Q: Returning to fiction, we’ve got Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning.

A: This book is often recalled for a very famous portrait of lunchtime seen from a Fleet Street window. Everybody’s going out for lunch. The literary editor and the foreign editor are going off to the Garrick by taxi, the subs are going off on foot to the cafe, the advertising bosses on a stroll to El Vino. And then: “The editor shuffled out, unnoticed by anyone, and caught a number 15 bus to the Athenaeum.”"

More here.

Jane Austen and ailments

Dr John Mullan adds a comment to the press reports that Jane Austen's death theory points to TB caught from cows

"Jane Austen's characters are preoccupied with illness. Mr Woodhouse shudders at every draught; Mary Musgrove fancies herself ill whenever there is no good dance or dinner invitation; Marianne Dashwood enacts an impressive psychosomatic illness when she is jilted by Willoughby. It is no accident that Mr Perry, the apothecary in Emma, can afford a hugely expensive coach. He has rich pickings among the local hypochondriacs.

But illness in Austen can also be quick and dangerous. Everyone assumes Frank Churchill's adoptive mother is always pretending to be ill – until she suddenly dies.

The vulnerability of flesh is taken for granted. We laugh at Mrs Bennet for being so delighted when her daughter Jane's illness keeps her at Netherfield, home of Mr Bingley. But it is real alarm that sends her sister Elizabeth across the fields to nurse her.

Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion, written when she herself was ailing, is a record of physical frailty. Mrs Smith, Anne Elliot's gossipy friend, is reduced by illness to an impoverished invalid. Captain Harville's sister Fanny has just died as has Dick Musgrove. Austen makes illness the stuff of comedy, but only in the knowledge that every affliction might end in death."

More here.

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The top ten dreamboats who sank

David Hayles comments in The Times:

"With the invention of the teenager in the 1950s as a ready-made market for pop music and films came the rise of the screen “heart-throb”, named after the palpitations these Brylcreemed dreamboats caused their hysterical admirers. This year’s model, a certain Robert Pattinson from the Twilight series, has become a traffic-stopping sensation (his more extreme worshippers are featured in a new documentary, Robsessed). But what will Pattinson do when the screaming stops? As our list confirms, some ’throbs let the adulation go to their heads and become seriously unglued, or worse, wind up dead. Others transcend their heart-throb status — the likes of Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt are now taken seriously as actors in their own right. Teen favourite Zac Efron, of High School Musical fame, is attempting to go down that road by appearing in the hip indie director Richard Linklater’s new film, Me and Orson Welles. The inevitable fact is that Efron, like his fans, must grow up — or rather, grow old. If only they could be like Pattinson’s character in Twilight and remain 17 for ever."

See the list here

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Google and the New Digital Future

This is the subject of a long article by Professor Robert Darnton, the Librarian of Harvard University, in the December 17 issue of The New York Review of Books. The article begins:

"November 9 is one of those strange dates haunted by history. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Nazis organized Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, beginning their all-out campaign against Jews. On November 9, 1923, Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch was crushed in Munich, and on November 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and Germany was declared a republic. The date especially hovers over the history of Germany, but it marks great events in other countries as well: the Meiji Restoration in Japan, November 9, 1867; Bonaparte's coup effectively ending the French Revolution, November 9, 1799; and the first sighting of land by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, November 9, 1620.

On November 9, 2009, in the district court for the Southern District of New York, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers were scheduled to file a settlement to resolve their suit against Google for alleged breach of copyright in its program to digitize millions of books from research libraries and to make them available, for a fee, online. Not comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might say. True, but for several months, all eyes in the world of books — authors, publishers, librarians, and a great many readers — were trained on the court and its judge, Denny Chin, because this seemingly small-scale squabble over copyright looked likely to determine the digital future for all of us."

More here.

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An old telephone box has become Britain's smallest library

Press reports last week noted that "an old red phone box has been turned into the country's smallest library and is already loaning more than 100 books. The former BT phone kiosk in the Somerset village of Westbury-sub-Mendip has been transformed from a telephone exchange to a book exchange. Villagers rallied together to put up shelves from DIY stores and now the phone box houses titles from cooking books to the classics and blockbusters to children's books."

This development makes the ACT library services "small is beautiful" new library at Kingston seem like the Mitchell Library in Sydney!

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V an Gogh's Letters

With the Impressionist exhibition now on at the National Gallery of Australia, devotees of Van Gogh should look at the online exhibition currently available from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

"Artists' letters, often literary treasures in their own right, can provide compelling windows into the private struggles, public triumphs and towering ambitions that shaped their works and lives. The evocative and revealing correspondence of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), excerpted as early as 1893, has long fed a fascination with the artist's impassioned story.

To mark the momentous publication of the artist's correspondence, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has mounted a special exhibition, "Van Gogh's Letters: The Artist Speaks." It is the largest showing of his work in the museum's history, and weaves together 340 of his letters, sketches, drawings, prints and paintings to offer a rare glimpse into the dense fabric of the artist's creative process, one that held his letters at its very core.

Over 800 letters written by van Gogh have survived, most of them addressed to his younger brother, Theo, an art dealer and an indefatigable source of support, and 80 others received from friends and family were saved by the artist. But while many of these letters had been published over the years, they hadn't been approached in their entirety as the illustrious literary monument they are, or with the fullest sense of their import for his art and career. This has now become possible with the publication of all of the artist's extant correspondence in "Vincent van Gogh—The Letters," a richly annotated and illustrated six-volume compendium, and the launch of a related, scholarly and eminently searchable Web edition (www.vangoghletters.org). In tandem and in time, they will undoubtedly reshape the landscape of van Gogh scholarship and the image of the artist long held by the public.

In both versions of the text — the culmination of 15 years of research and edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker — each letter is newly transcribed (the originals are also captured in facsimile on the Web site), painstakingly retranslated without adornment or amendment, and in some cases redated in accordance with new research."

See more here.

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Best selling author Neil Gaiman asks: Heard any good books lately?

Gaiman in a piece available on US National public radio ponders the future of audiobooks: "I grew up in a world where stories were read aloud. My mother read to me. My father and grandparents invented stories, mostly about animals, which they would tell me at bedtime. Some of my earliest memories are listening to stories on the radio as a boy in England. I had a record of Beatrice Lillie reading the poems of Edward Lear that I played until it was one long scratch. I read aloud whenever I could. I would read to my sisters if they would sit still long enough. I still remember being played the original 1954 Under Milk Wood in English class, and rejoicing in the words and the lilt of the voices..."

The full piece is here.

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John Mullan in the Guardian chooses the "ten best chases in literature"

Metamorphoses by Ovid

Ovid gives you any number of chases, usually with an alluring female pursued by an impassioned male deity. Escape comes only via metamorphosis. The pattern is set in Book 1, where Daphne is the object of Apollo's fiery affections. As she makes a run for it her garments blow aside: "She seemed most lovely to his fancy in her flight." He is about to catch her when her father, a river god, turns her into a laurel.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Walton, a polar explorer, sees a strange, huge figure sledding across the trackless snows. A few hours later he meets the pursuer, a crazed scientist called . . . Frankenstein. He is chasing a monster that he has created, a nameless being who has killed all those dearest to him. The chase is destined to end in a meeting deadly to the Faustian creator.

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

If Hawkeye and his friends are not being chased, they are chasing in this tale of 18th-century colonial wars in the American wilderness. When two English girls are caught by the dastardly Hurons, Hawkeye goes in pursuit, saving them from a fate worse than death (if not, in the case of one of them, from death)."

More here.

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Odd book title of the week

Memoirs of an Amnesiac. Oscar Levant. Hollywood. Samuel French. 1965

The National Library's Trove reveals copies at: http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an1332852. Many would have thought this would have been a very short book.