A Blog of Bosh

Edward Gorey’s Haunting House
Just in time for Halloween, a pictorial peek at the eccentric, ramshackle Cape Cod residence of the late artist and author Edward Gorey, master of the macabre.
washingtonpost.com | 30 October 2003

Tiger Lillies, with the Kronos Quartet, bring the artist’s macabre mirth to the stage in a brilliant show.

Telling tales is a treat for all children of all ages… Rick Huddle steps up to recite Edward Lear’s rhyming story ‘The Dong With a Luminous Nose.’ The words belong to Lear but the telling is all Huddle, a mix of pantomime, vocal changes and silly faces that make Lear’s strange creature seem to appear.The [...]

Rose-Red City Carved From the Rock
In 1812 a Swiss-born, Cambridge-educated linguist named Johann Ludwig Burckhardt passed through the city en route from Syria to Egypt. He spent an uneasy three days there, unwelcomed as an outsider by the inhabitants, and published an account of it in his book, ‘Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.’The [...]

Spike’s sad sharp edgeThose who grew up on The Goon Show will see him as later generations saw Monty Python - as the one who made sense by failing to do so, the great anarch who gave form to a sense of all-encompassing absurdity. In fact, it makes more sense to see him as a [...]

The Limerick Challenge
To mark National Poetry Day, you are formally invited to join the Magazine’s Limerick Challenge.BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | 9 October 2003

Nailing Spike [Milligan]
The combination of Spike, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, with help from deep-dish subversives emerging from their cocoons in the BBC, created an explosion of verbal anarchy that nevertheless flowed from a tradition, combining music hall with Lewis Carroll and the nonsense prose and poetry of Edward Lear. Carpenter does not [...]

Celebrity voices on charity CD
Les Barker, 59, who lives in Bwlchgwyn near Wrexham, has released a poetry CD entitled Guide Cats for the Blind, to raise funds for the British Computer Association of the Blind. His style is in the genre of nonsense verse, similar to that of Edward Lear, author of the Owl and [...]

Anyone for Tennyson?
The Queen’s residence at Osbourne helped make the Isle of Wight fashionable among the cream of Victorian society: Charles Darwin, William Makepeace Thackeray, C. F. Watts and Julia Margaret Cameron, among others, all moved to Freshwater.Of these, Tennyson was particularly close to Cameron and made frequent visits to Dimbola Lodge (her home), which [...]

Hamiltons sell up
Not much about Lear, but I’m trying to resume updating this blog after a long period and anything will do.ic Liverpool | 8 September 2003