Henri has cooked a goose and we are two of an invited party of eight, seated around a white pine table which Gerd has brought over from her Grandmother’s estate in Finland. A hundred-and-twenty years ago the surface of the table was sealed with cream. Every few years since it has been washed with soap. It glows with warmth.

We don’t know each other, the guests, though I recognise Jane Austen, the author who is sitting opposite me. And the young woman seated next to me points out Michael, giving him three syllables in hushed tones, Míchaël.

He doesn’t speak all evening. He has a gaze which usually encompasses us all. From time to time, though, he focusses on us as individuals. I become aware he has fixed on me when I taste a hint of port in a morsel of Henri’s goose-skin. I don’t chew. I don’t move. The buzz of conversation around the table retreats. I can see their mouths working away, telling their stories, but I am cocooned in silence.

*

The Ethics of Book Reviewing at the Book Critics Circle:

And 60.5 percent think it’s okay for a newspaper book section or magazine to ignore self-published books submitted by authors.

*

Jan Dalley lunches Umberto Eco in The Financial Times:

“You know, I have written 40 books, but I am famous in Italy for a few sentences in one essay I wrote in 1961, on the quiz programme Buongiorno, where I demonstrate that in every civilisation people have wanted to worship superior beings – the Greek gods, the knights of the round table, superheroes. But television has realised that while the idol was once Greta Garbo, no one could be like Greta Garbo, now the model is the nice girl who looks like everyone else – no one has to feel inferior to her. And television also gives us the fall guy, over whom everybody can exercise his own sense of superiority. In this sense television has brought a radical change.”

We have a shifting perception of neoteny at the present time. It was traditionally seen as a sign of weakness, immaturity. Someone who had, for whatever reason, failed to grow up.

Humans have tinkered with the development of other species for millennia, it seemed attractive to freeze domestic dogs in the puppy stage, or to grow seedless fruits like watermelons.

But it is only in recent generations that we have begun to recognise that the open and inquisitive qualities of youth can be useful throughout the span of our entire life.

“It’s an old disease in Iraq – people spend their money on books, not on food. Iraqi intellectuals are very poor because of it.”

The district was attacked by a suicide car-bomber last March, but is now beginning to open up again.

Iraqis looking for bargains at the weekly open air book market at al-Mutanabi street in central Baghdad in May 2006. Booksellers of every description showed their stock at al-Mutanabi’s street-level spaces. You could shop here for technical manuals, ornate copies of the Quran or a selection of pirated software.

“The book market has always been a favorite for international TV crews. In Saddam’s days, it was the place of choice for thoughtful interviews and good English.While there, we’d often rummage through the fascinating array of new and second hand books.

Sometimes, amid the stock-in-trade Iraqi government propaganda, we’d come across a favorite old out-of-print paperback or a must have memento, like an elegantly illustrated book of Arab love poetry that I found one day.”

After the blast, which claimed the lives of more than 100 people, Iraqi intellectuals gathered amid the ruins on the 8th March 2007. Baghdad poets read extracts from their work on what remained of the street.

“When you think about the history of education, going back to Socrates, it’s all been about asking questions, arguing over ideas, raising objections and then coming to some kind of resolution. That takes time, effort and hard work. It’s much easier to say ‘I don’t like this book.’”

*

Bowen T Hunter over at Bookarazzi is worried that reading is becoming a dying art; describing an illiterate child, he says:

The school she was at was very poor. She is 11, and knows only her 2 and 5 times multiplication tables. The new school expects rather more, and so I have been badgered into trying to raise her educational level. Where to start? Oh my. She cannot add or subtract single digits without using her fingers. If I ask her “What is twenty minus one?” she has to sit and think, then out come the hands…”Twenty…um…….EIGHTEEN!” It is scary to think that in her old school she was one of the brighter pupils!

*

Confessions of a Psychotherapist:
Ms Melancholy’s was the funniest post I read this week:

So….

I take a teeny weeny blogging break during which I explore my long-standing confusion about my sexuality, decide to split from my husband, take a lesbian lover, tell my adolescent son that his mother is gay and move house. And what happens? I watch my technorati rating plummet to barrel scraping levels.

You really are a fickle lot

Consider the most striking literary canonisation of our times. Jane Austen has always been esteemed, and FR Leavis sanctified her as one of the bearers of the “great tradition,” a sort of doctor of his secular church. But in the past 15 years she has turned into the English novelist, an inescapable part of the public consciousness, more universally present than any other writer bar Shakespeare. Some people think she owes her current prominence to popular fantasies of tight breeches and bosoms heaving beneath empire-line dresses. This does not seem likely: if that is what people want, they can get it more readily from Georgette Heyer. Another view is that she has benefited from nostalgia for a safer, quieter and more decorous world; but the idea that the world of her novels is cosy and comfortable can hardly survive the reading of them. Most of her modern popularity is the result of her actual merits, and in a broad sense the highbrows and the lower-middlebrows are admiring the same things: well-made plots, perceptive depiction of character and the acute study of social interaction. It is a genuine popular canonisation.

Waking in the night, the coroner went outside to the garden and taking his easement, heard shouts and uproar nearby. Finishing his business, he took his sword and went out to the way in front, where he found Adam and the tippler roused from their beds by the agitation. It was the dark time of the moon and shapes and shadows slipped by like phantoms while men with torches ran here and there, shouting oaths and threats. A shadow loomed over him and Brigge levelled his sword against the belly of a man who brought himself up to a sharp halt.

Bennett’s dystopian novel, preceded by a quotation from Goethe -

Mistrust all in whom the desire to punish is imperative

- opens in Northern England at the beginning of the 1630s. The Puritans are in control of the town and the initial idealism which accompanied their cause has degenerated into factionalism and fanaticism. No one is safe.

I generally avoid novels set in this period because I find it difficult to deal with so much brutality, gore and cruelty. And those elements are, of course, present in Bennett’s novel, although alleviated frequently by a masterful use of language.

Brigge is the town coroner and one of its governors. He is sitting in judgement on an apparently obvious case of infantilism concerning a certain Katherine Shay. But feels he has to interview a witness who the constable seems reluctant to produce. Eventually Brigge sets out to discover the missing witness himself.

At the same time the other governors of the town are involved in a power battle with secret arrests, false and hear-say evidence, and an increasing strangle-hold on the citizens of the town. Catholics and their priests are linked to heretics and fornicators, adulterers and beggars, and all of them are hurried through the inquisitors and towards the scaffold and the hangman.

Meanwhile the general populace, fearful of the unseen terrors which would take them in their beds, are whipped into a lust for revenge.

Bennett draws no easy or clichéd conclusions about our own time or the war on terror. He tells a story.

These things are even more true when they happen in the middle of the night. For then, if you forgot to bring the notebook to bed with you, you have to get out of bed, go downstairs, switch on the light, find the notebook and get whatever it was came to you into the notebook. OK, there’s a slim chance if you don’t do this you’ll still remember it in the morning, but do you want to take a chance like that?

This is from my notebook:

A teacher in the local arts college told me about asking her new intake of students what were the three best and worst things in the world. One of the young guys told her:

The best three things in the world: cakes, my girlfriend, and television.

And the worst three: death, sprouts, and opera.

You see? Without the notebook I could have lost that.