Blog Archive

1 October 2024

The mock-heroic return of the king

This is a happy story to set you on your way, though it sounds gloomy and defeated to start with. Remember what Sam said to Frodo: “It's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy?”

That’s not really what I first thought to write as I sat down to write about my good news. I just tend to think of the negative before the good news I have has left my fingertips, and in embarrassment I look for profundity in a simple quote. It’s my stock in trade.

Although, it might also be because I have a healthy respect for mock-heroic works. That is, a piece of writing about something trivial which is raised to the level of the heroic in order to mock it. ‘The Rape of the Lock’, a poem by Alexander Pope, is a good example. A lock of a girl’s hair is taken and two families descend into a petty feud over it – this was based on something that actually happened - and Pope mocked the whole situation by writing about it as though it was something on the level of a mythic struggle!

The first thing I actually intended to write about (and it’s hard to tell this because of the way that words are shaped by the Word Processor (like a food blender (is this why my writing is descending into endless asides?))) was the internet and how wonderful it is, because I have to say that, because I use it to publish this blog and this whole website, but then I also hate it because its changed so many things, including the way we shop and the publishing industry, and then I remembered that when I started writing this I was really writing about Dymocks, a book chain here in Australia, and its Penrith store which closed in May 2021, and then I read that sentence back aloud and ran out of breath …

But yes, that’s what I wanted to say!

Because Dymocks closed a couple of years ago when the owners retired, which was a good thing for them, even if it was bad for book lovers in our area. I wrote about it back then in two blog posts: April 2021; May 2021

But then Harry Hartog bookstore opened in Penrith last year (May 2023), which, as you see, is happier news (and now I’m on the right track) and it gets happier and happier, because now, I can also tell you that Dymocks is returning! It will be in Westfield again, but not in the same place. But it won’t be far off. The picture below shows me outside the future sight of the new Dymocks, which is only about ten metres from the old Dymocks, just across the other side of the pedestrian walk, where I took the photo in May 2021 for that blog post.

If this does not make you as happy as it does me, just reflect upon something that has made you sad and remember what Sam said to Frodo: “… in the end, it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer.”

And that, I will point out to end this, is also mock heroic!

- bikerbuddy

15 October 2024

Greek Myths and Projects

I went shopping over the weekend and I picked up the latest book in Stephen Fry’s series about the Greek myths, Odyssey. It’s the last of four books in the series, and it covers events which appear in Homer’s The Odyssey, the long return of Odysseus home from the Trojan War. While the first three books are non-fiction approaches to their subjects, Odyssey appears to combine novelistic elements with Fry’s exposition of the subject.

The series began with Mythos, which I reviewed as far back as January 2019. I subsequently bought the next two books, Heroes and Troy, but I have neither read nor reviewed them yet. I have so many books and different projects I’d like to do – and not all of them for this website – that things tend to go on the back burner.

One of those projects relates to Fry’s books. I’m almost halfway through a reading of The Iliad, which is taking far longer than I anticipated. The main reason for this is that I am creating a website page for each book of The Iliad as I read it, and it usually takes me a day to get one of those pages together. There are twenty-four books in The Iliad, and so far I’ve completed twelve pages.

After that, I intend to do the same for Homer’s The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid. Given my current rate of progress, that’s going to take years!

At the same time, I’m trying to read and review a few related books. I’ve reviewed Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, Robert Graves’ The Siege and Fall of Troy, and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. I have other related novels set aside to read, eventually.

One of the other projects taking my time right now is the Booker Project. The plan is to read and review every Booker Prize winner since the prize began in 1969. I have read most of the books we have currently not reviewed, so I’ll have to go back to reread a good number of them. But I also have the entire shortlist for 2024 to read before the winner is announced on 12 November and I’ve only reviewed two so far. I’ve gone back to reread Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, since Percival Everett’s shortlisted book, James, is based on Huckleberry Finn. Unfortunately, as things are going, I probably won’t get much, if any, reading done this week. The best I can hope for, I think, is to complete a review for Huckleberry Finn.

(And I haven’t even whinged about the continuing fall-out from my email problems yet. Yes, that’s still going!)

- bikerbuddy

16 October 2024

Emails, and why your comment dates are now wrong

As I was posting yesterday’s blog post I noticed that we had received a comment on the blog page from ‘anastasia’ earlier this month. Normally, I would have known this because I would have received an email to tell me there was a new comment. But I didn’t. This is the last gasp of the email problem we have been trying to deal with. As I explained in earlier posts, our email service was handed over to a new carrier and it continued to work until our grace period was over and I paid for the service. After that, I noticed one thing after another becoming a problem. The first was our newsletter service run by kit.com, and that’s what I first reported. And so, in all correspondence with our new email provider after that, they seemed never to hear that there were other internet companies we formerly had no trouble with now not working. Because their line was that the problem must be with kit.com, ignoring the fact that their own company was the only common factor in the whole problem.

And this included HTML Comment Box, a company we run our comments through. The email stopped working with this company too, and because it was not a gmail account we had to receive a ‘magic’ link to log in. We stopped receiving those links, and we weren’t receiving notifications, and because the email had failed, we couldn’t access the account to moderate comments.

The solution is nasty, but I’m willing to do it. We cancelled the email account, demanded and got our money back, and then turned to the problem of preserving the comments. You could still see the comments across the site because they were still linked to an account that I no longer had access to. But I would never be able to moderate future comments on that account. The solution was to set up a new account with the gmail address we’re now using for the website, and then copy the link back to almost 700 pages in which it appears (!!!) On top of that, I have to check to see if a page has comments as I make the change. If it does, I copy the comments to Word and then repost them once the new link has been installed. This means the comments are preserved throughout the site. Unfortunately, because I have no control over the date recorded for the comments, it appears all the comments in the site will have been posted over a one-week period in which I did the changeover. It’s not ideal, but I was determined not to lose the comments. It’s nice having comments from people. And I’m not just talking about comments of praise. Yes, we sometimes get comments from people who are critical or have a different perspective, and I want those preserved too.

So, if you’ve made a comment in the past you’ll know why the date is now wrong on your comment. That's why ‘anastasia’s’ date is no longer from the beginning of this month. And if a date on your comment is still correct, it just means I haven’t got to that page yet. But I will, and it will change.

- bikerbuddy

18 October 2024

Finalising our Comment Box transfer

I finally finished copying over the link across the website for the new HTML Comments Box account this morning. I managed to save a lot of the old comments. Unfortunately, it seems my belief that the comments from the old account would remain displayed for me to copy to the new account, was wrong. Once my old email was officially retired, the remaining comments disappeared. Obviously, there needs to be a link to a legitimate email for the comments to remain on HTML Comment Box. Not their fault. They’ve actually been trying to see if they can do anything to help, but I think this means they won’t be able to, now. We lost our very first comment on a review ever, as well as some comments from authors, along with other thoughtful comments on reviews that I valued. I also had to remove comment boxes from our blog archive. I only ever copy them there on the rare occasions we receive comments on our blog page.

So, if you’ve ever made a comment on one of our reviews and it’s gone, that’s why. Sorry. If you feel inclined to make a comment again, that would be very welcome!

Better News!

Back in early July I ordered a book which was coming from England. But it was taking so long that Fishpond.com emailed me, wondering if I wanted to cancel the order. I decided to leave it and see what happened. I was glad I did. Yesterday, my copy of The American Commonwealth by James Bryce turned up on our doorstep. If you’ve never heard of this book, I wouldn’t be surprised. I had never heard of it either until Toriaz was researching influences on our Australian Constitution for her work when she came across it.

Bryce was elected to the House of Commons in England in 1880. He was recognised for his intellectual acumen as a politician and historian. He published The American Commonwealth in 1888. It was an in-depth study of the state of American politics, its institutions and practices. Bryce intended that his be a practical study of his subject, rather than the more theoretical Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who published Democracy in America in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. I had acquired Tocqueville’s book a couple of years ago after reading The Federalist Papers. I thought Bryce’s work would be an interesting companion piece. Of course, I’ve just made it even more impossible that I will ever read everything I want to!

- bikerbuddy

18 October 2024

Why you should use HTML Comment Box!

First, this is NOT a paid promotion. We don't do that.

And I don’t normally do two blog posts in one day, either, but I am so grateful to the tech people at HTML Comment Box that I felt I had to say something about their company. I want to recommend HTML Comment Box if you have a website you want to place comments on. I’ve always found the service easy to use, and they have now helped me well beyond expectations (after dealing with an email company that didn’t seem to be able or willing to help at all). Read on to find out what they did.

The problems we’ve had with our email service have been written about in blog posts going back to last month. I wrote about how it affected our comments boxes across the website only this morning.

After I posted that last blog, I realised I still had to update some more comment boxes for special projects on this website, as well as the Dickens and Eliot pages. I’d forgotten them. It was then that I noticed a comment at the bottom of an Eliot review that shouldn’t have been there if my theory about what had gone wrong was correct. I checked back on the blog page and realised that the comments posted by ‘anastasia’ were now there twice: the original posted comment and the comment I copied over to preserve it.

Some background: I had written a couple of texts to HTML Comment Box explaining my problem. They had written back asking for the email for the old account and the new email. What I thought they would do, at best, is give me a way to access the old account so I could then solve the problems myself.

But they had done something much better! A few spot checks revealed all the comments I thought lost forever had been copied over from the old account to my new account. In between me working on replacing the comment links on each page this morning and going back to do more, the people at HTML Comment Box had reinstated all the comments by transferring them from my old account to my new account. It meant I had to go back and delete the comments I had managed to copy over. But it was a quick job on their website. And, what is more, it meant I not only had all the comments back, but they also had their correct dates!

If you’re interested in HTML Comment Box, click on this link or the image below to check them out!

- bikerbuddy