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Questionnaire

August 3 Comments

For three years I published and co-edited (as fiction editor) an online journal of literature. Lately I’ve been feeling uninvolved in the literary community, and I’m searching for ways to connect. I’m considering relaunching the journal. In the past we published fiction and poetry. If I did decide to relaunch it, I would publish only fiction. My question is this: would you be interested in reading such a journal? Would you submit to such a journal (on the understanding that I couldn’t pay you)? Would you be willing to post about such a journal on your blog? If yes to any of these, would you be willing to donate money (I’m thinking about micro-donations, a dollar here or there), with the understanding that any donations would go exclusively to the hosting bill? Why (or why not—this last question being an addendum to any and all of the above)? Please leave… Continue Reading →

The Long Read: The Anatomy of Melancholy

August Leave a Comment

I’m inaugurating a new reading project for vestige.org. It will be independent of Reading 2008 and subsequent related projects. It’s called The Long Read. There are a number of books in my stack that I’ve wanted to read for years, but have put off because they are daunting either intellectually or by virtue of their extreme length (or both). There aren’t many of these books, but they could take months or perhaps even a full year to read and therefore don’t fit well into my Reading 2008 project, nor my policy of reading only one book at a time. I’m talking about books like The Anatomy of Melancholy or In Search of Lost Time. What I propose is this: alongside my regular reading, I will read one of these long, daunting books. Rather than posting a single review after reading the book, I will post periodic reports, including interesting quotations… Continue Reading →

Comments Are Fixed

August Leave a Comment

The problem with the comments has been fixed. Because I’m quick like that. If you’ve previously visited individual entry pages on vestige.org, it would be a could idea to do a refresh before you write your comments, as the problem was with a faulty template, the data for which might still be in your cache (and for some reason still affects the comments—wonders never cease).

Comments Problem

August 1 Comment

It has come to my attention that there is yet another problem with the commenting system (MovableType seems to fail more or less at random, after working properly without issue for months or years at a stretch), and every single comment is now appearing on this entry, no matter what entry the poster actually intended to comment on. I won’t have time until later tonight, or possibly tomorrow, but I hope to have it corrected quickly.

Email Problems

August Leave a Comment

Anyone who may have tried to contact me via email over the last twenty-four hours more than likely found that they could not. Due to some inbox weirdness, I was able to send but not receive email until early this afternoon. All the messages I was sent during this period were lost; you will have to send them again. The problem seems to have been resolved, so things should go back to normal. Thanks for your patience.

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have A Policy

August Leave a Comment

After sitting on the idea for a couple of months, discussions like this one have finally forced me to draft a book review policy. It’s kind of wordy, but I think it covers everything I wanted to say. If I find that I need to make some adjustments later on, I’ll post about it here. So: authors, publishers and publicists, if you have a book that you’d like me to review, get the skinny here. I’d love to hear from you.

Real Simple Syndication (RSS)

August Leave a Comment

It was brought to my attention earlier today that my RSS feed has been acting up. In the sense that it hasn’t been working. It turns out that this is probably my fault; I reconfigured some things the last time I updated my MovableType installation (not recently, but I guess this has been going on for a while), and it looks like that broke the RSS feed. The old RSS feed was at https://vestige.org/index.rdf; this no longer works, and I can’t figure out how to make it work. But it turns out that if you point your feed reader to https://vestige.org/index.xml, everything will work just fine (although I haven’t done anything to the template, so it probably won’t look very pretty in your reader—if that sort of thing is even an issue; I don’t really know much about RSS, as I don’t use it myself). Sorry about the mix up.

Notice Anything Different?

August Leave a Comment

After eight consecutive hours of sweating over code, I’ve managed to not only give the old homestead a fresh coat of paint, but I’ve finally made it properly functional again. There’s a search box on the right, which I removed four years ago after it broke and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. It works again. I’ve updated my links, tweaked the about page (including the addition of my favourite photo of myself), and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you’ll find a new copyright notice and the very best renovation, pagination! You can now actually page back through previous entries (and then forward again, if you’re so inclined), a feature which was long overdue. The category archives are also paginated, so you won’t have to scroll through one single monstrous page when you check those out. I’ve also included more meta-data on each… Continue Reading →

Point of Order

August Leave a Comment

Regular readers (or even readers who have read none of this site except the last post) will know that I’m currently reading Steven Heighton’s Flight Paths of the Emperor, and should be done with it in the next day or so. When I am finished with that, I will begin reading Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, which arrived in the mail this morning. I was given the book so that I would write a short review to be published elsewhere, and as such I don’t want to post a full review here until after the short one has been published in that venue, which will not be until October at the earliest. So: though it will actually be book #55 for the year, my review will have it labeled as #56 or more likely #57. This may not be a particularly important detail to most of you, but it’s important to me… Continue Reading →

Sweet Relief

August Leave a Comment

The flood damage is nearly all cleaned up now (my parents gave me a dehumidifier as an early birthday present, and it now ranks as probably the second best birthday gift I’ve ever received) and several of my lost books have been replaced, so posting should resume regularly in the next day or so. The good news, I guess, is that I’m only two books behind, so it shouldn’t be too much work to catch up. I’m not generally “that sort of reader”, but I am kind of disappointed that I will now have a crisp, new copy of Ulysses on my bookshelf instead of the well-used and much loved copy I had before. The old copy was as much a kind of trophy as it was a book that I read an enjoyed. Happily I don’t fall into the books-as-trophies category too often (the only other two examples I… Continue Reading →