Litro #116 Humour Teaser

Issue 116

Joanna Kavenna Tom Toro Stephen Pile Aaron Stypes MV Montgomery Jess Sully Nichol Wilmor

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Litro 116: Humour

Falstaff, Arrigo Boito

‘All the world’s a joke and man is born clown’

Editorial

It takes two to make a good joke: someone to tell it and someone else to laugh. But if you believe the medical facts, laughing ten times a day can also help lower blood pressure, reduce anxiety, increase your sex appeal, prevent baldness, understand birdsong, reinvigorate your wardrobe and aid your appreciation of these humourous short stories.

(Note to stereotypically humourless lawyers: parts of the above may be untrue.)

But jokes are just the beginning. Linguists have often pointed to the link between humour and metaphor as a way of showing the world in a different light, making it recognisable yet new; understandable yet strange. In this issue, we’ve tried to bring together a mixture of styles and approaches (and yes, that includes puns: cf. M.V Montgomery). We’ve chosen stories that use humour as a kind of petrol to the engine: a clash of cultures (some of them biological) in an exclusive extract from Joanna Kavenna’s brilliant new novel, COME TO THE EDGE; knockabout humour in Tom Toro’s ‘Radio Cairo’; understated (yet pervasive) satire in Aaron’s Stypes’s ‘The Steve Show’, and in Stephen Pile’s two short pieces, proof that the real world is as barmy as anything we can make up…

We hope you enjoy them as much as we did!

Alex & Mohsen Editors

cover artwork: The Evil Eye - Chaperones, H. M. Bateman, The Sketch 1910 © H. M. Bateman Designs

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From Steve Bell and Ronald Searle to William Hogarth and The Beano the Cartoon Museum, near the British Museum, shows great original British cartoon and comic artwork from the last 250 years.

SEE THE WEBSITE FOR DETAILS OF OUR WORKSHOPS Upcoming exhibitions include 25 JULY - 21 OCTOBER Animal Crackers FROM 24 OCTOBER 75 Years of The Dandy

!"#$%&'!(()$*+,#+* 35 Little Russell St, London WC1A 2HH info@cartoonmuseum.org / 020 7580 8155

www.cartoonmuseum.org

Tues - Sat: 10.30-17.30 Sun: 12.00-17.30

CONTENTS Tom Toro

05

Joanna Kavenna

06

Tom Toro

11

‘I had a crazy dream about trapezoids’

exclusive extract from COME TO THE EDGE

RADIO CAIRO

Jess Sully AFTER THE FARMING MUSEUM

M.V Montgomery AT THE CONFERENCE

Aaron Stypes THE STEVE SHOW

Stephen Pile THE WORST EVER BROADWAY PLAY

Nichol Wilmor MOOSE-HEAD AND SHREW

Stephen Pile THE LEAST SUCCESSFUL HOSPITAL VISIT

17 22 23 29 31 35

Tom Toro

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Events

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Those who don’t study History…

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Extract from

COME TO THE EDGE Joanna Kavenna Cassandra White is not a virtuous widow with her grizzled hair coiled into a bun.

She does not wear a series of shapeless outfits in black, and she does not, ever, sit in a rocking chair surveying the scene with her rheumy eyes, saying, ‘Before my dear Harry died . . .’ or ‘In my day . . .’

She does not walk falteringly with a stick and she does not smell faintly of mildew.

She does not say ‘Oh dearie me’ when she stumbles.

In short, Cassandra White is not the delicate old lady I conjured as I read her advert.

Really there’s very little way I could have expected her at all.

She is possibly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She is six feet tall and she has a shock of orange hair, blood orange setting-sun orange, and when she marched down the drive to greet me it was flaming like a furnace on her head.

She appeared with a beacon above her, saying, ‘Welcome, did you find it OK?’ She shot me a brilliant smile, as I stumbled out with my bags. A charming twist to her mouth. As I stepped heavily into the knee-high mud, she took a bag and carried it. And all the way into her house she was like a tour guide, ‘And this is where my grandfather built the second part of the house, and this is the oak outer door my parents put in, and this is where my mother used to keep her horses,’ and the whole layer upon layer of her family history, ‘and this is where my late husband always smashed his head, be careful now.’

She was like a country hostess who somehow remained oblivious to the fact that her country pile was really a dump.

Because it was clear, as soon as we went inside, that Cassandra White lived in the biggest dump I had ever seen. A dump beyond my worst imaginings. Not a small dump, not a cramped hovel by any means. There was plenty of this dump, room upon room, each one full of family heirlooms and mouldering clocks and sour old bits of furniture teetering on the ancient slate. There was the storeroom with dead meat hanging in rows and layers of home-made wine and jam and cheese and butter and barrels of home-made cider and the greenhouse and the toolshed and the cowshed, where there was a pile of straw and the lingering stink of a cow.

‘My last remaining cow,’ said Cassandra, with an angry nod.

And the unspeakable grossness of the dry toilet or, as Cassandra called it, the thunderbox. I didn’t know about that when I first arrived– Lord Jesus, how I didn’t know about that, and how I was soon enlightened – but I did observe that the kitchen was a place of damp-ravaged tiles and peeling wallpaper, with the shrill high smell of rotting matter and something else, something even worse.

I somehow doubted – glancing around again – that Cassandra had anything like a dishwasher. I doubted she had a Magimix or a microwave. And there was no sign of a set of matching dishcloths and a range of over-sized wine glasses and tasteful ranks of white crockery.

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RADIO CAIRO Tom Toro I stumble into the jetway and assess my life. I am in Cairo. I’m meeting a friend of a friend whom I’ve never seen before. I’m supposed to be her professional sound recordist for a radio documentary about some unknown topic.

I took far too many sleeping pills on the flight over.

Someone is waving at me: an olive-complexioned girl in khakis and a fitted polo.

I wave back as if we weren’t total strangers. She laughs and points at her head, indicating, I suppose, my safari hat, which I doff in a hammy way that feels totally unnatural, and after that we run out of things to gesticulate.

The customs line moves at that agonizing airport rate: too fast to put baggage down, yet too slow to carry baggage comfortably.

“What is the purpose of your visit?” the agent asks.

Good question. “Business?”

“What type of business?”

“Media?”

He eyeballs me suspiciously and takes his sweet time flipping through my passport, its unending series of blank pages creating a shameful secret between us. Stopping at random, he pastes a sticker askew on the page and bangs it with a red stamp.

“Enjoy your stay in Egypt, please.”

“Salami lake hum,” I say, phonetically reciting what the stewardesses had grumbled at me, and also giving a nondenominational bow.

“Ah-salaam.”

I shuffle across the vacant lobby while she, growing elated, rushes to meet me.

At the security cordon a soldier inspects my passport, inspects the neckline of her polo shirt, then after a sufficiently long period to establish his importance to this whole proceeding, lets us unite. Smiles beam. We cheek kiss. Bystanders disapprove ostentatiously.

“Billy Orr! Look at you! You’re looking good – just like I imagined! Nice hat! How do you feel? Was it a long flight?”

“Thanks. You too. Fine. No.” I shake my head while grinning involuntarily, and cannot for the life of me recall her name. “Deborah’s doing great!” I say, blurting out our mutual acquaintance in hope that this will start a cascade of useful facts.

“Considering all that she’s been through recently, yeah. We can only pray.” She clucks her tongue in remorse.

What the hell happened to Deborah? I suddenly feel estranged, demoted. Which is extremely odd, because this whole time I’d been assuming that Deborah and I were actually the ones keeping a deep, dark secret from her Egyptian friend.

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AFTER THE FARMING MUSEUM Jess Sully So this is what happened on my school trip.

First off, I have to say, what really did my head in was mom coming along for the ride. They wanted volunteers and seeing as she’s on the PTA she thinks that what I really need for my adolescent development is for her to be hanging around like a turd I can’t quite scrape off my shoe.

Instead, she should be hanging around in sixth grade with Billy because he’s such a frigging know-it-all. When he puts up his hand and shouts ‘Miss, miss!’ he wants the biggest audience possible, grandstanding asswipe that he is. But no - mom knows, instinctively, to concentrate all the strength of her golden-green eagle-eyed stare on me. I mean, it’s not that I rebel, no, to look at me you wouldn’t think All right. I can’t even do the voice. Oh, how I want to do the voice. That casual hand-on-hip voice. The chewing gum malaise. For one, I couldn’t even really get away with a body con skirt. I have little pads of fat either side of my hips that’d give it a horrible line. Cutesie! I should maybe get some Spanx but they’re expensive and if I asked for them as a present, mom would just tell me Gracie, you should learn to love your curves.

Gracie! Tuesday’s child is full of grace. Of course.

Mom is full to the brim with the milk of human kindness. Overflowing. I have visions of her breast-feeding orphans, stray kittens, chimpanzees. She bakes a lot of muffins for charity.

So, anyway, we’d been to this farming museum and we were in the coach about an hour away from school. Donnie was eating these really stinky meat things, you know, those slices of salami where you pull open the plastic and it smells like a skunk farted and then in the next second died. And Rachel and Glenn were making out, because they always do, and it’s really clever of them. And some of the kids right at the back of the coach were amusing themselves by writing ‘Help - we’ve been kidnapped!’ on a piece of card and pushing it up to the back window. Like anyone out there would think we’d been kidnapped, because that’s what kidnappers do, isn’t it, hire a coach? Unless the coach was full of, I don’t know, pedophiles on a day trip, who stopped at a service station and bumped into us in the queue for the cannelloni, and said ‘How delightful, may we have this dance?’ and each one partnered up with the next in a big band number, and before we knew it, with our feet still tapping to the rhythm and our eyes glittering with the glamour, we were swept up the steps into the coach and the door closed behind us in that sort of puff-puff final way it does.

So, to summarise: smelly meat, making out, kidnapped. And then this really terrible grinding noise started from somewhere and the coach slowed down. We crawled along at, I don’t know, two miles an hour, and Donnie flicked a piece of his pink, lolling tongue meat into the aisle and shouted ‘Aaagh we’re gonna die!’ and started rocking the back of the chair in front of him until his knuckles turned white, and everyone laughed in a very knowing way, which made

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AT THE CONFERENCE M.V. Montgomery It had been one of those whirlwind conference romances. Now the very distinguished and very pretty professor from Irvine and I were deciding whether to attend one more afternoon session, or to flee the scene together.

I don’t know, she said. There’s this panel discussion on Adrienne Rich and Feminist Polemics, and one on Edgar Allan Poe and the Gothic Impulse.

You decide, my dear, I said, patting her shoulder. I’ll be there with you, for Rich or for Poe.

M.V. Montgomery is an Atlanta professor and writer. His most recent collection of fiction is Circle, Triangle, Square (NAP Publishing).

My Dear s H M Bateman

THE STEVE SHOW Aaron Stypes How Country Club Plaza was able to stay open, nobody really knew. It ranked as one of the central mysteries of the city, along with the hauntings at the California State Library and the underground tunnels in Old Sacramento. The question: how can a shopping mall stay in business when sixty percent of the commercial storefronts are vacant? On the south wing of the mall, where the management offices were, the vacancy rate was an alarming eighty percent: fifteen out of nineteen storefronts were empty. And this was no recent trend: it had been going on well over fifteen years, even after a multimillion dollar remodel five years prior. The reclusive owner/investor (whose name has never been released, curiously enough) must have hoped that the much-needed facelift would jump-start the dying mall and attract new customers. That didn’t happen, however. The vacancy rate continued to hover around sixty percent (“Coming Soon: Another Exciting New Retailer!” the signs outside each empty suite promised), with most of the existing businesses being large, stable venues: Macys, Off Broadway, Sport Chalet, Ross, and Hometown Buffet. At the southern end, Gottchalks had called it quits some three years ago, hastened by a poor economy.

Once a vibrant, bustling mall, Country Club had been decimated by the arrival of Arden Faire—the darling of the city—some fifteen years prior, as well as the Galleria at Roseville ten years ago. Country Club had neither the glitz and glamour of Arden Faire—which attracted everyone from Christian choir groups to hoodlums—nor the trendy, upscale modernity of the Roseville Galleria. The only other two malls in the area were Sunrise Mall—which, as the city’s oldest mall, had managed to revitalize itself and survived because of its lucky proximity exactly halfway between Arden Faire and the Galleria, far enough away from both to avoid being swallowed up—and the Downtown Plaza, which survived due to a single, charming novelty: it was the city’s only outdoor, open-air mall.

Surely, with dismally low attendance for fifteen years, the situation at Country Club Plaza couldn’t go on indefinitely. Yet the mall was always warm in the winter and cool in the summer . . . somehow, someway, it was able to pay its bills.

Two groups of patrons were most prominent at Country Club: elderly couples, who used the mall as an exercise facility, for their daily indoor walks; and by the mentally disabled, who were carted in by groups via caregiver vans. Obviously, the institutions that brought them wanted a sparsely attended mall where they could go out in public and not get in anyone’s way, and who could blame them?

Then came the turning point for Country Club, something that would change its fate forever: virtually overnight—it definitely came without any warning—people were confronted with the sight of a man living in one of the larger business suites. The message: the reclusive mall owner had finally gone mad. Did he—or she, as the case may be—not know that allowing domestic renting violated zoning ordinances governing commercial vs. residential dwelling? It is safe to say that most people wouldn’t want to live inside a shopping mall, yet perhaps some viewed it as a novelty: the convenience of, let’s say, walking thirty steps to Panda Express or twenty steps to Subway or Mrs. Fields Bakery & Café. In any event, the public was obviously baffled—and then charmed—by the oddity of seeing a private renter living inside a shopping mall.

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THE WORST EVER BROADWAY PLAY Extract from THE ULTIMATE BOOK OF HEROIC FAILURES

Stephen Pile An immediate and sensational flop, Moose Murders by Arthur Bicknell is now widely considered to be the worst play ever performed on Broadway.

‘If your name is Arthur Bicknell – or anything like it – change it,’ said the theatre critic at CBS. When it opened and closed on 22 February 1983, Frank Rich, the drama critic of the New York Times, wrote: ‘From now on there will always be two groups of theatregoers in this world: those who have seen Moose Murders and those who have not. Those of us who have witnessed it will undoubtedly hold periodic reunions in the noble tradition of survivors of the Titanic.’

The play, a mystery farce, relates the adventures of Snooks and Howie Keene, Nurse Dagmar, Stinky Holloway and others trapped together one excellent stormy night at the Wild Moose Lodge, a guesthouse in the Adirondack Mountains. Several murders take place, Stinky tries to sleep with his mother and a man in a moose costume is assaulted by a bandage-wrapped quadriplegic.

There is a thunderclap. The curtain rises on a hunting lodge which is attractively festooned with stuffed moose heads.

Act One gets off to a corking start when ‘The Singing Keenes’, the resident entertainers, come on and launch straight into a rendition of ‘Jeepers Creepers’.

A scantily clad Snooks Keene sings in an off-key screech. She is accompanied by her blind husband pounding away on his electric organ until the plug is pulled out by the resident caretaker, Joe Buffalo Dance, who wears Indian war paint but speaks with an Irish brogue.

They are soon joined by the wealthy Hedda Holloway, the Lodge’s new owner.

She arrives with her husband Sidney, the heavily bandaged quadriplegic, who is confined to a wheelchair. His attendant, Nurse Dagmar, wears revealing black satin, barks like a Nazi and whenever possible leaves her patient out in the rain.

In addition to her son Stinky, a drug-crazed Oedipal hippie, Mrs Holloway has a young daughter called Gay, who is permanently in a party dress. When told that her father will always be a vegetable, she turns up her nose and replies, ‘Like a lima bean? Gross me out!’ and then breaks into a tap dance.

Just before the interval Stinky gets out a deck of cards to give the actors, if not the audience, something to do. The lights go out mid-game and the first of several inexplicable murders is committed.

‘Even Act One of Moose Murders is inadequate preparation for Act Two,’ Mr Rich wrote. In the play’s final twist Mrs Holloway serves Gay a poison-laced vodka Martini for reasons that are never entirely clear. As the young girl collapses to the floor and croaks in the middle of a Shirley Temple tap-dancing routine, her mother breaks into laughter and applause.

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MOOSE-HEAD AND SHREW Nichol Wilmor Clive Montague never liked me particularly. I certainly never liked him. Loud, boorish, with floppy fair hair, there was—there is—nothing to like. This gives rise to two questions: First. Why, some twenty years ago, did I receive an invitation to the house-party he was hosting at his parents’ country residence in Dorset? Second. Why did I go?

The second question isn’t difficult to answer. Curiosity. Plain and simple. Clive and his public school ‘chums’ inhabited a universe I’d read about in Edwardian novels but thought had long since ceased to exist. It was a world I neither envied nor despised but one which I felt I should witness before its final expiry.

The first question will be answered in due course; I will add a third. I still dislike Clive; meanwhile, in the years since his invitation, Clive’s indifference to me has mutated into loathing. Why then, on occasion, do we find ourselves in each other’s company?

The house-party proved a cliché. There is no need to dwell on the kedgeree and kidneys at breakfast, the pink champagne and vintage port at night, the afternoon tennis, the morning croquet, the games of charades and sardines or the howling séance in the library. It was so much what I had expected that it was impossible not to be disappointed and, very rapidly, bored. I might have gone home after the third game of sardines on Saturday night—my absence would not have been noticed by Clive or any of his braying, whinnying companions—had it not been for the late arrival of a charming house-guest: the doe-eyed girl.

At this distance in time I can’t recall exactly what passed between us but I can only suppose that there must have been some exchange of looks or words that led me to believe she might be my prize for staying the course until Monday morning. It has to be admitted that Araminta was—that she still is—disconcertingly lovely to look at.

But let me take you back to the beginning.

Sometimes things seem so obvious from the outset. You see so clearly what’s going to happen. You make it known to other people. You are ignored. You make it known again. You are ignored again. It duly happens. And, well ... To appreciate the story—if such a trivial episode can be characterised as such—let me invite you to be me; to step into my shoes; to become, if you like, the protagonist.

On the first evening you notice that there is a loose wooden floorboard at the top of the main staircase. You notice this because, in the gloom, you trip over it and would have tumbled down onto the cold grey stone slabs of the hall floor if you hadn’t been quick enough to grab hold of the banister. Fortunately you were which meant that you didn’t. You resolve to say something in the morning.

A different incident occurs later that night. Returning from a journey to a distant bathroom with a towel round your waist—unlike your fellow guests you do not,

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THE LEAST SUCCESSFUL HOSPITAL VISIT Extract from THE ULTIMATE BOOK OF HEROIC FAILURES

Stephen Pile In June 2010 Mrs Connie Everett of Kitimat, British Columbia, was taken to hospital after colliding with a moose while driving to visit her sister, Mrs Yvonne Studley, who was in hospital after colliding with a moose.

banned books H M Bateman

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EVENTS London’s Pleasure Gardens June 2012

For 200 years Pleasure Gardens were central to London’s social life. Long before the festivals of today, they were places where people converged to meet, debate, listen to music, watch shows, admire paintings and walk and drink. LPG will recreate this festival atmosphere as an ever-evolving creative playground for both young and old alike.

Gangster Tour of London Various Locations June 2012 Actor Stephen Marcus guides this tour around the infamous Kray twin’s stamping ground. Highlights of the tour include seeing the pub used in The Krays which is smashed up by the Maltese boys and the location where Vinnie Jones’s had his first day of filming for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Southbank Centre Summer Festival Southbank Centre 01 June – 09 September 2012 Highlights from the UK include Bryn Terfel’s uplifting four-day celebration of Welsh heritage and culture; and Unlimited, the largest single program of commissions by disabled and deaf artists ever undertaken in this country. Installations by artists from around the world include the reopening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall roof garden and weekly food markets

The Royal Observatory Greenwich

THIS June 2012

The thought-provoking Spacetalk series sees Dr Lewis Dartnell ask one of the biggest questions in the Universe: are we alone? The Across the Universe show continues in the newly refurbished Peter Harrison Planetarium, whilst the Measuring the Universe exhibition also runs throughout the month. The planetarium also screens Coral: Rekindling Venus by Australian artist Lynette Wallworth as part of the London 2012 Festival.

David Nash at Kew The Royal Botanic Gardens 09 June 2012 – 14 April 2013 The exhibition will open to members of the public, with sculptures, installations, drawings and film in place throughout the Gardens, glasshouses, and exhibition spaces. Nash will work at Kew on a ‘wood quarry’ – the first he will have done in ten years, creating new pieces for the exhibition using trees from the Gardens that have come to the end of their natural life.

BP Portrait Award 2012 National Portrait Gallery June 21 – 23 September 2012 The BP Portrait Award is the most prestigious portrait competition in the world, promoting the very best in contemporary portrait painting. With a first prize of £25,000, the exhibition has proved to be the launch pad for the careers of a number of successful portrait artists.

Another London: International Photographers capture City life

JUNE 1930- 1980 Tate Britain 27 July – 16 September

Some of the most celebrated names in international photography, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Eve Arnold, with less familiar photographers to explore the

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EVENTS distinctive ways in which they saw and represented this unique location. Tate Britain will show over 150 classic photographs that depict the city and its communities from the 1930s to 1980s by photographers for whom London was a foreign city.

London 2012 Festival All 33 London boroughs 21 June – 09 September 2012 The Festival, announced by London 2012, is a 12-week celebration of the world’s best music, theatre, dance, visual art, literature, film and fashion. In London, an unparalleled programme of free events is being planned by the Mayor’s Office in partnership with artists and performers, across all 33 boroughs, to create an unforgettable experience for anyone in the city during the Festival.

Poetry Parnassus Southbank Centre 26 June – 02 July 2012 Southbank Centre’s Poetry Parnassus is set to be the largest poetry festival ever staged in the UK, bringing together a poet from each of the competing Olympic nations. 205 poets will come to Southbank Centre and tour the UK for a weeklong celebratory gathering which will include, readings, workshops and a final gala event with all the poets.

Nomad Various locations June – September 2012

THIS

The pop- up cinema will return to some of its favourite open-air venues with not only the best kit but also the best atmosphere. No matter where The Nomad appears, it will embrace and enhance each venue, offering new ways of seeing an uplifting range of films, from silver screen classics to cult, noir and silent, to mainstream guilty pleasures.

Summer of Love Generator Hostel London, 08 June – 08 July 2012 Generator Hostel London will transform its social spaces into a pop up park with grass, deck chairs and sun loungers. City sightseers can enjoy a homemade smoothie on the inside green of Generator Hostel London, while relaxing from the hustle and bustle of the day’s activities. In addition, the famous Generator Bar will be transformed into an International Sports Bar during the summer.

Summer at the National Theatre National Theatre June – October 2012 The National theatre is presenting two very special performances. Timon of Athens: World Shakespeare Festival, directed by Nicholas Hytner, with Simon Russell Beale in the title role, will run from July – October 2012 and The Last of the Haussmans: a new play by Stephen Beresford, directed by Howard Davies will play at the Lyttelton Theatre from June to September.

City of London Festival 50th Anniversary Various locations 24 June – 27 July 2012

JUNE

City of London Festival, is celebrating 50 years in dramatic fashion with over 100 performances over 34 days in over 55 spectacular London venues. The Festival’s

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EVENTS theme, City of London – Trading Places with the World will be brought to life in the City’s most iconic and historical spaces. Each event and performance acts as a new instalment in the story of the City taking the audience on journey that connects back to London’s heart.

Barbican Hall Upcoming Shows and Collaborations Barbican Hall / Village Underground 22 June – 05 July 2012 The Barbican Hall has announced four exciting new shows as part of its contemporary music summer season. The events are as follows: Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras meet The Congos, Van Dyke parks with Briten Sinfonia and special guests Robin Pecknold and Daniel Rossen, Paul Heaton’s The 8th and Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: World Cities 2012.

Sol Melia’s ME, The Strand Opening May 2012 ME London is located next to Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square, in the district of Holborn. Upon opening, the hotel will comprise of 157 rooms and suites, including 17 suites and 1 ME Suite, 1 ground floor bar and 1 roof top terrace club/ bar with amazing views across London. The hotel will have 2 fantastic restaurants including an offering from hot, American Steakhouse STK. The property will combine the historic facade of Marconi House with a new Portland Stone building and will feature a rooftop bar with views of Somerset House and the Thames.

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Dickens and the Artists Watts Gallery 19 June – 28 October 2012

Dickens and the Artists will explore the significant connection between Charles Dickens and visual art. Dickens was interested in both contemporary artists and the art of the old masters which he viewed and commented on in his tours of Europe.

JUNE

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LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Study Dutch... at one of the world’s best universities UCL, one of the top-ten global universities, houses the oldest and largest Centre for Dutch Studies in the English-speaking world, a recognised centre of excellence in both research and teaching of Dutch and Flemish literature, culture, history and society.

A full range of undergraduate (BA Dutch) and graduate degrees (MA/MPhil/PhD Dutch Studies) are available. Dutch can either be studied on its own, or combined with other areas such as History of Art, Management Studies, Film Studies, or another European language and culture.

UCL’s uniquely supportive environment for its students include an annual Writer in Residence programme with an acclaimed author from the Netherlands, visiting students and lecturers from the Netherlands and Belgium, a large array of digital learning resources, UCL’s careers service, and all the Dutch and Flemish attractions and cultural events that London has to offer.

For further information visit www.ucl.ac.uk/dutch

Image credit: Nick Piercey

LITRO | 116 HUMOUR

"It had been one of those whirlwind conference romances.

Now the very distinguished and very pretty professor from Irvine and I were deciding whether to attend one more afternoon session, or to flee the scene together.

I don’t know, she said. There’s this panel discussion on Adrienne Rich and Feminist Polemics, and one on Edgar Allan Poe and the Gothic Impulse.

You decide, my dear, I said, patting her shoulder.

I’ll be there with you, for Rich or for Poe. " At the Conference, by M.V Montgomery, page 23 www.litro.co.uk ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

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