Archive for April 2010
First Thoughts: ‘New Model Army’
Posted by: danhartland on: April 30, 2010
“I have come to understand that fighting and democracy are actually the same thing. Move the first term into the realm of the second we call it debate – democracy works best if debate is conducted briskly, candidly, sharply, with effective strategies such that the strongest case wins the day. If you reverse the semantic [...]
Oh, Gordon.
Posted by: danhartland on: April 28, 2010
Calling an elderly woman a bigot is a hopeless gaffe for any politician, but for one whose party’s strategy has rested on energising a core vote which will have sympathies with her is more so. Gillian Duffy asked the Prime Minister, amidst a heated conversation which was also about reducing the defecit, about “Eastern Europeans” [...]
‘A Friend of a Friend’
Posted by: danhartland on: April 27, 2010
- In: albums | music
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Gillian Welch hasn’t released a new record since 2003′s Soul Journey. This is a huge recording hiatus for any artist who isn’t Fiona Apple, and for long-term fans of the langurous, evocative, complex music she produces with collaborator David Rawlings, it’s almost intolerable. There are vague indications that a new album may be underway, but [...]
Reviewing Pains
Posted by: danhartland on: April 26, 2010
- In: Books | science fiction
- 2 Comments
My review of this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist begins at Strange Horizons today. The second and concluding part, in which I pick my preferred winner, will go online on Wednesday. Even more difficult than that decision, was the one – made in today’s installment – to exclude Adam Roberts’s Yellow Blue Tibia from [...]
Going Cruelty Free
Posted by: annafrench on: April 23, 2010
- In: animals
- 2 Comments
Today (April 24) is World Day for Animals in Laboratories, marked by a march through London. The day is the culmination of World Week for Animals in Laboratories. The event aims to raise awareness and to campaign against the use of animals in various laboratory tests. This post similarly hopes to raise awareness. But I [...]
‘Songs For Lulu’
Posted by: danhartland on: April 21, 2010
- In: albums | music
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In the manner of exuberant characters, Rufus Wainwright has been in danger of becoming a caricature of himself. Self-reference and indulgence have always been a part of his art, from ‘Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk’ onwards, but since the release and success of the wantonly lush Want duology, they have increasingly become its sine qua non. [...]
Enough With The Punditry
Posted by: danhartland on: April 17, 2010
- In: Politics
- 3 Comments
The political quote of the week belongs not to one of the three participants in Britain’s first televised election debate between the main party leaders, but to David Miliband. “When JFK said America would send a man to the moon,” the Foreign Secretary wrote on his blog, namechecking the same US President alluded to by [...]
‘In Treatment’: Good To Talk?
Posted by: danhartland on: April 16, 2010
- In: television
- 4 Comments
The redoubtable Sebastian Clarke encouraged me finally to indulge my niggling sense I should check out and the lauded HBO TV series In Treatment and take the plunge. The first thing I noticed was the bulk of the DVD set – forty-three episodes on nine discs, no less. The structure of the series is pretty [...]
“Genus and Species”: Sherlock Holmes’s Old Age
Posted by: danhartland on: April 14, 2010
- In: Books | sherlock holmes
- 3 Comments
The bees did speak to him, after a fashion. The featureless drone, the sonic blank that others heard was to him a shifting narrative, rich, inflected, variable and distinct as the separated stones of a featureless grey shingle. I read Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution five years ago, when it was first published, but it [...]
71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.
‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
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Words We Like
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
An astounding work of collecting-as-art, this compendium of 800,000 weird words is easily one of the most consistent genre anthologies I have read. Heterodox yet focused, it is fated to be the canonical text of weird fiction studies for some time to come - and deservedly so. The first-rank stories here - and there are many, not a few - are not excellent weird fiction. They are simply some of the best 20th century writing available in any mode. Not without its faults - but that is, ahem, the nature of the beast. Essential.
Sounds We Like
Sonik Kicks, by Paul Weller
I haven't paid much attention to Weller - an artist who hangs heavy in my musical tutelage - since 2000's Heliocentric, an album of diverse interests which felt like a shot of crisp elegance in that year of Steps and 'N Sync. The records that followed it - particularly Illumination - were enough, however, to make those achievements a distant memory. There have been rumblings of a renaissance - 22 Dreams got great reviews - but only the sounds of Sonik Kicks have brought me back. Energetic, fierce and, best of all, creative, this sounds like a record from a much younger man. Weller has a lesson or two in him yet.
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