Archive for August 2010
The Briar Patch
Posted by: danhartland on: August 29, 2010
Labour Party members this week await with baited breath their leadership ballots. In less than a month, we’ll know the identity of the new Labour leader, and it is therefore no great surprise that the mainstream media has suddenly started taking notice. The papers were full this week of claim and counter-claim from the various [...]
Sproule and Songwriting
Posted by: danhartland on: August 27, 2010
- In: music
- 2 Comments
In this video over on YouTube, Devon Sproule – complete with husband Paul Curreri – discusses the process of songwriting. The video’s a few years old, and seems to hail from around the time that people were still surprised by Sproule’s shift in sound and material from Upstate Songs to the jazzy, rootsy Keep Your [...]
In Holmes’s Footsteps
Posted by: danhartland on: August 25, 2010
Very busy indeed at the moment, in large part because we’re relocating. Regular readers of the Holmesiana on this blog will recall my giddy rush of excitement when I re-read ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk‘: Holmes and Watson walk New Street and Corporation Street, no less – the main shopping streets of my home town. The Victorian [...]
Don’t Mention The Bunker
Posted by: danhartland on: August 21, 2010
- In: Politics
- 6 Comments
Regular readers will know that I became a member of the Labour party just after the election. Due to personal circumstances, I’ve yet to get involved in a constituency party – I’m still not really sure which to call my own. But in all honesty that may also reflect some lingering reluctance fully to nail [...]
Pony Surprise
Posted by: danhartland on: August 17, 2010
- In: albums | music
- 2 Comments
Gary Lightbody, as well as having a name that makes him sound like a plumber turned Jedi warrior, is the lead singer of Snow Patrol, a band most notable for having a song which was covered by Leona Lewis and made to sound more edgy in the process. Though the band’s songwriting team includes Iain [...]
100 Days of Summer
Posted by: danhartland on: August 14, 2010
- In: Politics
- 4 Comments
Once upon a time, accusing a politician of being messianic was thought of as a satirical attack. Tony Blair suffered more than many from the suspicion that his government was driven less by intellectual analysis and more by blind faith. The enthusiasm of many for the Coalition, however, begins to approach the reverence of a [...]
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Posted by: danhartland on: August 13, 2010
- In: Books
- 4 Comments
That evening, by lamplight, Jacob retrieved the dogwood scroll-tube from under the floorboards and began the most exacting mental labour of his life. The scroll was not long – its title and twelve clauses ran to a little more than three hundred characters – but Jacob had had to acquire the vocabulary and grammar entirely [...]
Making A Hero: “The Great Game”
Posted by: danhartland on: August 11, 2010
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is at least two things: a collection of the first 12 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and an only intermittently successful 1939 film starring Basil Rathbone. Those short stories set a template which would be followed by all the great detective’s subsequent adventures, both by [...]
A Suburbanised Arcade Fire
Posted by: danhartland on: August 10, 2010
- In: albums | music
- 5 Comments
There are positive ways of framing The Suburbs: that all Arcade Fire music to one extent or another grows in the listening; that Neon Bible, for all its charms, was as bombastic as a band can hope to get in this post-prog age, and a paring-back was essential; that this new record’s central concept and [...]
SF and Experimentalism
Posted by: danhartland on: August 6, 2010
- In: Books | science fiction
- 4 Comments
A piece in the Observer’s New Review last weekend looked at an alleged decline in experimental fiction in English. “Avant garde fiction,” argued the writer, William Skidelsky, “at least in Britain and America, isn’t flourishing.” Skidelsky seemed to be defining experimentalism as a formal phenomenon – that is, one of style and structure rather than [...]
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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