Have you ever written a review of a work of Po? Then you’ve got to take a look at Dr Fulminare’s Irregular Features. Go to Things to Make and Do, Vitally Urgent: The Game of Blurb, and below THAT, you can write your review by magnet. This is different, fun, clever, intelligent. Yeay! I recommend Top Trumps too. There is an interview with a strange woman called Helena
Nelson. She sounds a bit nippy to me.
I have been blurbing myself recently. It is so difficult to write something that is true, memorable and doesn’t sound inane. I wish I had had access to Dr Fulminare. No, I don’t. I might not have been able to do it at all.
Busy week. Four publications are currently being assembled into boxes at Dolphin Press, which means a mania of posting is about to begin. Yesterday, I was parcelling review copies of the before-Christmas publications hither and thither. And more Treasure Grounds to Woodlands Farm. The pamphlet has been finding Reader A. It has, it has! It has been selling at farmer’s markets, no less. A bag of sprouts, a big bunch of carrots, four lamb chops and one of those poetry thingies, please hen.
Tonight is Rob Mackenzie’s valentine’s event, love poems inspired by the Song of Songs (or one verse of it). It’s from 7.45-9.45pm at the GRV, Guthrie Street, Edinburgh. ‘Special touches’ are promised. Hmmm. Lots of poets reading a little love byte. I am one of them. I must remember to find the poem (and the verse).
I’ve been fulminating (like Dr F) this week about my Adobe applications which have started to play up. All of them. Periodically they open up, then immediately shut down again. I have to restart the computer to get them to behave. Pursuing this matter (interesting error messages appear from time to time), I see I am not alone. I am depressingly not alone. In fact, I am comparatively lucky because in my case (so far) the applications will run after a restart. So far I have tried various Adobe suggestions to fix this. None has made any difference (this doesn’t surprise me after reading the bulletin board exchanges), and I am not clever enough or confident enough to go to some of the lengths that other users have gone. When it comes to matters of registry, I bow out. The awful thing about this is the TIME it takes up when you’re trying to do something else. Like create an invitation to a HappenStance birthday party.
Yes! There is going to be something to mark the five year arrival. It will be at the Scottish Poetry Library on Saturday 12th June, 3.00 pm. Put it in your diary. Come if you can. I think Robin Vaughan-Williams may do a world premiere of the whole of The Manager (bits of it have been seen here and there before). We’ll see. But there’ll be lots of stuff happening, lots of poets poetting, and a reduced-Shakespeare-type overview of the publications so far (about 60 by June). Less of a launch and more of an event, at which things will be launched (after lunch).
Sphinx 12 is nearly done. Doug Savage is doing an interview with me in cartoons. They are nearly finished. Nearly nearly. It will be the longest and most expensive issue of the lot. A collector’s item. Who are these collectors? Where do they PUT their collections? In this house, we keep thinking the ceiling of the spare bedroom might collapse because not only are there two walls of books, there are dozens of boxes of poetry pamphlets . . .