LATEST NEWS OF TERRY PRATCHETT

Discworld Monthly for December contains the following from Terry Pratchett on his activities and medical condition:

"Those of you who were kind enough to subscribe to the 'Trees for Terry' drive around my birthday this year might be interested tohear that we have acquired a derelict woodland nearby that this winter will be replanted mostly with hazel and cob. Many thanks to all. We don't expect to be able to photograph the green shoots until around the spring.

Finally, right now I feel fine. This is largely due to the fact that we are more or less out from under the massive amounts of commitments we have taken on this year, although I do have to deliver a large petition to Number 10 Downing Street on 26th November. Another reason is that I seem to be working around the problems successfully. Typing is still a bugger, but in most respects you would have to know me very well to know that anything was wrong. I also noticed recently that the Daily Mail, gods bless them, announced that I can't dress myself. This must have come as a huge surprise, not least to me, since I dressed myself this morning. It is true that if you handed me a shirt with one sleeve inside out it would take me a little while to work out the topography, but I do seem to be getting better at that.

Finally, I am delighted to be receiving an honorary Doctorate of Literature (LittD) from Dublin University (Trinity College Dublin) on 12th December. I'm sure that there will be photos."

Holiday Gift Guide for Library and Book Lovers

What do you buy for that book, library, or literature lover in your life? What gifts do you give that go beyond that special book or bookstore certificate? These will get you started, including Book Lover Sleep Shirts - Two varieties of sleep shirts (one size fits all) for book lovers.

The US Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Malcolm Gladwell's new book

"Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker staff writer famous for big ideas and big hair, is author of a new book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown), that is certain to make a rapid ascent of best-seller lists. Gladwell's two previous books are The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, 2000) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown, 2005). Both books - Gladwell calls them "intellectual adventure stories" - purport to explain the world by way of the author's trademark blend of sociology, psychology, and well-chosen anecdote.

In Outliers, Gladwell argues that success depends less on innate ability than on a combination of three other factors: attitudes toward work, cultural legacies, and luck. For instance, he attributes the mathematical proficiency of people from some Asian countries not to any genetic advantage, but rather to a deep-rooted work ethic cultivated over centuries of labor-intensive rice farming. Or take the case of Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who may never have pursued computing had he not happened to attend, in 1971, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, one of the few places where undergraduates had free, unlimited access to a computer.

In a recent interview with New York magazine, Gladwell explained his own success: "People are experience rich and theory poor. My role has been to give people ways of organizing experience." And that knack for organizing life into clever theories has aroused equal parts derision and envy. (Richard A. Posner, a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago and federal-appellate-court judge, famously derided Blink as "a book intended for people who do not read books.") In the weeks since it was published, Outliers is proving no exception, touching off a wide-ranging discussion about Gladwell, success - and why men seem to dominate the ideas-driven book market".

...

Germaine Greer is quoted: "Every week, either by snail mail or e-mail, I get a book that explains everything. Without exception, they are all written by men. Occasionally one of the male authors claims to be female, but it's a vain ploy. His maleness resounds from every monomaniacal sentence. There is no answer to everything, and only a deluded male would spend his life trying to find it. The most deluded think they have actually found it. ...

Brandishing the "big idea" is a bookish version of male display, and as such a product of the same mind-set as that behind the manuscripts that litter my desk. To explain is in some sense to control. Proselytizing has always been a male preserve. ...

I would hope that fewer women have so far featured in the big-ideas landscape because, by and large, they are more interested in understanding than explaining, in describing rather than accounting for. Giving credence to a big idea is a way of permitting ourselves to skirt strenuous engagement with the enigma that is our life".

Publishing Treasures in Libraries

The UK Bookseller reports on the publishing successes that can be found in the archives of libraries, such as the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Australian Humanities Review

The latest issue for November 2008 is now available free online. It is co-published in PDF and Print-on-Demand format by ANU E Press. Articles in the journal, edited by Monique Rooney and Russell Smith, include Guy Redden's lengthy and important article 'From RAE to ERA: research evaluation at work in the corporate university', and a special section on Rural Cultural Studies.

What Makes Humans so Different?

A fascinating lecture which is available online in powerpoint and in podcast from Professor Robin Dunbar, FBA, Director, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford.

"Although we share many aspects of our behaviour and biology with our primate cousins, humans are, nonetheless, different in one crucial respect: our capacity to live in the world of the imagination. This is reflected in two core aspects of our behaviour that are in many ways archetypal of what it is to be human: religion and story-telling. I shall show how these remarkable traits seem to have arisen as a natural development of the social brain hypothesis, and the underlying nature of primate sociality and cognition, as human societies have been forced to expand in size during the course of our evolution over the past 5 million years".

Download Professor Dunbar's PowerPoint slides to page through as you listen to his lecture.

The Little Professor Blog

Gives some excuses offered to booksellers by customers on the state and condition of books they bring in.

I've chewed over the contents: used as a toy by my Rottweiler.

Adored by all the bookworms in my family: as you can see from those tiny holes.

The foundation of my collection: used to stabilize an unsteady bookcase.

Well-loved: in danger of immediate collapse.

Needs some love: see above.

Gently used: for target practice, but my aim is really quite poor.

Extra-illustrated: my youngest son glued pictures of his Transformers collection into this first edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments.

Carefully annotated in owner's hand: some brat scribbled all over it in cyan crayons.

In like-new condition: if by "like-new" you mean "new from the damaged returns bin."

In my family for generations: and the book has survived this long because it's too dull for any of us to bother reading it.

Almost impossible to find: unless you have a passing acquaintance with Google.

A really unusual book: except for the 392,032 copies just like it.

I'm only selling this because I'm out of shelf space: and let me tell you, given the choice between keeping this one and keeping the latest Star Trek franchise novel...

A true collectible: because it's not like it has any actual literary value.

Your children will love it: unlike my children, who cried whenever I offered to read it to them.

Read over and over again: you don't want to know what the spine looks like.

I think it's a first edition: because William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life was first published in 1932, right?

November 05, 2008 in Books, Satire

Bad sex Literary Review Award goes to John Updike and Rachel Johnson

The nominee's were:

James Buchan for The Gate of Air

Simon Montefiore for Sashenka

John Updike for The Widows of Eastwick

Kathy Lette for To Love, Honour and Betray

Alastair Campbell for All in the Mind

Rachel Johnson for Shire Hell

Isabel Fonseca for Attachment

Ann Allestree for Triptych of a Young Wolf

Russell Banks for The Reserve

Paulo Coelho for Brida

The UK Guardian reports, "Rachel Johnson and John Updike named joint winners of this year's Literary Review Bad Sex Award. Updike, author of Widows of Eastwick, who couldn't make the ceremony on account of pneumonia. Or so he said. Updike has been shortlisted three times before so for him it was a case of better late than never. Fellow nominee Alastair Campbell didn't didn't show up. Shame on him.

Run by the Literary Review, the bad sex awards were set up by Auberon Waugh "with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels".

The ten best literary marital rows

The UK Guardian provides a list, beginning with Philip Roth (don't mention this to Claire Bloom!).

The Ghost Writer, by Philip Roth

Nathan Zuckerman visits his great literary hero, EI Lonoff, but finds he has entered a marital maelstrom. He watches in fascinated horror as the elderly novelist's wife, Hope, blows up over the presence of his beautiful former student (and perhaps lover) Amy Bellette. "She thinks with her it will all be the religion of art up here. Oh, will it ever!" Never marry a novelist.

Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding

Partridge, the village schoolmaster, has a truly terrifying wife who becomes (mistakenly) convinced that he is having an affair with his female assistant. Mrs Partridge does not restrict her violence to rhetoric: "Her tongue, teeth and hands fell all upon him at once." This "Amazonian heroine" then dissolves into tears and collapses in a fit".

More here.

Make room for the Millennial Generation

OCLC, the American library and information giant, has just issued a report on the Millennial generation, which makes interesting, if at times, depressing (depending on your age) reading.

"By 2010, the Millennial generation-those now 14 to 28-will outnumber their Boomer parents. Also known as “Generation Y,” the “Net Generation” or “Echo Boomers,” this group of approximately 76 million people have been described as “ … thinking and processing information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” (Prensky 2001, np).

Information services that match the information-seeking habits of Millennials, who cannot remember life without computers or mobile phones, will be more relevant to this group. In fact, the term ‘Screenagers’ has been used (Rushkoff 1996) to refer to the youngest segment of this group (14-19 year olds) because of their affinity for communications technology.

Several common themes arise when discussing the information-seeking habits of Millennials. They prefer:

* Immediacy. Millennials tend to be impatient, pay less attention to spelling and grammar and have a low tolerance for complex searching. Convenience is key.

* More choices and selectivity. Millennials prefer multiple formats and media.

* Collaboration and teamwork. Millennials prefer to collaborate virtually and in person as is demonstrated in their participation in social networking sites.

* Experiential learning. Millennials tend to be nonlinear thinkers, which may be attributed to surfing the Web".

Authors and cats

The UK Guardian provides an overview of the relationship between authors and cats. "The author lives in a converted barn in the West Country with her partner, who is a human rights lawyer, their two children, and four cats."

How many times have you read that, or something like it, in a writer's biography paragraph at the front of a book? How many author photographs have you seen with the distinguished man or woman of letters cuddling an unprotesting feline? Just what is it about cats that makes writers think we need to know they have an affinity with them?

While researching an earlier blog submission about Ray Bradbury I found online a picture of the stately SF author with his cat. It struck me how similar the image was to a famous photo of Beat legend Jack Kerouac, also up-close-and-puss-onal with a feline friend.

On a whim I stuck "author with cat" in Google's image search. There they were, a parade of writers of all genders and genres, the literary rubbing shoulders with the crime, the SF and chick-lit, all nuzzling a satisfied cat.

But why? Every man and his, erm, dog has a cat. And if they don't, they have a dog. And if they have neither, then they are probably not interested either way. If those author biogs read, "… lives with his wife and three huge manatees on a council estate in Greater Manchester", then that's worth noting. If an author does actually work with an elephant in the room, then I'm interested in knowing that. But, again, why with the cats?

Twentieth century Canadian novelist, journalist and playwright Robertson Davies tried to nail down the attraction with his oft-quoted: "Authors like cats because they are such quiet, loveable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons." Oft-quoted by authors on their websites trying to justify their obsession, I might add.

Perhaps it's just that cat people are generally more … what? bonkers? And authors are just normal people with normal cat fetishes, multiplied and magnified. You don't get as many dog photos, aside from old shots of Barbara Cartland lugging around a startled-looking ratty thing, or Jilly Cooper reclining in her country pile with some luxuriously-coated Red Setters. The fantasy author and graphic novel scribe Neil Gaiman did have a spell posting lots of doggy pix on his website, but he's just being disingenuous about his catty side. His collection of short stories Smoke and Mirrors contains a paean to the domestic moggy, with a pleasant but improbable tale of a stray cat protecting him and his family from the nightly menace of something nasty out in the dark.

Among those Googled authors and cats I found one of William S Burroughs, months away from death and leaning forward to eyeball a ginger tom. In common with his beat buddy Kerouac, Burroughs seemed to love cats almost as much as he loved breaking open Benzedrine inhalers. He even wrote a book called The Cat Inside. Which, presumably, makes him all right in the eyes of a huge swathe of the population, who can forgive him for putting a bullet through his wife's head while trying to shoot an apple off her centre parting, on the grounds that he's a dedicated "cat person".

Mark Twain was another feline-ophile, and you can find any number of pictures of his cats piled up on a wicker chair, and even a sketch of Twain, who once wrote "A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime", with a pipe in one hand and a cat in the other. Alexander McCall Smith (pictured) seems to want to make his cat the main subject of any photo he appears in, and there are similarly cuddly pictures of PG Wodehouse, Barbara Pym, Robert Graves, Ruth Rendell, Margaret Atwood (with "Fluffy") and on and on and on.

Perhaps cats are important totem animals for writers. Perhaps writers hope their independence and mystique will rub off on them, and seek to emulate the slightly magical moggy's feigned disinterest when those bad reviews roll in".

Browse the Royal Society

The Royal Society, based in the United Kingdom, is not only 350 years old, but is also not about the royal family. Rather, The Royal Society is all about science-influencing science policy and debating scientific issues, with other scientists and the public. Their website is loaded with resources, such as their “News” section which has articles on science, education, industry and the environment culled from the major daily newspapers. Click on the “Library and Archives” section to be catapulted into a virtual room of resources such as the “Science Policy Collection”, “Digital Journal Archive”, “Biographical Information on Fellows”, and “Picture Library”. The Library events podcasts are easy-to-listen-to and wide-ranging, though many are about the history of science, and include video and audio podcasts. Podcasts about scientific failure, apothecaries, and the taming of electricity are just some of the titles available from the past two years of library events. Visitors shouldn’t miss using the unique search feature called “Select an Audience” at the bottom of any page of the site that allows them to choose what information is viewed based on who they are, i.e. teacher, student, policymaker, researcher, media, scientist, or fellow. Such a feature really helps to make a large website, such as this, much more accessible and easy to navigate.

The UK Guardian lists ten of the best fictional episodes of drunkenness

"Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

Ineffectual academic Jim Dixon must give a lecture on "Merrie England" to local dignitaries. He nervously gulps whisky before he takes the stage and disaster is ensured. As he reads his lecture he finds himself helplessly adopting peculiar accents, culminating in something akin to "an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper". Bang goes the career.

Henry IV Part 1, by Shakespeare

Down at the Eastcheap tavern Falstaff has fellow topers on the roar. While drunk, he loquaciously celebrates drink. "It ascends me into the brain ... makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes; which delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit."

Money, by Martin Amis

Amis's narrator, John Self, is a heroic self-abuser. In the first chapter he is drinking Californian wine in "vases", Chablis in "quarts" and rum in "pints". He adds some champagne and passes out, "one happy yob".

The UK Times chooses the fifty most exciting blockbuster films for 2009

Reading on planes

The regular Sunday Times columnist, David Baddiel, writes:

"I've been in Los Angeles for most of the past two weeks, and, now, as I write, am flying back, feeling slightly resentful about not being upgraded. On the way there, I took the very fine Mr Philips, the second novel by John Lanchester. But even though I had really been enjoying the book prior to getting on the aircraft, I didn't pick it up until near the end of the ten-hour journey. This is because planes are the second-hardest mode of transport to read on. The easiest, obviously, is the train, although in Britain you may be put off by the realisation that by the time you've got to chapter 2, your journDavid Baddiel on why books struggle to compete with today's in-flight entertainmentey will already have cost approximately the worth of your house.

The hardest place to read while on the move is a car: especially if you're driving. Some people can actually read in the back seat, but not me: I feel sick texting. I did try once, on a motorway, assuming that the steadiness of the speed would counteract nausea, but just ended up being sick all over my book. If I was looking for a lazy laugh there I would now add “Or maybe that was just because it was by Dan Brown”.

The problem with aircraft is that they offer too many other choices besides reading. In fact, you could gauge how much you were actually into a book by how many pages you ended up reading - and therefore how many of the fabulous onboard delights you rejected - on a long-haul flight. So: here I am, on the redeye back to London. The book is Eli Gottlieb's Now You See Him, a tale of lust, suicide and literary superstardom. It's literary but I reckon it's also pulpy enough to fend off some of Virgin's various time-passing temptations. At least in premium economy.

8.55pm: Take-off. This is a good bit for reading, because there are no movies and you're not allowed to use computers, so I start: sadly, not my novel, but Country Life International, which is in a drawer above my seat.

You see? Too many alternatives. I would never in my normal life come across a copy of Country Life International. I actually spend quite some time looking at photographs of villas in the Seychelles that cost £3.2 million. Finally, my seven-year-old daughter, sitting next to me, shames me by starting to read her book, Billy Bonkers. I'm off, into Now You See Him.

10pm: They bring dinner. Another distraction, but I ignore it. I'd like to tell you that this is because I'm so wrapped up in the book, but it's actually because I had a Burger King Triple Texas Whopper in LAX to celebrate Barack Obama's victory. I've got to chapter 5. I'm quite enjoying it, but my copy has for some reason got a glitch where the words are occasionally printed like t his. This is putting me off, and it's a time when I really need not to be put off because ...

10.10pm: The in-flight entertainment system has come on. Heath Ledger as The Joker is on the cover of Seatback, the in-flight magazine, which means Batman: The Dark Knight is available. Eli takes a dive.

10.15pm: Turns out that the movie menu is yet to catch up with Seatback. The Dark Knight is not actually playing tonight. So, good, that means I can ... watch Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.

12.15am: OK. Movie over. Let's read. Oh, they've turned all the lights off. I could turn my light on to read but it might wake up my daughter, who is now sleeping beside me. Also ... sleep. Hmm. Another nice option that a flight offers instead of reading. As an insomniac, though, I never manage to sleep in planes. As an optimist, however, I do tend to try. Tell you what, I'll read a bit, to try and convince my brain that I'm in bed just before going to sleep like normal.

12.30am: Can't find the book. I thought I put it in that net thing on the seat in front, but now, in the gloom, it seems to contain only 100 copies of the duty-free catalogue. Perhaps I should just give up and buy some aftershave I'll never use and a teddy bear plane.

1.15pm, London time: Wake up, with a fright. Damn. Only an hour and a bit to go before landing. At least I can see the book. It was on the floor. I take it with me to the long, long queue for the toilet.

3.15pm: We're coming in to land. Any second now, they're going to tell me I have to stop writing this. I've read about 70 pages of Now You See Him, up to the murder scene. I estimate that I'll have read near 100 pages by the time we land. The boy Gottlieb done good. Not least because he's managed to dissolve my resentment about Virgin's baffling failure to upgrade me and my family to upper class: what with the masseurs, silver-service suppers, on-flight psychotherapy, free sex, and whatever else they have in there, I'm not sure a book could compete."

British Cartoon Archive

The British Cartoon Archive which is located in Canterbury at the University of Kent’s Templeman Library is wonderful to browse. It has a library, archive, gallery, and is a registered museum dedicated to the history of British cartooning over the last two hundred years. It holds more than 130,000 original editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons, supported by large collections of comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines. The collection of original artwork dates back to 1904 and includes work by W.K.Hasleden, Will Dyson, Strube, David Low,Vicky, Emmwood, Michael Cummings, Ralph Steadman, Mel Calman, Nicholas Garland, Chris Riddell, Carl Giles, Martin Rowson, and Steve Bell, amongst many others.

Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides

“Dying speeches & Bloody Murders” might not sound like a site to visit right before bedtime, but this engaging and fascinating collection brings together an important set of crime broadsides that will engage the attention of historians, legal scholars, and anyone with an interest in the history of crime and punishment. This collection comes from the Harvard Law School Library, and the conservation and digitization of these broadsides was made possible by a generous grant from the Peck Stacpoole Foundation. These broadsides would have been sold in much the same way a program would be sold today at a major sporting event. Their price was usually quite low, and they usually featured a description of the crime in question and a variety of illustrations. Here visitors can view over 500 of these broadsides, and they can browse around at their leisure, or search by category or keyword.

Odd Book Title

Gay Bulgaria by Stowers Johnson Robert Hale 1964 (Once noted as the least borrowed book in British Libraries)

Libraries Australia reports the 1964 edition can be found here.

Quot e of the week

A house unkempt can not be so distressing as a life unlived. (Rose Macaulay)