a gallimaufry

Real Bodies exhibition

Last Saturday I took the train to Brussels to meet up with a friend from university, and we went to see an exhibition called Real Bodies. It is an exhibition which I think has toured much of the world, and it consists of bodies and body parts which have been preserved by removing all the water and fats from the body and replacing them with acetone and silicone rubber, polyester or epoxy resin. The bodies were dissected so be warned: there is a graphic photograph coming up.

It was a very cold, dark day and there was a light dusting of snow everywhere. This is Tour en Taxis, an area of Brussels that has been fairly recently renovated and where the exhibition was displayed. The building on the right used to be a post office sorting house.

The exhibition was in the basement, which added a layer of gloom to the proceedings, and it was the strangest exhibition I have ever seen. On the one hand, it was an absolutely fascinating lesson in anatomy, and I could not but marvel at the human body, so complex and so beautifully constructed. On the other, it was deeply unsettling and made me feel faintly nauseous. These had been real people; admittedly they had donated their bodies to science* but it did resemble an artistically arranged butcher’s shop. The method of preservation gave everything a waxy appearance which I found quite repellent. The bodies were posed – playing football, running – to show different sets of muscles in tension but I also felt uncomfortable about that, as if it were disrespectful, although of course the owners of the bodies probably didn’t mind about that any more. Oddly enough I did not consciously think about my own mortality but perhaps this was at the back of my mind and therefore contributing to my unease. A disturbing experience.

Has anyone else seen this (I believe that an earlier version of it was simply called Bodies)? What did you think?

* So I believed when we went but I have subsequently discovered that there is some controversy over this which is making me feel even more ambivalent.

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London by Lauren Elkin

Shiny New Books 12 is out today (have there really been 12 issues?), always a cause for celebration, and I have written a review for it. Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London was just as good as I’d hoped (I’ve been awaiting its publication impatiently). If Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Calle, revolution and loitering interest you, then you know where the nearest library or bookshop is...

Meanwhile, I’m settling down to read the rest of Shiny and bankrupt myself.

Sometimes a Wild God, by Tom Hirons and Rima Staines

The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens have begun to sing
An old song in the mouth of your kettle.

This lovely little book is an illustrated poem: the words are by Tom Hirons and the pictures by Rima Staines. For me, it’s a work which requires both elements, word and image, to make it as special as it is. The ‘you’ of the poem, who stands for us all, has banished the wild god from his or her safe, modern life; what happens when the wild god returns? (A wild and rather fun party, although a wren in my kettle would be a little inconvenient and I’m not sure I’d like to cough up snakes.)

You can buy copies of Sometimes a Wild God and read more about it and its creators at Hedgespoken Press, which is run by Tom and Rima.

autumnal reading

Despite the unseasonably warm weather, days of sunshine and late flowers, the early dusk, leafless branches and occasional morning mists are a reminder that autumn is very much with us and for once I’ve noticed it in my reading habits.

(Still from The Weeping Woman, a shadow puppet film by Lisa Stock and Connie Toebe; image found here)

Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, by Judith Thurman – I’ve been rereading some of Seven Gothic Tales and it seemed the moment to find out more about Tanne/Isak/Karen/the Baroness, a fascinating, brilliant and troubled writer. The great moment of her life was the time she spent running her coffee plantation in Africa where she felt a deep affinity with the Kikiyu and Maasai; the many years she lived back in Denmark were a disappointing coda for her, but for us quite the reverse since it was then that she wrote her famous tales. This is a very good biography, all the more because its subject always preferred a good story to mundane truth and so it must have been difficult sometimes to weasel out fact from what we might boringly consider fiction.

The Angelic Avengers, by Isak Dinesen pretending to be Pierre Andrézel – Thurman explains that Dinesen wrote this, her only novel, during the Second World War, but afterwards practically disowned it. It’s gothic, it doesn’t take itself too seriously and it’s by Isak Dinesen, so I bought a copy and read it. More in a separate post, but it’s a lovely read.

A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness – It’s totally Harriet’s fault that I bought this (for the princely sum of 1p, sorry Deborah) and there was much to entice: a witch, a magic book, the history of alchemy. And really it’s a tribute to the author that she painted her hero, Matthew, so believably that I hated him so very, very much. I could not bear him or the slushy love scenes (yes I am the person who shouts at James Bond to stop kissing the lady and get on with the adventure! and I was doing the equivalent here), and the pace just slowed to nothing in the middle. And yet. I read the whole thing, and once my loathing of Matthew abates I expect I shall read the sequel, which is set in 1590 in England and may involve Marlowe, Shakespeare and the ‘Wizard Earl’, Henry Percy. I can’t really resist that.

The Carbonel books, by Barbara Sleigh – I think I last read these when I was about twelve, but they are just as good thirty years later and absolutely the ticket for a fuzzy-headed cold. Carbonel is King of the Fallowhithe cats, but has to enlist the help of Rosemary Brown and her friend John when his kingdom is threatened. Mrs Cantrip, the local witch, is a marvellous character – cantankerous, sloppy, lazy and unable to resist livening up the washing-up with a spot of magic; needless to say I identified strongly with her although my nose isn’t quite as big as hers. Yet.

A Dead Man in Deptford, by Anthony Burgess – Now that I look at what I’ve been reading, it seems clear to me that I was inspired to pick up this novel about Christopher Marlowe by A Discovery of Witches. It’s written in a sort of Elizabethan-inflected English, and so far there’s been drinking, fighting, wordplay, theatre and espionage, what you’d expect really; I’m enjoying it more than the Harkness (sorry again Deborah).

Apart from that I’ve read a couple of books for the in-betweeny edition of Shiny New Books, which comes out at the beginning of December. Both books were splendid, but more I cannot tell since the editors of SNB are famed for their disembowelling of bloggers who let slip too much before the magazine’s publication. And I can barely wait to get started on Fog Island Mountains, the first novel by Michelle Bailat-Jones, who maintains a lovely blog at pieces. It slid through the letter-box a couple of days ago and is described as ‘A haunting and beautiful reinterpretation of the Japanese kitsune folktale tradition, [...] a novel about the dangers of action taken in grief and of a belief in healing through storytelling.’

What have you been reading? Any recommendations? And are you looking forward to any new publications in the next few months?

(Black-and-white illustration by V.H. Drummond, from Carbonel, by Barbara Sleigh (Harmondsworth: Longman Young Books, 1973; first published 1955; from here)

some things I didn't know about e-books, and which you might not know either

(Library, diorama made and photographed by Lori Nix, 2007, from her series ‘The City’; from her website)

While I do not own an e-reader and don’t see myself purchasing one in the near future, I am not an adherent to the ‘Apocalypse rides on the coat-tails of e-books’ school of philosophy any more than I believe that anyone who persists in buying paperbacks is naught but a puppet to the dark forces of ‘legacy’ publishing and a Luddite impeding the free flow of great literature. I am bored with all the heated quarrels pitting paper against electronics and the wild predictions, and I have given up reading most articles with anything about e-books in the title. However, I have recently come across two pieces I found interesting on this very subject.

One, from the BBC, describes a reading revolution which is occurring in Africa. Hitherto, poor infrastructure has made distribution of books very difficult (and that is just one of the many headaches publishers in Africa have faced). In many areas away from larger towns and cities, readers and also aspiring writers have been left stranded, unable to access books. But in the wake of the astounding adoption of mobile phones across the whole continent over the past decade, smartphones are becoming increasingly popular. With them has opened up the possibility of downloading and reading books – any books! Books written in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Britain, France, the US; books translated from the Chinese, Latvian and Finnish. Books full of stories, ideas, challenges. Until global poverty has been properly addressed, millions of Africans will not have the means to afford a smartphone nor the access to electricity with which to charge it, but for many of the better-off this is hugely exciting and full of implications for the future.

The other article, in the Guardian, concerned some research which suggested that readers of a text on Kindles recalled less of the plot than readers of the same text on paper. The research only involved 50 readers, and of the Kindle readers only two were ‘experienced’ Kindle readers, so I think it needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt, but in conjunction with another small study of Norwegian students, also referenced in the article, it starts to raise questions about the limitations of electronic devices for certain sorts of reading. What do you think? Have any of you had experiences which fit with this? I used to copy-edit and proofread and I must say I didn’t work as well on-screen as on paper – but then I assumed that was because I was a dullard. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t...

(Some new friends)

improving on the old masters

(Svetlana Petrova, Zarathustra the Cat and Edouard Manet, Can I Help You Sir? found here via here)

It’s a well-known fact that no art is Great Art unless it has kittens in it. While the Rubenesque Zarathustra is no longer a kitten, I think we can all agree that her replacing Suzon as the barmaid in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergère improves it inestimably. No one would dare start a fight with that face looking at them.

Svetlana Petrova is a Russian artist who specialises in photoshopping pictures of her cat onto famous works of art. What a joy of a job! You can see more of her work here.

Happy Friday! (It’s the 13th, I only learnt this after I had got out of bed but the sky hasn’t fallen in yet.)

Moomins and memories

It’s the last week of term, I’m finishing my paperwork, waiting for my exam results and thinking about the future and what to do next (learning to drive a car is definitely featuring here; I keep telling  myself that it can’t be as difficult as following a teacher-training course in Dutch, please don’t disillusion me!). Writing more here, and more about books and less about me, is also part of the future. But today I lack energy, time and focus, so instead here are three links for you.

(The Moomins and the Great Flood; detail from the cover art from here)

The first is Jeanette Winterson, writing about the Moomins, and remembering how Finn Family Moomintroll affected her as a ten-year-old. 

I wrote out random words and stuck them on the wall above my bed with flour and water. This got me into trouble but I didn’t care. The words, random, alive, were making a kind of leaf mould in my mind. From that rich and fertile place came language of a different order.

Poetic disorder is how language is made. Only later is it codified. Naming starts as joy. Think of the pleasure a child has in finding words and inventing words and forming sentences that are also shapes. Words are ear and mouth before they are pen and paper. Words run away; you have to catch them.

 

The second is Medieval Memoria Online.

(St Jerome in the Desert, outer panels of an early sixteenth-century triptych made for the Van Beesd Van Heemskerck-Van Diemen family, from the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen; MeMO memorial object ID 504, 25-06-2013)

MeMo is a newly established database of inventories and descriptions of pre-1580 commemorative objects and texts from the Netherlands. It has been set up by the University of Utrecht, and includes images, inscriptions, epitaphs, altarpieces, tomb monuments and archival sources.

Researchers of medieval memoria consider the commemoration of the dead (i.e. memoria) a complex phenomenon, in which prayer for the care of the souls of the deceased, the care for the poor and the sick, commemoration of the deeds of the living and the dead and political aspects are inextricably linked.

It is fascinating...

(Claire Loder, big face, ceramic; from here)

The artist Claire Loder has been working with elderly people in the rural Cotswolds, ‘to help learn or rekindle skills while reminiscing and creating lasting memories in clay’. She has also created ceramic portraits of them, which are being shown in ‘Making Memories’ at New Brewery Arts in Cirencester. Her work is lovely; do go and see it if you have the chance. A commemoration of the living.

Christian Tagliavini

(1503, Donna Clotilde)

Christian Tagliavini’s collections Dame di Cartone and especially 1503 amazed me when I first saw them (online not, alas, in the flesh). They are bold, richly allusive, highly detailed, taking the form of portraits and exploring the tension between wearer and worn, fashion and art. Bodies are distorted to accommodate clothes; the sitters' identity becomes their garments, their stories the clothes' stories further mediated by allusions to fine art. Paintings or photographs? I could not immediately tell, they appear so tactile.

(Dame di Cartone, Cubism 1)

Tagliavini is a graphic designer and photographer, the combination of which, he writes, ‘provides him [with] the perfect frame and background to invent, create and totally produce images that blend fine arts and craftsmanship. No, not simply images, as Christian Tagliavini loves designing stories with open endings (requiring [the] observer’s complicity) on unexplored themes or unusual concepts, featuring uncommon people with their lives and their thoughts made visible.’

(1503, Ritratto di giovane donna)

All images from Christian Tagliavini's website; go and marvel o people who are not reading my web log and maybe you'll find you're lucky enough to be near one of the galleries exhibiting his work.