There is one thing wrong with the new Foyles

I was expecting to love the huge, shiny new Foyles in the former Central St Martins building on Charing Cross Road, but it's even better than I expected. The space and light and organisation don't blot out the eccentricity and curiosity; they accentuate it. No building containing this many freestanding shelves will ever be free of odd corners, however open its floorplan, and the imaginative ways the extra display space is used give a vivid sense of the fine individual tastes stocking the shop. There's more of everything, as far as I can tell. The magazine selection, already quite good, is now very good: I saw my first print copy of The Baffler there yesterday, and bought it. But the way the magazines are stocked is wildly frustrating.

Consider three magazines at the intersection of politics and culture: The Baffler, Adbusters, Dissent. They are none of them easily obtainable in Britain, and Foyles has the lot. Great! Now try to find them. Adbusters is easy: it's in the magazine display at the front, which looks extensive enough to be the whole thing, until you notice a little sign explaining that this is only the art and design magazines: a discreet colour-coded map lists selections of magazines on five different floors. And in fact that underestimates the complexity: most floors have several caches of magazines scattered around their different sections, and there are no signs within sections to tell you where the magazines might be hiding.

Dissent is, logically enough, among the politics magazines, which as promised are on the second floor - on a back wall underneath a secondhand book selection, just to the left of magazines about jazz and world music. (Magazines about rock, pop, film and theatre are on the far side of the same floor.) The Baffler, meanwhile, because of its bookish format, has been classified as a literary magazine: that puts it on the floor below. I look forward to browsing magazines at the new Foyles. I foresee a lot of exercise.

The scattered arrangement also seems to discourage stocking of weeklies: there were some in business, but literature didn't have the New Yorker (or the Atlantic or Harpers - perhaps they're all on another floor) and politics seemed very heavy on quarterlies and quite light on anything else. Stocking magazines is more of a North American bookshop habit than a British one; it's to be encouraged, especially now that so many newsagents are concentrating on the chocolate-and-booze business; but all the American bookstores I've been in kept the magazines together in one place, and there are good reasons for that.

How to make someone enjoy a mediocre curry

The other day I found myself needing a late lunch near St Albans City station. (This is what will sometimes happen if you go for bike rides on your days off.) I went into a nearby pub that had a big menu outside.

"Hello. Is the food still on?"

"Ye-es. Until three." (It was quarter to.)

"Thank you! I'd like the chicken curry and a pint of the Tribute."

"Would you like chips with that?"

"Um. Can I have rice?"

"I'll call the kitchen. We ran out the other day."

So she called the kitchen and they did have some rice, and I found a table and she brought over the cutlery, along, separately and unasked, with the ketchup, the mayonnaise and the malt vinegar. The curry was all right but oversweet - after its build-up, however, it tasted like a miracle. I didn't try it with the vinegar.

Never read the label

Here are three extracts from the packaging of a Pizza Express 'Sloppy Giuseppe' pizza.

Extract one, from a list under the heading 'Cooking like a real Pizzaiolo':

- Now most importantly, drizzle over a tablespoon of olive oil

Their bold.

Extracts two and three, from the ingredients lists for, first, the dough, and then the toppings:

- Wheat flour, water, salt, yeast, sugar, flour treatment agent (wheat flour, dextrose, emulsifier E472e, rapeseed oil, antioxidant E300)

- Tomato sauce (short omitted sublist here), mozarella cheese, spicy beef sauce (long omitted sublist here), red onion, green pepper, rapeseed oil, tomato puree

My bold.

I haven't eaten the pizza yet. It will probably be very nice.

Running away from Radio 4

From a discussion on Woman's Hour, just now, on life after retirement:

"I loved being a district nurse. I hated the thought of staying at home and listening to the Afternoon Play."

Oh, madam, it's worse than that. If you don't fill your days with purpose, you could end up listening to You and Yours.

The district nurse in question went and volunteered abroad, which eliminated the risk of hearing even Quote Unquote.

Wolverine: just bad, or criminal?

A background sentence from a New York Times story on a man who bought a pre-release bootleg of the film Wolverine from a dodgy bloke in a restaurant, uploaded it to the net, and had the FBI turn up on his doorstep after the leak became a national news story:

In 2003, a New Jersey man was fined and put on probation after uploading an unfinished print of “The Hulk” before its release. But last year, a man who took a copy of “The Love Guru,” from a tape-duplication company was sentenced to six months in prison.

Unresolved issue: was the more severe sentence because that guy physically stole a tape, or because he was causing additional dissemination of The Love Guru? I believe there are critics who would have imposed a harsher sentence.

More endurance

About 10 years ago, I saw a takeaway in Hyson Green, Nottingham, with a name that suggested the area might have something of a drug problem. But over time I started to think I'd imagined it, or subconsciously improved it. Then I visited some kind friends in the area for new year, and it's not only real but still there:

View Larger Map

The handpainted sign is also very cute, no?

Sub-editors notice these things

Selected headlines from the Guardian's build up to the New Zealand-England Test series:

Time for Panesar to learn from Vettori

Time for Bell to turn elegant fifties into mighty tons

Time for England's batsmen to knuckle down

Time, in short, for the sort of performance that would make "Time for..." headlines redundant. Failing that, time for a new way of expressing disappointment.

Two urban notes

1. Ken Livingstone is fortunate in having enemies who can't understand how ANYBODY could POSSIBLY like him. Such people find it difficult to make converts.

2. Postcodes of the bookshops consulted by the Evening Standard for its weekly list of "London's Bestsellers": W1, W1, SW3, NW6, WC1, SW10, N1, W8. Nothing south of the river, nothing east of the City. This may be useful in determining what the Standard generally means by "London".

Cycling with an iPod

"The heart of the matter, surely, is this: just how dangerous is it to listen to music while you ride? The idea is very appealing. But I don't do it because, instinctively, I feel I need all my senses to be safe. You're always listening for the car behind, even if you're barely conscious of doing so. And often it's precisely because you're listening out that you look behind, and then reassure yourself that the driver has seen you." - Matt Seaton, "Listen to traffic, not your iPod", Guardian, Feb 15 2006.

"My journey to work begins on a long, straight, broad road, and I'm always in a rush, so I hop on to my bike and then - when I'm already under way - need to fiddle around finding my dark glasses or putting on gloves or getting my iPod sorted (and that's a whole other sin, but let's not get started on that one). So I ride the first quarter-mile hands-free. It's probably not very sensible. Conceivably, even, I could get pulled over for riding without due care and attention. But I do it all the same. Because I can, and because I get a kick out of it." - Matt Seaton, "Two Wheels" column on "cycling's illicit pleasures", Guardian, April 12 2007.

At this point, I'm going to stop feeling guilty about cycling with headphones on. At least I do it with both hands on the handlebar.

A small mystery

This afternoon, I was overtaken by a car bearing a sticker that said

Beckenham Rugby Club

Where rugby comes first

which was slightly puzzling. What's the alternative, when you're running a rugby club? What is the other option that they're silently excluding?

Is it a dig at some rival organisation?

Beckenham Rugby Club

Catford Rugby Club mostly play tiddlywinks these days. The big girls

Or is it a quiet protest against political correctness gone mad?

Beckenham Rugby Club

Forget all that "Try not to break his neck" nonsense

Or, most worrying of all, is it a coded warning to the (stereo)typical amateur rugby enthusiast?

Beckenham Rugby Club

We don't have a bar

Lanchester on copyright

John Lanchester's long article on copyright for this Saturday's Guardian Review was based on a commendably clear and simple principle: that the purpose of the copyright system is to ensure John Lanchester a living. To that end, besides a slinky version of the usual attack on Disney and some personal remarks about the difficulties created by the need for clearance on obscure works, he has two suggestions:

One is that the period of copyright control does not need to be the same as the period during which an artist can earn royalties. I worked for a short while at Penguin in the early 1990s, during which Joyce and Woolf both briefly came out of copyright (on January 1 1992) and sales in their work zoomed upwards, as publishers came out with competing editions - in the case of the one book for which Penguin already had a licence, Ulysses, sales went up (and there were five other editions on the market). As a result of having seen that at first hand, I think that, 50 years after an author's death, anyone should be able to publish a book or record a piece of music or put on a play, as long as they pay a royalty. This would increase general levels of cultural creativity and still allow revenue, but not control, to artists' descendants. We could even have some fun with Mickey Mouse...

The other suggestion is that artists should be guaranteed, by law, a percentage of the revenue from the sale of their work. At the moment, the big retailers squeeze the publishers, who in turn squeeze the talent, so that it is common for as little as 5% of the purchase price of a book, say - though it's not just books - to reach the writer. That's 95% of the money going to someone other than the creator: does that seem right? My experience of asking people about this suggests, very unscientifically, that most people aren't aware that three-for-twos and dramatically reduced prices mean that the writer is earning a smaller royalty per copy.

The suggestions cut against the prevailing legal tendency to make intellectual property behave more like other sorts of property - cutting against that is fine by me - but they also cut against each other. What percentage of the royalties from Family Romance would go, by law, to the author of the anonymous poem that can be quoted only in its English edition?

The risk of reproducing potentially copyright material, as I (poorly) understand it, isn't just that the author's grandchild can decide to have your book pulped; it's that they can present you with a bill of unpredictable and possibly profit-destroying size. To make the first suggestion work in a way that made use of orphan works easier, you'd have to set some kind of standard rate, and then set up an agency to distribute the cash, adjudicate on claims, and - if you believe that the owners of un-orphaned works should be able to demand more than agency rate - decide who's an orphan and who isn't.

Then once someone's successfully claimed the cash for an orphan work, it has presumably ceased to be an orphan. Can they negotiate a higher fee for the next edition? Or stop it coming out at all?

I'd like these kinds of tweaks to work - at the least the first one, if it worked, might have a relatively high chance of happening. But copyright is almost certainly more broken than that.

Probably not intended to damn by faint praise

"The audience had been standing in line for an hour. Only a few of them were dressed as Greek hoplites. They were much better balanced between men and women than I’d expected..." -- Neal Stephenson attends a showing of 300 for the New York Times op-ed page. Via Jenny Davidson, who was convinced.

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.

Revised and updated

"In all of the more than 700 places reviewed within this guide you should be able to get two courses (starter + main or main + dessert), plus half a bottle of house wine (or a couple of beers) plus service (we've assumed ten per cent when it is not automatically added) for no more than £20 per person." -- Time Out Cheap Eats In London, edition three.

"In all of the more than 500 places reviewed within this guide you should be able to get two courses (starter + main or main + dessert), plus half a bottle of house wine (or a couple of beers) plus service (we've assumed ten per cent when it is not automatically added) for no more than £20 per person." -- Time Out Cheap Eats In London, edition four.

Emphases, conveniently enough, in originals.

[Time Out Cheap Eats In London, edition four, 2007. This is the only guidebook I buy every time it comes out, but it has fallen upon evil days. Not only is the new one 50 pages and 200 entries shorter, it has developed a tendency to seek out posh sandwich shops. These will generally let you pick up a sandwich, a banana ("main + dessert") and a can of organic fake Coke ("a couple of soft drinks") for less than £20, but even in London they wouldn't fit most people's definition of "cheap". On the other hand, it's more sensibly organised -- it has all the maps gathered at the back, rather than sprinkled unpredictably through -- and it seems to have somewhat better coverage of outer London, even if it does file its one Forest Hill recommendation under Deptford.]

Your New Yorker links may no longer work...

...but at least the "Not found" message is beautiful. (This joke stolen from a commenter at kottke.org, via a link emailed from a friend.)

The site has had a mostly handsome redesign; it also inserts cartoons into the text, reproducing the authentic New Yorker experience of pausing in the middle of 10,000 words on female circumcision to smile at a cat saying something Upper East Side. (That joke stolen from another friend the other weekend. It's originality day here.)

Notes on the tweaked Times

It has taken me four-and-a-half days to get my thoughts together on this one, which in blog terms might as well be never, but it's worth looking at some of the ways The Times may have learned from the Guardian redesign. The wedge serifs on its new headline font, Times Modern, are coincidence: we have it from the designer that the inspiration is an old Times titlepiece, and you can see the family resemblance. (All these links, by the way, are from the excellent Newsdesigner and its commenters -- go there for an overview of what's been done, and links to the official Times explanations.) But consider these:

The top one is the Guardian, the bottom one The Times. Now, lots of papers are trying to give their readers more summary information on stories, and more 'entry points' for reading - but settling on a pair of double-line subheads in the first column, separated by hairline rules, and with extra space under the second line in each one, seems a bit too coincidental. It's not a theft or any kind of misdemeanour, but it does suggest that the Times redesigners, Research Studios, read the Guardian pretty closely.

The next case shows more divergence:

This is one of the little breakers the G now uses to lift text-heavy pages, next to one of the grey boxes the T is putting to similar purposes. The T's are bigger and more flexible and less inclined to appear in the middle of text, which suggests they're the result of shared pressures rather than direct inspiration.

The third case is actually trumpeted in the T's description of its new style -- greater differentiation for comment bits on news pages:

Again, G followed by T. Ragged-right text for comment, once a G eccentricity, seems to be becoming an industry standard: the T is going about it much more beefily, however, adding bold to the text and using a radically different headline type rather than just a slightly lighter one. The result looks like something out of the G from before its latest redesign -- except that it used to use serif headlines on comment and sans on news, whereas the T follows the opposite policy.

The G, then, continues to wield design influence beyond what its circulation performance would lead you to expect. (That may be because so many designer types read it, rather than because of simple merit.)

General T redesign verdict? I quite liked the tabloid as it was; this wouldn't put me off, and has the potential to draw me in to pages I'd previously have skipped. The feel is a tad more conventionally tabloid, though, because busier and, in places, more tightly spaced -- not sure they've fully compensated for the bigger X-height of the new headline font, especially in single-line headings.

Explanation required

From my nearest bookshop, a strange little remainders specialist:

Is this supposed to be some sort of display? Is there a short member of staff who gets dangerously cranky when denied instant access to high shelves? Is it a conceptual art project? Or is it just an attempt to look lovably eccentric? If the last, it's succeeding.

The Grey Lady's light basement*

The New York Times "home page" feed just gave me this intriguing bit of fluff about politicians using hand-sanitiser after long bouts of handshaking. It has some of the falseness of all trend stories: to be news it has to suggest or imply that this quirk of behaviour has just come into being, or just become more prevalent; in fact, the reporter has just noticed it, and decided we might be interested. He's right, though. It is interesting. So fine.

The most interesting thing is that no politician is quoted as santinising to protect the public from their germs, rather than themselves from the public's. Maybe one of them tried that line and was dismissed as a flatterer; but surely they could have been profitably mocked as a flatterer in the text? So maybe they all are that egotistical.

I'd feel more sympathetic if the pols were French. According to a friend who should know, but may have been winding me up, the French cliche equivalent to "kissing babies" for political glad-handing is "feeling cows' arses". (And the key fact about Jacques Chirac, apparently, overlooked outside France, is that he's the greatest cow's-arse feeler in living memory.) Hand sanitisation after that? More than excusable.

*Apologies if this headline was even less comprehensible than usual. I believe a 'light basement' to be a human-interest story put in at the bottom of a broadsheet page; I'm going by a Julian Barnes piece collected in Letters from London, where Simon Jenkins says he insisted on having them as editor of the (London) Times. And the Grey Lady's the other Times, obviously, which having never fully accepted post-1930 conventions of newspaper layout probably finds the equivalent space half-way up a left-hand column, or on page K1 of a special weekly section called "Fluff". Forget I mentioned it.

Fun with juxtaposition

One of the nice features of the Guardian website is the little block of related links it gives you at the end of each piece. But this one seems unfortunate on a story about a man who leaves his own excrement in train carriages:

Adventures in pleading

His lawyer, Joe Tacopina, says of his client, “He’s a genuinely really sweet individual” who “has been demonized because he’s the guy who was cutting off the limbs.”

-- from New York's take on the Alistair Cooke body-snatching scandal, via Jenny Davidson.