Tom Wolfe on the state of US fiction

Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English at Emory University notes in his blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education an interview with Tom Wolfe by Carole Iannone in the current issue of Academic Questions.

"On writers and the survival of literature, Wolfe states, "The novel is sinking into its kneecaps.” Why? “I blame it on these master-of-fine-arts programs. Writers, important writers, used to come from all kinds of backgrounds. In the 1930s they went to great lengths to stress their proletarian origins. The cover of one of Faulkner’s novels boasts that he is a former dishwasher and a former shoe clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue. These were terrible exaggerations, but it’s true that if you lumped together all of Hemingway’s, Fitzgerald’s, and Steinbeck’s college educations you would barely reach spring break in the freshman year".

One Man, One Year, One Mission: Read The Oxford English Dictionary!

NPR reports on Ammon Shea, who has just read The Oxford English Dictionary. It took him a full year to read the dictionary. He has since written a book of his own about the experience, called Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. "I have to say, it was absolutely delightful," Shea said. "It was such a moving experience. It felt so similar to reading a great work of literature ... All of the human emotions and experiences are right there in this dictionary, just as they would be in any fine work of literature. They just happen to be alphabetized."

A selection of the 500 words Ammon Shea named as his favorites in reading the Oxford English Dictionary begins with:

- antapology - a response or reply to an apology

- bedinner - to treat to dinner

- conjugalism - the art of making a good marriage

Vladimir Nabokov's last book

Nabokov's son says he will publish the Russian author's last manuscript despite his dying request that it be burned.

Dimitri Nabokov says in an interview with the German edition of Vanity Fair that his father must have wanted the work published. He is quoted as saying: "Had my father really wished that this novel not be released, he would have destroyed it himself.".The work titled The Original Laura was left behind on 138 notecards when the author died in 1977. He asked his wife, Vera, to burn the work. She never did.The Original Laura is scheduled for release in September".

The New Yorker magazine recently asked asked its readers to tell it which literary figures might serve as role models for current world leaders, starting with Obama as Mr. Darcy and Gordon Brown as Heathcliff.

(See my blog of 21 July for more on Brown as Heathcliff)

"Here’s our favorite, from Tayyba Kanwal, of Houston, Texas:On the topic of current leaders and literary heroes, President Bush could be none other than Mr. Bumble [from “Oliver Twist”]. He is the parish beadle. He runs the orphanage. His English is atrocious. And he makes us laugh!

And a nod to a fellow blogger, Annie Kelly, of the Battle Creek Enquirer, who points us to her fabulously fleshed-out post on the subject. Obama and Dorothea Brooke [from “Middlemarch”] first come to mind. Both are hopeful, full of good intentions for changing the world. And it is Dorothea’s disconnection from the real world that causes her trouble, like many are afraid is the case with Barack Obama"

Hannah Adcock is an Edinburgh-based journalist and biobliophile who blogs in "Edinburgh’s brothel quarter - I mean book quarter - I know that the festival has arrived because more than half of all customers call us a ‘store,’ something which has always unnerved me. It makes me think of staff who are ‘happy to help,’ no matter what situation presents itself. Our shop approach to customer service has always been idiosyncratic. Personally, I tend to think that it does certain customers good if they have to look for a book themselves. If nothing else, it familiarises them with the alphabet and provides them with moderate exercise if they need to stand on tiptoes or bend down.

Anyway, the shop becomes busier and we might sell some books (a good thing) although getting to work means weaving your way round bovine groups and inane flyer folk (a bad thing). It also means that you have amusing conversations along the lines of, ‘Hello!! We’re doing a theatre show about Frog Spawn and Cliff Richard. Can we leave an A1 poster please!!’ I slowly look around. The shop is a teetering mass of book-laden shelves, with a few handmade posters dedicated to Edinburgh council’s health and safety department. More importantly, the answer is no".

Dylan Thomas - Secret diary reveals wife's undying love

The popular image of Dylan Thomas’s marriage was that it was tempestuous, blighted by drunken brawls and mutual infidelity until the poet drank himself to death at the age of 39. More than half a century later, however, a different side to the relationship is revealed in his wife Caitlin's private journal, according to the UK Times.

"Her journal counters the image of Thomas as a womanising drunk, which has endured since John Malcolm Brinnin’s 1955 biography 'Dylan Thomas in America', which Caitlin attacked as a “betrayal”. The yellowing leaves of a school exercise book are filled with poignant meditation on her love for the Welsh author of 'Under Milk Wood' - his play about an imaginary village called Llareggub (“bugger all” backwards)... The journal is among 40 manuscripts and inscribed first editions amassed by a New York enthusiast. The collection is being sold by Rick Gekoski, a leading London dealer in rare books, and is valued at £250,000.

George Tremlett, a biographer of Thomas and Caitlin, said that the journal could help to reverse the damage done by Brinnin’s biography and, more recently, by the film 'The Edge of Love' (soon to be seen in Canberra). Pubs were an important part of Thomas’s life, he acknowledged. But, while the writer could hold a pub audience spellbound with jokes and extempore poems, he could not hold his drink beyond two pints, he believes. While there were affairs, he added, the evidence is fewer than some suggest".

The 10 oddest travel guides ever published, including the Baedeker to Nazi-occupied Poland.

Zadie Smith on Kafka

Smith ponders details of Kafka's life, "as found in Louis Begley's refreshingly factual The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: a Biographical Essay: over six feet tall, handsome, elegantly dressed; an unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast, a vegetarian; a frequent visitor to movie houses, cabarets, all-night cafés, literary soirées and brothels; the published author of seven books during his brief lifetime; engaged three times (twice to the same woman); valued by his employers, promoted at work.

But this last Kafka is as difficult to keep in mind as the Pynchon who grocery-shops and attends baseball games, the Salinger who grew old and raised a family in Cornish, New Hampshire. Readers are incurable fabulists. Kafka's case, though, extends beyond literary mystique. He is more than a man of mystery - he's metaphysical. Readers who are particularly attached to this supra-Kafka find the introduction of a quotidian Kafka hard to swallow. And vice versa.

I spoke once at a Jewish literary society on the subject of time in Kafka, an exploration of the idea - as the critic Michael Hofmann has it - that "it is almost always too late in Kafka". Afterwards a spry woman in her nineties, with a thick Old World accent, hurried across the room and tugged my sleeve: "But you're quite wrong! I knew Mr Kafka in Prague - and he was never late."

Australian Humanities Review - Issue 44, 2008 is now out online and free from the ANU.

The idea of South: Australia’s global positioning - Edited by Monique Rooney and Russell Smith

The British Academy Review is also out with its latest issue with a similar online article format

The articles include

The 'Credit Crunch' and Trust, Geoffrey Hosking

'Levelled by booksellers': Sir Walter Scott, Robert Cadell, and the Economic Crash of 1825-1826, Ross Alloway

The Effect of Taxes and Bans on Passive Smoking, Jérôme Adda & Francesca Cornaglia

Dispossession and Displacement: Forced Migration in the Middle East and Africa, Dawn Chatty

Toleration, Past and Present, Jon Parkin & Tim Stanton

Why Humans aren't just Great Apes, Robin Dunbar

Palace or Powerstation?

Museums Today

Open access responds to public's hunger for knowledge

"Albert Einstein is on YouTube. Plato is on iTunes. And professors at Harvard and Stanford have begun freely sharing their work on the Web with anyone who is interested. We may just be entering a new era in the public right to knowledge.

In February, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to create "open access" copies of all their scholarly articles. In May, Harvard Law School followed suit. Then in June, Stanford University School of Education faculty unanimously voted for a similar motion.

By endorsing this open-access policy, my Stanford colleagues have agreed that publishing an article in a respectable journal is no longer the end of it. They will also post a copy of their work online, where educators and the public can freely read what we have learned about learning. Such public access to knowledge only makes sense, given Stanford's belief that educational research - whether it examines how children master subtraction, how communities can improve opportunities for youth, or how teachers can improve their teaching - should be available to those who are interested as well as those, such as teachers, who can make productive use of such knowledge.

It also makes sense, in light of the recent public scrutiny over whether tax-exempt private universities like Harvard and Stanford do enough to further the public good. Yet it is our hope that now that we have broken this new ground, other public and private institutions will follow our lead...

Certainly, the public's hunger for accessing knowledge online has never been stronger. Tens of thousands of people come together to build Wikipedia on a global scale and in many languages. Millions turn to How Stuff Works. Questions posed on public forums get answered. Regular people contribute countless reviews on everything from books and movies, to holiday resorts and gourmet recipes.

Public interest in finding information on the Web has gone academic as well, now that the virtual campus gates have begun to open. People are following links from Wikipedia to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York Times columns include links to economics papers. Visitors log on to Galaxy Zoo, eager to assist astronomers in classifying the galaxies within the massive data sets accumulated by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Students tap into open educational resources of every sort, from online textbooks to lesson materials.

Even if this new access to knowledge has yet to affect test scores or improve U.S. rankings in international comparisons in education, it does provide students with richer sources from which to learn. Citizens have new opportunities to consider and critically review sources of information. Open access of scholarly research can only add to the educational and deliberative quality of democratic life.

Faculty at Harvard and Stanford have taken a bold step forward into this new age of public knowledge by insisting that they will make their work open to public discourse and debate. By doing so, they affirm the contribution that research and scholarship can make to public life, and the responsibility that higher education institutions have for generating and sharing knowledge that can help the world address some of its most challenging problems".

JOHN WILLINKSY is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and is director of the Public Knowledge Project. DEBORAH STIPEK is the I. James Quillen Dean and Professor of Education at Stanford University. They wrote this article for the Mercury News.

The 25 best boarding school books from the UK Times

"Books about boarding school have always been popular, but they've often been seen - like the schools themselves - as old fashioned and well past their sell-by date. This may no longer be the case - for the school, and their fictional equivalents. Meanwhile Wild Child, a film about an 16-year-old American sent to a British boarding school to be "tamed" is released next week, while School Friends, a new boarding school series aimed at girls of eight and up, is published at the end of August. Its publishers are claiming that it's "Malory Towers for the new Millennium." My daughter is already a fan, proclaiming concisely that she "really, really likes them."

All this good news reminds me of how I used to love reading boarding school books myself. Here's my top 25 - mostly for children, but with a few special books aimed more directly at adults in there too. Feel free to disagree!

Odd Book Title

Jesus in my Golf Cart. By Bernita Jackson Brown. AuthorHouse, 2002.

Quote of the Week

'I like reviewing books because it makes me want to read them' Overhead at a London literary party.