The Guardian's Blog, page 179

Summer voyages: The Expedition Of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

A holiday journey around 18th-century Britain is irresistibly sweet

It's a profound shame that the reputation of Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) seems to be waning. A few generations ago, he was part of the quartet of Great 18th-century Novelists, alongside Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. George Eliot paid tribute to him in Middlemarch, when Brooke advises Casaubon: "Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett – Roderick Random, Humphry Clinker. They are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly – there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches." Thackeray, in his English Humorists (overlooking the fact that Smollett was born in Dunbartonshire) wrote that: "The novel of 'Humphry Clinker' is, I do think, the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began". Robert Burns praised the "incomparable humour" of Smollett; Hazlitt called Humphry Clinker "the most pleasant gossiping novel that ever was written".

The Expedition Of Humphry Clinker is an epistolary novel, in which Matthew Bramble, his nephew Jery Melford, his sister Tabitha, his niece Lydia and Winifred, Tabitha's maid, all send letters to their friends describing their holiday from Gloucester, to Bath, to London, to Harrogate, to Durham, Edinburgh, to Glasgow and back home. The zestful fun of the novel comes from the characters' radically different perspectives on the places they visit. For example, the curmudgeonly Bramble is less than taken with Bath: "They look like the wreck of streets and squares disjointed by an earthquake, which hath broken the ground into a variety of holes and hillocks; or as if some Gothic devil had stuffed them altogether in a bag, and left them to stand higgledy piggledy, just as chance directed. What sort of a monster Bath will become in a few years, with those growing excrescences, may be easily conceived". Lydia, by contrast, says "Bath … to be sure, is an earthly paradise. The Square, the Circus, and the Parades, put you in mind of the sumptuous palaces represented in prints and pictures; and the new buildings, such as Princes-row, Harlequin's-row, Bladud's-row, and twenty other rows, look like so many enchanted castles, raised on hanging terraces." The Expedition Of Humphry Clinker begins the tradition of the novel as tourism. It is also the first to capitalise on the idea of multiple perspectives (although Christopher Anstey had pioneered the form in his New Bath Guide). With Humphry Clinker, we have the beginnings of the ironic polyphony that Bakhtin thought characterised the novel as a form.

There is a plot – involving romances, an illegitimate child, and the delightful Lieutenant Obadiah Lismahago – but on the whole it conforms to Walter Scott's dictum "what the deuce is a plot for except to bring in good things?" There are disquisitions on the Enlightenment, Methodism, the Union, the freedom of the press, and copious accounts of the different forms of hospitality available in each place (oysters kept in "slime-pits" in Colchester, the English visitors trying to deal with "haggice" – "a mess of minced lights, livers, suet, oat-meal, onions, and pepper, inclosed in a sheep's stomach, had a very sudden effect upon mine", the dreadful adulterated milk at Covent Garden). Smollett indulges in a little proto-postmodernism when Ferdinand Count Fathom, from his previous novel of that name, makes an appearance. Although the idea of the malapropism is conventionally linked to Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals, it typifies the letters sent by the servant Winifred: "Oh Molly," she writes "you that live in the country have no deception of our doings in Bath", and she revels in "the very squintasense of satiety" they enjoy. "Matrimony" becomes "Mattermoney", as if to prefigure Jane Austen. She means more than she realises.

Sterne caricatured Smollett as "Smelfungus", on account of his irascible, cynical sarcasm: although Bramble begins very much in that vein, part of the charm of Humphry Clinker is in seeing how Bramble is himself charmed, becoming mellower over the course of the novel. Scott, in his biography of Smollett writes that "notwithstanding the general opinion denies that quality to his countrymen, Smollett excels in broad and ludicrous humour. His fancy seems to run riot in accumulating ridiculous circumstances one upon another, to the utter destruction of all power of gravity; and perhaps no books ever written have excited such peals of inextinguishable laughter as those of Smollett."

The voyage, Smollett suggests, is a chance to change: the Caledonian trip makes Bramble and his companions realise their prejudices about the Scots in particular, and anyone different in general. This was politically quite bold. At the time of publication, John Wilkes was stoking up anti-Scottish feeling in the pages of the North Briton, and Horace Walpole claimed that Humphry Clinker was "the profligate hireling Smollett" attempting to "vindicate the Scots". What he was doing was proving that the novel was a form that could create sympathy.

Byron, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, wrote of the "double joy" of admiring a landscape with a loved one. There's a quintuple joy in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, as we learn to love these often eccentric, sometimes delusional, sometimes incisive characters and see 18th-century Britain through their eyes.

FictionStuart Kelly
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Poem of the week: Lock Me Away by Clive James

An unsettling meditation on the mental disarrangements of encroaching senility manages a rare balancing of poetry and comedy

As a poet, Clive James shares some qualities with the English "Movement" writers, and an intellectual affinity with his compatriot Peter Porter. Typically, James combines traditional, often stanzaic, structures with glitteringly modern diction. Like a new Augustan, he can spin a verse-essay to engage mental gears contemporary poetry tends to neglect. And, notwithstanding some Larkinesque melancholy, he can make us laugh. This week's poem, "Lock Me Away", reflects both his comic talent and his agility in free verse when the latter suits his purpose. It's from a collection I've re-read with inexhaustible enjoyment over the four years since publication, Opal Sunset.

Writing comic poetry is a rare skill. Performance poets (with a few honourable exceptions) seem to imagine their excruciatingly clumsy rhymes are all just part of the fun. There are beautifully-crafted comic poems-for-the-page, of course; Wendy Cope, John Fuller, Kit Wright and John Whitworth have written some of them. What's unusual, though, in English poetry, is a comic poem which doesn't depend on rhyme and metre to be funny.

"Lock Me Away" is not, of course, only comic but it fends off the potential sombreness of its theme – mental deterioration – by steady increments of the surreal. The style of delivery is anecdotal, in short, rhymeless lines shaped by the speaker's natural intonation and syntax. In structural outline, "Lock Me Up" resembles the extended joke of a highly inventive stand-up comedian – with the added connective tissue of poetry.

The inciting incident is that "NHS psychiatric test" we've all heard about, and hoped was an urban myth: the patient has to spell the word "world" backwards. I wonder how many people have failed it out of sheer panic? The rest of us should start practising now.

Taking things a stage too far, as comedy usually does, the speaker tries pronouncing the new non-word, and the phonetic mouthful (DLROW, in case you're still struggling) sparks a riff of name-association and palindromes. The test to prove mental clarity appears to shatter it. Verbal fun is never in short supply: in fact, the comic incidents themselves derive from the wordplay.

The "sudden flaring picture" of Danny La Rue as a school-boy, cheeks bulging with marshmallows, as he tries to articulate "his initial and surname" comes with sound effects which the reader is asked to imagine. (James never gives away too much information in this poem: the reader has to stay awake). Narrative and noise climax when the palindrome-maddened speaker finds the columns of a certain national newspaper are becoming "populated/By a thousand mumbling drag queens". The implication that the Guardian uses the word "world" a lot, perhaps more than other newspapers, is a flattering one, so I should make it clear that I wasn't coerced into this choice of Poem of the week.

The next DLROW-man, Georges Delerue, is treated more earnestly. There's a biographical snippet to enlighten the too-many of us who've heard his lovely melodies without ever hearing of him. The scene imagined for the composer, unlike that of the infant drag-queen, is grimly unfunny. Does it hint at the idea that medical encounters may bring humiliation or abuse?

An apparently subject-changing device, "Why do I never think/ Of a French film composer …", the rhetorical question sprouts a philosophical one: "But can I truly say I never think of it/ When I've just thought of it?"

This cleverly-confused conundrum links neatly to the fear of "going stun". The original expression, "going nuts", is an idiom that makes light of wooden-headedness, but the palindrome "going stun" is fierce and scary - like Delerue's beating-up.

The next line is the one that makes me smile out loud. A crazy gang of new signifiers emerges from the palindromic treatment of "mad, bad and dangerous to know". While "dam" might allude to dames and mild damnation, "dab" sounds fishy and limp. As for the wonderful transitive verb "to wonk", perhaps its meaning is best left to the imagination. Clearly, the Mr Bean-ish character evoked is wonk-years away from the sexy, swashbuckling Lord Byron of the original phrase. But it's the incongruous "dangerous" that makes the description so deliciously funny.

"Ward" in the ensuing line ominously resembles "word." The speaker has muddled up the two, perhaps. Now identified as the patient, he addresses, and blames, the doctor for his confusion, and the poem's distant lightning-play of dread comes closer. What "ward" denotes is obvious, but the palindromic "cloudy draw" of the Marty Robbins song seems no less sinister. Those ghost-cowboys were seriously damned souls, chasing "the devil's herd" across the sky. The "draw" (gully) they galloped through might have been a passage out of hell.

Finally, the speaker asserts his intelligence by quoting the extended palindrome sometimes described as Napoleon's shortest speech (it would have been, if only he'd said it). The association with Napoleon makes matters much worse. The patient might have attained real insanity, thanks to that sanity check earlier: he now thinks he's Napoleon. It's the stuff of mental health nightmares, but the comic muse prevails, with a punch-line that ensures the poet and his readers exit laughing.

Since Opal Sunset, Clive James has published a further original-poetry collection, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower (2012) and, very recently, a new Dante translation, The Divine Comedy. The latter's at the top of my summer reading list. Given James's technical command and powerful personal voice, I'm anticipating a virtuoso performance. In the meantime, this little purgatorial adventure in the consulting-room will brighten any spirits – even those ghost-riders in the sky.

Lock Me Away

In the NHS psychiatric test
For classifying the mentally ill
You have to spell 'world' backwards.
Since I heard this, I can't stop doing it.
The first time I tried pronouncing the results
I got a sudden flaring picture
Of Danny La Rue in short pants
With his mouth full of marshmallows.
He was giving his initial and surname
To a new schoolteacher.
Now every time I read the Guardian
I find its columns populated
By a thousand mumbling drag queens.
Why, though, do I never think
Of a French film composer
(Georges Delerue, pupil of
Darius Milhaud, composed the waltz
In Hiroshima, Mon Amour)
Identifying himself to a policeman
After being beaten up?
But can I truly say I never think of it
After I've just thought of it?
Maybe I'm going stun:
Dam, dab and dangerous to wonk.
You realise this ward you've led me into
Spelled backwards is the cloudy draw
Of the ghost-riders in the sky?
Listen to this palindrome
And tell me that it's not my ticket out.
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
Do you know who I am, Dr La Rue?

PoetryClive JamesCarol Rumens
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What I'm thinking about ... ambitious women

Which was the first have-it-all generation of women? They were swinging half a century before the sixties, says Judith Mackrell

Writing biography is always a juggling of perspectives, an attempt to show the daily random life of your subject while imposing the logic of history and argument. It's a battle between present tense reality and narrative hindsight. And the other day I was reminded of how conflicting their truths can be by a magazine article I picked up.

It was a report on how young professional woman are suffering a collective sense of anxiety about combining careers and motherhood. Farrah Storr explained that she and her generation had "witnessed the despairing, exhausting fall out" of those who'd tried. And far from being inspired by those "solid confident chest-swelling career girls of the 1980s and 1990s who were told they could have it all" she and her peers regarded them as a warning.

Having had my own children in the late 1980s, while simultaneously establishing myself as a writer, I suppose I'm one of the women who tried to have it all. Yet while I can remember years of deranged tiredness (as well as deranged fun) I don't recognise myself in Storr's argument. Her implication that my generation and I had been driven by an ambitious and acquisitive "life plan", that we'd been sold the idea of being superwomen doesn't fit with how it felt at the time. . What I remember, at least among the women I knew, was a naïve and hopeful muddling through.

Chest-swelling career girls we certainly weren't. Coming of age to a mix of hangover hippydom and new wave feminism, we certainly assumed that we were going to live differently from our parents. But the grim state of the British economy meant that few of us had confident professional plans. And while a good many of us ended up with jobs and children we loved, it felt like a situation which we'd both lucked into, and blundered into.

I had tried to hang on to that feeling of being 21 and embarking on life without a road map when I was writing my book about women in the 1920s. I wanted to write about the decade as a transforming era for women, bringing in new political, social and sexual freedoms. And I wanted to explore it through the stories of six women who were in different ways, emblematic of their generation's bid for emancipation.

That they were a key generation was evident even at the time. In 1919 the Times was solemnly warning of the perils attendant on the new rebellious flapper. Yet while I was looking for the patterns of behaviour and belief that connected my six women to the decade in which they came of age, I didn't want to lose sight of the day to day mix of excitement and ordinariness, confusion and exhilaration, determination and dumb luck that went into the living of what now seem like extraordinary lives.

We can look back now on Josephine Baker and see her as an icon of the jazz age: yet when she left home to become a teenage chorus girl, she'd have done almost anything to escape the hideous poverty and abuse of the St Louis ghetto in which she was raised. We think of Nancy Cunard as one of the literary and social celebrities of the Parisian avant-garde, yet her initial flight to Paris was impelled by hatred of her controlling mother and grief for her lover, killed in the war.

Even Zelda Fitzgerald who at an absurdly young age saw herself hailed by the media as the original American flapper, was acting principally on the impulse not to be like all the "little women" in her home town of Montgomery.

In the light of Farrah Storr's argument we can also look back on these six women as trying to "have it all": free love, marriage, career, families, celebrity and an authentic life. I salute their courage, experimenting with ideas of freedom and self fulfillment that many thought had been invented in the late 60s and early 70s. But I also know that nearly all of them paid a very high emotional and physical price for it.

Did they know they belonged to a "dangerous generation" (the subtitle of my book)? The truth is that very few of know what times we are living through, until another generation comes along and tells us.

•Judith Mackrell will discuss pioneering women on Sunday 11 August with Kari Herbert, author of Heart of the Hero

BiographyEdinburgh International Book FestivalJudith Mackrell
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Edinburgh international book festival 2013: week one live blog

Join us here for all the news, events, reviews and discussions from the 30th anniversary Edinburgh international book festival

Hannah Freeman

Words' worth

The novelist kicks off a new series, coinciding with the Edinburgh international book festival, where writers consider the words that mean most to them

Once again, I'm afraid that I haven't been filing at all regularly. This is the year – apparently – of looking after myself and so working in the evenings when I've already worked all day has been placed off limits. Because it can make me a little bit ragged. But here I am with a nice empty run of moments: the sun is shining but not too hotly, somewhere in the garden there is at least one newt and it's nowhere near evening. So. Let's think about words – the things which allow me to address you in my absence and hopefully to say something of use, if not also beauty. They may even be able to suggest that, although you are not me and vice versa, we have a good deal in common – including the very human tendency to think that those who are not us are in some way … well, at least a little less interesting than we are, maybe slightly less jam-packed with the wonders we ourselves contain. (Forgive me for assuming that you are as spiritually stunted and unimaginative as I am. I do at least hope I can improve through time – you may not need to.)

It's difficult to say how deeply words run in us. They shape our worlds and our minds and our behaviour, either consciously, or covertly. And they are freighted with personal resonance. I can't hear the word mushroom without thinking of my grandmother who always pronounced it mush-ah-room. I never knew why. She wasn't an enthusiastic or even very active cook – my grandfather was the one to conjure up the Sunday dinner and the best toast I've ever eaten – and I don't recall her ever having served a mushroom, let alone (somehow the complimentary rhythms suggested this should happen) a mush-ah-room casserole. When my mother and I are together and making a meal we still use the term mush-ah-room because it is nostalgic and cheering and adds something to an occasionally rather insubstantial ingredient. It may not be coincidental that we both cook with them quite often. And that addition of glamour and interest to an often pallid and potentially fatal fungus may have been my grandmother's aim – she could be a little theatrical when she wanted.

Granny is also why I tend to call digestive biscuits – which sound gruelling and medical – suggestive biscuits – which sound as if they are capable of combining the best of two potentially delightful worlds. The suggestive/digestive substitution seems fairly common in people of an age to remember when digestives were one of the more interesting items available to have with your limp, tan-coloured coffee or stewed, oily tea. And I have to say that I am disposed to like people who spontaneously designate biscuits suggestive. Someone who is willing to be silly and who listens to the music of things is often good company.

And it's a lovely word in and of itself – suggestive. It does exactly what it should, softly and warmly in the mouth and with perhaps a more than averagely active tongue.

There were many words I loved very early on because they had a palpable effect when pronounced. Amphibian, for example, is a wonderful package of sound and meaning. I found it slightly difficult to navigate when I first met it and so I had to practice it a lot, while having it explained and looking forward to meeting animals that were both of the land and of the water. I was a bit haphazard in both.

As I child, I loved words that defined and gave structure, particularly in liminal areas. I wasn't aware that life could operate randomly, swiftly and unpleasantly around me despite very clear definitions having been set in place. I might, for example, be startled by a newt while out walking next week and fall on to an abandoned metal spike which horribly damages my brain and kills me, despite my brain holding all kinds of interesting facts about walking, spikes and newts.

I also wasn't aware until I was in my teens that reality could become much more troublesome and dangerous when human beings interfered with the words used to describe it. Currently health, a gently forceful and straightforward word for something extremely precious, is often portrayed as a laughable inconvenience for busy and sensible people. Just as safety is a ridiculous concept which no right minded democrat would go anywhere near. This continually surprises me, because I tend to feel that I like to be safe and that I particularly want those I love to be safe and that I assume other people love still other people and that the majority opinion is in favour of safety, long life, contentment and health. Words are like spells, like little tests of where reality might go next. I live in a country where the three words health and safety (surely the ideal combination) have for many years been a joke, a shorthand spat out to provoke loathing, an excuse for fabricated newspaper stories and a lack of customer service. And, oddly enough, I now live in a country where life is increasingly less safe, where the provision of healthcare is not a government priority, where employers are much freer to prioritise profit over humanity and where it is assumed that people who can't afford to defend themselves with money wouldn't really mind that much if they crippled their hand at work, or they ended up eating contaminated food, or being sexually harassed, or if their child died before reaching an A&E. I love the word health and I love the promise and openness and sibilance of the word safety.

As an adult I'm aware that all kinds of pressures - political, commercial, theological – will bring power to bear against the power of words in order to shape them to this or that agenda. And I'm aware that it takes concerted effort to continue to maintain interior clarity while suffering the cognitive dissonance epidemic language deformation evokes. Sometimes meaning will be removed by circumlocution, sometimes words and phrases will be appropriated, or censored, sometimes they will begin to die for lack of belief.

I did some work recently in Berlin's Humboldt University, performing a show about words in an upper room the balcony of which overlooked Bebelplatz where the Nazis held book burnings, including the vast destruction of 20,000 books on 10 May 1933. It's a very powerful act, to burn even one book. It's a magical gesture which seeks to destroy a mind, a way of seeing, a right to speak and be heard. Of course, book burnings are often a PR disaster now, are time-consuming and expensive to arrange. It's easier to undermine meaning at the level of individual words and phrases, to rig the education lottery against those who shouldn't be audible and who shouldn't notice when their rights are recalibrated, to close libraries, to let poverty and commercial interests restrict internet access.

Austerity – it is a little hard as a word (those two T's) and the hissing the middle, it sounds like a pebble clattering and sliding along the floor of a marble room, unsympathetic. But my reading of it is influenced by my surroundings. Austerity would never have sounded cuddly – it's austere – but it was once a word that had a sort of tired pride about it, that summarised the privations of a UK which had been ruined in every way bar one by WWII. It suggested communal sacrifice. It also suggested what the sacrifice created – a functional welfare state designed to care for other people and still other people. The war's suffering really hadn't ruined everything – it allowed us to meet and see each other in the most revealing and desperate of circumstances, to understand needs that must be fulfilled, the humanity we share and the possibilities of concerted action, of intellectual and moral courage. Austerity – I liked its old undercurrents, its shared necessities. Now that it means Austerity, for you but not for me I like it much less. It becomes a short hand for a type of unkind stupidity, a wilful ruining of that one thing we had left, our compassion for each other. Compassion – now there's a word I love: complex Classical roots, a kind of kiss in it, a slight punch of intention – that's a word I'd like to hear and say more often. Onwards.

• AL Kennedy will talk about her book of essays, On Writing, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday 12 August

Edinburgh International Book FestivalEdinburgh festivalFestivalsAL Kennedy
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Edinburgh: the ultimate literary city

Auld Reekie has writers deep in its bones, so there is no more appropriate city to hold a book festival

Patrick White spent his schooldays in Cheltenham ("a four-year prison sentence"), and Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard got together illicitly there, but that's about all that underpins its claims to be a book town. Hay's feeble best boast is the diary-scribbling Rev Francis Kilvert, who had a nearby parish. Of the places that host the UK's major literary festivals, only Oxford's credentials come close to Edinburgh's, and most Oxonian writers have been transients, not residents.

Anyone arriving by train for the book festival disembarks at Waverley station, surely the only transport hub in Europe (anywhere?) named after a series of novels. If you turn left after emerging onto Princes Street, their creator is looming over you, in the vast Gothic form of the 200ft-high (Walter) Scott Monument. Have you got the message yet? If not, you could turn right, and head for the more modest, but still imposing monuments to Robbie Burns and David Hume on Calton Hill.

Probably, though, you want to get to the festival site, in Charlotte Square off the far end of Princes Street. Head north and uphill from the station into the New Town, and a zig-zagging westward walk towards it can take in the birthplaces or homes of Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Kenneth Grahame and Robert Louis Stevenson, the favourite pubs of Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig, and the grave of Thomas de Quincey.

But that may all seem overly fusty. So instead you could turn left off Princes Street and set off, across Waverley Bridge, for the Old Town, where paradoxically the traces tend to be of more recent work. You soon reach the George IV Bridge, home to the cafe where the then-unknown JK Rowling used to write, and Deacon Brodie's Tavern – commemorating a figure who may have inspired Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and who is also echoed in the name of Kate Atkinson's detective, Jackson Brodie – where the Trainspotting gang drink.

Nearby on or off the Royal Mile are the Fringe venue where Tom Stoppard's career began with the 1966 premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the cobbles where Alasdair Gray's secretary, Rodge Glass, may or may not have saved his life by inserting himself beneath the falling writer.

Walking south from it takes you (possibly via the interestingly named Potterow) towards St Leonard's police station, base of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus, and Rankeillor Street, where David Nicholls lived and set the opening of One Day. By then you're close to Bruntsfield, Muriel Spark's birthplace and the location of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Everywhere there are reminders – inspiringly or dauntingly, for today's authors? – that Edinburgh has few rivals as a literary city.

Edinburgh International Book FestivalEdinburgh festivalFestivalsJohn Dugdale
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That'shhh entertainment: drawing up a library playlist

The Wellcome Library is hoping to distract its readers from noisy building works with a Spotify playlist. Can you add some quiet suggestions?

Most of us prefer a bit of peace and quiet if we want to do some serious reading but the folks at the Wellcome Library won't be getting much of that since a £17.5m programme of building works kicked off on Thursday.

The plan is to build new galleries and spaces to enable the library to show more of its varied collection, which ranges from an ancient Egyptian medical prescription written on papyrus dating from 1100 BCE, through a sound recording of Florence Nightingale made in 1890, to the world's largest collection of early English domestic recipe books and the personal papers of geneticist Francis Crick, which include his preliminary sketches showing the structure of DNA.

The library also houses a world-leading collection of medical and scientific books and journals, receiving 40,000 visits a year from academic researchers and general readers – that's an awful lot of tutting they have in store once the drilling, knocking and shifting begin in earnest. But those ever-inventive scientific minds at Wellcome aren't about to let a bit of aural distraction halt their research, and so to soothe readers through the noisy works are compiling special library-themed playlists for people to listen to on their earphones blocking out any blasts of building work.

The first, Adventures in the library volume 1, an eclectic selection of new and old, makes an unlikely combination of the likes of Elvis Costello and the Attractions' Every Day I Write the Book, with Belle and Sebastian's Wrapped up in Books, and Computer Love (2009 - Remaster) by Kraftwerk. Or maybe you'll browse further on, in favour of The Kinks' Picture Book or Siouxsie and the Banshees' Monitor?

Work has already begun on compiling playlist number two, on the theme of medicine and healing: Girlfriend in a Coma by the Smiths, perhaps, or would the Thompson Twins' Doctor Doctor do it for you – what would make your medical reading playlist?

Adventures in the library volume 1

Books Written for Girls – Camera Obscura
Library Girl - Squeeze
My Back Pages – The Byrds
Every Day I Write the Book – Elvis Costello and the Attractions
Books From Boxes – Maximo Park
Library Pictures – Arctic Monkeys
Read it in Books – Echo and the Bunnymen
Computer Love (2009 – Remaster) - Kraftwerk
The Book I Read – Talking Heads
The Book I Haven't Read – Lambchop
Photocopier – Fujiya & Miyagi
Let's Write a Book – Field Music
Wrapped Up In Books – Belle & Sebastian
Six and Seven Books – Toots and the Maytals
Library Books – David Arnold, Michael Price
Picture Book – The Kinks
Surfing Magazines – The Go-Betweens
Monitor – Siouxsie and the Banshees
Digital Girl - Gong
Download – Super Furry Animals

LibrariesLiz Bury
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Has William Boyd spoiled Henning Mankell?

US readers are up in arms about how much plot Boyd has given away. Are they right? Don't hold back

Just a few weeks before he publishes his top-secret James Bond novel, Solo, William Boyd is under fire. Beneath the sly headline "Treacherous", letters in the New York Times's books section last week slated him for giving away too much in a review of Henning Mankell's A Treacherous Paradise. "I feel no need to [read it], since Boyd has revealed the entire plot," fumed a reader. "Perhaps you may want to invite Mankell to review Boyd's forthcoming novel," said another.

The row echoes disputes in other art forms. Can a big "reveal" in a play be itself revealed if reviewers are not explicitly asked to keep it secret? Should comedy critics quote or summarise standups' gags? If you refer to a plot "twist" or "coup", are you distorting the audience or reader experience? Is it wrong to say that hero and heroine become an item in a romcom, even though the formula requires it? Is a next-day TV review free to discuss who was eliminated in a reality show or who did it in a detective story, although many will watch it later?

Defending his review of one film, the Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote of "bending over backwards" to avoid Boyd-style betrayal before wondering "how a critic is expected to talk about the things he/she believes are centrally important" without verging on spoiler territory. It is a particular problem in reviewing all forms of genre fiction – in love stories or thrillers – where endings are crucial.

Book jackets often give away plots – Pride and Prejudice with Elizabeth and Mr Darcy on the cover ruins it for a 12-year-old – and one just-published psychological thriller with a first-person narrator comes emblazoned with the message: "Don't believe a word she says." I won't spoil your potential enjoyment by saying whether that's a spoiler.

William BoydHenning MankellLiterary criticismJohn Dugdale
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Poster poems: Found poetry

Cut-up or collage, the challenge this month is to concoct something new from other people's words

One night sometime in the early 1930s a New Jersey doctor left a note for his wife on the door of their fridge. He looked at it again and saw something he hadn't noticed when first writing it down, something that made him write it out anew. The doctor was William Carlos Williams and the note became This is just to say, one of the best-known and most widely discussed "found poems" ever written. There was nothing particularly new about poems that used existing texts as their starting point, but Williams managed to create an example that was both ordinary and controversial at the same time, and it still stands as something of a breakthrough moment in American literature.

This is just to say is an oddity of the genre, not just for its fame but also because the original source was a text by the poet himself. Usually, poets find their poems in prose written by others. In the case of Howard Nemerov's aptly titled Found Poem, the source was a newspaper and I can't help but imagine that the original was somewhat less entertaining than Nemerov's reimagining.

Other poets have drawn on historical documents and records as a rich source for their work. Charles Reznikoff's Slave Sale: New Orleans is a fine example of the poetry that can be unearthed from these texts by the sensitive addition of line and stanza breaks. While Reznikoff's found poems tend to the narrative and expansive, Ian Hamilton Finlay made terse lyrics from nothing but the names, and sometimes serial numbers, of Scottish fishing boats. While many of these poems were published on paper, he often turned them into theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Science fiction's invisible women

They write some of the best fiction in this genre, but all the recognition and all the prizes go to men. SF is not supposed to be this old-fashioned

The Bible was written by a woman. Not all of it, just the good bits. Those fantastic old stories, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, were written by a woman living in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago as works of literature, only later co-opted to the service of religious dogma. So argues Harold Bloom in his treatise on the bible as literature, The Book of J.

Bloom places the mysterious "J author" at the pinnacle of the literary canon alongside Homer and Shakespeare. Seen through the ironic female gaze, God becomes less the ultimate patriarch than a petulant child sulking and raging his way through history. The Bible, with its cornucopia of talking snakes, burning bushes, seven-headed dragons, apocalyptic floods, parting seas, epic battles, tribal sagas, prophecies, miracles and magic is arguably the greatest fantasy story ever written. So if this most timeworn of texts was written by a woman, where in God's name are the women in today's modern myth-making?

Everywhere, actually. Science fiction – our modern version of those ancient mythic stories – was invented by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in Frankenstein; or, A Modern Prometheus. In recent decades much of the best SF writing has come from women writers, from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Doris Lessing's Shikasta to Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger, with hundreds more catalogued at the excellent SF Mistressworks.

But a genre that women have done so much to shape seems to have been co-opted by men. Of 29 Grandmasters of Science Fiction, only four are women – Connie Willis, Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey and Andre Norton. This year the two major UK awards for science fiction – the Arthur C Clarke and the BSFA – both announced all-male (and also all white and rather elderly) shortlists. Women, we were told by the Clarke judges, were simply writing fantasy, not science fiction.

Julie Crisp of Tor books – one of the UK's leading SF imprints – added to the discussion recently with a data-driven blogpost that seemed to shift the responsibility back to women writers. Of 502 manuscripts submitted to Tor, only 32% were from women, and those which were submitted were predominantly fantasy – either epic or urban – not science fiction.

Encoded in to the this strange divide between fantasy and science fiction is what Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, called The Double Standard of Content. How To Suppress Women's Writing, Russ's satirical text on sexism in art, is 30 years old this year but its lessons are still largely unlearned. Women's writing is dismissed as fantasy, while the fantasies of men are granted some higher status as science fiction.

All women SF writers have to do, they are repeatedly told, is conform to this double standard to be accepted. But no artist worth their salt artist willingly kowtows to the arbitrary, self-serving rules of petty cliques. Many women writers are, quite rightly, looking at the encoded sexism of the SF genre and taking their creativity elsewhere.

In her Guest of Honour speech at the Continuum convention NK Jemisin, one of the rising stars of contemporary SF, reiterated that the problems of both sexism and racism are not just about the 10% who are actively bigoted, but the larger group who empower racism and sexism through silence. Too many fans and professionals in SF and geek culture stay silent in the face of implicit racism and sexism.

The consequences are that talented women writers like Tricia Sullivan struggle to get published, while mediocre male writers continue their careers because we carry on buying their books. We demand a Doctor Who that isn't a White British Male, but continue to laud the television show when we are ignored. Our cinema screens are cursed with a summer of Batman, Superman, Iron Man and X-Men, and we queue up to watch these adolescent male power fantasies without questioning. Why is the white male the only genetic blueprint worthy of heroic status?

There's a huge audience of people who love science fiction, but do not see themselves reflected in white male faces that dominate it today. And there's a growing cohort of talented writers creating great literature for those people, as some time spent reading the groundbreaking Strange Horizons demonstrates. In these chaotic times for the industry, it's the publisher brave enough to break from the discriminatory definition of science fiction and reshape the genre around this untapped audience who will prosper. As will the writers who stop reinforcing the inherited prejudices of a patriarchal genre, and instead tell stories that help meet NK Jemisin's challenge to make SF a "literature of the world's imagination."

Science fictionFictionFantasyDamien Walter
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