Peter Stothard - Times Online - WBLG

Come to our party!

Or so said my new friend Tasha.

Sadly, she's in Tennessee ( I think).

But her party is anywhere one can join her Good Girls Kill For Money club.

If I understand properly the rules of a virtual literary party, I am there right now, chatting, asking questions, answering questions, gently suggesting that other guests should take a subscription to the TLS.

What's my favourite cocktail, best British Museum exhibit, best conversational line for women like Tasha and her clubmates who earn good money writing about bad people?

Why can't the rest of the publishers' Christmas season be like this?

Best thing in any museum? The gay tomb vase.

I've just answered questions from a fellow team of bloggers who not only asked for a favourite cocktail but for a favourite choice of objects from the British Museum.

OK, I did that. Results available later. Don''t try my pet drink at home.

But why stop at the British Museum? What would I put under my arm if I had my personalised dutch courage, a bag marked 'swag' and the free run tonight of every museum in the world?

Number One prize would be a very old Greek pot, the so-called 'Francois Vase' in Florence, one of the oldest that we (by which I don't mean I) possess.

A funerary urn for two?

Vote Veltroni! Vote Romulus!

For a Mayor of Rome who wants to be the next Prime Minister of Italy the unearthing of 'Romulus's cave' must seem a good omen.

"Rome never ceases to stun the world with this sort of discovery'', said Walter Veltroni, commenting on the possibility that a sea-shell-decorated grotto on the Palatine Hill might be the place where his ancient predecessors celebrated the founding of their city.

It may be premature to compare Mr Veltroni to the first Emperor Augustus, whose acolytes so heavily promoted the Romulus myth. So far the Mayor is anxious only to be seen as the next Tony Blair.

But Mr Veltroni is as big a believer in bread and circuses as any ambitious Roman politico of the past. He has made himself king of the free concert and brought Elton John and Paul McCartney like gladiators to the Colosseum.

With Prime Minister Romano Prodi looking increasingly ancient himself - and Silvio Berlusconi hardly less so - the age of Veltroni looms.

A worm's eye for politics

After decades of living in North London, meeting politicians (too many) and writing about politics (too much), I'm beginning to feel for the first time that I'm genuinely represented by one.

No, not  Glenda Jackson, the movie-star-turned-axe-face-of-the-old Left and my veteran Member of Parliament here in the Hampstead part of Camden. There is still some way to go before the House of Commons itself has anything for me.

No, not Lord Adonis of Camden Town, the former Andrew Adonis, the closest thing to a natural TLS-reader in the Blair and Brown governments. His choice of title for his appointed place in the Upper House of our legislature, while pleasing, does not make him strictly any representative of mine.

I do, however, have a local Councillor. He is called Alexis Rowell, a Liberal Democrat, an environmental campaigner, a blogger, a man with a wormery in his garden and good advice on electricity suppliers - and, mirabile dictu, he deals with his constituents about what is happening in the streets around us.

He genuinely represents.

Why didn't Africans fight to bring the West Indian slaves back home?

The loose (very loose) rules of journalism require that (generally speaking, all else being equal etc) we don't write reviews of new books or plays by our friends.

Bloggers can work to still looser rules.

But it still didn't feel right to write up Kwame Kwei-Armah's latest National Theatre show, Statement of Regret, when I caught it at its first preview last week.

There had been a bit of pre-publicity but the issue of the slave trade in current British black-on-black politics took a while to sink in.

And reviewing the first preview of a play also breaks rules, those that are somewhat more strictly enforced, that critics wait for a formally predetermined 'First Night'.

So I waited - and wondered what to do.

Mailer: I know I'm not supposed to do this but. .

'Norman Mailer is dead and we were wondering if. . .'

I was driving into Berkshire last night when the ancient mobile phone I borrowed from my son six weeks ago, the one that still isn't Bluetoothed to the car, began to splutter with where-the-hell-are-the-talking-heads requests to drive to TV stations to talk about 'one of the great English stylists of the century'.

Or that's what I'd have said if I'd accepted any of the offers.

I was en route to dinner, running late, with my screenwriter friend Paul Webb, who I knew was an even bigger admirer of Mailer than I, and who had spent a memorable evening with him several months ago.

I told the enquirers that I was driving - which, these days, is the way to get anyone off the phone.

So Paul and Carolyn, his wise wife, and I spent the evening in a bit of Mailer-land, with Paul recalling the glories of Ancient Evenings, the 1983 novel of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and me remembering only where I'd read it not anything much of what it said.

The TLS was a rare admirer of that book at the time. I wondered how many people in England other than Paul could properly talk of it today.

Apart from Mailer's throat-grabbing style, and the few familiar points that everyone else makes this morning, I'm not sure what else I'd have said about him. It takes a while to put a dead artist into some kind of perspective. And at the TLS, as we do, we will take a little while.

I couldn't even remember the long conversation he and I had had in 1991 about his CIA novel Harlot's Ghost - or why he'd written in my black-and-white oriental-patterned proof copy, smudged beside the computer now, some words about the 'right height' of a tennis net.

I know I'm not supposed to do this. Blogging abhorrs the repetition of print journalism from the past. But rather than snip and cut some bits, this is the talk with Norman Mailer, published, with all its now obvious flaws, in the Times Magazine of October 12, 16 years ago.

   

Out in the Bookosphere

The Bookaholics' guide to Book Blogs is selling well -  according to its co-author and publisher who was at the party for our TLS translation prizes last night.

There was even a number mentioned - but since Catheryn Kilgarriff and I met up only towards the end of the evening, when the last pieces of Greek cheese pizza were passing down the Egyptian, Spanish, German, French and Flemish throats, I will not risk remembering precisely what the sales figure was.

The book has already solved a big problem of the book-blogging boom for me - the need in these list-crazy days to able to say what are the best literary blogs.

As well as a ready answer to 'best novel this year?', 'top three biographies this millennium?', 'ten best short stories of one's lifetime?' and so on (the editor of the TLS can't risk being caught on New Zealand radio without an armoury of those), there is the 'what blogs do you read?' question.

Before getting my Bookaholic's Guide  I could honestly say only that I visited Frank Wilson and colleagues in Philadelphia with an occasional trip to see McSweeeneys and Golden Rule Jones and one or two others that had been in touch about one thing or another.

But now, while editing Dinah Birch's wonderful piece on Sherlock Holmes last week, I could drop by at virtual Baker Street.

And I am intrigued by Slushpile, Mumpsimus and Black Butterfly Review.

There is Mad Ink Beard and Francesca Beard - none of them any relation to the TLS's own incomparable Mary Beard, the one blog which I absolutely did read before The Bookaholics Guide appeared.

OK, I'm paid to read it. But I would visit it anyway. I even checked in last night after I'd handed out the translation prizes (congratulations again to all) and taken my wine and pizza as reward.

Now that I have a guide to the bookosphere in good, old-fashioned, make-me-comfortable, paperback form, I might try many others too, even those other Beards.