How I Learned to Read Again
Tuesday, January 15th, 2013I can’t remember learning to talk but I do remember learning to read. As the youngest of four, I had an urgent need to be able to read even before I started school. All around me, my family’s heads were buried in Mills and Boon, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, Mickey Spillane, Charles Dickens or the [...]
Inhabiting the Narrative – Housekeeping and the Hounds of Love
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012Being a Girl You’ve seen the film: a man looks behind an office filing cabinet to find a portal into another man’s consciousness – someone who turns out to be a famous actor. The intruder remains inside this other life for a quarter of an hour or so before being ejected onto the side of [...]
Melville’s Moby Dick in the Digital Age
Thursday, October 4th, 2012From their shared fascination with Moby-Dick, writer Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne came together to curate, first, an installation in Plymouth, England, celebrating the book – Dominion: A Whale Symposium. They put together a book with the same title earlier this year then organised and recently launched the Moby-Dick Big Read (www.mobydickbigread.co.uk), a website [...]
I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasieński – A review
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012In his 1921 “Manifesto on the Immediate Futurisation of Life” Bruno Jasieński called for Poland’s national poets – “the stale mummies of mickiewiczes and słowackis” – to make way from the “plazas, squares and streets” for the new: Futurists like himself. Many years later, as Soren Gauger tells us in the afterword to this excellent [...]
The truth, the whole truth and… – Mike Daisey, Apple and Foxconn
Friday, March 23rd, 2012Mike Daisey admitted to stretching the truth in his monologue The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, but when tech journalists say that Daisey, as a monologist, had ‘no business’ telling the story in the first place, it begs the question who does, and are they telling it correctly?
Sluts, Opportunists and Martin Amis – The Pregnant Widow
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012A lot of people are cynical about the sexual revolution. Most acknowledge that the new set of sex and dating rules has produced ‘confusion’. Some go so far as to label it ‘anarchy’ that will ‘destroy society’. We are told that women can have sex like men if they want to – that consenting adults [...]
The Monkeys’ Playlist 15/03/2012
Thursday, March 15th, 2012Here’s the first installment of what’s going to be a regular feature on TMO, where we introduce you to tracks/albums/artists that we’re listening to at the Monkeys’ HQ at the moment. There are no rules, and no specific criteria – except that we have to be able to include a video/stream of the song, and [...]
The Futureheads sneek a preview of Rant
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012TMO favourites The Futureheads have been working on an accapella album, Rant, which will be released on April 2nd 2012. The band from Sutherland, already well known for their adventurous song structures and harmonies (for example their electrifying version of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love – released as a single in 2004, and now some [...]
Digital censorship – Italian judges close down disaster information site
Sunday, February 19th, 2012Imagine the closing of an entire newspaper/magazine/portal online because judges deem one simple phrase published, on one of its pages, to be defamatory. No need to imagine it, as it’s already happened this month – not in China, as one might think, but in the heart of the EU; Italian judges, deeming one phrase published [...]
