iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I see The Changes got released with the stamp of BFI approval. After that late-middle-aged nostalgia pound. Those Scarred for Life books make for thick catalogues of suggestions

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Just ever so slightly before my time, but they get good word of mouth from 70s-weird-childrens-tv-nostalgia-afficionados: The Changes (1975) King Of The Castle (1977)

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Allan Massie - Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 80s magic realism, grotesque fantasy, and writerly arrogance Sunday Telegraph, 18 Feb 1990

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I've just been turning over newspapers.com for contemporary coverage of various 80s books I've read over the last couple of months, and Foot always contributes on some end-of-the-year books-of-the-year page with a diverse list of his favourites. He had a hinterland.

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The surprisingly long-lived James Callaghan?

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

last couple of pages of a 1973 Panther paperback of "The Nephew" by James Purdy lists "Other Panthers for Your Enjoyment", but one of those pages is headed: American Violence

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

channeling Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe: We shall receive four minutes warning of any impending nuclear attack. Some people say, four minutes - not a very long time. Well I'd remind those doubters that some people in this great country of ours can run a mile in four minutes

say.id

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

And what would you make of the original published title and cover? It is quite a gay book, actually, but more in the way of literary and aesthetic camp:

"I wanted the title The Puppies of Terra. I thought that was a charming title. Don Wolheim is into bondage, and he always put men in chains on the covers (I mean he's the discoverer and publisher of John Norman), so the title Mankind Under the Leash was the result. I don't think it represented the book's whimsical or comical thrust. But what could I do? I had a standard Ace contract. He had the right to make that change. To give him credit, he didn't actually rewrite the novel. He had a benign indifference toward what you actually wrote as long as it didn't exceed the length required."
"An Interview with Thomas M. Disch", Scott Edelman, Last Wave #5, Winter 1986

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

reading an 80s mystery yesterday I enjoyed this unexpected throwaway line about what's happening onscreen as a very upper-class family watch Dallas:

showed that she was by the swimming pool in the usual minimal swimsuit while beyond her one of the blonde ones was strutting away with a display of buttocks which would have done credit to an ape asserting its right to its territory.

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"people who love dogs and hate humanity"? Sounds like a tagline for A Boy and His Dog (1975): Jason Robards, baby-faced Don Johnson, telepathy, rape and cannibalism in the year 2024

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Avram Davidson was probably 50-60s sf/fantasy's most orthodox jew. So ultra-observant he would only accept friends driving cars, turning on lights, cooking etc, if they were already going to do that. Otherwise labour on his behalf was effectively *his* labour, therefore cheating and unacceptable.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It was stuff I half knew but good to have it all together, and his evangelical enthusiasm is so endearing. He's grabbing Spielberg and demanding he confess. Signs and portents for those who will see...

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Just earlier this month I stumbled across a fun 1979 article eagerly sharing how New Hollywood best directors were working through their obsession with the themes, plot and imagery of The Searchers - even to Star Wars and Close Encounters! (that's his breathless 1979 "!", notsomuch mine)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

not an interview but Disch crops up multiple times in this PKD doc www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cK2...

Philip K. Dick - A Day In The Afterlife (complete)

YouTube video by no data available

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Probably: "reification". So it becomes a different approach to what sf/fantasy *mean*. Similarly:

How much can the artist bring to bear on one metaphor? That's the art of writing. To use a metaphor successfully in a novel you must first recognize that your central metaphor is capable of supporting an enormous amount of weight. In this case, I knew immediately that I could pile a lot onto the metaphorical scaffolding.

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The art lies lies in developing a system where the angle/orientation and size of the fold immediately indicates where on the page, how much text and how significant it will be.

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

...the Road to Hell was the road to Hereford... Bruce Chatwin – On the Black Hill - 1982

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

God forbid , but this is based on Star Wars fanfic. Too much of the last decade's romance novel boom is fanfic which had then had to have the trademarked characters scrubbed, complicating the refs fanfic readers bring to the sit. Here it's imagining Rey and Kylo Ren in a college setting. Why?

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Last 20 minutes of Bad Apples is basically The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas but everyone in the PTA agrees the kid in the punishment pit is a real shit who deserves it all - which is great bitter comedy

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Given "Train to Busan" is getting released in the major UK cinema chains this halloween, it was a shame that the same team's latest film "Colony " only got a few showings in far-off arthouse cinemas not even in any of my neighboring counties

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Have you seen the original artist Russ Heath's comic strip reply to Lichtenstein:

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It's amazing that Heard's performance and mannerisms pre-empt - and effectively criticise - the winsome, self-elected good-guy lead actors and plots of *so many* 80s American films.

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I am now afflicted by the idea of a version of Seven Days to Noon (1950) where Barry Jones threatens London with a stolen nuclear weapon because he just wants to see a Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson concert

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It was inescapable. Constant repeats. TV marathons. Always included as one of the core pieces of classic American TV. And this was 30 years later.

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Then you'd been living your life right- and you're now in danger of taking a bad turn, e.g. Frankie Howerd as Mean Mr. Mustard: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBKt...

YouTube video by Andrew Langley

Mean Mr. Mustard - 1978

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

You've never seen George Burns as Mr Kite in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)?! For shame! You've shown yourself up badly. How can you have missed THIS: www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7pP...

George Burns - Fixing a Hole

YouTube video by 1Legendsrule

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It's good to see some unbiased Art Carney appreciation. In America all his achievements are massively overshadowed by his role as the comic neighbor in the classic sitcom The Honeymooners www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ylv...

Norton Preparing to Write

YouTube video by entropyrandom

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

PETER DICKINSON - Murder in the Manor - 1991 lecture after much personal history about realities of Big Houses (costs of running, number of "invisible" servants), economics meets social myth to explain the archetype of the body in the library

When we sit in Plato’s cave and gaze at the shadows on the wall, the ultimate Real Idea of the detective story, that casts all these dim and varied images of itself onto the rock ahead, is of some beastly upstart millionaire slumped at the desk in the library of his country house with a crooked Oriental dagger sticking out of his back.

There was a world once, in unreal, golden England, with houses of Georgian purity or Victorian fancy, standing amid a swooping, tall-treed sward where the deer browsed undisturbed. Ladies and gentlemen of breeding and education inhabited this Eden. (Other inhabitants were needed to keep it going, but they were not seen.) They lived a ritual life, governed by great festivals, grouse shooting on the twelfth of August, partridges and cubbing on the first of September, pheasants and fox-hunting on the first of November, rituals of sacrifice and slaughter. Different rituals of sacrifice between Derby Day and Goodwood, when the London Season was at its height and the virgins — and they really were virgins, most of them — were decked and paraded at nightly balls to be chosen as brides by the tall, young warrior-priests. Warrior-priests because that is what, without knowing it, they were. They kept their hair cut short and their clothes as rigidly prescribed as any uniform. They were educated to an ideal little different from the great warrior castes of the past — the Spartans, the Parthians — to keep their bodies fit, to show no fear or weakness, to ride straight and tell the truth.

And then reality broke in. It was not just that in 1914 these make-believe warriors were called on to fight, and die, though many of them did both. There was economic and social reality as well, which even without the war would have broken that world, because its time was over. It had reached a level of unreality which was no longer sustainable. It did not die at once, of course. When I was a child, there were still quite a lot of people managing to live something like that life, but to them and to the other survivors it was a sort of after-life — and, because they were unable or unwilling to recognize social realities, they blamed the change on the war. They created myths about it, and magics, partly lamenting it and partly attempting to make it live again by special rites and charms. This is why the detective story flourished, had its own Golden Age, between the two World Wars, because its underlying power and purpose was a deep-felt need: to bring that world back to life.

That is why the ideal setting for the mystery novel is the imaginary world of the country house. There, supposed balance and harmony is broken by the act of violence, just as in the real world it had been broken by the war. That is why the ideal murderee is the nouveau riche millionaire, the embodiment of the economic upheavals, contrasted with the dwindling resources that had kept the grand old families going. That is even, perhaps, why the dagger is Oriental, because of the underlying tug of guilt about our colonial empire. (No, that’s a bit far-fetched. Don’t believe that unless you want to.) But the library itself, and, even more, that quite extraordinary figure, the gentleman-amateur detective (a creature as farcically distorted from reality as a Pantaloon or Columbine in the commedia dell’ arte), are very believable symbols.

In almost every country house, there was a room called the Library. Often the books stayed undisturbed on their shelves from spring-cleaning to spring-cleaning — I know it took a five-year cycle to get the library in my brother’s house dusted. What is more, though the actual readers in such houses were often the women, the Library would have been thought of as a largely male preserve, a place for cigar-smoke, and port, and what Kipling described as the most beautiful sound in the world, the deep voices of men laughing together. And around them the books, representing the values of their civilization, the great tomes of sermons, the historians, the poets, at least as far as the romantics, Fielding, Richardson, possibly Scott, but no later novelists. And, above all, the classics — Vergil, Livy, Terence, Ovid, Tacitus, Seneca. Because all these men, however intelligent, however brainless, would have spent most of their school days learning Latin and Greek, subjects almost completely useless but still taught in the same mode right up to my day. Almost all the science I know, almost all the history, certainly all the English literature, is self-taught. The theory was that I could teach myself these relatively peripheral subjects because, there at the center, expert in nothing but capable of anything, stood the supposed product of the educational system, the trained mind. (I was terrible at Latin and worse at Greek, so mine may not be a very good specimen.)

And what is the amateur detective but the literary embodiment of the trained mind?

So you have this mythic world — mythic even in its reality but ten times more so in actual reality. It is doubly intruded upon — first by the upstart millionaire, the new and threatening economy of money unrelated to inherited acres, and then by the blood act in the sanctuary. Blood for blood, only a ritual sacrifice can heal the ever-bleeding wound.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Very much the present for children whose parents were not going to buy anything so declasse as Castle Greyskull Suddenly I am assualted by my slight shame at botching measuring the knot on the winch string through the drawbridge

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I think with MUBI it's not so bad as that as I'm pretty sure these are films that have been in their catalogue for at least a year or so before turning up on BBC.

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

For the last month or two BBC has been going through a phase of broadcasting fims that originally streamed on MUBI. I haven't seen it remarked anywhere - is there a deal? is MUBI's curation a crib list for buying up films as they become available?

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It is the closest anyone has got to putting a Richard Sala graphic novel on screen. Every so often I hope Sala got to watch it before he died.

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

"Spectator film critic" is not likely to be a post Blueskiers think worthy of much respect. But Deborah Ross does such a better job. Picks interesting films. Discusses them as a pastime of intelligent entertainment. Doesn't indulge thumb-in-the eye political grousing spectator.com/writer/debor...

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Did I hallucinate this appearing briefly on youtube yesterday?

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

from 1979 Stuart Byron explains to the laity how The Searchers is the "Super-Cult Movie of the New Hollywood": books.google.co.uk/books?id=0tc...

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Someone at NYC's PBS station knew what they wanted in the very early 90s, broadcasting things like this and My Beautiful Laundrette. Knowing nothing of Clause 28 I wrongly thought the UK I would return to was a lot more accepting of homosexuality and depicting gay men kissing

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

It's a great film, and Jude Law is so much better playing weak men. In one of Kim Newman's genre catalogues, thinking through all the ways of reconfiguring various elements, he mentions the possibility of a house haunted by its living owners - this fits perfectly, especiall towards the end

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Immediately thought there's only one actor like that left now. And I was right: Michael Culkin! Who is surprisingly 15 years younger than I thought - so the modern eqiv of eternally late-middle-aged Richard Vernon, Lionel Jeffries and John Le Mesurier

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

“Closed Doors, or The Great Drumsheugh Case” is in Roughead's 1931 anthology Bad Companions: archive.org/details/badc...

archive.org

Bad companions

xiii, 301 pages 23 cm

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

In McGee a recurring feature is him and a woman coming together to balm their aching souls, expressed sexually then leaving wiser, nourished people. So here she is cheapening sex. Upmarket "Playboy"-ism really Also he suffers from a bad case of Death-Penis. Touch it, ladies, You're a gonner.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

BBC: "The co-accused of a rapist...can be named for the first time after reporting restrictions were lifted...The husband, who still cannot be named to maintain his wife's anonymity" is probably a factor