One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,

Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews

Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book -

For behold, here is that book

Among these ranks and banks of duds,

These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns

Of complete stiffs."

"James might have missed out on the A$100,000 winning the Australian prime minister's literary award would have brought him, but this poem surely deserves a bitchiness prize" says the paper

Banned books

It's been the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, celebrating the freedom to read. Have you been exercising that freedom? Find out with a quiz in a UK Guardian quiz.

Question 2. "Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three /(Which was rather late for me) /Between the end of the Chatterley ban /And the Beatles' first LP."

Lines from whose memories of a more repressive era?

CLICK: WHAT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE DOING ONLINE AND WHY IT MATTERS

Searches for porn have dropped from 20 percent to 10 percent over the last decade and the hottest searches are now for social networking sites according to a new book by Bill Tancer, General Manager of Hitwise.

Should We Take Tarzan Seriously?

Professor Alex Vernon in the US Chronicle of Higher Education ponders if we should take Tarzan seriously?

"Cultural historians adore Tarzan. He emerged in 1912 as if called to battle against the New Woman, the New Negro, the new fascination with homosexuality, and all those new immigrants, and to provide a breath of fresh jungle air for a society industrializing and urbanizing at an astonishing rate. In his virile primitivism he became our answer to Prufrock, T.S. Eliot's vision of the paralyzed, self-conscious psyche of the modern civilized man.

But not so fast. As Tarzan grows and learns to read, he begins to question what it means to be human. Prufrock's "Do I dare to eat a peach?" has as its cousin, or distant ancestor, Tarzan's puzzle after killing his first African, Do I dare to eat a man? Edgar Rice Burroughs's original story, published 96 years ago this October, ends on a Wisconsin dairy farm (who knew?) as Tarzan allows his cousin to marry Jane and to keep the Greystoke name. This act preserves her honor and well-being, and in its restraint and self-sacrifice reveals his fully evolved, civilized soul. Tarzan of the Apes celebrates not his wildness, but its taming.

The complexities of Burroughs's Tarzan do not stop there, and the complexities of our Tarzan are compounded when he moves from book to film, starting in 1918, on his way to becoming, in all likelihood, the most well-known American fictional character of the 20th century. The isolationist story lines of the Tarzan films are a ruse, as the films played a large part in America's postwar cultural and economic global warfare. During and after World War II, for instance, Tarzan battled Nazis as well as Latin Americans of dubious political allegiance. My favorite moment in a Tarzan film is in Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), which features an arsenal of automatic rifles, large-caliber machine guns, hand grenades, a halftrack, a tank, and a fighting helicopter. Tarzan arrives in Mexico City by jet plane, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, and while still in his suit crushes a Mexican foe in the Plaza de Toros with a giant Coca-Cola bottle.

It's for good reason that cultural studies mines the Tarzan narratives for their significance - Gail Bederman's Manliness & Civilization, Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism, Marianna Torgovnick's Gone Primitive, and John F. Kasson's Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, are four prominent examples. Yet that approach risks overlooking the fact that Tarzan, for Burroughs and Hollywood, was gimmick, shtick. We risk losing the fun and play without which Tarzan simply isn't Tarzan.

Ig Nobel literature prizewinner at the annual awards ceremony at Harvard University

The Ig Nobel for Literature was awarded for research into the different breeds of unpleasant character one might encounter in the workplace. David Sims of the Cass Business School in London, whose paper You Bastard: A narrative exploration of the experience of indignation within organisations, won the literature prize, said: "I'm delighted. The whole ethos of the Ig Nobels is a wonderful way to make people think." The paper examines how people construct roles as clever bastards, devious bastards or bastard ex machina, and goes on to examine the mixture of joy and guilt of labelling someone as such.

Sims wrote the paper after puzzling how right-thinking people who often stressed the importance of appreciating others' arguments would give up and brand someone a bastard. "We are all novelists writing the next chapter of our life story and with bastards, we need to understand what kind of character they are trying to create," Sims said.

Virtual Worlds?: Outlook Good

The Sept/Oct issue of EDUCAUSE Review focuses on the theme of virtual worlds in higher education. Each of the authors, who are also identified by their avatar names, are students, faculty or instructional technologists with substantial academic experiences in virtual worlds to share. "A J Kelton's piece focuses on what is currently the most popular virtual world, Second Life. With more than 14 million users, of which 59% fall within the age brackets of 18-44 years, hundreds of educational institutions are building a presence in Second Life. Kelton, however, does not ignore the very real challenges ahead for virtual world use in education. For example, the wide perceptual that virtual worlds are nothing more than sophisticated games will need to be overcome if virtual world pedagogy is to gain acceptance. This entire issue is an excellent introduction, without the hype, to the potential application of virtual worlds by higher educationinstitutions".

Dead right?

How do you sum up a life in a thousand words? Forget the list of facts, argues Ann Wroe in the Guardian, an obituary should be an act of evocation: it's a thrill to get inside the head of an innovator, a tyrant or a thief

"There's a moment in Bede's History of England when human life is compared to a sparrow flying through a banqueting hall. Darkness lies on one side, darkness on the other, and between them a brief spell of warmth, conviviality, chatter and firelight. The image is lovely, but for all we know it may be the wrong way round. It may be that we come in from the light; we go to the light; and what lies between, murkier, clumsier, frustrating but still fascinating, is our existence here. The fire, like Plato's fire in the cave, throws our shadows on the wall; the gleaming brasses and goblets - for we might as well stay in Bede's world - are heaped around us for a while; the music makes us melancholy or joyful for something we have forgotten. But out of our experience, trapped in that wattle-and-daub hall for a while, we make what we can....

Obituaries have inducted me into beekeeping, Irish folk-songs, long-distance cycling, alien abduction, even the mysteries of frozen non-dairy topping. They have taken me into hovels and palaces, on to battlefields and theatre stages, into minds addled by drugs and delusions or alive with schemes and poems. Every sort of human endeavour, and every form of triumph and failure, is celebrated there. To paraphrase Dr Johnson, to be tired of writing them would be to be tired of life".

Prize overdrive

The UK Bookseller says "Book prizes often have a superficial quality, although this season the cynics are out in force. Yet despite their lazy complaints about too many prizes undermining the point of reward, the real trouble lies elsewhere.

Over recent years, reviews and discussion about books have come to focus less on the fiction and more on the trials and tribulations of the authors at hand. Prize coverage has become less about the texts and more about who's judging them and how. Indeed, being seen to make judgements is the nature of the game, but when it comes to prizes, most people have as little respect for the judges' authority at they do themselves.

From Lily Allen's much-loved walkout from this year's Orange panel and chair Shami Chakrabarti wondering whether men couldn't also evaluate women's fiction, to worry over whether former agoraphobic Stef Penney's Canada-set novel was "authentic" enough to deserve last year's Costa, even pioneers of prizes have begun to be embarrassed about the arbitrariness of who judges and who wins.

Consequently, it has become a virtue to pick people that represent the "everyday reader", panels of "women" or of "celebs you like"-categories where people are defined by anything but how well they can criticise literature. Rather than putting forward decisive standards, prize pundits bend over backwards to "engage" and encourage readers to vote for their favourite manuscripts instead. Far from heralding some new form of critical participative democracy, these half-baked measures get little further than picking winners off the top of tables of book sale figures.

Consequently, projects with a strong sense of what they value seem attractive. Richard & Judy's Book Club may be billed as banal by the elite, but the capering couple are two of the most influential book critics around. The pair present a clear sense of what they stand for, who they're talking to and what they're trying to achieve. Criticism gains most force through navigating a relationship with the reading public. Rather than reflecting and consolidating this process, however, book prizes today frequently jump in at the deep end and so seem meaningless to the majority of people.

Most worryingly of all, today's "all shall have prizes" mentality is mute on why it matters to be better than the rest. Far too often, book prizes are the navel-gazing of tightly-knit circles of colleagues content to celebrate themselves. At root, instead of raising the standards of writing and publishing, today's prize overdrive consolidates a culture of cynicism surrounding the point and purpose of literature. More prizes won't solve the problem; but less won't relieve it either. After all, it's nothing to do with bound bits of copy in themselves, but concerns the importance and resonance of the ideas and stories they distribute".

Philip Pullman on why banning books fails

"Firstly, I had obviously annoyed a lot of censorious people, and secondly, any ban would provoke interested readers to move from the library, where they couldn't get hold of my novel, to the bookshops, where they could. That, after all, was exactly what happened when a group called the Catholic League decided to object to the film of The Golden Compass when it was released at the end of last year. The box office suffered, but the book sales went up - a long way up, to my gratification.

Because they never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something - book, film, play, pop song, whatever - is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don't the censors realise this?

In the case of The Golden Compass, the reason the book was challenged is listed as "Religious Viewpoint", a reason that appears in connection with only one other book in the top five, a picture book called And Tango Makes Three. This is based on the true story of a pair of male penguins in New York's Central Park Zoo, who for a time formed a couple and hatched the egg of a mixed-sex couple who were unable to hatch two at once. This, if you can believe it, was challenged for six different reasons: "Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group."

Religious Viewpoint? Penguins?

I hope the authors have done very well out of the increased sales they'll have enjoyed, but this kind of thing only invites the rest of the world to consider the American public demented.

In fact, when it comes to banning books, religion is the worst reason of the lot. Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue - from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones.

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good".

Classic crime titles

"are being given a facelift this autumn (oz spring) with the launch of a new list featuring stylish monochrome artwork from Atlantic Books. The series will begin on 1st November with a four-strong launch comprising Gerald Griffin’s thriller The Collegians, Sapper’s detective novel Bulldog Drummond, Raffles by E W Hornung and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which Atlantic describes as "the first detective novel".

Thereafter, the publisher will launch a book every month-including titles by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sheridan Le Fanu and G K Chesterton-until at least the end of 2009. Toby Mundy, m.d. and publisher at Atlantic, said the decision to launch a series of classic crime novels had been made after the success of the firm’s contemporary crime range. "We’ll do one per month until we run out of ideas," he said, hinting at a "more international approach" to come.

Mundy added the range was designed to "colonise shelf space" and "enhance profitability" for the firm. "We are not paying the authors [because they are out of copyright] so we decided to invest more in packaging," he explained. "I wanted to create a cultural distance between us and Penguin Classics, because I wanted these books to stand on their own two feet as fantastic storytelling-not as historical muesli."

Print runs will differ for each book, but Mundy said the first four books would have worldwide runs of roughly 10,000.He explained the inclusion of Bleak House was to "grab people’s attention" and to demonstrate the "strong editorial point of view" within the series, adding that Dickens’ character Detective Bucket was "the prototype for many detective novels".Rather than an introduction, each of the books will feature "case notes" by series adviser Robert Giddings, looking at the world each book inhabited and the contemporary response to its publication".

The two Richard Holmes

Have both been in Australia in the last year for literary events and some cofusion reigned as to which was which. Now the Guardian writes:

"Several years ago a Sunday newspaper illustrated an article by the biographer Richard Holmes with a photo of the TV military historian of the same name, on horseback. The confusion continues to this day, not helped by the fact that the namesakes have autumn books published by the same division of HarperCollins a month apart.

Type "Richard Holmes" into Amazon, hoping for a life of a Romantic poet, and the first four titles listed are by the chronicler of battles; clicking on the literary biographer's new book, The Age of Wonder, down at No 8 reveals that other "Richard Holmes products" are his studies of Wellington, Marlborough and the first world war. The "sponsored links" on the The Age of Wonder page helpfully propose hiring Richard Holmes for speaking engagements (fee: £3,000-£5,000), offer discounts on his books at Tesco and allow you to access his Wikipedia biog - in each case, naturally, the military chap".

Library to place 14th-century royal cookbook online

Pages from 'Forme of Cury', a 14th-century cookbook are being digitised for online viewing.

A rare medieval cookbook is to be digitally photographed page by page and the results uploaded to the internet for gourmands around the globe to study.Forme of Cury, a recipe book compiled by King Richard II's master cooks in 1390, details around 205 dishes cooked in the royal household and sheds light on a little-studied element of life in the Dark Ages.Written in Middle English, it contains the instructions for creating long-forgotten dishes such as blank mang (a sweet dish of meat, milk, sugar and almonds), mortrews (ground and spiced pork), and the original quiche, known in 14th century kitchens as custard.

It is one of 40 literary treasures being made freely available on the internet for the first time by the University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library. Other Middle English manuscripts to be digitised and put online include one of the earliest existing editions of the complete Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, John Lydgate's two major poems Troy Book and Fall of Princes and 500-year-old translations of the Bible into English.The project will reunite fragments of a 15th-century manuscript of Chaucer's Miller's Tale, in an online collaboration with the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.

The work, which will be carried out using a state-of-the-art high-definition camera, will begin next month and is due to be completed by late 2009.

Jan Wilkinson, the director of the John Rylands library, said: "The library's Middle English manuscripts are a research resource of immense significance. Yet the manuscripts are inherently fragile, and until now access to them has been restricted by the lack of digital copies. Digitisation will make them available to everyone.

"For the first time it will be possible to compare our manuscripts directly with other versions of the texts in libraries located across the world, opening up opportunities for new areas of research. We hope that this will be the beginning of a wider digitisation programme, which will unlock the tremendous potential of our medieval manuscripts and printed books for the benefit of the academic community and the wider public."

Canbera boys Peter Hall and Paul Merrony do good in London restaurant land

Nicholas Lander provides 'a taste of money' in the Financial Times

"What makes The Giaconda Dining Room so distinctive is that it determinedly follows the tried-and-tested low-cost model long established across continental Europe.We were greeted by Tracey Petersen, the partner of chef Paul Merrony, and shown to one of the 15 tables in their restaurant before she handed us the menu and explained that day’s specials.

The restaurant opened four months ago in what used to be London’s Tin Pan Alley and is now humming with guitar shops, just off Charing Cross Road. Its interior can best be described as compact, utilitarian and noisy. Looking just past the shelves that hold the well-chosen wine list, I was able to keep an eye on Merrony in action from time to time.

He subsequently described the kitchen as a “shoebox”: smaller than many domestic kitchens, the tiny space has room for the chef, an oven with six burners, a grill, a work surface and just enough space for Merrony to turn at 90 degrees to place the finished dishes down for his waiting staff to whisk away.

What makes this minuscule kitchen possible, he admitted, is that it is so close to the tables; that there is a large cold store downstairs for his fresh produce; and, most importantly, his well-honed and catholic cooking skills that have been appreciated by those who have eaten his food in Sydney and London...

The first courses are all between £5 and £6 while the main courses range from £9.50 to £13; most come with some form of side dish included, a style of cooking Merrony subsequently referred to as “plate completed”. The average spend is £30.33 including drinks but excluding service charge (a custom Merrony has imported from his native Australia because he believes it is best practice), which has led to two obvious consequences. The Giaconda offers excellent value for money and is therefore extremely busy.

But does it make money? When I put this to Merrony, he suggested we meet in the nearby office of his partner, Peter Hall, a friend he met at school in Canberra. While Merrony has been cooking for the past 25 years, Hall went into investment banking and is now executive chairman of Hunter Hall Investment Management, one of Australia’s largest ethical investment fund managers. Hall’s love of food is apparent from the copy of Quentin Crewe’s Great Chefs of France that sits on his bookshelf next to numerous books on finance. Hall has also established two popular Soho coffee shops, Flat White (the name for a strong coffee hugely popular Down Under) and Milk Bar, both the antithesis of today’s coffee chains.

On the floor lay a file with the weekly profit and loss accounts Merrony assembles but before I could look at them Hall wanted to put Giaconda into context.

“It has always struck me that while good food is widely available inexpensively across Europe and in Australia, it’s much harder to find in the UK, so that is the first thing we are trying to do,” he said. “The second is that I really believe that Paul is a great chef but I don’t think the way for him to start in London is in some extremely expensive restaurant where the prices have to be commensurately high. If you look at all the great French chefs in Crewe’s book, like the Troisgros, Guerard or Blanc, they all started modestly and developed their businesses. That’s my game plan for Paul.”

The key to achieving the profits that will ultimately make this - and any restaurant - possible, he believes, is the rent. “For each of my sites, I have chosen slightly run-down streets but ones which I believe have a great deal of what I call resonance. They have got to have a lot of atmosphere. Where we have been able to do this, we have done deals where the rent is about 8 per cent of turnover.”

Merrony then explained the impact this has on his bottom line. “We are serving about 300 customers a week which means sales of £8,500 to £9,000 a week. My food cost is about 30 per cent of sales and my wine a little higher because I don’t want to make them too expensive. I employ a kitchen porter and two waiting staff and after Tracey and I have taken a decent salary, the restaurant is making about £2,000-a-week profit. Rather unromantically, restaurants are in the business of renting out seats and our fixed costs mean that we do this at about £2 a seat.”

When Merrony said this, Hall’s face lit up. “My investment to date has been £172,000 including the premium, start-up losses and ripping out what was formerly a run-down Indian restaurant whose name we took over. With a return on investment of 60 per cent at the moment, it looks and feels like a good deal.

“But if we can get numbers up from 300 a week to 350 by filling the early evening slots (the restaurant is ideally placed for pre-theatre customers), and a slightly higher average spend, then the profit could significantly increase, allowing us to do more."

The Giaconda Dining Room, 6 Denmark Street, London W1, tel: +44 (0)20-7240 3334, www.giacondadining.com

Flat White, www.flat-white.co.uk

Don DeLillo is blogging the Presidential election

for The Onion, under the title :Tiny Silver Death Machine." On the Republican Convention: "The women, crisp and alert, knowing people's names. Their husbands in little hats shaped like elephant heads, something about them suggesting massive health insurance coverage."

London Mayor Boris Johnson'S 2008 Tory conference speech

remembered past appearances there: such as in '2006 when I was physically pelted with pork pies by the press corps or last year when my speaking style was criticized by Arnold Schwarzenegger.And it was a low moment, my friends, to have my speaking style denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.'

Nevertheless, 'Ken Livingstone was terminated.' (The Register, 29 September )

Robert Burns tips his lid!

A Scottish hotel has printed a poem by Robert Burns, a former guest, along with a picture of the poet on the lids of all its toilets, “to make you smile at the end of the day.” Hotel co-owner Chris Walker said it was designed to "make customers smile" while raising awareness of the poet. Mr Walker spotted a company called Loo Prints, which specialises in personalised toilet seats, when he was at one of the summer agricultural shows. He decided it would be nice to use his hotel's connections to the poet to create a Burns edition featuring the Selkirk Grace.

Companion to Digital Literary Studies

The Companion to Digital Literary Studies is a major collection of essays dealing with texts and the humanities in the digital world; it was released earlier this year as a printed book. Now the chapters are freely available on the net.

ODD BOOK TITLE

Old Tractors and the Men who love them. Mbi publishing, 1995. The National Library of Australia report a copy in the ACT Library Service. Go for it!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Famous Last Words

From the most recent episode of "Gossip Girl", advice from a grizzled editor to an aspiring teen-age writer:

"When I was young, Bukowski put a shot glass on my head and blew it off with a pistol ... As we recall, this trick did not work out so well in the case of William Burroughs".