Back in the summer Clare, her brother Mark and I visited the foot tunnel to take some photographs. There had been sometimes over-egged stories about the tunnel’s scheduled closure for works over the next year and our main intention was to document some of the details of the fabric of the place, not knowing how much might be “improved” when it re-opened.
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I ask because Andrew Brown has claimed it is in his CiF blog, and atheism campaigner Ariane Sherine has strongly disagreed. CiF Belief is an engine that runs on this debate, but it’s an angle I hadn’t thought of before so I thought it was worth chewing over.
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Reading yet again that the fractured forms of the twentieth century avant gardes were a response to the traumas of the first world war, I’m moved to wonder (a) why anyone thinks this is worth saying, since everyone knows it, and (b) why anyone thinks it’s right.
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I’ve heard the phrase “just a theory” applied in a few different contexts in recent weeks and thought it might be worth teasing out what we mean by “a theory” and what that little modifier “just” might mean.
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As far as I can tell, here’s what happened. Last year, a teenager calling himself (or possibly herself) Cartrain made some collages that included images of work by artist Damian Hirst. Somehow or other, they ended up on the 100artworks site. Hirst was not amused.
Hirst alerted the Design and Artists Copyright Society, which is the mechanism by which artists in the UK get paid for their intellectual property. The DACS took legal advice (I assume) and had solicitors’ letters sent to 100artworks, which capitulated and (oddly, to my eyes) handed over the original artwork to the DACS.
Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation I just discovered a recording of Caroline Bergvall reading “Via”, a poem composed entirely of English translations of the first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
It might sound like a thin idea, but it’s mesmerising to listen to. What’s more, even if you know that translation is a complex process that makes meanings rather than just safely transporting them from one language to another, the repetition and the variations together really bring it home in a way that just reading the words doesn’t. So her reading is a beautiful piece musically, but it does something intellectually, too, that’s hard to precisely put a finger on.
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