Celia finally finished the outside painting at the flat this morning, with the help of Dominic. I know this wasn't going to be a diary cum journal kind of blog, but the point of what I just said is that now my life is starting to get back to being my own somewhat, and not the flat's. We didn't go down there last night, much to my relief, because it was too cool for the paint to dry. This morning, however, it was blisteringly hot before we went to work even, and so Celia at the last minute decided to take the morning off work, and got the job finished as a result. Good on her.

Being able to stay home and relax last night meant that I could do some writing-related stuff: posted a somewhat revised version of one of my old columns (one that's on this Geocities site) to the writers' list, with the aim of improving it. The suggestions for doing just that came back quite quickly, and certainly there more positive and helpful than not. Also made some notes for an article on whether it's safe to send credit card details by email. Have had this in my head for a little while and thought it was worth pursuing with our old friends at InfoTech. Haven't queried them about it - may send them the finished article this time, rather than a query, as that seems to work better. I've always been a bit in two minds about queries. Certainly they save you the work of writing an article that's never going to get published, but they also have to be so spot on in order to get the article visible. Sometimes feel just sending the thing is the way to go, particularly it involves style rather than content.

Now all I've got to do is rake up some energy to get going on the writing side. Tonight I feel more tired than last night - but then I have done the bulk of an email newsletter for the shop today; the usual 2000 or so words. So I guess that sort of counts. And on top of this I need to do a bit more practice, piano-wise, of the songs I've got to play in the next few days. Was suddenly reminded that I have yet another engagement on Thursday, in the lunchhour, at the Savoy, playing for Brent Read. I'd forgotten about it entirely. Already I'm playing for Arnold's lot tomorrow, at the travel club's Christmas dinner. (Dinner? It takes place in the morning.) Then there's this Thursday thing for the Rotary club. Saturday night I'm booked to play one song for a guy who's singing at the opening of the refurbished Coronation Hall at Mosgiel, and on Sunday we have this thing where I'm playing for Brent again, and Anna Leese (always sounds like one word to me: Analiese). Fortunately Brent is singing the same few songs on every occasion, almost.

Painting, aggravation and a DVD

Still painting, patching, spraying, scrubbing, rubbing, brushing, and coating the bloomin' flat. Yesterday, Saturday, was an all out exhausting day, with no let up. We'd planned to get started really early, but the weather was very patchy, and we didn't get off the ground till about nine. Then the weather packed up again and drizzled, and put paid to another stretch of time; then we started again, and Doug and Stef arrived with the famous granddaughter, who managed to get paint and goo and mud and various other elements on her body at different times during the day. Had to pack up again because of the weather so we went and got the paint, and I listened to a very unuseful conversation between a polite customer and an apparently polite retailer: the customer had been waiting to have a bathroom cupboard stripped of its varnish by the firm's stripping dept which was located in Stafford St. The customer had been put off more than one with the excuse that the stripping wasn't finished, and was finally told that it would be ready by Friday - definitely. The customer went there at 4.35 on Friday and found the place closed at 4.30. He came into the main shop of the firm, where we were, on the Saturday morning, hoping he'd be able to get someone to open up the other dept and collect his cabinet. The retail assistant behind the counter seemed to come to conclusion very early in the piece that the customer was being difficult and really had no case. Whatever his reasoning was, he argued quietly and politely back and forth with an increasingingly irritable customer and was plainly not prepared to do anything; furthermore he claimed that because it was the weekend he (they - the shop) had no jurisdiction over the other dept. This went on until it almost reached interminability - at which point the assistant (who wasn't one of your young know-it-alls, but a middle-aged man who should have known better than to handle a customer the way he did) went off and got the other bloke, who cheerily agreed to meet the customer round at the other dept and open up for him! How to make a customer mad for no good reason...!

Celia and I did have one night off this week - when we babysat the granddaughter - and watched a DVD of Miss Congeniality, with Sandra Bullock and Benjamin Bratt - and Michael Caine. Bullock plainly has the time of her life in this movie - the promos that were also on the DVD showed her barely different in reality to her character on screen, at times. More amazing, to Celia, was the fact that whole scenes had been excluded from the end product: three of them that we saw, and all of them involving quite a heap of people and the equivalent of several minutes screen time.

Finally got the review on The Poison Principle off to the ODT today. Other than that it's been all go at the Craigleith St house, last night undercoating the back windows, which were a boring light burgundy colour, and are now a tarted over white - not sure what they'll wind up looking like yet, but at least it'll have to be better than what was there. The result of course is that I'm getting very little writing done - though I did send the review off to the writers' list to see what comments it would elicit (and anyway it was ages since I'd subbed anything). Got one quick response, which mainly concentrated on the the way words were arranged or gave me alternatives for words I'd used: in fact I suspect I'd already tried out a lot of her alternatives and decided against them. That's the way it is. Apart from that I critted Sanchona's chapter 12, an action-packed piece that didn't quite work in detail, but certainly moved along. I think she does keep things moving; it's the details that concern me most of the time. And forgetting who or what did this or that.

I've debated sending the columns that I have here on Geocities off to the writers' list - again mostly for something to sub, and also because it would get me moving again, I think. Time will tell. Once this flat is sorted out - hopefully mostly over the weekend - I can get on with something else in life.

Opera Alive show is now finished, and once I get over the exhaustion of it, I'll do something more creative here. As it is, this afternoon (my first free afternoon for a while, it seemed) was spent at the Craigleith St flat, clearing up the foliage that had accumulated over the last year. The tenants had apparently done very little in the way of lawn-mowing, so a team of us: Stef, Doug, Ben, Celia and I went to it and cleared away a good deal of the overgrowth. Quite satisfying overall.

Did some real writing this morning, in the way of a review of the book by Gail Bell, The Poison Principle. I'll stick the review on this site as soon as it's tidied up. As for other writing, however, I'm doing next to nothing...apart from here. Have to get over the feeling that having been rejected, so it seems, by InfoTech, is the end of my career as a writer, and go on to open some other doors. Easier said than done, but at least at present I have the genuine excuse that I'm so busy with rehearsing with Opera Alive that I have neither the time nor the brain nor the energy to do anything so complex as writing.

The novel was/is about a man whose wife dominated him, to the extent of abusing him physically. Intriguingly, in the Opera Alive show this year, there are vague hints of this same theme...good grief, am I foisting the idea everywhere? I've had to produce some of the numbers this year, due to the lack of a choreographer/producer/director or whatever. In one of them, Shine On Harvest Moon, the moon (played by one of the girls) stubbornly refuses to shine on the young lovers' romantic pursuits in the outdoors - until the whole chorus pleads with her...and even then it's only when the young man gives her the 'spoon' which is a visual pun on 'spooning' that she relents. Heaven knows what Freudian significance the spoon has taken on as a result! 

That's the milder scene as far as a 'woman' refusing the man and making him beg - the young lover has to embrace her feet (I had nothing to do with that bit, as I recall). But in another piece, which I mostly put together, (I can't give you anything but love, baby), the lone girl is ;surrounded' by the five guys as the song progresses, until she has to force her way out of it. Her reaction throughout has been total nonchalance to their endeavours; it's only when they start pressing in on her, as it were, that she breaks out. I suppose, thinking about it again, neither of those 'scenes' are particularly like the couple in the novel...maybe I've layered on some of my feelings about the novel's action onto the the way I see the Opera Alive pieces...in fact, they're fairly innocuous by comparison. Perhaps it's my feeling about the boys/men's plight in each case that I've latched onto. The young lover in the first has to beg the moon to shine - the young lady has gone inside and left him to it. In the other scene, the five guys all plead to no avail. The idea that love of its own is sufficient (their theory) is tossed out by the girl, who is plainly into self-absorption and self-concern. At the time of the scene, at least, young men have no place in her life. It's the irony of the guys singing about the poverty of spirit of love without dollars attached compared to her reaction that everything is viewed, for her, materialistically. This is all rather heavy philosophising of some fairly innocent stuff, probably! I was just checking out the template again, trying to figure out how to change it so that it's more interesting. I can see more of what it's about, but am still a bit cautious about fiddling with it until I know what I'm doing. It's a matter of reading it as a code, in a sense. Once I figure the code a bit more effectively, I'll give it a go, maybe. I copied it over to AOLPress, but because it wasn't reading all the other stuff that goes with the bits of info attached to dollar signs, it was rather sparse - sparser than the page already is, in fact. This blog has replaced my normal journal writing over the last few days, although it's really only supposed to deal with writing. But that means, in fact, that I haven't done any writing on anything else for the last few days. Exhaustion from rehearsals has set in, and all I can say is that I'm glad tonight is a night off. Otherwise I'd be whacked for the rest of the week. Oh, yes, I've now arranged to have tomorrow morning off, as I normally do on Wednesdays, instead of going in and seeing my fourth rep for the week. Four reps in three days is several reps too many. All those decisions on what book or item to buy. Too much. I wonder why it feels as though I'm writing to somebody when I'm writing here. Rather as though this is an endlessly serialised letter to some foreign correspondent - the trouble is, the correspondent never replies...

More on Writing

Finally Sanchona, the writer from Australia whom I've had a lot of contact with by email, after 'meeting' on the writers' list, has got in touch with me again. I left a note on the writers' list itself in the end, as it seemed to be the only way to contact her (my emails to her address were going nowhere, bouncing back). It worked, because she has a second email address that was accessible, when the main one wasn't. She claims since then that I then wrote to her normal address, but I think she's confused about how the email got to her. Although anything is possible, since my work emails were coming to my home address on Friday morning, I discovered.

On the research side of my writing, I re-discovered the news groups the other day, and spent a good deal of time copying material on memorizing...both play scripts and poems. It's the sort of thing I hadn't been able to find just on ordinary searches before. So it's obviously a place to keep an eye on. I'm in the process of checking out the subject of steganography again, because an article has turned up in the the Wired News by Farhad Manjoo (there's a name to grapple with!). In the Google search of the newsgroups, there's even a steganography list, but there are also several other lists where steganography is the subject under discussion. That's the intriguing things about these lists: they began kind of in a wide format, and then suddenly hone in on a topic - and veer grandly off it too! The rec.photo.digital group has a longish discussion on steganography, but much of what's there is stuff I've already picked up (with comments) from the Net proper. Another group started a discussion earlier than Sept 11th, on three combined (apparently) newsgroups: comp.security.misc, sci.crypt, talk.politics.crypto, and wound up with 74 entries, many of them veering off the track. There's also discussion on a hackers newsgroup.

Like all conversations between a group of disparate people with a moderately common interest, these discussions on the newsgroups are only marginally useful. There are some very knowledgeable people out there, but also the usual bunch of know-it-alls who don't know-it-all. And whether I can be bothered to track my way through all that stuff for a bit of useful material is another question.

Off that subject entirely, I managed to both go to the movies and watch a DVD today: both comedies and both a lot cleverer than they first appear. The DVD was Best in Show, a film I'd had a hankering to see for a while, though Celia wasn't keen. (She sat through the DVD without enthusiasm, although she did give the occasional laugh - but ceased when we got to watching the deleted scenes. some of which were definitely verging on the not funny.) The sense of improvisation came through quite startlingly, and some scenes had the wonderful overlapping of conversation that you only get when the actors are playing with the idea of the conversation rather than working on a received text. Equally, some scenes, particularly the deleted ones, had a touch of the 'we don't know where to go next' feel about them. This afternoon, Ben, Stef and I went to see Ben Stiller's Zoolander, and absolutely crazy piece of nonsense, that works, in spite of itself. Stiller presents a simple-minded character with a voice verging on the unbroken, and a host of equally off-the-wall people who stroll in and out of the film with no comprehension that the rest of the world isn't anything like this. The only sane character, Zoolander's girl-friend, played by Christine Taylor, sees something in this lunatic that appeals. Of course it helps that he becomes an accidental hero in the end. It just goes to show that when you're on the 'in' side of film-making, you can present a crazy idea and get it to come off...and get the dollars to make it work too. Best in Show probably didn't cost a heap of cash, but Zoolander must have. The great thing about both movies is that everyone has got in on the idea, seen the potential for outrageous humour and gone all out for it. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Times has some strong words to say about it, not positive, and he's right. However, he does miss saying the positive things about it: that it's full of wit, in spite of the fact that the main character is a dummox.

Writing novels

It occurs to me that rather than beginning yet another novel, I should put the one I was writing on here, improving the draft version as I go. That would be a useful exercise, and would perhaps give me some inspiration to get a move on and make something of the thing. Of course, I could be ambitious and write two novels simultaneously - again, my great mentor, Dickens, did precisely that with Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby as I recall.

I've just downloaded a copy of the first section of the novel onto this computer, and even reading the first few sentences, I can see the need for tidying up. Even the original quote I took from Fleur Adcock's poem, (the first in the book of NZ Contemporary Poems) needs adjusting - the language, while useful in the poetic format, and as a starting point for my inspiration, needs now to leave its seed and move on.

I finally caught up with Sanchona, too, by putting a note on the main writers' list - probably totally non U but I couldn't think of any other way to contact her. She has another email address which I've written to. Hope she checks it, as she doesn't use it so often.

I've just altered something on this page, trying to see if I can link other stuff from the box at the top. And I can...so yet another triumph of minimal brain over maximal technology...

Blog-novelling

Had this idea of writing a novel on the Blog, adding not so much as a chapter a day, but a chunk a day, or thereabouts....although with Opera Alive going full-bore at the moment, writing anything is getting to be a major achievement. I've just wiped a whole screed of the writers' list emails because I just haven't had the time or energy to work my way through them. And of course I haven't heard back from InfoTech, so I can assume that Adrienne Perry wasn't excited about my latest query.

But if I was to write a 'novel' on here, even as a kind of draft version, it would sort of commit to presenting it in serial form, as though that was the final form, rather as they did in the 19th century, when Dickens and co wrote their novels as they went along - genius of course could achieve such a task.

Not on this subject at all, I've just come across a (rather badly designed in terms of colour) site called The Desertlight Journal, which focuses on the distress many men are caused through divorce, through non-access to children and so forth. Interestingly enough in their latest newsletter they mention the outrage that New Zealand lawyer Denise Ritchie caused from men's groups when she allegedly said that men should regard Father's day as a day of shame and should see it as a day to apologise for all the sex abuse of children that goes on. Her original comments aren't as provocative as subsequent responses made out. A supreme example of the ability of people to jump the gun by not reading what the person said. However, the responsees were right as well. In a sense it isn't fair that innocent men should be lumped together with those who are guilty in order to apologise for the actions of all men. This is a typical PC approach to problems: blame everyone and make everyone feel guilty. It applies across the board to the way law is now made, as well, with the innocent being forced to deal with the problems of the guilty because the law doesn't seem to be able to discriminate being right and wrong parties. It's what has happened with the Maori situation in NZ: everyone who is descended from those who were here in the 19th Century is somehow at fault for the sins of their forebears. In fact, it doesn't matter whether you had forebears here in those days; if your skin colour is not black (and of course, brown counts as black these days) then you are to blame. The Chinese even get lumped in with the whites in this approach.

I thought there might be a reference to the men's shame thing on Soapbox, but I can't see anything. Perhaps I should write up some of the thoughts above, and post them there.

Well, all this is a far cry from starting a novel...so maybe that will have to wait for another day!

The single but in the last post was something I was experimenting on, and have now forgotten. Obviously of great importance. Perhaps it had to do with the idea that was floating through the writers' list a week or so ago, as to whether you could end a novel with the word, 'but'. The attempts to do so - there weren't many - weren't very successful, and the idea died, like many of the ideas do on that list. It was hardly an inspiration, anyway. And it probably wouldn't be all that difficult to come up with a last line of anything that ended in 'but.'

As she stabbed him repeatedly, she heard him cry, 'But I never heard you say stop, but I didn't want you to hurt me....but...!" and so on. Or possibly you could write, the last image on his brain was of the bully about to give him a head butt. Okay, I know that one's a cheat...!

Or, Professor Finkelstein's last words, as he jumped off the cliff in response to the repeated grammatical infelicities of his colleages, were: "And I say, You can't begin a sentence with an 'and' and you can't end it with a 'but'. Of course, Finkelstein proved himself wrong in both cases.

Enough of this nonsense. As I said in a recent post, I'd like to use this place as somewhere to chew over the writing stuff - to give it some focus. There's already enough 'life' in the journal, the day to day ruminations on current events in the Crowl household and beyond. And while I've written about writing there in the past on a number of occasions, this gives me a place to let it be itself and me to try and define what I'm doing writing-wise.

For instance, I had an idea the other day of bringing in all those nonsensical things they're inventing in the electronic gadget field that are supposed to help people live more easily and comparing them with the master/servant relationship that has worried sci-fi writers through many a story, most notably, perhaps, in 2001, a Space Odyssey. The way Hal takes over, even though neither his builders, nor Hal himself (if he can be said to be) intended such a thing. Hal takes over by default, perhaps. But would we really want our personal lives taken over by retailers sending us the right kind of cereal as dictated by our toilet bowl, or the right kind of foods as dictated by our refrigerator? I don't think so! Nicht zu fassen!

You'll note I'm making good use of the italics, now that I've re-remembered how to use them - can't say there's much in the way of linkage here though - which really worries me: how can this be a true blog without links? Maybe it's a new type of blog - the linkless blog.

I still haven't had a response from InfoTech regarding the last query I sent them. Which is a bit of a concern, since they're usually on the ball. And talking of responses: both my NZ email writer-correspondent and my Aussie one haven't been in touch, the first because I think she's away at their other home for some days, painting the porch, and the Aussie one because her email address and mine somehow don't talk to each other...must be the only two email addresses on the Web that don't.

The other aspect of the InfoTech business, is that I'm back in that mode of relying on them as my only source of publication. I need to write for other outlets still, rather than relying on them fully, as I have done for the last couple of months. That puts me in danger of being where I was when the column was suddenly cancelled: with no other place to go. I need to get with it and aim for other publications as well. I see on the InfoTech page today that there's an article on Orcon taking over smaller ISPs. No mention of Hyper.net, that little company that my son's friend and his two mates set up in a bedroom in their flat, and which we joined up with last year. It's been taken over by Orcon, but is obviously too little too be worth mentioning in this article.

but...

And now, amazingly, the difference in time between the previous post and the one before that is supposedly four hours. Oh, pulease - I posted them within five minutes of each other. Plainly the clock these posts work to has its own version of time.

Checking a bit further, while I was in the 'properties' section, I noticed that the time was more accurate than it seemed when I wrote the above - the two o'clock in the morning is much more likely, than the ten at night was...maybe things were running a little slow.

I don't know what time in the world this Blogger.com relates to, but according to it, I've just written my latest notes on Thursday at around 10.18 in the evening. That's more than a whole day behind my real time, which is eleven o'clock at night, on Friday. Is there really somewhere in the world that's more than 24 hours behind me?

Geeks have their uses

My tame geek has finally conquered the wide yellow column down the left side. First we tried to do it off-line, by downloading the page and re-hashing it. This appeared to work until we posted another column at which point the great yellow slab re-appeared. Finally the tame geek had a go at the Template section and did something that has now made the page look like it belongs to a normal blogger (if such a thing exists and not to a mad artist from the fifties).

I'd like to continue the vein of Mike Crowl's Scribble Pad and write about writing and the arts generally in this blog - give it some focus, so that it's not just a blob (as opposed to a blog - the blobber has a certain valid ring to it too, especially in regard to some of the blogs I have read).

Of course, if I'm going to write about writing, I'd have to start with the frustration of having sent off another query to InfoTech only to have them ignore me again. But then I expect instant reaction from emails - though don't know why I should, as obviously there are plenty of people out there who regard emails as some kind of mysterious creature that you should never reply to on the same day as you receive it. That gives it a sense of being real post as opposed to this fancy electronic stuff.

I guess I'm also frustrated at being on this writers' list and hearing of the successes people on it have, while I'm struggling to get one piece off the ground. Of course, I do have to take into consideration the fact that at present I'm also trying to produce/musical direct a show of just under two hours which is badly in need of being further forward than it is, and that there are only so many rehearsals in a week, and so many days to rehearse in. Nevertheless, the people in Opera Alive are doing well all things considered.

I keep feeling as though I should be adding links here, left right and centre and upwards and downwards probably too. But nothing so far that I've written appears to need to be linked to anything, so blandly unlinked it all remains.

I am going to do an article about being bored with the Net, though I find it's not a frequent occurrence with me. But certainly I can see the possibility of such a thing, even if I don't quite appreciate how it could be. There's a great tendency to spend your time not actually surfing, but paddling. It's easy to stay close to the shore and not get into those shoals where oddball creatures lurk ready to corrupt your brain with their conspiracy theories or pervert your morality with their ugly views on life, sex and more sex. And if you stay close to the shore where the little waves are, it's unlikely you'll have that kind of serendipitous experience that the Net can give. So much of the oddball lies quite close to the shore in fact - you don't have to be a good swimmer to get to it. Put a word or phrase in the average search engine and all manner of strange things turn up unbidden (well, in the sense that you never expected to come across them while you were searching for something straightforward, like how many other people have the same name as you). There's a quirkiness about the Net - it's one of its greatest features. I don't know how many times I've gone searching for a basic bit of background material to a fairly ordinary idea and wound up discovering stuff I never knew people thought about, let alone experimented with - and I don't mean in the sex and more sex area, either.

I've learned more on the Net in the last few years than I ever learned in school (which doesn't say much) or more to the point, in my normal researching over the years via the paper media. The Net has the ability to pull together all manner of things that lie hidden from your normal daily routine. It's a way of tossing the world around like a salad and coming up with not only the vegetables that were hidden below, but a couple of caterpillars that had made their way in, as well.

Well, the tame geek has managed to overcome the large lump of clay-coloured material that was at the side, and now I have the page pretty much to myself, apart from the obligatory Blogger ad. And I find I can edit the page apart from Blogging at it...all rather curious. Anyway, time to move because the geek is learning his favourite piece on the piano, the one that I wrote called Response and I have to show him something before I hive off to the Opera Alive rehearsal.

What I can't seem to figure out, and will probably have to get the tame geek in to check for me, is how to get rid of that annoying great lump of yellow down the side of the page. Obviously other people don't have that, and perhaps it's the basic format for a blog, but it looks unexciting, and seems to contribute nothing. Even checking out the help section and the template section gave me no clue. The help refers to the template and the template is full of the kind of gobbledygook that only geeks can read...it doesn't even seem to be the sort of HTML I can make any sense of.

Never mind, at least one problem has been solved, even if it's meant staying up way past the time I intended to have as my curfew, especially in view of the late nights that seem to have been the norm round here recently, along with the coughing in the middle of the night that Celia's been rousing me up with, usually around three am. She wasn't terribly impressed last night when I got up and brought her some Buckley's Canadiol Mixture, because the smell of it is enough, you'd think, to put anyone off coughing for life (although Stef smelt it tonight and expressed the sort of appreciation you give to a fragrance from a perfume bottle - there's no accounting for tastes!). Time to pack it in.

I was trying to publish on Geocities again and discovered that I have been publishing on there all the time...it was just that page was invisible because there was nothing linked to it. Now this makes a difference - there's some point to sending off my ramblings if they're not going to be just stuck on Blogger and virtually invisible. I may even say something sensible at this rate.

I wonder what possesses people to write in these blogs in a way that is would be censored under any other conditions. Perhaps it's the freedom to say what you like without an authority figure standing over you. I'm not sure what the value of that is, and why anyone else would want to read the ravings of sexually-focused youths - and who does read these things, other than their creators? I guess there are some writers who turn out to be interesting; most of the rest of us are just ramblers, I suspect.

I miss the Word feature on here of being able to type 'i' and have it immediately turn into an 'I'. Certainly if I've been typing in Word for a while before coming on here it's tricky remembering to type properly again.

I haven't quite figured out how to see this stuff as a proper page either. Or else if I have (when I first started writing here) I've forgotten. This feeling of being crammed into the top half of a page is a little irritating, as though you were forever sliding along the top of a line that won't allow you below it for some pesky reason of its own.