Virginia Rounding's Blog

Thomas Buddenbrook in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, meditating on the irritations of growing old:

“We’re only as young or old as we feel. And when something good we’ve longed for finally does come along, it lumbers in a little too late somehow, loaded down with petty, annoying, upsetting details, covered with all the grime of reality that we never really imagined, and that is so irritating – irritating.”

Richard Grannison in Raymond Postgate’s Somebody at the Door soliloquises about afternoons:

“Afternoons are the time for seduction. Anatole France proved it long ago …

“Consider the whole question in the light of reason … The conventional night out. What does it mean? Why, creeping home about five in the morning, very tired and uncomfortable, with none of the buses or trains running, and probably no taxi available. One is unshaven and probably has an unpleasant mouth. If you are a man who runs the usual ménage, you are terrified of making a noise as you come in and facing questions afterwards. You are exhausted and irritable the rest of the day; and what, I ask you, are your last recollections of the girl friend? You saw her in the light of early morning: she was probably half asleep, with her mouth open, and she might be snoring …

“And then think of the afternoon … You get up – you have a cocktail (I am going to order one in a minute). Your last intimate recollection of your friend is of her in complete command of herself, in what the eighteenth-century poets called a sweet disorder. As lovely as you look this moment, my dear. You part about four or five o’clock – bland, cheerful, unchallengeable. Nobody knows that you have been occupied otherwise than innocently. You remember each other as we, I hope, will remember each other. I hope you will think of me as clean and well-shaved, and as cheerful after a large dry Martini. That is what I am going to order, and I have remembered that you like a Clover Club. And I shall certainly remember you as beautiful as you are now, and as chic as you were when you came – and as you will be when you take my arm downstairs. I shall say ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Grayling! It has been a pleasure meeting you,’ and that understatement will end a perfect afternoon.”

Characters from the wonderful Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, discussing academics and their writing production:

“ … my wife says that we anthropologists are like a housewife faced with the remains of yesterday’s stew and wondering whether it can possibly be eked out to make another meal.”

“You can do that all right with a stew,” said Penelope. “Add a few more vegetables, some carrots or a tin of peas, and a bouillon cube – or even just water – and serve rather a lot of potatoes with it.”

“But how does it work with an anthropologist’s material?’ asked Ianthe. “Surely that’s more difficult?”

“Surprisingly, it isn’t,” said Everard. “Many have made only one short field trip and yet they go on using that material in articles and even books for the rest of their lives. Just a few more vegetables or a bouillon cube,” he turned to Penelope, smiling, “and sometimes a great deal too many potatoes.”

The joy of research, as described in Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s The Rabbit Back Literature Society:

What joy is there in research, anyway? someone had once asked in one of her methodology courses. The teaching assistant’s answer had made an impression on Ella at the time: Research brings order to the world. It makes things clearer, helps us to understand things. Could there be any more joy than that? Did you ever put together puzzles as a child? The universe is a puzzle with billions of pieces. Putting it together is society’s highest shared responsibility, our right and our joy – and not only that, it is what separates us from the whole rest of creation, with a few possible exceptions.

Here’s the link to a podcast of a Round Table discussion I took part in last month (May 2023), about the Empress Catherine II of Russia.

https://ilcs.sas.ac.uk/podcasts/catherine-great-a-celebrity-across-time

This is about one of the projects I’ve been working on recently, researching the hidden histories of women in the City of London, from the Norman Conquest to the mid-twentieth century.

[image error]The ‘Track Changes’ option in the Review tab

When an editor or proofreader works on someone’s text in Microsoft Word, it is usual for them to use ‘Track Changes’ (one of the options in the ‘Review’ tab). The great advantage of this is that the author of the text can see the corrections and/or amendments that have been made by the editor/proofreader, and decide whether to accept or reject them. This can either be done by going through the text and accepting or rejecting each change or, if the author feels sufficiently confident in the changes that the editor/proofreader has made, by ‘accepting all changes’ in one go.

[image error]Options to accept changes

For anyone working on a text – either an editor working on someone else’s text, or an author revising their own draft(s) – it can be useful to have Track Changes turned on, but not to have to see them all the time, as the mark-up can be distracting and actually lead to more errors being introduced (particularly errors of spacing, when you cannot always immediately see whether you have deleted or added a space). Fortunately, you can work with Track Changes on without having to see them, until you want to – by selecting/deselecting what you want to see in the ‘Show Markup’ dropdown menu. 

So whenever I’m about to start work on a text, I go to the Review tab to switch on Track Changes, and then go to Show Markup, where I untick ‘Insertions and Deletions’ and ‘Formatting’. I also recommend that, if a client gets back a text back from me which is heavily marked up, they read it through with ‘Insertions and Deletions’ and ‘Formatting’ unticked, so that they can see the text clearly (and so they don’t despair at the amount of red markings).

[image error]‘Insertions and Deletions’ and ‘Formatting’ unchecked

There is one idiosyncrasy of Track Changes to be aware of, and that is that if you copy and paste a text with tracked changes into a new document while you have Track Changes turned on, Word will automatically assume that you have agreed all the changes and so they will not show up as tracked in the new document. If you want to keep the tracked changes showing, so that you can review them later, or so that someone else can see them, you need to do the following (which may seem counter-intuitive):

Ensure Track Changes is turned OFF in the document you want to copy fromSelect the text you want to copyEnsure Track Changes is also turned OFF in the document you want to copy toPaste the text into the new documentThen turn Track Changes ON in the new document, and the tracked changes will duly appear.

In the autumn of last year I was commissioned to write a research paper on women in the City, from the Norman Conquest to 1950, during the whole of which period City women were often unseen (because not looked for). It was a fascinating, though daunting, project, & of course all I could do was examine the tip of the iceberg. But it’s a start, and you can download the result here: Recognition of Women in the City of London Research Paper.

Very good advice on editing from “Mrs Hawkins” in Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington:

‘When you are editing copy, Mrs Hawkins, what sort of things do you look for?’ said Howard Send. ‘Exclamation marks and italics used for emphasis,’ I said. ‘And I take them out.’ It was as good an answer as any. ‘Suppose the author was Aldous Huxley or Somerset Maugham?’ he said. I told him that if these were his authors he didn’t need a copy-editor.

Virginia Rounding: Author/editor/proofreader

A blackbird alone in the dying sun’s footlights

sings to a backdrop of indigo blue;

for the sound of its voice, for the sake of the singing,

it plays out the longest day of the year.

Perched on the rooftop, stop-out blackbird,

late home, carousing, careless of time,

emptying its throat till its heart is empty,

scattering the tune like stars in the street;

unnoticed by drivers cocooned in their vehicles,

by comfortable viewers with volume turned up:

only the walkers of dark hear this singing –

the carolling bird in summer’s midnight.

©Virginia Rounding, 1993

First published in Poetry Nottingham International, Autumn 1995

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