An Inconvenient Truth

This isn't strictly a post on literary matters, but frankly you ought to be grateful it a paean to the ease of making mayonnaise (amazing!). I think everyone should be made to watch this film. Compelled. Maybe I'm getting fascist in my old age, but I sincerely belive some sort of creepy public screening in stadiums would be A Good Thing.

Set Texts

There's an interesting piece today in G2 about how the texts set for A-Level English Literature have changed over the years. To be honest, I was quite surprised at how well today's list stands up against one from 1953. Okay, so there's no Spenser - but who would wish that upon a callow seventeen year old with any ambitions to dally further with the subject? - , or Chaucer (which surprised me: I have fond memories of my English teacher reading us huge chunks of The Clerk's Tale in a entertaining medieval accent rather less than a decade ago), but there is Aphra Behn, Henry James and Margaret Atwood. Perhaps it's just the questions which have been dumbed down since the fifties?

There ain't no party like a ...

... Pen Pusher THREE party. Thanks to everyone who came along last night; I hope we managed to chat to most of you (reminiscing about that time there was the wonky lampshade in the Kennedy's house and Karl and Susan just didn't notice - genuinely) and that all except the fashionably tardy got a piece of the Champagne pie.

Anyway, we had fun (despite finally becoming grown up enough not to get blotto at our own party). People due a copy should be sent one over the weekend. And if anyone has any footage of the aforementioned Ramsay Street continuity error, please do send it along.

Chick Lit in Good Shocker!

As you may have noticed, I'm a little bit of an intellectual snob. So, imagine my shame every morning as I pant on the train, red faced with the worthiness of my cycle (which no doubt puts my fellow commuters in mind of a sylph like Oxford undergraduate flying around on her sit-up-and-beg, basketed affair), and pull out an airport sized paperback with a swirly title and a cartoon woman on the front. Called The Godmother (strapline 'Having kids is great ... as long as you can give them back'). It's almost as bad as picking up a Metro. Sadly, what they don't know, and I can't tell them (without futher helpings of shame), is that a) I'm considering it as a contender for a romantic novel prize and b) it's really rather good. It starts unpromisingly, and there are two incidents which made me close the book (through physical, rather than intellectual, revulsion), but it's gripping, well written and relatively unpredictable. Hurrah!

On an even more positive note, Pen Pusher Three arrived today, and looks fab. More hurrahs - see you all at the party on Thursday!

Booker Hooker

Yes, I'm shamelessly prostituting the Booker announcement out as a poor excuse for a subject matter today, despite it a) being old news and b) being something I know nothing about (save the name of the winner; Kiran Desai). Although I know even less about the winning novel itself, 'The Inheritance of Loss', I did wonder why big, noisy Indian blockbusters do so well at the Booker - I'm sure 'Midnight's Children' won it, as did 'The God of Small Things'. If 'A Suitable Boy' didn't, it jolly well ought to have done. India seems to be for the twentieth century novel (and I include TIOL in that category, as we're but six years in to the next hundred) what rural England was to the eighteenth/nineteenth century one, Desai the heir to Fielding, Eliot and Trollope. I suppose the family network, and traditional values remain strong, which provides rich material for such wide ranging plots, plus the exotic location adds the neccessary touch of spice that, perhaps, reading about a town that wasn't your own did two hundred years ago. Anyway, clearly I am saying nothing particularly deep or novel (ho ho) on the subject, but I did think it interesting. So there.

PP THREE

The last couple of weeks have been Rather Busy fighting over what is going to go into issue three, and where it's going to fit, and how to edit it, and all of that sort of thing. Finally it is off to the printers, through little fault of mine admittedly. My terribly staid day job gets me off the last hurrah of proofing and arguing, whilst the rest of the boho team sits around drinking coffee and squabbling in a beautifully intellectual fashion. You can imagine the sort of thing; pipes in hand, French poetry paperbacks tossed aside in righteous fury, specs akimbo...

The finished product of all this quintessentially literary activity will be available on 19th October, at the launch party, roll up roll up to steam up the spectacles and fill up the blackthorns in celebration.

The stuff what I am reading

I’m a glutton for punishment. Turns out I read the submissions for the romantic fiction prize so fast, they’ve asked me pass judgement on some more. They probably think I’m some twisted spinster who sits at home all day mooning over Alan Titchmarsh’s big manly plotlines.

In other news, I’m rushing through The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton for a review (sadly not for PP). She was such a marketable publishing phenomenon that most Victorians assumed her existence was as far fetched as her recipes for dressed tongue, instead imagining a Mr Kipling like figure (no, he doesn’t exist). As the Amazon reviews suggest, so far it is largely contextual scene setting, but none the less interesting for it.
http://www.mrsbeeton.com