ukjarry.bsky.social

A reminder to myself shop.bfi.org.uk/the-goons-at...

Reading The Bedsitting Room script ( Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, 1963/1970) after Ken Tynan's essay "The Royal Smut-Hound" (1966) shows that all the requested alterations and censorship were accepted. Somewhere there must be the original...

My favorite summary of Phillip K. Dick is from the BBC arena documentary about him where they interview a guy at a pet store who is like “Phillip K. Dick was so poor he ate horse meat here” and then Thomas Disch chimes in to talk about what a self-mythologizing drama queen he was.

The appearance of "Silly old twat" in "All Things Bright and Beautiful" (Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, 1962) is a surprise given the multiple times I've read Ken Tynan's zippy essay "The Royal Smut-Hound" about the Lord Chamberlain's nit-picking and over-weening theatre censorship

@dirtyfeed.org A fun discovery of this piece from the Harrow Observer giving a fairly full account of the recording of Monty Python's Money Programme / Argument Clinic episode. And all almost a full year before it was broadcast.

Allan Massie - Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 80s magic realism, grotesque fantasy, and writerly arrogance Sunday Telegraph, 18 Feb 1990

...the Road to Hell was the road to Hereford... Bruce Chatwin – On the Black Hill - 1982

Last 20 minutes of Bad Apples is basically The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas but everyone in the PTA agrees the kid in the punishment pit is a real shit who deserves it all - which is great bitter comedy

I am now afflicted by the idea of a version of Seven Days to Noon (1950) where Barry Jones threatens London with a stolen nuclear weapon because he just wants to see a Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson concert

PETER DICKINSON - Murder in the Manor - 1991 lecture after much personal history about realities of Big Houses (costs of running, number of "invisible" servants), economics meets social myth to explain the archetype of the body in the library

from 1979 Stuart Byron explains to the laity how The Searchers is the "Super-Cult Movie of the New Hollywood": books.google.co.uk/books?id=0tc...

As I can't find a copy of this already on Bluesky to like:

Sadly I note reports of the death of John Crowley (1942 - 2026), the writer of Engine Summer, Little Big, and the Aegypt quartet. A luminous and erudite writer on love and memory. 25 years ago I compiled lists of his career, works, reviews, documentaries, interviews: web.archive.org/web/20030628...

I like to think that barely comprehensible as this is now, when I look at it in the future it will have matured into the finest impenetrable gibberish: "3th"? Really? "Immaculate"? Like PauI Eddington? Few would call me "warm blooded" 100? When somewhere there's a textbook denigrating my cadences

Peter Barnes Barnes' People II (1984) "Insanity is the first sign of the zodiac" "On account of stupidity this world will be closed till further notice"

Two decades-long mysteries solved at last! Illustrators I used to see in the colour supplements in the early 80s: Janet Woolley Mordillo

Fresh from the pages of Punch, May 1955, it's Capsulysses ! Ronald Searle imagines how a schock film adaptation of The Odyssey might look. scans from the great ronaldsearle.blogspot.com (no alt-text - images too detailed, and half my keyboard is dying)

Ancient Gaul's Eye View Of Britain - From Our Own Correspondent, Paris The Times 19 Oct, 1966 explaining the recent popularity of Asterix includes these comments from René Goscinny

I couldn't figure why S. Clay Wilson work seemed so familiar 15 years ago, but today's tributes to John Blanche fantasy and sf gaming illustrations from White Dwarf, Sorcery! Warhammer when I was 9-13 are obviously what I was trying to recall for form, detail, colour, violence

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (3)

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (2)

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (1)

The last 10-15 years of conservative writing has delivered some terrible straining prose, habits of style now institutionalised in Grokipedia. A drive-by shooting of an explanation from Ruth Rendell in "A Demon in My View":

Stumbling across Celia Dale's earliest story, "The Scream" in "The Bystander" August 25, 1937, the issue also has this glorious photo of Alastair Sim in the play "The Gusher"

#hhgg Was Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gay? Would he have been happier out of the closet? Well, not quite… But Douglas Adams did say Marvin was inspired by comedy writer Andrew Marshall’s worst sullen behaviour and in a 2 Oct 1983 NME interview:

John Sladek – Bugs – 1990 Hoorah for logical semantic equivalences. Multiple times the AI computer intelligence in this novel argues “ Orwell was right “ explaining:

Bradley Denton - Buddy Holly is alive and well on Ganymede - 1991 A Charles Portis-influenced odyssey less gonzo sf than deeply-rooted chronicle of Boomer coming of age and aging. An appealing colloquial humorous tone (ala Howard Waldrop). The intro to a great fundamentalists bust-up over rock/pop: