books – Page 18 – don't confuse the narrator

miaow, meow, miau, miaou….

How do you spell that word?

Not that it really matters, but it seemed the right noise to be making since I just discovered I have an identity on the WorldCat website.

This being the internet, I’m rather surprised that the site has nothing to do with cats.

In fact it’s a searchable catalogue of library collections and it also includes a fun facility to follow connections and explore relationships between the identities held on file for people, things, characters and corporations. It’s a bit like playing six degrees of separation, but I haven’t yet worked out the route to connect my id with Kevin Bacon.

not so dusty

I like to start the new year with a clean house, but as I was away for several weeks from mid-December this year, that annual ritual went by the board.

Ever adaptable, I’m now looking at the Chinese New Year – January 23rd – as a spur to domesticity, so, in tribute to the Water Dragon, I started cleaning last weekend in the downstairs living area.

Like most of the women I know, I’m quite good at the lick-and-a-promise type of cleaning that can transform a room in five minutes when you suddenly realise the in-laws are due at any moment.
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books and friends

I don’t really see the appeal of Twitter – perhaps because I don’t really understand how it works – but occasionally friends send me links to ‘trending topics’.

Yesterday, I got a link to #whatsyourgeekconfession and found this at the top:

geek confession screenshot: I have more books than friends

the fear of the word

I started to write about the results of the Mslexia poetry survey yesterday, but ended up going off at a bit of a tangent.

I’d stumbled across a news item on the Poetry Book Society website which referred to the survey under the eye-catching headline “Mslexia Poetry Phobia Report”, and was immediately distracted (yes, my life is full of tangents and distractions) by the phrase “a condition known as metrophobia”.
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‘genderally’ speaking

I mentioned two survey questions last week, which asked about reasons for reading and reasons for writing poetry. At the time, I didn’t say who was carrying out the survey, as I wasn’t sure it was relevant. But what is a survey without results? And now the results have been published, and they raise further points for discussion.

So I’d better go ahead and say that the survey was sent out by Mslexia, which is published with the tagline “the magazine for women who write”.
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