All of a muddle.

It feels like a long time since I put fingers to keyboard for blogging purpose – it's certainly been an aeon since I managed 4 posts a day. Which is probably a good thing for all concerned. Recently the slowdown has been down to sheer pressure of work. I've fallen into marking like a drunk in quicksand. The more I flounder, the more it sucks me down. Iv'e done my online forums, and now I'm marking dissertations. After that it's the second-year Shakespeare/Renaissance essays, and after that it's the motherlode: 108,000 words of first-year drama essays. Great students, but marking really is a chore however good the work is.

There have been brighter spots. I went to two conferences the other week; one on Dissent Studies at Keele University and the other my annual Welsh Writing in English one, always held at the beautiful Neuadd Gregynog in Powys. The Keele gig was fun because it was multidisciplinary: I co-presented a paper on media coverage of the Co-operative Bank's travails, while others spoke about Jonathan Lethem's novels, legal matters, politics and a host of other perspectives. The keynote speaker was meant to be 60s agitator Tariq Ali, but he was too ill to attend. Instead we got a superb talk by cultural studies powerhouse Jeremy Gilbert.

AWWE a couple of days later was one of the best I've been at. We had to have three parallel sessions rather than two for some of the event, there were launches of good books such as Bethan Jenkins's Between England and Wales: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the 18th Century, and the wine flowed. M Wynn Thomas's keynote was a passionate account of the field's genesis and his disappointment that WWiE hasn't been afforded the intellectual respect other subject areas have garnered. None of his books get reviewed in the London literary press, for instance, reflecting a metropolitan uninterest in things Welsh. For the record, my review of his last-but-one book The Nations of Wales should appear in the open-access International Journal of Welsh Writing in English fairly soon. I don't want to give away too many spoilers but basically: it's a genuinely brilliant book. Wynn expanded on his topic with a fire that this generally gentle man rarely unleashes: he excoriated British historians and literary scholars capable only of reading English-language work, and identified a whole load of unexplored research areas for future scholars.

Other highlights included having a few beers with Jamie, whose PhD I examined a couple of weeks ago - all friends now! There were too many appealing sessions to justify sneaking off for a wander in the countryside, and I had to skip friends' talks to attend equally attractive ones. I tried to go to as many postgrad papers as possible – partly to be encouraging and partly to feed off their healthy fresh young blood. I was particularly pleased to hear people talking about the subjects of my PhD (Lewis Jones, Richard Llewellyn and Gwyn Thomas) in ways I hadn't thought about. We also had a compelling  – and visceral – keynote by Jasmine Donahaye about the existence (or not) of creative non-fiction, starting with her account of running over a cat and soon reaching her abbatoir views. Psephologist Roger Scully gave a fascinating account of changing Welsh political landscapes, though he wouldn't be drawn on whether our distinguished colleague Daniel Williams would win Neath for Plaid Cymru. The final keynote was Jon Anderson, the human geographer at the heart of the Literary Atlas Wales project, which is soon to launch. It provided some of the weekend's controversies, particularly the decision to choose only English-language texts. The other spat was Andy Webb's account of Owen Sheers' Pink Mist, which he saw as signalling its Welshness covertly and marginally: he saw the stage play as even more universalist, stripping any Welsh and anti-war material away to make it a Support Our Boys drama. Mr Sheers was following all this on Twitter and was, it's fair to say, less than impressed.

Since that weekend I've also been part of the hiring process for our very first Chair in English (white smoke has yet to emerge) which was interesting but probably not suitable material for a public forum, and done lots of the things that appear in clumps at this time of year: PhD progress reviews, external examiner work and so on. But above it all is the marking.

Wynn says farewell to Alyce von Rothkirch, who is returning to Germany and will be missed

Still, it keeps my mind off the outside world: mass murders at pop concerts and the most breathtakingly sinister and cynical election campaign I've experienced. The Tories in particular seem to be running on a Norsefire agenda of cracking down on democracy per se. Watch this space though: I'm actually running to ground secretive local Tory candidate Paul Uppal tomorrow at a very rare hustings. Your suggestions for questions are very welcome.

The Female Conference Delegate's Check-list.

Sadly, academia is no better than the rest of society when it comes to institutional misogyny: it takes five minutes over coffee to hear the most appalling examples perpetuated by people who probably think they know better, or exist within structures and cultures which do not encourage reflection or critical perspectives.

Which is why this Conference Sexism Bingo Card exists (click to enlarge):

Take it along to your conferences and see which excuses you hear. Having seen it, I wondered how the conference I've co-organised on Welsh writing in English holds up.

• Organisers: one male, one female.
• Prize winners: both female. 
• Keynote speakers/special guests: 4 female, two male.
• Presenters: 25 female, 13 male.  
• Panel chairs: 3 female, one male (more tbc though).

I can't say anything about the attendees yet, as bookings have only just started to trickle in, but I have to say that the Association for Welsh Writing 2015 conference is looking fairly good. Largely female speakers and chairs, A wide range of texts, periods and subjects covered, with no evidence of personal or institutional sexism. We hope the atmosphere and personal behaviour will match this, and I'm pretty certain that it will. We hope too that the debates and critical perspectives taken are also free from patriarchal perspectives which can't be captured in a check-list such as that I employed above: power and discourse are so intimately bound up with notions of sex and gender that unbundling them has to be done slowly, carefully and (obviously) retrospective, and I have no intention of acting like some kind of ideological cop.

The one cavil I have is that of the papers with an identifiable author-subject, it's running in favour of men by 17-11. There has been a concerted effort in the field recently to promote the study of work by female authors, sometimes in the teeth of some who wrongly believed that the political-industrial nature of Welsh anglophone culture meant that there were only male writers. This is part of the wider discussion to be had about female writers and their histories of suppression or exclusion. They were always there, but ignored or silenced by family, publishers, reviewers and also academics. Hence this book:

So I think AWWE15 proves that the top line of excuses doesn't hold true. Nor does 'women never volunteer to present'. Perhaps it's easier in the humanities, which have a larger proportion of female colleagues than some other disciplines, but I'd have to be an idiot to think everything was fine.

If you'd like to attend a conference like this, get in touch. March 27th-29th, Gregynog, Powys.

The wanderer returns

Hi everybody. I'm back from the 25th Conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English (though there was of course considerable overlap between the two languages), held at Neuadd Gregynog near Y Drenewydd / Newtown in Powys. I am bursting with energy and enthusiasm, having spent a few days in snowbound natural beauty talking about all the things I love – and more things I didn't know I'd love – with lots of other enthusiastic, friendly and intelligent people. It was like a mini-holiday.

Gregynog itself was built as a Victorian experiment in concrete. It's a huge, rambling pseudo-Tudor structure with all the quirks that implies. Antique toilets retained for show, enormous rooms with complimentary draughts, beautiful antique and art (there's a fine-art printer, Gwasg Gregynog, on-site – I bought a beautiful pamphlet of Gwyn Thomas's poetry, and left it somewhere I know not where), cake and wine shovelled down your throat seemingly every 23 minutes and no showers. Great big baths, begging for luxuriating in only with 65 other people queuing it seemed rude to really wallow. The grounds are enormous and beautiful, a beauty sharpened by the snow which fell continuously for 36 hours.

Here's the view from my bedroom window at 6 a.m. one morning and – explaining my sadness at returning – the view from my flat last night. You can see all the pictures I took at Gregynog here. To see these samples larger, click on them.

Consequently, the conference felt like it was only one murder or power-cut away from an Agatha Christie mystery. We had a library, a music room and all the other venues for a country-house drama or a live (dead?) edition of Cluedo. I thought, too, of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and The Box of Delights, all texts which require large country houses, a sense of isolation and lots of snow. Sadly the one realm accessible through my wardrobe was an REF panel demanding to know where my articles were and the Student Experience Committee wanting to turn me to stone. Little disagreement about my PowerPoints.

The conference itself focused on Literary Topographies: Mapping Welsh Writing in English literally, literarily and symbolically (focussed, that is, once we'd all stopped repeatedly laughing at England's humiliation at the hands of Wales in the 6 Nations). I couldn't go to everything, as there were usually two sessions running in parallel, but those I did attend were magnificent. M Wynn Thomas and Tony Brown launched their new books on RS Thomas. MWT, who examined my PhD has written RS Thomas: Serial Obsessive while Tony co-edited the Uncollected Poems of RS. I was really pleased to discover that most people share my feeling that the later, less didactic poems are better than the nakedly political earlier work. In the questions we got to talking about presence and absence of nation and god in the poetry, and RST's search for them both. Also launched were the new edition of Allen Raine's A Welsh Witch edited by Jane Aaron and Kirsti Bohata and Katie Gramich's collection of essays on the wonderful Margiad Evans.

M Wynn Thomas in the midst of full-on hwyl

The books being launched. Did I buy them? Of course. And more…

The first keynote speaker was Damian Walford Davies, one of a clan of extremely accomplished critics and authors. His subject was Swedenborg's Skull, Swansea and the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins. He took us through the details of the Swedish mystic's posthumous indignities (his skull was repeatedly purloined, substituted and traded), including its sojourn in Swansea in the mid-twentieth century. Vernon Watkins, friend, mentor and obituarist of Dylan Thomas, said DWD, subtly channelled the Swedenborg story in poems covertly memorialising his deceased friend, along with references to the Mari Lwyd tradition (parading with a mare's skull) and perhaps (I added) to the Celtic tradition of collecting your enemies' skulls and of talking decapitated heads. Entertaining, erudite and  enjoyable.

The Gregynog Dragon - all fire extinguished

Then, it being 10 o'clock, we headed to the cellar bar to carry on the discussion. Next morning, I was up at 6.15 not to beat the queue for the baths (nobody needs to see Plashing Vole en dishabille) but to go for a walk with my camera before everybody stamped through the deep, undisturbed snow. I met Kirsti, a pheasant and a lot of very depressed sheep standing around in what became quite a snowstorm. I make no apology for the huge number of pictures of sheep. I like them. They have a quiet dignity only enhanced by the sure and certain knowledge that they will soon be dinner. Here are some of the snow shots I took. 

Depressed pheasant

Gregynog Hall

Kind of makes you stop and think, doesn't it?

Before long the sheep appeared to look upon me as their Saviour and followed me around the fields bleating piteously. Mind you, I was covered with snow: perhaps they thought I was one of them. 

After a hearty breakfast larger than my usual entire day's intake, I went to the Transformations session. Reuben Knutson presented a fascinating ethnographic documentary/art production examining the hopes and dreams of the 1970s eco-incomers who made their homes in Wales, escaping from what they saw as damaging and self-destructive urban English life. One of the organisers was a child of this movement, as is my colleague Steve, so it was fascinating to see their lives in a wider framework. 

After that, Andy Webb of Bangor University examined poetic responses to the spate of reservoirs built in Wales by English city councils in the 19th and 20th centuries. He used new approaches from human geography to get us to see the reservoirs and the massive amounts of surrounding land as industrial, capitalist products. Without the water, the English cities couldn't expand and develop. So they acquired enormous tracts of Welsh land, flooded historic villages and valleys, and entirely stopped development in the watersheds, meaning that the land we're encouraged to see as natural beauty and as a leisure resource is deeply implicated in capitalist and national imbalance. The poems we discussed were by Ruth Bidgood, RS Thomas, Gillian Clarke and Harri Webb. I didn't know much of Bidgood's stuff: now highly recommended. 

The final presentation was Anwen Jones and Rowan O'Neill's discussion of Owen Rhoscomyl's fascinating and frankly bonkers National Pageant of 1909 and Cliff McLucas's ethnographic-art-human geography-ethnographic-cultural studies exercises he calls 'deep mapping'. All completely new to me but compulsively interesting. I'd like to see some of McLucas's work at some point. 

Quick stop for cake and coffee, then I went to the session on Placing Literature. Jon Anderson and Sarah Morse talking fascinatingly about the porous borders between fiction and reality when texts take 'real' places as settings. The result is that places 'make' texts and texts 'make' places: I know that I'm always aware of the literary significance of the places I visit, such as Lud's Chapel appearing in Gawain and the Green Knight. They also discussed the importance of 'plotline' as a means of readers orienting themselves in a text, in very creative and individual ways. Following that, they showed a film they made tracing the various Cardiffs of several authors, overlapping each one's fictional setting. They also presented this quotation from one of my favourite books, Gwyn Thomas's A Welsh Eye (not the poet Gwyn Thomas previously mentioned):

the geology of remembrance is damnably deep and will need to wait overlong for its final textbook. It will prove to be more insolent and unyielding than the rocks and destructive bubbling filth of this eroded and ambulant clinker. And legend has made our particular case more than usually complicated. 

The final session was a presentation by Bronwen Price, 'Literary Tourism'. Holding a PhD in Welsh literature and working for Llenyddiaeth Cymru / Literature Wales, she organises literary tours around Wales: the Dylan Thomas canoe tour, a talk on RS Thomas in the Manafon church he hated being vicar of, a Tolkien's Wales tour and several others. Some sound tenuous, others fascinating, and I shall be attending several in 2014.

After lunch, I went to Robert Clark's keynote on 'Critical Literary Geography'. Clark runs the subscription site Literary Encyclopaedia and described himself as a 'humanities enterpreneur'. I happened to share the train ride home with him and he told me a lot about his friendships with the late, lamented Angela Carter and Lorna Sage. Clark is soon launching Mapping Writing, which uses Google Maps to locate events in authors lives and in their works, such as Robinson Crusoe's journey. A long time ago it occurred to me that this kind of thing would be excellent. Imagine clicking on, say Bloomsbury to find out that Virginia Woolf wrote a chapter of Orlando in this house on that particular day, while over in Mayfair Bertie Wooster was rudely awakened by Aunt Dahlia. Of course, authors and their texts aren't (and shouldn't be) literally reliable, but it's a fascinating exercise. For instance, Clark explained that calculating the costs and distances travelled by Austen's characters gave one a sense of their social positions and her careful approach to accuracy. From the novels, one can even work out which maps she used, and how these maps created a particular cultural perspective (e.g. by depicting the Great Estates rather than the villages nearby). Bergson, Chatwin, Swift and Lefebvre were all fed into the mix. Interestingly, he also claimed that French intellectuals are swiftly consigning Foucault and Lacan to the intellectual dustbin. I must confess to being surprised, but then I don't keep up with the debate, embarrassingly.

The site works with Safari but it's not quite ready and is better viewed with Firefox. Contributors are being sought and I'm rather tempted.

Robert Clark

I must confess that I skipped the next session. Exhausted, I bought more books and retired to my single bed in the room larger than my entire flat and dozed. Following more tea and cake, I returned to the fray for the Masculine Modernities session. It could have been designed for me, both papers touching on work I've recently done on Welsh masculinities and walking tours. Steve Hendon covered David Jones's and Llewelyn Wyn Griffith's 'Representations of First World War Masculinities' (if you haven't read Jones's In Parenthesis, you're in for a treat: one of the most impressive modernist texts you'll ever encounter), while Tomos Owen discussed WH Davies's and Ernest Rhys's accounts of walking tours through South Wales. I learned an awful lot and took copious notes.

Actor and academic Peter Morgan examines a research poster.

Detail from an enormous painting leaning against a wall

Prof Jane Aaron examines Nor Hashima Isa's poster

Llenyddiaeth Cymru / Literature Wales walking tour guides

After that, more wine and a poster session on new research, followed by dinner and another keynote, Tristan Hughes reading hilariously from his novels and talking about his Canadian-Anglesey life. I'd never heard of him before, but have now ordered all his work. I particularly enjoyed his short story about a flaky, aggressive, deluded New Age hippy. When I was a student at Bangor, every Surrey-dwelling Tarquin and Annabel donned a tie-dye disguise, grew dreadlocks, got faux-Celtic tattoos and tortured us all with bloody digeridoos everywhere we went. I would put them in camps. Or at least take away their trust funds.

The day was only enhanced by the other event on over the weekend: Welsh Young Musician of the Year trials. Gorgeous live music emanating from random rooms wherever I went.

Another trip to the bar ensued, this time chatting to poetry Demiurge Kathryn Gray, Eighteenth-century expert Elizabeth Edwards and the whole CREW (little in-joke there) of postgrads from Swansea, quite the coolest bunch of people I know. I got several tips for my Welsh SF plan and caught up on all the gossip, particularly the tale of the egregiously self-promoting and entertainingly bitter Julian Ruck, a man with even more opinions and fewer brain cells than me: the Swansea crowd got caught up in the media coverage of the man's latest little outburst against the 'Taffy literary establishment' which won't print his appalling books. They spent the day wrecking our heads with the 'missing pound' maths conundrum then spent the early hours wrecking their heads with copious quantities of alcohol. Their disgusting youth meant that they turned up to breakfast looking fresh and relaxed after only three hours in bed. The serene bastards. 

I stayed in bed on Sunday morning rather than go for another walk in the snow. (In case my mother's reading: even this Pope would have forgiven me skipping mass, and anyway I'm an atheist now mother and there's nothing you can do about it). After that, I fancied some genre fiction, so I went to Alyce von Rothkirch's and Catherine Phelps's 'Big Data' take on Welsh crime fiction. I don't read much crime fiction other than Pryce's Aberystwyth noir-parodies, but they demonstrated some fascinating conclusions about the ways in which Welsh crime fiction can be categorised. Then Katriona Mackay discussed Underworlds and the Gothic in Pryce's work and Torchwood. As I'm going to do something on Welsh SF, her material was fascinating and very useful. She and Katie Gramich are doing some fascinating work on Welsh Gothicism, so I'll be keeping an eye out for their stuff. Finally before lunch, Paul Vigor presented his preliminary thoughts on Tolkien's possible use of the Marcher wars as models for his Gondor v Mordor fantasy history, drawing on topography and place-name meanings for support. I've never voluntarily sat through a paper on Tolkien before!

Finally, I went to the session on Writing Places 2. I really wanted to hear Steven Lovatt on Dorothy Edwards (about whom I wrote my MA), but he couldn't make it. Instead, Gwyneth Tyson Roberts and Rita Singer gave what I thought were exemplary papers. Tyson Roberts spoke about two early poems by the 19th-century poet and essayist Jane Williams (Ysgafell). She handed us copies of the poems and pointed out that they were derivative, conventional and even (whisper it) clichéd homages to 18th century poetry rather than the more current Romantic trends. Oh god, I thought. This is going to be dreary. Wrong. Roberts demonstrated with utter conviction that the poems were deliberately written with the taste of literary authority in mind because Williams was 19, sequestered in a Welsh cottage as an au pair and desperate to be accepted as a poet. And if that wasn't enough, Roberts uncovered the covert biographical elements of these seemingly non-specific texts in a virtuoso demonstration of close reading and cultural contextualisation. Afterwards, Rita Singer did something similar with the early 20th-century novels of Allen Raine, explaining that there's a cultural and moral geography at work in her interesting (and finally re-published) texts. 

Readers, returning to the Dark Place and the pile of marking was a struggle. How I wish we'd been snowed in for another couple of days. I had enough pairs of clean under crackers, the wi-fi worked, there's a grand piano and a fully-stocked library. And bar. Instead, here I am in the office once more. 

PS. As you can seen, I'm a prime example of Michael Gove's 'Bad Academics', one of the Enemies of Promise, a Marxist 'Hell-Bent On Destroying Our Schools', one of 'The Blob'. Poor Mr Gove appears to have overdosed on McCarthy speechs, Tea-Party videos and 50s alien invasion movies. I almost feel sorry for him. Almost, but not quite. If he was merely dim, one could forgive him. But Michael's a sold B-grade student: not up to originality, but quite intelligent enough to know better. And he does know better. That's what's so sad. He doesn't really think that the country's schools and universities are packed with traitors brainwashing students. He just knows that's what UKIP voters and Mail readers believe, and he's all too willing to service them. This kind of cynicism is far worse, far more reprehensible than merely being a bit limited in the Grey Matter department. No amount of re-sits will help him now. He should be gently ushered out into the world of work. I'm sure there's a level crossing he could operate, or a lift old-fashioned enough to require an attendant. He'd like that.

Reflections on the piano

The Library corridor

Another library room

I'm quite pleased with this still life of Daffodils

I just liked the symmetry of the stairs

Books reflected in the harpsichord

Again, I just liked the architectural lines

The Jacobins are coming

For the purposes of search engine optimisation, I'd like to say that the first plenary lecture of the 'Wales and Revolution' conference was about sex and delivered by Justin Bieber.

In reality, it was by the very distinguished Romanticist Caroline Franklin and it was much better than sex with Justin Bieber (if you don't know who he is, you're in the right place). She spoke of 'Wales as Nowhere: the tabula rasa of the "Jacobin" imagination'. Basically, she looked at novels and romances by the leading radical creative writers of the day: an early William Godwin novel called Imogen: A Pastoral Romance from the Ancient British (1784), Tamworth progressive industrialist Robert Bage's Mount Henneth (1782), Catherine Parry's Eden Vale (1784), Anna Maria Bennett's Anna; or, Memoirs of a Welch Heiress (I love these rolling titles: there should be more of them: Shameless; Or, A Tale of Mancunian Urchins, or The X-Factor: being a Wondrous and Scarcely Credible Account Of Nincompoopery, Macaronis and Dandies perhaps) and several others which use the pre-industrial, romantically-Other Celtic Wales as the site for critiquing the reactionary capitalism destroying England, and for fantasising an industrial communist or guild-style utopia.

Often closely connected to the Dissenter Industrialists like the Midlands' Lunar Society, they weren't opposed to industry, but saw in it the potential for an equal and harmonious society: Ken McLeod would be impressed, I think. They'd applauded the American Revolution (lots of people in Britain did) and at least the initial phases of the French one, but mainstream opinion was turning against them, and so romance was a safe place in which to propound their political alternatives.

Right - off to the bar to moan about management and talk about books.

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Wales I go

I'm away to spend a weekend in a Welsh stately home. No, I haven't managed to shake off my proletarian social circles and elevate myself to the Wooster classes. I'm going to Gregynog, the country mansion bequeathed to the University of Wales / Prifysgol Cymru for educational purposes.

It's the 2011 conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English, this year's theme being Wales and Revolution. Given that my main academic interest is Welsh literature and my obsession is politics, especially revolutionary politics, this thing is catnip. If only I'd had the time to write a paper for it.

Highlights for me include Matthew Jarvis's 'Writing for Revolution? Reading the Red Poets', H Gustav Klaus's 'Voices of Anger and Hope, 1840s-1940s' (I drew on his work for my PhD), and Röms and Edwards' 'Restaging a Revolution: Wales' First 'Happening' (Cardiff 1965), but all the others look uniformly fascinating.

The other attraction is that Gregynog is a beautiful house set in wonderful parkland: plentiful opportunities for photography. It's good socially too: being outside Wales, I rarely get the chance to catch up with those in my field, some of whom taught me at BA and MA level. I can pick up new ideas, moan about work, and of course buy a lot of books.

The final advantage is that it's one of the few places in the country which doesn't have a mobile phone signal, or it didn't last time I was there: it sits in a bowl below rolling hills. No TV, no phone, perhaps not even wi-fi. Just clever people being passionate about important things. Good job there's a bar.

The place is also home to Gwasg Gregynog (the Gregynog Press): they make the most beautiful books and prints, none of which I'll ever be able to afford (like The Romantics in Wales, a snip at £795, or this bargain £150 edition of The Afanc King and the Sons of Teyrnon with linocut illustrations and beautiful typography). Birdwatching fans with deeper pockets might like Of A Feather: Avian Collective Nouns and Terms of Assembly, accompanied by a number of beautiful woodcuts. A snip at £1750. Any graduating students looking for a way to express their gratitude for three years of enlightenment and learned repartee are welcome to pop a copy in the post.

Actually, the Press annoys me. It makes the most beautiful, hand-crafted books and prints, but these things cost a lot to make. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement aimed to demonstrate that beauty wasn't necessarily expensive: they largely failed, but the intention was there. For Gwasg Gregynog to sustain itself selling tiny runs of deeply obscure titles to very rich people seems undemocratic, to say the least. I'm torn: the existence of these objects is a good thing: the exclusiveness certainly isn't.

This is Kyffin Williams' Rhosgadfan, printed on specially-commissioned hand-made County Mayo paper, limited to 100 copies. Mmmm…

Books books books… yn Gymraeg

It's not often that I'm moved to buy a book by someone of whom I've never heard, on the strength of an academic article.

Er, OK, it is often. But I thought I'd share this one with you in the (vain?) hope that you'd go with me on this one. I've been reading Almanac (no working website), the Association for Welsh Writing in English's yearbook of essays. Amongst the many genuinely fascinating pieces is Rob Gossedge's attempt to revive the reputation of Nigel Heseltine, who I hope isn't related to the evil Tory bastard Michael.

Anyway, Heseltine was the son of monstrous Peter Warlock, an interesting composer who died early, and a difficult mother. They were the rag-ends of the Welsh squirearchy, a particularly obtuse, moronic, traitorous and unsympathetic bunch of wastrels, and its this class which Heseltine satirised in Tales of the Squirearchy, before he became a prolific translator, travel author and literary commentator.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Unfortunately, I've just spent £25 on one of only three copies available on the web, all in the US. What an undignified end to what seems like a talented life.

OK, if satirical short stories about the vanishing aristocracy aren't your thing, this might be: Fflur Dafydd's Y Llyfrgell has won the Daniel Owen Prize at the Eisteddfod. This is seriously prestigious.

The plot and setting are utterly up my street so I'll be breaking out the dictionary for this one:

a controversial novel that takes a peep into one of the major institutions of Wales, the National Library. Set in the year 2020, the novel follows a cast of characters during one dramatic day when two armed lady librarians occupy the Library.

This is a satirical novel, with a large dose of black humour, which lampoons librarians, academicians, civil servants, politicians and janitors, and throws them mercilessly together in a sinister and bizarre crisis. The novel also deals with a number of topical themes – digitisation, post-feminism, literary criticism and, most importantly, a nation’s memory and identity. The novel is an alternative view of the nation’s future, a future where women will govern; politicians overly influence the arts, and the book – and the author – are things that have been forgotten as the new technology takes their place. This is undoubtedly a challenging novel that will upset many a reader – particularly the male critic – and is certain to stimulate debate.

Like Fflur Dafydd’s other works, such as her novel about Bardsey, the novel is an amusing analysis of one of the icons of Wales, with the location itself turning into a major character during the course of the novel, as the reader sees this institution in a new and thrilling light.

Halcyon days of summer

Morning everybody. It's a good day. I've done 56 lengths again, it's a little gloomy, and the rain's beating on the window like a locked-out girlfriend. I'm expecting Daniel for a day's work under my watchful eye, and I'm planning to settle down with a copy of Almanac, the yearbook of the Association for Welsh Writing in English. Other than that, I've a couple of meetings with management as I'm on duty for the union this week and an early manuscript of my colleague Steve's manuscript on Hinduism to look through. Today's soundtrack is Slint (to whom I introduced Neal yesterday) and perhaps some Thomas Tallis.

All in all, it's going to be a perfect day.

Damn… more books

I've just received the very elegant Yearbook of the Association for Welsh Writing in English, Almanac, packed with excellent scholarly articles. This led to the OUP sale page, where I just slapped down £60 for The Oxford Companion to Chaucer, Modernism and Democracy, The Grounds of English Literature (about medieval lit) and The Oxford English Literary History: The Victorians. Mmmm… academic. Now I'm off to Amazon to order Hodd, Adam Thorpe's Robin Hood novel. Must stop this madness.

(Rumours and) Curses

There are few bright spots in my mundane existence, so it's sod's law that two of them are on the same day - my Polish fencing trip and the Annual Conference of those fun-lovin' academics, the Association for Welsh Writing in English. Put 50 genuinely interesting teachers, researchers and authors in a stately home with one of the best bars anywhere (plus a lot of very special books on sale) and the results are fascinating. I shall genuinely miss it this year.