So much for my big idea

“It’s said that in the beginning was the word, but for me the beginning is always an image.”

Addicted to images

Idriss, a teenage goatherd in the Sahara, encounters two French people in a Land Rover. One, a young woman with blond hair and bare legs, takes his picture. She is taken aback to find that Idriss knows enough French to ask for the photo. She promises to send it once she gets back to Paris [...]

Heart of Darkness

I love Joseph Conrad’s writing. So I’ve always been disturbed to hear that people think Heart of Darkness is racist. I first read it years ago, and I remembered that black people don’t get a very flattering portrayal in the book, but I thought that if you gave Conrad the benefit of the doubt it [...]

Why don’t I understand poetry?

L found a book in a second-hand-book shop in Johannesburg called Future Exiles: 3 London Poets – Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Brian Catling. It was Paladin Re/Active Anthology No. 1, published by Paladin Poetry in 1992 and edited by Iain Sinclair before he was famous: the jacket blurb, I imagine composed by himself, is as [...]

Turner tosh

Read the small print, however, and you find that what you are in the presence of is something rather more significant. “Wilkes’s installations apprehend an end point in our understanding of things as they are – a point at which words become insufficient and the naming of objects is disconnected from our experience of them” [...]

Curating Architecture

Bringing together [how? Are buildings being transported girder by girder and paintings DHLed to some crossdisciplinary ground zero in New Cross?] artistic and architectural projects by distinguished [the guarantee of quality, the answer to the question "Why should we be interested?" They are Distinguished. But what distinguishes them? And from what? How far are they [...]

From Davies to Dracula

To begin with, the tale of Our Lady of the Flowers lulls present time, for the very words the murderer uses are the magic words that equally handsome hoodlums spat out like so many stars, like those extraordinary hoodlums who pronounce the word “dollar” with the right accent. But what is to be said of [...]

1001 words

I’m not a writer, but… Barbara Campbell gave me a chance to write for her brilliant 1001 nights cast project – she’s the online Scheherazade, and has been for 779 nights now – and though the only chance to see and hear her perform it has gone, you can read it in the archive. You [...]