ME: Hello?
MAM: Hi, Treen. Are you doing anything?
ME: Watching a movie, but I can pause it. What’s up?
MAM: Your dad wants to know if you can tell him how to record the World Cup final tonight. Your brother’s gone out and we don’t know how to work the machine.
ME: The World Cup final?
MAM: Well, whatever. The football. At midnight.
ME: The F.A. Cup final?
MAM: Yes. Can you tell him how to record it?
ME: Mam, I don’t even know what brand your DVR is!
MAM: Well, can you just give us some ideas?
ME: I can suggest that you should have bought a TiVo.
MAM: Can you at least tell us which channel SBS is on?
ME: Pardon?
MAM: Your dad can’t find SBS. He’s on channel 90 now.
ME: Do you have my brother’s mobile number?
MAM: Yes.
ME: Can you send him an SMS, asking him if he’ll be home before midnight?
MAM: We don’t know how to send an SMS!
DAD: (excited but muffled shouts from off-phone)
MAM: He’s found SBS.
ME: Well, that’s a start. Can you not just pick a programme and press “record”?
MAM: I don’t think so. Can’t you tell us how to record it?
ME: Mam, I moved out of home before you bought that machine.
MAM: Can Nick tell us how to do it?
ME: I don’t think so. But he could send my brother an SMS for you.
NICK: What do I say?
ME: ‘Are you coming home before midnight? Dad can’t record the F.A. Cup final and he’s bullying me. Love, Treen.’
DAD: (vague muttering off-phone)
MAM: What’s ‘EPG’?
ME: I don’t know. Oh, Nick says it’s the Electronic Programme Guide. That’s probably what you want.
DAD: (vague muttering off-phone)
MAM: Your dad says that probably won’t work.
ME: Mam, that’s the best I can suggest. Try picking a programme and hitting “record.”
MAM: I don’t think we can do that.
ME: Well, my brother just sent an SMS saying he won’t be home tonight. So just try it.
DAD: (excited but muffled shouts from off-phone)
MAM: He’s found the F.A. Cup Final. What do we do now?
ME: Press “record”?
MAM (shouting to Dad): Treen says to press record. (To me) Dad says there’s only an “OK” button.
ME: Try hitting the “OK” button, then.
DAD (excited shouts from off-phone)
ME: I take it that worked?
MAM: (shouting to Dad) Tell Treen what? (Pause) I’m not telling her that! (To me) Dad says he’s very disappointed in you.
ME: He’s what?
MAM (shouting to Dad): You’re not very disappointed in her!
DAD (off phone): I am!
MAM (shouting to Dad): You’re not! (To me) Oh, there’s a call coming in. It’s probably your brother ringing to tell us how to record the F.A. Cup final. Bye!

ME: Did you say you were making me a cup of coffee?
NICK: Yes. For you are deserving of coffee!
ME: Oh, god.
NICK: What? What now?
ME: But now I’m going to be worrying about whether or not I’m deserving of things. What if I eat some yoghurt but I’m not deserving of it? What if one day I’m not deserving of dinner?
NICK: Treena, this is crazy talk.
ME: I know! See what a pass you have brought us to.
NICK: You started it.
ME: I did not!
NICK: Yes, you did. You invaded Poland.
(Pause)
NICK: Running away now!

A strange conversation between two extremely distracted people:

ME (looking at baby pictures on the Internet): I’d like to have twins. It’s a shame you can’t arrange it.
NICK: Yeah. Ahead of time.
ME: Yeah.
(Pause)
ME: No, wait. You can’t arrange it after the fact, either.
NICK: No. That’s . . . right.

Yet another conversation centred on Nick’s iPhone:

NICK: You know, now I have proper data connectivity on this thing, it can actually function as a GPS. See?
ME (refusing to look up from my Rex Stout novel): You mean, next time we get lost while driving, you can make the subsequent argument significantly worse by insisting on pulling out your iPhone?
NICK: Somehow I knew you were going to look at it like that.

Women: we’re just so damn unreasonable!

After an unnecessarily complicated conversation over instant messaging about whether or not the latest issue in The Great Fables Crossover came out today:

ME: I don’t know how I’ll go back to only one comic a month after this!
NICK: You’ll have to follow a few other comics then!
ME: Nah. Anyway . . .
NICK: You need to get back to work . . .
ME: Yep. Or, you know, play Peggle. One or the other.
NICK: It’s all grist for the Mills.
(Pause)
ME: I’m going to ignore that.
NICK: I’m very grateful for that.

I’m been obsessed with reading my visitor logs since I started this blog last year. And one of the things I love most is seeing the Google searches that bring people here.

Unfortunately, I suspect that The Circulating Library is a disappointment to some of these readers.

Nevertheless, these are some of my favourite Google searches from the last few weeks:

• “pompous Victorian male.” You know, I really should have more pictures of pompous Victorian men on this blog, now I think about it. For now, I’ll have to settle for this one.

• “deaths of fictional characters.” This is a far, far more popular search than I had ever imagined. Then again, I do often find myself, halfway through novels, thinking, “Oh, just die!” I can be an impatient reader.

• “Jack meets Ianto.” See, to me, this is one of the delights of Torchwood: the programme is its own slash fiction. (I know that slash fiction originally marked fan fiction about two heterosexual characters, but when we met Ianto, he had a girlfriend and we had no idea he also liked boys, and Jack is interested in anyone, regardless of gender or species. So “slash” still fits.)

• “Victorian plaid.” Yet another topic I don’t cover often enough on the blog—except for that one time. May I also suggest (yet again!) the excellent Hugh Trevor-Roper chapter on the Victorian creation of Scottishness, from this book? You won’t regret it.

• “tied-up kneesocks.” This suggests to me a curiously specific and accessory-focused type of bondage porn, but I suspect they were really looking for something more like this. Or perhaps this. Actually, I could become a sock fetishist quite easily.

• “worried about young Christian Anholt.” Oh, me too, anonymous reader! At least, I was worried about Christien Anholt when he was Perkins in “The Curse of Fenric” (Doctor Who): that was a bad situation to be in. And I was even more worried about him when he was Donald Cooper in “The Last Word” (Press Gang). I’m excessively worried about him now I’ve just found out he was in sixty-five episode of Relic Hunter, but I suppose you’d call that a different kind of worried.

• “Naughtiest Girl in School pictures.” Much like the “tied-up kneesocks,” I think this sounds more salacious than it’s supposed to . . .

• Agatha Heterodyne porn.” Not on my blog! Though considering how often she appears in her underwear in the first few books, Girl Genius itself basically is Agatha Heterodyne porn—if you have a penchant for corsets and bloomers.

• “Davros + narcissist.” Well, I won’t disagree with you there, anonymous reader. But I have a feeling that if I used the word “narcissist” on the blog, it would have referred to a different character altogether . . .

• “textual criticism of Mary Poppins.” Well, no. But it’s an excellent idea, and one I might well come back to.

• “inflatable Dalek.” Finally! A reader who shouldn’t be disappointed by the results of their search!

• “Sontaran haka + ridiculous.” Well, that was technically Tim’s argument rather than mine, but I’ll take all the Google search results I can get.

• “Barbie syndrome.” According to the infallible Wikipedia, Barbie syndrome is the desire to look like Barbie. And I’m glad I looked that up, because all I had was a vague memory of reading somewhere—probably in Marie Claire or HQ in my dim and distant magazine-reading past—of a recognised phenomenon among young children of viciously mutilating Barbie dolls. Apparently, Barbie syndrome is not at all what I thought it was.

• “Mr Darcy + wedding night.” Sorry, anonymous reader, but I have to refer you back to the title of this post. Sadly, this is simply not that kind of blog.

(And in the space since I started writing this, someone has come across the blog by Googling “David Eddings in prison + locking a boy up.” I can’t help you with that query, anonymous reader, but that is now by far my favourite Google search ever.)

It’s been a long day, so I’m sure you’ll understand when I say this started from a discussion about whether the TiVo icon in the top left-hand corner of the television screen was sentient and, if so, if it became bored:

NICK: Treena, it’s connected to the Internet constantly. I’m sure it’s fine.
ME: Oh, no! What if it’s downloading pornography?
NICK: Computer pornography?
ME: Yeah!
NICK: Oh, yes: like, ZX81s in compromising positions?
ME: Honey, no. ZX81s are ancient!
NICK: True. Oooh—late ’90s Macs! With their translucent covers. Yeah.
(Pause)
NICK: What? Why are you looking at me like that?!

ME: In what Defamer calls [paraphrased, because I’m forgetful] Defiling Your Childhood’s Grave Part 27 . . .
NICK: Yes?
ME: They’re remaking Flight of the Navigator.
NICK: Hmm. Well, I’m torn on that. One the one hand, it was just a little ahead of its time, visually. But on the other hand, no one knows how to make children’s movies these days.
ME: It’s the same exec. producer. And the writer was a writer-producer for Arrested Development.
NICK: Really? Which one?
ME: I want to say Jon Osterman, but I don’t think that’s right.
NICK: No. Because that’s Doctor Manhattan.
ME: Oh. I don’t think it’s being written by Doctor Manhattan, no.

The first object lesson to be taken from this post is never blog when you’re tipsy.

ME: I’m bringing my computer out to the living room, because I secretly like to tweet Rage.
NICK: Me, too!
ME: That’s how we know we’re the perfect couple.
NICK: Really?
ME: No, not really.
NICK: Pardon?
ME: Well, I secretly don’t like you very much.
NICK: I’m making you coffee, if that makes a difference.
ME: No, not so much.
NICK: I thought as much.
ME: Then why make me coffee, if you didn’t think it made a difference?
NICK: Treena, everyone needs their own form of incentivisation.

The second object lesson is never enter into an argument with a man who is so steeped in bureaucratese that he can not only make nouns from verbs (as we all can) but can actually make nouns from other nouns.

Why, yes: I have spent the afternoon adding more books into Delicious Library. This time, I hit a patch of girls’ detective stories (my other guilty pleasure, along with girls’ school stories), and it occurred to me that more modern reprints of the old classics tend to lack most of the charm of the 1970s’ hardbacks.

It’s partly the format: I loved the hardbacks when I was a child, because they felt like real books to me.

But it’s partly the comparatively hideous cover illustrations (and I realise, as I say that, that the 1970s’ covers were hideous in their own way).

But take this 1974 edition of Nancy Drew’s The Moonstone Castle Mystery:

It’s true: Nancy does look disturbingly like Grease‘s Rizzo in a bad wig here. But other than that, the cover has everything you could ask for. Girl detective in a prominent position! Easily identifiable best friends (sporty brunette) George and (plump blonde) Bess! Person who is possibly Carson Drew in a suitably distant position! Looming castle! Man who may or may not actually be a statue! Whistler’s mother!

What more could you need?

Compare that to this 2000 edition of a brand new Nancy Drew adventure, The Mystery in Tornado Alley:

Hmm. I can’t even tell which one of these blonde girls is Nancy. I’ll assume it’s the one in the pink polo neck, but where’s my red-headed girl detective? And if that girl next to her is plump, boy-chasing Bess, I’m going to be more annoyed than I was by the fact that when they re-jigged the Hardy Boys mysteries, the first book showed them investigating the death of faithful long-time girlfriend Iola Martin in a car-bombing.

(For the record, I was quite annoyed about that.)

Actually, the more I look at this, the more questions come to mind:

• Why is Nancy wearing those hideous high-waisted shorts, at least five years after they were in fashion?
• Has she realised that if she’s that close to the tornado, she’s probably dead already (in a metaphorical “Achilleus at the end of The Iliad“ way, rather than actual zombie fashion, of course)?
• Why is she gasping in horror and staring off to her left when the tornado is actually behind her?
• Shouldn’t the tagline read “Nancy is swept into a tornado of danger”? Because, according to Wikipedia, a tornado is really a specific subset of the broader category that is whirlwind, so I suppose the pun works, but it just seems a little weak. Much like some whirlwinds.

And the publishing gap between reprints doesn’t always have to be broad for the covers to take a sharp dip in quality/amusement value. Take this 1975 edition of the Dana Girls’ Winking Ruby Mystery. (The Dana Girls were an attempt to cash in on the success of Nancy Drew: they were published under the same pseudonym as the Nancy Drew books—Carolyn Keene—and this was their twelfth adventure.)

Honestly? I love this cover, around which I constructed the following imaginary conversation:

LOUISE DANA: Heavens! The idol!
JEAN DANA: Louise, why am I holding this . . . well, I don’t know what kind of tool this is, actually.
LOUISE DANA: Its eye! It’s a ruby!
JEAN DANA: Couldn’t I at least have the shovel? At least I know what’s that’s called. Or is that a spade? Should I call that a spade?
LOUISE DANA: But one of the eyes is missing!
JEAN DANA: I mean, anyone can see by comparing my lustrous blonde locks to your pixie cut that I’m not the tomboy in this family.
LOUISE DANA: Someone has been here before us!
JEAN DANA: Fine. Don’t listen to me. I’m just going to stand here and practice my sultry face.

Compare that to this 1981 edition of Mystery of the Stone Tiger:

Well, Jean still looks intensely bored. But now Louise’s expression says nothing so much as, “What was that?! Did I just walk through a spider’s web? Is the spider on me? Get it off, get it off, get it off, get it off!”

The vampire in the background is fairly awesome, I suppose. But I remain unconvinced by that overgrown garden—give me the apparently post-apocalyptic setting of The Winking Ruby Mystery any day!

We live (almost) at the intersection of two fairly major roads. I rarely think about it unless I want to take a photograph of the sunset.

Then I see that we’re webbed in by telegraph poles and power lines, which criss-cross the skyline in all directions:

A bus hit one of the telegraph poles this morning, nearly wrenching our power line out of the front of our house—so that it was held up by a conveniently placed jacaranda and frangipani—and knocking out the electricity for the entire street.

And all of a sudden, telegraph poles look much more fragile than they seem when you’re walking past them at street level: worn wooden struts, exposed to the elements and at the mercy of apprentice bus drivers:

And I’m still uncertain as to how hitting the bottom of the pole could cause this much damage to the top end, let alone risk wrenching our power line out of the front of our house.

Electricity indeed works in mysterious ways.

ME: Are we going to have breakfast in the same cafe as last time?
NICK: I think so. Where was that?
ME (turning and pointing): It’s back here.
NICK: I feel like . . .
ME: . . . an explorer in the wilderness?
NICK: . . . . pancakes.
(Pause)
NICK: “An explorer in the wilderness”?
ME: I’m just trying to finish the simile, honey. I thought, “It’s a bit of a cliche, but that’s Nick for you.”

To celebrate not having any marking to do for the first time since week two, I decided to carry on adding books to my Delicious Library database.

I should, in retrospect, have settled for sleeping on the sofa while pretending to re-read an Agatha Christie novel that I’ve already read, since it took me six hours to catalogue two shelves’ worth of books.

But the upside is that it did remind me of some truly disturbing book covers lurking in there.

In the last post, the books themselves were cheesy. The semi-tragic aspect of these books is that they aren’t all cheesy, but their covers most definitely are.

And you don’t get much cheesier than 1970s’ science fiction:

And the terrifying thing I learnt when Googling this book is that this isn’t even the cheesiest cover available. I’m remarkably lucky, I feel, that I don’t have this cover instead:

Except—well, at least in the second one both protagonists are equally naked.

Then there’s one of my disturbingly large number of copies of Jane Austen’s Emma:

I did consider checking whether that bonnet is historically accurate or not, but I’m just not that dedicated. I will venture an entirely uneducated guess that the pink ruff she’s sporting was not a common item of clothing in the Regency period, though.

Still, Austen got off lightly compared to Sir Walter Scott:

I’ll be honest: this cover kills me. No one’s going to lost sight of these two on the battlefield! And while I can perhaps see—by squinting and exercising an over-active imagination—that the knight on the left has feathers on his helmet, no amount of squinting will perform the same service for the knight on the right. I’m forced to assume that he topped his helmet with an intricately folded crocheted scarf.

And science fiction isn’t the only genre that suffers from bad covers, of course:

I’m particularly enamoured of the gold text on that one, but let’s have a closer look at the protagonists, shall we?

They seem to be looking at each other longingly, but the more I look at the expression on his face and the position of his torso, the more convinced I become that she’s actually just dislocated his shoulder.

Well, some of the cheesiest books on my shelves, anyway. (This post brought to you in the wake of the cheesiest television event of the year, the Eurovision song contest.)

Some of the books are partly cheesy (the headscarf!):

And partly surreal—why is the most significant event in the narrative the moment when Robin checks her friend’s wristwatch by the light of her torch?

And is it just me, or does it look as though that cover’s missing a noun? I always want to ask, “The phantom what, Robin? The phantom what? If this were Nancy Drew, it would be a phantom stagecoach. Or maybe a phantom staircase. Or a clock. But just ‘a phantom’ seems like you’re not trying hard enough, Robin.”

(Imagine how awesome it would be if it were The Mystery of The Phantom: Robin Kane, Girl Detective, versus The Ghost Who Walks.)

They do get cheesier, though:

Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter, are you on some kind of harness? You seem to be leaning at an extraordinary angle there. Still, if you are on a harness and yet still calm enough to be casually chewing your sunglasses, I do have to admire your sang-froid.

Don’t look now, but I think you’re about to be shot in the back by a cowboy.

And sometimes they are both cheesy and impossible to interpret:

Kim Aldritch is, and I quote the back of the book here, a “smart, beautiful secretary for an international insurance firm . . . living for the day she can become a full-fledged investigator for the firm . . . action-loving, curious, and courageous.”

And, yes: those are their ellipses. They clearly don’t believe in moderation—or really know what purpose ellipses serve.

What I find intellectually intriguing about these books—this raft of books published right down into the 1970s (this one is from 1972) that deal with working women—is the way in which they construct ambition and professionalism.

What I find amusing about them is the dodgy cover art. Is Kim coming up out of the water there? There does seem to be a boat in the bottom right corner. But then what angle is she on? And how? Why isn’t her hair wet? And why on earth would she apply so much make-up before scuba diving? For that matter, is she scuba diving? She doesn’t have a tank or a snorkel.

So many questions—and only two hundred pages of plot, the first ten of which are taken up by a description of Kim’s trip to work, on the subway, with her father.

Sometimes the books are just out and out cheesy:

The Donna Parker books are, it seems, popular enough to warrant their own Wikipedia page. I didn’t know that when I bought them, of course. I just liked the picture boards and the strangely freakish faces. (Plus, I have a possibly unhealthy obsession with depictions of female adolescence and female professionalism in young-adult fiction of the early to mid twentieth century.)

And I love his optimism: “Donna, if I give you this twig I just found on the ground, will you be my girlfriend?”

And sometimes the books involve Annette Funicello tail-gating some guy in a convertible:

Enough said, really.

Apparently, the mysterious fungus thrives on damp weather—which is convenient, given the amount of rain we had yesterday.

So rather than being the rather streamlined and elegant object it was a fortnight ago, when it reminded me rather of decorative cornices, it’s now bloated and disturbing:

If I see any sign of it moving, it’s out of there.