More from a magpie

I will give you an insight into my sad, magpie-like brain via a post of some links of what caught my interest on the blogs in the past couple of days (no crime fiction):

Lyn Gardner asks on the Guardian arts blog whether peer-review can work for the performing arts. The process works pretty well in various academic spheres: publication of articles in journals and funding projects, for example. I like the idea of peer-review for Euan McGregor in Othello or Suzanne Shaw in Dancing on Ice.

Inky Circus profiles Olivia Judson, daughter of Horace Freeland (author of The Eighth Day of Creation) and herself author of Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation and much more besides. I never knew before what OJ looks like: she is highly photogenic, in a rather different way to the T. Rex unmentionable (on this blog) body part discussed in the article - rather more Keira Knightley or Keeley Hawes in style, I'd say.

For St Patrick's Day (yesterday in case you hadn't noticed), Mark Thwaite at the Book Depository lists the ten greatest Irish novels in the past 30 years. Genre is out and I promised no crime fiction, so all I will say is that I don't think the Roddy Doyle on there is his best.

Thirty-six comments so far on Jenny Geras's Picador blog post on the controversial Orange prize for fiction. For some reason this year, everyone is taking polarised positions on whether it is a good thing, or not, to have a women-only book prize. Predictably, the Telegraph leads the anti-women pack, and Jenny features some choice comments from the Telegraph online comments which she guesses will have been removed from the site itself -- and which she thinks show inadvertently why the prize is needed. Me? I am out of my depth on it, but.....

Here is Female Science Professor (FSP) on being introduced before giving a talk: "here is my top-3 list of most loathed introductory remarks, with #1 being the one I have hated the most:
3. FSP killed her advisor.
2. FSP is The Best Woman scientist in her narrow sub-discipline of Science.
1. FSP is The Wife of Brilliant Professor X."
One is tempted to write QED for the pro-Orange prize lot on reading the FSP. In her regular and telling blog posts, she epitomises how far we have to go before we, as a race, can call ourselves civilized.

OK, my brain is tired and that's it....apart from to thank Dave Knadler, who does not blog often enough, for posting about the Onion's article on Novelists' Strike Fails to Affect Nation Whatsoever. Cue wry smile.

Comments

[Mark Thwaite]

Hiya Maxine,

Thanks for the link to "my" list of "the ten greatest Irish novels in the past 30 years". Just to clear it up, it is actually James Joyce expert David Pierce's list. My list would NOT have included Roddy Doyle either, although David's own recent book ("Reading Joyce") might have sneaked in if I could bend the rules a bit!!