You don’t have to like sci-fi to enjoy these words and images, just interesting things. Things like neolithic cities without streets, the Chilean socialist internet, London’s 19th Century hydraulic power network, privacy issues for genitally-modified computer game avatars and cities with legs for walking.

- Primo Levi

The John Murray Archive contains more than 150,000 letters and manuscripts by Byron, Scott, Darwin and countless other figures of global significance.

The rich and diverse range of subjects includes archaeology, classical studies, bibliography, history and scholarship, art, architecture, art history and collecting, cookery, gardening, music, theatre and children’s books.

The travel and exploration papers contained in the Murray Archive include papers from David Livingstone and Ernest Shackleton, as well as manuscripts of reviews by Sir Walter Scott.

Quite a coup for the Library, then, and, since they plan to open parts of the Archive to the public ‘within months’, with online access to follow, really rather exciting news.

Update: …or possibly not. Keen reader Bob Mottram (relation) just emailed, pointing to this report, from March of last year, in which John Sutherland, of UCL and the Grauniad, describes the collection as a ‘plumless pudding’.

It’s mostly a list of examples of index wit. Here’s the entry for God in the index to Francis Wheen’s excellent How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World:

…accepted by Newton; angered by feminists and gays; appoints American coal-owners; approves of laissez-faire economics; arrives in America; asked by Khomeini to cut off foreigners’ hands; believed to have created humans 10,000 years ago; could have made intelligent sponges; doesn’t foresee Princess Diana’s death; helps vacuum-cleaner saleswoman; interested in diets; offers investment advice; praised by Enron chairman; produces first self-help manual.

Sadly, Hensher confirms that the following entry in the index of a Catholic encyclopaedia is apocryphal:

Woman: see Sin

As is usually the case with this sort of pseudo-intellectual broadsheet fluff, the author is writing thinly-veiled advertorial, shilling his new novel, The Fit. For once, I’m glad of the heads up: Hensher has his protaganist dream of compiling an Index To The History of The World, one ‘so beautiful and complete that there would be no reason whatever to write the book itself.’ Not knowing Hensher’s past novels, I haven’t a clue whether this will make for sub-Borgesian pap or the sort of wilfully arcane intertextual mucking about that makes me weak at the knees (arguably the same thing) but I can’t wait for it to hit the shelves so I can find out.

I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means. Emin’s bed, Hirst’s sheep, the Chapmans’ defaced Goyas are psychological provocations, mental tests where the aesthetic elements are no more than a framing device.

It’s interesting that this should be the case. I assume it is because our environment today, by and large a media landscape, is oversaturated by aestheticising elements (TV ads, packaging, design and presentation, styling and so on) but impoverished and numbed as far as its psychological depth is concerned.

Artists (though sadly not writers) tend to move to where the battle is joined most fiercely. Everything in today’s world is stylised and packaged, and Emin and Hirst are trying to say, this is a bed, this is death, this is a body. They are trying to redefine the basic elements of reality, to recapture them from the ad men who have hijacked our world.

Emin’s beautiful body is her one great idea, but I suspect that she is rather prudish, which means that there are limits to the use she can make of her body and its rackety past. Meanwhile, too much is made of conceptual art - putting it crudely, someone has been shitting in Duchamp’s urinal, and there is an urgent need for a strong dose of critical Parazone.

And, later on:

Can art be a vehicle for political change? Yes, I assume that a large part of Blair’s appeal (like Kennedy’s) is aesthetic, just as a large part of the Nazi appeal lay in its triumph of the will aesthetic. I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order. The ocean liner art deco of the 1930s, used to sell everything from beach holidays to vacuum cleaners, may have helped the 1945 British electorate to vote out the Tories.

Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allen Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the centre of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kaballah, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee’s “Eternal Orang-utan”, which would end up by writing all the known books in the cosmos.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blurb that lists quite so many things and people by which or with whom I have been horribly, horribly obsessed over the years. (Even Orang-utans! I loved those cheeky Sumatran hominidae, and they taught me never to say out loud words I have only read, after a childhood humiliation experience prompted by my repeatedly referring to them as orange you-tans.)

This, of course, means that the book is as likely to be a hideous disappointment as it is the perfect novel for me.

We shall see.

I very much resent it in the West when people - maybe with all the good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, “It’s their culture.”

It’s like… saying the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches.

First of all, there are aspects of culture which are really reprehensible, and we should [all] fight against it. We shouldn’t accept them. Second of all, women in Iran and in Saudi Arabia don’t like to be stoned to death.

I long ago lost count of the number of times I’ve had to say words to that effect, only to have them dismissed as the inevitable opinion of a blinkered, patriarchal, Western hegemonist oaf. I don’t know why I care what the sort of condescending prat who cites ‘cultural difference’ as a justification for stuff that is plain old wrong, but I shall be using Nafisi as ammunition against them from now on.

Anyway, the brouhaha surrounding Nafisi’s book passed me by, but going by the following snippet from a glowing notice in The Guardian alone, it looks to be well worth seeking out.

In her class Humbert Humbert’s seizure of his nymphet’s life and identity becomes a metaphor for the way the radical Islamic state was treating its women - not least in his recording that it was Lolita who initiated their sexual relationship, the adolescent who seduced her stepfather; it felt as though radical Islam was blaming women.

It has many, many temptations. Thus far, I’ve managed to restrict myself to two books that I’ve wanted for years.

I first saw a battered edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land - A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including The Annotations of Ezra Pound at school. One of my two English teachers in the Sixth Form, Mr. F., was of the sort who had obviously watched Dead Poets Society one too many times, and fancied himself as an inspirational, groovy teacher. At the time we thought him a terrible embarrassment, but in retrospect he did a pretty decent job of turning a bunch of stoned schoolboys on to Modernist poetry, Joyce, Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter. Martin Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd is the only textbook I remember referring to, and I still don’t understand how the syllabus slipped past the Head of Department in a distinctly old-fashioned school.

Anyway, the self-appointed grandstanding super-hip teach, Mr. F., produced his annotated copy of The Waste Land with such a flourish that I believed his claims of its impossible rarity and great value, which - aside from the fact that it is a riveting look at a collaborative process that turned an unweildy epic into a dense, beautiful poem - made me really want a copy, while assuming that it would be forever out of reach. A quick search on Abe Books, and I am in touch with Francis Edwards of Haye-on-Wye, antiquarian booksellers since 1855, who have a First Edition. For £30. And now I have it, after a dozen years.

The second book is a little less exciting, and one I should really have bought years ago: Contemporary Artists, the weighty reference tome edited by Colin Naylor and Genesis P. Orridge. It has biographies, brief essays and statements on everyone from Abakanowicz, Magdalena to Zox, Larry. Essential stuff, to the extent that I’m beginning to think lustful thoughts about the 2nd and 3rd editions.

If you haven’t seen Abe Books before, my apologies for linking to it. It’s my most dangerous discovery on the web since I stumbled on that weird site where everything is for sale. It might not be as good as trawling a real bookshop and getting dust up your nose, but the arcane argot of booksellers - can that really be a VG 1st Ed. thus. 4to d/w? And with dec cl binding? - just about makes up for the lack of tactile browsing.

See also: Dotcom chapter of success, a Guardian piece on the site.