John Garvey in the latest edition of the Times Literary Supplement Online examines Globalization and its cures. Can anything good come out of our messy ideas about how the world works now?

GRANTA GOODIES

The UK magazine Granta continues to offer excellent content online, including Maud Newton's Portrait of my Father, which includes the paragraph:

"Dad was a fearsome and disapproving figure who grounded me for Bs and spanked me for everything from being constipated to referring to my sister and her friend Eleanor as ‘you guys’ (they were both girls; the proper term was ‘y’all’). A conservative lawyer who’d grown up in the Mississippi Delta and was now raising his family in 1980s Miami, he seemed unaware that there was no reason or opportunity for his daughters to learn how to act like proper Southern ladies. I did not relate to him. I did not trust him. Most of all, I did not want to have anything in common with him."

There is also a podcast of Joseph O'Neill and Jonathan Lethem discussing the same subject.

The Koran and Bible Moved To the Top Shelves

The UK Telegraph reports that officials at UK libraries have recommended keeping all holy books, including the Bible and the Koran on the top shelves in the interests of equality. Leicester's librarians consulted the Federation of Muslim Organisations and were advised that all religious texts should be kept on the top shelf to ensure equality. But there are critics of the new requirements. See more here.

Amos Oz

A lengthy interview with Amos Oz can be found in the UK Guardian. Oz says "If every last Palestinian refugee was settled in the West Bank and Gaza, it would still be less crowded than Belgium".

The Bookride blog reports that "Second hand bookshops have become oases of sedition, eccentricity, obscurity and unashamed intellectual fervour in an increasingly conformist and dumbed down world. The great bookseller Simon Gough, now retired, used to chuck people out of his shop if they said they were 'only browsing' -he was once heard once heard shouting at a customer. "If you want to browse, go and do it outside - get out"!!!!! If Simon liked you, however, he would offer you a 'dish of tea'. Another East Anglian bookseller Bob Jackson (oddly enough a former member of the Powys society) offers tea to all customers and often leaves them browsing while he goes off on a house call asking them to pay for their books in an honesty box.

What a history of human excesses a second-hand book-shop is! As you 'browse' there- personally I can't abide that word, for to my mind book-lovers are more like hawks and vultures than sheep, but of course if its use encourages poor devils to glance through books that they have no hope of buying, long may the word remain!-you seem to grow aware what a miracle it was when second-hand book-shops were first invented. Women prefer libraries, free or otherwise, but it too often happens that the books an ordinary man wants are on the 'forbidden shelves'. But there is no censorship in a second-hand book-shop. Every good bookseller is a multiple-personality, containing all the extremes of human feeling. He is an ascetic hermit, he is an erotic immoralist, he is a Papist, he is a Quaker, he is a communist, he is an anarchist, he is a savage iconoclast, he is a passionate worshipper of idols. Though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical and wicked spirits! In books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind.

It is for this reason that a bookshop--especially a second-hand bookshop--is an arsenal of explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium den of reactions. And just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority."

Don't get depressed: A writer's guide to surviving the recession

Robert McCrum in the UK Guardian writes "It's my belief that, in a downturn, books are more resilient than, say, banking; but there is still that urgent question: What can writers and journalists do about the recession? The short answer is: not much. We are passive spectators, not masters of the universe (at least in the short term). Still, in the spirit of optimism for which this blog is noted, I've come up with Seven Principles for Surviving the recession.

1.Write in English, British, or American

If you want an international audience, however small, it makes no sense to write in Swedish unless you're Stieg Larsson."

Kindle And Beyond: 15 E-Reading Devices

An overview of e-reading devices is necessary given that the Consumer Electronics Association estimates that about 538,000 e-readers were shipped in 2008, representing 235 percent growth in the market from 2007. While the recent unveiling of Amazon's Kindle 2 makes the device a hot item in e-readers, it has received quite a lot of critical comment. Channelweb.com has taken a long look at what's out there. See pictures of the Jinke, Netronix EB-100, Readius, and other readers you may not have heard of. Slideshow here.

101 uses for the sacred foreskin

The UK Guardian's summary of a study called 'The Circumcision of Jesus Christ' has aroused a lot of interest. The article pioneers a new flavour of interdisciplinary research: urology at last joins forces with theology. The study, published in the Journal of Urology, focuses on what happened to Jesus's foreskin during and especially after biblical times.

Too Christian or Too Narrow?

Pursuing a religious theme, a major scholarly project - four volumes, hundreds of authors, 3,000 pages - is setting off a furor according to the US Inside Higher Education Blog. The major publishers Wiley-Blackwell have halted sales of their religious encyclopedia, against charges of "anti-Christian bias and threats of lawsuits. While the publisher unveiled the project this fall and started promoting it, it abruptly halted sales in November. The editor in chief of the encyclopedia has been circulating letters this month accusing Wiley-Blackwell of trying to censor the project because it is too Christian and because some entries are critical of Islam. The publisher in turn is charging that the editorial board for the project was ignored and that there are legitimate quality control issues that required the volumes to be pulled.

The dispute is being portrayed in some circles as a conflict between secular academics and thinkers of faith. A blog posting by one contributor to the encyclopedia is headlined: “Too Christian for Academia? A four-volume encyclopedia gets pulped in the name of political correctness.” But the publisher insists that nothing has been destroyed and that the printed copies remain in storage. And some of those who have raised questions about the project are in fact Christian scholars (both in what they study and their faith)."

PBA Galleries in San Francisco had some fascinating items for sale in its Feb 19 auction

These included:

- A first edition set of James Cook’s Three Voyages, including the Atlas to the Third Voyage, bound in early 19th century diced calf, estimate: $30,000/50,000.

- A rare, large paper copy of The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series by Sir Isaac Newton - his posthumously published exposition of the fundamental problem of the calculus. Estimate: $30,000/40,000.

- Walt Whitman’s Complete Poems & Prose, 1855...1888, signed by Whitman on the half-title of Leaves of Grass. This is the definitive edition of Whitman's work, issued in his lifetime, and published just three years before his death. Limited to 600 copies. Estimate: $7,000/10,000.

- The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most famous of all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, in first edition, first issue, with the original decorated cloth. Estimate: $4,000/6,000.

To view the entire catalogue, complete with illustrations for each lot, click here.

Ten of the best weddings

John Mullan in the UK Guardian lists ten of the best fictional weddings, which include:

Claudio and Hero

In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing this pair get two weddings. At the first , Claudio hands Hero back to her father without plighting his troth; he has been tricked by the villainous Don John into believing her unfaithful. In the play's last scene, believing Hero dead, he agrees to an arranged marriage with a veiled young woman - who is, of course, the forgiving Hero herself.

Mr B and Pamela

Mr B has spent a few hundred pages of Pamela, by Samuel Richardson, trying to seduce his lovely servant girl, and variously gropes and insults her. But then he reads her letters and becomes virtuous. She accepts his proposal.

Ellen and unnamed "dastard"

In the ballad included in Walter Scott's Marmion, "the young Lochinvar" rides across country and swims the river Eske to reach the parentally approved wedding of his beloved Ellen to a nameless, spineless rival. After a quick dance Lochinvar swings her on to his horse and is off , chased in vain by relatives. This is surely where the final sequence in The Graduate comes from.

Quote of the Week

"Genius is an infinite capacity for giving pain" Anon.

Odd Book Title

Given this week's religious theme, look out for:

Eating Baby Jesus. By Enda Wyley. Dublin. Dedalus Press, 1993.

Debbie Campbell of the NLA reports that Libraries Australia only holding is in the ACT!

Pun of the Week

Is a head cold Rheum service?