May of the Penguins

A bank holiday weekend of museums, this time. First of all, the opening day of the Great North Museum on Saturday. We had to go for two reasons: firstly, they're been working on it around the corner from my office ever since, well, ever since it was my office; and secondly, the winsome young girl on the posters all over the Metro threatens to scream and scream until she's sick if you don't. A more considered write up will have to wait until the place isn't so incredibly busy; walking into Newcastle at lunchtime, it was encouraging to see that the queue reached all the way out of the museum grounds and round into the university (the one place you're usually guaranteed to see a queue reaching out of a door in town is the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Northumberland Street; I'm not being facetious, it's actually true). The exhibitions on Hadrian's Wall and ancient Egypt aside (well, not aside, they're very good), the main focus is on natural history and taxidermy in particular; owls seem to be the favourite, which is fine by me (to anyone reading in Norman, Oklahoma - pop into The Library pub and say hello to the stuffed owl who lives there). Admittedly, the prevalence of stuffed animals makes the occasional appearance of a living reptile in a box somewhat surprising, as if they weren't sure whether to go for the full reptile house display or not, but it's all very well laid out. There's also a replica dinosaur skeleton and a planetarium, which we had no hope of getting into on Saturday, but which we'll be going back for. I haven't been in a planetarium since Jodrell Bank c. 1990, me.

Then on Sunday, to Gateshead for the "70 Years of Penguin Design" exhibition at the Shipley Gallery. Firstly, though, a comment on the interior of Gateshead Metro Station before someone decides to rip the whole thing out, because they really shouldn't. Yes, it's dated, but there's a period charm to it, rather like the Piccadilly Line at Heathrow Terminals 1,2,3, of which Gateshead is weirdly reminiscent. If you ever have a dream in which you're at the Heathrow tube station and it looks familiar yet unfamiliar, as if all the elements have been somehow shaken up into some kind of architectural anagram, then you're probably at Gateshead Metro. In fact, it's intriguing how the different parts of the Metro are shaping up as various tribute acts for sections of the London Underground. Gateshead is the Piccadilly line, with hints of the Victoria; the all new Haymarket is clearly going for the Jubilee look, albeit without the platform doors (which I never liked anyway - I like a bit of edge on my tube); Jesmond is the Circle/District, whereas West Jesmond is clearly some prosperous Metropolitan line suburb. Monument (Newcastle), ironically, bears little resemblance to Monument (London).

Well, it's intriguing to me.

Anyway, the Penguin exhibit. The title of "70 Years of Penguin Design" was somewhat baffling at first, until I realised that this exhibition has been touring for the last four years and should therefore be called "70+4 Years of Penguin Design," catchy as that isn't. Some very nice material on the development of the logo (from its dancing days to a more sedate, regal stature) and striking mounted displays of orange, blue and green Penguins (this last turning into some kind of private Panini sticker transaction for me: "Got... got... need... got... need"). A particularly nice exhibit showed the various incarnations of The Great Gatsby over the years, and made the curious point, seemingly obvious but which had never occured to me before, that whereas music (at least, popular music) is pretty much inextricably linked to a certain cover image for the rest of its cultural life, the marketing identity of the written word is much more changeable, and even where book covers become iconic (the Penguin Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance), there's a sense that eventually a new cover has to be designed precisely in order to overthrow such visual dominance. More theoretical discussion of why this might be the case was passed over, but I'm sure I'll come back to this in the near future.

Comprehensive as the exhibition was in some areas (gratifyingly, green Penguins and the development of the Marber grid), there were some curious omissions. There was a big display of the Penguin 70 range to celebrate the 70th anniversary, but barely a mention of the Penguin 60s from 1995, which were surely much more influential in popularising the pamphlet style publishing which Penguin have capitalised on so much in recent years. Most strikingly, the Classics range wasn't even acknowledged as existing beyond the 1960s; lots of material on the roundel design of the original version from the 1950s, including the strangely humorous error on the cover of E.V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, which shows a boat with both oars and full sails, but not a single black spine of a later publication in sight. Since the recent redesign of the classics range in the last five or so years has been the most striking innovation to folks like me - and, let's be honest, to most of the people who go to this exhibition - this seems a little odd, not least because it's in changes like this that Penguin lead the market (or did you think Oxford's rebranding of the World's Classics series shortly afterwards was coincidence?). However, there was a nice display of some splendidly 1970s covers for J.G. Ballard, all looking like stills from a Terry Gilliam animation (and one including the image of Mickey Mouse on a television screen - I imagine that was a copyright nightmare) and an interesting survey of how far the orange/green bars look of the original paperbacks has infiltrated publishing and popular culture more widely. Oh, and we got lovely free bookmarks as well. If you're at all interested in publishing or just want to see some occasionally freaky covers from the 1970s (especially on the Pelicans), go and see it if it pops up near you. Go on, pick up a - no, I'm not going to do that.

Conference Pairs

Time to roll out what I only half-jokingly refer to as the tour dates for the summer. Only two, really, so less of a tour and more of a line between two points:

May 15th sees all the fun of a conference without the bother of a hotel for the seemingly obligatory hometown paper (cf. Exeter, July 2008) for the Crime Studies Network in the North symposium, Crime Studies: Facts and Fictions. It's free, so if you want a good seat, I would e-mail Malcah Effron at Newcastle University to book your place.

Then, July 20-22 sees me in London for the University of Reading's Narrative Dominions, a conference based around the forthcoming volume four of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. I hear that the chapter on the detective story is the most awesome six thousand words ever published.

Talking of publishing, it's been a good year for reading fiction so far. I don't mean all those shiny new novels in Waterstone's, the darkly comic portraits of modern life and the like, but somehow finding time to get through the 280-odd novels that comprise the fiction waiting list on my shelves. Highlights so far have included Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (honestly, the heroic cheese sentence made me laugh out loud. You'll have to go and read it now, won't you?), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (not quite as out there as it thinks it is, though), and in particular John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, which so far looks pretty secure as this year's best novel. The middle ground includes Patrick Suskind's Perfume (nice, but with the weirdly inescapable flavour of the middlebrow bookclub about it - mmm, the taste of condescension there), Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (an excellent and convincing discussion of socialism and often quite moving, but a little on the flabby and repetitive side as a novel), and Paul Auster's latest variation on a theme of metanarrativity, Man in the Dark. And then the badlands; Ian Rankin's The Flood is a little too obviously the frst novel he had published, and the slightly too self-congratulatory foreword to the new edition proudly notes how expensive those 1980s first editions now are; Malcolm Pryce's Last Tango in Aberystwyth is the same joke as his first novel - now with half the characterisation, but the same great fractured paragraph taste! Then there's James Wilson's The Dark Clue, a turgid attempt to write a sequel to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, notable solely for the front cover recommendation of "Read 50 pages and you'll be gripped," surely the most backhanded literary compliment ever paid (I made it to about 90 pages, before the utter lack of forward movement and the ridiculous caricatures of historical figures such as John Ruskin put paid to any idea of actual literary fun). And, dare I say it, Pat Barker's Regeneration. You heard me. Pat Barker's Regeneration. That'd be Booker Prize winning Pat Barker, y'know, but I'm afraid I found Regeneration a bit too diffuse - expecting a closer focus on the encounter between W. H. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon, Barker throws in a bunch of other weirdly diffuse characters (Prior, who I hear takes over in the rest of the trilogy, seemed particularly incoherent) and a habit of explaining her metaphors in case you wus too dumb to get it (the subtext of Rivers' self-examination towards the end is practically nailed to the reader's forehead). Oh, and the horrors of war. Except that we all know that war has horrors, so you've got to make your horrors really horrific to escape the kind of cliche inherent in the very idea of 'the horrors of war'... which Barker doesn't. What? You loved it? Perhaps it's just me.

And finally... did anyone else hear Christopher Caldwell on Start the Week this week? Did anyone hear his question to Monica Ali about the problems of writing a novel that addressed an atomised society, such as today's modern world apparently is? (We're so cool today, see. So atomised, modern, liberated. We done liberated us from the Victorians). Did anyone else goggle when he used Dickens as an example of an author concerned with the local? Did anyone else shout "So what the hell was Bleak House* about then?" at the radio? What? You loved it? Perhaps it's just me.

* Or Our Mutual Friend. Or Little Dorrit. Or - hell, any of them.