Occasionally I feel in the need of a rant. Most recently my wrath has been incurred by a BBC4 Programme entitled In Their Own Words. I have decided to try to give my ire a more theoretical and, hopefully, objective framework by considering the topic of dumbing-down. Dumbing-down is a much misused term to which …
Month: August 2010
Three August Movies
Definitely, Maybe (2008) written and directed by Adam Brooks is a movie I have seen a couple of times now and throughly enjoyed on each occasion. Unfortunately, also on each occasion I have watched the film in the middle of a depressive episode, and am therefore unable to write about it as much as it …
Trollope’s Later Short Stories – The Lady of Launay
A period of at least three months having passed since I completed Trollope's Later Short Stories, it is interesting to find those which have remained most firmly fixed in my mind. I should say at once that these stories are almost always at the least interesting, but among them are a number of delicious gems, …
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Letter From An Unknown Woman
After a long period of closure Birmingham's main 'arthouse' cinema at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) has reopened. Actually the whole of MAC has been resigned/redecorated/refitted and it is now a much more pleasant and airy space. I don't think they have done that much to the cinema, but it does mean that foreign language/independent/reissues …
The Sound of Music 2010
A wonderful evening out to see the stage version of The Sound of Music. This was a much better production than the last one we saw some years ago. In part this was due to the presence of Connie Fisher as Maria. Fisher was the winner of the 2006 BBC show How Do You Solve a …
Crabbe’s Tales – The Critical Heritage
Crabbe: The Critical Heritage (ed: Arthur Pollard 1972) provides the full text of a number of contemporary reviews of The Tales. The following are summaries extracting what I saw as some of the main points of interest. [This entry is far from complete but I thought it would be useful to get something down and, …
Byron’s Religions
'Byron's Religions' was the title of the 2010 one-day Conference of the Newstead Abbey Byron society held at Nottingham University on May 1st. Personally I think that despite some very interesting papers I found this Conference something of a disappointment. Of course this may have much to do with the fact that I was not …
Scottish Idyll
An entry of purely personal interest, being an account of our holiday in Scotland in May. We spent the first couple of nights on Arran at the Kildonan Hotel (fairly obviously in the village of Kildonan which is at the southern tip of Arran). The hotel was decorated and furnished in a pleasing, if somewhat …
The Wire
Watching every episode of all 5 series of The Wire was an endeavour quite different to the other viewings of DVD box sets which I undertook during my hiatus in terms of both quantity and, more importantly, quality. It is one of those, relatively rare, items which undoubtedly belongs on both my blogs (which is …
Byron Journal – Academia and Byron’s Sexuality
I subscribe to the Byron Journal which is a bi-annual publication of The Byron Society. It is a somewhat strange mixture of extremely academic articles (especially most of the lengthy book review section), reports from various conferences and Byron societies around the world, and articles on various Byron related matters. Although some of the articles, …
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Moving Toyshop 