It is a truth universally acknowledged…

that a young lady in possession of a fortune should never mention Fight Club.

(Accents apart, this is capital).

WTF? LOL: FAIL!!!!

Hello. Relatively quiet today, as I've got enormous amounts of marking to do, and had a Very Serious Meeting about whatever it is that we're meant to be doing here.

Anyway, some bright Web 2.0 sparks have decided that we have collectively failed as far as reading goes. Because none of us are capable of detecting nuance, tone or mood from the written word, they've invented a special symbol, or massive flashing signpost, to indicate sarcasm - the SarcMark

It's obviously what I've been waiting for. It abolished all that pesky ambiguity that we've wasted our time with. If only Jane Austen had known about this, I wouldn't have whiled away summer afternoons explaining to my students that when she wrote 'it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife' (Pride and Prejudice from memory, ladiesngennelmen), she was being sarcastic or perhaps ironic, or even playful, but probably not overly serious anyway.

Clearly the new version would run something like this:

Rich blokes want birds, innit!!LOL!!!

I know that sometimes you, dear reader, fail to appreciate my humour, but that's because you're stupid I'm not very funny. There hasn't been a sudden failure of print or readers. Words on screen don't suddenly lose power because of where they are. So all in all, well done, SarcMark designers. What a brilliant idea. You guys are brilliant and your idea will be on every keyboard within a year.

Laugh riot, Victorian style

Ms. E-mentor's Victorian Vision caption competition reminded me of one of my favourite cartoons, by JW Taylor and published in Punch, the famously unfunny British 'humorous' magazine, now happily defunct.

This is the only online version I can find - sorry it's so tiny, but click on it for a slightly larger version. I'll have to scan my larger one in.

'We like the plot, Miss Austen, but all this effing and blinding will have to go'

Death to… well, somebody. A recount, at least.

The Iranians are participating in the democratic process with some energy today. Follow it live here, or (if you must), at twitter (#iranelection).

I'm in the office (of course) avoiding looking at my final PGCE essay. Instead, I'm trying to quell the panic while I fail to understand what I should be doing with my Workload Allocation Form, Scholarly Activity Form, Appraisal Form and all the other things which document how much work I couldn't get out of last year, and how much labour will be extracted from me next year. What I really want to do is get back to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is actually brilliant, though the author occasionally regresses to American English expressions and spellings. Still, Elizabeth Bennett is even feistier (and perhaps kinkier) than she was in Austen's first attempt.

Swimming in lovely books

3 today - Sutherland's Jane Austen's Textual Lives, Harman's Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World and Sally Nichols's Season of Secrets.

Somebody stop me

I just wanted to check a title online and ended up ordering 2 biographies of Jane Austen and a children's novel about the Green Man, reading and death (Season of Secrets) because it sounded interesting (and only two things are certain in my life - reading and death).

A few days ago, I toyed with buying Compact Editions' The Mill on the Floss: Books in Half the Time solely to annoy those of my colleagues charged with 'encouraging' our students to read weighty Victorian novels - it's an edition so abridged that it's half the length. Essentially, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, the publisher behind the imprint, have become literary rapists. 

I resisted temptation, though I'd love to know what was cut out. More fun, however, is this new genre: classic novels crossed with themes from other genres. I came across this announcement on the Librarything blog - order your copy now!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies from Chronicle Books, due out in April. According to the description:

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- Pride and Prejudice 

and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. 

As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the 

quiet English village of Meryton — and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. 

What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield 

as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans."