Was Hitler a bookworm?The UK Times notes that while Hitler owned some 16,000 books, "did Hitler bother to read any of them? Ritchie Robertson duly notes the presentation copies, the absence of Nietzsche and the "thoroughly annotated" volumes of "racial pseudo-science" on the Führer's shelves". Full article here.
We can work it out: Getting an MA for studying the Beatles
When I did my MA thesis for Liverpool University back in the late 60s, I had to research a thesis of 80,000 words on the English understandings of Spain and Latin America in the 16th and 17th centuries. It took six years to do part time, so one wonders a little when last week, Liverpool's Hope University launched UK's and perhaps world's first master's course in fab four studies. Given my years in Liverpool, it would have been easier to have studied the Beatles?
Hunter Davies, the biographer of the Beatles and who donated some of the Beatles most famous manuscripts to the British Library, writes in the UK Guardian "I don't know what's taken Liverpool Hope University so long. Serious, academic study of the Beatles has been going on, at colleges and universities all over the world, for almost 30 years. Originally it was dopey little campuses in the US that started offering Beatles modules, but then gradually bigger, better places followed suit.
About 25 years ago I got a call from London University, asking me to be an outside examiner for a student doing a PhD on the Beatles. I thought it was a wind-up at first, but then I was invited to University College London, where I was to meet the other two outside examiners. One was the late Wilfred Mellor, professor of music at York University, who was one of the earliest musicologists to write learnedly about the Beatles in his book Twilight of the Gods as long ago as 1973. (William Mann, music critic of the Times, wrote about them academically even earlier, back in the 60s, making us all snigger at his long words, fancy notions and Schubert comparisons).
I can still remember the student's name, because it sounded as if John Lennon had made it up: Melodie Ziff, an American, who had done her thesis on "the Beatles' lyrics as poetry". I thought it was excellent, though her phraseology was a bit American-academic, but my two fellow outside examiners were more critical, awarding her, as far as I can remember, an MPhil, not a DPhil.
Since then, not a week goes by without some student, somewhere, writing to ask me a question on the Beatles, almost all of which I can't answer. About 10 years ago, I was contacted by an academic from Lancaster University who had become a world expert on the Beatles in Hamburg - a very rich field of study, as you can argue that playing in Hamburg had a more important effect on their music than playing in the Cavern. In Japan there's a Beatles fair once a month, which usually has an academic in attendance, giving a talk on his latest Beatles research.
it would look quite neat on my visiting card, if I had one, to say Professor of Beatles Studies at the University of Cumbria. Then I think, nah. I'm going to hold out to be Professor of Football Memorabilia at the University of Kentish Town."
• Hunter Davies's authorised biography of the Beatles will appear in an updated paperback edition from Ebury in May
The Guardian also poses some questions to test your knowledge on the Beatles as a precursor to studying that MA. Click here.
http:// www.guardian.co.uk/education/quiz /2009/mar/04/beatles-liverpool-ho pe-degree-quiz
What do you read if you are alone in a restaurant?
Leanne Shapton in the New York Times writes "alone in London last spring, I took Grégoire Bouillier’s short book "The Mystery Guest" to my favorite restaurant, propping it up over my baba ghanouj, chorizo and tortilla. I slurped mansaf soup between page turns and crumbled bits of yogurt pistachio cake into the book's gutters, simultaneously finishing my meal and the story. It was a lovely date. A week later, at the Hay Festival, a literary gathering in Hay-on-Wye, the writer A. A. Gill was asked who his ideal dinner companion would be. His reply: "One of the great joys is to go to a restaurant you can't afford and sit and eat with a book." This led me to wonder whom other authors were taking to dinner, so I asked a few of my favorites.
Jay McInerney
Over a recent solitary meal at Otto in New York, I was reading A. J. Liebling’s "Between Meals," a kind of gastronomic memoir of Liebling’s early years in Paris. I find that it stimulates my appetite.
Rebecca Miller
"The Assistant," by Robert Walser, is a rare glimpse of suppressed hysteria and paranoia in a male psyche. It’s such a modern, interior book, and it’s funny, too, and strange. Perfect for moments of alienation while eating a sandwich alone." More here.
The March issue of the UK Literary Review has the following articles online
THE MARQUISE WHO SAW IT ALL
She lived through the French Revolution, made a new life in America, and wrote a dramatic memoir. John Adamson casts admiring glances at Madame de le Tour du Pin...
TROUBLE IN PALESTINE
The murder in custody of a Jewish boy in 1947 by a British police officer spelt the end of Britain's presence in Palestine. David Pryce-Jones investigates.
NO NEED TO GET HEATED
Who's afraid of the menopause? Joan Smith challenges the fear-mongering advocates of HRT...
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
Jason Burke reviews a study of America in the Middle East.
MYSTERIES OF THE SOUL
John Cornwell praises an attempt to put the soul back into science.
Rare First Editions
On sale at the Swann Galleries in New York on March 12, include "the desirable 19th-century literary works of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in its first one-volume edition, which is also the first illustrated edition, and first to credit Shelley as the author, (estimate: $2,000 to $3,000), Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress, in three volumes, illustrated with 24 George Cruikshank drawings, ($5,000 to $7,000); a signed, first limited edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray ($3,000 to $4,000); and a signed, first limited edition of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, ($5,000 to $7,000)."
The 2009 Shortlist for the Oddest Book title
The UK Booksellers notes that Baboons and sieves vie for the odd title prize. "The shortlist for the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has been unveiled by The UK Bookseller. Six titles, with subjects ranging from fromage frais to strip knitting, make up the shortlist for the hotly contested award, which is now in its 31st year.
Philip Stone, a sales analyst at The Bookseller, added: "We received a huge number of entries this year and the debate was furious as to which would be included on the shortlist. Six seems such a cruelly low number given titles such as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD were rejected.Stone added: "The Diagram Prize this year has achieved a wonderful quadruple. It celebrates the diversity within book publishing today, the risks publishers are willing to take to support freedom of information, the beauty of print-on-demand for fascinatingly niche titles, and perhaps most of all, complete and utter oddity."
The shortlist is as follows:
Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth (University of Chicago Press)
Curbside Consultation of the Colon by Brooks D Cash (SLACK Incorporated)
The Large Sieve and its Applications by Emmanuel Kowalski (Cambridge University Press)
Strip and Knit with Style by Mark Hordyszynski (C&T)
Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring by Lietai Yang (Woodhead)
The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Professor Philip M Parker (Icon Group International)
Patrick Stewart video interview in UK Times
"This summer, the 43 year old Star Trek franchise hits the big screen again, and it aims to attract a far wider audience than the usual 'Trekkie' crowd. In a conversation with Clive James, Patrick Stewart said he was proud to have walked the deck of the Starship Enterprise. Famous for his portrayal of kings and emperors as a star of the RSC, Stewart took the unusual step of moving to Hollywood to play Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. "All those years of working for the Royal Shakespeare Company... sitting in the throne of England, was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the Captain's chair on the Enterprise."
Professor Mary Beard gives her views on literary festivals in her Times Literary Supplement blog
"Literary festivals are huge fun -- but also unnerving affairs if you're a performing author. The question is: what counts as a successful festival gig? Is it filling the hall they've assigned you? That's easier if the organisers have not expected a huge turnout and have given you a modest room with a modest number of seats.' Standing room only' is always good for morale, even if only takes 40 or so punters to achieve it. The other way round -- when a few faithful followers (usually friends and relations) are dotted around a vast hall fit for a best seller -- is at best a salutary reminder that one's own obsession with one's own book is not actually widely shared. At worst it's a real put-down.
Or do you judge it by books bought and signed? Is an audience of 40 each of whom buys a copy of your latest tome more a success than an audience of 500 if only 10 decide to take a copy home with them? There's a good deal of humiliation in store here too. I dont imagine that there's a single 'ordinary' author who hasnt been in a joint signing session, where the queue to get a signature out of the other authors snakes right out of the 'signing tent' -- while you're sitting there 'unbought', talking to an old student or a friend of your parents who has taken pity on you.
Anyway, these reflections are prompted by the Saturday evening gig that I did at the Bath Literary Festival -- a lecture on Pompeii, a 'tie in' with my new book. I should say that I had a great time (including a wonderful supper before the lecture). And on the first criterion I did just fine: every seat was sold, and more. But the sales weren't exactly brisk...ten or books altogether I would have said. The optimistic explanation would be that the audience had mostly bought it already (dream on, Beard ...!). The truth must be that, even if I can deliver a good lecture (and I think it was OK), I haven't got much talent as a sales-person. Are you actually supposed to plug the book, I wonder? Imply that your kids will go unshod unless everyone goes away with at least a couple of copies of your latest book (and a few of your earlier efforts) under their arms?"
The Oxford Professor of Poetry election
The London Evening Standard comments "Derek Walcott, the celebrated Caribbean poet considered one of the most important figures in post-colonial literature, could be Oxford University's first black Professor of Poetry. So far Andrew Motion has ruled himself out and Ruth Padel has ruled herself in. Now I can reveal there is a campaign underway by biographer Hermione Lee to have Walcott elected to the position. The five year post is considered the most prestigious in poetry after the laureateship and previous incumbents include W H Auden, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Walcott, 79, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He currently divides his time between Trinidad and Boston University, where he teaches Literature and Creative Writing. Walcott recently wrote a poem inspired by the election and inauguration of Obama, called The World is Waiting. How apt if Derek could follow Barack."
The UK Guardian lists the 10 most embarrassing sporting endorsements
1. Ashley Cole and the lottery
The Chelsea defender has made bad decisions over the years - that paragraph about wages in his autobiography comes to mind - but none can match his decision to appear in this cheesy campaign for the National Lottery in 2006. The concept might have been dreamt up by a council of Cole's worst enemies: he appears in white lounge suit and midriff-revealing shirt, draped over wife Cheryl as smoke drifts about their feet. They are, apparently, in heaven; we'd argue this image represents something like the reverse.
2. Roger Federer and the coffee machines
Federer's print ads for Jura coffee machines, first circulated in 2007, marry him to a series of horrific tennis puns. "Set: Federer" pictures Roger as the contented owner of a full assortment of Jura products; "Service: Federer" has perhaps the finest tennis player of all time holding out two cups of coffee like an aggressive junior waiter just daring you not to tip. A more recent campaign depicts Feds in cuddly knitwear, commanding us to "be unique" and "be true" (by drinking coffee from a Jura machine, presumably)". More here.
Quot e of the Week
"Our wines leave you nothing to hope for". Swiss restaurant menu.
Odd Book Title
Reusing Old Graves. By Douglas Davies and Alastair Shaw. Shaw & Sons. 1995. Debbie Campbell from the NLA reports apparently no copies in Australia in WorldCat.org.
Pun of the Week
The first tavern to open in Alaska was a polar bar.
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