Well, the date was with my blog but I’m certainly late. I like to publish on a Monday and today is Tuesday. So I’m sitting here while the Prague Cello Quartet sits in a library somewhere and plays Roxanne by The Police and pretending to write something useful. I could write about the latest book I finished or I could leave that until next week. It’s a translation of Diary of a Madman and other stories by Gogol, I found it both amusing and confusing in the one story. If I leave it till next week it gives me another week to finish my current book, much needed time as it’s over 1,200 pages.
So, today, I ramble.
I’ve picked up a short term casual job. It’s only scanning in some archival material for a genealogical association. I can’t say I’m engaged with it, but it’s work and needs doing. I’ve been given two boxes of papers. It’s fairly easy work as the papers are mostly flat and all A4. The hard part is the naming convention. With my scanning to date I’ve created my own naming convention and if I’ve stuffed up I’ll figure it out later. With this work I’ve been given a naming convention and it’s confusing me completely. Instead of looking at the document as a whole and calling the file something logical, I’m having to pull information out of the first couple of pages. It’s making me think in a whole new way and I can only have music while I process the images.
What this job is also making me think about is some kind of ongoing scanning of archival material work for me. In order to give people some idea of how I work with my lovely scanner I’m thinking of making some videos of the work process. The first part of that would be preparing some fake documents. I don’t fancy having someone else’s documents showing up in my video for privacy reasons. As we still have some documents left over from Nullus Anxietas 7: The Australian Discworld Convention I’m considering using some of those. The information in these documents wouldn’t affect any privacy issues and might give people food for thought about how good the conventions are.
Does this mean I’m moving into a new phase of my working life? Possibly, but after today I’m going to make sure it doesn’t affect my reading and blogging life. You’ve all been such a huge part of my life and you’ve become essential to my well being. Reading books and writing about what they mean to me has changed my life in so many ways I can’t imagine doing without. I’ve only been writing this blog since April 2009, not a long time as things go. But my blog has been going longer than many other book blogs in Australia, I only know a couple of people who have been going longer than me.
Apart from apologising for not publishing on a Monday I had no idea where this article was going to go. Now I’m watching the Prague Cello Quartet play Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen in a different library. There was one video that made me really uncomfortable and I now feel the need to see where Prague is with its Jewish inhabitants and the Holocaust. Thus bringing my brain on another segue. My synagogue has a Czech Scroll, a Torah Scroll from from one of the Czech Memorial Sifre Torah collection. These were treasures collected in Prague during Nazi occupation from desolated Jewish communities in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. They came under the control of the Czechoslovak Government before being sent to the Westminster Synagogue in 1964. Some of them have been dispersed to communities around the world to be cared for and possibly used.
And now I must stop rambling and move onto some work. Next week I’ll write about Gogol and how he made me feel. I’ll also write about the translator, without translators I’d miss out on vast bodies of writing because I have only English.
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