Harry's Place Arts

I love a good hoax.  A hoax is a scam and a con job, but not the sort when a low-life flogs off expensive energy deals to pensioners.  Although some hoaxes have made money, that should not be what a hoax is designed for. Its object should be to make the pretentious and pompous look [...]

A niche topic, perhaps, but one which takes in some rather good books.  Be warned – this post contains quite a few spoilers. I bought Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna because I enjoy alternative histories focused on Rome.  But Judaism is an important, though submerged, strand in the novel, which is really a collection of loosely [...]

I wanted to post a link to Desolation Row but Dylan’s YouTube presence is very minimal.  But here is something to watch/listen to and here are the lyrics to Desolation Row – which work (though don’t ask me what they mean) even without the music. They’re selling postcards of the hanging They’re painting the passports [...]

I have no idea what the answer is to the first question – I was hoping you might have some thoughts.  Sometimes I help teach a course on sf and we always hesitate about what text(s) to include after Neuromancer.   Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow is certainly a contender, as are several of Dan Simmons’ [...]

Diana Wynne Jones (16 August 1934 – 26 March 2011) was a writer of fantasy, mostly aimed at older children.  I have vivid memories of my first encounter with her work, back in the 1970s, when The Ogre Downstairs was read on Jackanory.  The central idea, a chemistry set with conventional chemicals on top, and [...]

When you heard that Julie Walters was playing Mo, in the eponymous bio telly pic about the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland you knew Maureen Mowlam was going to be warm, and human and dead loveable and out-spoken and Northern, with an adoring husband.  Similarly in Wide-eyed and Legless, where Julie Walters was playing Diana, [...]

I watched a TV adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, heard the word “parenting” and winced.  “Parenting” has become a common word since about the 1990s, but it wasn’t round much in the 1890s and it doesn’t occur in the text of The Turn of the Screw. It is a gender-neutral term that we [...]

A guest post by de Bentvueghels Previous episode here “When Alfonso entered Naples in 1443, he was met by a procession in which moved a large tower. Its gate was guarded by an angel, and from its top four Virtues sang to the king. This is placing Virtues in a castle container just as one [...]

This is a guest post by Google Doodle Google gifs have been celebrating Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary over the past few days with a grand finale today: Sesame Street was always considered an experiment. When the very first episode aired on Nov. 10, 1969, the show seemed to pose one big unanswered question: Could children [...]

When I started out playing in bands in the late 1980s, getting into a recording studio was a grand ambition. My first band used to record our ‘demos’ on a stereo hifi tape deck, which necessitated getting a good live mix and a mistake-free performance (just like they did in the 1950s). We dreamed of [...]