Have decided to do a weekly blog. My writing is going slowly. I have been blocked out for a long time working on the crime thriller 'YELDON,' so have decided to leave that book and work on something else. This is a novel called 'DAY DOG,' I wrote a draft of this several years ago. The new version will be written in the first person. This will be the first time I have attempted such an approach. I am aware of many technical challenges writing in the first person so will have to see how it goes. I am trying to escape the awful sense of writing being a flog, a grind instead of something I look forward to every day. This is difficult. I have not experienced such a challenge for many years. Here is hoping that things change and that words begin to flow again.
Going down to sunny Yorkshire for a few days. Taking my computer with me to work on my present novel that has the working title of 'YELDON.' I have almost reached page 100 of its third draft but this has taken months to accomplish mainly because of recent bouts of ME when I can do no work at all.
How sad, worrying and disgusting is it to see the race to become the next President of the USA reach such a squalid level of debate.
Just to remind people about my last novel published on Kindle 'ROAD TO RIBBELHEAD,' an historical novel about the navvies who built the last great railway line in Britain.
There is a Mormon church near where we live and we often see young Mormon missionaries in the area. This morning I met and chatted with two of them, two young ladies, one from Germany, the other from the USA. I told them I had been to Salt Lake City which neither of them had yet visited. We talked about the different versions of religion. One of them understood this very well having a Muslim mother and a Catholic father. They told me how their Mormon religion put strict limitations on their lives and yet within such restrictions they found a great deal of freedom. We agree that lives needed some sort of shape. They were of course hoping to interest me more in their religion but I told them my interest in Christianity was purely historical, that you cannot understand European history without knowing as much about the Bible and Christianity as possible. On that note we shook hands and went our separate ways.
He was last night's Panorama target, such an easy target, the perfect capitalist, everything above board, everything legal and so clever leaving thousands unemployed and a massively leaking pension fund while Green lounges on his private yacht, one of the biggest in the world. But this is not really about him. It is about a system that allows such men as Green to survive and prosper. Teresa May thinks she can bring some sort of morality into Capitalism, thinks she can tinker enough that things might change a little. But the system will defy such attempts. It is too successful for too many very rich people. It is solid. It is the Establishment. It will resist all tinkering. The future will see many more Philip Greens unless something much more fundamental happens and sadly that might be a long time in coming while the majority of any country accept what is happening.
Reading a life of John Knox at the moment interspersed with listening to Schubert's 'Impromptus,' a strange mixture of history and music, the one dark, intense, constantly theological while the other is the light, almost plaintive sound of night time drawing rooms.
With ME I have several levels of concentration that starts with being able to read factual books, down to fiction and then when my brain cannot manage that I go onto the visual, TV, Amazon Prime, Netflix and then when even that is not possible I listen to music and after that nada.
Forty years ago I listened to a programme and about the fears people had about genetic engineering. The programme focused on the epilepsy of Dostoyevsky and whether in the future such a genius as Dostoyevsky would be allowed to exist when genetic engineering could take out the possibility of anyone ever having epilepsy in the future. That future is now with us. Choice seems to be everything. Medical science wants to give mothers every possible choice by screening their babies for every possible malfunction and then giving them the decision whether to terminate the pregnancy or not. The personal and moving documentary by the actor Sally Philips last night on BBC2 emphasised one aspect of that choice when she explored the depressing future for Down Syndrome babies. In Iceland there is a 100% termination rate of Down Syndrome babies. In California there are scientists who now have a complete genetic picture of a foetus, who can predict so much about each possible life. The next stage will be to not only screen out imperfections but to start changing the genetic makeup of a foetus to insure it becomes what the parents want, the perfect baby, healthy, possible blonde, blue eyed, tall, intelligent etc etc. The irony is that such perfect babies will be born into an imperfect world which right at the start will begin to undermine and challenge such inbuilt perfections. There are no guarantees. There never can be. Of course parents will want the best for their future children but whatever the scientists do they will not be able to completely safeguard their children growing up in a world that becomes minute by minute more complex, more pressurising, messy, threatening, competitive etc etc. Now sadly it appears the chances of a Dostoyevsky being born are very slim. He was too different. That is not what people want and they will be given the opportunity to avoid any such differences. Of course absolutely normal is best.
A long title. A long subject and yesterday a large coincidence. In the afternoon I go to see the movie 'Free State of Jones,' one well worth going to see, about one man's attempt to help negroes after the Civil War in any way he could. Then at 9.00pm we have Neil Oliver's documentary into how Scottish settlers first in Virginia and then all other the other Southern states had a large effect on the growth of cotton plantations and slavery. After the Civil War defeat there were others in the South who with the Ku Klux Klan decided to continue the persecution of blacks who were now supposedly free. Amazingly the novels of Sir Walter Scott were a large influence on how Southerners not only saw themselves buy even how they spoke to each other. The KKK saw themselves as Scott's knights of old. The Scottish plantation owners saw themselves as traditional Lairds ruling their slave based domains. And of course the BBC documentary emphasised that the huge problem of racism in the USA is still endemic. Like the madness of so many guns in America racism is the cancer still eating away at the democratic heart of the country.
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