But wouldn't it be nice if the expectations were not actually preconceptions, as in the recurrent case of people who decide that they will read A Random Romance (quite probably one from Quite A While Ago) and feel entirely qualified to amusingly crap all over a very varied genre.
Do people do this with any other genre? I am sure one could do this ( Read more... )

The longform patriarchs, and their accomplices: Beyond the white male canon: Bernardine Evaristo’s New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize Lecture offers a manifesto for the creation of a new, inclusive literary landscape: This essay notes that novels by women and about women are often demeaned by the longform patriarchs and their accomplices, as “domestic ( Read more... )

I have, my dearios, lately been apprized of a forthcoming work the advance notice for which suggests that the authors of whom the reader will detect 'echoes' are Thomas Mann and Flann O'Brien* (Penguin books tout him as 'Ireland's greatest comic writer', which one must concede must be a hotly fought-over crown).
Quite apart from that being an oddly ( Read more... )

The British creativity I grew up with - in pop, fashion, poetry, the visual arts and the novel - has almost always come from outside the mainstream

A codslap (one of several) delivered to That Person Woezing About Diversity = End of Civilisation, or something.
Which sounded awfully like those wails whenever the playing field does actually become ( Read more... )

Have been noticing on Twitter people remarking that spectacles are not a stigmatised assistive technology and neither is the need for them -
Well, maybe that is so now, but I think we have had some discussions in comments in this here venue about the Victorian resistance to letting people with myopia wear glasses rather than struggle and try to ( Read more... )

Have been trying to resist moaning on about an exchange on a listserv I was engaged in over the weekend, because I seem to be being grumpy hedjog going 'these people NO NUFFINK' far too often these days, and it wasn't so much, in this instance, knowing nothing as having various assumptions about the transmission of knowledge and what knowledge was ( Read more... )

My dearios will doubtless be aware that I am never not irked when somebody responds to a listserv or whatever request for historiography on some subject with title of some book that a) was published 30 years ago &/or b) sounds from the title that it might be relevant, but actually isn't (good luck with finding out anything on Victorian self-abuse ( Read more... )

It's been linked everywhere and I don't feel like giving it hits but there was a lengthy post about Worldcon which amongst other gripes was 'OMG, Old People!'
As one of those greying beings who was flitting about the ExCel Centre -
- And whose first ever Worldcon it happened to be -
- Was, really, not best pleased.
It seemed to me, apart from ( Read more... )

I've surely flagged up heretofore the 'popular mind''s very loose grasp on what happened when and issues of periodicity - the Long Elizabethan era (in which Milton, we are given to suppose, must have written under Gloriana's never-ending rule); the Almost Interminable Regency (Undead Prinny stalks the realm; no really, one Brighton Pavilion was ( Read more... )

How many books is too many books? What makes you a book hoarder? What do you do when you have too many?

This irritates me. Particularly when the ceiling for the designation 'Compulsive Book Hoarder' is a measly 1000.

I don't really think this article makes the necessary distinction between 'book hoarding' and people who keep books because Research ( Read more... )