British Library
The shelves in libraries or bookshops labelled Science Fiction and Fantasy interest me only for the former, not the latter. Games like Dungeons and Dragons have never appealed to me, and much as I like maps and strange lands, the works of Tolkien leave me cold.
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Writing: making your mark, screenshot by Terry Freedman
If you’re in London, you might be interested in this exhibition on the history of writing, at the British Library. Here are my views on it.
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Screenshot of the British Library website, by Terry Freedman
It’s all very well being able to write, but what about how we write, that is the tools we use? There is a fascinating exhibition coming in London in April 2019 that explores this.
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Victorian humour? A contradiction in terms, surely? Not according to Bob Nicholson, a lecturer in history who is on a mission to make Victorian jokes funny again (which presupposes they were funny in the first place, of course, but one assumes they were!).
Now, you may think this has nothing to do with writing, but it has. Bob is using a computing technique known as “text mining” to trawl through loads of Victorian publications held by the British Library, and extract jokes.
“There’s Terry, always with his head in a book or a comic.” My mother’s gentle admonishment was a constant feature of our household. But it wasn’t an admonishment against reading, which my parents actively encouraged (books were revered in our home because they were books, almost regardless of the content). Rather, it was a cry of frustration over the fact that once I was engrossed in a book or a comic, anything she said to me literally fell on deaf ears.