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Emily's Biography | The Oeuvre | Flannigan Bio | The Inventions |  |
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...About the Emily
Chesley Reading Circle
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Founding Member Bio | ||||
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John Sloan, Thuder Gott of Cyber Space (Thuder) (An article thoughtfully provided to us by Spun magazine,
What makes Sloane moan? By Jeff Perverse The lead singer/songwriter for Canadian pop quartet Sloane, who’s 1996 CD Thrice Removed has been cited as the "touch stone of a subculture" and topped Chart magazine’s poll of "the 50 best Canadian Albums of All Time," says his band takes its unassuming name from a London, Ontario-based amateur literary historian and newspaper columnist known and loved by many as the Thuder God of Cyber Space. "We’re huge John Sloan fans," says Haligonian Kris Merfie, who subscribed to the London Free Press at age 15 just so he could read Sloan’s weekly technology column. "My dad’s an insurance salesman and after a business trip to London in 1989, he brought home a copy of the paper that published John’s first column. What can I say, man – I was totally stoked by his prose."
Merfie has read Sloan’s column religiously
ever since and his band mates – James Fergus, Patty Portland and
Andy Scotch – he says all made easy converts. "Just before
we cut our first album, we decided it would be pretty cool to pay homage
to this visionary by naming the band after him. After all, he’s
a master of lucidity, and that’s one of the qualities we strive
for in our songs. To play it safe, we just added an ‘e’ to
the end of Sloan to ensure we weren’t exposed from a legal perspective."
These days, Merfie says the band draws much of its creative inspiration from Sloan’s scholarly work on a relatively unknown but prolific Victorian writer of speculative fiction. "We often turn to obscure works of literature for lyric ideas, so we were blown away when we discovered John was a founding father of the Emily Chesley Reading Circle. The stuff those guys have dug up about the life and work of this great but often overlooked author is like, well… let me tell you, it’s something." Little is known about Sloan, the man. He was born in Woodstock, Ontario in 1961. After completing a masters degree in journalism at the University of Western Ontario, where he now works as a bitterly disgruntled, immensely overworked and grossly underpaid multi-media specialist and writer, he got married, had two kids, bought a house, yadda, yadda, yadda, and became profoundly amused by the intricate workings of computers and publicly funded bureaucracies. Sloan’s interest in computers – and frustration with publicly funded bureaucracies – led to the founding of his Free Press column, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary and helps cover the costs of his caffeine addiction. Meanwhile, his obsessive interest in Emily Chesley has inexplicably led to a binge-drinking problem. You may contact him via email. --"Scholarship" by Foothills |
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| ...About the Emily Chesley Reading Circle Public Services |
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December 1998…) 