Blog Posts

Gone!

After nearly 15 years on Twitter, I’m gone. I’ve never used it that much anyway and was always more of a lurker than active antagonist on the platform. I followed a small number of people, mostly from education, writing and comics. I didn’t post very much. When I added something to my blog it automatically forwards it to Twitter (I’ll end that after this). For the last couple of years I’ve been aware how toxic things have been – particularly in educational discussions. Lots of people I’ve followed for years seem to be on a right-ward shift and don’t just…

60 Years Ago Today: Love Me Do by The Beatles

Someone to love. Somebody new. Someone to love. Someone like you. Time plays odd tricks. It’s 60 years ago that The Beatles released Love Me Do on 5th October 1962. The opening harmonica hook remains haunting and evokes the grainy black and white early Sixties. Melancholic images of fog on the Mersey. John, Paul, George and Ringo playing the smoky Cavern Club. Screaming teenage girls tearing out their hair. The thaw in post war austerity. Yes, the first few notes of the harmonica hook are instantly recognisable as redolent of a seeming moment of cultural change in Britain. By the…

October comes with rain whipping around the ankles / In waves of white at night

Autumn is definitely here. Not the lingering, warm Autumn of early September, but the damp, wet Autumn that points with trembling finger towards Hallowe’en and the first chill winds of Winter. For me, September has been one of reading tales by Algernon Blackwood that seem to anticipate this change of weather: of islands of willows on the Danube, of remote Canadian wilderness, of ghostly monasteries. I’ve also enjoyed reading Thistlebone by T. C. Eglington and Simon Davis. In the background of my September life has been The Advisory Circle, Pye Corner Audio, Boards of Canada and (more upbeat) Stereolab.

Fantastic Four No.1 Panel by Panel

Comparing Panel by Panel with Maximum FF suggests the change in the way that the November 1961 first issue of Fantastic Four seems to be viewed (at least by Marvel). In 2005, Walter Mosley’s presentation of the issue is as an art object: something that “crystallized an art form that has had an impact on our culture”. Mosley delights in Kirby’s “dynamic motion within a single frame” and the way in which the narrative draws a reader into its fictional world which, he says, expressed the world view of a younger generation and “put words to our suspicions”. Chip Kidd’s…

Then we danced the dance ’til the menace got out

Positively pleased with my new Synology DS220+ NAS. Last week, part of my old NAS, a WD My Book Live, was remotely wiped. WD’s solution is to tell users to disconnect until they investigated the issue. It was clearly too late for me and I was worried that the other part of my NAS, a WD My Cloud, could be similarly affected. (An upgrade earlier this year had prevented the NAS from backing up in the way it had done for years and I’d procrastinated in sorting it out.) My last proper backup was in April so I’ve lost about…

Madness!

It’s beyond question that Boris/Al and his ministers just aren’t up to the job of leading the UK in this crisis. Again and again they’ve avoided properly forward planning and left it too late when inevitable actions have to be taken. It’s time for them to go. Boris must resign. Once more it’s been left far too late to deal with the extraordinary spread of the virus. Sorry, but I don’t believe it’s all down to some mutant strain. It’s down to dithering and the pressure of ultra-right wingers who are happy to see the chaos and devastation the virus…

Swamp Thing

I’ve always had a soft spot for DC Comics’ muck monster, Swamp Thing. When I was a kid, there was a newsagents in Bryant Road in Strood where they had a spinner rack full of American comics for sale. I’d buy comics on the way home from school. It was something to look forward to at the end of a day and was where I first discovered comics like Teen Titans, Daredevil, X-Men and Swamp Thing (I had no idea that these titles were created during a comics renaissance by legendary figures like Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, Maru Wolfman and…

The Goalkeeper’s Revenge and Other Reminiscences of English

This morning I was talking with Alice about my experiences of school. We’d been swapping anecdotes about childhood as you do when you get older and try to discern some sort of pattern in those early years that led to where you end up as an adult. It’s all a bit Dockery and Son (and I continually worry how much influence Larkin had on me in my late teens). Anyhow, it led me to think hard about my own experiences of English at secondary school. Most of it is forgotten, mostly vague memories and a few vivid recollections. I went…

Alas, Apple Watch I knew you well

At the end of June my Apple Watch stopped charging. I took it off and forgot to charge it for a couple of days and found that it just wouldn’t turn on – even after charging overnight and swapping cables and plugs. Up until then it’d worked fine. I tried all the resurrection techniques suggested on Youtube, Reddit and other places but it was clear that the battery couldn’t hold a charge. The watch is a Series One second gen that I bought about 4 years ago. When I think about it, the watch has lasted a fair amount of…

Intellivision Summer

Back in 1983 my mum rented an Intellivision games console from Radio Rentals. She couldn’t afford to buy a console so she added it to the colour tv she rented. I actually wanted an Atari 2600 at the time but that wasn’t available from Radio Rentals. Some of the kids at school had owned an Atari 2600 for years. It was one of those things that made me realise that we weren’t as well-off as lots of other families. The Intellivisision had been on sale for two years before we got one. We were given a choice of one game…

Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars

I’m currently working my way through Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series of pulp adventure novels. A Princess of Mars, the first of the series, was a surprisingly enjoyable romp reminding me of a mix of Gulliver’s Travels, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. While I’ve always been aware of John Carter, I’d not read any of the books in my youth. I’m not sure why as it would have been the sort of thing I’d have loved. Burroughs – who is possibly more famous for penning the Tarzan books – secured publication of A Princess of Mars (initially titled Under the…

Back to the Back of a Block-rocking Comic Book!

One of my monthly pleasures before Lockdown was to scan the pages of Previews, the catalogue that would announce upcoming comic book and graphic novel releases. Things have changed since March: lots of titles have been cancelled (some creators have been cancelled, too, but that’s a whole different matter) and DC has split from Diamond distributors which has thrown the comics business into a great sense of foreboding and confusion. UK comics are being released a week later than the US at the moment which is a bit rubbish as the online hype and conversations about each week’s releases will…

Room at the Top

After I was born my mother took me home from hospital to a small rented attic room at the top of a Victorian house in Rochester. We walked past the house today and I pointed it out to Alice and Soren. “That’s where I lived as a baby,” I told them, pointing at the top far-left window. It’s a tall, dark and Dickensian-looking house that hasn’t changed at all. My mother was on her own when I was born and she told me that she spent a very cold winter with me in her room. She became unwell and her…

Florian Schneider, “sonic perfectionist”

This month’s Electronic Sound has a heartwarming tribute to the enigmatic Florian Schneider, who died earlier this year. The piece, by Stephen Dalton, gives an excellent account of Schneider’s role in Kraftwerk. It’s particularly good in establishing the nature of the tensions between Schneider and Ralf Hütter that eventually led to Schneider leaving the group in 2008. I loved the ending of the piece: “Their Kraftwerk Konzept still visionary, their musical legacy unassailable. Humans may die but The Man-Machine goes on forever.”

"a furball coughed up by a supervillain’s cat"

Frankie Boyle on the British government: Boris Johnson, flapping about like a poorly-tethered bouncy castle, is supposed to serve as a distraction, a furball coughed up by a supervillain’s cat. He isn’t supposed to actually lead us through anything. We have a government that has no interest in governing up against an opposition uninterested in opposing. It feels like we’ve got Owen Jones, graffiti, and breakfast news against a ruling class, media, and virus that are broadly in agreement.

“this weird thing of hyper-normalness”

Mark Fisher in an old interview: “What we have got with this digital culture now is this weird thing of hyper-ordinariness. You have got people who are done up to the nines but it isn’t like David Bowie where you are playing with some abstract aestheticisation. We have got people who have this uber ordinariness – it is a normative model: perfect teeth, right skin tone. An utterly conservative artificiality.”

Discover, with a deflating quotidian horror

Mark Fisher on Doctor Who: “To look at the old Doctor; Who is not only to fail to recover a lost moment; it is to discover, with a deflating quotidian horror, that this moment never existed in the first place. An experience of awe and wonder dissolves into a pile of dressing up clothes and cheap special effects.”

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As much as I’m enjoying the Twin Peaks anniversary stuff, UK-based newspapers seem to have forgotten – or decided it wasn’t important – that those of us in UK didn’t see the first episode until October. By then the big reveals were already being spoiled…

Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.

Frankie Boyle: Did you ever wonder what you’d be doing during an apocalypse? Indeed, you have to wonder if the virus is so very different from extractive capitalism. It commandeers the manufacturing elements of its hosts, gets them to make stuff for it; kills a fair few, but not enough to stop it spreading. There is no normal for us to go back to. People sleeping in the streets wasn’t normal; children living in poverty wasn’t normal; neither was our taxes helping to bomb the people of Yemen. Using other people’s lives to pile up objects wasn’t normal, the whole…

“democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one”

David Runciman on what the Covina-19 crisis reveals about democracy, politics, power and order: Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be, but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to make the really tough choices. Pre-emption – the ability to tackle a problem before it becomes acute – has never been a…

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May 29th. Bioshock Trilogy. Switch. I will be returning to Rapture!

"This coronavirus reminds us that we belong to the material world."

George Monbiot on the Covid-19 wake-up call: …this could be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology and physics, and dependent on a habitable planet. Never again should we listen to the liars and the deniers. Never again should we allow a comforting falsehood to trounce a painful truth. No longer can we afford to be dominated by those who put money ahead of life. This coronavirus reminds us that we belong to the material world.

Boris “seemed to have totally lost the plot”

Jim Crace excellent political sketch on Boris and the boys’ performance: It’s not just Boris Johnson’s fundamental lack of plausibility that is the problem. At Thursday evening’s daily Downing Street press conference, he seemed to have totally lost the plot. After a few days of trying to do “serious face” he had reverted to his default end-of-the-pier-show act; the Archie Rice who could no longer even entertain himself. Back were all the familiar smirks, knowing nods and third-rate gags. He sounded tonally deaf, totally at odds with the mood of the nation. When the country wants a man of substance,…

Why we’ve not had more female Robins

Knowledgeable piece about Robin and – correctly – asking why there are so few female Robins: Why we’ve not had more female Robins – or better served ones – is a symptom of a much wider problem. Of the 11 writers announced as contributing to DC’s upcoming anniversary issue for Robin, only two are women: Devin Grayson and Amy Wolfram. Between January and March last year, women accounted for 16% of the credits on comics released by DC; of writers, only 13% were women. The studio celebrated 80 years of Batman last year, but in that time not a single…

“If the government wants schools to stay open, we need far more support”

Heartfelt piece by headteacher Jules White in today’s Guardian Schools need more cleaners to complete regular hygiene work and deep cleans if there is a short-term closure. So give us access to agencies who must prioritise schools… Sats tests in primary schools should be abandoned in the current circumstances. We must also consider children of real disadvantage: schools are often their place of sanctuary and constancy…. Urgent help is required for children who have to deal with disability. Schools need emergency resources to help these most vulnerable young people, and now.

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“a dangerous British trait”

Nesrine Malik argues that the British government’s exceptionalist approach to the Covid-19 crisis should be scrutinised and not simply followed because of British deference: It is a dangerous British trait to fall obediently into line behind those in power when things are uncertain. When the chips are down, a class system redux kicks in. The laws of the hierarchy must be observed. It is a sort of tyranny of politeness and deference that suspends judgment. I’ve certainly heard and read some very odd justifications for the British government’s approach to tackling the virus. I’m not convinced “Wash your hands and…

“opportunity to build a more robust society”

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times suggests that the Coronavirus pandemic could lead to fixes to society: “As the coronavirus spiders across the planet, I’ve been thinking about the illness as a very expensive stress test for the global order — an acute, out-of-nowhere shock that is putting pressure on societies at their weakest points. Some nations, like Iran and perhaps Italy, are teetering under the threat; others, like South Korea, are showing remarkable resilience. The best ones will greet the crisis as an opportunity to build a more robust society, even better prepared for a future unseen danger….

Grinding to a Halt

Educational Inequality. Fiona Miller in The Guardian: The process of narrowing gaps in educational attainment due to class background is grinding to a halt and will now take 560 years to close, according to the Education Policy Institute

DC’s Three Jokers is coming: Healing right, healing wrong, and surviving.

I’m wondering how much of Three Jokers is going to be meta-commentary? By the sounds of it, quite a bit: “It goes back to the beginning when Batman first encountered the Joker, but it’s also The Killing Joke and A Death in the Family that speak to the book and that we’re building off emotionally,” Johns says. “Barbara and Jason have gone through so much, as has Bruce, and it’s really focused on healing, on scars and wounds and what that does to somebody. If you suffer some trauma, you don’t just get over with it and move on with…

Fear is an immunosuppressant

Gordon White on the Covid-19 virus: Fear is an immunosuppressant. Sleep and fasting and cutting out alcohol and regular exercise and daily meditation and low carb/high protein all upregulate the immune system. And you can do them now. Like, right now. But that’s less entertaining, isn’t it? It means you have to do something beyond checking a hashtag and ghoulishly firing up mainstream news sites that you know repeatedly lie to you. You like it. That is your infection. You like the fear.

Cultural Capital: “Slippery and Complex”

Another excellent piece by Barbara Bleiman. Here, she challenges the current interest in teaching “cultural capital”. For Bleiman, it’s a complex thing that – as she shows – is difficult to pin down: cultural knowledge is almost without limit, that you can’t teach it all, that it depends on which texts you’re studying, that it doesn’t need to be exhaustive but just enough to illuminate the text, that many texts provide their own cultural knowledge – they are, in fact, the way in which students absorb that knowledge. If all of this is true, it has profound implications for how…

Teaching a novel using the “Just Reading’ approach

Andrew McCallum discusses the “Just Reading” approach to studying a novel at KS3 and what makes a challenging novel “Meaning reveals itself gradually over an extended period of time, requiring readers to constantly think back, puzzle, make predictions, make connections, ask questions, and even change their minds. It makes sense that when this is done relatively quickly in the first instance, so that pupils can keep the whole text in mind, then overall understanding improves. Halting the reading experience too much, so that it bears little resemblance to the reading process that most of us engage in when reading a…

Comics I Read, January

Looking back on the month, it seems like I’ve read very few comics. It works out at an issue a day roughly. In my head I seem to read much more than this. I started the month reading back over Flash: Rebirth, Flashpoint, The Button and DC Universe: Rebirth. This was to get the Doomsday Clock series straight in my head (it didn’t). I read Peter Thunderbolt because I read somewhere that it was a better way of handing a Watchmen sequel (sort of). Dollhouse Family was great and I’m on board with reading the rest of the limit series….

Force fields explorer racing home the ancient star

SALLY SALT: Who are you really? Baron Munchausen isn’t real. He’s only in stories.BARON MUNCHAUSEN: Go away! I’m trying to die. SALLY: Why?BARON: Because I’m tired of the world. And the world is evidently tired of me.SALLY: But why? Why?BARON: Because it’s all logic and reason now. Science. Progress. Laws of hydraulics. Laws… of social dynamics. Laws of this, that… and the other. No place for three-legged cyclops… in the South Seas. No place… for cucumber trees… and oceans of wine. No place for me. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam, 1988) Increasingly, I see myself morphing into a…

Old man don’t lay so still, you’re not yet young

Back to work after my surgery. I’d expected pain at some point during the day… but nothing. I guess I’ve moved beyond feeble stage now. We watched the first episode of Succession, the HBO drama. Incredibly engaging (though every time we saw Brian Cox, I couldn’t get Bob Servant out of my head).

When feeding time has come and gone They’ll lose their heart and head for home

Bearing in mind I take surveys and polls with a terribly large pinch of salt, the report by Mintel, consumer analysts, about the growth of vegan products in the UK suggests a number of things: only 1% of UK are vegan (not sure this shows any change); 88% of Britons who eat non-meat substitutes say they would still eat meat in the report, people do not appear to cite animal cruelty or exploitation as a reason for not eating meat: When asked about the benefits of eating less meat, 25% of consumers cited improving the environment, while 32% said it…

Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel

Jan had me up at 5am and the day didn’t seem to get any better. I made the mistake of taking him down slides at a children’s play centre and antagonising my wound. Foolish.

He’s cooking in the woods, a brush fire in your neck

Today I’ve been thinking about a couple of environmental articles I’ve read. Both present a similar viewpoint: individual changes to consumption or recycling won’t impact the environmental crisis the planet is facing. The first, I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle. by Mary Anaise Heglar, argues against apathy, despair and a sense of nihilism that pervades some of the environmental debate. Industries and governments have transferred responsibility onto individuals and “it’s victim blaming, plain and simple.” Heglar says: We need to let go of the idea that it’s all of our individual faults, then take…

I will hide and you will hide And we shall hide together here

Another day recovering. Better than yesterday where my wound hurt every time I moved and throbbed continually through the day. I forget that when you are “ill” or “recovering” that’s what you’re actually doing. Last week I imagined I could recuperate by reading and writing, popping out a little. In reality it’s been hard to do very much except sit watch 25 year old episodes of The X-files and feeling grim. The days go quickly, so even if I did want to be hyper-productive, I wouldn’t get the time before the kids are back and the evening routine begins. No…

This is some parade, yesiree Bob

Magazine reading. I subscribe to Wire magazine and it’s great to see the main feature is about Wire and their new album. Also read some tech magazines… but the less said about this nerdish preoccupation, the better. Very sore after my walk out yesterday. Surely I didn’t overdo it just having a little walk. I was told that someone’s partner took 6 weeks to get over a similar operation and go back to work. I’m looking at going back on Monday! Listened to an episode of The Writers Panel podcast interview with Paul Tremblay that was very interesting in terms…

But the wire, the wire turned to lizard skin And when he climbed it sagged

Managed to get out today for a short time on my own. It was wet and windy but I needed to see how mobile I actually am and if there’s a current limit on how long I can be on my feet before if I have any pain. I managed to walk into town and from there to pick up Soren from school. Feeling it now a little, of course. Watched an episode of The X-files, “3”, about vampires. It’s likely that the last – and only – time I saw this episode was in the nineties. I have a…

In the light I saw quite a scene in there

Much better day today. I’ve even been able to have a shower and change my dressing. I even managed to leave the house for a short time but I fear I may have been a little premature. A chunk of my time today has been listening to music and, inevitably, circling back to Boards of Canada (which at this point in my life has become inextricable entwined with my nostalgia for my childhood). Been listening to Music Has the Right to Children, their 1998 first studio album. It always affects me and, when I get some time, I’ll write a…

The map that you painted didn’t seem real

Feeling a little more human today though I’m still finding it hard to stand up and move about. What’s definitely better is that I’m not feeling so exhausted. Apart from sitting around waiting for my wound to heal to a point that I can actually do things, I’ve spent today either reading, watching The X-files or writing. I was going to watch Doctor Who but the terrible reaction to today’s episode is almost unanimous in its condemnation that I think I’ll just skip it. I wonder if the show will be cancelled or put to rest for a little while?

Caught like flies, preserved for tomorrow’s jewelry, again

So… I’ve not been out the house since Wednesday and I got back from hospital. Can’t say the pain in my abdomen’s improved at all. Much of the day I’ve either been reading or finished watching the first season of The X-files. Alice is doing everything – even though she’s tired – and I feel terrible I can’t help out with the boys. Speaking of The X-files, I’ve been slowly watching the episodes from the start. I haven’t watched them for over 15 years. When the show first aired on BBC2 in the 1990s, it was essential viewing for me….

The ocean sang, the conversation’s dimmed

I’m still immobile from my operation. Watched Apocalypse Cow, George Monbiot’s recent documentary about the impact of livestock farming on the planet. Monbiot’s excellent at stripping away the falsehoods and misconceptions surrounding agriculture. At the start he presents a model in which he shows how livestock dominates Britain (something like 51% of Britain is occupied by livestock farming; crops are 20%; towns and cities are 5%). Mobiot’s argument is that farming is causing incredible damage on the environment. He views sheep farming as causing terrible devastation. Rivers are polluted more by farming than any other industry. Only 14% of British…

Speaking in tongues, it’s worth a broken lip

Recovering from surgery at home. While I’m not in pain, I’m far more sore than I was yesterday. I think I was lulled into a false sense of being mobile yesterday. It’s quite difficult to get up and hobble about the house and uncomfortable sitting on the sofa. There’s a sharpness in the wound when I move. Watched The Lost Ghost Story, a 2013 documentary about the life of M.R. James with Mark Gatiss. It’s very good: combining extracts from dramatisations with Gatiss’ recount of James’ life, interviews and commentary. Gatiss draws heavily on James’ biography, especially James’ apparent repressed…

Wrap your heel in bones of steel. Turn the leg, a twist of color.

During my stay overnight in hospital I watchd Martin’s Close, the BBC adaptation of M.R. James’ ghost story. It captures the tone of the short story, the trial of a young country squire who had murdered an “innocent” woman excellently. The layers of narrative: the story-teller, the trial, the flashbacks and the harrowing final scene were deftly constructed. It Peter Capaldi is suitably “toned down” as the prosecutor and Elliot Levey as Hanging Judge Jeffrys are both well-cast. The depiction of the ghost is grim and piteous rather than frightening for fhe viewer. I liked it a lot and Mark…

Stickheads jumping off the ground

I’m having surgery today on my abdomen. Nothing major: just a little operation to keep my lower intestines in ship shape! This is a before and after blog post. Before. Hungry. I haven’t eaten or had anything to drink since yesterday. I don’t usually eat very much in the mornings but I do rely on several cups of tea and coffee to keep me up and running. Hopefully the surgery will be quick and I can get a drink this evening. Going to hospital always seems to be a strangely liminal experience; as if it’s only half-happening. That strange half-asleep,…

A magic kingdom, open-armed, Greet us hello, bravo, name in lights

Just read Drive by S.A. Corey. It’s a SF short story set in The Expanse universe (I’m intending to read all the stories, novellas and novels over the next month). It’s a straightforward story – about Solomon Epstein, the inventor of an engine that allows fast spaceflight and his first testflight – but what is delightful is the way that it’s told in flashbacks about the developing relationship with the woman he marries and the backdrop of growing tensions between Mars and Earth. It has a bittersweet ending. Really cross with myself for seemingly losing my ipad! I left it…