I know I'm branding myself a Luddite when I say I'm cheered that a number of publishers have ended their infatuation with the CD Rom.
Some technological innovations of the past twenty years have been a positive boom. The process, for instance, by which this column finds its way on to the page you're reading is made a lot easier (for me, anyway) by the invention of the modem, and I thoroughly agree with Leonard Bernstein's assertion that the arrival of the CD was the best new thing to happen in his lifetime.
But I remain old fashioned about reading and I believe that the best way to read a book is to, well, read a book. I've tried trawling through CDRoms of dictionaries and encyclopaedias, but the process irritates me, and I much prefer the ritual of taking books from the shelves and discovering what I want to find in that way.
So obviously do many others, which has led Dorling Kindersley (one of the main CD Rom publishers) to axe 50 of the 350 employees employed in its multimedia division. And the CD Rom departments of Marshall Cavendish, Penguin and HarperCollins have also retrenched.
This is not to say that CD Rom is on the way out (overall sales of CD Rom titles are rising), merely that it largely remains the toy of the computer hobbyist and that the publishers were wrong in thinking it would so seize the imagination of the general reader that we would all be peering at computer screens rather than turning pages. Long may page turning continue.
JUDGING from the letters column of this newspaper over the last couple of weeks, I seem to have incensed some readers with my comments about Bob Dylan's eligibility for the Nobel prize for literature.
These irate correspondents seem to have missed the point, wasn't disparaging Bob Dylan either as a songwriter or as a performer - indeed, I'm convinced that Highway Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding and Blood on the Tracks are among the small number of rock albums that have enduring potency and stature (in the twenty years since that last named album he seems to have given up the ghost creatively, but that's another argument altogether).
All I was saying was that the nomination of Dylan for the Nobel literature prize is ridiculous. He doesn't write literature, which is made from words; he writes songs, which are made from a combination of words and music. Now I know that there are Dylanologists out there who spend half their waking lives examining his lyrics and finding in them the meaning of life (and good luck to them), but that makes him no more eligible for a literature prize than Cole Porter would have been.
However, if the Nobel committee ever gets round to instituting a music prize, I'll have no objection if Bob Dylan is nominated. Hell, he might even win it: in the end such things often come down to a simple twist of fate, and, if so, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
MY father was born in Mitchelstown, Co Cork, in the early years oft he century, and he has vivid memories of being taken a few miles out to Bowen's Court at Christmas time, where the adults of the town were given a seasonal beverage and the children were treated to sweets and soft drinks.
Bowen's Court, alas, is no more, having been demolished by the Corkman who bought it in 1959, but it will always remain in the imaginations of those who love the work of its most famous inhabitant, Elizabeth Bowen, one of the finest novelists and short story writers of this century.
My father has always been pleased by Elizabeth Bowen's association with Mitchelstown, and in more recent decades he was also pleased to learn that another great short story writer, William Trevor, was born there (Elizabeth Bowen was actually born in Dublin).
I mention all this because next year the first Mitchelstown Writers Summer School will be celebrating the achievements of the town's two most famous writers. It will be held from May 30th to June 2nd, and in association with it the William Trevor Short Story Competition has been initiated.
The prize for the winner is £1,000, entries are now being accepted, and to qualify you have to be over eighteen and your short story (no more than 7,000 words) must be previously unpublished. The closing date for entries (which must be accompanied by £5) is December 13th next, and the person to whom you send your manuscript is William Fitzgibbon, Secretary, William Trevor Short Story Award, 24 Upper Cork Street, Mitchelstown, Co Cork.
The winner will be announced at a function in Mitchelstown next January.
IT's the season for book launches. At a packed reception in Temple Bar's The Ark, Brian Lynch spoke eloquently and affectingly about his former Evening Press colleague, Jack Hanna, and about Jack's wife Brighid and son Davoren. The occasion was the launch of Jack's book, The Friendship Tree (beautifully produced by New Island Books), which is subtitled "The Life and Poems of Davoren Hanna" but which in fact encompasses much more and with great feeling. The same publisher didn't have a launch for Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody? but that doesn't seem to have been necessary as the book sold out immediately in some shops. This, no doubt, was as a result of Nuala's Late, Late Show appearance, where she spoke very movingly about her family background and personal life.