Becoz gurllyz shood only rite about fluffy bunnikinsies!

Fascinating interview with an enraged Val McDermid in today's Guardian G2: Women section.

She has been set up by the media as engaged in a slapfest with Ian Rankin in which her sexuality (the epithet 'bloodthirsty lesbian' has featured in headlines) has been foregrounded and the contributions to the debate of a self-declared heterosexual woman crime writer totally ignored.

She has also been criticised by another woman crime writer, Joan Smith, on the grounds of her 'books were full of dead bodies and gratuitous violence towards women'. (Duh? goes with the territory, surely, and feel that these motifs also figured in JS's novels - perhaps less graphically?)

Also, although she doesn't say it in so many words, the whole thing raises the question of how, if men write about graphic violence and gory death, it's gritty and dark and existential and intense, but if women do it, it's somehow Their Pathology rather than a comment on How Things Are In The Real World.

She also notes the

snobbery in the literary world when it comes to the crime genre. "It is manifestly clear, however, from the kind of critical acclaim we get, that there are now very good crime writers." It will be a "good day", she continues, when a crime novel wins the Booker prize.

I do have to admit that I don't much care for McDermid's more recent work myself, but that is just about my own lack of resonance with the 'creepy psychological serial-killer' subgenre. I quite enjoyed her earlier series, even if I suspect, in retrospect, that they may have been trying a bit to be Paretsky/Grafton/Muller in UK setting. It's a while since I read them, so I may be misjudging them on that count.

However, the interview itself raises a lot of fascinating issues, including her experience as a guinea-pig in a hot-housing academically pressurised experimental programme at Kirkcaldy High School (shared by Gordon Brown).

Not TGIFing because I'm working tomorrow, but...

Hedgehog haz visa! ('Hedgehog can and will go to Illinois' doesn't have quite the same ring as 'Bunnies can and will go to France', a phrase which is probably meaningless to the majority of my readership).

Hedgehog haz hot stuff! and is impressed at least with the expedition with which purveyors of spicy products got my order to me (ordered Wed evening: arrived this morning). The parcel even contained lagniappe in the form of a teeny vial of 'fruit seasoning' (to season one's fruit, rather than fruity flavoured seasoning for other things) and a lollipop.

Hedgehog also (finally) haz Flora Segunda, having ordered this several weeks ago, seen a copy in the local bookshop the day after, and been fuming about its non-arrival.

***

And some links:

This woman is an example to us all: Margaret Bramall, whose obituary states

She demonstrated against fascism in London and helped feed the Jarrow marchers as they passed through Oxford.

When a Somervillian was sent down after being found in bed with a man in her lodgings (the man was only rusticated for a term), Margaret supported a plan to get every woman who had slept with a man to sign a petition to Miss Darbishire, the august principal, to rescind her decision - or send them all down too. They were counting on 30 fellow criminals. But no one else would sign.

This would be around the time that Harriet Vane was investigating the problems at Shrewsbury College. Bramall went on to bring this attitude to bear on the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child, for which she worked for seventeen years, working critical changes in its approach.

A tool-using strategy that was key to the advancement of early humans has been observed by scientists in a bird. Go, corvidae, go go!

A classic silly season story: when travellers finally set eyes on some of the most well-known attractions the pilgrimage ends too often with a distinct sense of anticlimax. Next up: dog bites man.

Hotel mistakes Nobel laureate for bag lady.

A mass free distribution of mosquito nets in Kenya... has nearly halved child deaths from malaria in high-risk areas.

Yesterday's ODNB 'Life of the Day' was rather fun: Lottie Collins, famous for 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’.