A European Literature Brainstorming meeting is being held on 25 January in London involving publishers, editors and critics from the UK books industry who took part in the EU trip to Brussels I reported on earlier this month, to take forward the ideas and needs that were generated. The idea is to get more people in different countries able to read other nations' best books.

There must be good reasons why the fine crime novels of Michael Dibdin have been absent from screens large and small. They're probably to do with Dibdin's deadpan satirical tone and the anti-heroic nature of his protagonist, the Venetian detective Aurelio Zen. Also, his shrewd observations of the hidden undercurrents of Italian society are almost bound to get lost in screen translation. "Books and movies are completely different media", Dibdin once commented, "and the more the Hollywood crowd learns to knit their own stuff, the better."

This year the Eurozone is going to be the big political subject; fragmentation the looming concern. Culturally too, one would think that Europe, with 23 official languages, and another 60 minority languages spoken, is too much of a warren to be able to find any possible unanimity. But two ambitious projects are afoot in Brussels: to enable the translating of major literature across languages, and to join up all the museums, galleries and centres of knowledge in one great cultural cornucopia. And before you mutter that this is as exciting as sprouts, think for a moment of the implications - an online equivalent of a vast library of all the major known cultures, a gigantic linking of the great libraries, museums, galleries and universities in a single place for all humanity to access.

It’s 6.20 on a chilly Monday evening. The doors at the venerable Bitter End club in Greenwich Village don’t open till seven but already the line for the open-mic Moth StorySLAM is snaking down the block, way past the corner of Bleeker Street into La Guardia Place. It’s a chatty, hyper crowd, mainly in their twenties and thirties, some nervously eager to take the stage for five minutes and tell their stories, some, like me, there just to listen. We know there may be agents in the audience, scouting for talent. Tonight the topic is Disaster, very suitable for post-Thanksgiving.

I've been to a fair few spoken-word events in my time, and as a rule the more upmarket they are, the worse they tend to get. The bigger the celebrity or cult cachet of an author, the more likely they are to attract a crowd that turn up mainly to be seen basking in their reflected literary glory – pulling theatrical "concentration faces" during the reading then shooting to the bar to network wildly as if the writer were mere sideshow.

In England you may joke about having Siberian weather with minus 7 degrees. This is really what Siberian winter looks like - at minus 26 degrees. The river is gushing steam, a hellishly peculiar sight. After travelling for 16 hours and through seven time zones to get to Krasnoyarsk at six in the morning, I am not sure I’m seeing what I’m seeing.

Harry Potter has devoured entire childhoods, swallowed adolescences whole. Not to mention swathes of many a middle age. There are those of us who have read all 2,765,421 words (I checked) of the seven-part saga out loud to their children. Adults who would sooner use diminishing brain-cell capacity to store more pertinent information can tell you who teaches Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, the uses of gillyweed and the difference between a grindylow and a blast-ended skrewt.

These days Gérard Depardieu looks as though he wouldn't need much padding to play Obélix again. Though he continues to work with some of the biggest names in French cinema, it has been a while since he really surprised us, maybe because he's now such a familiar presence; in 2010 alone, he took on no less than five leading roles and a couple of walk-ons.

It's a curious fact that, for whole swathes of the music-buying public, their jazz collection has never grown beyond the ubiquitous Kind of Blue. OK, it's a seminal masterpiece which continues to sell like shovels in a snow storm. But why stop there? Perhaps the music's slightly arcane nomenclature has something to do with it: modal jazz, free jazz, fusion, bebop. Where to start?

The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words, and the words of those who came into his orbit.