Fundacio Miro and other Barcelona notes
One major point about this excellent museum: don’t think you can walk up there from the nearest metro station – it’s a long way up. Anyway, it restructured Miro in my mind: this has some magni[…]

Portrait Of An Artist, As An Old Man – Joseph Heller
I’m a sucker for metafiction, and this is full of it. Heller, in his last novel before his death, tells of an old writer who started with a critical and commercial smash, who is trying […]

Gates Of Eden – Ethan Coen
I didn’t know that one of my favourite filmmakers ever had written a book until I came across this. It’s a collection of short pieces, a few reading like radio scripts, and it has all the strengths of his […]

o tempora o meerkats! As a child the little painted pirate heads I only ever saw in shops on the Aberdovey sea-front somewhat fascinated me – you put them up on the wall (eg like flying ducks) but I have never discovered the proper name for the[…]

“Purple is the international colour of equality”
Hein?? Clearly it’s been taken up by some groups as such, and this lot seem, well, harmless enough – but the choice of purple still seems odd. Until the 19th century and the dev[…]

Molvania
This is the first travel book to be written about Molvania. Why has it taken so long to write a guide to this Central European backwater? Well, it’s had its fair share of civil wars, natural disasters and brutal dictators, but also bec[…]

Glad to see that deranged Narnia site getting wider linkage. Like a lot of crackpot Interweb sites it’s taken a small nugget of insight into the books and magnified and spun it in all sorts of crazed directions. In other words it’s mad bu[…]

So there is a website out there; it shows all of the images that Lichenstein cribbed his famous images from, and its making me rethink the whole comic book/benday dot thing.
I thought that the big and important thing about Lichenstein was his restru[…]

Research Nuggets: I have just read a pretty dry history of the Royal Court Theatre : The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage by Philip Roberts . Mainly to get a vague idea of the climate of the last fifty years of theatre production. The Royal C[…]

HOLIDAY READING = House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
OK so to patch up his collapsing marriage, a World-Famous Photographer buys a house in the Virginia boonies – except when the family move in, they discover a secret room which CAN’[…]