In the UK, I think people talk of the ‘recession’, but here in Spain we’re not mealy-mouthed – no tenemos pelos en la lengua – so it’s a full-blown ‘crisis’.
Despite the world’s financial problems, though, I’ve been fortunate to have a reasonable amount of work, and I’d begun to hope that things were getting better for other people, too. So I was a bit taken aback to receive this in an email from a translation agency this week (my emphasis): Continue reading “situation critical”
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”.
Continue reading “the fear of the word”
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”.
Continue reading “‘genderally’ speaking”
I’ve not been getting much in the way of junk comments on the blog recently, but I still occasionally remember to check and make sure the system hasn’t thrown anything away by mistake. Sadly, all these encouraging remarks were correctly identified as spam:
I also check and see what search terms have led people to the blog.
Continue reading “feedback”
Having picked up Pride and Prejudice to look up Bingley’s comments on accomplishments the other day, I decided to re-read the whole book.
Along with Kipling’s Kim, it’s one of my ‘comfort books’; this time, however, I wasn’t reading it while ill in bed, so perhaps I was more critical. Certainly it struck me that it would be hard to cite Austen as a role model for good writing.
Continue reading “quibbles & niggles”
don't confuse the narrator 