Peter Lovatt is carrying out more research into dance Find out more on his website DanceDrDance.com

More here.

ANU Meet the Author/Canberra Times invites you to meet Alexander McCall Smith, Sarah Waters and Mark Danner in February

Great news for fans of the three authors above as the ANU with The Canberra Times will be hosting events in ANU's Manning Clark lecture theatres in February. All literary events will be free but bookings are essential.

Alexander McCall Smith, one of the world's favourite authors, will bring you all the latest chat from Mma Ramotswe in Botswana, the goings-on at 44 Scotland Street, the delights of The Sunday Philosophy Club and introduce his new series, Corduroy Mansions. Thursday, February 4, 5.30pm.

American Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of the world's leading foreign correspondents, Mark Danner, will be speaking at 6pm on Tuesday, February 23 on his new book 'Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence and War' in the ANU's Freilich Foundation Series.

Three-time Booker short-listed author Sarah Waters will make her first visit to Canberra in conversation with Marion Halligan at 6pm on Wednesday February 24.

Bookings details: Christina Apps, ANU Communications and External Liaison Office

Email: events@anu.edu.au or phone 02 6125 4144

At all events books will be available for signing at the Uni Co-op Bookshop stand.

"You lie!'" on Yale Librarian's List of Year's Memorable Quotes

Fred Shapiro, associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at Yale Law School, is releasing his fourth annual list of The Yale Book of Quotations. It’s here.

Top quotes are as follows:

1. "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Speaker at health care reform town hall meeting in Simpsonville, S.C., commenting on the government-created Medicare program, quoted by The Washington Post on July 28.

2. "We're going to be in the Hudson." Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, responding to air traffic controllers asking on which runway he preferred to land US Airways Flight 1549 on Jan. 15 before he landed in the Hudson River.

3. "There's an app for that." Apple's advertising slogan for the iPhone.

More here.

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One million newspaper pages now online

The National Library's Australian Newspapers service has reached a milestone, with one million pages now available on Trove. This includes 10 million articles covering the period between 1803-1954. By 2011, 40 million articles containing over 4 million pages will be available. Search, browse and 'text correct' Australian Newspapers on Trove here.

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The population bomb is still ticking

"In this interview one of the world’s best-known biologists, Paul R Ehrlich, answers questions from Dr John Richard Schrock. Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies and President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. He received his PhD from the University of Kansas. As co-founder with Peter H Raven of the field of co-evolution, Ehrlich has pursued long-term studies of the structure, dynamics and genetics of natural butterfly populations.

Ehrlich: India and China are both vastly overpopulated by the simple standard that they are living on (and exhausting) their natural capital - agricultural soils, ground water, and the biodiversity that runs our life-support systems. Until and unless we can humanely begin to shrink the global population, following the lead of over-consuming and over-populated European nations, the future seems grim.

Most unfortunately, over the past few decades the principal population issues considered by activists and foundations have been of reproductive health and rights. Those, of course, are very important but they will be totally moot if overpopulation, helping to drive climate disruption, land-use change, ocean overharvesting, toxification of the entire planet, the increased probability of novel epidemics, and greater threats of resource wars - especially a nuclear one - has not abated.The population explosion will come to an end. The only question is whether it will do so by humanity balancing its interventions to decrease death rates with interventions to decrease birth rates, or whether the death rate will soar".

The full interview can be read on the University World News site

here.

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Australian Humanities Review

Issue 47, 2009 Edited by Monique Rooney and Russell Smith

The new bumper issue of Australian Humanities Review is now online from ANU E-Press, featuring Meaghan Morris on grizzling about Facebook, Ken Gelder on global reconfigurations of literary studies, a special section on creative non-fiction and the Art of the Real, six essays in the Ecological Humanities on the theme of ‘Writing the Anthropocene’, plus the usual selection of Book Reviews.

It’s here.

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You can read it in the bathtub

Time Magazine reports as follows "Dave Eggers, McSweeney's founder and Panorama's mastermind, wanted to prove that print is not dead. On the morning of Dec.8, several dozen volunteer newsies spread out across San Francisco to hawk copies of the city's brand new newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama. The 320-page doorstop, printed in full color on old-fashioned broadsheet paper, sold for $5 on the street and $16 in bookstores. With articles by Stephen King, Michael Chabon and Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative journalist Robert Porterfield, the Panorama was an homage to the increasingly threatened - some would say obsolete - institution of print journalism. The paper's entire print run sold out in less than 90 minutes...

The San Francisco Panorama is actually the 33rd issue of McSweeney's Quarterly, a literary journal known for its novel packaging. Previous issues have been sold as cigar boxes and bundles of mail. But the Panorama issue is different. The one-time experiment was conceived by Eggers to prove that print media weren't dead. "We wanted to remind people of what newspapers can do that the Internet can't," Eggers explains: the format excels at long articles, photographs and comics and can be read anywhere — "even in the bathtub."

Read more here.

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UC San Diego experts calculate how much information Americans consume

The December 14 issue of OCLC Abstracts headlines that "Computer games and TV account for bulk of information consumed.

US households consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to the “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” released by the University of California, San Diego. One zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes, and total bytes consumed last year were the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.

Key takeaways:

The new report estimates that between 1980 and 2008, bytes consumed increased 350 percent, for an average annual growth rate of 5.4 percent. According to the report, the average American’s information consumption is 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words of information a day.

Hourly statistics confirm that a large chunk of the average American’s day is spent watching television. The new report estimates that on average 41 percent of information time is watching TV (including DVDs, recorded TV and real-time watching). American consumers watched 36 million hours of television on mobile devices each month — a number that, while expected to grow, is a fraction of the hours spent watching television at home.

Based on bytes alone, computer games are the biggest information source, totalling 18.5 gigabytes per day for the average American consumer, or about 67 percent of all bytes consumed. Approximately 80 percent of the population plays some kind of computer game, including casual games such as Bookworm, Tetris and social networking games.

Americans spent 16 percent of their information hours using the Internet (second only to TV’s 41 percent). With the proliferation of email, instant messaging and social networking, the Internet today dominates two-way communications, with more than 79 percent of those bytes every day."

See the report here.

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Literary Review Newsletter: December/January 09/10

Has its usual quota of free online articles, including Grow Up, Greens!

Bryan Appleyard on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline, a book that ‘brilliantly defines our present predicament – our need to deploy science to clean up the mess made by science’.

Click here.

A Wink and a Nudge

Irked by books that purport to explain society with a sprinkling of jargon and a few hokey anecdotes? Francis Wheen dismisses clever-dick lit.

Read more here.

In Two Minds

A C Grayling admires a book that attempts to explain civilisation through the interrelationship of our brain’s hemispheres. But does the science convince?

Find it here.

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The world's greatest train trips

The editor of Great Train Journeys of the World lists his favourite five journeys in The Guardian.

"Back in the early 1980s Jimmy Savile fronted a series of TV ads with the tag line, "This is the age of the train". Frankly, it wasn't. At the time the railways were haemorrhaging passengers, while motorways were multiplying and accessible air travel was no longer an impossible dream. Nobody wanted slam-door rattle-bang any more. Fast forward nearly three decades and the situation has changed. Motorways are nose-to-tail and airports have lost their glamour. But trains have gone on doing their own thing. Yes, we've got wonderful new high-speed services in Europe, but there are also hill-climbing antiques, trans-continental empire builders and retro-style sleepers, still plugging away.

That diversity is refreshing in an increasingly homogenised world, but railway travel does share key characteristics. It is a stress-free, uncluttered way of seeing a place, with the chance to meet its population en route. With that in mind, here is my (very subjective) list of the world's top five journeys".

Read more here.

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Colbert meets Stephen King in a fascinating video interview here.

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11 Of The Coolest Bookcases

Also from the Huffington Post, a slide show of some very cool bookcases and bookshelves.

View it here.

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The decade's best unread books

The Guardian has two Australian novels by Helen Garner and Margo Lanagan, although they got very well read here.

"While people are busy ranking the hit books of the last 10 years, many a publishing insider is quietly mourning a volume that unaccountably never made the 'best of' or bestseller lists, but should have. Here publishers, agents and translators speak up for the ones that really shouldn't have got away

Jamie Byng, Canongate publisher and managing director

The Spare Room by Helen Garner, published 2008. This deceptively slight novel is as good as anything Canongate has ever published. Or will publish. It's deceptive in many ways and I think its great subtlety is one of the reasons that it will only get fully appreciated over time. I've read it three times now and on each occasion my awe at what Garner has achieved increases. The Spare Room is a brutally honest novel about death, friendship and emotional dishonesty, written in prose that manages to be both delicate and visceral. It was overlooked by all the judges of the literary prizes in this country and these prizes are key for a book like this to sell in any serious quantity. But I still remain confident that this exceptional book will be come to be widely regarded as a modern classic. Because that is what it is.

Victoria Hobbs, literary agent, AM Heath

Mutiny was published in 2001. It was Lindsey Collen's fourth book and, we thought, her break-out novel. She had previously won the Commonwealth Writers' prize for the Africa region and been longlisted for the Orange. There was a sense that appreciation of Lindsey's work was growing and we were getting somewhere – John Berger called it "a break-out and a breakthrough". She was published with great energy and commitment by Bloomsbury. She came to London (from Mauritius) to promote and there could be no better advocate for her work – she is an extraordinary woman whose own experiences of an oppressive political system and incarceration as a result of that system fed directly into the writing of Mutiny. The few reviews she received were excellent. And somehow it just never quite took off. The novel is not an easy or comforting read; it is fierce and challenging but is utterly compelling.

Roland Philipps, John Murray managing director

War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres, published in 2005, is one of the funniest books I have ever been involved with – it's about the author's hapless time as an embedded reporter with the US Marines in Iraq. I think the reason it did not take off as it should was to do with the gap between commissioning it in 2003 and it being written and published two years later: by then the war had got so unpopular with the public that every book about it, brilliantly entertaining or not, was struggling. I hope in time it will become recognised as a classic.

Simon Spanton, Gollancz editorial director

Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, published in 2006: Yes, it was a collection of short stories and yes, the industry wisdom is that it's hellishly difficult to sell short story collections but what a collection this was. It was like having a new Angela Carter on your list. Margo is an award-winning author of fantasy stories of haunting power and beauty which seemed to speak to genre fan and non-genre fan alike courtesy of strikingly beautiful prose and an unflinching eye for truth. Black Juice contained Singing My Sister Down. When this story was circulated in-house it had an unprecedented impact – countless people admitted to being brought to tears by it. We sent that story out to the trade and the response was the same. We had a stunning cover for the book, we published it as a hardback for the price of the paperback, the trade supported us to the hilt, we got a decent number out, got rave reviews ... and 60% of them came back. Crushed. And utterly mystified."

More here.

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Pinter’s crime solved at last

The Evening Standard reports "An antiquarian bookseller has stumbled on a book belonging to Harold Pinter which the playwright was so moved by that he liberated it from a library in Southwark in 1950. London based bookseller Ed Maggs came across the stolen book while cataloguing Pinter’s entire collection of more than 2000 books earlier this year. He also discovered that Pinter is on record admitting to having stolen the book. The book in question was Murphy by Samuel Beckett, an author who Pinter says had become a huge influence on him at the time. The book seller wants to keep the Pinter collection together, as he’s hoping to sell it in its entirety. He has proposed to Southwark Council that rather than return it to their library, he buy it off the council. The council has agreed, and has pledged to use the money for a project that aims to get a publishing deal for promising young writers in the borough."

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R.W. Johnson has reservations in The Cup Comes to Cape Town in the London Review of Books

"Cape Town is in a state of serious dislocation because of next summer’s football World Cup,’ The city wanted the new stadium to be built in a poor area, both to create jobs and to make it easier for people without money to get to the games. But FIFA wouldn’t stand for that: they needed ‘fine mountain views’. The massive new stadium at Green Point will probably be ready in time. As for the football, ‘it is ironic that the first Cup to be held in Africa will experience the worst weather of any World Cup in decades,’ Johnson writes. Cape Town in winter is cold, wet and windy, and upon the highveld it’ll be freezing. The home advantage doesn’t promise much for the South African team: on paper it’s the worst of all the countries competing, clocking in two places below North Korea in the world rankings, and there’s a risk it could be the first host nation not to make it through the first round".

More here.

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Ten of the best lawyers in literature

From John Mullan in The Guardian. These include:

Perry Mason

In the crime novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, Perry Mason is a wily defence attorney who specialises in apparently hopeless cases. His clients are invariably bang to rights, but always, we find, really innocent. Invariably the truth is revealed by Mason in a courtroom coup de théâtre. He never seems to work for an actual criminal.

Horace Rumpole

Rumpole does defend the guilty (or "muddled and sinful humanity", as he is likely to call it). John Mortimer's loveably crusty defence barrister loves cheroots, wine and poetry, and radiates good humour (except when arguing with judges). He usually wins, but even when he loses he goes down with bon mots and ruefulness.

Atticus Finch