http://entertainment.tim esonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_enter tainment/film/article6902642.ece? &EMC-Bltn=TW1861F

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Nobel Prize Winner John Coetzee gave a fascination speech at the recent launch of the University of Adelaide E-Press

He began "There is a rhetorical strategy, used by prosecutors in law-courts in Roman times, which works roughly as follows. "Marcus Publius Maro is before us charged with defaulting on a debt of two hundred sesterces. Defaulting on a debt: that is the offence with which he is charged. Therefore I am not going to mention that two years ago, in a court in Ostia, this same Marcus Publius Maro was convicted of falsifying his grandmother’s will. Nor am I going to mention that he used his influence among certain senators to get his brother an appointment as governor of Numea, a province whose public coffers he and his brother then proceeded to empty. No, I am going to concentrate solely on the charge before us, namely that he has evaded repaying a contracted debt.”

The matter before us today is the launch of a splendid new enterprise, the University of Adelaide Press, which will devote itself to publishing in electronic form books by members of the University’s academic staff, as well as, under the Barr Smith imprint, books related to the University itself and its history.

Here are a few of the matters I will not be mentioning.

First, the history of “Publish or Perish” and its impact on the academy over the past sixty-odd years, culminating in the effort, first in the United Kingdom and then in certain other countries, including Australia, that took their lead from the United Kingdom to produce quantitative measures of so-called research output and then to allocate funding to universities on the basis of such measures.

Included in such a history would be some reflection on why the unit of research output came to be standardized as the research article, by single or multiple authors, leaving the single-author book, which in the minds of humanities scholars had always been the gold standard, more or less sidelined.

In its widest form such an historical account would have to reflect on why in the late twentieth century the reduction of objective judgments to quantifiable judgments, objectivity to quantifiability, should have been allowed to spread into the academy, where there were surely enough historians to point out the turn toward quantification was a recent development with not much of an intellectual pedigree, and enough lawyers to remind people that the law, in its wisdom, had never fallen for the lure of the quantifiable – had never assigned numerical weights, for example, to items of evidence; and where there were mathematicians too, who – as a last resort– would have been able to devise better metrics for the judgment of research output than the rudimentary arithmetical measures settled on by the bureaucrats.

Another topic I will not be raising is the growth and decline – a galloping decline in our day – of university presses, presses whose raison d’être has been to publish learned books for sale to scholars and academic libraries, and the concomitant rise of commercially driven publishers specializing in academic books and periodicals, which are written and edited for them for free by men and women whose careers depend on their generating research output, and which they then sell at astronomical prices to the captive market of those same academic libraries.

The last topic I will not be raising is the failure, on the whole – there are of course many splendid exceptions – of scholars in the humanities and social sciences to defend themselves competently against the assault on their enterprise that commenced around 1980 and was in essence political and ideological. By and large, the universities that housed these scholars failed to protect them, failing to appreciate, until it was too late, the scale of the attack that was taking place on their own autonomy. The humanities and social sciences in particular received one crippling blow after another, as a result of which they are in the position they occupy today: faculties that had once been the core of that peculiarly Western, Christian cum classical institution the university have become outliers." More at:

http://www.adelaide.edu. au/press/news/

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Anne Rice is the Original Vampire Lady

Anne Rice has just given an extensive interview in the UK Times. "The Queen of Southern Gothic talks about her family tragedies, her obsession with dolls — and why the Devil hasn’t left her yet". Interview at:

http://entertainment.tim esonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_enter tainment/books/fiction/article690 5136.ece

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Br itish Academy’s first ever Literature Week

Leading writers, academics and practitioners came together at the British Academy recently to bring to life the work of major figures in English literature, including TS Eliot, Arthur Miller and Shakespeare. Now, via the British Academy’s new Media Library, you can listen to Lindsay Posner, Michael Lesslie and Jonathan Bate debate the reasons behind the popularity of American drama with UK audiences; hear Robert Crawford’s take on T.S. Eliot’s childlessness; discover what new technology inspired Sir Brian Vickers to solve a 400 year old Shakespeare mystery; be entertained by actors, Charles Dance, Kenneth Cranham and Elizabeth McGovern bringing poetry to life in the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, and much much more.

All eight events are now available to download as podcasts at http://www.britac.ac.uk/medialibr ary/lit-week09/index.cfm

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Challenges for great libraries in the age of the digital native

Was the title of a lecture by Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, The British Library. She said:

"Opportunities exist for real and vocal leadership in shaping this emerging space, shaping the political economy of higher education, and shaping its interactions with knowledge creation, knowledge ordering and dissemination, and knowledge interaction. This is a role that I think the information profession should participate in very strongly.

I hope that in my lecture I have given you an insight into some of the major issues facing research and national libraries as we move into the roller-coaster of our digital future.

It is certainly a great time to be the Chief Executive of The British Library, and I hope that I have conveyed to you our commitment and enthusiasm to be active participants in creating and shaping this information rich world to support economic, social and cultural success."

Download the full lecture here:

http://www.nfais.org/files/fil e/mc_lecture_2009.pdf

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Follow the Green Sheep with Mem Fox

Penguin TV presents three new videos now available on YouTube. Discover where the Green Sheep has been with Mem Fox, hear Peter Carey talk about his new book Parrot and Olivier in America and learn more about Bryce Courtenay.

http://www.youtub e.com/user/PenguinAustralia

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Siegfried Sassoon collection launches online

JISC and Oxford University marked this year’s Armistice by launching the first ever online collection of the manuscripts of Siegfried Sassoon, focusing on his war poetry. This is the first time these have gone online and they present a comprehensive collection of his war poetry, reassembled from collections across the world.

The work, which will be freely accessible online, will be part of Oxford University’s First World War poetry digital archive, which is funded by JISC. This allows online users to view over 12,000 previously unseen materials such as poetry manuscripts, letters, and original diary entries from some of the conflict’s most important poets including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Vera Brittain.

Visit the new collection at

Find out more about the project at

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Discover y of only known voice recording of Sir Keith Murdoch

The National Film and Sound Archive recently discovered, according to its latest newsletter, what is believed to be the only known voice recording of the late Sir Keith Murdoch. The recording was made at the launch of radio station 3LK, Melbourne on the 4 January 1937 before an audience that included then Prime Minister Joseph Lyons.

ABC Radio National program Background Briefing was in the process of researching a radio documentary about media ownership and in particular, the contribution of the successive generations of the Murdoch family when they found the Sir Keith Murdoch's speech in the NFSA collection.

The speech was found on lacquer disc labelled 3LK Opening (NFSA Title #198114) which was later determined to be the sole audio recording of Sir Keith Murdoch in existence.

The NFSA is making arrangements to present the Murdoch family and News Ltd a copy of the recording for their own archives.

--------------------------- --------------------------------< p>Les Murray the Black Dog in the November issue of ABR e-news

Chris Wallace-Crabbe revisits Les Murray’s ‘harsh and uncomfortable’ collection of confessional poetry and memoir, Killing the Black Dog, upon its reissue in expanded format.

Click here to read the full review.

http://www.australia nbookreview.com.au/files/Features /November_2009/ABR_Nov_09_Wallace -Crabbe_review.pdf

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Worlds Largest Thesaurus Published

After nearly four and a half decades of work and a host of setbacks, this month Oxford University Press is publishing the world's most comprehensive thesaurus. The two-volume, 4,448-page Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is not only twice the size of Roget's version, the current standard, but it also lays claim to being the first historical thesaurus compiled for any language, covering almost a million words from Old English to the present. Full article at Poets&Writers:

http://www.pw .org/content/world%E2%80%99s_larg est_thesaurus_published

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Robert McCrum in the Guardian states "Great writers never die, they just fade away.

Literature and longevity make poor companions. If most writers' reputations are made, or at least begun, before the age of 40, then very few novelists put many runs on the scoreboard after 70. Arguably, they can even start to damage their reputations, as anguished fans concede that their idols have feet of clay.

Philip Roth is often cited as a great contemporary who has enjoyed a remarkable late flowering, from American Pastoral to Exit Ghost. But now, aged 76, his increasingly thin fiction – for example, his latest, The Humbling, massacred by the reviewers – suggests that he might be well advised to call it a day. Small chance. Leaving aside hungry publishers and agents, a failing life force will persuade most writers to go on to the bitter end. Another reason? Even inferior art will continue to have meaning where life itself seems pointless.

Take Vladimir Nabokov. There is every reason to suspect he knew that The Original of Laura was far below his best work, but he battled on with it, even on his deathbed. Finally, admitting defeat in his last weeks, he ordered its destruction, even though this was a deed he could not bring himself to undertake and bequeathed to his luckless inheritors. Amid the acres of commentary that will greet Penguin's launch of this posthumous curiosity, it will be intriguing to see how many critics conclude that the old boy must have known that the game was up.

Ageing great writers recognise the inevitable no more than the over-optimistic late starter. Leo Tolstoy wrote "I Cannot Be Silent" at the age of 79. Resurrection, his last novel of any consequence, appeared in 1900 when he was 72. Three score years and 10 still seems to retain its biblical magic, though not, strangely, in art: Picasso, and Matisse painted memorably deep into their 80s.

But now that 80 is the new 70, you might think that literary endeavour would flourish among octogenarians. The evidence is not encouraging. Yes, Goethe completed Faust at 81, but here in Britain, both Graham Greene and William Golding published new, and inferior, books in their 80s.

Doris Lessing won the Nobel prize for literature in 2007, aged 87, and published The Cleft in 2008. But even her most ardent fans would agree that she'll be remembered for The Grass Is Singing, and The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, when she was 43."

More at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/b ooks/2009/nov/08/roth-lessing-tol stoy-greene-shakespeare

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What did ordinary soldiers read in the the First World War

Richard Davies, Udo Goellmann & Sara Melendre examine Trench Literature – Reading in World War I.

"The literature generated from World War I is well documented and will hopefully serve as a reminder of how the world can fall apart. From Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the poetry of Sassoon, Graves, Brooke, and Owen to All Quiet on the Western Front, there are numerous examples of acclaimed writing inspired by the Great War.

But what did the ordinary soldiers of World War I read on a daily basis during life in the trenches? Reading material was in heavy demand from the men living in cramped conditions in a war that was static for long periods of time.

Perhaps the safest answer is anything they could get their hands on. Most soldiers travelled light to the front and then craved books and magazines once they were embroiled in the stalemate. They would read anything that could take their thoughts off the mud, the rats, the shelling, the smell, the snipers and the prospect of going over the top and charging machine gun emplacements.

Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and John Buchan were popular as were the horse racing novels of Nat Gould – the Dick Francis of his day, who penned more than 130 books, many of which were published as affordable yellowbacks. Captain R.W. Campbell’s Private Spud Tamson novel would also have offered light relief.

One of the most popular magazines in the British trenches was The War Illustrated – one of many magazines created at the outbreak of war. Targeted at working class men, the magazine was heavily illustrated and often carried stories about German atrocities – both true and fabricated.

In December 1915, War Illustrated published an article about how soldiers found solace from reading and needed books to be sent from Britain. It reveals the men had no appetite for “literary essays by literary men.” W.W. Jacobs, who is best known for his short horror story The Monkey’s Paw, is listed as being popular. Jacobs was also famous for humour writing, especially his marine tales, and those stories probably provided welcome relief."

More at:

http://www.abebooks.co.uk/b ooks/world-war-soldiers-reading-k ipling/trench-literature.shtml?cm _mmc=nl-_-nl-_-091107-g00-trenchB -_-01cta

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THE LITERARY REVIEW NEWSLETTER FOR NOVEMBER

Contains the following articles.

When the Fat Lady Sings

Opera has never been simply about the music. Rulers have used it to display their power and audiences to parade themselves. Tim Blanning sings the praises of a social history of the art form.

http://www.literaryreview.co.u k/blanning_11_09.html

Onward Christian Soldiers

Robert Irwin campaigns for an account of the crusades that not only lets the participants speak for themselves but demonstrates how the rhetoric of crusading has been used throughout history.

http://www.literaryrev iew.co.uk/irwin_11_09.html

W ords, Glorious Words

For forty-five years scholars have laboured to put together the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which shows the development of meanings through time. Elspeth Barker is almost rendered wordless by this great achievement.

http://www.literar yreview.co.uk/barker_11_09.html

In the Budd of Youth

Patrick O’Connor enjoys the charm and enthusiasm of diaries that Benjamin Britten kept between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.

http://www.literar yreview.co.uk/o’connor_11_09.html

The Highland Rembrandt

Edwin Landseer produced some of his finest drawings while staying on his Scottish estate of the Duchess of Bedford. Paul Johnson admires these intimate sketches.

http://www.literaryre view.co.uk/johnson_11_09.html

< p>Prozac Blues

Drugs have been the major treatment for depression over the last half-century. But do they actually rebalance the brain’s chemicals or are they just placebos? James Le Fanu writes up his observations.

http://www.litera ryreview.co.uk/lefanu_11_09.html< p>

Darwin’s Demons

Ben Wilson investigates whether, in the celebrations of Darwin’s bicentenary, we have forgotten the dubious political programmes inspired by his work.

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ODD BOOK TITLE

Kaspar. Teach Yourself Air Navigation. English Universities Press. 1942.

Libraries Australia report that no copy is held in an Australian Library. Perhaps why Qantas have never had a fatal air crash? http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an2824 5623.