleton’s Launching Sheep and Other Stories from the Intersection of History and Nonsense.

If you follow Sarah’s blog, you’ll know the quirkiness of it all. These 86 stories wallow in delightful oddities, and at the same time each expounds on almost eccentric historical points that you “never knew before”. Sarah also manages to include a whole range of true characters from her real life: her husband, her sons, her parents… and you feel almost “part of the family”! There’s enough to satisfy our fondness for wanting to know what’s going on in other people’s lives, and so we think they’re friends.

Each story is short. To me that’s a huge plus. I’m a very modern person, and therefore my concentration span is grievously limited. You can read ten stories in a line if you’re a literary glutton. You can snuggle up in bed and read just one – or maybe another one, and another… because they’re addictive. You can read one out aloud while your partner prepares dinner; it saves getting pre-dinner indigestion by having the television news on. You can read it on the beach (provided you don’t live in Kansas, silly).

Wonderful story titles make one want to read more, such as Why You Should Have Smarter Friends and a Fabulous Cupcake Recipe and Hey, Mom! Do you think this would blow up if I…? and The Dark Days of Pinball: How I Nearly Took a Sledgehammer to a Snowman.

One of my favourite stories is Just Please Don’t Tell My Husband in which the author makes pancakes while giving the history of pancake making and the famous Olney pancake race. Flipping fantastic!

This is a book I like. I recommend it to everyone and every library. It is published by Bright Button Press of St Louis and is available through Amazon (both real and virtual). It would be a terrific gift for any grown-up who likes to read. If I had discovered at school that history could be so interesting I would not have dropped it in order to take Latin.

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I can deal (at times) with all sorts of computer languages, but I can’t see how to re-blog on WordPress! Anyway, when one is all nervous and shaky and excited, how is it possible to calmly find a re-blog button? The truth of the matter is:

MY NOVEL HAS BEEN REVIEWED!!!! HERE!!!

The review is worth a read just to savour the wondrous writing skills of the reviewer: Uma Shankar. His blog is well-worth savouring – he writes stories, poems, reviews, and translates into English poetry from Hindi. It’s a delight to read a review composed with more aplomb than that being reviewed!!

So I’m posting this connection to his blog not only by way of thanks for the review, but to give others the opportunity to experience and enjoy his considerable literary skills!

Thank you, Uma.