The bloggy front page has its uses. But it may be time for a change to accommodate easier browsing and keep readers from having to scroll down the abyss of previous days’ postings to get at something worth a click. The new design (coming soon) lumps most of the material in summary form toward the top of the page so that a week’s worth of postings or so can be taken in at no more than one or two screens’ scroll. Many thanks to those who contributed suggestions when the prototype was in the shop. The new page will be up for good in a few days but you can access it here and leave your comments and criticism below, Halloscan allowing, or reach me by email here. The inside pages will be redesigned slightly as well, but not yet.
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
