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Books

Sir Pterry wrote non-fiction. You understand that, yes?

As I sometimes do, just dipped into a Pratchett last night. I know the plots well enough, it’s just a joy to see how he incorporates some of the jokes again. One of which is how the Post Office has stopped putting mongeese (mongooses?) into the post boxes. They now agree that that was a bit of an overreaction. But they were put there for good reason, to eat the toads which they’d introduced to them, the toads to eat the snails which were eating the glue from the cabbage flavoured stamps. Along those lines at least.

Rod Liddle today:

Residents in Storrington, West Sussex, are displeased that the Royal Mail has ripped out a 100-year-old postbox, leaving them without one. According to the Royal Mail, the problem was that the box was infested with “wildlife”. What fearsome creatures could it be? Tigers? Rats? No, it’s snails that Postman Pat and his friends are worried about.

Apparently these pulmonate gastropods enjoy feasting on the gum used to seal envelopes and so the postbox has to go. If I were a cynic I might venture that Royal Mail operatives had, in the small hours, been shoving snails into the pillar box to ensure they could close it down.

Non-fiction I tell ‘ee.

Yes, and?

A drag queen who criticised JK Rowling over her views on trans people was invited to celebrate Burns Night at No 10.

It’s is possible to think that JK is a bit of a top one. You know, pretty good etc? And still think that even people who criticise her might still be sufficeintly within the bounds of polite society to get to go to No 10?

You know, maybe?

Is Konrad Kujau available for comment?

Unity Mitford was known as the “English girlfriend” of Adolf Hitler and scandalised British society by fawning over the man who threatened her country’s liberty.

The discovery of her long-lost diaries has now revealed how infatuated the 1930s socialite was with the fuhrer.

Her leather-bound journal, which has been found after more than 80 years and serialised by the Mail Online,

Visibly Doctrinal – the new book

So there was that book, Invisible Doctrine, by Monbiot and Hutchison. Which, basically, said that neoliberalism – and by extention, the ASI. Madsen Pirie and, in spear carrier role, me – were the source of all modern evil.

So, an examination of the claim.

And a link here:

Available in Kindle and paperback.

Or the normal page here.

It can also be read, chapter by chapter, by subscribing to the Substack. Which is more expensive but there might well be more books this year on the same basis.

Goddammnit

So how do we get those little Amazon ads these days?

Amazon itself says get a link. So:

https://amzn.to/4j5fFe4

Which is fuck all use to anyone

How to get those links with a little ad attached to them?

 

Ah, “full link”.

Blimey

Uploading a book to Amazon is not easy.

Fortunately, I do know someone who knows. But just the responses you get from it. It goes from “this isn’t quite right” to “here are 13 pages on bleed of titles” and yer wha?

Sigh.

Anyone here really understand Amazon publishing?

I know I used to load stuff up for UK and separately for US (for .co.uk and .com). Has that now changed?

And, if there is someone who really grasps all this stuff then perhaps I might be interested in someone stepping up here. I’ve the book, the cover, etc. But the necxt bits baffle a bit.

Eh? What?

With his space business and passing resemblance to Thunderball’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Jeff Bezos could easily be mistaken for a Bond villain.

But the founder of Amazon is now in a real-life struggle against the family who control the rights to 007.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Barbara Broccoli believes that Amazon is run by “f—ing idiots” – and the feud is holding up the release of the next film in the franchise.

Mr Bezos’s corporation bought the rights to release any Bond film when it purchased Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio for $6.5 billion in 2022.

But Ms Broccoli, 64, owns the copyright to Britain’s most famous secret agent and has the final say on script, casting and when a film can go into production.

The daughter of Hollywood legend Albert “Cubby” Broccoli is delaying any move to release another film, the Wall Street Journal reported, over concerns that Amazon is too focused on algorithm-driven “content”.

The producer of Bond movies is complaining about algorithm- driven content?

Rilly?

Yes, OK, they are

Writers and publishers are criticising a startup that plans to publish up to 8,000 books next year using AI.

The company, Spines, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed and distributed with the help of AI.

Independent publisher Canongate said “these dingbats … don’t care about writing or books”, in a Bluesky post. Spines is charging “hopeful would-be authors to automate the process of flinging their book out into the world, with the least possible attention, care or craft”.

“These aren’t people who care about books or reading or anything remotely related,” said author Suyi Davies Okungbowa, whose most recent book is Lost Ark Dreaming, in a post on Bluesky. “These are opportunists and extractive capitalists.”

They’re extractive capitalists.

And?

If readers buy and enjoy these books then that’s an increase in human happiniess. If they don’t it’ll all soon go away.

And?

Hmm, well, yes….

The curse of celebrity authors

In regard to Catherine Bennett’s article, the huge advances paid to celebrity “authors” drains the pool of money that publishers have to pay other, full-time authors (“There is a moral in Jamie Oliver’s story of stereotypical folk, just not one he intended”, Comment). I made a reasonable living writing more than 100 books for children, but couldn’t do it now because the money offered to middle-ranking authors has shrunk as the advances paid to celebrities have risen. When I retired I was being offered the same advances as at the start of my career 35 years earlier.
Richard Platt
Hastings, Kent

A publisher, might, at some point, hope you’ll earn out your advance, no? And if, 50 books in, you show no signs of that then advances are unlikely to, erm, advance.

But just for a little context. Freelance rates – producing an article, a column, that sort of thing – have not changed in the 25 years I’ve been doing this sort of thing. Not changed in nominal terms that is. In real terms they’re down, what, 50%?

One way to win an election

At elections held in October 1954 the candidates of the Communist-controlled National Front, which comprises the Socialist Unity, the Liberal Democractic, The Christian Democratic, the Democratic Peasant and the National Democratic Parties, obtained ninety nine percent of the votes. Electors voted publicly for the single list of candidates by placing it, unmarked, in a ballot box.

One of the reasons I like reading old books – here The Penguin Dictionary of Politics, 1957 – is that you pick up the sort of detail unlikely in more modern productions. Also, a certain dryness in the description of election practices.

Oh God

Richard Seymour, the unthinking man’s Marxist, is back:

For Seymour, then, comradeship isn’t just between humans, but between species and the living world. This is surely the bedrock of not just socialism, but eco socialism.

To better understand this and what we’re losing, it makes more sense to talk about mass extinction than just climate change, he tells me. “It pertains to the destruction and decay and etiolation of life across the board and all the evidence suggests we’re in what some call the end – Holocene mass extinction.” And extinctions reveal all our unacknowledged dependencies; we need plants and other animals. We, human beings, do not sit at the top of a grand hierarchy. Continuing as we are, exploiting other animals and the rest of nature, is unsustainable.

“If you want a less fancy way of putting it: love,” says Seymour. This isn’t necessarily where all Marxists might end up but he adds, “if we’re talking about socialism, what else are we talking about?”

That’s the product of 9 years of deep thinking on hte subject of climate change and the rise of the far right.

This shit is going to be everywhere over the next fwe months.

Sigh.

Genuine writers, eh?

‘It’s quite galling’: children’s authors frustrated by rise in celebrity-penned titles
Keira Knightley is latest star to publish a children’s book, but some say trend pushes aside genuine writers and makes it harder to find great children’s fiction

What is a genuine writer? Someone who’s done the right degree? Been on the right creative writing courses?

No, really, that’s not how it works

Poppy Coburn
The Kamala Harris plagiarism row is a disaster for her campaign
It threatens to compound the perception that she is out of ideas

There are a few millions who follow the details of American election campaigns. Out of those perhaps some few hundred thousand know what plagiarism means.

OK, being perhaps a bit too heroically rhetorical there but still. “She copied some of her book” is not something that will cut through to the electorate en masse. It’s something the American journalistic class get very het up by as they spend their – very expensive – Masters in Journalism years being told that it’s something they should get het up by. In the real world is just doesn’t matter. Well, not unless you do enough of it to trigger a copyright claim.

Storm in newsroom teacup rather than anything else.

Sigh

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales has been hit with a trigger warning by a leading university over “expressions of Christian faith”, it has emerged.

Why not “Warning, contains fart jokes”?

This is lovely

Kate Womersley is a doctor and academic specialising in psychiatry

Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation by Danny Dorling is published by Hurst & Co (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

So a psychiatrist is used to review a book on economics by a geographer.

He cleaves to his theme on economic income, explaining that “none of the eight ‘protected characteristics’ enshrined in UK law matter even a fraction as much as income and wealth” when it comes to inequality: whether or not you can afford a winter coat, internet access, heating, holidays, a new kettle if the old one breaks, or a school friend over for tea are what segregates us. Through these windows on each child’s life, Dorling exposes how financial inequity affects housing, education, health, employment, tech access, social care, rent and food. The stress for families of securing these necessities hums through the chapters.

The doctor fails to spot the geographer’s trick about economics. What is being described is poverty, not inequity. “Npot having enough” is poverty. “Having less than others” is inequty. If lots of people don;t have enough then what we require is a richer nation – more economic growth. Which isn;t the answer the geographer reaches about economics. Amazin’ly.

Oh God, again?

Undercover as a hotel cleaner in Ireland: ‘Lifting the heavy mattress, I cry tears of rage and exhaustion’
Saša Uhlová

Some American bird did it in “Nickled and Dimed”. Then Polly T did it here. I’m sure I’ve seen an update here of Polly’s attempt. And now this?

Can we not gain originality in telling us all how terrible capitalism is?

Great!

It’s a truly dreadful irony: for many of the 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to even a basic water supply, there is likely to be a significant reserve in aquifers sitting just a few metres below their feet.

Groundwater – the water stored in small spaces and fractures in rocks – makes up nearly 99% of all of the unfrozen fresh water on the planet. Across the African continent, the volume of water stored underground is estimated to be 20 times the amount held in lakes and reservoirs.

The opportunity that groundwater presents for increasing access to water is widely recognised, with more than half of the global population already believed to be relying on it for drinking water.

When you add the ability of solar energy to power the necessary infrastructure and the fact that groundwater supplies are much more resilient than surface water during drought, the potential for harnessing this water source to provide a clean and regular supply to communities in chronic need comes into focus.

So, that’s another problem advamncing tech has solved. Aren’t we the lucky ones.

but it must be sustainable and fair

Typical bleedin’ Guardian.

There’s a bit in one of the Reacher novels. He’s down by the Tx/Mx border. Land’s dried out. Old V8 engines (the old 5.7 litre hemis I guess) appear regularly along the roadside. Used to be used – back in the days of fixed and low oil prices – to pump up the groundwater to irrigate. Rising oil prices stopped that decades back now it’s just scrub, near desert.

I realise that I am weird but reading that bit of it – while waiting for the next punch up in the story – my thought was, well, wouldn’t solar powered pumps solve that? And put that land back into agricultural production?

You know, buy southern TX land?

So, whadda we do about it?

Research from BookTrust found that only half of children aged 1-2 from low-income families are read to daily. Furthermore, children from low-income families who do well at the end of primary school are twice as likely to have been read to early in their lives.

“Reading isn’t a silver bullet to solve world poverty, I know that. But it is a major way to improve equality and bring fairness. To dramatically improve the quality of family life and open up possibilities, opportunities. We know children who read have tools for life at their disposal,” Cottrell-Boyce said.

“It is not right and not fair that children who could benefit the most are deprived of a life that is rich in reading.”

I think there’s a truth there but that’s not the point. So, what do we do about it?

Second hand kiddies books are what, 50p each? So each household with a kid in it gets £10 to create a library. We’re done. Or, at least, we’re as done as government policy can make it.

That is, even if there is a real point here there’s not a grand amount that the state can do about it…..