Yes I said yes I will Yes

Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.

Everyone's bliss comes from different places.

For me, today, June 16th, Bloomsday, I've been transported into a state of bliss, listening to BBC Radio 4's dramatisation of James Joyce's Ulysses, which will continue in small packages of sheer delight right up until midnight.

How I love that book!

When I was at school, if you won the award for exceptional work over an academic year, you could choose a book for a prize, to be presented on Speech Day. As a pretentious child, I always asked for the book that might make me appear to be the very most intellectual. (Cringe!) One year it was War and Peace. I think I was about 13 when I asked for Ulysses. 

I tell you what, though, I read both from cover to cover. All 1400 pages of War and Peace. All 265,000 words of Ulysses.  And I loved them. I truly did. At first I didn't love Ulysses, because I was trying to read it as a novel, trying to work out what was happening, trying to analyse and compartmentalise.


But then I just lost myself in the language and let it all wash over me and round me and through me. There is poetry in every line. No matter what the subject matter of the line, it is poetry.


“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all...

Or, here he is in the bath...

“He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.”

I'll be downloading the dramatisation and it will soothe me to blissful sleep each night, so it will, I tell you.

Yes I said yes I will Yes.

I write like...someone with multiple personalities, apparently...

Yesterday, I came across this site. Forgive me if I'm late to the party since it was launched last year, but here it is:

The link is here - I'm sure you won't be able to resist racing straight over there. Not until you've read my blog...OF COURSE.

Anyway,  I Write Like is "a website created by Russian software programmer Dmitry Chestnykh, founder of software company Coding Robots. The site analyzes users' writing samples and, by looking for certain keywords, vocabulary, and style via a naive Bayes classifier, returns the name of a popular writer the sample most closely resembles."

Yeah, the good old naive Bayes classifier. Never be without one.

So...I put in my first sample  - an extract from my novel  Of Night And Light.

Fantastic! I write like Lewis Carroll. What more could a girl want? (A girl who writes fantasy stories for children set in a world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures.)

 Here's me visibly growing in stature at the very thought of it.

But, wait a minute...one of my characters is called Alice. I shall change the name of the character to Caroline. Now...I write like James Joyce. That to me is probably the ultimate accolade.

I could die happy now, but I have to go and spoil everything by putting in some other samples. Apparently, I also write like Chuck Palahniuk. (He wrote Fight Club) And sometimes I write like Arthur C Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) Notice - all of them are male...

What am I to learn from this?

1. That the site I Write Like is possibly a load of nonsense (but fun)
2. That, probably, the person I most write like is...Caroline Coxon

All ten of me.