Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Zombies of Sex-Coburg

Apparently now writers aren't allowed to behave badly or they will be punished. I wonder if this new boilerplate contract contains the phrase 'damages our brand'.

Well, there goes Oscar Wilde. There go Jane Bowles and Jean Rhys. There go Verlaine and Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Colette, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Ashbery and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. There goes Norman Mailer and there, in spades, go William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Add your own. It's a long list, as long as a piece of string.

(There, it might even be argued, goes Virginia Woolf, for here she is, fooling His Majesty's Navy. That's her on the left-hand end: click on the photo to enlarge, or, as we say in the blogosphere, embiggen. Has anyone ever done a proper academic feminist/postcolonial analysis of this affair, against the background of British/African relations c. 1910? I think there's a thesis in it.)

Abandoning the good ship Apostrophe

So, which major Australian publisher's website contains the following, in a bio of one of its fiction writers?

[Insert name of author here] lives in a partially renovated house in the Dandenong's.

Now, butchers and fruit and veg merchants and so on don't make their living from reading and writing. One expects them to commit the odd apostrophe howler on their specials boards. But a howler as egregiously wrongity-wrong-from-Wrongtown as this on a publisher's website really is not a good look. There's no point in spending a lot of money on classy web design if you can't get someone fully literate to write the copy for it.