Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

The launch of four pamphlets and the seasonal merriment last Saturday went beautifully. There was a really lovely atmosphere, especially with Edinburgh bathed in frosty chill outside. The Mai Thai restaurant did us proud – -and I think it was the most packed launch we have ever had. All four poets did masterful readings, and there were poet pop-ups in between.

It was fun and it was varied and it was a great audience. Now I am so tired….

But on Monday it was the launch of Hamish Whyte’s new Shoestring book. Oh bugger, the name of this very nice volume temporarily escapes me, but I will come back and edit it in later. He read from it beautifully.

This time the launch was in the Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh. I confess this is my first visit to that august venue, and the Museum wasn’t even open. It’s at the top of the Mound. As you come out you see the Christmas lights in the trees, and down on Princes Street, the Christmas carousels and the ferris wheel. After the launch, Eleanor Livingstone and I walked with John Lucas (Shoestring Publisher) through the Christmas market and over towards Charlotte Square…. It was very cold and glittery and, in retrospect, slightly magical.

Oh bother! After writing a whole set of paragraphs in the HappenStance Story Chapter 3 about the pain of errors and having to learn to live with it, there was a bebo, I mean booboo, in the first line of my verse Christmas card. How many times have I read that card? How many weeks did the prototype sit in the dining room table? I don’t think I would ever have seen it said ‘Bards of Bards’ instead of ‘Bard of Bards’ if someone hadn’t written and pointed out the ‘clunker’.

 

It reminds me how one day I found a mistake in a poem that had been to and fro to magazines, printed in a couple of places — and nobody, including me, had noticed something dead obvious. You read what you know is supposed to be there, especially when you were the person who wrote it.

There is an error in my poem ‘Falling in Love’ — I carried it through issue one of Unsuitable Poems, through the revised edition two years later as well.

It’s on the postcard of the poem.

The same error was in the same poem in an Aldeburgh Festival poster this autumn.

It persisted into in the recent Scottish Love Poems anthology.

It’s not a bad error, I suppose. It’s a capitalisation thing: following a colon at the end of a line, there’s a capital T at the front of ‘They’ll write on our headstone’. It should, of course, be lower case, because that’s the pattern for the rest of the poem. It causes me a little twinge every time I see it.

Oh well. It represents just how blind and intelligent person can be about her own scribblings. So I’m pointing it out for the record. Nobody is to be trusted, but most of all not yourself.

I expect it’s observations like this that win blog competitions..

No doubt about it, this blog has received a resounding ‘not noticed you exist’ reaction.

I have mixed feelings about these things. I was at an SQA event today in my other existence (Scottish Qualifications Authority). I teach what the Scotttish nation calls ‘core skill communication’ (among other things) and recently the documents that define what has to be taught under this remarkable nomenclature were revised. Except they didn’t use the word ‘revised’. Instead, the trendy term is ‘refreshed’ (I know: painful).

Hm. Thing is, in the attempt for educators to be modern, one of the writing genres that increasingly gets a reference is ‘blogs’. As though they are some kind of respectable modern way for the young to communicate. Only I am 55 and actually I don’t know any young bloggers, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t be able to comprehend the version of English they communicate in, if it’s anything like the Bebo messages exchanged by the young people I teach. (Yes, I am on Bebo too, but don’t hold it against me).

This whole internet business, this whole blogging business — I think it might be just another way of clothing the sort of human communication that has always manifested itself here and there. Having said which, it is hard to imagine why somebody writes something like this without a specific reader in mind. Where ARE YOU specific reader?

I’m midway through the maniacal Chapter 3 post-out, picked it up from the printer yesterday. The number of subscribers creeps up all the time, even with one or two dropping out. Last night, I had just started doing the labels for the envelopes when the computer stopped talking to the printer. This happens from time to time. However, usually I can sort it out quickly.

Not so last night. At one point I even phoned the help people, but they went home before they answered. In the end I unplugged all the connections for a few minutes and reconnected the printer cable to a different port. Now it works again. It took about an hour and a half and that meant dinner was at half past nine AGAIN.

Off to put more of them in envelopes now. The various reminder slips and little notes are on beautifully coloured paper because Liz and Robert (www.dophinpress.co.uk) gave me a box of goodies. I love paper.

I can never quite believe how long this takes… Of one thing I am fairly certain: my Christmas card will be the first that most people get. They have to go into this mailshot because otherwise it would be another forty quid’s worth of stamps, and this post-out, at £100.00 is more than enough. The post office makes SO MUCH money out of me…

This year’s chapter is themed: Through the Looking Glass and What You Find There. Back to the envelopes now.

The date on the first post wasn’t the date it was actually written. It’s too complicated for me to explain why — besides it’s Hallowe’en. Anything could happen and anybody could arrive at the door at any minute.

Suffice it to say, the blog has arrived. It will not be very blogg-ish. But it will update what’s going on with HappenStance publications. It may also include some of my moans and groans, but at least they will be poetically expressed.

This weekend, The HappenStance Story Chapter 3 is to be completed somehow. Martin Reed’s forthcoming chapbook has now got a title: The Two-Coat Man. It’s not far from finished.

Gillian is thinking about The Two-Coat Man‘s cover design from some place in the depths of Forres where Jamie is playing a gig…

This is announcing a page, a presence, a mini-blag of bloggery, a little log of loggery, an amateur fog of foggery. But it is not a forgery.

In progress at HappenStance: Chapter 3 of the HappenStance Story and a new chapbook by Martin Reed. There will also be a meta-story (story about the story) about D A Prince’s book Nearly the Happy Hour by Colin Begg. Colin observed and commented on the process behind this publication as part of the work for his M Litt and has agreed to share the results with you. It’s lively, interesting and objective. Also it will quite soon be available as a free download. But not quite yet…

This weekend in the UK the hour changes. That is to say, there is an hour’s extra sleep on Saturday night, which is very welcome since we are approaching peak hibernation instinct. It’s been dark lately anyway, and wild and windy in Scotland. Anybody in their right mind would like an extra hour in bed once a year…

Thirty-seven more parcels in the post today, many of them review copies going hither and thither. And the PoemCards are done – I just have to pick them up from the printer and start sending them out. I’m dying for them to be ready because I need to use them myself. Also I love the whole idea of this. I want to send Matt Harvey’sTens Times Table to all my maths teacher friends . . .

Meanwhile, we’ve agreed the long-list for the STORY comp and it’ll be on the website imminently. Long discussion and some re-reading went into this but it’s reassuring to find that Sarah and I (both of us having read ALL the entries, and all the longlist at least twice) made substantially the same choices. Soon Janice Galloway will get the short listed stories.

A friend from university, Sue Brackell, sent me a moving self-published set of poems titled Losing Liam. The sequence of poems centres on loss, the loss of a son in his twenties. He was mentally ill and took his own life, and this book deals with grief, terrible grief, head-on. He would have been roughly the same age as my own son – a little older. The rawness of the feeling, the reality of the anguish is more intense than any comment I could possibly make. I read it and wept.