Gently altering the world – the arts
March 30, 2020 at 11:24 pm | Posted in art, arts and health, Common Good, creativity, humour, humour as medicine, rural Ireland, Stand-up comedy - Australian, stress management, value of the arts, writers' health | 5 CommentsTags: Cill Rialaig, Elizabeth Cope, Genevieve Lacey, James Veitch, Ken Robinson, Michael Jnr, Peter Ammer, Shankill Castle, TED talks - funny, You can't ask that
Returning from a writing residency in Cill Rialaig, in Ireland’s County Kerry – https://cillrialaigartscentre.com/residencies/ – it was weird to be back yet not be able to hop on my bike and see friends, go to tango lessons, films, cafés and libraries or walk around the lake.
I watched that ingenious ABC program You Can’t Ask That and this time it was on nudists. I thought they would just answer the questions in their clothes.
But no – there they were, all shapes and sizes, in the nude. It reminded me of an unusual art exhibition I heard about in Cork.
Near Kilkenny I stayed a week at the fabulous Shankill Castle – https://shankillcastle.com – home of painter Elizabeth Cope and her husband Geoffrey. I have one of her beautiful paintings, pictured above. You can see her work here – she does landscapes, still lifes and portraits. She had an exhibition in Cork of only her nudes. A group of nudists asked if they could view the exhibition in the nude. The gallery said yes. I suppose it wasn’t winter. Continue Reading Gently altering the world – the arts…
‘Life is not for doing the doable.’ – Tim Ferguson
December 5, 2018 at 9:25 am | Posted in Australian memoir, Comedy writing, Comic memoirs, humour, Tim Ferguson | 2 CommentsTags: Cheeky Monkey, Theatre in war time
Penny Hanley and Tim Ferguson
There are remarkably few books or courses on how to write humour. Most people think that it can’t be taught. Tim Ferguson disagrees. He holds regular classes on how to write narrative comedy, in Australia and other countries, and has written a book on it, The Cheeky Monkey: Writing narrative comedy (Currency Press, 2010).
I did one of his weekend courses recently in Canberra and it was fantastic. Tim Ferguson is generous, smart and a fabulous teacher. He’s a humane and witty guy who shared the secrets of comedy and the milieu of comic writers and performers in Australia with us. And it was like paying a (very reasonable) sum of money to laugh from nine to five, two days in a row. Continue Reading ‘Life is not for doing the doable.’ – Tim Ferguson…
Robin Dalton’s exhilarating books – great Christmas presents
December 2, 2017 at 1:32 am | Posted in Aunts up the Cross, Australian memoir, Comic memoirs, humour, One Leg Over, Present giving, Robin Dalton | 1 CommentTags: Country Life, John Hargreaves, Kerry Fox, Michael Blakemore, Sam Neill, Sydney 1930s, Uncle Vanya
High dramatic comedy
Death was ‘always present, cosily accepted’ in Robin Dalton’s 1930s childhood in Kings Cross, Sydney. As a single child in a house full of eccentrics, the fairy tales she was told were the amusing accounts of how her relatives met their ends.
Her 85-year-old great-aunt Julia was knocked over by a bus. This bus was travelling slowly, in the right direction. It was Great-Aunt Julia who was, characteristically, walking very fast, in the wrong direction. Great-Uncle Spot fell off a ladder while changing a light bulb. A great-aunt died as a child from eating green apples and another from blowing up a balloon. The author’s great-grandfather died while reading Uncle Vanya and her Uncle Ken, a soldier in Gallipoli, was killed not in action but from a fatal bite of sugar. (Clearly an early casualty of the ‘Sweet Poison’ we’re hearing a lot about now – see davidgillespie.org and www.sarahwilson.com )
Dalton’s Aunts up the Cross is still in print, I’m happy to see – originally Penguin and now a Text Classic – and it would make a great Christmas present. There is not a word wasted, every word is elegant, and nearly every word is funny. Continue Reading Robin Dalton’s exhilarating books – great Christmas presents…
Puns in life and puns in dreams
February 17, 2017 at 1:17 am | Posted in dreams, Father/son memoirs, humour, Puns, puns in dreams, Shakespeare | Leave a commentTags: Hugh Grant, word-play
Fraught father/son relationships
Last post was about the memoir I Am Brian Wilson. There’s an interesting aside in it that involves a pun. I’m not a big fan of puns (notwithstanding the visual one on this site – a sharp pen) but they can be interesting, specially when they involve a Freudian slip.
Brian’s father, Murry Wilson’s relationship with his sons was fraught. He used to hit them, sometimes with his open hand and sometimes even with his fist. When the sons became old enough to decide that they didn’t want him to manage their band the Beach Boys any more, they essentially fired him. Continue Reading Puns in life and puns in dreams…
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