Links to Stuff II

Baz Productions are a very exciting theatre company based in London who recently had a production of Macbeth running in the Crypt at St Andrews in Holborn. You can read their blog here. This was the first production I've seen in a long time which actually made me realise how much I miss working in the theatre. I'm looking forward to seeing the work Baz Productions make in the future.

I'm giving a paper at a conference in Ottowa next year: History, Memory, Performance. My paper will be on history, memory and storytelling in some Stephen Poliakoff dramas. I'm very excited about it, but I'm trying to pretend I don't have to fly - I'm not scared of flying I just hate it, and the cheapest flight to Ottawa is nearly 15 hours with a stop over... Maybe I could row over there or something?

The Electric Forest are fantastic light installations and walks through British forests. I'm looking forward to going to the one in Thetford Forest.

Critics

I've been thinking about critics lately.

The first two assignments my students have to hand in on the course I am teaching this term are book reviews. This might sound easy: it is not. The work they need to produce should be well written, well argued and succinct - the word limit is a very strict five hundred words maximum. Only a very few of them asked before they began their work what the role of the critic in a review is. This is a question which attracts different answers, and over the last few years there have been discussions - in theatre and literature - about who should review work, how, and for what purpose.

On Wednesday evening some friends and I went to see the new production of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at English National Opera directed by Deborah Warner, whose production of School for Scandal at the Barbican in early summer was badly reviewed by some (not all) critics - to which Warner responded, and a low key, short lived - but media inflated - 'spat' occurred when two critics took this response very poorly and then themselves responded... are you bored already? What always seems to come out of things is an air of critics in one camp and writers, artists, actors, theatre directors - or whatever other artists I have left out - in another, with no real dialogue occurring between them: critics - and the newspapers they write for - do not want to change the way they do things, which leaves everybody feeling frustrated. Warner - I should declare now that I have great respect for her work and have yet to see anything directed by her in the theatre or opera house which I have disliked - seems to have been attempting (I may be entirely wrong about this of course) to get some sort of discussion going for a while, at least since late 2009 when I heard her on BBC Radio 4's current affairs programme PM talking about critics and criticism and role/responsibility of the critic - but consistently the response to this from senior theatre critics has been patronising and condescending if nothing else. Which, for me, is disappointing, because I feel very strongly that this is a discussion which should be had - there must be a way of properly jump-starting this conversation and preventing it from becoming some sort of pathetic newspaper argument. Before my students hand in their next review I will be encouraging them to think about the role of the critic, or rather think about what the responsibility of the critic is, and what they - as writers, critics, readers, and audience members - want from a review. 

The production of Onegin is stunningly beautiful (the lighting alone was worth the price of the ticket) and without a doubt the best thing I've seen all year - I would go again every night before the run ends if I could, but I can't so I hope it returns to the Coliseum in the future. There were six of us, each enjoyed it, but from different points of view - at the first interval we had a great discussion about the date the production had settled upon - the story is an 1820s one, but this production was firmly rooted in 1890, and our discussion ranged from Jane Austen to Chekhov via wars, revolutions, 'The New Woman' and Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (one of my favorite films, but it entered our discussion because of the duel in both that film and Onegin) . If you want you can listen to a live recording of it via the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer, but I really do urge you to go an see it if you can.  

Links to stuff

I'm going to try to blog more, so if I can't write a proper blog my compromise is going to be to post some links to interesting things (things which I think are interesting and hope you will too).

Quick reminder about my friend Peter Falconer's project to write A Song A Week in 2011. He has ten songs left to write, record and produce - and there aren't ten weeks of the year left so if you haven't already take a look at the SAW2011 blog and give him a comment or two to encourage him, and a few pounds for the charity pot if you can.

High Arctic exhibition at the National Maritime Museum - is a rather extraordinary exhibition conceived by Matt Clark of United Visual Artists after he went on the 2010 Cape Farewell High Arctic expedition. The blogs by the people who went on the expedition can be found here.

BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival is currently happening in Gateshead. Radio 3 broadcast various lectures and events and you can catch up on the iplayer.

And for something absurd and hilarious: French and Saunders Hungarian Madonna Interview (with thanks to Mr Falconer for sending me this link).

Reading Lists, libraries and beautiful books

Somebody asked me recently what books I'd read recently - I had to think about this, which is unusual as I can usually reel off quite a few without thinking at all. I read everyday, but rarely these are books anyone else would want to read - New Perspectives in Historical Writing, Probing the Limits of Representation, Practicing New Historicism, anyone? Thought not.

To add to this I've been stuck in interminable chapter writing hell since sometime in March, which finally came to an end about ten days ago, but which has meant I've not been able to read anything non-chapter related, mostly because I've just been too tired to read anything else at the end of the day.

This term though I've been teaching a course on contemporary writing, so I've been reading a book a week, and this is the reading list:

Marilynne Robinson - Home
Ali Smith - The First Person and Other Stories
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
Michelle Paver - Dark Matter
Jackie Kay - The Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay -Fiere
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jose Saramargo - The Elephant's Journey
Alex Wheatle - Brenton Brown
Bel Mooney - A Small Dog Saved My Life

In the last week of term the students get to choose the book they want to read. A few of my students raised their hands 'What do we do in week 12?' questions abound. Choose a book you like and suggest it to the rest of the class. 'What?' - none of them could think of a book they had read. What did you read in the summer? Silence. You must have read something. One finally mumbled that he spent the rest of the year reading and so didn't read anything over the summer. What is he doing an English degree for if he doesn't like reading? When I finished my undergraduate degree I was so tired I couldn't read any of the books I loved or wanted to read, but I needed to read something so I trundled my way through all my Dad's crime novels. How can these students spend a whole summer not reading?

I would go crazy if I didn't or wasn't able to read - books have been there at the most difficult and terrible times and I've always used books as a way of escaping the terribleness. When I worked as a bank clerk I used to use my lunch hour to go to the library in the town (whatever town, as I was moved about a lot) where I was based and sit in there and read; it was an hour of grace day on day, week on week while I was doing a job which made me very unhappy; it got me out of the bank and effectively made the job bearable until a job I wanted to do came along. In the last month I have learned four out of the seven public libraries I used have been shut down, two have had their hours cut, and one risks closure.

The Kindle advert may be claiming the thing replaces the book (it doesn't because you can't drop in the the bath for a start, not to mention all the other things, which I won't mention otherwise I will be ranting) but I cannot replace the library: the experience of going into a place filled with books, pulling something off the shelf at random and starting the reading journey. Or going into a library with the reading list for your course and looking at the shelves and pulling books off to find which ones you need, which are interesting or helpful, and which are no good and can go back on the shelf. The rejection process in the academic library is as important as the act of discovery. 

I haven't managed to finish AL Kennedy's The Blue Book - I was just too tired and couldn't actually hold the book upright in bed, and decided the book and I would be much happier if we left each other alone for a while. I'll be reading it at Christmas though and I still love looking at it in all its blueness on my shelf. Slight aside - there seems to be a small trend at Vintage/Jonathan Cape at the moment to publish books which have the ends of the pages the same colour as the cover - Julian Barnes' Booker winner has a black hardcover with the ends of the pages also black, and the edges of the dust jacket also black so it sort of melds, the new Vintage edition of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is very orange in the same way that The Blue Book is blue. I wonder if the rise of the Kindle (how much do I hate that TV advert? More than the actual Kindle I think) and the iPad and other assorted e-reader things, has meant that publishers are trying to make (some) effort to produce hardback editions which look beautiful.

After I escaped chapter hell, I started reading Sara Wheeler's wonderful book Terra Incognita, which is about her travels in Antarctica. This is the first non-work book I've read since sometime in the spring. I've never read much travel writing before - there is so much fiction I haven't read, not to mention the poetry, that non-fiction - unless it is really vital and essential - tends to slightly fall off my radar. But this year I started to give in to my desire to read books about the Arctic and Antarctica, starting safely with a travel book about Norway, where I turned immediately to the bit about the Arctic Circle, and then picked up a copy of a novel called The Still Point whilst traveling to a conference in Exeter which I read in huge gulps on the train there and back, along with an article about the Northern Lights in the Saturday Guardian Magazine someone had left on the seat of the train from Exeter. Chapter hell began, along with some other awful things and my snow and ice filled reading dreams had to wait; I'm back there now and loving it.

I'm off to jump down another chapter black hole - I may be some time.

What's in a title?

I had a meeting this afternoon about a paper I am giving at a research seminar on a panel with two of my friends and colleagues in March. Our research is quite varied and does not really link up in anyway - one of us is researching scientific writing and the Royal Society in the 17th/18th century, another on the East India Company Archive 17th-19th century, and my research is on Stephen Poliakoff, which puts me firmly in the late 20th/21st century.

There is, however, one area in which we are all interested and have talked about with varying degrees of intellectual depth: the archive. But none of us could face yet another panel on this subject and have happily discovered that we are also interested in the anecdote - so that will be our general subject for our panel.

From there we had to write a title for our panel - this sounds easier than it actually is.

In today's lecture for the course I teach on we were discussing contemporary publishing in all its glory and shallowness, and one of the questions was about whether we read a book because of its title. To our surprise none of the students said they were attracted to a book by a title - other factors were more important for them, particularly front covers it seems, so that old saying about judging and covers never goes away. But do we judge a book, or a play, or opera, or an art exhibition, or a film, or a song, or whatever else, by its title? What impact does a title have? Do we learn anything from a title?

We decided our panel title needed to have a colon - the colon in academic paper titles is all. Or not. I still maintain my best title was a two word title for a paper on AL Kennedy - Writing Home - now though I have long wordy titles with quotes and colons. We wanted something about fragments in our title to reflect the fragmentary, shard like, nature of the anecdotes and anecdotal stories and incidents we would be discussing. The only thing which came to mind over and over again was 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' - the famous line which comes four lines before the end of the fifth section - What the Thunder Said - of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and while I'm talking about titles, it is interesting to observe the reason why the European Parliament wouldn't allow Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw to stage The Waste Land in their new parliament building in Brussels was because the powers that be didn't care for the title...What if T.S. Eliot had kept the title he originally considered - He Do the Police in Different Voices? Or on a less dramatic level if Ian McEwan had maintained the original title of Atonement so that it was An Atonement - it was his publisher who wanted it to be just Atonement and McEwan relented.


'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' is an incredible line, but one which we could not use: how could we?

The line has been haunting me for the rest of the day, and whilst I listened to a paper on mourning this evening it kept returning: 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'.

Eventually we came across a fantastic Francis Bacon (Bacon senior, the 16th century statesman, not the 20th century painter) quote: 'Out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time'. But this was too long, so after a bit of chopping and twisting we came up with 'Recovering from the deluge of Time' as our before the colon bit of the title. We liked it, but while we were trying to work out the post colon bit, we started playing around with a (mis)quote from Paul Simon's song 'You can call me Al'. So now we had 'Incidents and Accidents, Hints and Allegations'...  we stuck with it, but I do wonder a little bit if we cheated. We had moved away from our desire for fragments, the Bacon quote seemed a long way away, but I like it so much I know I have to use it at some point.

What is in a title? Would you read a book just because of its title? Or see a play?

In Search of the Perfect Notebook: Part 2 The Search Continues

After some thought I managed to work out where I might have bought the 'perfect' notebook for my work back in 2008. I narrowed it down to two shops in London, one on Devonshire Row opposite Liverpool Street and another on the Holloway Road near where I used to work. I was in London yesterday for a meeting about my difficult third chapter (which I'm told is reasonably good... but I'm not convinced, all I can see is a mess), so I decided I'd visit these two shops, however my day did not go quite to plan and I never got to the Holloway Road stationers, and when I got to Devonshire Row Crane Stationers were no longer there - just a row of empty shops.
I rang Holloway Road shop and explained my predicament with regards to the paper in particular, and although they were not sure what make the notebook was or if they still stocked it, but they said if I took it along with me they would see what they could do. So that will be a job for my next trip to London.
As a precaution - because my current notebooks are almost used up - I went into WH Smith at the train station and went to pick up one of their 'ok, but not great' notebooks, and found a label on the front saying the paper is 70gsm, which means they have downgraded it because I am sure the one I have is 80gsm. So I left it on the shelf and ended up with the New Statesman, the London Review of Books and the Independent's daily mini paper. Which is just as well because the train was delayed...

In Search of the Perfect Notebook

It seems many people who need to use, or want to use, notebooks - I mean the paper kind not the computers - is not really satisfied with the one they have got, and are therefore always in search of one which is better suited to what they want. I am no different. I wrote a few months ago about the notebooks I need to use - of all the notebooks listed the most important notebook I use on a daily basis is the one for my PhD research.
My requirements are: A5, casebound in a hardback cover, good quality paper which takes fountain pen ink and pencil well, I need lined pages, the notebook must lie flat when opened, and for bizarre reasons know only to myself and my archiving needs, the notebook must have a red cover.
I have tried making my notes directly onto my laptop but this just does not work for me - I need the feeling of pen or pencil on paper to process my thoughts - so I use the notebooks. I am currently using a WH Smith own brand notebook, which is ok, but the paper is not as good as I would like - some inks feather and bleed on it - but it does its job in most cases, but I'm still on the search for a better notebook, and I'm not that keen on the shade of red.
Over the last few weeks I've been writing the third chapter of my PhD, and I expect this notebook will be used up in the next few days as I struggle - and this chapter really has been a struggle - to finish the first draft. This academic year has been difficult for so many reasons and this chapter should have been completed some months ago. This time last year I was on target, now I feel horribly behind. I am having to write huge stretches of the chapter longhand before typing them up because I cannot seem to be able to work out what I want to write on the screen. This is both time and notebook consuming.
After I finish this notebook I will use up the few remaining pages in my Seawhite of Brighton notebook, which I stopped using when I realised how much I need lines. It is actually a sketch book because Seawhite of Brighton are an art supply company; it is a great notebook, I like the cover, and I like the thick pages, but I really do need lines. So I need to find something else.
I know all the paper aficianados out there are shouting 'Clairefontaine', but have you seen the price? I go through these notebooks too quickly to justify spending over £7 per notebook, and although I agree the paper is great for fountain pens, I do find the ink takes a bit too long to dry on this paper - and if my thoughts are flowing I need to get them down and keep going, not wait while the page dries before turning it.
Yesterday I discovered I did once have the perfect notebook. Searching through a pile of Poliakoff plays I found one of my old notebooks from my MA. It seems I filled this book up with terrifying speed in the British Library whilst doing some research on Irish writers broadcasting on the Third Programme in the late 1940s and early 1950s: it is full of pencil scribbles about dates and times and content of broadcasts made by Irish writers, copied from piles and piles of archive copies of the Radio Times. I flicked through the notebook and realised what a good book it was - the paper was smooth but not slick, it had lines, the cover was a nice shade of red and had a smooth texture, it opened flat. I'd only written in it in pencil (pens are banned in the BL) so I needed to find out if the paper was up to the worst behaving inks I own. I found a page  with a small amount of space took it to my desk and tried the inks.
It was perfect. But where on earth did I buy it? There is no brand or identifying marks on the cover. Are they still made? The search begins...

Browns

It may be late August, but it is still the summer. However, where I live almost all the fields which surround us have already been harvested and ploughed - the greens and golds of the peas, parsley, barley, wheat and oilseed rape have all gone, only the deep shiny green leaves of the sugar beet remain. Ten or twenty years ago I remember the farmers leaving the fields for weeks, even months, after the harvest, and I can recall playing as a child in the stubble and pea mush well into the autumn months. Today it seems the farmers do not leave the fields for more than a few days before they start breaking up the earth and turning the soil.
We are now surrounded by varying shades of brown as the earth is turned to expose the dark moist clay soil underneath, before it dries to a different hue, and is turned again and again, each time the lumps of earth becoming smaller until the soil is ready for drilling and sowing for next year's crops.
This week I will harvest the onions in the garden and lay them out in the sun to dry. I will dig over the earth and sow rows of carrots for the winter. Soon the bright green shoots of the carrots' foliage will start peeking above the top layer of soil.
The brown of the fields surrounding us got me thinking today about brown ink in my pens. Brown is not really a colour people use to write - when they do actually write and not type, but that is another subject altogether - and I will admit that had it not been for my avid tea drinking habits, I would not have purchased a bottle of J. Herbin's Lie de The ink some months ago, and I certainly would not have thought about other brown inks. I do love Lie de The and have used it in two pens, and so far it has been my favourite ink in my silver-green Lamy Al Star.
I was undecided about the exact shade of brown I wanted to try next - Lie de The has beautiful shades of brown and yellow and green - and I was reluctant to buy random bottles of brown inks to find ones I liked, so instead I decided to buy a number of ink samples from the fabulous Goulet Pen Company in the US. I have now tried Noodler's Brown, Noodler's Golden Brown, and Noodler's Burma Road Brown, all of which I like, but I think I will definitely be buying a bottle of Noodler's Brown, which is a rich brown with a hint of red, and looks great in my Brown Esterbrook J. The ink and the pen suit each other perfectly, and the ink behaves extremely well on almost all the papers I have tried it on. I will certainly be trying some other browns - probably a few more from Noodler's and some from Diamine.

New blue pen for making notes on The Blue Book!

This is my most recent pen purchase. It is a 1940s Waterman 513 with a W-3 (mediumish) nib.

Contrary to the heading of this post I didn't buy it to make notes on AL Kennedy's new novel The Blue Book (published this week, go and buy it, it looks beautiful and is an awesome book). And it is very, very, blue!


I won't say anything more about it yet since it is a couple of days before it is in the shops - although I notice it hasn't prevented some newspapers from printing reviews of it, which I'm not reading because I don't want to know what happens before I get to the end.

Do books have a season?

If you visit here often - there are some of you out there I think - you'll have noticed that To Siberia has been in the 'currently reading' list on the left hand panel for about 8 or 9 months. It isn't a difficult book, but I find that I can only read it in small sections, and then put it down for a while, and leave it for sometime. I had this with another of Per Petterson's novels - Out Stealing Horses - and I have a friend who said it was a 'winter book'. I struggled to get into it in the summer months, even though a fair amount of the narrative was set in woodland during the summer, so I put it down and began it again last winter, and finished it in a few days. I began To Siberia a few weeks later, but still have it on the go - I thought it might be another 'winter book' but it seems I was wrong, and haven't yet found the right season for it. Do you think books have a season? I can't decide...

Tea Leaves, Tree Leaves, Book Leaves

My new TWSBI Diamond 530 arrived on Saturday morning from the super efficient online pen shop The Writing Desk - I placed my order for one pen, one bottle of J. Herbin Éclat de Saphir ink and a Clairefontaine notebook at around 10:55am on Friday morning and less than 24 hours later the postman was at the door - at about 8:20am. So The Writing Desk get a big thumbs up from me for excellently swift service, and I will certainly use them again in the future - probably to buy more ink in the near future, maybe even Herbin's Lie de Tea ink, because I am also a slightly obsessive tea drinker.

Indeed, as I type I am drinking a mug of freshly made Mélange Madeleine tea from Hédiard in Paris, which might be my favourite blend of tea. My mainstay teas are Earl Grey and Brodie's Afternoon Tea, both of which I have in the cupboard as tea bag teas for a quick cup of tea, then I have many different types of tea as tea leaves - including various green teas, an Earl Grey from Hédiard, a black tea and flower blend called Blue Lady which has mallow flowers, marigold flowers and grapefruit petals which I got somewhere in Scotland, a tea called Nirvana from another shop in Paris called Compagnie Anglaise des Thés, which my parents bought for me along with a rather lovely tea pot.

In the garden all the autumn leaves have finally been cleared up, and put in the compost bin. I've just ordered some new roses for my garden from Peter Beales Roses - I've ordered three ramblers to be trained against my garden fence panels:

Ghislaine de Feligone:




Phyllis Bide:




Narrow Water:




Now moving onto books. Why are there so many people with Kindles? I'm less bothered about iPads than I am about the Kindle, because the Kindle seems to be trying to pretend it is a book replacement. What is the appeal? I don't get it, and it isn't because I am a technophobe, because I'm not - I like my gadgets quite a lot, but I could do without them if it came to that, because there are books, and paper, and pens and pencils. BBC Four's series The Beauty of Books is a wonderful celebration of the book, and as one of the commentators points out - I think it might be Stephen Bayley - at the beginning, the book is the best information storage and retrival system ever created, and that you can read it in the bath - by which I think he is really saying 'you can read it in the bath, and drop it in the bath, without permanently, irrecoverably, damaging it. If you drop a paperback in the bath it will not be rendered unreadable - it will get a little warped but other than that you're still going to be able to use it. My main problem with e-readers of all types though is the lack of actual, physical, turnable, pages - essentially there are no 'leaves'. E-readers can attempt to manufacture the turning of the page all they want, but the thrill of opening a book and turning the page is gone. I'm sure there are people less bothered and obsessed about this than I am, but part of the reason I love books is the page-turning. I love that you can pass them onto other people, make a gift of a book which is especially special to you, make annotations or leave messages in them, not worry too much about dropping them, you can get them second hand so they have some past before coming to you, they are like old friends - my list could go on quite excessively.

Writing of books which are like old friends - yes you guessed it - my non-PhD reading this week has been a collection of AL Kennedy short stories, my brain is tired at the moment and can't sustain reading a novel, so I've been reading Indelible Acts again. Kennedy's new novel comes out in August and has a very blue front cover. Well, it is called The Blue Book. Hoping I might get my hands on a proof copy sometime in the next couple of months.

My visits to the British Library are becoming quite rare because it is becoming increasingly noisy in the reading rooms. Why? Mobile phones. Last time I was there the man sat next to me kept listening to his voicemail messages in the reading rooms. So I've taken refuge in the periodicals reading room at Senate House. However, when I have been at the BL I've taken to ordering up a book called How I Write, which is edited by Dan Crowe and Philip Olterman, and is really a collection of essays by different writers on various writing subjects - Will Self on post-it notes for example. I have a slump about half an hour before lunch so I read a couple of entries and then go off and have lunch. I've been working through it slowly and will soon reach ALK's entry called 'Notebooks thrown across rooms'.

I've been saving this entry - I was tempted to jump right to it, but have restrained myself - and have been wondering lately about notebooks, because I use them everyday for my work and I am beginning to understand exactly what I want from a notebook. Primarily three things: sturdiness, good paper and the ability to lie flat. I need one for my PhD research, a pocket notebook for other stuff and a diary (I've tried using my phone and computer for the latter but it doesn't work for me: I do use the laptop for 'to do lists' on iCal though). I used to get the 'pocket' sized page-a-day Moleskine diaries, but came to the conclusion that they were too bulky and I wasted many of the pages. This year I've got a soft-cover pocket size, page-a-week Moleskine diary, which has a lined page for notes on the opposite page. So far I quite like it - I have enough space for weekly notes, and if I keep my writing neat I can fit all my appointments and meetings in each day section. I've heard that some people have found the soft-cover Moleskines damage easily - the covers rip off and such like. The bugbear I have with it is really to do with the elastic band - it seems to have got baggier and a bit flimsy. And why do they persist in providing an address book in each and every diary? I've got three now which I will never need to use. We shall see.

My notebooks for my research tend to be hardback A5 hardback books, plain or lined pages, and most of them are red or some sort of reddish shade - not sure why - I've four in total: a Collins Ideal, which was started for an undergraduate journal I had to submit for a course years ago and which is actually larger than the A5 size, the first 20 pages or so are used, but I will cut them out and use the book at some point; a Seawhite of Brighton book, which I think is actually a sketch book; and two standard A5 notebooks with lined pages which I think came from WH Smiths, one of which is full and the other I am currently using. I expect to finish both the Seawhite and the Smiths books in the next few months and then will start using the Clairefontaine book I purchased last week. I also got a pile of black soft cover A5 notebooks free a few years ago on a festival I worked on, I don't actually like them all that much - the front cover is embossed with The Times logo, and they don't open out flat. I only continue to use them because I like the paper - pencils don't smudge and fountain pens don't feather or bleed through the page. On closer inspection the paper is made by Conquerer. I've got two of these Times notebooks on the go, I've donated two to my sister, and have two left which I will willingly send to anyone who asks. I'm quite happy with my red A5 notebooks for research notes and shall continue with them - they've all been sturdy and have good paper.

My problem is with the pocket sized notebooks. I've been using a hard cover, blank page, Moleskine for a few years and am towards the end of it now. It has withstood several festivals, a house renovation, many, many train journeys, and being in my bag on a day-to-day basis. It is one of the older Moleskines so has one of the older, tighter, sturdier, elastic bands. The top and bottom edges of the spine are slightly worn, but not enough to bother me. On the whole I like it, but I do have issues with it. My problem with Moleskine is about the paper, and about the falsified Moleskine 'legend'. I could overlook the latter - but I'm not willing to pay for it. The paper, however, I can't overlook because ink bleeds through and feathers - I've had problems with rollerballs, gel pens, and fountain pens, and the paper is particularly bad with some fountain pens and inks - although, oddly for a pen which can be a bit temperamental, my Waterman Hemisphere with black Waterman ink writes on Moleskine paper very well, doesn't put down a dry line, feather, or bleed through. However, because the Waterman pen was given to me as a present by my parents I consider it to be my best pen and don't want to have to carry it around with me everyday just because it is the only pen I have which writes perfectly in a Moleskine.

So while it is generally a good notebook, and I do have another blank page Moleskine, I am on a search for a new pocket notebook. There are several blogs who are on a quest to either find a Moleskine alternative, or inks and pens which are Moleskine 'friendly' - you can find links in the blog list on the left - I've read a few of these and recommendations include the Stifflexible (which I can't find anywhere online or in a shop), the Alwych 'All Weather Notebook', the Quo Vadis Habana, the Rite in the Rain notebook - another all weather notebook - Rhodia notebooks, and Cartesio notebooks. The Journal Shop offers paper samples from some of the notebooks they supply, so I'm going to ask for a sample from the Cartesio - I do quite like this bluey coloured notebook in the Cartesio range.

In the meantime I very much like my new TWSBI Diamond 530 and am going to enjoy using it on a daily basis.

On a final note, The Morgan Library in New York is currently holding an exhibition called The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives. If - like me - you are not in, or near, or going to or near, New York, then they have pictures from the exhibition online and an audio tour you can download.

Last time I wrote it was to plug my friend Peter's new songwriting project A Song A Week (if you haven't taken a look at his site, then what are you waiting for? It will make you laugh if nothing else) and I mentioned office hours and having to hold free ones, as well as the four I get paid for. Having been begged by my students to hold office hours so they could come and discuss the forthcoming assignment I duly booked an office in which to hold them (there were two of these hours), got up early like a grow up person with a proper job, ironed my shirt (this is very rare) had breakfast (also rare) and got on the tube a rush hour (even rarer) arrived in my borrowed office at 9am and spent two hours drinking tea and faffing about on the internet, until one student finally appeared. I was not impressed - I was expecting all 35 odd of them... because virtually none of them came to my paid for office hours I then had to hold another not-paid-for office hour - just to clarify I get paid to hold four office hours a term, but this is never enough and I always end up having to do more.

Anyway, the point of this waffle is to say that the first installment for Peter's charity fund has been safely put somewhere where I can't spend it on note books or pencils; but also to direct you to the current PhD Comic: The PhD Comics Guide to TA Office Hours.

For those of you who are wondering the 'PhD' in 'PhD Comics' stands for 'Piled Higher and Deeper'. Enough said...

Meanwhile my thesis is now onto chapter 3 - and a very cheerful chapter it is proving to be: children, Second World War, evacuation, trauma.... chapter 1 needs some tinkering with, but we like each other so that is fine, we won't fall out over the tinkering, chapter 2 on the other hand needs to be hit with a mallet, and we don't like each other at all. It is in fact sulking under a dictionary at present. If you think I've finally lost it take a look at another PhD Comic offering: How Do I Love You, Thesis? Let Me Count The Ways...

It is Reading Week - which is like half term for academics (in which students arse about, and academics catch up on sleep and research) - unfortunately it seems to have clashed with half term for school children and so there will be no peace. And I have marking. Lots of marking. But I am going to read a non-PhD book this week. Not sure what at the moment...

but I have brought myself a new fountain pen with which to improve my truly awful handwriting (this is what comes of using pencil all the time - biro becomes impossible to use without turning your handwriting into a spidery mess). It is in the post on its way to me and is a TWSBI Diamond 530 and is blue and looks like this - I think it looks quite cool, but I am a geek, so my opinion may be meaningless. It requires proper ink from a jar, I might not be able to cope, and the ink will no doubt pour everywhere. We shall see.

A Song A Week

My singing, songwriting, tea-with-no-milk drinking friend, Peter Falconer, has challenged himself to write a song every week in 2011 - he says this is partly to stop himself being a lazy bastard, but he's also going to raise some cash for Parkinson's UK.

If he manages to write the 45 songs he's aiming for then I will donate him the money I would have earned for doing extra office hours for my students this term, that is if I was being paid to do extra office hours, which I'm not, but I do them anyway, otherwise my students would get 2 minutes of one-to-one time a term, which I'm sure you will all agree is a bit rubbish.

Not sure how much it would be, but it should be an unstingy amount...

Why don't you take a look at his blog and listen to the first song of the year: A Song A Week!; and if you are so inclined donate some money.