Lecturer in Popular Fiction, University of Birmingham, UK. “The successful candidate will have research expertise in popular genre fiction (with Horror, the Thriller, Noir, Mystery, or Young/New Adult as areas of research interest that would be particularly desirable).” On the slim assumption that this is a rare English Literature centre that hasn’t effectively become a […]
Archive for the ‘Reading’ Category
Lecturer in Popular Fiction, Birmingham
09 Nov 2017 at 15:17
David Haden
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John Baskerville: Art and Industry in the Enlightenment
23 Oct 2017 at 06:13
David Haden
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A new Birmingham history book, just published: John Baskerville: Art and Industry in the Enlightenment… “Baskerville was a Birmingham inventor, entrepreneur and artist with a worldwide reputation who made eighteenth-century Birmingham a city without typographic equal, by changing the course of type design.”
Secondhand bookshops, coming back?
28 Sep 2017 at 08:50
David Haden
Birmingham, Reading, Regeneration, Zeitgeist
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Wormwoodania muses on The Rise of Secondhand Bookshops in Britain, and crunches the overall numbers with the aid of a 1984 Driff’s Guide and the current thebookguide. “So we can see that there are indeed more second-hand bookshops in the UK than there were thirty years ago, in fact about 25% more.” Interesting. Yes, given […]
Birmingham City University – research repository
24 Nov 2016 at 17:15
David Haden
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Birmingham City University has just launched a public research repository. Currently it’s too new to be indexed by Google, which would enable one to discover if there’s actually any full-text open access PDFs in there. Most record pages I tried were “full-text not available”, even when one went back a year or two. Which seems […]
Kenneth Clark
Wonderful to see that there’s a major new biography of the great Kenneth Clark, Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. Country Life has a review of the book. The review gives a nice anecdote about the impact of Clark’s magnificent Civilisation series, on art appreciation in Stoke-on-Trent… “Even when the programmes were first broadcast, in […]
Geoffrey Hill
The West Midlands poet Geoffrey Hill has passed away. Hill came of age in the years immediately after the Second World War, in a rural Worcestershire village on the northern outskirts of Bromsgrove. He went away to study at Oxford in 1950, and then taught in the blunt northern city of Leeds from 1954-80. During […]
Eastercon 2017 in Birmingham
18 Apr 2016 at 14:32
David Haden
Birmingham, Entertainment, Reading
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Eastercon, the year’s major British convention for literary science fiction, is coming to the Birmingham NEC next year. 14th – 17th April 2017 at the Hilton Metropole, with Guest of Honour Pat Cadigan.
Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation
27 Mar 2016 at 16:48
David Haden
Birmingham, Entertainment, Reading, Teaching
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The Oxford University Press has a new video-interview today, on an outstanding new project… “Over ten years, David Crystal has constructed an entire dictionary of Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation — with guidance on how every single word in the First Folio would most likely have been heard by Shakespeare’s audiences.” The book is the new The […]
State magazine
05 Mar 2016 at 18:34
David Haden
Birmingham, Creative industries, Reading
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State magazine, a new Birmingham magazine for… “insight into the lives of creative individuals within the music industry”
Society of Indexers comes to Birmingham
21 Feb 2016 at 13:09
David Haden
Birmingham, Creative industries, Reading, Teaching
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The Society of Indexers has chosen Birmingham for their 2016 national one-day conference. The venue will be The Studio, on the edge of Birmingham city centre, on Tuesday 13th September 2016.
Tolkien and mid Staffordshire
Opening 6th March 2016, the Cannock Chase Museum exhibition J.R.R. Tolkien & Staffordshire 1915-1918: A Literary Landscape surveys the influence of the middle part of Staffordshire on Tolkien… “The Great War years were a formative period in the development of Tolkien’s work on the mythology, languages, history and geography of what would become middle-earth. References […]
Edge Question 2016 – in Kindle .mobi format
02 Jan 2016 at 05:57
David Haden
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The annual Edge Question compilation is out today, asking 194 leading thinkers and do-ers: “What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news, and what makes it important?” The combined answers run to the length of two novels. There’s no official ebook version, and Instapaper is going to choke on 133,000 words. So, as […]
The Edge is where The Centre is
22 Nov 2015 at 07:41
David Haden
Birmingham, Entertainment, Reading
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A book of essays and observations on the West Midlands’ film Penda’s Fen, The Edge is where The Centre is, in a new revised and expanded second edition.
Birmingham Science Fiction Group
20 Nov 2015 at 09:03
David Haden
Artist(s), Birmingham, Entertainment, Reading
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Birmingham Science Fiction Group, with a focus on literary science-fiction…
Irish Studies South
The new open access journal Irish Studies South opens well, with a large special issue on poet Seamus Heaney…
Reddit Enhancement Suite
Useful. There’s an equivalent of Facebook’s F.B. Purity filtering browser add-on, but for Reddit. Reddit Enhancement Suite.
Getting past the WordPress.com roadblocks
09 Sep 2015 at 14:11
David Haden
Creative industries, Reading, Techie
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s0.wp.com, s1.wp.com and s2.wp.com are such pains in the neck on free WordPress.com sites. Often they’re unreachable and thus totally prevent the main blog from loading. Is there no way to create a local cache of the common design graphics and styles that these sub-sites host for WordPress.com? Perhaps via a browser addon?
GRAFT
To accompany my JURN search tool I’ve made a quick way to search across all the world’s repositories. Repositories are the special Web servers that universities, museums and archives etc, use to house all their digital goodies — such as online collections, full-text papers and book chapters, and similar Open Access treats. The new search […]
Neil Gaiman on “How Stories Last”
12 Jun 2015 at 16:50
David Haden
Comic art, Creative industries, Reading
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Neil Gaiman takes on a very timely topic, in the week that saw the superb Tomorrowland cruelly tossed aside at the behest of cynical and uncomprehending critics. Gaiman’s “How Stories Last” is a new and lengthy Long Now Foundation talk, followed by a one-to-one discussion with Stewart Brand. Free audio .mp3 (190Mb). Neil’s talk explores […]
Edge question for 2015 – in Kindle .mobi format
The world’s leading thinkers on the Edge question for 2015: “What do you think about machines that think?”. Since the single page is the length of two novels (130,000 words), and Instapaper et al will choke on it, I’ve taken the liberty of making a simple free Kindle .mobi conversion which looks nice and has […]