Advent Calendar

A poem from today’s Guardian Review by Rowan Williams:

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Visual Book List

I have started a visual book list. Looks quite nice, though the numbers of unfinished books worries me slightly. Will get round to writing little reviews at some point for each one.

Chain Reading

Chain Reading. It’s like a social booklist keeping thing. Kind of.

You select the book you are reading, and have read, and will read. Recommend them to people. Maybe they will recommend some to you. Fairly interesting.

Of course, some people had this idea nearly 12 months ago…

Google Print, Firefox, Google Portal

A day off work today. A few quick things before I get on. Maybe more later…

• Google Print is online. Had a quick play, looking for H.G. Wells’ The First Men on the Moon. Sadly that text is still under copyright so not all of it is available. Plenty of other classics are there in full though. Haven’t had a chance to see what options are available for printing – I am guessing that it is probably just an on screen thing.
• Firefox has reached a 10% share of the browser market, according to ZDNet, linked to by John Naughton. This is good news, not least because the more people using FireFox means that they can’t be ignored, and web sites will have to start complying with standards to ensure their sites are displayed proplerly.
• Google’s personalised portal is now released for the UK. Has a few new links for UK related stuff, like news and even the London Review of Books! Sadly, the UK-centric weather service focuses only on a select band of cities – the closest to me being Wolverhampton, which is almost completely useless!

Gutenberg formatting

Palimpsest’s Book Group is reading two H.G. Wells books at the moment. Being a skinflint, I thought I would download them from Project Gutenberg, a library of free books available in ext format, and sometimes HTML.

The two novels are:

• The First Men on the Moon
• The Sleeper Awakes

The trouble is that often the HTML option isn’t there, and the text files are formatted with hard line breaks, which means that the lines break at that point whether it needs to or not. So if you load them into a word processor and change the font and text size to get the page count down for printing, the results look terrible.

Surely, I thought, it must be possible to automatically remove these line breaks, somehow? I asked in various places:

• Palimpsest’s Ono No Komachi suggested using EReader, but that costs money!
• The guys at South Cheshire LUG had a go at producing some Perl to convert the text files – but they didn’t quite work, and I don’t have a linux box to run these on yet
• Blixa on Palimpsest came up with some VBA script for MS Word to reformat the text, but it doesn’t quite work either, and it involves Word and VBA (but is very clever)…

All to no avail!

Until Carfilhiot suggested a tool called GutenMark, a command line tool for linux or Windows which takes the text file and reformats nicely it to HTML. It is released under the GPL, so it should be possible to have a look at the source and see if it can be persuaded to produce just text files, though it may be possible to cut and paste from the browser to a text editor to see what results from that.

Carfilhiot has hosted the reformatted versions of the Wells texts:

• The First Men on the Moon
• The Sleeper Awakes

Excellent – and the copy-and-paste to text file seems to work too!

Stating the Bleeding Obvious

As reported in The Guardian: I’ve never read a book, says Posh.

I would have thought that should anyone have actually wasted their time considering this issue, they would have assumed that was the case anyway?

Baby, Scary, Ginger, Sporty and Bookish probably wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it. Despite penning a 528-page autobiography charting her rise to the top, Victoria Beckham has admitted that she has never read a book in her life.

The revelation emerged in an interview with the Spanish magazine Chic. Although the issue in question has yet to the hit the shelves, details were leaked to the Spanish press over the weekend.

“I haven’t read a book in my life,” Beckham confesses. “I don’t have the time.” However, the 31-year-old former Spice Girl does shrug off suggestions that she is a philistine. “I prefer listening to music, although I do love fashion magazines.”

She also admits that having given birth to three boys – Brooklyn, six, Romeo, two, and six-month-old Cruz – she would like a daughter and could imagine “painting her nails, putting on make-up and choosing clothes” with her. Beckham also said she was not jealous about the attention paid by other women to her husband.

“I know what other women think and I say to myself ‘He is very good looking, he dresses very well, he is great with children and he has an enormous heart’. I am not jealous and when people look at him, I think it’s because he’s great.”

Her library-dodging confessions may come as a surprise to fans impressed with the literary style of her autobiography, Learning to Fly.

In the book, she recorded how seeing the film Fame encouraged her to seek stardom. According to the blurb, “A line from the theme song stayed with her – ‘I’m gonna live for ever, I’m gonna learn how to fly’. With this amazing book she gives us the chance to fly alongside her on her journey from lonely teenager to international star…”

Palimpsest Book Group

Palimpsest has a book group, discussing books read by all the members in a topic on the forum. It has worked really well in the past, but recently has fallen behind a little.

To try and perk things up a bit it was decided that instead of choosing books month-by-month, 6 books should be chosen to cover half a year’s group reading, meaning that everyone knows where they stand. After various discussions and slightly complicated voting systems, the final selection looks like this:

• 1 September 2005: The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Gustave Flaubert
• 1 October 2005: No One Writes to the Colonel, Gabriel García Márquez
• 1 November 2005: The First Men in the Moon/The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. Wells
• 1 December 2005: Dance, Dance, Dance, Haruki Murakami
• 1 January 2006: Virtual Light, William Gibson
• 1 February 2006: The Three-Arched Bridge, Ismail Kadare

Some pretty challenging stuff there!

Wells

Great quote from H.G. Wells in amner’s review of The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells.

An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

Richard Yates on Palimpsest

One of the great things about Palimpsest is the way it throws up quality discussions about authors I have never heard of. And it brings together fans of that author that might not otherwise ever get to discuss his (or her) work with a fellow devotee.

This happened most recently with Richard Yates. Follow this link to the thread and enjoy. I am certainly going to invest in some Yates in the near future.

Peter Singer

Interesting profile of the Austrailian philosopher Peter Singer in last Saturday’s Guardian Review. I remember reading a book of his for an essay on Practical Ethics for A-Level R.E.

George W Bush and Peter Singer were born on the same day – July 6 1946. But there the similarity ends. Only one is an Australian vegetarian who campaigns against animal cruelty and does not believe in the Judaeo-Christian nostrum of the sanctity of life. Only one supports abortion and infanticide in some cases and backs stem-cell research that uses genetic material from embryos. Only one thinks the world would be better if the US were subject to UN sanctions for emitting more than its fair share of greenhouse gases.

And yet there are parallels. In his 2003 book The President of Good and Evil: Taking George W Bush Seriously, Singer quoted from one of Bush’s speeches: “Some people think it’s inappropriate to make moral judgments anymore. Not me.” To which Singer added: “Well, not me either, so that is one view about morality on which the president and I agree.” Both men, in an age of seeming moral relativism and selfishness, insist on the overwhelming importance of moral renewal.

That book nonetheless argued that Bush’s ethics consisted mostly of hypocrisy and intellectual confusion. By contrast, Singer stresses that his moral philosophy is the product of cold logic. Singer concedes his views are often upsetting for Bush supporters. “In a Christian society we have views about the sanctity of life that were formed in a totally different period when we didn’t have to make decisions about embryos or whether you should keep people alive who are irrevocably unconscious. People get stuck with this ethic from the past, which has not been able to adapt itself to other circumstances because it has been encapsulated in a set of religious beliefs.”