Be respected literary novelists, that is?

Here be blokes going wah wah wah about the plight of the male novelist, lo, the voice of the Mybug B heard in the land, no?

Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025:

“Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.” The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

And apparently at least one of the lairy 'scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male' novelists of the 90s who cannot catch a break these days:

["W]rites crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

Oh, wait.

I do wonder WHY they want to write SRS LTRY FIKSHUN??? is it all about the Kultural Kred? (Am currently reading Norma Clarke on Goldsmith and Grub Street, and how it was Not Gentlemanly to be a hack who wrote for filthy lucre, and the delicate balancing acts Georgian literary figures had to engage in.) And why are they all about being warty boys when they do so rather than being, oh, Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald or noted for their exquisite prose style? is it also about Macho Cred?

My own literary tastes among the Blokes of the Pen whose works you will tear from my cold dead hands have been discursed of here and they range widely. I can't help imagining several of them waxing satyrik about this lot.

This weeks bread: a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Heritage Seeded Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: penne with bottled sliced artichoke hearts.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, strong white flour - perhaps just a little stodgy.

Today's lunch: kedgeree with smoked basa fillets - forgot the egg due to distractions and basa cooking rather more slowly than I had anticipated, still quite good - served with baked San Marzano tomatoes (we entirely repudiate the heretical inclusion of tomatoes in kedgeree but they are perfectly acceptable on the side), and a salad of little gem lettuces quartered and dressed with salt, ground black pepper, lime juice and avocado oil.

I don't know if anyone else has clocked this, which sounds like another of those vexatious cases brought by Christian homophobes, about the rainbow pedestrian - or as I was wont to call them in my youth, 'zebra' - crossings. The logic is, shall we say, convoluted.

Camden resident Blessing Olubanjo has told the local authority to get rid of the three blue, pink and white-painted pedestrian crossings... or else she would begin judicial review proceedings. She complained that the markings, installed in 2021 during Transgender Awareness Week, infringed her rights as a Christian and constituted “unlawful political messaging”. In a letter to the Town Hall, she said: “As a Christian and a taxpayer, I should not be made to feel excluded or marginalised by political symbols in public spaces.” Ms Olubanjo has been supported by Christian Legal Society, which has cited a section in the Local Government Act 1986 prohibiting councils from publishing material that appears to promote a political party or controversial viewpoint, and the crossings were a form of ‘publication’.

But where is this that she is protesting?

Why, in the very heart of Bloomsbury, and not just Any Old Bit of Bloomsbury ('living in squares, loving in triangles') but Marchmont Street.

Where we may find the iconic Gay's the Word bookshop as featured in the movie Pride (inaccurately described there as being in Soho) and a blue plaque for Kenneth Williams, and close by one for Boulton and Park.

Anyway Camden Council '“entirely rejects” her argument, and [said] that the borough has “no place for hate”' and the views of local people taken by The Local Democracy Reporting Service were very much on the side of leaving the crossings be.

“They were lost to their passion and their lust” - it's actually Buddhist monks in Thailand, but this is not a scenario unknown in the annals of Christian monasticism in Europe, hmmmmm?

The disappearance of a respected monk from his Buddhist temple in central Bangkok has revealed a sex scandal that has rocked Thailand, with allegations of blackmail, lavish gifts and a string of dismissals raising questions about the money and power enjoyed by the country’s orange-robed clergy. Investigations into the whereabouts of senior monk Phra Thep Wachirapamok unexpectedly led police to a woman who the police suspect conducted intimate relationships with several senior monks, and then blackmailed them to keep the liaisons quiet.

Monks in Thailand receive monthly food allowances of between 2,500-34,200 baht (£57-785), depending on their rank, but temples and monks also receive donations. The latter can prove especially lucrative for monks of higher stature, who might be given tens of thousands of baht, or even more, by wealthy individuals.

But this is just Damn Weird:

A group of seminarians studying at Denver’s St. John Vianney Theological Seminary were taken on the trip in January 2024 by then-vice rector of the seminary, Fr. John Nepil, during which they were woken in the middle of the night and invited individually to swear a “blood oath” in a ceremony involving a dagger and a man in a yeti costume. During the bizarre ceremony, video of which was sent to The Pillar by multiple sources in the archdiocese, seminarians were told to scream as if in pain before returning with a bloodied cloth wrapped around their hand and their mouths taped shut, to a room where others waited for their turn to be brought in.

[T]he idea of this prank came from the man hosting the seminarians and the seminary staff on the ski trip, whom he confirmed was the person in the yeti costume. “This Catholic man is well known in the town and is regularly asked to appear at events in this costume,” Nepil said. “He has done this specific prank many times with family, friends, and other guests who stay at his ski cabin. At no time was there any risk of physical harm, but in hindsight, and even though the host wanted to do this, it should have never happened.”

(Is the yeti actually a fursona, we ask.)

What I read

Finished Long Island Compromise, and okay, didn't quite go where I was expecting but didn't pull a really amazing twist either.

Alison Espach, The Wedding People (2024), which somebody seemed enthusiastic about somewhere on social media while mentioning it was at 99p. Well, I am always there for Women's Midlife Narratives but this struck me as a bit over-confected plotwise and I was not entirely there for that ending.

Latest Literary Review (with, I may as well repeat, My Letter About Rebecca West).

Simon Brett, Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse (The Major Bricket Mysteries #1) - Simon Brett is definitely hit and miss for me and some of his more recent series have been on the 'miss' side, come back Charles Paris or the ladies of Fethering. But this one, if not quite in the Paris class, was at least readable.

On the go

I have got a fair way in to Jonny Sweet, The Kellerby Code (2024) but I'm really bogging down. It's an old old story (didn't R Rendell as B Vine do a version of this) and for someone who cites the lineage Sweet does, his prose is horribly overwrought.

I started Rev Richard Coles, Murder at the Monastery (Canon Clement #3) (2024) but found the first few chapter v clunky somehow.

Finally picked up Selina Hastings, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life (2020), which is on the whole v good. Okay, blooper over whether Sybille could have become a barrister: hello, the date is post Sex Disqualification Removal Act and I suspect Helena Normanton had already been called to the bar. However, the actual practicalities might well have presented difficulties. And wow, weren't her circles seething with lady-loving-ladies? And such emotional complications and partner changes! there's no 'quiet spinster couple keeping chickens/breeding dachshunds' about what was going on. Okay, usually conducted with a fair amount of discretion and probably lack of visibility, though even so.

Helen Garner, This House of Grief (2014), which I actually started a couple of weeks ago at least, and picked up again for train reading today, as the Bedford bio is a large hardback.

Up next

I am very much in anticipation of the arrival of Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb (The Trials of Gabriel Ward Book 2)

Have been involved over the last day or so in the discovery and revelation of a hoohah over an esteemed bibliographer having copped to having fabricated a set of letters, of which the transcriptions appear on their website, with, true, a provenance note that might give one to be a tad cautious when citing.

But anyway, someone I know did actually cite something from one of these letters - fortunately not as a major pillar of an argument or anything like that - in their book which is only just published (and copy of which for review I finally received last week). And was informed by the perpetrator.

Cue kerfuffle. The ebook can be readily corrected but not the hardback copies.

But anyway, this led to me (particularly given subject and period) to think upon an instance I had encountered of learning - from the author no less - that a series of supposedly authentic Victorian erotic novels had been knocked up (perhaps that is not the phrase one should employ?) as remunerated hackwork for a paperback publisher in the 1990s.

A few of these are now accessible via the Internet Archive and I discover that they have introductions setting them up as Orfentik Discoveries of the writings of a Private Gents Club.

Anyway, I wrote this all up for my academic blog, and there has been discussion on bluesky about hoaxes and fakes and also I introduced the topic of people being misled by fictional pastiches that were not meant to mislead (or at least, like 'Cleone Knox''s work, have long been known to be made up).

(Ern Malley complicates this like whoa, since it has been claimed that the authors of the hoax actually produced SRS surrealist poetry whether they meant to or not.)

And as a scholar and an archivist I am against hoaxes and fakes and people inserting false documents into archives and so on -

- but I still have the occasional qualm that some naive reader will not read the disclosure of the real origin story right at the back of the volumes and think that the Journals of Mme C-, subsequently Lady B-, actually exist.

Dr rdrz may have noticed that (in spite of the FAIL at getting to the Birmingham workshop in early May) I have gradually been Getting Out Into the World beyond health-related appointments and walks in the local parks.

Am still being possibly unwontedly cautious.

But, anyway, on Saturday went to a BBQ in coughingbear and hano's garden - slightly earlier this year than the usual Mahv'll'ss Pahti of the summer - and it was lovely to see them and other friends after so long being A Hermit.

Still (as found at conference the other week) having issues adjusting to the hearing aids - when there are several conversations happening - I think this possibly depends a bit on where I am positioned in relation to them - a distinct sense of (very dating reference) trying to tune in radio and getting two or more overlapping stations.

But on the whole was, I think, Coping.

This week's bread: a Standen loaf, 4:1 Strong Brown/buckwheat flour, with maple syrup (last drain from bottle) instead of honey and Rayner's Malt Extract. V nice.

During the course of the week I made Famous Aubergine Dip to take to a BBQ.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe: approx 70/30% wholemeal/white spelt flour, Rayner's Malt Extract, dried cranberries, not bad.

Also made foccacia to take to BBQ.

Today's lunch: sweet potato gratin with black olive tapenade (as there were sweet potatoes left over from last week), served with warm green bean and fennel salad (I did use tarragon vinegar but I think this had rather lost its oomph) and baby green pak choi stirfried with garlic.

This time it was online, in Teams, and worked a bit better than some Team events I've attended, or maybe I'm just getting used to it.

A few hiccups with slides and screen sharing, but not as many as there might have been.

Possibly we would rather attend a conference not in our south-facing sitting-room on a day like today....

But even so it was on the whole a good conference, even if some of the interdisciplinarity didn't entirely resonate with me.

And That There Dr oursin was rather embarrassingly activating the raised hand icon after not quite every panel, but all but one. And, oddly enough, given that that was not particularly the focus of the conference, all of my questions/comments/remarks were in the general area of medical/psychiatric history, which I wouldn't particularly have anticipated.