Here is a link to the story, which you might want to read instead of the first 900 words of this and here is a link to a word about our Hauntography project.
Firstly, mostly to get them out of the way, two boring anecdotes.
Semi-irrelevant anecdote #1:
Once when I was working in Waterstones in Oxford, I sold lovely David Mitchell a book of M R James’ ghost stories. The end.
Semi-irrelevant anecdote #2:
I went to a supposedly haunted school. more »
I neglected comics aimed at girls when I wrote the first 25 parts of this series. I’m male, and I read few comics for girls when I was young. I have had some entertainment looking back later, from the extraordinary extremes they went to to torture their heroines, and the ludicrous contrivances. That’s not to say it’s all silly and unpleasant, but the good stuff is not easily found, and I can’t be of much help. The American market has been traditionally hopeless for girls, though in recent years it has improved.
But the Japanese comic market is completely different, and there I have found a few good comics aimed squarely at girls – and one masterpiece, actually aimed at young women rather than girls, which is what has prompted me to add to my series a year and a half later.
Ai Yazawa’s Nana is perhaps my favourite comic ever now, and I thank my friend Cis for pointing me at it. It’s about two young women who move to Tokyo for a new life, both called Nana. Nana K is sweet and rather naive – the punky Nana O calls her, in an exasperated temper, “puppy-dog-like”, and Nana K gets the happiest expression ever. Nana O is a singer, and it’s her band and that of her ex that provide most of the other characters, and the two bands are central to the developing story, which so far runs to 19 translated volumes of around 200 pages each. more »
You probably want to read The Treasure of Abbot Thomas before you read this.
In M R James’s universe everyone who matters is fluent in Latin. It’s not so for the modern reader – or at least this modern reader – and there’s an interesting gap left between the Latin that he so liberally scatters throughout his stories, and the translations we read.
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas begins with some big chunks of Latin, which our antiquarian protagonist – Mr Somerton – gets straight down to translating. What he ends up with isn’t immediately clear to him, either, but he follows up the clues within and is lured into a hunt for buried treasure, departing to parts foreign, and for now out of our sight. more »
marna in FT / The Brown Wedge • 6 Comments
Well I must have been onto something in my last audition roundup because Roland Muldoon has echoed my observation that today’s young comedians eschew, by and large, political or social commentary. Muldoon – the guy who ran the Empire for 20 years and who still does the New Act of the Year competition there – went off on one at the School of Comedy’s Funny Festival, as reported here in Chortle.
His rant can’t have done any favours for the nerves of last night’s auditionees. (Yes, they all read Chortle.) (It is a weird business.) Yet it was the strongest group we’d seen yet. more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT / The Brown Wedge • 1 Comment
For any fans of old horror monsters and/or the stylings of Roy Thomas, here’s a three pager I originally wrote for the horror issue of Solar Wind, that finally found a home in Duke Etrange’s World Of Weird. Art by Brian Coyle.
Full images under the cut…
One oddity about this year’s hopefuls* is that not one has done political material. What are the chances? This is a fairly catholic smattering of forty or so comedians from all over the UK (though mainly London) and after a few nights of hearing yet again from the person on stage that he is “quite tall, people always notice that” or indeed “why is my beard ginger”, as was asked last night via the medium of song by a man seated behind a synthesizer (remember, I go to these things so you don’t have to), the total avoidance of such a rich seam of ridiculousness as national politics seems downright bizarre. more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT / The Brown Wedge • No Comments
Stand-up comedy, like all art forms, has a few hardy perennials. In the plastic arts you’ve got landscapes painted with oils, for example. In standup you’ve got jokes at the expense of disabled people. In theatre, say, you’ve got big brassy musicals. In standup there’s a widely shared pride in how dangerous/boring one’s home town is.
If you see enough standup you’ll become a connoisseur of the quotidian observation. Where the casual observer might see a hopped-up loudmouth in an ill-fitting suit, you can distinguish the fine gradations of it all and appreciate the tangy bouquet of self-loathing overlaid on a peaty observation about Oyster Cards. This is not a good thing. more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT / The Brown Wedge • No Comments
The last big event the Hackney Empire will put on before it goes dark for an indefinite amount of time next year – thank you Arts Council – is the New Act of the Year. Theoretically anything goes, but “new act” has come to pretty much mean “neophyte standup comics” — which may be your idea of hell (there were actually two different predictive text jokes involving the sad face coming up when the name of your town is punched in), but that’s why we go to these things, so you don’t have to. My notes, as scribbled hastily in the dark between gulps of beer and the occasional bout of a strange kind of short fit that I believe is known as laughing, are as follows… more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT / The Brown Wedge • 2 Comments
It’s the time of year when i say: Come and see HIBBETT in Edinburgh! If you’re lucky, you might even see a SPACE DINOSAUR wandering up and down the Royal Mile (hint: it is ME).
AH-OO AH-OO AH-OO
We’ve even got a trailer this year: more »
CarsmileSteve in FT / The Brown Wedge • 1 Comment
art inspired by maurice sendak’s 1963 classic, at TERRIBLE YELLOW EYES
Art and literature weblog by the staff of Freaky Trigger