Even Christopher Hitchens is doubting the newspaper’s future:

In Frayn’s two novels in the sixth decade of that century, the lure of television is already beginning to exert its anti-magic. The mindlessness of the opinion poll and the reader-survey is coming to replace news and analysis. The reporters and editors are beginning to think about mortgages and pensions. The editor is a cipher. I do not think that there will again be a major novel, flattering or unflattering, in which a reporter is the protagonist. Or if there is, he or she will be a blogger or some other species of cyber-artist, working from home and conjuring the big story from the vastness of electronic space.

The whole piece is an extensive survey of the journalist in literature – and a reminder of why when I became a journalist my father sternly forbid me to join the Press Club in Sydney, which he considered a den of the deepest iniquity. (Don’t know if it was – I went bush, so no chance to find out.)

Probably it was mostly myth, which allows me to segue seamlessly into the Literary Review Bad Sex Awards, the winner of which I dealt when I worked at The Times. It severely tempts me to share a lovely piece of gossip about the man who leapt up happily to received the award, but I suppose I will restrain myself, since this isn’t PopBitch. Instead I’ll point you to the most unbelievably awful collection of writing – quite a bit by “serious writers” – you’re likely to see in a long time: the nominations.

Then finishing the media gossip line – the Guardian is going into the comedy show business. Three blokes, so what’s new?

Specialist women’s institutions, such as the Women’s Library, or proposed exhibitions with a feminist theme, often have a tough time selling themselves to funders and even visitors because, it is assumed, women are now included in the mainstream.

A neat example of how wrong this claim often is comes from a US exhibition of comics – which treats them as “fine art”. Only one trouble – every single artist included is male. This article from Art News Online says:

The curators of “Masters of American Comics” have provided plenty of grist for querulous [sic!] feminists. “These are 15 artists who used comics to express themselves,” says curator Carlin, who explains that selections were based on the criteria of craft and formal innovation. Of the marquee catalogue essayists who give personal glosses on the artists, the only women are New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly (who also happens to be Spiegelman’s wife), who provides an informative take on Crumb, and art historian Karal Ann Marling, who writes on Frank King (“Gasoline Alley”). “These artists are mostly white, middle-class, male,” acknowledges Carlin, who readily admits that women artists got cut as the list narrowed from 40 to 15 artists. “But I felt a canon needed to be there, in order to be challenged.”

The article goes on to discuss how a certain, male-focused aethetic – “that values explosive drawing—SPLAT, BOOM, POW—and adventure stories” excluded women artists. So when’s THEIR exhibition on?

To the Institute for Historical Research tonight for the Late Medieval Seminar given by Emma Cavell (Balliol College, Oxford) on Noblewomen in Thirteenth-Century Shropshire. It turned out to be focused on their choice of burial place.

Women could – sometimes – choose whether they were buried in their own foundation (abbey or monastery), in a foundation associated with their natal family or their husband’s family. And with your body went a settlement that would support your chosen institution, so it is easy to imagine the conflicts that emerged.

One rather neat way of solving these was splitting up your body after you’d died. (More common in France than in England.)

But serendipity strikes again, for in the post on Museum of London earlier this week, I noted the slab that covered the burial of the heart of Joan, wife of Fulke de St Edmond (sheriff of London 1289-90) from St Swithin’s Church in Cannon St.

I’d hazard a guess – no more than that – that the rest of her body went to somewhere associated with her natal family, which would I suspect have most likely been country-based. Don’t suppose there’s anyone out there who knows?

A papal decree in the 13th? century ended the practice, since as I understand this the practice hardly squared with the theory of bodily resurrection.

From the Times Literary Supplement this week, a history of the pineapple. Particularly pertinent since it plays a prominent place in The Libertine, which I reviewed earlier.

No, not like that – but the king at one point in trying to win over Rochester gives him a pineapple. And it turns out in modern terms to have been worth £5,000. (And a gardeners’ boy would have been employed full-time just to stoke the fire in the greenhouse that would have kept it growing.

Still on the historical line, in what may be a blogging first, The Head Heeb has issued a call for papers for a blog symposium, to be held in late January. The only guideline is that you use the wonderful resource of The Old Bailey Online, which contains accounts of more than 100,000 trials at London’s central criminal court between 1674 to 1834. All of human life is here!

“Submissions ranging from the scholarly to the entertaining will be welcome” – so you don’t have to be a history academic (I’m not); I’d imagine if you wrote a story inspired by a case that would be welcome too.

I’m very keen on breaking across boundaries of discipline, status and approach, so this strikes me as a brilliant idea – a way of bringing a wide range of approaches together, producing a richer understanding.

… has reached the (traditional) age of majority. No XXI is up now on CLEWS: The Historic True Crime Blog. And thanks, Laura, I’ve had a good run.

But there’s also plenty of bloggers who are new to me there – expect to see my history blogroll enhanced soon.

Items that particularly took my fancy: “Angela Merkel a reincarnation of Otto von Bismarck?” and “The Maid’s Revenge”.

And the distant past now has its own blogging artist … Watch out for the Daeodon!