His Dark Materials?

In my pigeonhole today were a number of interesting objects.

Superman: War of the Worlds, an interesting insertion of the Man of Steel into the H. G. Wells story, bought mostly because Oswald Mosley, the wannabe British Hitler, makes an appearance and I'm thinking of writing a piece on literary representations of this odious individual. It was packaged beautifully: clearly nerds are much more careful with their belongings than ordinary book dealers.

The new (Spring 2011) issue of New Welsh Review - full of good poetry, short fiction and reviews.

John O'Sullivan's A Photographic History of Mining in South Wales. I'm giving a paper on masculinity in mining fiction at a conference on Saturday, so it should provide some good images. Once I've written the damn thing.

Eirene White's very, very short The Ladies of Gregynog, the fascinating story of these Victorian/Edwardian couple, leading arts patrons and cultural icons.

Stead Jones's reprinted Make Room For the Jester, another piece of forgotten Welsh Writing in English reissued by the Library of Wales.

A remote control for my Nikon D7000. Rather pleasing that it cost £6 considering the huge cost of the actual camera.

Gruff Rhys's new solo album, Hotel Shampoo.


Nicholas Daly's Modernism, Romance and the fin de siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914.


Sally Ledger's The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle.

Finally, and most oddly, this piece of craftwork. I have no idea who made it, so thankyou to whoever put it there. File me under 'bemused but touched'.

Kinder Scouting for Boys

One summer, the Map Twats went camping and walking in the Northern Peak District, based in Edale. I was particularly happy about this: I wanted to visit Kinder Scout gritstone peak, location for the famous Mass Trespass, organised by the lefty British Workers' Sports Federation to open the land for people other than aristocrats intent on massacring the local wildlife. It lead to a mass brawl, but it worked. More pictures here, courtesy of Dan.

Meanwhile, I've become a flasher. In the sense, of course, that my beautiful new Nikon SB400 flash and diffuser have arrived, so arrivederci mug-shot style faces and terrible shadows. 

Moronicity

I'm such an idiot. I bought a beautiful Nikon D40 a few weeks ago. Today, rushing out to snap a pair of buzzards, I dropped it and appear to have wrecked the 18-55 zoom lens: it won't take photos at all on Automatic, the motors whirr but nothing moves, and manual photos are out of focus. So I guess I'm looking at £80+ wasted on repairs or replacement for my own stupidity. 

I've started putting my photos on Flickr - only the Malvern ones were taken with the Nikon, but Vilnius is beautiful through any viewfinder.