The first figures have come out of searches on Google Books, and they make for curious reading. No 1 on this particular “best-seller” list is Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers, Peter K. Endress.
I can only conclude that the sex organs of plants have proved, if accidentally, to hold considerable fascination.
As for Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot, Brad Graham,Kathy McGowan, perhaps there are lots of would-be Mars explorers out there?
Having just come back from theGreen Party conference I’m feeling both exhilarated by the time spent with lots of people passionately devoted to saving the human race from itself, and slightly daunted by the thought of the task before us. Ann Pettitt’s Walking to Greenham: How the Peace-camp Began and the Cold War Ended
Pettitt deserves the title of “one of the founders” of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, for she was one of the leaders of the walk out of which this genuine mass movement – hundreds of thousands of protesters were involved there over its 19-year existence. Yet the beginnings were so small. She and her partner had downsized before the term was even invented, swapping an intellectual London life for a smallholding in Wales, where in between raising two small children – struck by the fear that they might not have a chance of adulthood – she got involved in the anti-nuclear movement.
A year later I was trying to help write a leaflet in someone’s house in Kidwelly, about nuclear-free zones. I was feeling bored and stuck general with the way we seemed to be creating a re-run of the CND cmapaigns of the Sixties … What was the point of your local town declaring itself a ‘nuclear-free zone’ when what we were facing was the possibility of a nuclear war ‘limited’ to Europe. My eye caught an item in a Peace News magazine that was lying open on the floor; about a group of women walking from Copenhagen to Paris to protest about this threat. I no longer felt bored or stuck, I felt terribly excited.
In between childcare, struggling with the family smallholding and the lack of cash and resources – in rural Wales Pettitt couldn’t even drive – she organised with three other women (they had six pre-school-age children between them) a walking group that eventually totalled 40. Often they encountered disbelief that they could simply be women who’d decided to act:
“..this march thing, is too big to be just ordinary women, like you say you are, doing it. There must be some organisation begind you – I just don’t believe you’re acting on your own, that’s not possible.”
“Well, you’re just going to have to find out aren’t you? Just tell me one thing – are you going to organise lunch for us or am I going to have to find someone else?”
“Oh all right then. What do you call yourselves?”
“Women for Life on Earth. Thank you. I’ll be in touch.” Good, I thought, that’s another lunch-stop sorted.
But finally, with most of the lunches and sleeping arrangements sorted, forty women set out from Cardiff to walk to Greenham Common on August 26, 1981, to protest at the plans to place American Cruise missiles there. For many it was their first protest of any kind.
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If you go on holiday and sleep for 10 hours plus every day, you are probably a bit too far into sleep-deficit to be healthy. So I’ve made a resolution about getting more sleep. (I thought you were supposed to need less as you get older? but it doesn’t seem to work for me. I probably manage to average about six and a half hours a night, and it is really not enough.)
And of course a day into the resolution I’ve broken it… although in part because my new Phyrne Fisher arrived from Australia, and I couldn’t resist that. Murder in the Dark – very good fun, as always: it has joined the long list of “book reviews” to write – one reason why the sleep resolution won’t stick.
Over on Blogcritics I’ve posted a little musing on the decision by Google Books to start posting complete books for download. It’s early days yet – they’re only doing books from the early 19th-century or before, but it is a potentially enormous step towards, as I say on BC – ending the “information drought” in which the human race has lived up to now.
At present, however, I don’t think there’s any listing of the books available – if you hear of one I’d like to know about it.
Here’s the Google release about the project, which does list a few – but if you find other listings please tell me about them.
OK, I admit it, I’m a bit of a Kerry Greenwood nut. We’re not talking fine literature here, but just fun characters and fast-paced writing. A query on the old post led me to check Angus and Robertson (Australian bookstore) today, and although Greenwood’s website says Murder in the Dark won’t be out until next month, it appears to be available now. (And I picked up the new Corinne while I was at it…)
I may have been a bit quieter than usual last week, as I spent Thursday and Friday the Literary London 2006 conference. It was the first of these I’ve attended (although it probably won’t be the last), for it is a fascinating combination. Basically focused as the name suggests on literature, it is however, highly welcoming to interdisciplinary approaches, and ranges widely in timeframe, from current, very current, technological “art” back to, well the earliest paper this year was on Chaucer and the “shitty” place of Southwark in his London.
I also presented, for the first time, a paper myself, entitled “Exercises in rhetoric or genuine laments? Four accounts of a ‘bounteous Ladies large beneficence'”, about Dame Helen Branch. The session worked out rather nicely, since one of my fellow panel members, Adam Hanson, from Queen’s University Belfast, was speaking about “William Haughton’s London in Englishmen for my Money,” a play written in 1598, only four years after Dame Helen died, so the two papers were quite complementary, and I was able to refer to his map handout. (Thanks Adam! and thanks to all the commenters on this blog – particularly Clanger and Sharon – for all their help in the research that went into my paper.)
I’m not posting the paper here because I would like to get it published some time and posting might complicate that, but if anyone is interested I’d be happy to send you a copy.
The following is a short collection of notes from the sessions I attended. (Note, these are my thoughts and collected snippets, and should not necessarily be taken as a full reflection of what the speaker said. And I think they are accurate, but it was an intense two days. Caveat rector.)
“John Milton, London writer”: Patrick J. Cook, Washington University
He’s more of a London writer than you think, was the basic thesis. Women and London are both alluring and frightening – the combination explains why London starts as the source of all beauty and ends up as Circe’s cave. (Logical enough for a boy just up from a male-dominated Cambridge.)
Milton was a great walker, but became much more a walker in London after going blind he “became a blind version of John Stowe”. (And when you think about it walking about early modern London – the smells, the noise – manufacture, horses, carts, itinerant traders singing out their wares – must have been pretty amazing, and frightening.)
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