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Weekend Report
Apr. 20th, 2026 12:45 pmYesterday was Bicycle Day, and today is 4/20. I looked up Owsley Stanley AKA “the Grateful Dead’s chemist,” and fell down a rabbit hole of 1960s counter-cultural references. I’d only known of Wavy Gravy by name, but his Wikipedia page is impressive. Also in his Greenwich Village beatnik days he sort of looked like a thinner version of Victor Buono as “Bongo Bennie” on 77 Sunset Strip.
Simon Fisher Turner and others talk about scoring the reissue of The Great White Silence.
Plus you get someone from the BFI remarking “Gaumont, one of the (Terra Nova expedition’s) sponsors, had specifically requested footage of penguins, and by God did they deliver.”
Turner’s Wikipedia page is also a rabbit hole.
L.T.C. Rolt's ghost stories are kind of like M. R. James, except Rolt was an industrial historian rather than a medievalist, so a large number of the stories are about haunted railways tunnels, canals and in one case, a car-racing track. It’s a good thing I watched that video of a foundry a few weeks back, or I’d have had a hard time visualizing the climax of 'Hawley Bank Foundry.'
Even more so than James or other ghost-story writers I’ve encountered, Rolt will give the reader just enough information to guess what likely happened, and then end the story very abruptly, implications hanging. He’s also quite adept at something I’d subconsciously noticed with this genre and still don’t have a convenient name for.
See, the protagonist’s usual job in these stories is to be the witness to/victim of events, so he (the characters are usually men) doesn’t actually do all that much. But at the same time, for the story to be believable we need to believe in him, so he’s got to be characterized economically, yet vividly.
Also the supernatural elements are scarier if our protagonist 'isn’t prone to flights of imagination.' In Rolt’s stories, that means we meet a gallery of veteran railway workers, hard-headed retired manufacturers from the Midlands, etc, along with the usual ambiguously-middle-class urban professionals on holiday. We usually meet them rather briefly.
Simon Fisher Turner and others talk about scoring the reissue of The Great White Silence.
Plus you get someone from the BFI remarking “Gaumont, one of the (Terra Nova expedition’s) sponsors, had specifically requested footage of penguins, and by God did they deliver.”
Turner’s Wikipedia page is also a rabbit hole.
L.T.C. Rolt's ghost stories are kind of like M. R. James, except Rolt was an industrial historian rather than a medievalist, so a large number of the stories are about haunted railways tunnels, canals and in one case, a car-racing track. It’s a good thing I watched that video of a foundry a few weeks back, or I’d have had a hard time visualizing the climax of 'Hawley Bank Foundry.'
Even more so than James or other ghost-story writers I’ve encountered, Rolt will give the reader just enough information to guess what likely happened, and then end the story very abruptly, implications hanging. He’s also quite adept at something I’d subconsciously noticed with this genre and still don’t have a convenient name for.
See, the protagonist’s usual job in these stories is to be the witness to/victim of events, so he (the characters are usually men) doesn’t actually do all that much. But at the same time, for the story to be believable we need to believe in him, so he’s got to be characterized economically, yet vividly.
Also the supernatural elements are scarier if our protagonist 'isn’t prone to flights of imagination.' In Rolt’s stories, that means we meet a gallery of veteran railway workers, hard-headed retired manufacturers from the Midlands, etc, along with the usual ambiguously-middle-class urban professionals on holiday. We usually meet them rather briefly.
