blogs in the fog: some Christmas crackers

I pinched this very foggy picture from the ever-delightful Non-Working Monkey, and hope soon to have taken one of my own.

The reason I can do that is that the fog (soon to be known as the Great Fog of 2006) is still with us. Fab East End blogger Diamond Geezer has written a Christmas tribute to it which is much the better for being seen, rather than just quoted from; but, as a taster, here's the first bit:

O little town of London Heathrow
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and endless fog
No silent planes go by
Yet in thy terminals endureth
An everlasting plight
The suitcased hordes from flights abroad
Are grounded in thee to-night

The wonderful Londonist has also paid tribute to our current prevailing weather conditions, pointing out that that quintessential Londoner Charles Dickens already did as much as can be done for fog. I'm just plain embarrassed not to have thought of this one.

Furthermore, the Londonist has linked to a quintessential game for Londoners: a "make your own Standard headline" website. You can keep playing: it's in my "things to make and do" list, blog right.

Ellis Sharp over at The Sharp Side just keeps on warming the cockles of my heart. It's hard to know which of his recent posts to quote from - the joy just goes on and on. But I'll start with the John Updike one, which goes in early with a graphic account of Updike's physical disgust towards women (I can justify this: in Updike, women are all about carnality just as hapless married blokes are about the spiritual quest. Thus, his corporeal disgust must be personified by the fair sex, etc etc...):

It’s good to see an author of John Updike’s stature reviving one of V.I. Lenin’s favourite nouns, as in this complaint about the modernisation of Boston’s North Station:

A sickening smell of hot cheese wafts everywhere from a pizzeria that has been installed at the end where the cretins who attend sporting events in Fleet Center might be tempted to coat their guts with fat and gluten.

Worse, this is an age in which young women blow bubble gum:

In this place, for decades a daily station of my pilgrimage, the young woman unthinkingly showed me her pink bubble, and then wolfed it back, seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity.

There’s a lot about corporeality and disgust in Toward the End of Time (1997)...

Ellis goes on to describe the novel, which he likes much more than it sounds as if I would, ending with this fantabulous conclusion. I say fantabulous because it has just added something to the way I think about Updike, even though I don't think I agree with the Sharp assessment of the book itself:

The deer which annoys the wife by eating plants in her garden is killed, its corpse graphically attended to, but human death is not addressed – more drowned out by noise, by wordiness, blanked and evaded by an omnipresent glitter.

But wait! There's more! You just have to read his blog. The Sharp Side offers no space for comments and lists no email address. You just have to know the guy. Which I don't. So, Ellis - if you're reading this! Ahem! (Which noun was it?)

In the midst of all the kerfuffle (or "vicious turf war") about who's more "real," blog reviewers or newspaper ones, this Wednesday a self-published children's author did an astonishing thing. He asked for his book to be taken off the amazon.com listings. George Walker's book, Tales From an Airfield, has appeared on amazon's listings without consent from him as either author or publisher. Quite rightly, Walker says that this is to the detriment of independent bookshops, which were already selling it just fine. Further, he says: "What they [amazon] are actually doing is getting the independents to do their market research."

Kind of like Starbucks, then! Very interesting.

And amazon's response? They now list the book as being "out of print or unavailable from the publisher." Nice, eh?

Read the article here.


**NOTE: the links issue with the previous post applies to this one too, which used to be part of the last one. I moved that to its own space for other, and equally boring, formatting reasons, which you can see below.