Theatre note: Blind Summit's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Last night a friend's spare ticket took me to an adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Battersea Arts Centre. It was sold to me as a puppet version, which sounded irresistibly unwise. In fact, although there are a couple of puppets, what you mainly see are people, in overalls, performing the story as Brechtian didactic theatre - as if Brecht were a member of the Ingsoc Inner Party. Chunks of the original narration are delivered with a sort of ironic sarcasm, which I suppose cancels out to sincerity. The framing device works brilliantly in the first half, sinister and funny; it helps that you're not wholly certain at first it isn't real bad Brechtian theatre. In the second half, when the company are required to evoke soul-annihilating terror, the frame starts to get in the way. But if soul annihilation isn't your idea of a fun night out, that might be just as well.

Weather note: when I came out of the BAC, the saddle of my bicycle had a thick coating of frost. Not lock-freezing cold yet, though, thank God.

End-of-season's greetings

They will keep the feast in Stepney. The angel's wings are moved there; he wants to keep them, till there is another child in the house of the right size. He sees them going, shivering in their shroud of fine linen, and watches the Christmas star loaded on to a cart. Christophe asks, 'How would one work it, that savage machine that is all over points?'

He draws off one of the canvas sleeves, shows him the gilding. 'Jesus Maria,' the boy says. 'The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an instrument of torture.'

From Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which having just finished it really does appear to be that good. Time is required, though, to certify the level of praise it has received, and time can be particularly hard on historical novels. As the main points of your new year emerge from under canvas, may they turn out to be decorations, rather than instruments of torture.

Clever Perec sell

This "staff pick" card, found in an Islington bookshop, pimps A Void, Adair's virtuoso translation of La Disparition, in words that honour its famous lipogrammatical constraint. OK, so that's not a wholly original trick - a critic or two had a go at it on first publication - but it's still not a thing that many of us would think to try in such tight conditions. Bravo Adam, I say.

The war on cliche-cliche

Here is the opening of Christopher Ricks's essay on "Cliche" in State of the Language (1980), a fat volume with many surprising authors (Enoch Powell! Angela Carter! Randolph Quirk! Something for everyone!) that I bought purely for the pleasure of this quote:

The only way to speak of a cliche is with a cliche. So even the best writers against cliches are awkwardly placed. When Eric Partridge amassed his Dictionary of Cliches in 1940 (1978 saw its fifth edition), his introduction had no choice but to use the usual cliches for cliches. Yet what, as a metaphor, could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, more outworn than outworn, more tattered than tattered? Is there any point left to - or in or on - saying of a cliche that its "original point has been blunted"? Hasn't this too become blunted? A cliche is "a phrase 'on tap' as it were" - but, as it is, is Partridge's "as it were" anything more than a cool pretence that when, for his purposes, he uses the cliche on tap it's oh so different from the usual bad habit of having those two words on tap? His indictment of "fly-blown phrases" has no buzz of insect wings, no weight of carrion.

Even George Orwell (whom William Empson, with an audacious compacting of cliches, called the eagle eye with the flat feet) - even Orwell had to use the cliche-cliches (hackneyed, outworn), and could say, "There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could be similarly got rid of if people would interest themselves in the job," without apparently being interested himself in whether fly-blown wasn't itself one of those metaphors which could be got rid of.

Ricks goes on to argue that writers can make intelligent, meaning-reviving use of cliche, quoting examples from Geoffrey Hill and, inevitably, Bob Dylan. "Cliches invite you not to think - but you may always decline the invitation, and what could better invite a thinking man to think?" I can't think of a better invitation, if you regularly wax sarcastic about writing, to think harder about the terms you use to do it.

[State of the Language, edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, California, 1980. You want this one, not the disappointing Faber-published sequel dated 1990. I bought my copy from the revived Skoob, now buried under the Brunswick Centre. Presumably a more prominent space would detract from the parade of expensive chain stores that make good, in a bad way, on the centre's claim to be "a high street for Bloomsbury". No matter: the basement shop has a decent amount of space, the lighting's good enough that you don't much miss the windows, the range of books is as wonderful as ever and there's now an official Skoob Glob. And they have a second copy of State of the Language (1980), if you're interested...]

Annals of accurate praise

"Nuttall as a writer appears as a gentle, donnish figure, prepared to quote a good student essay in support of a case; constantly, in a Platonic way, citing past and present agreements with friends and colleagues. He reacts also, in a way that is sometimes baffling or opaque, to his own earlier writings and earlier opinions. He inhabits a world of sweet reason, and is good company. He can hear, and make you hear, the mystery of Bertram, in All's Well, fearing 'the dark house, and the detested wife'." - A.S. Byatt, towards the end of a rather prickly review of Shakespeare the Thinker,
captures something of the pleasure of reading Tony Nuttall, and of being taught by him. (For an excellent appreciation on the second point, visit a friend of mine here.

A message from Lance "Brownshirt" Smithers

This is what happens when George Saunders attempts to give his support to that "save the book review" campaign without breaking irony...

The cycle of life

"In the beginning was the review copy, and a man received it from the publisher. Then he wrote a review. Then he wrote a book which the publisher accepted and sent on to someone else as a review copy. The man who received it did likewise. This is how modern literature came into being." - Karl Kraus, as translated by Harry Zohn in Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths.

One of the revolutionary things about the internet, of course, is that it allows you to write the review without first receiving the review copy. We must wait to see the consequences for the rest of the cycle.

For those who don't automatically tune in to the Today programme...

...this link should give Alasdair Gray paying tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, who died yesterday. Gray doesn't sound ever so well himself - he may not be a morning person - but he's definitely worth listening to.

Reading, cooking, thinking, cooking

What remains, for a couple of days, the current New Yorker contains a characteristically elegant thing by Adam Gopnik on recipes in novels. It has some lovely solipsistic digressions:

A devotion to shell beans, I have noticed, divides even amateur cooks from non-cooks more absolutely than any other food, and they are, into the bargain, a perfect model of writing. Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn’t producing them knows.

But its central argument seems to me flawed. Gopnik's case is that many modern novels have their characters cook at length "to represent the background of thought", in the way that (his examples) walking is used in many Victorian novels, or driving in John Updike. He thinks this is a swizz, because...

...the act of cooking is an escape from consciousness - the nearest thing that the non-spiritual modern man and woman have to Zen meditation; its effect is to reduce us to a state of absolute awareness, where we are here now of necessity. You can’t cook with the news on and still listen to it, any more than you can write with the news on and still listen to it. You can cook with music, or talk radio, on, and drift in and out. What you can’t do is think and cook, because cooking takes the place of thought.

He demonstrates by cooking recipes from several contemporary novels, reserving his politest and deadliest scorn for Henry Perowne "idly" cooking a fish stew in Ian McEwan's Saturday: "You can’t idly make a bouillabaisse while you brood on modern life any more than you can idly make a cassoulet; these are nerve-wracking concoctions."

Probably true. But it's not true, in this bad cook's view, that all cookery demands a disengagement from thought; and even if it was, cooking from fictional recipes would be a particularly faulty way to show it. Ruminating characters tend to be making something they cook routinely, for themselves or a forgiving family audience; Adam Gopnik is trying out new recipes for the benefit, going by one aside, of a "gang".

I can't cook something that I have to think about and think about something else - an audience and a recipe are the two things most likely to push a dish into this category - but if I'm cooking one of the half-dozen things I can do by heart, for myself or for friends with time on their hands, and I'm not at one of a few critical moments, then the process can open up some marvellous space for thought. The best description of the condition is by Primo Levi, in The Periodic Table, when he explains why he finds the process of distillation beautiful:

First of all, because it is a slow, philosophic, and silent occupation, which keeps you busy but gives you time to think of other things, somewhat like riding a bike.

He is engaged, you'll notice, in what amounts to a particularly precise and formalised version of cooking. And he's right about cycling, too.

Oxford links

I'm going to have to buy Isolarion, by the looks of it. I want to read more contemporary fiction, really I do, but I keep being tempted away. Incidentally, any Americans tempted up the Cowley Road by that Bookforum review should bear in mind that "From a penny to a thousand pounds" is a traditional slogan, not anything like an accurate description of the pricing at the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House: all the (very good) main dishes cost about the same (£8 or so, last time I was there, six years ago). Try to avoid being seated by the speakers and you'll be fine.

Also, while in town: this and this are cryingly envy-making.

Jamesians

Slate has decided to provide a high-profile home for Clive James's webcam interviews, which is excellent news, and to launch them with an extravagant editor's appreciation:

Whether we know it or not, one of the chief inspirations for our ongoing efforts to provoke thought and mirth at the same time is none other than this polymathic Australian extrovert. The kind of television coverage Troy Patterson writes in Slate grows almost directly out of the column James wrote for the London Observer beginning in the 1970s. The quick-witted cultural writing to which we aspire owes its tone to James' essays, first collected in The Metropolitan Critic.

That seems a bit much. Clive James was better than anyone before or since at turning the TV review into a blast of highbrow comedy, but he wasn't first with the idea. Bernard Levin, of all people, used to do it in the Manchester Guardian of the 1950s, where the ground was prepared for him by a once-famous tradition of needlessly witty and erudite music-hall reviewing. And although I admire James's reviewing, I can't shake the accusation in Jonathan Raban's For Love and Money that he writes a dialect "as recognisable as Mummerset; at once donnish high-falutin' and come-off-it low slang, it is the received standard accent of the smart English book review".

But Jacob Weisberg is right to wonder why the man is not more prominent in America; he is as widely cultured a good talker as Christopher Hitchens, treading much of the same literary territory, and better at reading closely (as if that matters). I suppose it's to do with the primacy of politics over culture, Hitchens being a political writer deriving status from his cultural hinterland and James a cultural critic aiming for a political edge. And then Hitchens's old socialist-among-liberals schtick would be more of more use to American talk-show bookers than the liberal-among-socialists one that drives most of James's more political stuff. That James's jokes are for laughing at, rather than admiring as sallies of wit, and that he puts so much work into looking laid back, probably do their share of damage too.

Two depressing thoughts for the weekend

From David Remnick's Reporting (£6.99 in hardback from the bookshop below), Philip Roth's entertainingly precise sketch of literature's route to hell in a handcart:

"Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced. That's a very easy way to visualise it," Roth said. By "readers", he said, he means people who read serious books seriously and consistently. The evidence "is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end," he said. "The evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen, the progression from the movie screen to the television screen to the computer. There's only so much time, so much room, and there are so many habits of mind that can determine how people use the free time they have. Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing. It is difficult to come to grips with a mature, intelligent, adult novel. It is difficult to know what to make of literature. That's why I say stupid things are said about it, because unless people are well trained they don't know quite what to make of it."

And, via Obscene Desserts, a fragment of Iraq news from The Times that reads like the grimmer parts of Ryszard Kapuscinski's African reporting:

The morgue classifies victims according to their injuries; if a victim has been beheaded, he is a Shi’ite killed by Sunnis. If he has been killed by a power drill to the head, he is a Sunni murdered by Shi’ites. Most victims have been tortured. Bodies are dumped by the roadside and lie there for hours.

J Carter Wood couldn't find anything to say after that, and nor can I.

A Dickensian character

"Charles Chaplin, Charlie, Charlot, the Tramp, the little man, kiss-kiss, was the most important and dynamic figure in the early days of cinema. In defeat and glory, pathos and aplomb, he was an inspiration to many, ammunition for the rest, and someone who never knew boredom with himself. Indeed, following Chaplin's slapstick career, reading the Autobiography that could have been co-written by Micawber and Heep, is to have the sense of someone watching his own show. Surely that is a clue to filmmaking, direction, or whatever: the ability (or the curse) of being in life while directing the act at the same time." -- David Thomson, The Whole Equation.

The purpose of this post was to applaud that 'Micawber and Heep' quip. But I was unable to stop myself typing out the rest of the paragraph, and I reckon my first reading missed the real insight (and insult): "never knew boredom with himself". That really is worth applauding.

[The Whole Equation, by David Thomson, London, 2004. Celluloid's own John Aubrey turns from biography to history, and proves as blessedly idiosyncratic in his new form. This is a four-chapter verdict; I'll be surprised if I'm less happy at the end.]

Ian Hamilton on Larkin's afterlife

The Larkin fun in the sidebar here (it points here and here) sent me scurrying back to Ian Hamilton, who I rememembered being good, and angry, on the post-biography change in Larkin's reputation. Sure enough:

A couple of weeks ago, there was a write-up in the Independent about a rap performer name of Ice Cube, author of 'A Bitch is a Bitch' and 'Now I Gotta Wet'cha'. Ice Cube, we were told, is notorious for his misgyny and racism and for whipping up his fans into ecstasies of loathing: he has them 'grooving to a litany of hate'. Only one of Ice Cube's lines was quoted - 'You can't trust no bitch. Who can I trust? Me' - but the reviewer did attempt to pinpoint his subject's characteristic manner of address. He called Ice Cube's language 'incessantly Larkinesque'.

Larkinesque? Did this mean that Ice Cube, for all his appearance of commercialised aggression, was secretly a somewhat poignant type of artist, wry, subtle, elegiac; that his dignified, distressful lyrics were likely to linger in the memory for decades? It seems not. In this context, 'Larkinesque' signified 'foul-mouthed'. And the Independent's readers were supposed to know this. Oh, Larkinesque, they'd think as one, that means Cube uses the word 'fuck' a lot.

And who can blame them if they do so think? After all, in the week before the Ice Cube notice, these same readers were treated to a daily dose of Philip Larkin's more repulsive apercus: sexual intercourse is like having someone else blow your nose, women are stupid, kids should be sent away to orphanages more or less at birth, and all the rest of it. At the bottom on one page, in a little box, we would get the Independent's 'Daily Poem' - usually some workmanlike concoction without a flicker of inspiration or originality - and on another, similarly boxed, there would be the ugly mug of Philip Larkin, together with a line or two of his off-the-cuff plain-speaking. What a busy newspaper: encouraging les jeunes and les no-hopers even as it chips away at the repute of the best poet we have had since Auden.

That's the introduction to a review of the Motion biography. The start of his review of the letters gives one notable reason why fashionable literary London (as the phrase goes) might have turned against Larkin:

There is a story that when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming 'Hi, Norman!' in the Index, next to Mailer's name. A similar tactic might happily have been ventured by the publishers of Philip Larkin's Letters: the book's back pages are going to be well thumbed. 'Hi, Craig', see p. 752, you 'mad sod'; 'Hi, John', see p. 563, you 'arse-faced trendy'; 'Hi, David', see p. 266, you 'deaf cunt', and so on. Less succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie ('droning out his tosh'), Ted Hughes ('boring old monolith, no good at all - not a single solitary bit of good'), and Anthony Powell, a.k.a. 'the horse-faced dwarf'. There is even a 'Hi, Ian': he calls me 'the Kerensky of poetry'. Not too bad, I thought at first. Alas, though, the book's editor advises me that Larkin almost certainly meant to say Dzerchinsky, or somebody - some murderer - like that.

(It seems the letters were out first, by the way, at least in England.)

But Hamilton does not follow the approach of defending Larkin by attacking his executors. He had written about them sympathetically (in the greatly to be recommended Keepers of the Flame) before the Letters and the life came out. He jibs at Motion's style -- "too solemnly intrusive... The teacher in him is often at war with the narrator and, in the early sections of the book, where he is guessing, he slips easily into an inert biographese"; but he does not cricitise the handling of Larkin's sex life and his primary reactions seem to be shock and (for Larkin) something between anguished empathy and pity, with a dash of irritation. I'm going to take him as my guide, for now.

You see, I've never actually picked up the Motion biography, having heard so much bloody about it. But a good sample of Larkin's hates and rages come through in his poems. We don't have to live with them on the basis that his feelings against women, black people, lefties, rivals, everyone, were first and deepest feelings against himself, although probably they were. We have to live with them because he forged them into poems that are lasting and memorable and touching and draw echoes from us (me, anyway) even of their most shaming admissions. If we can't cope with that, it's our problem -- not his and not even (I suspect) his biographers'.

(The Hamilton reviews quoted appear in the The Trouble with Money, which is apparently still just about in print, and in Walking Possession, which isn't. I'm afraid you still need both.)

Only secondhand books give you this

Tipped inside the inside cover of the first volume of Macaulay's History of England:

It's a five-volume edition, in all, so it would have been a handsome present, especially when books were scarce. This one is half-wrecked from reading, or at least handling; the others would be at least one condition category up. The text of the dedication, as you might just make out, is:

To Stan.

"I cannot allow other common friendships to be placed in the same line with ours. I have as much knowledge of them as another and of the most perfect of their kind, but I should not advise anyone to measure them with the same rule; he would be much mistaken. In those other friendships one has to walk with one's bridle in one's hand, prudently and cautiously: the knot is not tied so tightly but that it will cause some misgiving --- --- But in the other kind where we exhibit the very depths of our heart and make no reservations, truly all the springs of action must be perfectly 'clear and true'." (MONTAIGNE)

from Dicky, APRIL '45.

The date finishes it off nicely, I think. You can imagine some sort of pilot-and-rear-gunner scenario -- in comments, if you like.

[Macaulay, History of England From The Accession of James II, London, 1849-1861. Shameful to admit, but I'm just reading back to the point I'd reached last time I mentioned it. It'll be clear soon enough whether I've jinxed it again.]

Arnold Bennett as Edwardian QVC presenter

I think it will be agreed the cost of this library is surprisingly small. By laying out the sum of sixpence a day for three years you may become the possessor of a collection of books which, for range and completeness in all its branches of literature, will bear comparison with libraries far more imposing, more numerous, and more expensive.

Send no money now. Return within 90 days for a full refund.

This is Literary Taste: How to Form It, published by Bennett in 1909. It has gone through seven editions by my copy, dated February 1914. It suggests that, quite apart from his novels, Bennett could have made a fortune writing self-help books or flogging Chambers' Cyclopedia of English Litearature door to door.

On the one hand, he is too scrupulous to suggest a single path. His first warning is: "People who regard literary taste simple as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction". His first advice is: "Buy! Surround yourself with volumes, as handsome as you can afford. And for reading, all that I will now particularly enjoin is a general and inclusive tasting, in order to attain a sort of familiarity with the look of 'literature in all its branches'." He takes pleasure, extracted with effort from acknowledged classics, as his guiding pedagogical principle.

On the other hand, he is too canny to pass up the sales potential of "DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS FOR COLLECTING A COMPLETE LIBRARY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE". The justification is peremptory: "I began by urging the constant purchase of books -- any books of approved quality, without reference to their immediate bearing upon your particular case. The moment has come to inform you plainly that a bookman is, amongst other things, a man who possesses many books. A man who does not possess many books is not a bookman."

With the help of a tame retailer, "my old and valued friend, Charles Young, head of the firm of Lambley & Co., booksellers, South Kensington", he compiles "a library containing the complete works of the supreme geniuses, representative important works of all the first-class men in all departments, and specimen works of all the men of second rank whose reputation is really a living reputation to-day", specifying editions and prices. It runs from Chaucer (and a little before) to George Gissing, excluding translations and works not in English. For 337 volumes, the cost is £26 14s 7d, of which £14 17s 7d is the copyright-heavy 19th Century. "I am fairly sure," he says, "that the majority of people will be startled at the total inexpensiveness of it."

£26 14s 7d comes out at about £1,800 in today's money using the RPI inflation calculator at EH.net; and many of his volumes are one-shilling Everymans, for which you might struggle to find an equivalent at £3.50 today. Dover Thrift and Wordsworth Editions could take you some way, I suppose.

I love Bennett's tone -- intimate, clairvoyant and stern -- although there's every chance another reader would want to throttle him. He's your friend; he knows what you're thinking; and he can fix it. And I take some comfort, decline-of-literary-culture-wise, in his description of the crapness of the market for poetry in his time. "If the sales of modern poetry, distinctly labelled as such, were to cease entirely to-morrow not a publisher would fail; scarcely a publisher would be affected; and not a poet would die -- for I do not belive that a single modern English poet is living to-day on the current proceeds of his verse."

Given more enterprise I'd work through the list -- two volumes a week for three years, I'm fairly sure that most people will be startled at the total unambitiousness -- but enterprise is not something you'll find much of around here.

Literary Taste is available as a Project Gutenberg e-text.

Another book I'll have to buy

While classical texts and Guardian headlines are the subject, I appear to have missed a good one yesterday, despite enjoying the article it was meant to attract me to: "Honey, I'm Homer", for David McKie on Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey. McKie hits off Butler's can-this-be-serious tone excellently, and this bit seems horribly plausible:

Today, to judge from the Notebooks, he would have probably made a fortune, perhaps as a house vituperationist for the Daily Mail, or as a telly pundit. He delighted in snappy inversions of popular tenets - "An honest God's the noblest work of man" - and overheard oddities - "At a funeral, the undertaker came up to a man and said to him: 'If you please, sir, the corpse's brother would be happy to take a glass of sherry with you'."

I'm not sure, though, that his account captures quite how funny, or how cuckoo-bananas, The Authoress of the Odyssey is.

Butler almost certainly did think Gladstone used Homer as as basis for "excessive pontification". After all, he hated Gladstone. He boasts in his notebooks of turning a servant against him. But this didn't stop him drawing largely from Gladstone's already archaic scholarship, in place of later writers who didn't moralise so much.

In Authoress, he accepts serenely many of Gladstone's moralising readings, but blames them on the writer having been young, female, priggish and without real knowledge of the world, the ancient-Sicilian equivalent of a vicar's daughter. (Of course, Butler was a vicar's son.) He makes her speciality jokes -- delightful little feminine ironies at the expense of masculine heroism. He is breathtakingly sexist, even in his praise.

The drive that made Butler's Homer criticism fun to read is the same one that stopped it connecting with the scholarship of his day, even as a provocation. It rests on intuiting a character for the author of each book (the Iliad was by a cynical old Trojan gentleman) and then remaking everything to fit the intentions, secret biases and flaws of the writers he has invented. David McKie credits Butler with pointing towards the "compound" Homer, the by-committee version already fashionable in his day. But that was completely against his way of reading.

One final revelation I'm deeply grateful for: The Authoress of the Odyssey is back in print, and has been for two years, with a university outfit called Bristol Phoenix Press. That's another £20 gone, and when I finally get to reread the bugger doubtless everything I have said above will be wrong. Now can we have The Humour of Homer, please, Bristol Pheonix Press? Please...

(There's no Project Gutenberg version of Authoress, if you were wondering, despite a full set of his not-very-religious religious works.)

At long last Loeb

Slate has a late but good addition to the hoopla surrounding the 500th volume in the Loeb Classical Library, the venerable series of Latin and Greek texts with facing translations. Good because the author, Emily Wilson, actually has something amusing to say about Quintillian's Lesser Declamations, with facing translation by H. Shackleton Bailey, and because (not unrelatedly) she's a working classicist with intelligent doubts about the sort of dilletantism the series enables:

I still wonder whether we really should be welcoming these splendid new translations with open arms. I, for one, would be extremely wary of recommending a Loeb in an undergraduate class in which the students were expected to read the original Latin or Greek. The temptation to rely too heavily on the translation would be all the greater now that the translations are so much better than they used to be.

This is surely a decision that makes itself. You don't have to recommend Loebs. Where there are undergraduates expected to read Latin and Greek, there will be at least one bookshop with a wall of the things. Even if your classics department is too small to make your town a Loeb-rich environment, word will get around. Some things are too useful not to hear about. Your students will find them and crib. And if you haven't recommended them, then any moderately conscientious student will crib thoroughly enough to give the impression that they didn't crib.

The worse worry, well expressed higher up the article, is that the Loebs can serve a culture with no place for the more than moderately conscientious. Mastering the crib is as far as you're encouraged to go. Indeed, you may receive a gold star for getting that far. Googling around this point, I found that the Weekly Standard considers Loebs to "certify seriousness". It's the handsome covers that do it, apparently.

Back when I dreamed of being serious about such things, it was the Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis that certified seriousness: hyper-reliable texts, no English even in the notes, and a cover style that makes a Loeb look modernist. I never managed them. But even a straight English translation was more heavyweight than a Loeb, provided it wasn't a Penguin.

Loeb bonus: Harvard UP's publicists, otherwise pretty hot on this one, seem nonetheless to have missed the 90th birthday of one of Latin literature's most-used cribs: H. Rushton Fairclough's Virgil. Or maybe they're saving the champagne for the second volume's 90th, in two years' time.

The art of taking offence

Working on a regional paper changes the way you read. You begin to scan each text for references to your circulation area; and, although you probably try not to be conscious of it, you prefer the disparaging. Drawing your readers' attention to an insult and then loudly defending them from it promotes the togetherness on which local journalism thrives.

(This may be one reason why maligned and misunderstood places - shitholes, if you want to take the outsider's view - tend to nourish newspapers. Think of Wolverhampton and Dudley, with their paper bigger than the two Birmingham ones combined. Think of Aberdeen, with its two papers each larger than the prestigious Edinburgh equivalent.)

Also to be considered, especially if you're in a shithole, is the frisson of agreement some of your readers will feel at the insult. When I worked in Aberdeen for a few months, a friend told me to read Christopher Brookmyre's A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away, which gives the place several pages of full-on comic crying-down. I tried the local library, but all 23 copies were on loan.

There are five copies of Geoff Dyer's riff on DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, in all Nottingham and Nottinghamshire's libraries, and only two of them are in Eastwood. A shame, because his curses upon Eastwood and Notts are first-rate: "Lawrence country - north of Shakespeare's county, south of the Bronte country, bang in the middle of motorway country... there is no getting away from the fact that Eastwood is an ugly little town in an ugly little county".

Perhaps Dyer's whitewater-rafting version of the stream-of-consciousness narrative has kept Eastwoodians out. Perhaps it prevented filleting of the book by the people who would tell them to be offended. Or maybe the gatekeepers were distracted by the quality of the other jokes - this is a man who gathers momentum even as he describes depressed inactivity:

It went on for a couple of months. Laura went to work while I stayed home and did nothing. I read nothing and did nothing. I spent most of the time watching TV which may not sound so extreme but this was mornings and afternoons, it was Italian TV and - the clincher - the TV wasn't even turned on.

Something must be done. Do you think we could start a campaign to ban Out of Sheer Rage in Notts? I regret that I have come to the question so late, but the publicity would still surely bring others to the pleasures of this book. We might even get the libraries up to 23 copies.

While we're on the subject of libraries...

This seems a splendid idea: the OED, a decent newspaper archive, and a shelf of other expensive reference works, from anywhere in Britain, for anyone with a library card. And I didn't notice it until the official responsible managed to get a letter in The Times. My local seems to have some similar system, but I'll definitely be asking them about this one.