Literature
Billy Childish ~ I Go With What I Am Like
by Nick Glossop on June 2, 2013
Prolific musician, writer, painter, mustache-cultivator, and Artist in Residence at the Chatham Historic Dockyard, Billy Childish gives a few minutes of his valuable time to Berlin’s eNtR.
Part 2 after the break. …
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Joyce’s Phantom Power
by David Reddall on March 17, 2013
I am prepared to affirm this proposition: only James Joyce could read Finnegan’s Wake. It is not my desire to assert that only James Joyce could read it insofar as that verb can signify studying it closely in order to ascertain its meaning. Instead, I would invite you to consider the possibility that the characters who speak, for example, in the scene whose improbable, necromantic reading we owe to …
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Happy Birthday, Edward Gorey
by Nick Glossop on February 22, 2013
Born this day in history, the incomparable Edward Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000).
There is no going to town in a bath tub.
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Burns Day Musings On My Glasgow Years (and on my love for Ivor Cutler)
by Nick Glossop on January 26, 2013
Scotch Odds 1
There should be an annual celebration of Scottish oddness running from January 15th to the 25th. It would end with the usual Burns Supper Bacchanalia of dubious cuisine, impenetrable verse and bellicose tea towels, but it would begin with a more modest acknowledgment of the birthday of Glasgow’s most lovable wordsmith Ivor Cutler (15 January 1923 – 3 March 2006). Cutler’s poems, stories and songs (typically played …
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The Tall Tale Of An Alternative Burn’s Supper
by Nick Glossop on January 26, 2013
There were none but Scotsmen present at the event in question so we cannot claim to have a reliable account of what went on, but, according to at least one scurvy Caledonian, it began with a general malaise that settled on the city of Glasgow. A restless dissatisfaction held the entire population in its grip. Blandly and blindly, the people went through their daily routines, stopping at the chip shop …
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Vancouver Poetry Slam – Delicious Reason With or Without Rhyme
by Gaalen Engen on January 11, 2013
Since the advent of self-awareness, we have sought to define our existence, to find purpose in the amalgamation of matter and time, to mine the answers to those questions skirting the edge of understanding. The act of communication is a manifestation of this need and as we learned to form the words we would hang upon the face of our thoughts, we discovered the lyrical mystery of language; its ability …
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200 Word Reviews: Roadside Picnic
by Malcolm Parker on November 14, 2012
Long wishlisted and newly available on the Kindle*, The Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic is to its filmed version, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is to Scott’s Bladerunner. From the movies, you’d expect Dashiell Hammet in the 21st century for the Dick and ordure-tinged, post-apocaplyptic Dostoevsky for the Strugatskys, but you get humour from both, and Stalker didn’t have zombies**. Roadside Picnic…
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Pussy Riot And Dostoevskian Protest
by Nick Glossop on October 28, 2012
What is Pussy Riot’s ‘Idea’?
Sitting recently in a café in the company of various activists and artists after a cultural event in Moscow, a young and impassioned activist, who had impressed the oppositional milieu with her speeches in recent protest rallies, introduced her friend to me as a ‘Voina group activist and author of Pussy Riot projects’. The unknown author just nodded and continued tapping his iPad. I wondered
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Dept Of Chickentown Karaoke (Evidently)
by Nick Glossop on October 20, 2012
Christopher Eccleston conflates the bard of Salford with the bard of Stratford in the Danny Boyle (he of the scandalously topical opening ceremonies to the London Olympics) short film Strumpet. (Strong language warning)…
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Call Girl Of Cthulhu
by Nick Glossop on September 13, 2012
Bespectacled pre-Med Miskatonic coed by day…
CALL GIRL OF CTHULHU
A virginal artist falls in love with a call girl who turns out to be the chosen bride of the alien god Cthulhu. To save her, he must stop an ancient cult from summoning their God and destroying mankind.
h/t Tom Murray…
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Sympathy For The Glidd
by Nick Glossop on September 11, 2012
North American readers may not know this but, long before such forgettable motion picture events as 10 and Arthur, Dudley Moore was actually very funny. The creative powerhouse behind Not Only, But Also, and Beyond The Fringe, was, however, the bat-guano-crazy Peter Cook, seen here as the regal package known as the Glidd of Glood. As the neo-feudal age yawns before us, we might as well get …
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Seeing Emily Dickinson (a Second Time)
by Andrew Loewen on September 10, 2012
Researchers believe a new daguerreotype (c. 1859) of the great poet has emerged, only the second known photographic image of the iconic writer and recluse (this younger, more slight portrait is the first and previously only known photographic image). Dickinson would have been age 30 at the time, seated with her friend Kate Scott Turner (since the 1950s some scholars have speculated the two were romantically involved).
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