For anyone coming to my talk on Tuesday ( or anyone not ), there's a drama about the last days of Dylan Thomas tonight on BBC2. Why not watch and then pop along to Waterstones at 1pm to hear me tell you what they got wrong ( I don't know yet, I haven't seen it either ).
0 Comments
Today, I am mostly researching... funeral furnishings in the 1890s. Don't ask. And thought I'd try a slightly smaller font, just because I'm that sort of devil may care soul. Means I can fit more of me on the page, which is always a good thing, right? Right?
The good news for those of you hoping to listen to Owen Teale at the talk at Waterstones on Tuesday, the format has changed, and now we'll each be doing a talk followed by a Q & A. Bad news for me, I have to take a chainsaw to my talk to get it down to under 30 mins. Bye bye to 'In My Craft or Sullen Art' and 'Our Country', but hello 'Love in the Asylum'. I'll add an extra page after the event and hopefully youtube or podcast the full talk as it would have been. Just read a lovely little book with some background on poverty in Victorian Liverpool. Not much to directly affect the Square but really helpful in setting the contrast between the rich and wealthy and the vast majority of people living in the city at the time. It does make you wonder how much the typhus, cholera and famine in the nineteenth century impacted on those living a short walk away.
Having been inundated with an e-mail from a Mrs Trellis in North Wales ( addressed to Humphrey Lyttelton ) suggesting my 'weebliness' is hard to remember, my blog can now be found at www.abercrombysquare.com
Whether it be for a book or a talk, proof reading is always a key priority kids. Case in point, my crib sheet notes for my DT talk summarised for me how the poet is often either loved or hated, rarely neither. Thanks to Belinda for pointing out what I probably meant to write was 'Marmite Poet'. And NOT... 'Bovril Poet'. Hmmm. I was actually subconsciously referring to the beefy verse and sense of the forties nostalgia. Probably.
First dry run of DT talk given to my spider plant tonight. 80 minutes. Way too long. And the plant fell asleep when I talked about Auden. Time to cut and redraft I think. The spider plant liked one of the poems and one of the descriptions of Thomas by his colleague Julian McLaren-Ross though, so we'll keep those bits in. The plant's name is Peter Parker.
|
Archives
March 2024
Categories |