Tony > Recent Status Updates

This was Hannah More's 'Betty Brown, the St Giles’s Orange Girl: with Some Account of Mrs Sponge, the Money Lender'. What is it with the 18th century and long titles. This was a moral tale about how the poor are exploited and how they can save themselves by good behaviour, Church going, and cutting out drinking. It is patronising as hell. More was an evangelical. And it shows.

Having finished 'Beyond Lies Wub' by Philip K Dick as the short story part of the Ray Bradbury Reading Project I am moving on to this for the next 32 days - starting tomorrow. I have read four of the stories already when I was dipping in and out of different collection plus I've read 'Silver Blaze' several times in my Sherlock Holmes fanboyness.

One of the poems in my reading today ends with the line "Thy loves the bloom no canker worm destroys" and I wonder if it is an echo (or a response) to Blake's 'The Sick Rose', which was written before the Clare poem.

Read 'On Marx and History'. I actually made a real effort to have a conversation with the text on this one: notes, underlining, questions and I wrote a little 'What I Learned from This' in the nice space left at the end of the chapter.

Today's story 'The Meddler'. You could see where this one was going pretty early on. It has a similar theme to The Skull from earlier. Time travel is a dangerous thing.

The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford is a fun story. The final line is funny.

Two really good stories: Expendable, which is short and has a fab ending and The Variable Man.

Finished Chapter 2: Spanish Literature and Modernity. Lots of interesting stuff about the fluidity of identity in early Spanish literature. Lots more books that I'd like to read but will probably find aren't easily available in English.

The Preserving Machine - aka be careful what you wish for - I really liked this one.

First chapter is about what constitutes 'Spanish' literature and when it began - looking back to pre-unified Spain, to Islamic and Jewish Andalusi, - and the different languages within Spain - Catalan and Basque etc - and then talking about Spanish exiles who wrote most of their work abroad sometimes not even in Spanish. There's a long list of Spanish writers I've not heard of so that's a rabbit hole for the future

This story was 'The Infinities' aka the one with the Guinea Pigs.