"It was prime rib and plain steak"

Stephen Fry takes tea with Lady Gaga for the FT (site registration required)!

(The cakes on the tiered stand look pretty appealing also...)

Monday grumbling

I rouse myself from illness and lethargy to share a lovely little bit from WWD (!) about a power luncheon at La Grenouille in support of the International AIDS Vaccine Initative, sent to me by Dave Lull because he knows of my interest in Oliver Sacks:

To raise funds to secure more L-dopa, the mild-mannered Sacks said lightly, “I did what I never did before in my life. I went to a luncheon.” Though he’s likely been to several such gatherings since, Sacks’ tie let on that he’s never going to be the conventional party-goer. It was blue with yellow banana slugs on it, a tribute to UC Santa Cruz, where Sacks once taught. “I have a thing for mollusks,” he explained

My enjoyment of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy was not augmented by the shared highlighted comments that the Kindle showed me, which invariably hinged upon the most banal and aphoristic pronouncements, so I have now turned that function off. The books themselves are grippingly readable, in spite of an occasional lack of subtlety in the psychology (individual and political) and flatness in the prose - I ordered books 2 and 3 for instant delivery as soon as I had read the first few chapters of the first one, and really I read them straight through pretty much without putting them down except when absolutely necessary.

I had lunch with my agent today (I felt so sick I almost canceled, but I knew it would be a great disappointment to me if I missed seeing her while I am in New York). She had wise advice, and once I'm back in Cayman I'll buckle down to do a good rewrite on the style book (a number of the editors who passed this time will look at a 'next' version, and it really will depend on where the revisions take me whether it will be better suited to be a university press or a trade book) and also to try something (is this top secret, should I be embargoing it?!?) that seemed to me a very interesting suggestion: to combine the manuscripts of The Explosionist and Invisible Things into one long novel so that she can pursue some possible European interest. That is definitely a long book, but it is truly one continuous story; I was very careful to make the second book self-sufficient, it should work well for readers who didn't read the first one, so some of those explanations may need to be taken out again, but I will be interested to see how it looks.

I would love it if the books could have a single-volume afterlife - really I wish Tor would publish the story as a fat mass-market paperback with a lurid fantasy cover!

"Aesthetic promptings and hesitations"

From Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty:

He was wearing the same old jeans of their first date, which for Nick now had a touching anecdotal quality, he knew them and loved them; and a zipped-up tracksuit top which made him look ready for action, or for inaction, the rigours and hanging about of training.

Ace cartography

At the TLS, Peter Hennessy reviews Brian Harrison's new history of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. An interesting topic, and some very good snippets:

From a journal to which I was hitherto a stranger, Heating and Ventilating Engineer, [Harrison] has gleaned that in the UK, the “average living room was over 5° Fahrenheit warmer in 1970 than in 1950[.]”

A. J. P. Taylor’s celebrated English History 1914–1945 has stuck to the Velcro of my memory, for example, partly because of his use of the brilliant cameo biographical footnote of which the second one in his first chapter was particularly unforgettable: “George V (1865–1936), second son of Edward VII: married Princess Mary of Teck, 1893; King, 1910–36; changed name of royal family from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor, 1917; his trousers were creased at the sides not front and back”.

Treacle Mine Road

British town 'twinned' with Discworld capital Ankh-Morpork - and a fuller account at the Independent.

(NB photo accompanying second story makes me feel I must adopt a more striking style of authorial dress.)

"Unisex Richard III isn't always what the occasion demands"

A. L. Kennedy is funny!