Penguin dating

Penguin Dating "where book lovers meet", is a partnership between Penguin and match.com. "You can go on singles nights in libraries and there's even a hybrid speed-dating book club in a pub.You can be intrigued, perplexed, turned off or turned-on by our singles' reading habits. Now we don't want to get too snobby here, because one woman's Vampire Encyclopaedia is another's love at first bite. A young buck reading a history of Goldman Sachs might be exactly what you're after even though you're busy stockpiling Marian for a week in the Balearics. Sometimes its enough to provoke curiosity when a person's reading taste jars with your mental image of what they should be reading. That guy who looks like he's just clocked-off from a building site, surely he can't be clutching the collected works of Jane Austen? [Find Singles Online Dating with Match.com] Lots of potential for libraries here ..."

BAD SEX AWARDS 2008

This year's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards took place on the 25th November, at the In & Out Club, St James's Square. Unusually, two prizes were awarded. The 16th annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award went to Rachel Johnson, for a passage from her book Shire Hell, while a Lifetime Achievement Award went to John Updike, whose The Widows of Eastwick garnered him a fourth consecutive nomination. Dominic West, star of The Wire, presented the award to Rachel Johnson in front of 400 guests.

The Bad Sex Awards were inaugurated in 1993 in order to draw attention to, and hopefully discourage, poorly written, redundant or crude passages of a sexual nature in fiction. The intention is not to humiliate. Below are the shortlisted passages from this year's award.

Free online access to 20th century UK cabinet papers

The National Archives3 today launch Cabinet Papers, 1915-19774, a ground-breaking education website concerning British governance in the 20th century that provides free online access to more than 60 years’ worth of cabinet papers.

The project was funded via the JISC Digitisation Programme2, and provides online access to more than half a million pages of cabinet minutes and memoranda. Users are able to key-word search the entire content of each record, while education tools - including interactive maps and images - will help students engage with the records and understand the way they influenced people’s lives over the years.

The website is aimed at A-level and HE students. Taking users through the key events of the 20th century, it shows how the government grappled with issues ranging from the General Strike and two world wars to the creation of the welfare state. ‘Cabinet Papers’ is an invaluable resource for students, as many of the topics covered form an integral part of related A-level and university syllabuses.

The HE section of the site covers more than 100 topics written by historians and peer-reviewed by leading academics. These packages give students an introduction to the subject area and then support them in conducting their own research.

Who wants Martin Amis

Amis,according to the London Evening Standard, may be paid footballer style wages at the University of Manchester but he doesn't seem to have made much impact on the student body. In a survey carried out by Student Direct, only 11 per cent of students at the university recognised the author of London Fields and Money who is paid £3,000 an hour to teach creative writing. He is on an £80,000 salary but is committed to working there only 28 hours a year. Out of the 200 students surveyed, he was roundly beaten by comedian Ben Elton, who is a university alumnus, and the Student's Union Women's Officer, who has achieved a certain amount of publicity thanks to her proposal to establish non-gendered loos in the Union.

Australian cooking retro

'Immoveable Feast,' by John Baxter is just published. Baxter writes

"In hell, it's been said, the drivers are Italian and the police French, while the lovers and, worse, the cooks are English. The Australia of my childhood still thought of itself as an outpost of the British Empire, and ate accordingly. Scandalously for a country abounding in succulent fish and seafood, fresh greens and salads, in mangos, papayas, and pineapples, Australian cuisine comprised hot dogs and meat pies, fried fish and chips, overcooked roasts, soggy vegetables, and canned fruit with canned cream. Meals were less a case of "chips with everything" than "chips instead of everything."

I can see most of my life as a flight from the horrors of the Australian table. It's ironic that, almost as soon as I left for Europe in 1969, its food began to improve, until today there are few countries where one can eat and drink so variously and well. But by then it was too late. I was launched on a voyage that would take me, via the cuisine of a score of cultures, to safe harbor in the gastronomical capital of the world, and cooking Christmas dinner in Paris.

That a person raised in rural New South Wales, in the heart of the meat-pie-and-peas country, should end up preparing Christmas dinner for a French family with roots deep in the soil of medieval France, and, moreover, do so in a country house dating from before Australia was even discovered, seems the height of improbability".

World Internet Project Report 2009

The World Internet Project (WIP) has published its global findings on the impact of online technology-a five-continent collaboration that creates an international picture of change produced by the Internet.Among the findings:

Information on the Internet: is it reliable? In the 10 WIP countries and regions that reported on this question of Internet reliability, 40 percent or more of users said that one-half or less of information on the Internet is reliable. Countries and regions in which a majority of respondents said that about half, a small portion, or none of the information online is reliable were: urban China (70 percent), Sweden (64 percent), Canada (62 percent), Australia (60 percent), Israel (58 percent), Colombia (52 percent), the United States (52 percent) and New Zealand (51 percent).

The Internet: importance as an information source. Even though large percentages of users consider less than half of online information as being reliable, the Internet is nevertheless considered an important source of information by large majorities in all of the WIP countries and regions. In all of the WIP countries and regions except for Sweden, two-thirds or more of users said that the Internet is an important or very important source of information. In all of the WIP countries and regions except for Macao and Sweden, larger percentages ranked the Internet as an important or very important source of information compared to television, newspapers and radio.

Downloading videos. Overall, relatively low percentages of users go online to download or watch videos. Only in urban China (37 percent) did more than 30 percent of users go online at least weekly to download or watch videos. By comparison, only 17 percent of users in the United States report going only at least weekly to download or watch videos. Forty-nine percent of users in urban China go online at least monthly for videos, along with 43 percent of users in the Czech Republic, and 42 percent in Israel.

Downloading or listening to music. Compared to those who go online for video content, larger percentages of users go online to download or listen to music. In five WIP countries and regions, more than 30 percent of users go online at least weekly to listen to music or download songs. In urban China, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel and Macao, 47 percent or more of users download or listen to music online at least monthly. While some resources serve very large audiences, many digital publications-capable of running on relatively small budgets-are tailored to small, niche audiences.

The Neglected Books page: Where Forgotten Books Are Remembered

The Neglected Books page provides lists of thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or

stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.

The winner of the 'Russian Booker' is ...

"The Librarian" by Mikhail Yelizarov. The first prize of 20 thousand dollars goes to the young author of the mystic novel Librarian.

A list of bands that derived their names from books

Has been compiled by Tim d'Arch Smith and runs on the literary blog Bookride (bookride.com)according to the New York Times Among those included are Bronski Beat (Grass), the Doors (Huxley), the Fall (Camus), Heaven 17, Moloko (Burgess), My Chemical Romance (Welsh), Level 42 (Adams), Soft Machine, the Soft Boys, Steely Dan (Burroughs) and the Thompson Twins (Hergé), with others such as the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground and Tears for Fears mentioned as borrowing their brands from non-fiction or obscure books rather than novelists. Welcome, too, is the information that there are, or were, bookish combos called Benny Profane, Augie March, The Bell Jar, Dorian Gray, Love and Squalor, Look Back in Anger and S/Z, that the Dead Milkmen owe their name to a Mr Macon "Milkman" Dead III in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and that a band called Modest Mouse drew inspiration from an all too characteristic reference to "modest mouse-coloured people" in a Virginia Woolf story.

Lawrence of Arabia: The Book Collector (From Rare Book Review)

Letters penned by T. E. Lawrence have fetched £10,000 at an auction, nearly three times the expected estimate. The British soldier, dubbed as Lawrence of Arabia for his liaison role during the Arab Revolt of 1916-18, is said to have expressed how his old motorcycle had been running “like a new one”.Lawrence, who had written the letters between April 1932 and November 1933 to an RAF flight sergeant, also talked of his love for book collecting and mentioned 1933 as a “vintage year for books”, after listing some of those that he had read, also saying that he had been spending money on his cottage in Dorset, to which he had moved his book collection.

18 months later, the 46-year-old who had been building rescue boats for the RAF and the Navy, had been fatally injured in a motorcycle crash near his cottage in Bovington.The correspondence was sent under the hammer by Henry Aldridge and Sons of Devizes, Wiltshire after they had remained in the flight sergeant’s family.

A Season in Hell -170 years worth of erotica and pornography for your eyes only now at the Bibliothéque Nationale (RBR)

Over 350 books and prints taken from the forbidden "L'Enfer" (hell) section of the library will be viewable for the first time ever in this highly academic, yet outrageously filthy, three-month exhibition in Paris.The material, steeped in French and British history, has been carefully selected from the Nationale’s vast hell section - one of the largest and richest collections of pornographic and erotic materials in the world. Often beautifully executed, its style and content is sometimes surreal, sometimes amusing, sometimes brutal, but always highly provocative. “The exhibition is an eye-opener,” wrote one review. “A quietly and intelligently displayed but garish cornucopia of sadism, masochism, bestialism, scatology, bums, tits and staring genitalia. It is also a fascinating, and sometimes beautiful, expedition through the dark, winding corridors of the human psyche.”

Convinced that the exhibition will not offend the public, the French authorities have converted a disused Metro station into a preliminary example of the show. From 17 December to 15 January the abandoned Croix Rouge station will be turned into an erotic ghost train station adorned with large reproductions of provocative old prints.Previously the "L'Enfer" collection had been accessible to bona fide academic researchers only. "Twenty years ago, such an exhibition would have been unthinkable, certainly one sponsored by a state body such as the Bibliothque Nationale," said Marie-Franoise Quignard, one of the two curators. However the vast availability and omnipresence of pornographic images in the modern world has persuaded the French national library that it is permissible, finally, to open the doors of Hell.

THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS

"Creamed turkey. Curried turkey. Turkey à la king. Turkey potpies. Turkey macaroni casserole. . . . If only Ebenezer Scrooge had not, in the excitement of his transformation from miser to humanitarian, diverged from the traditional Christmas goose to surprise Bob Cratchit with a turkey “twice the size of Tiny Tim.” But - alas - he did, and as “A Christmas Carol” approaches its 165th birthday, a Google search answers the plaint “leftover turkey” with more than 300,000 promises of recipes to dispatch it. As for England’s goose-raising industry, it tanked".

Kathryn Harrison reviews Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits By Les Standiford

"Scrooge. Tiny Tim. Bah, Humbug! “A Christmas Carol” may no longer effect the “sledgehammer blow” its author intended to bring down “on behalf of the poor and unfortunate,” but more than a century and a half after its publication in 1843 it remains one of the rare novels to have infiltrated popular culture, leaving the impress of its characters and language and choice of appropriately celebratory fowl even on those who have never read it or seen one of its countless stage and film adaptations. Scrooge and his edifying ghosts are so much a part of Christmas that the idea their creator might actually have “invented” the holiday as we know it is neither new nor original to Les Standiford.

“The Man Who Invented Christmas” is a good title, too catchy to resist, perhaps, as Standiford admits that the public’s extraor¬dinary and lasting embrace of Dickens’s short novel is but one evidence of the 19th century’s changing attitude toward Christmas. In 1819, Washington Irving’s immensely popular “Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent” had “glorified” the “social rites”of the season. Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “The Night Before Christmas” introduced a fat and jolly St. Nick whose obvious attractions eclipsed what had been a “foreboding figure of judgment” as likely to distribute canings as gifts. Queen Victoria and her Bavarian husband, Albert, “great boosters of the season,” had installed a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle each year since 1840, encouraging a fad that spread overseas to America by 1848. In “The Descent of Man” (1871), Charles Darwin announced that celebrants of the season had a more tangible relationship to apes than to annunciations, further secularizing what the Christian church hadn’t conceived but poached (along with Yule logs and stockings to stuff) from German pagan practices. A writer and his era’s zeitgeist may be “animated by the same energy and faith,” as Peter Ackroyd observes in his 1990 biography of Scrooge’s creator, but the idea of Dickens’s responsibility for what has become an orgy of tinsel and spending is one he dismisses as humbuggery, the suggestion of “the more sentimental of his chroniclers.”....

A Dickens novel (“Oliver Twist,” “Little Dorrit,” “Bleak House”) announces more than cloaks its agenda to reveal social injustice, especially the plight of those two “abject, frightful, hideous, miserable” children peering out from under the robe worn by the Ghost of Christmas Present. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want,” the Ghost tells the quaking Scrooge. “No perversion of humanity . . . has monsters half so horrible and dread.” Dickens intended to make the sufferings of the most vulnerable of the underclass so pungently real to his readers that they could not continue to ignore their need, not so much for charity as for the means to save themselves: education. At least this was his conscious purpose - his rationalization. The deeper truth is that even genius of the magnitude of Dickens’s can’t free an artist from his demons; it can only offer him an arena for engaging them....

DICKENS, galvanized by the response of his Athenaeum audience - “rapt” - and by a renewed vision of the cost of disdaining the plight of children, returned to London having conceived what would be the first project he completed as a whole rather than in serial parts. For six weeks he worked feverishly, delivering a manuscript to the printer in late November, for publication a few days before Christmas. Standiford, the author of four other non¬fiction books, tidily explains the appeal of “A Christmas Carol,” its readership “said at the turn of the 20th century to be second only to the Bible’s.” Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with a crippled child whose salvation waits on man’s - not God’s - generosity, Dickens laid claim to a religious festival, handing it over to the gathering forces of secular humanism. If a single night’s crash course in man’s power to redress his mistakes and redeem his future without appealing to an invisible and silent deity could rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might do for the rest of us!"

Bernard Shaw autographs

BOOKRIDE Blog reports "A country clergyman, hearing that Shaw was an expert in the brewing of coffee, wrote to ask him for the recipe. Shaw obliged, adding as an afterthought that he hoped the request was not an underhanded way of obtaining his autograph. The clergyman cut Shaw's signature from the letter, returned it with a note thanking him for the coffee recipe, and concluded: "I wrote in good faith, so allow me to return what it is obvious you infinitely prize, but which is of no value to me, your autograph."

Shaw once came across a copy of one of his works in a secondhand bookshop. Opening the volume, he found the name of a friend inscribed in his own hand on the flyleaf: "To ---with esteem, George Bernard Shaw." He promptly bought the book and returned it to his friend, adding the inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw."

Would you have your ashes scattered in Jane Austen's garden?

Well, even if you wanted to, forget it. The practice has just been banned by Jane Austen's House Museum says Charlotte Higgins in the UK Guardian.

"The power of Jane Austen never ceases to amaze: the myriad film and TV adaptations, the biopics, the spin-off self-help books, the novels about Austen book clubs and Austen obsessives and even, next spring, the publication of a book about "how Jane Austen conquered the world" (Jane's Fame, by Clare Harman). And now comes the just-too-weird story that deceased fans of Jane Austen have been banned from having their ashes scattered in her garden. In a letter to the Jane Austen Society, Louise West, the collections manager of Jane Austen's House Museum, wrote: "While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!" (Or is it? Surely a small quantity of fresh ashes judiciously placed beneath a hydrangea bush is just the ticket?)

Anyway, leaving aside the Gardeners' Question Time minutiae, what on earth is going on here? I like an Austen novel as much as the next person - I probably reread my way through the complete works every couple of years - but I am baffled as to why one would want to be laid to rest among the flowerbeds of Chawton. The only explanation is the currently unstoppable power of the Austen cult, fuelled by Colin Firth in a wet blouse, by Andrew Davies's adaptations, and by Hollywood. I'm all for enjoying books, but the cult of Austen has reached ridiculous proportions. In a post-feminist world that should know better, she seems to be adored as the comforting provider of romantic, happy-endings nonsense instead of the sharp and acerbic social satirist she deserves to be seen as.

(Does anyone actually believe her, by the way, when she foretells a happy marriage for Darcey and Elizabeth? I fear a woman as interesting as Elizabeth would be sorely disappointed with this standard-issue British Repressed Public-school Man - hopeless emotionally, and probably hopeless in bed.)"

Ten of the best literary locks of hair from John Mullan in the Guardian

Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In these poems Browning described the course of her courtship by Robert Browning. She includes one sonnet in which she offers him the ultimate love token: "I never gave a lock of hair away / To a man, Dearest, except this to thee, / Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully / I ring out to the full brown length and say 'Take it'."

Possession, by AS Byatt. Byatt knows the Victorians liked their locks, and makes her plot turn on the discovery of a lock of hair in a grave. In the box that was buried with the great poet Randolph Ash, the eager researchers discover a bundle of letters, a bracelet and "a blue envelope containing a long thread of very finely plaited pale hair". They are sure they know whose hair it is, but the novel finally turns on the fact that they misidentify it.

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Quote of the Week

"I hope I may die before you, so that I may see Heaven before you improve it". A remark made to Capability Brown.

Odd Book Title

The guide to owning a Quaker parrot by Gayle Soucek, Neptune City, TFH 2002 Australian copies via this link.