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The Pipwick Papers

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News by Philippa Warr Former Staff Writer
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Sometimes you forget that it's Easter Sunday because you've been up late reading Neuromancer and have had weird dreams about a gigantic terrifying crab with a sound system implanted in its legs which terrorises the city and so you are confused by the onslaught of egg puns on Twitter for a few minutes and the weird photos of Lindt bunnies that apparently your friends like to eat face-first then Instagram the scene before devouring the rest of the egg. So you sit down to write the Pipwick Papers in a state of slight confusion.

Think of this as an Easter Egg hunt but one where I've done all the work for you so you have nothing to hunt and there are no eggs.

This is not the Sunday Papers.

  • George R.R. Martin has published a new extract from The Winds Of Winter - it's an Alayne chapter which I rather enjoyed. To be fair she's always been one of my favourite characters, though, and I'm filled with a sense of general foreboding on that front given George's history with other characters I rather like.
  • Jeffrey Marlow for Wired on the ongoing love affair with country music.

    • "It wasn’t inevitable that country music would thrive in the globalized world of perpetual Facebook updates, a world whose frenetic pace can be felt in electronica, or whose nouveau riche aspirations are extolled in hip-hop. In fact, the co-occurrence of spiraling technological advances and the continued rise of the country genre – which traditionally has valued more off-the-grid sensibilities – seems almost paradoxical."

  • Why Is Dad So Mad is a book Retired Army 1st Sgt Seth Kastle has written to try to explain to kids about having PTSD
  • Here's a beautifully illustrated interview with Paul Koudounaris which Simon Davis did for Vice. Paul's an author and photographer who travels round the world documenting ossuaries and charnel houses and other ritual sites and activities relating to death. I first became interested in his work through the book Heavenly Bodies which contains pictures of spectacularly bejewelled and decorated skeletons.

    • "Death can be a soft border, or it can be a hard barricade. It can be a fortified barricade like the Maginot Line through which thou shalt not pass. That's what it has become in Western culture over the past 100 years. The dead don't come on our side, we don't come on their side, and if you're trying to talk to them or you're trying to interact with them there's something wrong with you. You're up to no good."

  • If you're looking for a last-minute Easter-related activity and you have some eggs and paints lying around there's a really cool tutorial for creating galaxy eggs by Allison Murray. If you don't have the craft eggs she's talking about I remember when I was a kid I used to use a knitting needle or a skewer to poke a hole each end of a real egg and blow the innards out leaving me with a hollow shell to paint.
  • Ruby Tandoh is excellent. This week she wrote warmly and accessibly about queer identity and Pretty In Pink for Polyester Magazine.

    • "Somehow total campness was palatable to me in a way that more measured versions of femininity hadn’t been. I’d leapfrogged good taste to land with one foot in trashy Barbie-hued fantasy, the other planted firmly in plaid, parkas and pullovers. I began to face my own queerness sidelong as I straddled butch and hyper-femme, at first embarrassedly and then gleefully, filling my wardrobe with sequins alongside rough denim and camo print."

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