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The most famous lighthouse keeper in America was a woman! Based on a true story, The Bravest Woman in America by Marissa Moss tells the tale of Ida Lewis.

As she grew up near the sea, Ida helped her father tend a lighthouse. She learned to polish the lighthouse lens, how to watch the sea for signs of trouble and most importantly, she learned to row. Eventually, Ida took over the care of the lighthouse, as well as the role of protecting those who ventured onto the ocean. Then one day, wild waves swamped four boys out sailing. And Ida was the only one who could help. Click here to read more.

Life - This was a nice day. We woke up late, no alarm, a little laziness after we were awake, the perfect way to start a morning off. After a while, we drove down to town and ate breakfast at the Fairground Cafe, I had Corned Beef Hash, home fries and a blueberry pancake, all of which were very good. (Though, naturally, it wasn't as good as The Stone Dog Cafe's Corned Beef..) After breakfast,

Monday was an easy day, with my in-laws and I driving down to Ferryland (on the coast, South of St. John’s). We hiked out to the lighthouse where I did a few quick sketches. The fog was heavy and the cliffs, rocks and water below were hard to see, if we could see them at [...]

I had done this quick cartoon version of the first day of my Newfoundland trip off and on during that same first day. A lot of this was done as we were driving which made for herky-jerky results. No pencil rough; just put down as the day went on so I could remember what we [...]

Megan Branch, Intern

In addition to all my blogging and publicity intern duties here at OUP over the past six months, I’ve also been interning for the 19th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference. The Conference is held at a different university every year and this year it just happens to be taking place in New York. The majority of those attracted to the Woolf Conference are Woolf scholars, but this year there is something for the rest of us: there’s going to be a band.

The band is called Princeton and they almost never make their way to the East Coast, so their one-night-only performance at the Woolf Conference is even more special. The band is made up of 3 guys based in Los Angeles who sound like a cross between The Shins, Sufjan Stevens, and a library. Princeton write and perform music based on the lives and work of the members of the Bloomsbury Group that included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes. One of my favorite songs from Princeton’s Bloomsbury EP, “The Waves”, shows off what they do best. The song pairs heartbreaking lyrics, detailing Woolf’s last thoughts before her suicide, with music so upbeat that it’s practically bursting with sunshine. Princeton’s music makes you happy, and then it makes you think.

For the Woolf Conference, Princeton will be playing all of their songs from the Bloomsbury EP and have collaborated with the Stephen Pelton Dance Theater to produce “Lytton/Carrington”, influenced by Bloomsbury member Lytton Strachey’s unique relationship with the painter Dora Carrington. Also premiering at the Woolf Conference is the dance theatre piece “it was this: it was this:”, choreographed by Stephen Pelton, which uses movement to illustrate Woolf’s use of punctuation in one paragraph of To the Lighthouse.

Princeton and the Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre will be performing in Fordham University’s Pope Auditorium, 113 W. 60th St, on June 5th at 8 PM. Tickets will be available at the door for $20.

You can learn more about the 19th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference here.
See for yourself how awesome Princeton and the Stephen Pelton Dance Theater are.
And here’s the music video for my favorite Princeton song, “The Waves.”

Tool: Artrage2
Merry Christmas everybody!!


**Tilen's shop ~tilen.etsy.com~tilen.dawanda.com**

This coming Monday the interview media circus for Stardust begins, or it does for me anyway. So I went in to Minneapolis yesterday and got a haircut from Wendy at Hair Police, so I will look less like a man with a honey badger growing on his head in the photographs, then I nipped down to DreamHaven and signed stacks of books for them (some that people had ordered and some so they could sell them over at their www.Neilgaiman.net shop). The circus starts Monday and then, with a few outbreaks of Beowulf on the way, it barely stops until about August the 3rd. Argh.

Let's see... Actor Doug Jones talks about me and Miss Maddy visiting the Hellboy set over at his blog, and the day the three of us went to Margaret Island. His blog is just like him. http://dougjones.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/i-think-im-still-alive/

(Here's Maddy and Doug -- sans Abe or Faun or Silver Surfer makeup -- on the bridge the Sunday of fountains and Viggo Mortenson, with Margaret Island in the background. The next time we saw Doug he had shaved off most of his hair, because it's more comfortable, and cooler, to have your head encased in latex if you look like a marine recruit.)

Film Ick reviews the script to Hellboy 2 at http://www.filmick.co.uk/2007/07/all-hellboy-2-you-can-handle-for-one.html.
From the bits they quote, it's obviously an earlier draft of the script than what's being shot currently in Budapest, but you definitely get the flavour. I enjoyed the first Hellboy film, but didn't think it was a major Guillermo Del Toro work. I'm pretty sure, from all I've seen and from reading the script, that the second film will be one of those sequels that improves and deepens and is seriously better than the first film in the sequence, rather than being one of those films that gets knocked out quickly to try and get people to buy tickets for something not quite as good as the thing they liked the first time around. Guillermo sees it as an upbeat, comic-book-based companion piece to Pan's Labyrinth, anyway.

...

I keep meaning to write about, or at least link to, Heather McDougal's Cabinet of Wonders

http://cabinet-of-wonders.blogspot.com/

which is fast becoming one of my favourite stopping off points on the web. It's a blog of essays and pictures of things I either know a bit about and wish I knew more, or about things I know nothing about and really really needed to. Everything from Ossuaries to astrolabes, automata, orreries and shadow-puppets, and even short films of stop motion beetles, like this one.

Start back in March and come forward, or just poke around the coolness...

And not far behind it for sheer interesting stuff, if a little more narrowly focussed, is

http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/

yesterday's future, today.

The link stolen from Eddie Campbell's blog, 1947 comic artists drawing their most famous characters blindfolded... http://a-hole-in-the-head.blogspot.com/2007/07/eyes-wide-shut-in-1947-life-magazine.html

And finally, for when you need a complete trilogy of movies condensed into one tiny pill (like those retro-future "instant roast beef dinner" pills from Just Imagine):

http://xkcd.com/c254.html