The story that Herman Melville left untold comes to life at the Ulster Hall ‘Call me Atha.’ In Moby-Dick, the classic tale of obsession and revenge, author Herman Melville gives scant page-space to the monomaniacal Captain Ahab’s family. A ‘girl-wife’ and a young son, both unnamed, serve as just one more thing abandoned to the hunt. In Ahab’s
This week, 45 bloggers are celebrating the release of Incarnate by Jodi Meadows by participating in a treasure hunt with clues, activities, and lots of prizes including signed books and handknit fingerless mitts. You’ve reached a CLUE blog, which means somewhere on this page is a clue to finding the hidden page and grand prize
Belfast author Gerard Brennan sells two books to Blasted Heath e-publisher. Listen to a reading here. Most authors have a simple, three-step career plan: write a book, find an agent and get a publisher. The end result of which, it is hoped, will be a Derek Landy sized advance cheque on the doormat come Monday
Is it a panto? Oh no it isn’t! Listen to extracts from rehearsals. ‘Right everyone, stop rubbing Norman.’ Andrea Montgomery pushes open the double doors at All Souls Church Hall in Belfast, and declares: ‘Culture Northern Ireland is here.’ Norman, in case you are wondering, is the genie in Carol’s Christmas, a new seasonal comedy written
Do these women understand the risks? That is the question that Julie Bindel posed in the Guardian today. I think that her answer boiled down to ‘not really’. (Feel free to correct me!) Except, there’s something about that answer that doesn’t sit right with me. There are many reasons that women, and men, end up
An article in Slate today about birth-control made me think of that most unfairly reviled of biblical men, poor old Onan. To make a long and quite deviant story (seriously, Dynasty has nothing on some of the early Bible stories) short, Judah had three sons. Er, the eldest, got married to Tamar and then got
From the Artful Dodger to Titanic ‘bad lad’, the Belfast actor is back for the Takeover Festival. Martin McCann has come a long way since playing the Artful Dodger at school. The Belfast actor has been praised by Richard Attenborough, cast by Steven Spielberg, played U2 frontman Bono and acted alongside Tom Hanks and Daniel
What is more Christmassy than fibre-optics, glue and models? November is an odd month to be sitting outside drinking coffee – in Belfast anyhow – but sometimes CultureNorthernIreland has to suffer for art. Luckily, the barista did give us some napkins to dry the seat. ‘It’s such a beautiful day,’ visual artist Deirdre McKenna enthuses.
For 40 years Blackstaff Press have published some of the freshest, funniest and most thought-provoking literature in Northern Ireland. Now, to prove that this old publishing house can learn new tricks, they are launching an eBook list. ‘I suppose we have been thinking about it for a while,’ managing editor Patsy Horton explains. ‘It is a growing market. More and
Decca Aitkenhead seems to be very impressed with David Willetts. She praises his academic bent, talks admiring of his disdain for tribal politics and polishes his Oxford based CV with a nicely damped chamois. Don’t be fooled. She puts the boot in like she’s been practicing down the pub on Sunday nights and had steel
Paul Kennedy and Kerry Woods on staging an apocalypse play in an abandoned warehouse ‘There was another warehouse we were looking at,’ Kerry Woods from Tinderbox Theatre Company explains. She is perching on a plastic-covered dining room chair in a storage room full of car-boot sale cast-offs. There are bunk-beds around the corner and a
Over the last few years pseudonyms have become one of the hot button discussion topics on the internet, first during RaceFail and now on Google + with their spottily applied insistence on the use of ’real names’. Speculation on Google+ by people who use nicknames or pseudonyms about what this means is rife. Some think it
