If Agatha Raisin went to Lochdubh...

There are many different types of crime novels, but when it comes to series of crime novels there seems to be two overarching archetypes.

One is the series that involve a detective who actually has a reason to go around solving crimes.  This person is a police officer, a sheriff, a DCI, a Kommisar... whatever the local law enforcement happens to be.  He or she is paid to find murderers, so it makes sense that they would be asking awkward questions in pursuit of a killer.

This person is usually stationed at a particular place.  Quite often this is a country town - no doubt because country towns offer a nice range of eccentric recurring characters for the author to draw on.  However, this does mean that a lot of murders occur in that country down.

Quite a lot.  An inordinate amount of murders.  So many, that these little country towns seem to be vying for the role of "crime capital of the country".

It's a wonder the eccentric locals don't all leave to find some place less murdery.  And those stay would be forgiven for getting a bit blase about it all:

"There's been a murder!"
"Oh?  Well, I suppose it has been several weeks since the last one..."

The second main archetype for crime series involves the amateur detective.  This is the person who has no good reason to go around solving crimes, they just happen to be particularly clever and always in the right place at the right time.

It doesn't seem to matter where this person goes, death is sure to follow.  Thankfully, these people are usually quite interested in crime solving and enjoy the process of finding murderers, or they would surely find the amount of death rather disturbing.

"Thank you for inviting me to your birthday party - whoops, there's a murder."
"I'm just in town for a few days visiting my - whoops, there's a murder."
"I saw this place in a holiday brochure and thought it looked like a nice - whoops, there's a murder."
"I'm afraid I can't come to your wedding on that mysterious island, even though it sounds lovely, as I want everyone to make it out alive."

I can't help but wonder what would happen if one of these murder magnets found themselves visiting one of these crime capitals.  If Miss Marple wetn to Midsomer to visit a friend, would there be a mass killing?  Would multiple people die in multiple locations under multiple sets of mysterious circumstances which may or may not be connected?

If Agatha Raisin went to Lochdubh, would anyone make it out alive?

Some days I feel like a librarian

So, earlier today someone came to the desk and said they wanted to know where their grandfather could browse for books about medicine or books in French.

Without even looking it up, I said "the 610s for medical related books, and 840s for French literature".

She looked at me as if I was made of magic.

Just then I was doing some research for an assignment, and this is the first thing I typed into the search box:

((non-native* OR "non native") w/3 speaker*) AND (english w/3 language) AND (textbook* OR "text books" OR text-book* OR (course w/3 material*))

The first thing.

As in, I didn't even try to go to the guided search options, or start with a couple of words and see what happened - I just went straight for a search string involving several layers of brackets, multiple truncation and phrase searchers and half a dozen proximity searches.

I am a librarian.  This is how I roll.

Lecturers should do their own assignments

The more I re-engage with education as a student, the more I realise lecturers really need to stop marking assignments until they've actually tried doing those assignments themselves.

I recently had an assignment (an annotated bibliography) graded and given back to me, and for pretty much everyone of my lecturer's comments I had the following response¹:

"Yes, I know, I thought of that, too - but there was this word limit, you see, and I couldn't fit that in without leaving something else out."

I played it out fairly evenly across the board - I left some things out of one entry and left different things out of another.  She noticed every single oversight.

I have a feeling that, had she had to do that assignment within those limitations, she would have missed out on important pieces of information as well.

But, as she was marking the assignment, not writing it, she was in a position to see the limitations in my answer, rather than the limitations imposed by the question.

At least the question was a reasonable assessment task to begin with.

At the reference desk of an academic library, I often see students come for help trying to answer really, really stupid assignment questions.  A surprisingly large part of my job involves helping students compensate for bad assessment design.

There should be a rule somewhere that states a lecturer cannot set an assignment for students until after he or she has satisfactorily completed it him/herself.


1. Not that I actually "responded".  Giving feedback on an assessment piece or its mark isn't done - although I'm sure there's something to be gained from it.

The Professor

For nine and a half hours (not consecutive), I have been listening to James Wilby read Charlotte Bronte’s first novel, The Professor, and I think I can safely sum it up in one word:

Interminable.

That book could easily be abridged.  It should have been abridged.  It wants for nothing more than a good abridgement.

Well, a good abridgement and a character who was less of an annoying jerk.

At several points during the novel, Wilby’s narration and the fact that it was a CD in my car stereo where the only things stopping me from hurling the book across the room in a fit of annoyance.

For those of you who thought Charlotte Bronte only wrote one novel, the story actually goes like this:

The Bronte sisters, having spent most of their childhood writing poetry and short stories to keep themselves amused, decided to try their hands at writing novels.  They formed their own private writing circle and worked on three novels - which they intended to publish at the same time under the gender-ambiguous pseudonyms of Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell.

Charlotte (Currer) wrote The Professor, Acton (Anne) wrote Agnes Grey and Ellis (Emily) wrote Wuthering Heights.  You may have heard of the last one.

Now, Anne and Emily’s books were both accepted for publication, but The Professor was rejected.  Probably on the grounds it of being, by turns, boring and irritating.

I just want to point something out here – Agnes Grey was accepted for publication, but The Professor wasn’t.  Agnes Grey is a romance novel in which nothing happens.  A governess puts up with children nobody likes while pining after a man who barely looks at her.  The book is roughly three-parts “my goodness, rich people’s children are obnoxious” and five parts “oh, if only he would look at me”.  Right at the end our patience is rewarded with the following exchange:

“So you do love me, then?”

“Yes.”

This book is, it must be said, kind of boring.  It’s still miles better than The Professor.

Charlotte then went on to write Jane Eyre, which you may have heard of.  That book was a roaring success – although, in hindsight, it could be regarded as Agnes Grey on spooky-pants steroids.  She also wrote Shirley (which is interesting) and Villette (which is a brilliant book, even if it has a stupid ending).  Anne went on to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (which is less famous than anything her sisters wrote, but more famous than her other novel).  Emily went on to die before writing anything else.

The Professor was never published in Charlotte’s life-time, and I can see why.  It’s terrible.  It was so terrible that she could never convince anyone to publish it, even though her other books made her a well-loved and respected novelist.

Okay, granted, it's not "my goodness, my mental faculties are damaged after reading this book" kind of terrible - and a Bronte completist probably shouldn't avoid it - but it's really Not Very Good.  Anyone who had the misfortune to read this book before any of her others would probably assume she was a pretty rubbish author and never read anything else by her.

It was the first full-length novel she wrote, and it appears someone told her that the trick for writing a novel (as opposed to short stories and novellas) to fill it with pointless drivel.

The first-person narration by William Crimsworth features large sections of the character yammering on endlessly about such subjects as the moon, the misery of old maids, the character of people with big foreheads and the two-facedness of Catholics.

Apart from the fact that he just seems to be talking trash for no reason other than padding out the book, the diatribes are also largely offensive as it becomes quite clear that our Mr Crimsworth is an egotistical bigot.

He is quite unpleasant, and Wilby did well to make him sound like someone not-entirely-terrible.  This is the kind of man you would meet at a party, think was a reasonably nice guy for the first few minutes, but then come to dislike the longer you listened to him talk.  At the end of the party you would probably never voluntarily seek out his company – and may even try to avoid him.

Crimsworth has a low opinion of pretty much everyone who doesn’t fit into his ideal of upper-middle-class English Protestantism.  Are you French?  You are loose of morals.  Are you Catholic?  You are a conniving, inveterate liar.  Are you Flemish?  You’re an idiot.  Are you a woman?  Your faults – whatever they may be, are somehow much, much worse than those of your male brethren.

The man is racist - that's the only way you could describe him.  And to make things weirder, he takes his racism out on Flemish people.  I dread to think what he would have said if he came in contact with a Moor.

I found myself pitying the woman who had the misfortune to be his ideal woman.  The way he spoke about her – the way he talked about how she “grew” under his “stern” tutelage…

It was just a little bit creepy.  I really hoped she would run away with his best friend, but she didn’t.  Instead they lived happily ever after – with his wife continuing to call him “monsieur” for the rest of their married lives (supposedly because she couldn’t pronounce “William” comfortably).

Charlotte, I know you’re dead, so this advice won’t do you any good, but – really, girl, you need to stop idolising Byronic jerks.  And grow a bit of self-esteem, will you?

At a Primary School (Teacher’s) Reading Level

Over the many years I have spent reading about education and reading books designed for educators, I have had several encounters with works written specifically for primary school teachers.

It is the strangest thing, but books and journal articles written for people who teach the lower grades for a living are written at a different reading level than those for high school teachers, which are also at a different reading level than those for tertiary-level educators.

Now, theoretically, it doesn’t matter what level you are teaching – you still have at least one university degree to your name.  You have a tertiary level education yourself, and should be perfectly capable of reading works written at that level…

Yet, without fail, every book I’ve ever encountered that was aimed at a primary-school-teacher audience is written in a simpler, clearer style – usually with slightly larger text and a design that wouldn’t look out of place in a middle-school level textbook.

It’s not a bad thing.  In fact, last year I was secretly pleased that one of my textbooks was written for that market.  It was a nice change from the denser texts I’d been reading – the ones designed for university students and teachers of university students.  After a while, university level texts start getting a bit wearying. 

But I’m still always taken aback by the change in tone, text density and vocabulary – by the implicit assumptions about the audience for the book.

I’m currently reading a short “guide” downloaded from an educational website, and I couldn’t figure out why reading it was making me feel, well, slightly patronised.  It is clearly intended for teachers, but whoever wrote it chose to produce it in a level of language that boarders on simplified.

Then I realised – the target audience is primary school teachers.  This is the sort of stuff people give them to read all the time.

Why is that?  Is it because they spend so much of their day working with texts at very low/young reading levels and would find it taxing to suddenly shift to significantly harder, denser texts for professional development? 

That would make sense.  I find children’s books to be a refreshing read that allows my brain to regain some of its bounce.  If I spent most of my time with the bouncy texts, I expect a dense, jargon-ridden, technical piece of writing would feel a bit leaden and unpleasant.

Or, is it because people who teach at a primary level do so because they like the information they work with to be of a simpler nature?  If you wanted to work with Shakespeare you wouldn’t be teaching kindergarten, after all.

I can’t say.  All I know is that books and journal articles written for primary school teachers definitely seem to assume they can’t or won’t deal with the same level of textual sophistication as people who teach at higher levels.

And that’s interesting.

Lancelot mused a little space

He said "she has a lovely face.  God in his mercy lend her grace - the Lady of Shalott".

Shut up Lancelot.  You're a jerk and nobody likes you.

You know, you can't go around acting like a first class cad for most of the old texts and expect to get away with being everyone's favourite Arthurian hero.  For my money, you'll never be a patch on Gareth.  But does everyone talk about Gareth?  Does anyone talk about Gareth?  No.

And you went and killed him, didn't you?  Here was a knight who was *actually* chivalrous, rather than just being a smug git with an attitude problem, and you go and kill him.  And Gaheris, who was just hanging around Gareth (which seems to be all he really did - hang around with other, more interesting knights).  And Agravaine, but quite frankly he should have expected that - after all, he tried dobbing you into the king for being the first class tosser that you are.

And did you even apologise to their family?  Did you say something like, "hey, Gawaine, I'm really sorry about killing three of your brothers because they got in my way?"

No.  No you did not.

So, you know what, Lancelot?  I don't wanna hear whatever you have to say about the "Lady of Shalott" - especially since we all know that poem was a sanitised version of the Fair Made of Astolat, and you led her on, broke her heart and then acted all surprised when she topped herself.

Jerk.

Speak Latin whenever you can

I just acquired a new book, and it's walking a tight-rope between hilarious and brilliant.

Latin For Beginners by Wilkes (author), Shackell (illustrator) and Priddy (designer).

It's an introduction to Latin, aimed at children, and designed in exactly the same way as an introduction to French or Italian might be designed.

It offers the exact same language learning advice (use it whenever you can) and the exact same situations (at the restaurant, in your home, talking about your hobbies) that you'd find in any modern languages introductory book for kids.

Using this book, you'll be able to tell the waiter at the restaurant that you really like potato chips (amo poma terrestria assa) or talk about what time one watches television (quadrante post quintam televisorium spectat).

And the little visual jokes that would be mildly amusing in a book introducing Italian are downright hilarious in a book introducing Latin.