"Money is scarce, but hopefully humor is in good supply. When the well-heeled patrons of New York's venerable Morgan Library wander through its new exhibition of cartoons about money, there may be some hollow laughter as they ponder their own hard times. The exhibit of 70 years of New Yorker magazine cartoons titled "On the Money" was planned over a year ago, before the full scale of the financial crisis that has plunged the United States and much of the world into recession became apparent.

She said some at the Morgan Library, which prominent financier Pierpoint Morgan established in the early 1900s as his private library, had questioned late last year whether they should go ahead with the show at a time of economic gloom.

"There is something to be said about the need for some perspective and some levity, even though it's true that people are indeed really hurting," Tonkovich said.

"Being able to smile, or laugh, or recognize a thought articulated through a cartoon, is actually a really cathartic thing right now," she said."

A few tips for Kate Winslet if she wins an Oscar

After two recent rather awkward and emotional acceptance speeches by Kate Winslet, the UK Times has come up with some advice for her, which includes the following:

"Ladiesandgentlem en. Gosh! Blimey!”

(Gauge reaction. If extreme Britishness goes down well, repeat. If extremely confident, risk a “lawks”)

Here's a tip; Kate: just try acting

“This time, I am absolutely not lost for words. I have lots of words. I've practised them. I'd like to start by thanking my director and my husband, who may or may not, in this film, have been the same person.”

(Point, wink, DO NOT wave)

“I'd like to thank everybody who worked with me on this particular film, whichever film it was. If it's the one with Leonardo DiCaprio, I'd like to apologise for turfing him off that door into the sea in Titanic without even bothering to check he was dead.”

(Pause for laughter. Wait for camera to cut to Leo)

“If it's for the Holocaust one, of course, all humour would be misplaced.” (Look grave) “But I'd like to thank Ricky Gervais for giving me that cameo in Extras in which my character noted that a sure way to get awards was to do a Holocaust film. Because I'd be lying if I said it didn't get me thinking. Bloody hell. This bit won't get on the news, will it?”

(Pause for Bafta audience laughter. If Oscar audience does not laugh, say “blimey” again. That should do it)"

More here.

Wome n take over Top UK Research Libraries

The appointment of Anne Jarvis to the Cambridge University Librarianship recently, the first woman in its history, means that the British Library, Oxford and now Cambridge have female Head Librarians. Peter Fuller, former Literary Editor of the Canberra Times has reminded me that times have changed as "This was the library which refused to let Virginia Woolf through its portals. "You can close the doors of your library," she said, "but you can't close the doors of my mind."

The Paradox Who Was Chesterton

The Times Literary Supplement has an interesting article in its current issue on G.K. Chesteron by A. N. Wilson.

"W. B. Yeats, in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, recalled how the 1890s came to an end - “Then in 1900, everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church”. Oddie’s comment - “He was wrong about the Catholic Church of course” suggests that he has not quite caught Yeats’s tone. But maybe the joke tells us more than many more serious sentences about Chesterton. Having abstained from the absinthe and, as in one of his funnier Ballades, decided not to hang himself, GK was perhaps never more “Nineties” than when he followed in the footsteps of Lionel Johnson, John Gray and Oscar Wilde himself, into the arms of Rome."

A Very Strange Scottish Love Poem

The UK Times says that while "everyone knows about Robbie Burns, but there must be more to Scottish poetry. We asked Gerard Carruthers editor of a new collection of Scottish Poems, to pick out some overlooked gems."

These include Tom Leonard, A Summer’s Day, "The great Glasgow love poem where the speaker has difficulty expressing his feeling but the emotion says it all."

Yir eyes ur

eh

a mean yir

pirrit this wey

ah a thingk yir

byewtifl like ehm

fact

fact a thingk yir

ach a luvyi that’s

thahts

jist thi wey it iz like

thahts ehm

aw ther iz ti say

Christine Rosen - people of the screen

A long article by Christine Rosen in the latest edition of New Atlantis examines digital literacy and reading patterns.

"The book is modernity’s quintessential technology-“a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn’t-if we choose to replace the book-what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?

We have already taken the first steps on our journey to a new form of literacy-“digital literacy.” The fact that we must now distinguish among different types of literacy hints at how far we have moved away from traditional notions of reading. The screen mediates everything from our most private communications to our enjoyment of writing, drama, and games. It is the busiest port of entry for popular culture and requires navigation skills different from those that helped us master print literacy.

Enthusiasts and self-appointed experts assure us that this new digital literacy represents an advance for mankind; the book is evolving, progressing, improving, they argue, and every improvement demands an uneasy period of adjustment. Sophisticated forms of collaborative “information foraging” will replace solitary deep reading; the connected screen will replace the disconnected book. Perhaps, eons from now, our love affair with the printed word will be remembered as but a brief episode in our cultural maturation, and the book as a once-beloved technology we’ve outgrown.

But if enthusiasm for the new digital literacy runs high, it also runs to feverish extremes. Digital literacy’s boosters are not unlike the people who were swept up in the multiculturalism fad of the 1980s and 1990s. Intent on encouraging a diversity of viewpoints, they initially argued for supplementing the canon so that it acknowledged the intellectual contributions of women and minorities. But like multiculturalism, which soon changed its focus from broadening the canon to eviscerating it by purging the contributions of “dead white males,” digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed-and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming people of the screen, not people of the book?"

Scandinavian Crime Fiction Boom

The UK Guardian says "move over, Ian Rankin" in highlighting contemporary boom in Scandinavian Crime Fiction. "The plotlines are bleak, the locations are forbidding and the main characters are usually angst-ridden alcoholics. So why is Scandinavian crime writing suddenly the hottest genre in town?

Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire sitting pretty at the top of the UK's hardback fiction bestseller lists; Henning Mankell's detective, Wallander, turned into a television series for the BBC, starring Kenneth Branagh; Jo Nesbø, Asa Larsson, Arnaldur Indridason, Håkan Nesser, Karin Fossum and Yrsa Siguradottir all recently published here in English to critical and popular acclaim. As Colin Welland might have put it, "The Scandinavians are coming ..."

And about time too. Scandinavian crime fiction may still be something of a novelty act in the UK, but it's a well-established genre in the rest of Europe, particularly Germany and France. So how come we got left behind? Put it down to that old national weakness for effortless superiority combined with instinctive parochialism. While other European countries are happy to publish roughly 25% of their books in translation, in the UK that figure is nearer 3%. And when you reckon that 3% includes academic and childrens books, that doesn't leave a lot of room for anything else.

"There's a nice irony here," says Gunnar Bolin, veteran producer for arts programmes on Swedish Radio. "For a long time, British crime fiction was regarded as the best in the world by Scandinavians and it was its popularity that inspired so many of our writers to try their hand at it. They were having little joy getting their serious work translated and they wanted to make some money from foreign rights."

It was the Swedish husband and wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö who kick-started modern Scandinavian crime fiction with their Martin Beck series in the 1960s and 70s, but it was Mankell with the Wallander series and the Danish writer Peter Høeg with Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow that became the first real international bestsellers."

More here.

John Mortimer's Last Book

The UK Guardian has published the opening chapters of Mortimer's final, unfinished manuscript, Rumpole and the Brave New World.

Google & the Future of Books by Professor Robert Darnton of Harvard features in the February 12 issue of the New York Review of Books

"How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?"

Oxford hunts for a new Professor of Poetry

The UK Guardian reports on the possible runners for the position. These include Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage and JH Prynne, as well as Australian poet, Les Murray. The position is seen as the most important in poetry behind that of poet laureate.

Shakespeare scholarship: a race to the Bottom?

Professor John Sutherland reveals how the demands of publishing are conflicting with scholarship on Shakespeare.

"With no new Harry Potters on the horizon, publisher Bloomsbury is having to make do with Shakespeare, buying the "Arden" multi-volume edition of Shakespeare, lock, stock and scholarly barrel. Arden is a hot property now in its third edition ("Arden 3") and the amount paid by Bloomsbury was undisclosed but think of a number, add seven zeroes, double it, then double it again, and you won't be far off.

Why so much? Because education books sell, even in a recession; English is a core subject; and there isn't a curriculum - even at Hogwarts - that doesn't have Shakespeare at its centrepiece.

And nowadays it's not just the publisher who stands to profit. Under its original publisher, Methuen, editors received little other than glory and career points. Now literary agents drive hard financial deals for their clients. I was talking to one of the editors of an Arden 3 "big four" tragedy who told me his edition was selling 100,000 copies, year in year out, and the royalties would make for a very happy retirement. There are rival editions, of course (Riverside, OUP, CUP, Penguin) but Arden is probably the market leader in the UK.

Over the next few years, Arden 3 will have to pay off the many millions of pounds Bloomsbury have given for it upfront. And publishers no longer like waiting around for scholars to get their stuff together.

As an incomplete complete edition, Arden 3 is competing with one arm tied behind its back (the one-volume Riverside, for example, is complete).

Methuen were famously patient. I had a colleague who was 25 years producing his Arden 2 edition of Troilus and Cressida; another who took 40 years over the Sonnets, and died with the work unfinished.

The clock will tick a lot faster in Soho Square. But can good scholarship be produced under the gun, with the whip on the shoulders? Would Troilus and Cressida have been as good had my colleague not conscientiously devoted the major part of his career to doing it?

The question is given focus by a quarrel currently raging on the net, and on academic email circuits. The eminent American scholar and Stanford professor, Pat Parker, was contracted, 10 years ago, to do A Midsummer Night's Dream for Arden 3 - a big seller, thanks to its popularity as a school text.

Last June, her contract was revoked. The "Reinstate Pat Parker" website (www.reinstatepatparker.com) claims she was working "diligently" and that her "scholarly and pathbreaking" research on the edition has already met with "widespread acclaim from academic Shakespeareans".

"There is", the website adds, darkly, "concern that Pat's termination is in part an effort to elevate corporate profitability over the principles of scholarly diligence and thoroughness." Fellow scholars are invited to write letters of protest to the publisher (now Bloomsbury) demanding Parker's reinstatement. Many have. Some of them very big guns. Parker herself is a very big gun over there.

It's potentially a legal dispute and one can't prudently get into the rights and wrongs of it except to say that, in general, one can see two sides of an argument here. How long should scholarship take? As long as is needed, of course. You can't hurry excellence.

But what if every year in which there is no edition supplied, 100,000 products don't leave the warehouse and the publisher is millions of quid out of pocket? Wouldn't you sprinkle a little hurry-dust on the editor in those circumstances? Is "corporate profitability" ("corporate survival" in the current economic climate) that dirty a word?

The whole question of the tempo of scholarship in the UK has been given a vicious twist by the RAE. In English literary studies it establishes a quota: four major publications in six years, or you're not pulling your weight and will bring your department down. Under the RAE gun, the rate of UK scholarly production went into overdrive - some would say warp speed. Was scholarship improved? Or did scholars merely learn how to game the system?

In the US, there is no RAE stick of dynamite up the scholar's fundament. Time will tell whether a fast clock, or a slow clock, serves scholarship best. And whether Parker gets her reinstatement."

Quote of the Week - may be for the Prime Minister and his recent article

Q: What's the difference between capitalism and communism?

A: Under capitalism. Man exploits Man. Under Communism it is exactly the opposite.

David Levy in the Spectator.

Odd Book Title

Cooking with God. By Lori David and Robert L. Robb, Hollywood, Ermine Publishers, 1978.

Debbie Campbell of the National Library reports a 1976 edition is available in the US, see on WorldCat.

Pun of the Week

A Canadian Lumberjack Union was formed by a splinter group.