Day: May 8, 2003

Categories
RDF

The Enron executive who came in from the cold

It’s time for me to refocus back on the RDF Poetry Finder, and to that end I made a trip to my favorite place tonight — my local library. Among the prizes brought home are Folk Poetics: A Sociosemiotic Study of Yoruba Trickster Tales by Ropo Sekoni; Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, and John Le Carré’s newest (for me that is), The Constant Gardener

I used to buy all the new Le Carré book’s for my father, who is a huge fan of his. I’d then borrow the books from my Dad to read, though this type of political suspense/thriller isn’t necessarily my favorite type of book. Still, I can admire a way with the written word, which Le Carré definitely has.

When I spotted The Constant Gardener, I checked the flyleaf to see what it was about. I was curious as to who could possibly be the new type of villain since so many of Le Carré’s stock and trade antagonists have turned out to be paper tigers. According to the cover:

 

A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, Le Carré portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism.

 

Oh my. Le Carré’s finally found a villain he can sink his teeth into and hold on for the rest of his career — western capitalism. Of course I had to bring the book home.

The Folk Poetics book covers Trickster from an African perspective and looks to be an effective blend of story and analysis, thorough but possibly a bit dry. As I was checking it out, I found that it also isn’t a popular book — it’s been in the St. Louis library system since 1994, but I’m the first person to have checked it out. It’s an old new book, with crispy, limp, dusty, fresh, bright, faded pages.

Anyway, back to RDF and the Poetry Finder now that the technician’s been silent, and the poets have had a chance to chat in my comments.

Categories
RDF

The Enron executive who came in from the cold

It’s time for me to refocus back on the RDF Poetry Finder, and to that end I made a trip to my favorite place tonight — my local library. Among the prizes brought home are Folk Poetics: A Sociosemiotic Study of Yoruba Trickster Tales by Ropo Sekoni; Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, and John Le Carré’s newest (for me that is), The Constant Gardener

I used to buy all the new Le Carré book’s for my father, who is a huge fan of his. I’d then borrow the books from my Dad to read, though this type of political suspense/thriller isn’t necessarily my favorite type of book. Still, I can admire a way with the written word, which Le Carré definitely has.

When I spotted The Constant Gardener, I checked the flyleaf to see what it was about. I was curious as to who could possibly be the new type of villain since so many of Le Carré’s stock and trade antagonists have turned out to be paper tigers. According to the cover:

 

A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, Le Carré portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism.

 

Oh my. Le Carré’s finally found a villain he can sink his teeth into and hold on for the rest of his career — western capitalism. Of course I had to bring the book home.

The Folk Poetics book covers Trickster from an African perspective and looks to be an effective blend of story and analysis, thorough but possibly a bit dry. As I was checking it out, I found that it also isn’t a popular book — it’s been in the St. Louis library system since 1994, but I’m the first person to have checked it out. It’s an old new book, with crispy, limp, dusty, fresh, bright, faded pages.

Anyway, back to RDF and the Poetry Finder now that the technician’s been silent, and the poets have had a chance to chat in my comments.

Categories
Weblogging

Trackback for the non-trackback enabled

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I created a Trackback form for pinging my weblog posts for those people who aren’t using Movable Type or some other Trackback enabled weblog tool (or don’t have a Trackback stand alone server) but who want to send a ping to the post.

In the main page, next to the Trackback counter is the link for the form — just click it and in the form page that opens, fill in your post’s information and push the submit button. In the individual pages, the Trackback form is next to the Trackback title in the appropriate section of the page.

Hopefully other Trackback enabled weblogs will provide this type of form for their own posts, as a courtesy not only for those who are kind enough to reference our posts in their own weblogs (or in an email list, wiki, or web site), but also for our readers so they can see everyone who is talking about the post.

A text version of my form page is here. All that you need is to change the look. If you don’t have PHP at your site, you’ll also need to change the process that pulls the Trackback identifier from the URL when the form is accessed.

Simple technical change. Lots of payback. Hopefully a minimum of abuse, but feel free to play with it a bit — I can delete test trackbacks today.

Enjoy.