The Browser with Stuart Kelly

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:05

Kindly look again at bad sex award nominations

The Bad Sex Awards this year has a bumper quartet of high-brow porn-peddlers in Amos Oz, Paul Theroux, John Banville and Philip Roth, below, whose thigh-rubbing piece of prose helpfully starts with the phrase "this was not soft porn". But I can't figure out why they included Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. It's not a novel I enjoyed, but its frequent, copious and abject scenes of bad sex are bad for a reason: the individual in question doing the sexing is an unrepentant

Poetic injustice

Signs of the End of the Age, No 112: I won't name which Scottish literary prize demonstrated its outward-looking nature by spelling Seamus Heaney's first name "Seumas" on the press release, but tut-tut.

Predictable trends

I've been poring over the catalogues for 2010, trend-spotting, and most are wearingly predictable. The Credit Crunch. The Labour Party (Suzie Mackenzie has a biography of Gordon Brown out in March, which might mean it lacks a certain natural closure). "Whither Britain" – there's Dimbleby on Britain and art, Rob Young on Britain's "visionary music", Francis Pryor on the British landscape, and a new one-volume history of Britain. If not Britain, then England: the English and the seaside; "Is God Still An Englishman?"; countercultural London; Derby Day; the dominance of the English language. Oddly, there's a flurry of publications about the Romantics but very little on Scotland's contribution to Romanticism. But then, Scotland is so 2009 in publishing terms.

More power to zombies

My favourite fan-boy moment last week came reading a tie-in to DC's "Blackest Night" arc, where Vril Dox spoke for a thousand fans with the words "Zombies with power rings? I'd like to see that." January will see comics rising from the dead, as defunct series such as The Question and Weird Western Tales come back to life for more zombie shenanigans.

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 22 November 2009.