If you are a pub­lished writer in the UK you prob­a­bly know that if you reg­is­ter with PLR you can receive a very mod­est pay­ment if your books are bor­rowed from a pub­lic library. What you might not know, how­ev­er, is that the gov­ern­ment intends to cut the amount of mon­ey it gives to PLR in the future, which of course means less mon­ey for writ­ers. If you want to let Gor­don Brown know what you think about this, you can sign an e‑petition on the 10 Down­ing Street web­site.

Appar­ent­ly, hun­dreds of UK vet­er­ans who wit­nessed nuclear tests in the 1950s have joined one of the largest com­pen­sa­tion claims against the Min­istry of Defence. There’s a fas­ci­nat­ing piece on this by Hele­na Mer­ri­man at the BBC. She inter­viewed one wit­ness, Bob Mal­colm­son, who was an 18-year-old radio oper­a­tor on HMS Diana at the time. He saw a 98-kilo­ton explo­sion: “The explo­sion was tremen­dous. They actu­al­ly heard it in Aus­tralia 200 miles away from the islands. We turned our backs, cov­ered our eyes with our hands. I had my eyes open and I could see the bones in my hands, even with my back to this thing.” Mal­colm­son was lat­er diag­nosed with blood can­cer. I hope they are suc­cess­ful in the courts. Read the rest of the piece here.

Last week there was a won­der­ful arti­cle in the Guardian called ‘Read poet­ry: it’s quite hard’, by Sean O’Brien. He argues con­vinc­ing­ly for a poet­ic canon, in part because it “presents a chal­lenge to the read­er, of a kind which in our impa­tient times often pro­duces anx­i­ety and resent­ment”. I agree: canons can be help­ful when you’re a stu­dent, if only to give you some­thing to rebel against.

One of his con­cerns is that a new gen­er­a­tion of read­ers may be miss­ing out on chal­leng­ing texts, as teach­ers dis­card “clas­sics” in favour of more “rel­e­vant” pieces. He’s crit­i­cal of the con­tem­po­rary atti­tude to reading: “The dif­fi­cul­ty that read­ers face owes much to the fun­da­men­tal­ly pro­sa­ic and util­i­tar­i­an view of lan­guage which dom­i­nates our peri­od: speed, impact and ‘the facts’ are pre-emi­nent.”

I was inter­est­ed in this point as I have just been read­ing Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, which is a fas­ci­nat­ing explo­ration of the neu­ro­science of read­ing. She is trou­bled by the impact of the Inter­net rev­o­lu­tion on the way we read, believ­ing it leads to a more super­fi­cial way of read­ing. Per­haps we need a slow read­ing move­ment, as well as one for slow food?

And final­ly, a very fun­ny piece on acad­e­mia by Ben McGrath in the New York­er: “Pow­der Room 101”. Enjoy.