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poetry

How To Successfully Stalk Comedians

In this guest post, award winning author Emily Dodd gives you a taste of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s seedy underbelly – the twilight world of stalking.

I’m not talking creepy or romantic stalking. Successful comedian stalking is quite different; a fine art with the ultimate aim of making the comedian laugh. Then you have arrived, then you are funny.

I first started stalking comedians in the Fringe by accident. I’d recognise them and greet them like one greets an old friend. I was so ridiculously friendly that they were polite; perhaps thinking I was someone they knew but didn’t recognise. You could see them racking their brains trying to work out who I was.

A real friend, Vicki once caught me mid-stalk with Simon Amstell.  She edged away, embarrassed. I went to find her afterwards.

“What were you doing?!” she exclaimed.

“I don’t know” I confessed “I just forgot I don’t actually know him.  It keeps happening..”

Continue reading “How To Successfully Stalk Comedians” →

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Keep Short Stories on Radio 4

Those of you who are on Twitter may already have heard about the campaign to stop Radio 4 from culling their short story output from 3 per week to just 1.  It was brought to my attention by Susie Maguire, an author who tweets (very fittingly in this instance!) as @wrathofgod and has been getting people to sign a petition, here.  There are 3746 names on there at the time of writing, including lots of authors and actors and culturally important types.  And me…

Continue reading “Keep Short Stories on Radio 4” →

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Latitude 2011: A Review

The one in which I tell you about my holiday, as if you even remotely care.

On Thursday I travelled from Edinburgh to Suffolk (on the train via Peterborough and Norwich, route planning fans) to attend Latitude, a nice middle class festival for nice middle class people.  If you think that an unfair assessment, incidentally, witness the food van that had the longest queue of the weekend on the right hand side of this post…  Please correct me if I’m being condescending and people lined up for ages to access this van at T in the Park as well, though.

The nice thing about Latitude is that it tries to do something a bit different by not being a straightforward music festival.  Whilst there are three music stages, it also has tents dedicated to comedy, poetry, literature, theatre and cabaret which have arguably far better lineups than the music ones do.

For instance, here is what we saw over the weekend:

Continue reading “Latitude 2011: A Review” →

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A Call To Arms

Family was very important to Caligula, to the extent that he had most of them deified (ie worshipped as gods), he put them on coins, and he had the senate swear allegiance to his sisters as well as to him.

His favourite was meant to have been Julia Drusilla – the only one who probably wasn’t involved in a plot to kill him, to give her her due – to the extent that the gossipy so and so’s who wrote the historical sources closest to the period accused him of having an incestuous relationship with her.  Certainly he was very cut up when she died, but although he made a massive fuss and ordered the entire empire into mourning, that wasn’t without precedent.

Anyway, whether he loved her in a wrong way or not, it seems they were close.   So in the blog I’ve decided to have him composing some epic emo poetry to her memory.  The quality should be no higher than William McGonagall, and no lower than that of a fifteen year old blogging in the darkness about how unfair everything is.  With that in mind, can anyone point me in the direction of some terrible, self indulgent poetry for inspiration?

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