During the preparations for dinner tonight, while Nick was frying some sausages:

ME: Honey?
NICK: Yes?
ME: Two things, really. One, I would like some more wine.
NICK: Okay.
ME: Two, why is my kitchen slowly filling up with smoke?
NICK: You can’t break an omelette without making some eggs.
ME: And the omelette in this metaphor would be . . .?
NICK: Freedom!

Sometimes, I wish I were making these up.

It never fails: I no sooner actually write a post about how I have nothing to post about than I think of fifteen different possibilities for entries.

In this case, though, I was sitting this afternoon desultorily flipping through the rats’ packs in Packrat—hoping a raincloud would pop up for me, but it never did—when I kept focusing on Judging A Book By Its Cover, a collection of essays edited by Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody that I recently reviewed for M/C Reviews.

I’m fascinated by reader-response work—though frequently horribly frustrated by it, as well—and it formed a key element of my thesis.

I’m also fascinated by the marketing of fiction, though not quite in the same way as the essays covered in Judging A Book By Its Cover, which focuses largely on twentieth-century publications: my nineteenth-century interests have more to do with advertising and networks of authorship than with graphic design.

But the book did make me realise that I have some books with truly hideous covers on my shelves.

(Of course, I also have a wide number of books with gorgeous covers; I may do a companion post once I’ve finished this one.)

These aren’t the worst, but they’re all fairly awful.

Of course, picking a 1970s reprint of an Agatha Christie novel is rather like shooting fish in a barrel; they’re all dreadful, really.

But this is one of the worst:

That poor owl.

I haven’t actually read this novel, I’m ashamed to admit (I only picked it up in May this year, judging by my inscription) so I have no idea whether a brutally murdered owl is central to the plot, but it’s certainly not something you want to look at on your bedside table as you’re dropping off to sleep.

Of course, I picked Endless Night over two others, which I think have much more revolting covers: Lord Edgeware Dies shows the back of a man’s head with a knife sticking out of the nape of his neck, while By The Pricking Of My Thumbs gives prime position to the broken, dirty head of a porcelain doll.

(That latter instance may not freak out other people as it does me, but creepy dolls are right up there with clowns in the terror factor, as far as I’m concerned.)

Either way, neither of them were images that I wanted on the blog.

If 1970s’ Agatha Christies are too easy a target, so are 1980s’ Rex Stouts. At least Endless Night probably never stood a chance. The image above is from a 1971 reprint, but the novel itself was published in 1967, and would almost certainly have always had a hideous cover.

But this cover of Some Buried Caesar is a 1982 reprint of one of the earliest Nero Wolfe mysteries, from 1938:

By all rights, this should have some lovely, elegant typography and minimalist artwork. Instead, we have a grimacing man about to be speared by a pitchfork (if it helps, he’s already dead. Spoiler!) and a fairly ugly font.

It doesn’t really seem fair, for one of the funniest and cleverest of the Wolfe mysteries.

But then, I revere Stout, so perhaps I’m taking up the cudgels on his behalf a little too readily.

But then, I also revere Sayers, and I’ve included this in the list:

This, like Stout, is a 1980s’ reprint of a 1930s’ novel: in this case, the 1988 edition of 1937’s Busman’s Honeymoon. They’re dreadful editions—the type of paperbacks where the glue shatters after a decade, so every time you read it subsequently there’s a constant gentle rain of yellowish fragments into your lap.

Really, it doesn’t look as bad as the preceding examples. The font is rather pretty and period appropriate, and I rather like the portrait of Wimsey, although I suspect it flatters him.

But it gives away vital information.

Sayers’s (or rather, Wimsey’s) technique comes down to this: when you know how, you know who. This cover, then, gives away the murderer, if you read it the right way. And that always irritates me. (My copy of Ngaio Marsh’s Grave Mistake does the same: it’s as though they were designed by people who went on to write programme promos for Channel 7. But then Marsh’s title is a dead giveaway, as well.)

Still on the crime theme, how about a late edition Trixie Belden? This one’s from 1984: there’s no evidence that it’s a reprint and it’s a late title in the series, so it looks as though someone deliberately marketed a new title with this cover.

I mentioned in my second post on Tunnels the widely popular belief that boys won’t read books with girl protagonists—I wonder if that’s behind the androgynous image of Trixie in the middle of the cover.

I mean, I know she’s a tomboy, but honestly. She looks like Jimmy Olsen.

She’s more feminine in the bottom picture, assuming that’s her in the bottom-left corner next to Honey Wheeler.

Still, I’ve saved the best for last. This, I suspect, is the worst cover on my entire bookshelf:

This is a reprint—undated, alas—in the Abbey Rewards series, a series of reprinted novels sharply divided on gender lines: the list of “Girls’ Fiction” on the back includes Rosamund Takes The Lead, Sidney Seeks Her Fortune, and Polly of Primrose Hill, while “Boys’ Fiction” encourages them to read Adrift in the Stratosphere, Wreckers’ Bay, and Berenger’s Toughest Case.

The book itself is an inoffensive if unoriginal school story, but the cover is nightmarish.

No—I’ve unwittingly told a lie.

What Katy Did Next (1886) is the third of Susan Coolidge’s five novels about the Carr children and their lives in New England in the 1860s.

What Katy Did Next, actually, shows Katy travelling to Europe and meeting a handsome naval lieutenant with whom she could live happily ever after.

Some time in the distant past, I bought a copy of What Katy Did Next from this Abbey Rewards series.

If I hadn’t subsequently removed it from the house on the grounds that the enormous eyes and hideously disproportionate heads scared me witless, that would certainly have been the gem of this list.

But, honestly, I haven’t been doing anything in the last three days to warrant an update, not even the “slice of life”-style updates that I sometimes worry are overtaking the blog at the expense of the reading material.

Nick and I have discovered The Middleman television adaptation—I really must track down the comic books, which I’ve never read, but they don’t seem to be highly available, due no doubt to the forthcoming omnibus edition. The Middleman is lovely; people seem to be suggesting that the SFX are no good, but that doesn’t bother me when the dialogue is so snappy and fast paced. It reminds me a little of the live-action Tick, but slightly—only slightly—less insane.

We’ve starting watching Chuck, too, which I’d only vaguely heard of and hadn’t even considered watching until we saw the pilot episode the other day.

True, the best friend gets on my nerves a little, and there’s perhaps a few too many spy-porn moments for my liking (although that may be influenced by the fact that all the spy-porn moments involve the CIA chick rather than Adam Baldwin. But even the reverse would get old after a while), but it’s fun and breezy. The science makes no sense, of course, but I did watch a fair few seasons of Alias, so that obviously doesn’t bother me. (Also, I don’t understand science at all. Any branch. It’s like magic, as far as I’m concerned.)

(Actually, it occurs to me that I can no longer remember how many seasons of Alias I’ve watched. Surely I should be able to remember that? I only hope whatever bumped that piece of information out of my head was important. Perhaps it was instructions on how to change a spare tire. Or a reminder of when to clean the lint filter on the dryer. Something like that.)

I’m not just watching television, though. This is also the time when I need to break some sections of my thesis off into journal articles, before second semester begins in a month. The research is all fairly fresh, so it shouldn’t be as difficult a task as it could be. But I’m tossing up between two pieces: one on the methodological difficulties of preparing a bibliographical listing for an author who wrote exclusively for penny weeklies, and one on verisimilitude and textual manipulation in adaptations of penny-weekly serials for suburban theatres.

Naturally, I intend to write both of them—it’s a question of which will require the least manipulation of extant material, so that I can get back into the swing of writing as quickly as possible, and hopefully push two articles out there before teaching becomes too intense next semester.

My inclination is towards the piece on adaptations, myself.

I also want to see if I can place the bibliography of my key author (the gem of the thesis, I think) and perhaps at least one of the indexes to fiction in Victorian penny weeklies. I’d hate to see that much work go to waste but, more than that, I’d hate to think of other researchers spending a year sitting in front of a microfilm reader when I’ve already done all that work.

I know it’s called re-searching, but let’s not go nuts, here.

I don’t know if writing journal articles is a topic out of which I can make fascinating blogging, myself. I’m also not sure that my research is something I’m comfortable putting on the Internet in any detail—that’s a hurdle I haven’t crossed yet.

So if the next month is made up largely of short pieces on television advertising, that’ll be the reason why.

On the other hand, Nick and I are currently debating the value of my live-blogging the upcoming season of Doctor Who when it starts airing on the ABC, this week.

So it could be a matter of more updates than you can handle.

We’ll see.

I sometimes claim to collect girls’ school stories. But, deep down, I know “collect” is far too grand a term: it also implies some degree of discretion and selectivity. Really, I just buy whatever I come across and then read it.

But, collector or not, I do have an entire bookcase filled with girls’ school stories—only a small bookcase, but still—ranging from Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, Little Female Academy (1749: said, in the introduction to my 1968 Oxford reprint, to be the first full-length novel written explicitly for children and, therefore, the first girls’ school story as well) to a much more modern series in which the girls all have boyfriends from a local boys’ school (unthinkable, in the Enid Blyton model!) and in which the hockey team is rather unfortunately called the Trebizon Tramps.

(Apparently, the Trebizon books were published between 1978 and 1994, but the few volumes I have are all from the 1980s.)

One argument that could be made against girls’ school stories as a genre is that they have a tendency to be formulaic. The same argument is often levelled against detective fiction, and it can be countered in the same way: certainly, the banal ones are formulaic, but a clever author working in an established genre can do much to subvert the reader’s expectations.

But that’s not really the point. I just like reading them, much as I like reading stories about plucky girl detectives, and therefore own a scary quantity of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden novels.

And I have, over the years, culled a number of valuable life lessons from my reading of girls’ school stories, which will allow you to navigate life in a girls’ boarding school, should such a thing be necessary.

1. Midnight feasts must always include boiled eggs, sardines, biscuits, cake (preferably left over from somebody’s birthday, the celebration of which is the best reason for holding a midnight feast), boiled sweets, and tinned pineapple.

It may include bottled ginger beer, which allows a certain enjoyable hysteria to infiltrate the party through the fear that a mistress may hear the tops popping off and come to investigate. However, a midnight feast has more cachet if you manage to coax the cook into making fresh lemonade.

But a midnight feast should never, ever involve cooking sausages. This can only lead directly to disaster.

2. Midnight feasts should never be held anywhere near a swimming pool. This will also end in disaster. Plus, schoolgirls are hearty enough, without needing to hold swimming races at midnight.

3. If you develop a passionate friendship (or, more accurately, a “pash”) with another girl in the school, the object of your affections is significantly more likely than her schoolfellows to die in a freak cross-country skiing accident.

(Seriously. I wish I could remember the name of the book in which this was the main life lesson, but they all blur into each other after a few years.)

4. Mysterious men who hang around the school for no apparent reason are invariably either

a. planning to steal the school’s silver tennis trophies, in which case the school’s rebel should thwart his purpose and thus transform herself the school’s heroine, or

b. the long-lost and extremely wealthy relative of the girl who has just arrived at the school from somewhere in the Antipodes, and is busy not only shocking the school with the freedom of her colonial manners but also winning all their cricket matches through her mysterious power of “spin bowling.”

5. If an unusually tall and strong girl arrives at the school, another student will almost certainly fall over a cliff or be trapped in a burning building at some point during the coming term.

This outcome is inevitable if the unusually tall girl has a famous mountaineer for a father.

6. Unusually tall and strong girls also have problems with anger management. Why bad tempers are associated with physical strength is never explained in the books.

I suspect steroids.

7. School bullies are always motivated by jealousy of the other girls’ prettiness, because they themselves invariably have poor complexions and greasy hair. Their bullying can be stopped if you tell them firmly to stop eating chocolates and brush their hair one hundred times before bed every night.

8. If the school is divided into different houses for sporting events, one house will always be subject to the scorn of the others. This will stop when the members of the disdained house show an unusual talent for handicrafts, thus saving the school’s annual charity sale.

9. French mistresses are always either plump and cheerful or thin and cranky. In either case, they are the best subjects for practical jokes, because French mistresses are thoroughly credulous, and can be made to believe in anything from imaginary odours to self-propelled crockery.

If you have more than one French mistress, the two will usually be fierce enemies. You can use this to your advantage in practical jokes.

10. Most schools have girls who fall into the following categories: a skilled artist; a mathematical genius, who is often an excellent musician as well; a clever writer; a talented sportswoman; a practical joker; and a skilled needlewoman.

All of these will come in handy when you inevitably have to put on a pantomime in your fifth year.

If your school was founded by Enid Blyton, you stand a good chance of finding that one of your classmates used to ride bareback in a circus. She may also be of Spanish or gypsy ethnicity, and will therefore have a fiery and uncontrollable temper, even if she is not unusually tall.

11. Occasionally, a school will allow in a girl whose working-class father has made an enormous amount of money. She will not, of course, “fit into” the school, and may spend most of her time boasting about what her father can afford to buy.

If this is the case, it is in no way repellent for you to respond, “Really? Can he afford to buy himself a few hundred hs?

In fact, your classmates will ignore the egregious classism and applaud your quick wit.

Of course, the girl will almost certainly be expelled for bringing the school into disrepute—the headmistress will describe her as a “failed experiment”—so you need to make that remark early in the term.

12. If any of your classmates run away from school, there’s no need to be alarmed: they will certainly have forgotten to check on local public transport, and can easily be collected from the local train station.

13. One of your classmates will sleepwalk. This is usually a sign that they’re being pushed beyond their endurance by ambitious parents or ignored by parents who blame them for the death of a favoured sibling. These parents will be in no way affronted if you send them a letter pointing out the flaws in their parenting practices.

14. If your school has an unusual location, be aware that this is a sign that you may face certain challenges. Schoolgirls in Austria, for example, need to be prepared for everything from attending the Passion Play in Oberammergau to facing down Nazis. Schoolgirls who live in a former Cistercian abbey, on the other hand, face the threat of becoming entangled in the English folk-dancing revival.

I leave it to you to decide which is worse.

15. Finally, if your best friend is unusually beautiful and generally beloved, beware: she will almost certainly not “play the game,” and you will have to jeopardise your own place in the school to protect her from the consequences of her folly.

Actually, I’ve had a good run on Professor Layton and the Curious Village this morning.

I managed to figure out how to cross from island to island while only visiting each one once—they allowed me to build a bridge, but I’m still quite proud of myself for figuring that one out.

(But last night I had to get Nick to help me figure out how many of twenty people trapped on a sinking boat I could save if it took the five-person life-raft nine minutes to make a round trip to a nearby island; it never occurred to me that it would be halfway back to the island when the ship actually sank. Of course, it also didn’t occur to me that one person would have to stay on the raft to pilot it. And, carrying on the tradition of creepy messages that began with the dead-dog puzzle, this one ended with the message “Let’s spare a thought for the two who lost their lives.” This aspect of the game is starting to freak me out.)

I also managed to figure out two of those “If you give me two years, I’ll be twice as old as you” and “My age is your age plus half my age” maths puzzles, which I’m feeling pretty smug about.

I completely failed to figure out how many coins, interspersed among a twisted rope, I would be allowed to keep when the rope was pulled taut, if I were only allowed to keep the ones above the rope. I did try and follow the pattern of the rope, but it was so twisty I became thoroughly confused as to which was top and which was bottom.

But I did manage to complete an eight-piece sliding puzzle to make an apple with a worm in the middle. Of course, according to the ticker at the top, it took me something like six hundred moves.

But it was the mouse puzzle that made me realise that I’m not cut out intellectually for these sorts of puzzles.

The mouse puzzle pointed out that mice reproduce at twelve babies every month, and baby mice can reproduce once they are a month old. So, the puzzle asked, if you buy a mouse the day after it’s born and bring it home, how many mice will you have after a year?

I didn’t try any complicated multiplication, you’ll be happy to hear. I figured there wasn’t any point, since I was never going to work out the correct answer, and it occurred to me that knowing the genders of any subsequent babies would be necessary for correct calculations.

Then I had what I thought was a brainwave.

What, I thought to myself, if my mouse is a boy? Then I won’t have any baby mice at all! And I’ll only have one mouse at the end of the year.

(The mouse clearly wasn’t a boy. In keeping with strict gender roles, it had a pink bow on its head, the poor thing.)

The answer was one, of course.

But I could have saved myself a lot of effort had it only occurred to me that mice—whether male or female—can’t actually reproduce asexually.

In fact, I can’t say that I’ve never passed a maths exam, but it was certainly a rarity. Whenever I have to do any kind of counting, or adding, or figuring out percentages as part of a tutorial, I make sure that I tell my students that I am a walking example of the benefits and disadvantages of specialisation.

That way they’re prepared for the fact that I rarely get the same answer twice when I have to do a maths problem on the fly.

That’s why trying to play Professor Layton and the Curious Village has given me a splitting headache.

In fact, my general attitude towards the game right now can best be summed up, as usual, by this Penny Arcade comic.

I’ve been wanting to play this game for a while, on the grounds that it looked like my sort of thing: no button-mashing combat, no time restrictions, no chance of your avatar suddenly dying and you having to start the game all over again even though you’ve already forgotten which direction to go in.

Instead, Professor Layton is an archaeologist and puzzle expert (nice specialisation, if you can manage it) who ends up in the village of St Mystere after its late squire leaves a mysterious will. Mysteries are, oddly enough, the focus of life in St Mystere, and you can’t do anything—and I mean anything, not even opening most doors or getting instructions—without first being asked to solve a puzzle.

And that’s fine. I’m not great at puzzles, but many of them revolve around lateral thinking, and I’ve made enough futile attempts to complete cryptic crosswords in my life to make a stab at most of them.

So I managed to ferry three wolves and three chickens across a river, two at a time, without allowing the wolves to eat the chickens. (Well, to be honest, without allowing them to eat the chickens too many times. A subtle distinction.)

I managed to spell the word “Food” in matchsticks. (It really was more complicated than it sounds. The puzzle didn’t just say “Take these matchsticks and spell the word “Food.”)

I managed to turn four cubes into three cubes by only moving one matchstick.

I managed to separate seven bloodthirsty prize pigs by partitioning them off using only three ropes. (I failed that one the first time, and had to try again. “Have you ever seen a pig fight?” the game asked me. So, no pressure, then.)

I even managed to solve yet another matchstick puzzle in which I had to move two sticks to turn a picture of a dog into a picture of the same dog after it had been run over by a car. I had to read the instructions twice before I could be sure that that was really what they were asking me, but I finished the puzzle. (Horribly, when you get the puzzle wrong, you get the following message: “Remember the dog has been hit by a car. It’s very sad, but try and think of what the dog will look like after the car has hit it.”)

But what I hadn’t taken into account was the sheer number of mathematical puzzles.

For example, I came across one puzzle that ran along these lines, more or less:

Rodney and Alan have been hired to sow seeds on a 10-acre farm. They divide the farm, and each plow half the land. Alan can plow twice as fast as Rodney but Rodney can sow seeds three times as fast as Alan.

There was more, but I didn’t read on.

There’s something about that kind of puzzle that terrifies me. It can only be, I suppose, the memory of dozens of hours in exams, wondering whether it was worth simply guessing the answer, only I couldn’t, because I had to show how I arrived at the solution, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about it.

I admire people who have good, all-round intellects. I don’t and I never have had.

I’m happy to play around with rearranging matchsticks and trying to spot the logical traps in puzzle questions.

But if the people of St Mystere don’t lighten up on making me solve their maths problems, they might discover that Professor Layton, archaeologist and puzzle expert, also has an unsuspected homicidal streak.

If I didn’t drink so much coffee that I can only prevent myself from bouncing off the walls through sheer effort of will, and then upload a picture of my feet onto the Internet while listening to a Nine Inch Nails cover of a Joy Division song.

At least, that is the ritual by which I shall be celebrating the advent of winter from now on.

I saw an advertisement for the new Mazda 6 earlier tonight and, while I have next to no interest in car advertisements, something struck me as a little odd.

Then, when I saw it again a moment ago, I realised what it was: they were quoting a magazine review that apparently read “Most cars have a fatal flaw, but not this one.”

A fatal flaw?

Most cars have a fatal flaw?

I know mine gets a little tetchy with me if I leave the air conditioning running for too long, but the situation’s never proven fatal.

The only way this would reassure me if they meant fatal flaw as it’s used to describe Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.

It’s a noble ambition in a car manufacturer, to work so hard to remove the hubris, jealousy, and ambition from their vehicles.

The marking is done for another semester. Of course, I haven’t actually formalised the grades—that’s a task for tomorrow morning—but that’s something that can at least be done with a bit of music in the background.

But since I’ve finished the actual marking/adding/double-checking the adding/wondering why I’m incapable of adding things/being surprised that the addition was correct in the first place—you know, the usual process—I think a celebration is called for.

Am I going to celebrate by updating my blog?

No.

No, I’m not.

I’m going to lie down in the living room with an enormous glass of wine and a novel.

And maybe some chili, lime, and tamarind almonds.

Cheers!

So Dexter is coming to Channel 10. Dexter Uncut, according to the ad. we just saw.

(Just saw, that is, while we’re still desperately waiting for Rove to finish so we can watch Supernatural. Don’t get me wrong; there’s something charming about Rove as a person, but I have absolutely no interest in his programme. Plus, the ad. for Supernatural promised me an answer to an important question: will Dean kill someone to save his own life? My feeling is that the answer lies somewhere between “Yes” and “You just completely made that dilemma up for the purposes of advertising, didn’t you, Channel 10? I really wish you’d stop doing that.” But I still want to know the answer.)

Where was I?

Oh, right. Dexter.

We’ve already seen the first two seasons of Dexter—and loved it. It’s not easy to watch, and I wonder how it will do on Channel 10.

But what interested me in the Channel 10 ad. was the way they positioned Dexter as asking a series of questions: “Killer? Cop? Good? Evil?”

I turned to Nick and said, “Well, he’s not a cop.”

I haven’t finished marking, but I have finished for the day, and I’ve missed my blog. I’ve been thinking more the last couple of days about the actual process of writing that this blog entails; it has been my most intensive writing outlet since I submitted the thesis, and since I make my living by both writing and teaching writing, I feel it’s only sensible to think about my writing as well.

The best way to think about my writing is to write about my writing.

Plus, I read an article today that made me think a little about what I do on this blog.

I came across this article on personal blogging today, written by Emily Gould for The New York Times Magazine. I knew nothing about Emily Gould except that she was the former co-editor of Gawker (which I don’t read, although I do obsessively read one of Gawker Media’s publications, Defamer) and I now know she has her own Wikipedia page, although it’s largely concerned with the media backlash against Gawker’s Stalker Map.

I came across the piece, as is the way of the Internet, through a series of links. I found it linked to on the blog 2amSomewhere, which I don’t read regularly. But I have nipped on to it occasionally, because its author is a regular commenter on a blog I do read with some degree of regularity, Drunken Housewife. (To make the process more complicated, I came across Drunken Housewife originally via the forums at Etiquette Hell, where I’d been innocently lurking, hoping that the stories on the main page would soon be updated.)

But the process is actually a telling one, because the sites in question are all intensely personal in nature. Etiquette Hell is sometimes embarrassingly personal; any site with a strong focus on etiquette sometimes raises issues that I feel I shouldn’t be made aware of—at least not where they concern complete strangers. Drunken Housewife does have a strong slant towards reading and politics, but focuses heavily on day-to-day life.

And 2amSomewhere—as I rapidly became aware, reading the specific post in which the author linked to the Gould article—is an anonymous personal blog. That’s not a form with which I’m familiar, since I chose not to blog anonymously myself. It seems that writing anonymously about deeply personal experiences might be an extraordinarily liberating experience—but it’s not one that I could see myself either seeking or enjoying.

Of course, I’m not always terribly discreet in the flesh, either, especially after a couple of drinks, so it’s questionable whether there’d be much personal information that I haven’t already brought up at parties. That might make the blog a bit dull.

But there’s also the question of creating and fiercely protecting anonymity.

That’s also not something that attracts me. It must be inordinately time consuming; the author of 2amSomewhere notes in that entry that even his wife is unaware of his blog. But I rather like being read by people who know me. There’s nothing horrific, or painful, or unpleasant, or heartbreaking in my life, nothing that would prompt me to treat this blog as though it were a therapist’s couch or a confessional.

One disadvantage—though not one that has a great deal of weight with me—does arise from my not blogging anonymously, and that’s my refusal to talk specifically about my teaching on here. I give an enormous amount of my time and energy to my teaching, and I love it—nothing but the writing process (when it’s going well) is capable of giving me the euphoric feeling that a really good tutorial or lecture creates. It seems somehow unnatural to omit from this blog something that is so central to my professional and personal lives. But I consciously chose not to mention my teaching in any but the most oblique terms on here, and I don’t regret that decision.

But I do have to acknowledge that this is a personal blog. I didn’t start it with that intention, and I don’t, even now, think of it as a personal blog.

In fact, if I were to count the entries in each category, I would hope that the personal entries would be outweighed by the pieces on reading and writing.

But, let’s face it: Nick is the starring character on this blog, and that makes it personal. It’s only one aspect of the blog, but it’s there.

And that’s because Nick is hilarious: everyone knows this, but not everyone gets to spend as much time with him as I do. So broadcasting the “Strange Conversations” on the blog is a public service, really.

But, long before I came across Gould’s article or started thinking about just how personal some personal blogs are, I’d realised that I couldn’t just assume that my everyday life with Nick was there to be mined for material.

I couldn’t assume that I had that level of control over the blog.

Now, the blog is mine—that’s irrefutable. I’m the only person who posts here and, after an early incident in which Nick (as the site’s designer) moderated one of his own comments, I’m also the only person who moderates the site (except when I was live-blogging Eurovision). The latter role, though, is not entirely or even primarily about control: I just thoroughly enjoy checking to see if people have commented on the blog, and I feel a bit cheated if I can’t moderate the comments. (There’s not a great deal of power in the role, anyway, since I’ve never deleted a comment from the blog in the four months I’ve been keeping it, except by request.)

But when it comes to content, I know that I can’t just assume myself free to blog something if it involves Nick. And, while he’s normally more than happy to make regular appearances on here, he has vetoed—on rare occasions—my blogging certain conversations, mostly because he feels they make him look too silly.

And that’s fine. It gives the blog a co-operative feeling that I rather enjoy. It ensures that Nick and I should never find ourselves embroiled in the kind of argument that Gould describes on the first page of her article. And it means that the blog never becomes a threat.

I do sometimes say, as in this conversation about the remote control, “Right, I’m putting that on the blog!”

But it’s not a threat if Nick knows both that he has the power of veto over his role on the blog and that I’ll respect his decision to veto something.

I may make that something the subject of an anecdote at a party, but that’s not really the same thing.

At least not if he’s not in earshot.

No real updates, anyway.

I’ve been sitting in this chair marking exams for seven hours, and I can’t feel anything below my ribcage. Or, for that matter, from my right shoulder down.

It would probably be a matter for Occupational Health and Safety, if I weren’t working at home.

And I don’t think I’m even halfway through the exams.

So, much as I would like to write another ranty post about inappropriate gender politics in television advertising and in 1970s’ reprints of Victorian novels, that’s going to have to wait.

Nick finally began thinking about the new armchairs, while I was sitting in the left-hand one:

NICK: You know what this is like?
ME: What?
NICK (patting the right-hand chair): I’m Will Riker; you’re Counsellor Troi. We need another big chair to go behind them.
ME: I’m Will Riker! That’s my chair!
NICK: And the television is the viewscreen. And we can pull the sofas around . . .
(My stare of bemusement finally gets through to him.)
NICK: I’m a geek!

You’re telling me, honey.

UPDATE:
A couple of days after this conversation, I reclaimed the right-hand chair, Will Riker’s chair.

Nick looked at me for a couple of minutes, and then said, “You know, I had it the wrong way around before. Now you’re Deanna Troi.”

There’s no length to which that man will not go to stop me being Will Riker.

It’s not really live-blogging, per se. But, sometimes, when we don’t have anything we want to watch on television, Nick and I will just run through the CD collection—and that’s what we’re doing tonight.

(Just for the record, it was Nick who suggested it might make interesting blogging. I wasn’t so sure.)

So far, we’ve just finished listening to Elmore James’s “The Sky is Crying”—and before that his version of “Dust My Broom,” but, really, who hasn’t done a version of “Dust My Broom”?—and I’m about to insist on some Billy Bragg.

We’re not drunk, by the way. It just seems as though we are.

Ah, Nick has just brought me coffee at the same time as I’ve started Billy Bragg’s version of “The Red Flag”—I’ve been feeling unusually bolshie after the events of this week. This version has the original music—much more inspiring and martial than the dirge-like version that’s sung these days.

It has whistles and something called a “bodhran”—I’m not sure what that is.

Ah: it’s an Irish frame drum. Apparently. Makes a good sound, whatever it is.

NICK: I don’t think I’ve ever heard the more typical version.
ME: The dirge.
NICK: Yeah.
ME: You’ve watched a Labour party conference?
NICK: Ah . . . no. Of course, the Australian Labour Party’s anthem is “Fuck the Communists,” as far as I can tell.

(I was going to spell that with an asterisk, but my Mam doesn’t read my blog, anyway.)

(Is this the height of solipsism? Maybe—but it’s a fun writing exercise.)

Billy Bragg’s the only artist apart from The Cure that I’ve ever seen twice: he’s brilliant live. That’s why I’m breaking the rules, to play more than one song from this EP.

Ah, he’s just been singing about the “dark satanic mills” in “Jerusalem”—my Dad hates that line, on the basis of the digs in the ribs he used to get when he was a choir boy in the Midlands.

Now Nick’s complaining that I’ve put Duran Duran on. I intend to challenge him as to why he hates Duran Duran, but he’s pre-empted me.

NICK: The only good Duran Duran song is “View to a Kill”—and you can quote me on that.

(Apparently, my spell-checker doesn’t recognise “th” as misspelt—that’s odd. I’ve caught two instances of my leaving the last letter off already: I“ll have to keep an eye on that.)

Whoops, I think Nick’s slipped into a coma—I might have to change the CD.

I wonder if he’d let me play something from Essential Soul: Volume One—note: contains no actual soul songs—if I promise not to play Patches. I love that song: makes me laugh every time. It’s the soul equivalent of the death of Little Nell.

It shouldn’t make me laugh, of course, but there’s a fine line between pathos and bathos.

Nope—couldn’t stop myself from listening to “Patches.” Brilliant.

It’s actually not a bad song, and I am an evil, evil person to laugh at it. It’s got a lovely rhythm, really.

On the other hand, I was raised by a woman who asked me and my sister to write poems for her obituary a few years ago, on the grounds that she wanted to edit them before she actually died. (She wasn’t actually ill, or anything—she’d read a newspaper article about a man whose son had written a poem for the newspaper obituary, and it enflamed her ambition.)

My sister wrote a limerick.

This live version of the Local Hero theme goes on forever, but I’m with Douglas Adams on the subject of Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing.

(I just skipped on to the Admin pages—while listening to “The Ship Song”—and found that someone had found the blog by Googling “Romeo+Juliet+blurbs.” I’m not even sure what that means, but I hope they enjoyed the blog.)

Nick’s just shown me a picture without telling me that it would completely spoil the last two episodes of Doctor Who for this season. If you don’t want to be spoiled, do not click on this link.

For those of you who did click—cool, huh?

We’re up to The Smiths, by that way—just to add a cheery note to the whole evening. Has anyone spotted that I usually get to pick the music on these evenings?

But I have just dragged my best of Bon Jovi album out, just in case we do fancy something a little more up-beat.

Musical tastes is one area where Nick and I do not have a lot of overlap—it’s odd, really, given how similar we are in terms of our tastes in television and movies. (Well, except for the ongoing debate about whether I should be able to watch Battlestar Galactica without bursting into tears.) But we really have next to no overlap on music—except for The Cure. But Nick is the more magnanimous here, because he will listen to some of my stuff, whereas I can’t stand most of his favourite artists.

Oh, I am so not listening to “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”—that’s grim even for The Smiths.

I’m not intending to make this the world’s longest post, by the way. But there is a different challenge to writing down mundane events (almost) as they happen and (hopefully) making them interesting. That’s what I like about the blog: well, one of two things. It makes me stretch my writing and it’s overcoming my distaste about showing my writing to people.

(I have no problem showing thesis drafts to my supervisors—but I’m reluctant to display any other form of writing. Or I was, until I started writing the blog.)

Of course, you can’t trust me—I’ve used the word “solipsistic” more times since I started writing this blog than . . . well, I was going to say “than I have in the 31 years preceding” but a more accurate closing clause would be “since I wrote that tutorial paper on Satre in my second year.”

Nick hasn’t given me many amusing comments so far—I’ll see if Bon Jovi will flush him out.

NICK: Ah, this song [“Living on a Prayer”] would be much better without the talk box. That “whah whah whah”—really annoying.

See?

Plus, we’ve just had a little chat about how “torque” and “talk” are homophones, so Bon Jovi is educational as well as fun.

Of course, now he’s singing along at the top of his voice, and I’m deeply, deeply regretting my choice.

Key change! It’s like Eurovision all over again.

Nick’s just told me that the American Red Cross has spent its entire disaster-relief budget. That’s . . . damn. I don’t even know what to say about that.

I’ve moved on to 1960s’ music, by the way, which has suddenly filled me with a overwhelming desire to listen to “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Hey—it’s not just Liverpool FC’s song (as though it needs to be anything else!) It also has geek credibility: it’s the song that Eddie the shipboard computer sang when the Polaris missiles were heading towards the Heart of Gold in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Of course, I have it on an album called “Rock and Roll Heartbreakers”—which it really isn’t, even if you don’t associate it with tens of thousands of fans singing it after yet another FA Cup victory.

Is it just me, or is “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” the strangest song to find on the soundtrack of a Western? Even a Western like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

On the other hand, it has led to a spirited debate between Nick and me about whether “outro” is a real word. Nick thinks it is, on the grounds that “intro” is now a word in its own right and not merely a truncation of “introduction.” I think that’s rubbish.

The argument was a stalemate, because Nick brought out “well, in a musical context,” which gave me no grounds for riposte, since I know nothing about music.

But I do know that these are some of the greatest lines in musical history: “Eleanor, I really think you’re groovy. Let’s go out to a movie” and “You’re my pride and joy, et cetera”.

Actually, I think that last line reappeared in one of the Eurovision entries this year.

And on that note—Nick is singing along to “It’s My Party,” which has to be seen (and heard) to be believed—I should stop writing this before it either gets so long that people just skip over it or I’m tempted to use the word “solipsistic” again.

For once, I haven’t doubled up any of books at the Lifeline Bookfest, not even The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as I initially feared.

And, as I alluded in my earlier post, buying Phineas Redux did complete my collection of the Pallister series; I’ve now found the other five—which were, naturally enough, stored far apart from one another, on completely different bookcases, and, in fact, in completely different rooms—so I can assert its completion confidently now.

Of course, they’re largely different editions, which is annoying in a series of books: half of them are Oxford paperbacks, but in two different versions, and another two are inexpensive Wordsworth reprints.

But the one I’m thinking of replacing is the Panther edition—a television tie-in edition from 1975—of the first novel, Can You Forgive Her?

But not because it’s a television tie-in; I don’t particularly like that, but it’s not sufficient cause to replace the book.

No, it’s because of the introduction by Simon Raven, who had a hand in the adaptation of the series for television.

More specifically, it’s because of this quote about Alice Vavasour, called in the blurb “one of the most striking heroines in Victorian fiction”:

Alice, though keen on sexy men, is terrified about what is going to happen on her wedding night, and keeps shuttling from George to Grey and back, not so much because one cheats and the other is a bore, but because she funks consummation with either. How the matter is resolved, I leave you to read for yourself; with this caveat, however, that while you will be interested you will not be wholly convinced, and that well before the end you will long for Alice to be hit on the head with a mallet and then raped (which is not, I hardly need to add, what happens). (xix)

Well, that should certainly cure the poor girl’s wedding-night jitters! So that’s a relief.

I suppose you do have to admire the confidence with which he inscribes that horrific desire to the entirety of his readership—and to think I wasted all that time pondering the complexities of various reader-response theories.

I have never read any of Simon Raven’s novels—although I understand, and the quote can be found here on the Wikipedia page, that his Shadows in the Grass was called “the filthiest cricket book ever written,” which, frankly, is quite an achievement.

In fact, the quotes on the Wikipedia page make both broad and specific use of the word “cad” in a density I haven’t seen since I last read T. H. White, while even his obituary claimed that his characters are “guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all.”

Whether the quote about Alice is meant to be taken literally or ironically, I think the same can be said of Simon Raven as of his characters.