New book. New readers?

I have never let the obvious subject matter, stand in the way of my writing something.  I am a great believer in the thought that, if you are sincere in wanting to write then something (anything) will suggest itself as a subject worthy of words.

     This time, for this entry, I do actually have something to say.  (And as someone who cares about writing, I couldn’t help notice that I have overused the word “something” in the last couple of sentences.  Noticed?  Yes.  Going to do something (ha!) about it?  No.

     So, to The Matter of Import!  I have written (another) book.  The last effort was a ‘chapbook’, which is more of a glorified pamphlet, but my latest effusion is a real book.  You can tell it’s a real book because it has a spine, and it is wide enough for the logo of Praetorius Books to be printed thereupon.

     Called, “Caught in the Conceit” the book is the latest in the series of books and chapbooks that I have produced during Holy Week over the last ten years.

     I started writing the poems because (ten years ago) I hadn’t realised that the Sunday on which I was having my post-swim cup of tea was actually Palm Sunday.  There was nothing to differentiate it for any other Sunday.  No sense of special, no sense that this was the Sunday before Holy Week, leading up to the most important celebration in the Christian Church of Easter Sunday.  It was the sense of ordinariness, the complete lack of otherness, that struck me.  How far, I seemed to ask myself, had we travelled/progressed/declined so that what was once an important part of the year (let alone the Church Year) was so casually ignored.

     The first poem in the first edition of Poems in Holy Week (“Clocks of Dust”) did reference the lack of appreciation of the significance of the day, but always at the back of my mind was the thought that this was not just about Christianity but was rather about how attitudes to what was once thought of as an essential and defining part of the year had declined into ‘just part of the weekend’.

     Things change.  Even institutions and concepts that have seemed to be set in stone (thinking about it, that could be literally true) are coming loose or crumbling.  The only certainties we are left with are “Death and Taxes”!

     As an atheist I did not feel myself to be bound to an overtly Christian theme, even though the poems were written in what used to be an overtly Christian time of the year.  The subject matter ranged far and wide, but that was not a deliberate rejection on my part.  I might be atheist but, as I have said too often to people who don’t really care, but I am an Anglican atheist! 

     As someone who was brought up (by my mother) as a Christian and (by my father) as a Humanist, and as someone who regularly went to church for the best part of thirty years of his life, I am imbued with the ‘trapping’ of the Church: its liturgy, its ceremonies, its architecture, its music, its art, its theology, and most importantly, its words.  I have no intention of repudiating such elements that have played their part in making me the person I am today and I regard myself as interested but uninvolved in religion.

     The writing of those first eight (sometimes more) poems (I take Holy Week to extend from Palm Sunday to Easter Day) gave me real satisfaction, and I resolved to repeat the process the following year.  Which I did, and then carried on.  For example, as well as the poems that I have written for each day this year during Holy Week, I have also written a handful of haiku to accompany each day as well.  Each volume is slightly different from the one that went before.

     For the Anniversary Edition of Poems in Holy Week 2024, I decided to add a section which looked back on the almost 100 poems that I had written over the years, and to make a personal selection of poems and prose from the various introductions to the chapbooks I had written.

     So, that is what “Caught in the Conceit” is, this year’s poems and a selection from the last decade.

     The volume is illustrated in a variety of ways, ranging from the garabatos (that I regard as a form of graphic meditation) to use of AI to give some sort of visual form to my wordy instructions in the programs that I have used.  There are also treated photographs and a touch of graphic design!

     At the moment the book is with the printer, and I am enjoying that indefinable moment of something like lazy satisfaction, between the work having been completed and holding the finished volume in my hands.  Then the real work starts of getting information out about the book and getting people to buy it!

     It is possible to leave a message on this blog if you want to reserve a copy of Caught in the Conceit.  There are a limited number of copies, and they are available only from the author, myself.

     Book details: Full colour cover, 172 pages, including this year’s Poems in Holy Week, together with selection of poems from past editions, short prose and poetry extracts, garabatos, photographs, illustrations, and a brief introductory essay.  Each copy of Caught in the Conceit comes with its own unique bookmark!

     I should have the books printed and in my hands in the next week or so and then I will look forward to the next stage in the books development when eyes other than my own read through and pass judgement!

 

As a sort of freebie to encourage good thoughts about Caught in the Conceit, the following QR Code will take you to a copy of my last chapbook, "A sight too much?"  Use your mobile phone to scan and you should be taken to a site where you can download the file and read my last series of poems.

Enjoy!

Scan me!                    

 

Program progress!

Let joy be unconfined!

     The booklet making program has been successfully installed in my major computer.  I would like to say that I was fully in control of the download, and I knew what I was doing.  But that would be a lie.  I don’t really know what I was hoping for.  I think that I was hoping that there should be a sort of sympathetic osmosis, and that the program that I installed in my laptop would gravitate toward installing itself in my upstairs computer and that all things would be well.

     But that didn’t happen.  I even considered buying another copy of the program because it is so insanely useful for my purposes.  But there was always the nagging memory that in part of the documentation that I printed out for the program there was a mention of it being available for six other family members.  If that was true, then there must have been some way in which I could have downloaded it onto another of my computers.

     The problem as I saw it, was that the program interacted with my printer downstairs, and I wanted it to work with the computer upstairs.  (And, yes, doesn’t everyone have more than one printer?). But there was no clear indication of how to transfer the program from one machine to another.  I even downloaded the receipt from the Apple Store to see if there was some sort of code or registration number that I could use to extend the program to another machine.  But there was nothing useful that I could see.

     In a wistful attempt, more to show willing, than to show that I knew anything about how to install the program, I loaded the information about the program and, lo and behold, there in the top right corner was a little download symbol.  On which I clicked, and which did as it suggested it might do, and downloaded the program.  And it worked.

     I have worked with (those last two words are probably only an approximation of professionalism) computers for decades, as I am an enthusiastic early adopter of digital technology.  But I cannot say that I know much more about the actual workings of the programs that I use, in the sense of how they have been formulated, than I knew when I started, starry eyed, wondering about the possibilities of what could be achieved with such magical machines.

     In the very early days of personal computers, I did waste a great deal of time pretending that I was interested in programming the things before the eventual realization that I was a User (with a capital ‘U’) rather than a programmer.  I would have spent the time that I wasted on creating mindlessly simple programs that did nothing far better by paying more detailed attention to what a program could do.

     It is a truism, accepted by virtually everyone, that most Users use only a tiny percentage of the capabilities of any program.  Time would be more productively spent in learning what a program can do than trying to work out just how it does what it does.

     As I am working on a chapbook of poems at the moment, the importance of the program that is now working in both my computers is that I can complete the whole process of creating of the raw poetic material to the production of a completed chapbook ‘in-house’.

     And this new program is even supposed to indicate the optimal spot for the placement of the staples when I have folded it, and it is ready to be assembled!

     This is just one of the multitudes of ‘features’ that the program offers, in a list bewildering in its expansiveness.  I will, like most Users, find a simple path to get what I think I want, and then stick to it through thick and thin, not venturing into the rarefied regions of professionalism that the program holds out to the unwary buyers.

     I wonder if I can get a rebate for only using a tiny percentage of the possibilities.  A 50% return on investment might be encouraging.  But I know that I will count my blessings and be grateful that I will no longer be hurling vituperative invective at the printer as it fails, yet again, to do what I want it to do.

     For 22 euros, it is a small price to pay for peace of mind and a clean mouth!

Here we go, again!

 What’s the right time?  There’s never a ‘right’ time.

            That could be the questioning start of something very serious, but it’s only me, thinking about how to phrase the restart of my blog.  

I have been woefully remiss in my writing of something that used to take up a part of every day and satisfied that Puritan part of my writing mind that felt that I had to Do Something every day.

I have written books since the last entry in the Blog, but it doesn’t seem to compensate, in my mind, for the dutiful entry day-by-day that together formed an opinionated diary.

I sometimes dip back into the entries and am amazed by how much I have forgotten about so much that I obviously felt so passionately about at the time.  At times, I read the entries as if I were a stranger – and very enjoyable they are too, though I am not always in agreement with the person who wrote them!

 

One of the reasons that I have been hesitant in putting fingertip to computer key is my feeling that I ought to wait until I had something significant to say before I was able to justify starting up the blog again.  But I have concluded that is the wrong approach.  Or perhaps the word ‘wrong’ is itself wrong, and I have been using the concept of significance as a way of justifying my inaction.

I, more than most, should take my Family Wisdom to heart and recognize that “Anything is better than nothing!” and simply get on with it.

 

And it’s not as if nothing has happened in the intervening years, or however long it has been since I last wrote.  But the idea of ‘filling in’ the Lost Years is foreign to the impulse that started the Blog in the first instance.  It was to record my move from Cardiff to Catalonia and to note my impressions of the experience of moving from one country to another and to record the differences in day to day living in Catalonia as opposed to living in Cardiff.

I have now been living in Castelldefels for years, and it feel like home.  Certainly, a recent visit to London for a friend’s ‘significant’ birthday celebrations did not make me homesick, and the weather alone was enough to make me wish to be back by the sea!

So, this return is not necessarily to record quaint differences in living styles that mark the differences in Wales and Catalonia that I experience, but rather to provide me with a daily opportunity to indulge my inclination to pontificate and digress.

 

As a non sequitur to everything that has gone before I would like to indulge myself with a mini rant.

As well as being the only teacher I know who has used the OHP (Overhead Projector) throughout his teaching career (from the Training Year to his Retirement) I was also the manic exponent of the booklet approach to dealing with aspects of my subject.

The start of my teaching career pre-dated the use of computers in school and the use of personal computers, and the photocopier and the reproduction of teaching material was difficult, and we used Roneo machines and Stencil machines and all sorts of messy ways of getting our thoughts onto multiple pieces of paper.

The first plain paper copiers revolutionized the whole way of producing teaching material.  And I photocopied with a vengeance!  

Of course, in the early days, the format of a booklet had to be done in rough, each of the A5 pages printed separately and then counted to see how many pages were in the booklet, and then stuck onto the pages of a blank same-sized booklet so that all the pages were in the right order to be photocopied page by page, to make the final finished product.  Time intensive, but very satisfying when completed.

The computer made things much easier, and when I discovered that the printing program had a ‘booklet’ setting my delight was complete.  This setting took a booklet composed on the computer and sorted out the individual pages so that they were printed in the correct order.  All you had to do was collate and fold and staple and the job was done.

And that was true, right up until the time when the program didn’t work.  The instruction is there in the choices you get before you print, but it simply does not do the job.  And no one has been able to explain to me why that is.  At one time I had experts in Mac, Brother and Word all working at getting the program to work.  And they all failed and did not know why they were failing.

Usually, I have found a way to getting around the obstacles that the non-working program has put in my way, but, as time goes on, so the program becomes more and more skittish and even the work arounds that I have found which compensate for some its vagaries fail to work themselves.

So, I have bitten the bullet and bought a program specifically designed to work with all the programs that I use to print the damn things.  And I resent the fact that I have spent some twenty Euros to do something that used to be bundled with the printer program.

The bought program does work, but my next problem is finding out a way of getting my desktop computer to get the program as well as my laptop.  There must be a way of getting more than one of my machines to have the program, but I have yet to find a way to get my other computer to recognize that I have bought the program.  Of such concerns are paranoia made!