Do Coffee Granules have feelings?

Great post over at Normblog, quoting a book review by Gerard Alexander. The book? Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein by Rebecca Weisser. You only need basic French to understand that the translation is "The Black Book of Saddam Hussein".

Whatever could she be writing about? How he loved puppies and changed nappies uncomplainingly?

This bit jumped out at me:

"The soft bigotry here is not of low expectations but of no expectations. This suggests that only Westerners have moral agency."
Norm also writes about the current fatigue in the blogosphere - I've noticed it, you've noticed it, everyone I like who blogs seems to have run out of steam a little bit.

Here's my take on it.

1. My own case - I'm happy these days, really blindingly happy some days. It's kind of enervating though. I can sit happily staring off into space and running happy mental videos over and over.

2. I'm rather complacent since attending the Milblog Conference. Some amazing people are out there, writing well and passionately about the things I care about. They beat me hands down for knowledge and writing ability.

3. The really dumb people just keep doing dumb things and it's gotten boring. Ok this sounds really funny but even the media only hung out for half an hour.

4. I think if you are grumpy and fresh to a subject you have a lot of energy for writing.

When I first started studying Michael Collins, it was subversive and anti-establishment to do so. The Dublin archives were poorly indexed and you could find little treasures without much effort. So many of the best books on the subject were out of print.

Now the only book that is still out of print is the volume of the Treaty Talks - Debate on the Treaty Between Great Britain and Ireland signed in London on the 6th December 1921.

My beaten up, stained copy cost £125/$225 seven years ago. The most dramatic aspect of the treaty talks in my book? No one complained about partition. That's probably why the Irish Government bookstore hasn't republished it, although they did republish the minutes of the proscribed Dail meetings of 1919 to 1921. I've got a pristine copy of that from five years ago.

I started my blog last June - wow, it's been a year now. Did it to let off steam and would leap out of bed in the morning to write what I was thinking or run home from an evening out to write up my thoughts. Blog as lover, or obsession, anyway, probably healthy to get it all out, right?

So here I am, experiencing the lighter side of life, laughing at ridiculous things all the time, filled with 'the joys of spring'.

If the poets are right about that, isn't 'gather ye rosebuds' also relevant too? So I'm off, stormy weather today but ""hope springs eternal" as some would say.