Life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of exemporanea

They were the same height in real life.

You'd have to be pretty unkind not to wish an engaged couple all the best in their future life. But I have this wierd feeling about this new royal engagement that, like jokes about the death of a much-loved family pet, it's just a bit too soon. I think that for my generation Princess Diana was a pretty defining figure. I was five when they got engaged, so it didn't strike me until much later just how young she was. I didn't quite understand all the fuss about the picture where you could see her legs through her dress, because I thought, though I was prepared to be told I was wrong, that everyone has legs. I was angry when my mother explained that in order to make Charles look taller than Diana for official pictures like the ones on the stamps, Charles had to stand on a box. I thought that was stupid. Then as I grew up, things got worse and worse for Diana, as revelations got into the press about how she wasn't loved, and we found out that Prince Charles's idea of sexy talk with his mistress involved tampons, and that we as a nation liked to eavesdrop on Prince Charles talking about tampons with his mistress. None of us were coming out of this well. I read Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love as a teenager and realised that Di was now a Bolter. The Martin Bashir interview was while I was an undergraduate, and a couple of us watched it with my Director of Studies. It was fascinating and upsetting, an early lesson in how, just by sitting still with our eyes open, we can be implicated in something not quite right, a sort of accessory to someone's mental damage. And then she died, the summer I graduated and turned 21. A lot of people are very rude about how upset the country was, which annoys me. You can criticise the illogicality of it only if you have never cried at the end of a book or a film (and if you've not ever cried at a book or a film then frankly you're a lot wierder than the people who cried for Diana). It was a very sad story; a teenage girl presented with the supreme fairy-tale happy ending, only to realise that her husband doesn't love her and has married for dynastic reasons, sending her on an increasingly frenetic hunt for love. And the two poor boys, already doomed to mental disfunction by the accident of birth, now had no mother. It's like the whole country had been watching Bambi together for the last fifteen years, and suddenly wolves leapt out and slaughtered Bambi's mother, and they were our wolves -- and come to think of it we had been talking to them recently about the delicious taste of venison.
Having said which, the phenomenon still involved an element of wanting to be part of a phenomenon. The idea of a nation all sharing a feeling was quite an appealing one. There was a candle-lit vigil on Parker's Piece, I think on the eve of her funeral. I went along in a Chuck Palahniuk-ish way to see what it was like to feel the same thing as other people, to participate in a national moment. But when I got there I got the impression that most people had gone with the same motive, and that people who actually had the feeling were in short supply. Still, to stand quietly on Parker's Piece with a candle while thinking about the transience of life is not such a bad way to spend time.
Poor old Princess Diana. I was never a girly girl who wanted to be a princess, but if you'd decided slowly to teach a generation of primary school children that fairy tale endings are a fatuous and dangerous concept, then you couldn't have gone about it better. You can't really ask us to suspend disbelief again now, even if Kate Middleton does seem like a tougher kind of girl.  There are several reasons why I am not that keen on the Royal Family, but if I had to pick just one, I'd say that I'm a republican because I think it's rude to stare.

Anyway, here's an old polaroid I found of me winning first prize for fancy dress at a local Royal Wedding fete in 1981.  My mother had turned me into a wedding cake with the help of cardboard boxes.  The total number of entrants in this class was one.  My prize, a blue tin with the royal couple on the front, was discovered by me to have contained fruit jellies only after said sweets had all been eaten by others.  You can't really tell, but in this picture I am crying because everyone is looking at me.

Forgiveness and 90s pop acts

As I write this Take That are standing on the X Factor stage, performing as a reunited five-piece group, and I am feeling slightly emotional. They probably should have stayed a four-piece, without Robbie. He's likely to flake out at some point in his large-pupilled dazed Bez-like way; not to mention that he's said some unpleasant things. But still they took him back. It's like the parable of the prodigal son in man band form.

You'll momentarily forget all your problems

In case you haven't come across it, here is Harry Hill's Little Internet Show. I think I'm going to save them up for when I feel in need of a tonic. They should make a longer version of the theme tune, for cheery times.

Instead of moaning about my novel

I do think there's some great female solo artist pop around at the moment. It's helping me to novel with its up-tempo energy. (Novelling mood-swings update: today I am sad face.) I blogged the Saturday's video before, and I like the Cheryl Cole song even if it's a bit feverish and I don't know what she's doing with those wierd puttee things on her legs. Rihanna ("RiRi") has a good song out too. Here is Nicole Scherzinger trying to do Toxic and doing pretty well.

Although I do disapprove of all Pussycat Dolls on principle. I am on record about how they remind me of the sexy lapdog in Pynchon's Against the Day.

I do love the way that all pop songs these days start with someone, usually the "feat." rap artist, shouting the names of all participants over the intro. If they had done this in my youth then it would have been much easier to tape songs off of the radio. Go RedOne!

Mangelwurzels

Also I forgot to say that the field with the new lambs in it was scattered with mangelwurzels almost as big as the lambs. This is to supplement the ewes' diet since the grazing isn't great at this time of year. You have to love somewhere which has a genuine use for mangelwurzels.

Deaven

The hunt are out again. I can see them from my window as I type, and I can hear the horns blowing. They do make an excellent sight. I can see the hounds casting around an old barn a couple of hundred yards away. When I was doing my PhD I used to go riding at a place just outside Cambridge called Haggis Farm, which was right next to where the Trinity Foot Beagle hounds are kept. I used to ride a horse called Parker, who was quite young and had been brought over from Ireland, where of course he had hunted a lot. When they called the hounds to their food with a hunting horn Parker would prick his ears up and his head would go high and he would flare his nostrils out very excitedly. Lots of horses do this in their fields when the hunt goes past. Poor old Parker. He was a bit too big for a riding school horse, with a long stride, and they didn't have much hacking round there. Haggis Farm has since become a polo school, and he's certainly no polo pony, so hopefully they've sold him on and he gets to shake his legs out a bit more now. He's the only horse who has actually ever fallen over with me on top. Falling off a horse is one thing, but a horse falling right over when you're riding him is pretty disconcerting. It amazes me now that I ever had the courage to ignore my bruises, get back on a horse which has just fallen over, tell him not to be so silly and put him again to the jump he didn't like. He was fine, by the way, we did check that first. It was the smallest jump ever, which may have been what wrongfooted him.

Anyway after writing that paragraph I just went out to get a better look at the hunt. When I was a kid we used to follow the hunt on foot on Boxing Day. My parents' most recent field is called Siding Hill, and it's really only half a field. The other half was bought by a man who earned his money shearing, and he calls it "Sheargraft Farm". If you want to farm and don't have land then I think it's a pretty common route to spend a few years as an itinerant shearer, maybe in New Zealand, while you save up. He keeps sheep there and he still shears. My mum is hoping that when they eventually sell up he'll buy the other half of the field and it will be back together again. There's a footpath that goes over across the fields, first in our bit then in his, so I went up that. I could see at least thirty horses with the hunt, riding across the next door field which is stubble from wheat. Some of them were doing the most fantastic dressage movements, they were so excited, beautiful passages and canter pirhouettes. Oh how I wish I had ever been a good enough rider to hunt. When a horse is excited like that it's like holding a bow in a drawn arrow, and you just release them and you're both away. It's utterly glorious. But the great surprise was that the Sheargraft Farm part of the field was full of lambs! I walked across that footpath the day before yesterday on my way back from the bus stop in Uffculme, and then the field only contained broad-beamed sheep. And now there are loads of tiny lambs, sitting bleating with their little legs tucked under them, and still with long tails. I did not pick any of them up -- this is the definition of self-control.

If you read this blog and haven't already gathered, I love Devon. It's not all pastoral quietude -- some of it's quite hard. Is it OK to kill foxes with dogs? (Though they are probably drag-hunting because who wants the legal hassle.) What about the little rubber bands on those lambs' tails, put there to constrict the circulation so that the tails will fall off before long? What about keeping lambs in a field with a footpath? When I was a kid I knew very well that if any of our dogs worried sheep then they would be shot. I still love this place though. I love the fact if I wanted to keep a horse then it would probably cost me less than keeping a car, especially if, like many people round here, I didn't have it shod. I love that even on the motorway you get casual views down into little valleys that shift round you as you pass. I love the way it's noisy with noise not made by humans, and stinky with non-human smells. I love that the man whose wife sometimes grazes her cobs in one of our fields collects up the horse dung and barters it with someone in his office for old comedy DVDs. Even the fact that personalised number-plates are still considered a form of wit in these parts has a certain charm. (One of the local farm vets has one that reads M005 VET, e.g. moo's vet.) Now if there were just some way of making a living here...

Twenty thousand badly-chosen words later

Is it bad luck to speak too soon?  Does pride come before a fall?  Is it inadvisable to count your chickens before said chickens are hatched?  Because so far I am blowing NaNoWriMo out of the water!  It is less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels!  Never mind the quality feel the width (as the bishop said to the actress or, in East Anglia, as the art teacher said to the gardener).  Let's celebrate, not at all prematurely, with Alan Partridge:

Eat my goal!  (New Partridge here.)

I've sort of got over the way that reading it back makes me wince, and how totally it sounds like it was translated from Latin by someone who doesn't quite understand Latin.  I don't care that roughly half of the characters have a claim to be renamed Basil Exposition.  Or that everyone has very similar names (which is after all the Anglo-Saxons' fault with their stupid names).  And yesterday, when I needed some evidence for my detective to absorb, I just wrote "PUT EVIDENCE HERE" and moved on.  I feel a bit like a primary school kid who has decided to invent an amazing new colour by mixing lots of other colours and hasn't yet realised that when you mix loads of colours you get brown.  Or who doesn't care because brown is a colour too!  Hurray for not worrying and just enjoying yourself!  This must be what it's like to be Wagner.

Hoot La

My father has just got back from plant-hunting in Arunachal Pradesh, the bit of India that's further east than Bangladesh.  They went right to the eastern end, between Tibet and Burma.  My father was, at 60, one of the younger members of the group.  Before he went my mother kept making dark references to Last of the Summer Wine, which made every one of us who heard her think of them all careering down the Himalayas in bath tubs...

Anyway, plant-hunters are a tougher bunch than most of us.  They travelled all day on foot but often got no further than about a mile, not just because of the extremely sloping ground, but because there were almost no paths except for hunters' tracks, and they had to hack their way through the forest.  Most nights there was no flat land to put their tents on, and apparently the bearers would cut a small shelf into the muddy slope, and pile up bits of vegetation at the other end, and they'd just try not to move too much in the night in case the tent started sliding down the mountainside in the mud.  They went to a place called Hawaii, and a place called Hoot La.  "What a great name for a place," I said to one of the people who went with my dad.  "Well Hoot was very nice," he said, "but not so much the La."  La means pass, apparently, like Shangri La.  Their bearers were Adi, though they called themselves Abor, my dad says, which was originally an ethnic slur but which they are now adopting for themselves.  He gave me an Adi scarf which one of the bearers gave him when they left.  It has proper hand-made flaws in the weaving, and I like it.  Also it smells of rancid yak butter.  (If you are wiser than me you will never try authentic Tibetan tea with rancid yak butter, but some years ago my dad made it for us all at Christmas with such an air of puppyish enthusiasm that we all of us suspended our better judgements and gave it a go.)  I may nick some of my father's photos of Arunachal Pradesh and post them, if they're good. The problem is that most of them will be of rhododendrons.

In noveling news, I'm still perversely enjoying the terrible terribleness of my work, and every dull sentence and wooden piece of dialogue is filling me with a sort of righteous anger.  Perhaps I like the way it vindicates my hitherto novelling-free existence...  Though I did write quite a lot of one when I was fourteen.  It was called "The Rose and the Thorn" and had its own bright orange binder on which I drew a rose in permanent marker.  It sort of tailed to an end when I realised that the hero was an arsehole.  Adolescence -- such a magical time.

Hating the writing

We're only just twenty hours into the NaNoWriMo novel-writing challenge, and six hours of that I spent asleep.  Somehow, though, I am already sick to the back teeth of my grindingly dull and neck-breakingly pedestrian novel.  I really really hate it.  I'm determined to finish it out of spite.

This feeling is oddly comfortable.  I wonder if my brain was permanently bent out of shape by the whole PhD thing?  When you've hated something that much for so long it would probably make a mark on your psyche.  And I do have this odd feeling that nothing I've done since then has really counted (though in the intermediary years I have written a friendly book and a scholarly book, been a fellow of an august body of scholars, lived in Italy, etc etc, so I haven't really done nothing).

I'm trying to get a good chunk done today anyway, so that I can hate it on a more secure basis.

I like Putin's new Siberia survivor pictures.  If it weren't for the sunglasses it could be the start of the People's Act of Love.  If you haven't read the People's Act of Love you are a fool to yourself.

And I like that Shakespear's Sister is at no. 8 on the itunes chart after Cher's rendition of Stay on Saturday.  Itunes says I have now downloaded 500 tracks from them.  This is the 500th::

Some useful advice about the face

NaNoWriMo starts at midnight tonight.  I have put a word-count device in the sidebar of this blog, but I may not post much in November.  Or I may give up on the novel and post loads.  Or I may give up on novelling and be too ashamed to post anything.  Who can tell?  I've got quite a lot of other stuff I've got to get done too.

For those cultivating moustaches this November, watch how my great-great-grandfather Samuel Symons did it.  It may have taken him more than a month, but here he is as a clean-shaven bridegroom circa 1877:

and here he is in later life, with a flourishing face shelf.

You'll immediately spot the pitfall: try not to let your eye do that wierd thing.  Is it a stye?  Is it the result of some accident?  Or of trying to bring up eleven children in a three-room house on a shipwright's salary?  (For all I know shipwrights were paid loads, and the census suggests that he managed to apprentice them all off at age 13, which can't have been cheap to arrange.)  Anyhow Eliza, his very poised eighteen-year-old bride, wore the years better:

I am smelly and ill and I need pudding

Cows eat grass and from it they produce poo and milk.  I have just been spat at thoroughly by an alpaca.  When alpacas spit they use the semi-digested grass which they would otherwise chew as cud and reswallow.  I can testify that it smells of rancid milk with a hint of poo.  So that's what I smell like now.

It wasn't the alpaca's fault as such, he was scared.  Though it was stupid of him to be scared given that we were only moving them to some better grazing.

Anyway I also have a nasty cold, the sort that gets into your head and makes you feel vague and miserable, so that when you can't get to sleep because of your bunged-up nose you lie awake remembering all the unpleasant things you've ever done in your life, especially things from primary school which you ought to have forgotten by now.  I have lost interest in everything, even my kindle, and can't remember what I do for fun.  In short, I feel miserable, and I smell so bad that even I can smell me.

It's in times like these that I turn to the internet in hope of solace.  This advert for super-size Japanese pudding is the only thing that is making me feel human right now.  I'm going to watch it a few times on repeat to garner enough energy to take a shower.

What happens in November

This year I am doing NaNoWriMo.  The first rule of NaNoWriMo is, you must talk about NaNoWriMo.  Actually the first rule is that you have to write a 50 000 word novel from scratch over the course of November.  So talking about it is probably the second rule.  Anyway, the idea is that if you tell everyone you've signed up then it will be that much harder to give up in the ten days in when you realise that you're half killing yourself to produce big piles of garbage.  Not many people read this blog, but I know it has readers to whom I would be embarrassed to admit that I had failed.  I've made peace with the fact that what I write will be rubbish, but I still think it will be pretty cool if I can leave November with a large amount of stuff written.

Scary things about it: there are tons of 17 year-olds out there who have won for the last four years, etc; just think how many unpublished novels there are in the world!; plus it's a huge amount to get written in one of the year's shorter months.  I've got various bits of freelance work to do at the same time, of course, and an article to revise, so although it's not quite the same as working full-time and trying to write it, I do have several competing demands on my organisational energy.  It's not just the work, it's the work of making myself work.

I'm trying to plot it out in advance to give myself the best chance possible.  It's an historical murder mystery with lots of real people in it, so I'm doing quite a bit of research, and getting frustrated with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  I usually love the ODNB; and I suppose that really it's a strength that different scholars' accounts of related people vary so much in what they lay down as fact.  And because I'm writing a novel I can just choose what I prefer.  Still I'm trying to keep a sense in my own mind of what is actual historical material and what I've made up to fill in the gaps with plausible factoids.  And I'm reading Augustine on the Donatists partly because I'm trying to write from a point of view about holiness which I don't quite understand, but mostly because I think it's quite cool to read Augustinian theology as preparation for a cheapish murder mystery.

So much for my November.  I know at least one man who is participating in Movember, the first rule of which is that you grow a moustache for the whole of November and get sponsored for research into prostate cancer.  You can read James's Warren's blog post about it here, and it has a link to where you can sponsor him, or sign up yourself.  Prostate cancer is not one of the really big name cancers, so I expect it's harder to raise money for research into it, and therefore it ought correspondingly to be supported.  It killed my Grandad when it metastasised, and although he was 80 we did really need him.  I think it killed my Grandpa too, but that side of my family is very reserved and it seemed like it would have been impolite to ask exactly what was killing him.  Anyway even if those deaths weren't the case it's clear that it's a very good cause.  Plus moustaches are great.  Go Movemberers!  I feel slightly guilty that my NaNoWriMo is just self-indulgence and not to contribute to the bettering of the world.

A Cambridge friend mentioned in an e-mail that she thinks it's great that there's several men of our acquaintance doing Movember, and several women doing NaNoWriMo.  I suppose moustache-growing is intrinsically a male activity -- though I did get something approaching a Christopher Marlowe-style fluff going when I was an angry feminist sixth-former, making a point which now escapes me -- and you could argue that novel-writing, or at least a certain sort of humility towards novel-writing, is quite a female thing.  When I was a kid I used to get annoyed by the song we sung at Sunday School which went "Jesus loves the Rownhams girls / some with straight hair, some with curls / and he loves the Rownhams boys / even though they MAKE A NOISE".  (You substitute your own town or village for Rownhams.)  It irritated me that the boys got to do things while the girls were just looked at.  Of course as a child I could never explain why I disliked it, because one of the terrible things about childhood is how dumb you are to explain what you mean.  So it's nice to see us all disregarding the gender stereotypes of the 80s.  I think this is probably a really inane thing to say, and perhaps I ought to get past noticing these things.

Anyway the implication was that there are more Movemberers out there, and more NaNoWriMoers among my acquaintance!  If anyone reading this is doing Movember and would like me to sponsor them, or is doing NaNoWriMo and would like to be my NaNoWriMo writing buddy, then please identify yourselves.  I would love to have some mutual NaNoWriMo support.  I'm really rather apprehensive.

The X Factor

Sometimes I read the Guardian's X Factor liveblog, complete with the "comment is free" (comment is harrowing) comments.  It makes me feel like I've wandered into the lounge at a retirement home.  I'm 34, I'm old enough to be Cher's mother, but even I know who Jay-Z and Duck Sauce and Blackstreet are.  Looking at the twitter it seems the young people think that Shout was by Dizzee Rascal -- and I'd find that more annoying of them if it weren't that the actual Graun liveblogger has decided to attribute it to James Corden.  Plus he seems to be startled and bemused by Cher's habit of doing more than one song at once.

This week's theme of Guilty Pleasures was annoying for two reasons: I don't really approve of the concept; and then they didn't follow it -- though perhaps it's entirely logical that they make no distinction at all between Guilty Pleasures X Factor and every other week on X Factor.  Wagner is always a guilty pleasure.  But no one sang anything by the Wurzels, and no one did The Bloodhound Gang.  Not a single William Shatner cover.

I saw my brother and sister-in-law this afternoon and discovered that not only had neither of them seen the fantastic picture of Wagner holding a lion by the tail (which you can see here) but they hadn't seen the Stephen Fry Wagner youtube video, so I'm posting it here in case you've missed it.


Plus here is a really good song.  No X Factor connection, just something I've been listening to quite a lot.

Collings alert

Tonight at 8pm Matthew Collings will be on BBC2.  Tell me things about art, Matthew Collings!  I like to hear you talk.

Some things I have been reading on my Kindle

I love my kindle, but it does have its disadvantages.  Every time I try to play with it I get distracted by novels, so I still don't really know how to do loads of things on it.  Though I have found that if you save a word document with a table of contents and then e-mail it to your kindle it preserves the table of contents for you, with links.  (I did this for the Douay-Rheims translation of the Psalms.  Of course you have to set up the styles and generate the Table of Contents properly, but if you use Word and don't know how to do this then it is definitely worth learning anyway.)

Anyway here are some reviews of books with links to where you can get them.  Many are cheap or free.  I don't think any of them costs more than a fiver, though for some you have to go to websites other than Amazon.  (I'm leaving aside for the moment books by K. J. Parker, about which I am going to blog separately.)
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Fantastic.  The lunatic who begs for a kitten is great.  The lesson is, if you're hiding from a monstrous super-human with unknown powers, best not to do it in mental asylum.  And if your wife wants to know what's going on, just tell her!  Don't treat her like some sort of morally-fragile pet.
Free at Amazon

The Beetle, Richard Marsh
Came out in the same year as Dracula.  Not really as good, but still has its spooky moments.  Very much a product of its time.  There's a good bit where an important politician is completely cowed by someone just going "The Beetle!" at him.  The Beetle!
Free at Amazon

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin
OK.  It's about a horrible ruling family and a grand-daughter who is brought in from outside for nefarious purposes.  Lots of odd bits where she has sex with gods.  I'm not sure I will bother with the sequels because it seemed somewhat melodramatic.
Amazon link

Carmen Dog, Carol Emshwiller
Brilliant.  Set in a world where nobody knows why some pets are turning into women, and some women into animals, but it's making men very worried about Motherhood.  Pooch finds herself taking on increasing household duties while her mistress becomes more and more snappish and uncommunicative, but when the mother of the house bites the baby she expects she'll be blamed by her adored master, and runs away to become an opera singer.  Mad but very excellent.  Go Carol Emshwiller!
$5.95 at Weightless Books.  (For a Kindle you want the .mobi file.)

The Bertrams, Anthony Trollope
Excellent Trollope stuff.  It's about two young men, one of whom gets a first- and another a second-class degree at Oxford, and their subsequent lives, particularly their marriages.  It's also a bit about an older friend of theirs who becomes a barrister.  More of this takes place abroad than is usual for Trollope, in the Middle East.  His feelings about the Holy Sepulchre are quite amusing though I feel a pang about how similar they are to mine.  But the Kindle edition, although mostly good, had an over-zealous editor who had done bad things to sentences, I think under the auspices of Project Gutenberg.  For example, s/he added the word in square brackets to this sentence, even though it reads much better without:

By degrees they both began to regard him with confidence -- with sufficient confidence to talk to him of Bertram; with sufficient [confidence] even to tell him of their fears.

And removed the square bracketed word from this:

I do not think he would have [him] come down here had he heard it -- not yet, at least.

And what made me raging mad beyond anything rational was that the editor changed the word "vicegerent" to "viceregent" in a reference to the Russian emperor as heir of the Byzantines.  Vicegerent is right!  Don't introduce errors into Trollope!  Do not!
72 pence at Amazon or free at Project Gutenberg

The Nebuly Coat, J. Meade Falkner
Excellent old-style mystery, largely set around an old church, where a young architect is worried that the arches cannot take the strain of the added tower.   This man also wrote Moonfleet, which I loved as a kid.  But apparently he was also librarian of Durham Cathedral.
71 pence at Amazon or free at Project Gutenberg

Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, Kage Baker
The only Kage Baker I could find in ebook form.  Not her best, but still pretty readable and amusing.  It's about a man who accidentally becomes a pirate although he'd much rather be a bricklayer, and gets involved in a hunt for Prince Maurice, Prince Rupert's missing brother.
$5.00 at Webscription.net

Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link
Excellent mad short stories -- a bit spec fic, a bit slipstream, but good-humoured and interesting.  She also edits Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet which is a very good zine.  See also Small Beer Press and Weightless Books.  In fact those last three URLs deserve a blog post all to themselves in their excellence.
Amazon link

Sum: Tales from the Afterlife, David Eagleman
Very hyped, but worth the hype because extremely good.  It's a series of short stories giving different ideas of the afterlife.  Very Calvino.
Amazon link

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
An amiable and fun time-travel mystery, centring around Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat and the bombing of Coventry Cathedral in the Second World War.  It's a bit Importance of Being Earnest-y as well.  Good stuff if you're in a light-hearted mood.
Amazon link

Ayala's Angel, Anthony Trollope
An excellent Trollope book.  It's about two sisters whose artist father dies leaving them penniless.  One of them is to go to their rich aunt for a life of vulgar riches, and the other has to go to their poor uncle for a life of scraping genteel poverty.  The younger, Ayala, is a very romantic girl; men keep falling in love with her but she has an idea in her mind of the perfect man, and finds their attentions frightening and rather shocking.  Trollope writes women very well.  Even though Ayala is provokingly naive in a way which leads her to be inadvertently rude to quite a few people, you still can't help but be on her side.  And why shouldn't a nineteen-year-old girl be silly?  It would be more surprising if she weren't.  One of Trollope's funny novels.
Free at Project Gutenberg

Dr Wortle's School, Anthony Trollope
A shorter Trollope novel, e.g. two volumes not three.  Dr Wortle runs a very good school -- we're not in Dickensian territory here -- and he has found an excellent usher in the form of Mr Peacocke, whose wife does the linen and basically acts as a matron.  But Mrs Peacocke has a complicated past.  The novel is mostly about how Dr Wortle deals with the ignominy brought on his school when that past becomes known.  Not as funny as Ayala's Angel but still quite cheerful.
Free at Project Gutenberg

Can you stop the cavalry?

Probably not.  War is notoriously difficult that way.  But you could wait thirty years and then have many cameos in an IKEA advert with a new version of your other big hit:

That's the way to do it: write something that gets played every single Christmas while keeping your other hit to rerelease just when 80s nostalgia is at its most commercial.  I have bought this single by the way, it's available on itunes.  It has shouts-out to various kitchen appliances at the end.  I quite like that.

Here's another great song, off of The Sounds' album Dying to Say This to You, the same one as has Tony the Beat (Push It), but not exactly current as it was released in 2006.

Lyrics; euromillions; zoos

I like that Cee-Lo's Fuck You is higher in the itunes charts than his Forget You, the version which has been redacted for the sake of sales.  It's not just a catchy song, it's also pretty much exactly the plot of the Abbé Prevost's Manon Lescaut, which is a brilliant novel, and helped Lord Peter Wimsey work out who killed Cathcart in Clouds of Witnesses.  For example, there's a bit that goes

Now I know that I had to borrow
Beg and steal and lie and cheat
Tryin' to keep ya, tryin' to please ya
Cos bein' in love with yo ass ain't cheap.

The Chevalier Des Grieux could have said just the same thing, only in French, of course.  Manon Lescaut made a big impression on me as a teenager and it is the only whole novel I have ever read in French.

I went to the zoo with my brother, sister-in-law, and excellent nephew on Saturday.  On the way they told me about how last Saturday my sister-in-law had got a text message saying she'd won some money on the Euromillions.  It didn't say how much.  So they wondered whether to do something special -- but they were already on their way to the cider festival.  And what was going to top that?  Then they thought they could go to an expensive restaurant that evening, but my brother remembered that he'd got the stuff to make his special courgette and feta tartlets, and my sister-in-law really loves my brother's courgette and feta tartlets.  So they were a bit stumped.  Luckily it turned out that they had only won six pounds something.  I thought this was a cool story-- even without winning the Euromillions they already had the cider festival and delicious tartlets.  Someone should turn it into a children's story.

The zoo was very good.  They were penguins which you could watch from above or below, and a Zona Brazilia with capybaras and tapirs.  My nephew liked the rats, because he knows that rats are good things.  On the whole he's not sure about the larger mammals, which is fair enough really.  It must be disconcerting at that age to see all these animals you know from books, like the snake and mouse out of the Gruffalo, but not taking part in a narrative, just lounging around in cages.  It was Bristol zoo, or Brizzle as they say around those parts.  The gift shop had excellent t-shirts with local phrases like "Cheers drive!" and "Yer tizz".  Also "Alright my luvver?" which is more Cornwall, really.

Meanwhile on the internet

First Great Western just don't get it.  My PhD is non-gendered, so I went for Other.  And at least put the options in alphabetical order!

Oh rap, has it come to this?  It's quite a happy thing to watch though.


Here is a handsome young man from Wales singing a very good song. Well done Wales! Well done popjustice hifi! You can buy this right now.


Here is a handsome young man from Newcastle singing a very good song, previously released by Donkeyboy it's true, but it's fine for singers not to be songwriters and vice versa. I keep finding myself singing it at odd moments. This is released on the 10th, so I expect he'll be on the X Factor this weekend.

Someone made a pickled pacman. It has a very real looking tongue.

Here's Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross talking about Russell Brand's new book. I read the first one and it amused me, so I will probably read the second too. At one point in this interview Russell Brand says "All forms of desire are the inappropriate substitute for the desire to be at one with God", and I think the fact that he says this as if it's quite a reasonable answer to Ross's question (basically are you going to keep it in your pants once married) epitomises the thing about him that I like. He's a lunatic but at least he's unusual.

This Boing Boing slide about the internet makes me feel really comfortable.

Devon, Cambridge, Persia

I'm back in Devon, looking at my beautiful view, and listening to the sound of the hunt. They're just a few fields away today, so there's lots of view hallooing and sometimes hounds baying. I don't know if they're hunting a real fox. Probably I ought to care, but I find that I really don't. We had harvest festival last night, with real bits of harvest in the church instead of tins, and we sang all the excellent harvest hymns: For the Lord our God shall come, and shall take his harvest home, etc. Afterwards they auctioned off the produce, and I bought a pumpkin which I am going to turn into soup of some kind. This is the time of year when everyone is utterly sick of courgettes and cooking apples, and a lot of houses have boxes of them outside with a sign saying help yourself. Mr Underhill, the farmer across the road, has also put out a box of conkers for the children. In short, it's pretty damn bucolic here.

The wierd thing about Cambridge is that I always have a great time catching up with excellent people and looking at lovely manuscripts, but I dislike the actual place itself. Every time I go I get a cold, or a psychosomatic part-cold, and at the same time I have a really good time. I can't imagine living there again.

At the moment the Fitzwilliam has a very good exhibition on the Persian Book of Kings, the epic poem Shahnameh by Ferdowsi. I found that my Kindle was able to provide me with a prose translation/version of the first half of the epic for only £1.71, so I read that. (I love my Kindle.) It reminded me very much of the Morte d'Arthur, perhaps just because the nineteenth-century translator/reteller was influenced by that style. But the men are always having children who are grown up a few paragraphs later, or who are remarkably strong and attractive even in their youth, and they go on odd quests for honour's sake, and will die for something they know is wrong because commanded to do so by a king they know is foolish. There are more monsters in the Shahnameh, though. The main hero is Rustem, with his valiant steed Rakush (or Rakhsh), who is constantly having to clean up messes made by stupid kings to whom he is nonetheless strictly obedient. One of the kings decides to fly by tying specially trained eagles to his throne, and putting legs of lamb on spikes above the throne's posts. But he hadn't thought about what would happen when the eagles got tired. Rustem rescues him and scolds him thoroughly for his stupidity. The Fitzwilliam exhibition is really worth seeing. There are lots of beautiful, very delicately drawn, really lovely pictures, quite likely to be appreciated by children too I'd have thought. There's the simurgh, and trials by fire, and lots of dragons and demons. Some of the adventures of Alexander the Great are quite cool too. There's a brilliant one where he's riding into the land of darkness to look for the fountain of everlasting life, and behind him the horses of two of his followers are exchanging aghast glances.  Also click here to see a picture of Alexander having his death predicted by a talking tree, and to hear a translation.  He found it quite upsetting.

I had some thoughts

I had some thoughts, and while I'm trying to recover pictures of manuscripts from a damaged SD card I decided to share them with you, the reader. Lady Wortley Montagu had an endearing habit of apologising for the length of her letters, but saying that if the reader didn't like it she could always chuck it in the fire. You can't really burn a computer, but there's always ctrl+alt+del in extreme circumstances, or a simple ctrl+w closes the tab.

Thought 1. I'm in a city right now, and it occurred to me this morning that the thing about the countryside is that it's casually beautiful, and full of death, often at the same time. There is death absolutely everywhere, and almost all of it is both random and in some way beneficial. In the city people don't have that much to do with death. Except for the occasional pigeon, and that's treated as an aberration instead of what's happening everyday everywhere -- it's something someone will have to clear up, rather than a windfall for the rooks.

Thought 2. Though I did think that I saw some buzzards over Corpus yesterday. I don't see how that can have been right, but there they were, four or five of them circling up on thermals. I think they were buzzards not red kites because they had wedge-shaped tails rather than the forked, and were hefty in build rather than slim. I'm disconcerted by this.

Thought 3. I wish my SD card hadn't failed. I was looking at a really disconcerting manuscript on Wednesday, a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Bible from Lincoln. It had initials in the white-vine style, which I don't much like at the best of times, because instead of the light entwined foliage or curled leaves of other styles it has fat white vegetable stems, like something grown in the darkness, and makes me think of bean sprouts. But in this manuscript the fleshy white stems don't end in foliage but in the heads of odd beasts, with gaping jaws, and black eyebrows. The human figures have red spots on their cheeks as if they are ill, and enormous hands bigger than their heads. I have a feeling I may have nightmares about it; it was quite crudely done, but also in a wierd style. Anyway, even if I still had the pictures I couldn't post one, because Trinity lets you take pictures for personal use only.

Thought 4. I love my kindle, for many reasons. Hurray for buying stuff instantly! Hurray for its compilation of my highlighted passages, and for being able to search for names of characters whose significance I have forgotten! But boo for the way I no longer enjoy Waterstones so much. Though I did buy a book yesterday, a translation of Isidore's Etymologies which I've wanted for a long time, but needed to get from the CUP shop because of my author discount. It is £29 before discount as a paperback; as an ebook it is 128 dollars. Plus I used a CUP ebook once before and it was infuriatingly terrible. Boo, CUP, boo. Seriously, CUP, give me a job as one who formats ebooks for you -- you're missing a trick. It's when companies do that sort of thing that people yearn to pirate. Now, I'm not going to pirate CUP books, and I imagine that legally I am not allowed to make my own personal ecopy of a book just because I own the paperback, but morally I feel like it's more of a grey area. Unfortunately a while ago I decided that it is morally wrong to break the law unless it's a matter of principle, and I don't think that wanting to read a book on Kindle is a matter of principle. Heigh ho.

Books I have been reading

I've decided I'll only blog about five at a time.
Susan Hill, The Mist in the Mirror
Lots of people rave about Susan Hill's ghost stories. I've always found them a little unsatisfying. There were a few spooky moments in this one I suppose.
Jenny Valentine, Broken Soup
This is YA fiction and got very good reviews. I saw a copy for a quid in a remainder sale so I bought it. It's quite well written, but reading it reminded me of the tremendous rubbish we were all supposed to enjoy as teenagers, in which people have, you know, feelings, and social problems. It was supposed to speak to us in some way, and I'm quite certain it was well meant.
Eça de Queiroz, The City and the Mountains
Very good. About a man who lives in Paris, surrounded by the best in early twentieth-century gadgets (electric lighting, and the théâtrophone, etc). He undertakes a journey to his ancestral estates in Portugal, but it goes disastrously wrong and he loses all his luggage. Quite a funny and amiable book, more comfortable than much of the work of Eça de Queiroz.
Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
This is quite good. The point is that their behaviour is at once very well-mannered, and absolutely atrocious. The main character is a bit of a monster and blithely unaware of what is going on around her, and has been very nastily treated by her family.
Erick Setiawan, Bees and Mist
This sounded to me like just the sort of thing that would annoy me. But I read a few reviews which said, essentially, not as annoying as you'd think, and they were right, it's only a bit annoying. It's about two families, and a girl who marries from one into the other. The first family is haunted by several different-coloured mists, while the second family's mother has at her disposal a swarm of maddening and persuasive bees. You could go so far as to see these bees, these mists, as some sort of metaphor. Anyway, on the plus side it's readable and at least a bit unusual. On the minus side there's all the mists and bees, plus the mother-in-law is a pretty 2-D villainess, and the characters all have names like Meridia and Gabriel. Buy it if you see it on a market stall for two quid, but not from Oxfam, who will probably want £3.95. That's my advice anyway.

Kage Baker PS

Something I forgot to mention about Kage Baker is that I like the attention she pays to the mechanics of writing. For example, the first book mostly takes place in Tudor England, so there's some Elizabethan-y language in it, when the owner of the house holds feasts and such like. But no one wants a whole book where all the dialogue is like that, and she unobtrusively makes it clear that when the lovers are alone they talk Latin, as a more straightforward language. And when the immortals are alone they speak something they call Cinema Standard, which is essentially the language of golden age Hollywood, as spoken by the people in the future who tell them what to do. So she has this distinction between the different types of English which marks out the strangeness of the immortals' situation, but it's far from laboured, and you could ignore it and just get on with the story. Likewise a certain amount of explication is inevitable in a series of books like this, and at the start of most of the books in the series it is necessary to recap the basic premise of immortal agents controlled by people in the future, working to preserve things which would otherwise be destroyed. But she makes it so that it's a different person who explains it each time, and they each present it differently, with slightly contradictory accounts of how it all started, and that way she not only shows the personality of that character but also introduces to the reader suspicions about the reliability of certain accounts. So if you come across a book from the middle of the series without reading the earlier ones you still understand the premise; but if, like me, you read all the books in order as fast as you can get your hands on them, you still find these bits interesting and not just explication blah blah blah. I think it's good craft.

Two very good authors, part II

I discovered the books of Kage Baker this summer. She is not that well-known in this country, and I had to turn to ebay, amazon marketplace, and abebooks.com to source most of her work. Now, Joyce Carol Oates is a serious writer, so very serious in fact that I didn't feel at all like reading her work until I found out that some of it is in genre; whereas Kage Baker wrote science fiction. Nonetheless I feel like Kage Baker was the better discovery of the two. There's a certain quality that some writers have which I find very relaxing, and which I'm now going to find hard to describe. I think of it as "humanity". It's a sort of sympathy with the whole human race without sentimentality. When you read, say, Martin Amis, whatever you may think of the book itself you know that the author is an arsehole; what I'm talking about is the opposite of that. It's a sense that the author would make an excellent aunt, or warden in a women's prison. It's something I tend to associate with female writers; Barbara Kingsolver has it, and so does Barbara Trapido. But I think Terry Pratchett may have it too, a sort of wise kindness. Anyway, I probably haven't described what I mean very well, but Kage Baker's work has it in bucketloads. It's particularly good to discover it in science fiction, because the genre as a whole is prone to a sort of aspergers-y coldness.

Most of her work is in the Company series. The premise is that in the twenty-fourth century a consortium of scientists and merchants have come up with two remarkable inventions, neither of which turns out to be marketable in the way they had hoped. They have invented time travel: but it's a really unpleasant procedure; and although you can go back in time and then return to where you started, you can't go forwards in time from your start point in any other way than living it. Plus you can't change recorded history. Martin Luther King still gets shot; the Titanic still sinks. They also invented immortality: but it's even more unpleasant to go through; it only works on carefully-selected small children; and at the end of the process you're not entirely human any more, but a sort of cyborg. So neither of these can be marketed to middle-aged billionaires. But then they find out that although you can't change recorded history, you can work around the gaps. You can't stop an animal from going extinct, but you can take a population from the wild before it happens, and hide them away somewhere to be rediscovered centuries later. And if you don't want to go through all the nasty time-travel yourself, why not go back to the dawn of time, make some suitable children immortal, and then leave them to it, preserving things to order for the billionaires of the future, and recruiting other children to join them.

The first chapter of the first book, which explains all this, is available for free here. The rest of the book is about a girl called Mendoza. Aged about four she is rescued from the dungeons of the inquisition in Spain, and put through the immortality process. She trains as a botanist, and is sent to England to stay in a house with a remarkable garden, and to take clippings and DNA analysis of some rare plants which are soon to go extinct. She's violently anti-mortal because of her inquisition experience, and although she's been made immortal she's still only seventeen years old so far. Unfortunately she falls head over heels in love with the garden-owner's secretary, a protestant. But it's the reign of Mary Tudor, who has just married Philip of Spain, and the inquisition is coming to England.

The second book involves Joseph, the man who recruited Mendoza. The Company sorts him out with some impressive prosthetics and sends him to the west coast of America, where he has to pretend to be Sky Coyote in order to persuade a Native American village to let anthropologists come in to document their doomed civilisation.

As well as the main books in the series, Baker has also written collections of short stories and novellas, some set in the same world. I've read almost all of them now. Some aren't quite as good as the others, but they are all an enjoyable way to spend time. Kage Baker is the sort of writer I would like to be, and I'm glad she managed to finish the Company series before her death earlier this year.

Kindle: some thoughts on it so far

My kindle arrived yesterday, hurray! I like it. Here are some things I have thought about it so far.
1) Reading on it is fine. It tells you how far through a book you are, and is pretty easy to navigate. When you turn a page it's fast enough. The screen flashes black as it changes and some people find this distracting -- I don't mind it myself, because for one thing you can see the words of the next page in white on black just for a moment, and so continue reading. The screen is better than any e-ink screen I've ever seen before, but it is still a little grey rather than bright white. If you try really hard and turn it the right way you can just about get a little glare off it, but on the whole the more light the better.
2) The dictionary is more useful than I would have expected, maybe because I've been reading nineteenth-century material. I expect it's rather good for me; for example I wouldn't usually bother to look up words like indurated, because the context suggested the correct meaning, but it's so easy just to flick the cursor to the right place that I did it, and now I know. And because it's the Oxford English Dictionary it can cope with the odd Classical reference, which can be useful in nineteenth-century stuff. (Though you do have to change it to the OED in the settings, instead of the default American dictionary.)
3) Somehow it's rather charming.
4) But I find that I miss the blurb on printed books. I don't quite know why. I must consult book blurbs more often than I thought I did. I have been reading a few pretty obscure things, and some of them I downloaded a while ago in kindle readiness. Reading the blurb of a book sets you up for reading the real thing, I suppose. But I wouldn't have expected to miss it. And once you've finished a book you're just stuck on the last page, which leaves me feeling some odd sort of need to do something like reread the blurb, or shut the book in a definite manner. In time I'll probably feel just as satisfied by moving it into my "Finished" collection.
5) You can organise books into collections, but this is not yet flexible enough. And for some reason you can't put magazines into collections.
6) I wasn't expecting to use the magazine possibilities, but after browsing a lot I have taken out trial subscriptions to two which consist simply of short stories.
7) The browser is pretty good -- perhaps less so if you have high expectations. I don't have a smart phone, and every now and then I really feel the need of a way of checking train times, or looking for a nearby shop, or some such. I think it works best with mobile versions of websites. But I haven't tried it out on the road so far. It connected very well to the wifi here, but we don't have 3G here, so it will be interesting to try it the other way round.
8) Buying things from amazon.co.uk is very simple indeed. Downloads are remarkably fast. You can also get a sample of a book sent to your kindle before deciding whether or not to read the whole thing. I've done this with some items, e.g. to find the best Kindle edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. (This is the best kindle edition; Amazon tell me they are trying to sort out the mislabelling issue with the publishers.)
8a) I bet that suggesting samples could be a good way of sharing book recommendations with friends. Amazon could add a feature saying "suggest this to a friend" and the friend could get a message saying "XX recommends this to you, would you like to download a sample?"
9) I really like the highlighting feature, and I will tell you why. It's very easy indeed to highlight a bit of text, and the kindle assembles on the fly a text file of all your highlighted stuff, labelled with where it came from, as a sort of immediate commonplace book. I wasn't expecting to annotate things much on the kindle, so this comes as a surprise to me.
10) You can share those annotations over facebook or twitter. You can read other people's annotations of books you have downloaded. Needless to say I turned this feature off as soon as I got the kindle. Just imagine reading Moby Dick if you could see all the annotations and underlinings of all the American high school students who have to read it! On the other hand it might be a good sociological experiment, or a new form of novel.
11) As for choosing books, you have to watch out for the really cheap or free items, because some are very badly OCR'd from old copies of texts, and I have heard that poetry in particular can be very badly formatted on the page. If you come across a problem like this it's very easy to get your money back from Amazon; and it's a problem you're most likely to find in free things anyway.
12) Other shops: check what format they supply in. Kindle uses .mobi, but it can't use .mobi with DRM, as I understand it, unless it's Amazon's own DRM. A program called Calibre will turn epub documents into Kindleable documents, as well as other formats; but this only works on epub docs without DRM. So watch out for DRM. But stores other than amazon are often dramatically expensive anyway. I've only used one other shop so far. I've found it very easy to put non-Amazon .mobi files onto my Kindle.
13) But so far I have not experimented with putting onto it files which are not ebooks.
14) Instapaper is quite good. It gives you a "Read later" button for articles on the web, and then you can export the whole lot onto your kindle as a sort of self-made magazine.
15) I think that for the moment I shall continue with cheap or free stuff for a while, or things which it wouldn't be easy for me to get in another format.

PS another odd thing

Here are the four finalists for the third annual "Dance Your PhD" competition.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/09/dance-your-phd-finalists-announce.html
I like the chemistry one: it has the most smiling; also "props", as it were, to the guy with the beard who plays Urea. But the Social Sciences one looks somehow like archive footage from the 70s.
My PhD dance would start with lots of English scribes dancing Whigfield's Saturday night.

Odd stuff

Before I post about Kage Baker, here are some odd things I've seen:
1. Someone in Russia made a high energy dance track about wanting a man like Putin. Putin now uses this at his rallies. Oh, those Russians!


2. Talking of Russians here are some excellent Russian photo sets. Here are some pictures of Russian 'types' from the 1860s: this link takes you straight to the start of the photostream, while this one goes to one particularly excellent picture of a peasant, looking like he came straight out of Dostoyevsky. And here are pictures from the school for female cossacks. Go female cossacks! They're just as brassy as you'd hope.

3. Talking of tough ladies, there's a very interesting documentary about women competing in a prison rodeo on 4OD. I found it via Boing Boing, which has a trailer, and a lot of heated argument about whether it's OK to watch prisoners get beaten up by bulls for entertainment. In the documentary itself the rodeo and the chance of maiming are the light-hearted bits. In fact it's probably not fair to call these women tough -- they're very very damaged, and most of them started failing their children before they had really finished being failed by their own parents. Sad but interesting.

4. Someone has thoroughly analysed the way that genders are divided by signs on toilet doors, and it's quite interesting. I hate it when toilet door signs try to be clever.

5. This Six Degrees of Francis Bacon poster shows how all literature is related.

6. The new X Factor magazine is quite good. I'm not going to apologise for reading it -- I need amusement in my reading life, and I can't get it all from Anglo-Saxon liturgy or intensely clever books by Joyce Carol Oates. (You can probably guess who the senior editor is...) I think you can only get it in Tescos though.

Two very good authors, part I

I have discovered two excellent writers, specifically Joyce Carol Oates (her Gothic novels), and Kage Baker. I'm going to blog about them separately, but before I start: hurray that there are always good books to be found!

Joyce Carol Oates's Gothic novels
I found these because I read a Guardian article by Carlos Ruiz Zafon about twentieth-century Gothic novels. I had to buy them secondhand from the USA, and I love that they come in slightly trashy mass-market covers; they remind me very much of the sweeping family sagas which I used to find in my granny's house as a kid. At the same time, Joyce Carol Oates is clearly formidably intelligent, and she has chosen to write this group of novels each in a different related genre because she has points to make underneath the stories.
Bellefleur is the first I read. The cover has a hole cut in the O of Oates to show part of a picture which is revealed when you turn the page:

It's about several generations of a rich and exploitative American family in the nineteenth century. Frankly it's gloriously mad, and cries out to be illustrated, perhaps with melodramatic engravings, something like Goya's Sleep of Reason. It starts with the traditional stormy night and something unknown approaching the castle, and the impetuous young wife who rushes down to let it in before anyone can stop her. The family members tend to meet strange fates -- about the best you can hope for as a Bellefleur is to disappear and not be known for certain to be dead. There are lots of grotesque elements, like Leah's unusually attractive pet spider Love, the Bellefleur Vulture, and the woman who accidentally fell in love with a bear. Oates writes extravagantly, daringly long sentences which deliberately push at ridiculousness and sometimes curve back on themselves like Pynchon. There's a sort of chutzpah quality to the writing which you also find in Julian Rathbone's works -- as if you read something and think "hang on a moment, what?" and the author replies "you heard".
The Mysteries of Winterthurn was the next one I read. This is a "mystery" in that it has a detective figure, but also in that it has elements of horror and the supernatural. It's less exuberant than Bellefleur, and much angrier -- it has that undertone of suppressed rage which is found in many nineteenth-century novels by women -- just think how angry Jane Eyre is. It's very spooky and could be read as a straightforward story, or rather three stories; but the first two stories also hint something rather disturbing about the third, and all three together make points about different types of suppression, points which are there to be discovered rather than forcing themselves on the reader.
A Bloodsmoor Romance is the story of five sisters; and starts with the sudden abduction of one of them from their grandparents' garden by a sinister black balloon. It's the funniest of the three, and the one which most clearly has points to make, as the five sisters meet their different fates. The reviews, or at least the reviews quoted on the flyleaves, reflect this, saying things like "that rare and valuable thing, a warm-hearted and humorous feminist tract", and "female, clever, facetious and mischievous... the book is a feminist romance with a lot of axes to grind, and it grinds them wittily until their edges are polished to a fine sharpness". Either the reviewers or the publishers seem to have taken this one rather more seriously than the others.

I am currently waiting for My Heart Laid Bare to arrive from America. And the last of the five, The Crosswick Horror, has not been published (apart from an extract about rabies) and lies, complete, in an archive in Syracuse. People often talk about the Great American Novel, often in a rather tongue-in-cheek tone, but I think that maybe in this group of novels about the American family and class system Joyce Carol Oates may actually have written it, without many people noticing.

The odd thing is that I still feel a bit cautious about reading Oates's other books. She's famously prolific, and I don't know where I'd go next. The same is not true of my other new discovery, Kage Baker. Tune in tomorrow (or sometime soon) for information about why you should read everything Kage Baker has ever written! She's not as literary, and she doesn't put genres on and off like outdoor coats, but I'm still just as glad to have found her work.

Stylistic contamination

Today I have been writing a book review, a somewhat overdue book review, of a worthy, one might almost say excessively learned tome. Yet because of the influence of Joyce Carol Oates' excellent Gothic novels (on which I shall blog further at a later day) I am having immense trouble not to write it in a slightly overwrought, faux nineteenth-century style. A book, I want to say, design'd more to be consulted, than read.

Well, hopefully it will wear off soon. Here's Kylie's new single (embedding disabled by request), which might help me remember which century I live in.

Interesting Radio 4 piece

A friend alerted me to this short piece by Lisa Jardine on hardbacks and ebooks. Apparently Oprah's book club readers wanted books in hardback to keep on their shelves. That's quite interesting, I think. It was on Radio Four, and I don't know how to embed the iplayer, so here's a link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tmtft/A_Point_of_View_Book_Choice

Readers

That thing where authors sell books to publishers who sort them out and distribute them for money is obviously only part of book culture. I don't think it's likely that there will be a wholesale move to eBooks any time soon in the way that cassettes got replaced by CDs, just because the codex format of book is such a brilliant one. It has tons of advantages, perhaps foremost among them how easy it is to move from place to place within the book -- I don't know yet but I rather suspect no one is going to want to read a book with endnotes on the Kindle -- and also how little is needed in the way of accessories to get at the words. Plus, they are likeable and there are so many of them out there. I don't think the codex is going to die out. But maybe there will be a big shift for certain types of book, perhaps chief among them 3-for-2 paperbacks, Tesco books, cheap genre fiction, casual consumable throw-away books. I can't think of any way in which this might be to the detriment of the publishers and authors -- except insofar as they will eventually feel it if book culture suffers damage. Take the question of how many people read each copy of a book. Presumably authors and publishers feel that the ideal number is 1, and with the current model of ebook-distribution they can pretty much achieve that. But then some of those putative second readers of books might like the author, or the genre, and this might lead to more sales in the future.

So the thing that concerns me about this likely shift has to do with the implications of fewer chances to be physically proximate to a random book. To be honest it seems likely to me that other things will pop up to take their places in unpredictable ways, and that serendipity will still occur. I have often heard people bemoan the loss through digitisation of discovering the book next to the book you're looking for on the library shelves: but not only do most library catalogues show you things in shelf-mark context if you want, digitisation has helped me discover quite a few obscure references in places I wouldn't have thought to have looked, quite randomly while searching for other things in Google Books or Google Scholar. So I think it evens out, pretty much. And for myself these days I mostly decide what to read from reviews and recommendations, rather than by browsing in bookshops. (The big exception is the Waterstone's near the Cathedral in Exeter, which always has good stuff on its shelves.)

But I'd be sad if opportunities are lost to the young, with their unformed tastes and lean pockets. The picture at the top of this post shows excellent nephew one Sunday afternoon when he got bored with us all and went to fetch a book instead. (I can tell him from experience, that behaviour will only be treated as cute for a limited number of years.) When I was a kid I, like many, read anything I could get my hands on, which meant terrible trash at my dad's parents', repulsive Reader's Digest abridged books at my mum's parents', utterly random things from book stalls at village fetes, pretty much anything the library was selling for 20p or less, my parents' books, and stuff from the local book exchange which sold Mills and Boons by weight. Also, of course, second-hand bookshops and those small local independent bookshops, now largely disappeared (which were actually pretty rubbish and don't quite deserve the sentimental way we remember them). If it's that very class of entertaining, consumable literature which is likely to go less physical, won't it be harder for children to bump into books randomly? They say that having books lying around is a good thing for children's literacy, but I'm not quite sure how that will work if the easy-come-easy-go books which used to stack up on the windowshelves of spare rooms are instead intangibly stored on devices.

Which doesn't mean it won't work, of course, just because I can't quite imagine it. Maybe when he's old my nephew will reminisce about how he loved to visit his mad aunt because she'd let him play with her ebook reader, and that's how he first discovered Wilkie Collins or something. Maybe gadgetising books will make them more appealing to some kids who might not otherwise have become readers. And they will be in luck about having the old and reasonably obscure at their fingertips, thanks to Project Gutenberg and the like. Perhaps the kids of tomorrow will grow up voracious readers of Anthony Trollope and Sir Walter Scott.

Some videos

1. Here are some free-runners in Cambridge, leaping about, pretending to be cats. OK so maybe climbing on old bits of carved stone has the potential to cause damage to both stone and climber, but I still think the thing at my block of flats where I was supposed to call the police when I saw them was an over-the-top reaction. I think that one of these kids in this video is one that I stopped and talked to one time. I like the ending too. It's quite "hang on lads, I've got a great idea".


2. I watch the X-factor with about half of one eye and about a quarter of my brain, and with a remote constantly ready so I can put it on mute. It's at the auditions stage, so really it's just waiting for them to open their mouths, when either they can sing and people clap, or they can't and people laugh, or the song doesn't go that well and Simon Cowell says have you got another song, and then he says, you really turned it around with that song. Best bit by miles so far was a 16-year-old called Cher singing like someone who is 16 in 2010, which really shows up the wierd time-warpy quality of most of the performances. It's Keri Hilson's version of Soulja Boy's Turn My Swag On, and if you want an example of the way in which the X-factor is occasionally cheerful and life-enhancing then you can watch it below:

(Here's Keri Hilson's version.) Poor kid must be a bit disappointed that no one gave her more than 100 percent. Maybe they're all saving the illogical percentages for live finals this year. Anyway, suspend your disbelief, try to ignore how it's somehow sinister when Simon takes a sip of water while the audience is applauding, and remember that this could well have a happy ending.

3. Here is an excellent remix.


4. I found that last one on popjustice, of course, and here's popjustice hifi's second single release, a brilliant song by a good-looking man from Wales.


5. If I were quicker with my camera I'd have put here a video of Jemima the baby alpaca chasing rabbits. But I didn't catch it so you'll just have to imagine. It's very cute, if that helps.

What is a book?

Arrrrgh. I'm really interested in all this eBook stuff but so much incredible rubbish is written about it, like this really stupid Guardian article. It's not a matter of the Kindle versus the Book! Dracula on a Kindle is still a book! The Kindle is a good thing for books and the book-industry because it gives people extra ways of reading them. I take a lot of books with me when I travel -- if I'm going alone then at least one a day. If I take a Kindle instead would this make me anti-book? Would it signal the end of the book? Will Self, who annoys me even though his books are pretty much all brilliant, talks in the same terms, or at least is quoted in those terms, in that article. But Will Self, who makes money through writing, should be saying hurray that there is a now a new way to sell his stuff to readers, and what's more sell another copy to someone like me who might suddenly want to reread Great Apes and be unable to find my paperback copy which may have gone to Oxfam anyway, I can't remember.
(PUBLIC INFORMATION ANNOUNCEMENT: do not ever read Will Self's My Idea of Fun. It's an excellent book but it's grimmer than American Psycho.)

Anyway it makes me very annoyed. If they come up with a format for books where trained monkeys whisper the chapters into your ears at twilight Frankenstein will still be Frankenstein; Jane Eyre will still be Jane Eyre. Will Self will still be writing wierd novels for someone to teach to the monkeys. Please everyone get a grip and remember that the word "book" has several meanings. A decline in hardbook sales is not an assault on literature. Hardbacks are rubbish anyway.

If you want to know, the proper term for a physical book with pages linked together at one side is a codex. It replaced the roll as a physical format for most purposes during the late antique period. I'm sure it seemed like the end of the world to everyone at the time. I can't imagine reading Vergil, they would have moaned, in one of these cheap objects where it's so easy to lose your place. Oh for the smell of old papyrus! And it may be convenient not to need a slave to rewind it for you once you're done, but where's the dignity in that? It's the death of literature.

Books and gadgets PS

I'm a huge fan of Neal Stephenson, and I know there are others out there, they post on Boing Boing and such. But the Baroque Trilogy, which I think is fantastic, has failed to be liked by both my friends whom I have managed to persuade to read it. I don't think either of them got past the undergraduate Newton bits so didn't even encounter the excellence of Half-Cocked Jack the king of the vagabonds.

I still strongly recommend Crytonomicon; the Baroque Trilogy; and The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The electronic book in this last is a brilliant device.

Anyway, Stephenson's latest project is called The Mongoliad. It's not just him, there are others involved, and I think it's an attempt to make a new format of publication which takes advantage of the sorts of things that technology now does well. As I understand it, stories are published in installments, and these will later form a novel which will be published as such at some point. There is also a world in which the novel is set. I think you can read the chapters without subscribing but I'm not sure. You definitely have to subscribe in order to do all the contributing-to-the-world stuff. On the one hand, kudos to them for engaging with the whole fan-fic thing; on the other, apparently when you sign up you give away all rights in anything you produce. I don't know how well it will catch on because people who write Neal Stephenson fan-fic are also likely to be pretty savvy about the copyfight. (Myself, I prefer to consume; I think Web 1.0 had a lot to recommend it.) The problem is, much as I like the Dickensian publishing by instalments thing, and Tolkienian interest in back-story, it looks like a lot of it is just going to be about sword-fights and various types of armour. But if it's good I will post about it.

Books and gadgets

I'm going to blog about books at some point, but I keep being interrupted by work or power cuts or traumatic alpaca births (Jemima is doing very well by the way, I am watching her frolic about as I write). The book I'm reading at the moment is by Eça de Queiroz. The blurb on the back says of the protagonist:

He lives in a mansion crammed with books and all the latest gadgets, for he believes that human happiness depends on a combination of erudition and the most sophisticated of mechanical aids.

I think happiness itself might depend on other things, but you can't deny that books and gadgets make a pretty strong contribution. Hurray for books and gadgets! So I've pre-ordered a Kindle. (It's not really pre-ordering obviously, it's just that it's going to take ages and ages for it to arrive.)

I have also come up with a genius idea. When people talk about eReaders vs actual books they always talk about a) can you read it in the bath and b) real books smell nice. Almost as soon as the Kindle appeared people started making clear watertight covers, or just using ziplock bags, so that the bath thing became less of an issue. I am going to make felt covers which are impregnated with the smell of real book! Either I will come up with my own somehow -- my copy of the Centaur press paperback of Lucy Toulmin Smith's 5-volume edition of Leland's Itineraries smells fantastic -- or I will use this spray by people who came up with the idea before me. Though I don't think they get it -- it's not new book smell, like with cars, it's old book smell you want. Those Leland volumes smell amazing because they just sat in a warehouse forgotten from the 60s. (You can't get them at a bookshop, you have to know the name of the man to write to, and I'm afraid I've forgotten it.) It's not a musty smell either, it's oddly sweet and slightly spicy. I read somewhere that the lignin in the wood-pulp paper breaks down into vanillin -- I don't know if that's true.

(I'm pretty sure the smell argument against digitisation of books was first made by Giles in the fantastic Buffy season one episode where Willow accidentally scans an ancient demon onto the internet. Then he gets in touch with her via a chat room. And Buffy says "He says he's a sixteen-year-old boy but you've never even met him! He might have a hairy back!" Excellent episode, you can watch it here if you either speak Italian or can read subtitles backwards. "Did you know in the last two years more e-mail was sent than regular mail?")

My other gadget news is sad news. There is a rumour about that Apple is dropping the ipod classic. When they announced all the new versions today they didn't mention the classic at all. But I need all 120Gb of my ipod space -- I can only get all my stuff on there because I tell it to sync to the ipod at a lower quality than my actual files. Trying to fit it onto a 64Gb iPod touch would involve thinking about what music I'm likely to want at any particular time, which would be a boring job. So I hope that they didn't mention the Classic because it's not changing at all. The standard 160Gb version is still there in the Apple store, which is hopeful.

In other things-contributing-to-happiness news, the Pet Shop Boys sang "I want a dog", and it's easy to agree. But they went on to specify that it should be a chihuahua and I've never really agreed with them about that until now: