Death by a thousand sequels

I'm drowning in work this week: mostly induction talks and trying to find out where the students who missed induction talks might be and working out how many students we actually have and whether that's an astonishingly good number all things considered or an astonishingly bad one and where we're going to teach them and whether there's an ethical or moral problem with teaching (e.g) the Holocaust while lounging on the bean bags furnishing our new teaching space and so on and so forth. In a word: your normal Freshers' Week. The bright spot is meeting new students – my admittedly limited contact with them leads me to be hopeful.

In the midst of all this, I've managed to do some reading and listen to some music. Thanks to a friend's performance from memory of Sonic Youth's grossly offensive yet seductive 'Tunic (Song for Karen)' (Carpenter, that is) and the discovery that I don't actually own any of their LPs – possibly part of the vinyl haul I sobbingly sold during the Great Teaching Hours Drought of 2003) I've acquired several in one go:



So far the one I'm enjoying most is Goo, followed by Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. Which reminds me: Dinosaur Jr. released a new album last month that I still haven't bought. The other album I've just acquired is an NMC release of Emily Howard's compositions. I remember a few years ago looking through my classical section and realising that I didn't own a single piece of music by a female composer other than a collection of Hildegard of Bingen sacred settings. Having read Joanna Russ's wonderful How To Suppress Women's Writing I knew that there must be oceans of good music out there, lost, silenced, unperformed or unpublished and that I'd missed out badly, so I've started seeking it out. I haven't yet been disappointed, though some is less to my taste than others. Howard's great: she has a background in maths and science, and her music tackles the forces that drive the universe.



Amongst the recent discoveries, I've really got into Pauline Oliveros. An accordionist into drone electronica: what's not to like?





I'm also very partial to a bit of Sally Beamish, particularly her Viola Concerto: much more classical modernist than experimental, but moving and thought-provoking.



Others I've listened to recently: Deirdre Gribbin, Imogen Holst, Kaija Saariaho, Roxana Panufnik (her father Andrzej is underrated too) and Julia Wolfe.

And now to books: this week I've read one good one and one terrible, shameful waste of ink. The good one is Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford, a beautifully written – speculative – romp through the short life and untimely death of Christopher Marlowe who in this novel loves boys, poetry and pub brawling, but is less keen on spying and the violent deaths that ensue from his espionage activity. There are walk-on parts for Shakespeare, Greene and various other contemporaries, and it's written with a nod to the speech, vocabulary and orthography of the day. I wouldn't rely on it to write an essay on Marlowe but it's diverting and thoughtful.

The terrible book I read saddens me. I loved Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, her fictional, imaginary biography of Laura Bush: it had so much to say about American, sexual relations and power. It led me to read her other novels too, including Prep, a fascinating look at the chilly schooldays of the WASPs. And so, liking Sittenfeld and being an Austen nut, there's no way I wasn't going to read her retelling of Pride and Prejudice, entitled Eligible. 

Not that I was entirely starry-eyed: I have already read several Austen retellings that did no good for my blood pressure. I'm happy to admit that Clueless is by far the best adaptation I've ever seen: a perfect example of how the spirit of Austen's social structures and plots can be reproduced without slavishly photocopying the original. The worst one – by far – is PD James's 'sequel' to P and P: Death Comes to Pemberley, in which the characters assemble while the killer of Mr Wickham is sought. Reader: I cannot remember reading so dreadful a novel, especially one by a long-established, acclaimed author. It's like PD James had a personal grudge against both Jane Austen and the English language and sought to do to them what she does to Mr Wickham. The original Austen mash-up, Pride and Prejudice With Zombies is far, far more faithful to the spirit and style of Jane's work, while Bridget Jones's Diary (Bridget, like me, is unfairly mocked for being a graduate of Bangor University's very fine English and Linguistics department) wears its debt to Austen both visibly and lightly. The other one I rather like is The Price of Butcher's Meat, Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe police procedural retelling of Austen's fragment Sanditon.

 I thought that Death Comes was the worst anyone could do to Austen until I started reading Eligible. I thought that given Sittenfeld's excellent track record in anatomising upper-class American life she might to a decent job. It's set in Cincinnati, which must be the equivalent of Netherfield – self-regarding, provincial, smug but rich. Mr Bingley is now 'Chip' Bingley, a wonderful doctor who appeared on a series called Eligible (modelled on Love Island) but not entirely willingly: his 'manager' is his sister Caroline. Darcy is a pompous surgeon, and the Bennet girls are older than in Austen's original, and their social situation is rather different. Lizzy is a style journalist, Jane is a yoga instructor, Mary's a permanent student probable lesbian and perhaps even a feminist (outrageous!), while the younger two are foul-mouthed gym bunnies. Mr Bennet has recently had a heart attack and Mrs Bennet is a shallow shrew. Essentially it's like buying a posh car to discover that someone's ripped out the good bits and added go-faster stripes, bucket seats and a Trump bumper sticker. It manages to maintain Austen's attack on snobbery while being supremely snobbish.

Worst of all, however, is the writing. I cannot adequately convey the awfulness of the dialogue, from the abysmally-failing attempts to make Mr Bennet and others sound dryly witty, to the obsessive addition of 'she said' or 'he said' to every utterance as though the implied reader cannot follow a conversation even if it lasts no more than two sentences.

“That wasn’t bad,” Liz said. “Especially for someone who scored as low as you did on the verbal part of the SATs.”
“Stop quarrelling, girls,” Mrs Bennet said. “It’s unbecoming.”
“They’d never speak to one another otherwise,” Mr Bennet said.

It's not a satirical reproduction of degraded Cincinnati posh parasites' slang: it's just cloth-eared, crude, leaden, lumpen and patronising. Austen may be conservative and didactic but her wit and intelligence shine through in ways that Sittenfeld – in this novel anyway – can't manage.

I own Joanna Trollope and Val McDermid's Austen's retellings in the same series: I'm now dreading reading them. There's a long tradition of appropriating characters, texts and plots to do something new with them – in the 18th century people didn't even wait for authors to die before rushing out cheap and unauthorised sequels to best-sellers – and many of them are successful on their own terms. Eligible may just have cured me of the habit of reading them. Though I have just bought the Manga Emma.

To have sex with the ocelot, turn to page 45

At last! The literary world has found room for a contemporary twist on the Choose Your Own Adventure stories, of which I owned several as a young tyke. I can't remember which ones I read, though I vaguely remember Nazis featuring heavily, but I do remember finding them boring and frustrating:

I presume that the books were a response to the perceived threat of computer games, which were beginning to evolve from simplistically teleological (win/lose or live/die) narratives to more sophisticated texts in which simple actions were replaced by complex decision-making. I guess Skyrim is a decent modern version, as the quests can be ignored in favour of exploration to some extent. My favourite computer game, by the way, is this one. You can play it for free, for ever. I have memorised the books and still can't get far. I also used to play Civilization II but gave up once I realised that it was ideologically constrained: it was impossible to succeed by running a peaceful socialist state, and I hate being lectured to.

The other motivation is of course the perception that boring old novels with their starts, middles and ends were incapable of holding a cool 80s kid's attention, too bossy and prescriptive for Gen-X rebels. In this sense, I'd have to say that they were failures. The idea that the reader was 'free' to choose an adventure of his or her own was illusory, and the illusion was brought to the fore by the mechanism. The slim books only held room for a certain number of choices, and in particular of endings. The mechanism of narrative was laid bare in a really boring way for me, though that in itself was educational, I suppose.

Paradoxically, the classic novel affords the reader far more freedom than the CYA ones. The latter are solely about plot: there's almost no characterisation or narrative commentary. Entirely written in second-person ('You reach a fork: to turn left, turn to page 31…'), the destination becomes the only thing of interest and the outcomes were so stark that boredom is inevitable. Where the traditional Bildungsroman would end with the protagonist growing up, understanding society, himself and his place in (or out of) society, the CYA novels would end with 'You are dead' or 'you find the treasure'. Not much room for ambiguity or side plots, let alone allowing the reader to prefer death or not care about the treasure. While established genres have more or less authoritarian narratives, none of them are quite so reductive. Tristram Shandy's black page and the first-person narration of Tristram's own conception, various authors' use of pages to be read in random order, or the seemingly random flow of Ulysses leave the reader with far more freedom of interpretation, understanding and creation than the CYA sub-genre. Even the less experimental texts are implicitly more adventurous than CYA ones. Take Pride and Prejudice and its famous opening sentence:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

So many choices have to be made just by the time you reach the end of this sentence. Your choices dictate what kind of novel you read. Imagine assuming that this sentence is entirely seriously intended. The result is a novel in which the interest lies in getting the rich man a wife and we're just reading for a conservative happy ending in which the rich man acquires his female trophy. It's a romance, slightly undercut by the monetary foregrounding (which makes a 'straight' reading difficult). Let's choose another adventure: let's assume the narrator is being ironic. Just by changing the tone of voice, we have a completely different novel which uses satire to challenge established social conventions. There are other choices to make. Is this an external narrator, refereeing the action and characters, or are the attitudes of one particular character being relayed (we call this free indirect discourse) and perhaps even mocked? If so (and I'd suggest Mrs Bennet) then we have not just a social comedy or satire, but rather a cruel parody of a woman trying her best in difficult circumstances to provide for her daughters. Another possibility is that the text sympathetically explores the precarious situation of young women whose only salvation is in snaring the young man, whether they (or he) wish to or not.

That's not all: as long as Choosing Your Own register and genre, you have all the fun of reading with or against your narrator, picking your characters' clothes, appearance, back-story, preferred fates, accents and a host of other things. A decent book will leave you with lots of space to interpret events, statements, implications and endings for yourself, far more than a CYA novel will.

And what of the new Choose Your Own Adventure novels? Rather boringly, they're Choose Your Own Sexual Adventure texts. Not 'boringly' in the sense of 'middle-class academic takes fashionably dismissive view of sexual content', but boringly in the sense that this was inevitable and will inevitably be entirely reductive and predictable. In one way, sex is the ideal subject for a sub-genre (no pun intended) with the limitations described above. However you look at it, the basic permutations of sex are pretty limited and mechanical, and for men at least, lead quickly to a defined end-point, however one chooses to get there. As Pulp's jaded take on sex and by extension life, 'This Is Hardcore' puts it,

I've seen the storyline played out so many times before.
Oh that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there. & then it's over.

Oh, what a hell of a show but what I want to know:
what exactly do you do for an encore?

The inventive aspect of sex, and sex writing, is how one dresses up the the permutations and divert attention from their repetitiveness. The books will feature a few relatively mild sexual options (light S+M, different locations, no doubt some class and racial mixing) all of which will tell you quite a lot about the idealised readership's cultural state, but they'll be as boring as porn, which I'm told also lacks compelling plots, characterisation or discursive variation.

The limited nature of the children's versions of CYA books will only be accentuated by the sexual versions. All the readers will know (at least in theory) what the preferred ending will be, and certainly won't be pleased by a realist treatment. Just imagine it:

p. 1. A rich man invites you to stay with him on his yacht. If you choose to go with him, turn to page 3.
p. 3. Your sexual adventure is over in 32 seconds. Your partner claims that this has never happened before and falls asleep. He later wakes up, gets your name wrong and explains that his wife doesn't understand him while ostentatiously looking at his watch. Go back 7 pages and try again. 

or

Your new acquaintance asks you to use some toys and 'sexy' clothes. Do you a) laugh derisively or b) give it a go? If b) turn to page 69.
p. 69. Your partner is snoring loudly. You lie awake in the dark empty, disappointed, unfulfilled and used. Do you wish to try again or browse dejectedly for LOLCats on your phone until sweet oblivion takes pity on you?

Actually, I'm tempted to give writing one of these a go. Although Joe Dunthorne, whom I admire very much, has already written one.

If you think I'm being overly mean, let's have a look at what these books actually do:

"you" are a woman who has been stood up in a swish hotel bar. When a stranger mistakes you for a high-class escort, slips you an envelope full of cash and invites you to his room, the first of many choices begins. 

Erotic adventures could include "enticing two young men into a memorable threesome", "dinner with a stressed-out executive involv[ing] more than food on the table", or a visit to a porn set. "Remember, even if you choose submission, the control is still all yours," says the publisher.

Interestingly, the author decides that some Adventures won't feature:

Dominatrix for instance, just didn't come out erotically.

So: choosing your own adventure starts by asserting a fixed sexual identity: female and heterosexual, with the cash-sex nexus and male dominance firmly established, despite the claims that the female reader at whom the novels are aimed remains 'in charge'. The only choice is between thinly-disguised variations of tired, conventional social positions (no pun intended, once again) with no opportunity for genuine transgression ('You arrive at the zoo. If you wish to sleep with an ocelot, turn to page 45…').

Choose Your Own Adventure indeed! The only real choice is whether to further enrich an opportunist publisher by buying another coil of old literary rope, or retire to bed with nothing other than your own imagination. Or a copy of Ulysses. And my answer to that would be:

yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

'The person…who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid'

So said Mr Tilney, in Northanger Abbey, reflecting Jane Austen in typically waspish form (if you don't think waspishness is typically Austenian, stop watching the TV adaptations and start reading the books). I'm not sure he's right – my own dear parents have never knowingly opened a novel but aren't noticeably stupid, but it's a good line.

There's a new Austen project afoot: six very well-known authors have been commissioned to write new versions of Austen's novels. Joanna Trollope's Sense and Sensibility is out now, followed by Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey, Curtis Sittenfeld's Pride and Prejudice and others to follow. Interesting choice of authors. Trollope does social mores well, McDermid's crime fiction lends itself well to the creepy mock-Gothic of Northanger, while Sittenfeld's Prep, The Man of My Dreams and American Wife all deal with territory close to Austen's: forming a self, finding a place, being a woman in a masculine public sphere.

I'll be buying them. I think it's an interesting idea, and I like the authors so far (though I've only heard McDermid speak, rather than read any of her books). I'm interesting in Jane Austen's afterlives as much as I am the books. My boss calls her 'the most dangerous author in literary history': he sees her work as a trap for women reader and writers, and as a diversion from literature's counter-hegemonic mission (I think: I only got the short version of his quite famous lecture, delivered in a corridor on the way to a seminar). I can empathise with the argument but for me Austen is the author of despair, desire and yawning insecurity: beyond the frocks, these women are engaged in a desperate battle for survival no less real for the privileged surroundings. I'm fascinated by what happens to Austen afterwards: the way her family and admirers tried to hug her work to death for instance, burning diaries and suppressing anecdotes which made Jane look less saintly. Then there are the cults of Austen which popped up in unlikely places, such as WW1 trenches as escapist fantasies and reminders of the values supposedly being defended (read Harman's Jane's Fame and Sutherland's Jane Austen's Textual Lives on this). I enjoyed Bridget Jones as an Austen adaptation, appreciated Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well as Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen as witty homages, and above all Clueless: it lost the political edge but remains one of the truest film adaptations of all, despite the total absence of corsets and carriages.



I also hugely enjoyed a spiritual ancestor of this project, ITV's tongue-in-cheek Lost In Austen. 



So I'm going to buy these adaptations, despite the critical alarm at the project. Yes, it's clearly an attempt to cash in on Jane to shift some books, but I can't get angry about that. I'm actually quite appalled at the idea raised by Elizabeth Day that it's a waste of time 'reading something that lifts its ideas from someone else'. I haven't read her novels, but I'd be surprised if they were entirely original, given that even Shakespeare nicked large chunks of plot from a plethora of sources including Chaucer, who lifted enormous chunks of his work from the Italians and so on ad infinitum. Day worries that there's no suspense in the adaptations because we know what happens - but surely any sophisticated reader will enjoy the quality (or absence thereof) of the writing: we don't always read for the plot (I hope).

It's long been a cliché that there are only six basic plots to any narrative, but it's nonetheless true(ish). Even if these books are terrible – and the shadow of PD James's awful Death Comes To Pemberley hangs over them like a ghost at the party – they'll be interesting.* Austen's novels weren't 'original' in that they're largely about privileged young women getting married, but the way she handled the elements was original. What will be interesting about these texts is the decisions made about which Austenian elements are retained, or adapted, or dumped. How much water has flowed under the cultural bridge since then?

I don't really buy the argument that Austen needs to be made 'relevant', nor the argument that we should read her work because it's 'relevant'. Relevance be damned. I'm not an upper-class early Victorian virgin in want of a husband and large estate, but I read Austen because I'm capable of empathy and because the work is well-written. If Trollope's Sense and Sensibility is rubbish, I'll hurl it into the circular file, but I don't 

When Day criticises these authors for 'lifting' ideas unoriginally, I imagine someone round at Turner's house ('Not another fecking seascape!') or Stubbs's latest viewing ('Horses again, George? Really?'). Nobody criticised the English Renaissance writers for attempting sonnets, with all the rules handed down: what people criticised was the worst practitioners' adherence to the letter rather than the spirit of the law, hence Shakespeare's mocking 'My Mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun…'.

I've still got Walter Benjamin and Baudrillard on my mind: these adaptations certainly strip away the 'aura' of genius – which is a good thing – and are in a sense hyperreal or second-order simulacra, but I don't think we should worry. Jane's work is good enough to withstand a few shonky adaptations. Relax!

*Seriously, you'll want to pluck out your eyes and wipe your memory after this excrescence.

And finally…

Last few shots of my weekend in Winchester (rest of the set here, or enlarge these ones by clicking on them). I promise tomorrow the thrill will have worn off and I'll be wearily blogging my outrage at the Tories/Leveson/the Tour de France once more. After I've gone to a 9 a.m. meeting, that is…

A lovely medieval statue mutilated in the Reformation's iconoclastic stage

Part of Bishop Fox's tomb in Winchester Cathedral. He's depicted as a skeletal, suffering figure in his death throes to remind us that even the rich and powerful come to the same end as the rest of us. I'm planning to send a copy to Bob Diamond. 

The 13th/14th Century Round Table of King Arthur in the Great Hall in Winchester. It was made for the engagement party of one of Edward I's daughters. The faux-Arthurian painting complete with Tudor rose was added for Henry VIII, the shameless spin-meister. 

One of the amazing things about the Cathedral is how knocked about by history it's been. Apart from the Norman chunk, it looks fairly coherent internally, but outside you can see evidence of the DIY undertaken by every generation since it was built a thousand years ago, such as this intersection of a blocked Norman door and an old roofline. It housed St. Swithin's shrine until the Reformation. As I visited on St. Swithin's day, it seemed only right to pray for rain. And so it came to pass! Old Swithin seems like a decent sort: he insisted on being buried outside the Cathedral with all the commoners - when they moved him inside, 40 days of rain followed as a mark of Heavenly Disapproval. 

Part of the Cathedral Close

The Jane Austen Death House. She lived there for six weeks and then died. 'Either that wallpaper goes, or I do'. Those were her last words. True fact. 

Some kind of flower

An industrious wagtail in the middle of the river

To bee or not to bee…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in want of a plot, turns to Austen.

I am, for the first time I can remember (and I've been reading for 32 of my 36 years), considering not completing a book. Normally I'm bloody-minded enough to battle my way through a bad book on the grounds that I've spent good money on it. Also, many bad books are culturally significant in some way (I'm thinking of Hornby and Parsons here).

I must confess, however, that P. D. James's Death Comes To Pemberley is on the verge of defeating me. It is quite the worst book I have read since How Green Was My Valley, about which I wrote my PhD thesis (and a forthcoming best-selling exposé, or 'journal article' as we call them in the trade), as a form of catharsis.

I'm a bit of a Jane Austen obsessive. Her interests are not my interests, her world and beliefs are not my beliefs, but the sheer quality of the writing renders that irrelevant. I'm also interested in what subsequent cultures have done with Austen's work - often made it more dull, sometimes highlighted the troubling or radical impulses which are detected, and at the moment, turned to satirical responses. Clueless is one of my favourite films: a whip-smart adaptation of Emma. I own multiple copies of the novels because I'm interested in the different ways cover design and blurbs are used to reposition Austen, such as for the 'chick-lit' market. I also own Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dawn of the Dreadfuls, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Pride and Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts.

All of these are superior to P. D. James's Death Comes To Pemberley, an attempt at a country-house murder sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Why James thought that an Austen murder-mystery was required is in itself a mystery: Jane wrote one of those herself, called Northanger Abbey, in which she expressed very clearly and hilariously her distaste for cheap thrills and sensationalism.

The most obvious fault is the author's determination to shoehorn in her own very reactionary politics. James is - in addition to being a best-selling crime author (I recommend Children of Men), a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. In this novel, she repeatedly goes out of her way to demonstrate that servants love their employers and depend on them for support and sustenance. They're grateful, obedient, unobtrusive, grovelling and wholly without character. They are - in the dread phrase of the nanny-employing classes - 'part of the family', albeit a part of the family that doesn't get to speak or go above stairs.

There's also a very weird passage in which two magistrates (one's kind, one's strict but they both have the interests of justice at heart - like a bad ITV drama) discuss the legal system. James spends several paragraphs explaining why courts of appeal are a bad idea. Despite the whole depressing history of British justice going wrong (for example: the Birmingham Six), James seems to think nobody has ever been wrongly convicted and therefore appeal courts and judges in general should be abolished in favour of a single jury trial before the prison doors clang shut. Why this should be in the novel at all is beyond me: it's far worse than the socialist propaganda novels so roundly mocked by the literary elite.

James also appears to have a cloth ear for dialogue and language. Characters are 'depressed', which strikes me as a very twentieth-century use: the term existed in Austen's day, but not quite in the same sense. Characters repeatedly refer to familiar people by their full titles, such as Sir Selwyn Hardcastle (he's one of the magistrates, and in case you're so dumb that you don't notice, the narrator steps in to make the point that his name suits his 'firm but fair' crusty administration of justice). I don't know whether PD expects her own friends to address her as Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James of Holland Park at all times, but she should surely know that the knight would be referred to as 'Sir Selwyn' by most people. It all gives one the impression that the novel's been written by an American tourist.

However, the worst element of the novel is the constant fecking exposition. Incapable of a prose style other than breathless yet plodding romantic-realism - as though Austen was typing while wearing boxing gloves rather than delicately painting on 'this little bit (two inches wide) of ivory' - James sticks the most embarrassing passages of expositionary dialogue on every other page, interspersed with tedious, patronising narrative commentary which serves only to prove that a) she's no Jane Austen and b) she thinks her readers are thick as pigshit.

You can't turn a page without a character saying something like 'Remind me again where you met. It was in London at your lawyer's office was it not?' 'Why yes, it was, but I'll tell you all over again because there might be readers out there who don't know, and that would be totally bogus dude. I mean, Sir'. This stuff is all over the place. I recommend How To Write Bad Exposition to the Baroness, because her novel is every bit as bad as this example:

John: I've been so upset since Margaret died.
Jane: Margaret? Your wife?

I'm half way through. I'm firmly convinced that P. D. James neither reads nor understands good fiction. There's no structure, no confidence in the subtle power of words, and no sense that she's addressing an intelligent reader capable of inference. Ambiguity and complexity have no place in this novel. A literary and political travesty which displays contempt both for Austen and for us.

If you're going to write a pastiche of a famous, well-loved novel, you need more than presumption. You've got to have a perfect ear for language - James assumes that 19th-century dialogue is achieved simply by removing contractions and making hilarious comments such as 'this is the nineteenth-century, after all' and you've got to have a bit of respect. You might think that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Clueless and Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts would be cheap, cynical cash-ins and James's novel be a serious homage by someone with a real affinity with Austen's world. You'd be wrong. The parodies work beautifully because their authors understand language and dialogue, they know how to structure a work of art, and they actually love and respect Jane Austen. This gives them the confidence to take dreadful liberties with their heroine's work and succeed. They know what they're doing, so they can relax, be jolly, have a romp. By contrast, Death Comes To Pemberley is a smash-and-grab raid. James steals familiar characters and settings and shoehorns in a bad plot, clunking dialogue and inappropriate political homilies without any of the respect shown by the parodists for the same source material. She thinks this is her world - though the various anachronisms make it very clear that it isn't - and is too snobbish to have any fun. Jane Austen she ain't.

Less Death Comes to Pemberley, more Death Comes To Dialogue.

A proud day

I've always wanted to get a letter into Pedantry Corner in Private Eye (it used to be called Pedant's Corner until some pedants said it should be Pedants' Corner), and I've finally managed it.

Someone wrote in last time to correct an error: a contributor wrote Bingham when they meant Bingley, the character in Pride and Prejudice. Unfortunately, the letter added a mistake: spelling the Bennet family's surname as Bennett.

I'm a bit torn: I'm proud to be in Pedantry Corner. But is it really pedantic to insist on getting the names right for one of the most famous novels in the English language? I correct them all the time in essays…

Underneath the Cover Versions

So, there's another sex-novel based on Jane Austen's work, Mitzi Szereto's Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts. The previous one was the witty Canongate Pride and Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen. That one worked because the style was mimicked beautifully and Eckstut had a deep understanding of the structures and gaps in Austen's plots - as well a total lack of shame in filling those spaces with hilarious and unlikely couplings.

Whether or not the new one is anything more than a shameless and cynical PR stunt, it does make you wonder why Austen should be the target. There's no Henry Gaymes, or Charles Dicking (sorry, this stuff writes itself). I'd have thought Vanity Fair would be ripe for stuffing with sex, and I'm frankly stunned that Pamela and Clarissa haven't been porned: they're not far off as they stand. Austen must be targeted because lazy readers think that the texts are sexless, which they certainly aren't. The point of Austen is that lust, Enthusiasm, greed and above all fear rage, but they rage beneath the surface. Her women often live lives of quiet desperation: passed around (or not) between rich men and lacking material resources of their own. Slavery, war, illegitimacy and class struggle are all there, but you have to listen closely. People write pulp like Hidden Lusts because they think readers are so dim that they can't empathise with Austen's characters and situations enough to work out what's going on. Personally, I find Austen's hints far more stimulating than Szereto's shouting. To be fair, it's probably adequate. I don't think Austen or any author should be 'protected': it's when people mess with them that the really good texts shine.

This is not to be borne!

Hello children. Have you been out enjoying the snow? I haven't. I huddled under blankets and watched the entire run of the Andrew Davies adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which reminded me of Austen's utter genius for bitchiness, bores, boors and put-downs ('you have a very small park'; 'you have delighted us long enough' and the magnificent 'I send no compliments to your mother'), some of which will be deployed in seminars if my failing brain remembers them.

And, of course, if my frozen corpse isn't found before winter draws to a close - I haven't any water supply at the moment, as my appalling and uninsulated Victorian building comes complete with frozen pipes. Bah humbug!

I'm not weird after all

Sales of Pride and Prejudice with Zombies have hit 4000 on pre-orders alone - clearly a lot of horror fans have been hankering for some Regency manners, and a lot of Austen fans are thirsting for blood.

Thanks, readers

Interesting suggestions (keep them coming). I'd forgotten about The Master and the Margarita but agree - it's stunning. I'd also forgotten to list Jane Austen, whose works I go back to several times a year. I'm not so keen on On The Road, though I used to be many years ago. There's just something so self-involved about hippies and proto-hippies. The same goes for Coelho and that whole band of self-styled spiritual gits. They're a result of the 1960s radicals failing to get anywhere. Faced with political defeat, they decided to look inside themselves rather than take the serious choices required to save the world. They couldn't accept the external authority of organised religion, so they made up a load of old cobblers - from Scientology to self-help - and made pots of dosh on the way. I hate it. The only books I'd happily burn are those under 'Mind, Body, Spirit'. Savonarola was right.

Let's be clear, the only rules you need for a happier life in the West are:

1. Eat less.

2. Walk more.

3. Try to be more kind to people. Even students. Not Tories - they deserve a spade through the face.

4. Buy fewer things.

5. Read more.

Did anyone watch Stuart Lee's Comedy Vehicle last night? The man is a genius because he's intelligent, has a sense of the absurd, and is right about the gaping cultural void in our lives which we seem only to be able to fill through the purchase of pointless, empty objets. We've exchanged our messy, tasteless, jumbly, interesting lives for houses, clothes and activities designed to make ourselves indistinguishable from the 'lifestyles' of show-homes and the fake nuclear families featured in adverts. Resist! Swap your plasma TV for a ferret, or a book, or a train-set - whatever makes you happy in your own odd way - and stop worrying about what other people think of your lifestyle.

(Easy for me to say, of course - I'm used to the condescension or pity evinced by students, friends, family when my 'career' comes up).