Feed your mind

Can you get to Gower Street at lunchtime? If so, check out these free lunchtime lectures - what a wonderful richness of subjects: today, Vampires, new week the interaction of courts and hospitals in the nation's health, and the list goes on.

(Unfortunately, I can't get to Gower Street in my lunch break, so I'll have to settle for watching the video versions they provide.)

So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by...

Free tonight? There are still a handful of tickets available to see/hear Benjamin Bagby giving a performance of Beowulf in Old English, at the British Museum, in honour of the one thousandth anniversary of the epic.

If you're not free tonight, the performance goes with a free exhibition, where the original manuscript will be on display until January. (The Heaney translation is in our library, too, if any of my students are reading this)

* Photo by dunechaser, used under Creative Commons, with thanks. (Check out his gallery of Literary Minifigs!)

But summer`s gotten away from us

So, One and the Other ended yesterday, and I must admit as I came into work this morning, the plinth looked not just empty but somehow bleak and bereft. I'd gotten used to the always looking up as I cross the square to check who was there and what they were doing.

It's been grand - not just the plinthers themselves, but the wider conversations, especially as it seems to have outlasted the 'modern art is rubbish' knee-jerk. As I was walking home the other day, I saw a policeman explaining what was going on, and talking about some of the other plinthers who he'd seen to a little girl, about 6 or 7 years old, while her mum was taking photos of the square. How often do you get policemen talking to kids, at length, about modern art? Not often enough, I'd guess.

In totally unrelated news: Angels - costumiers for film and tv and fancy-dress suppliers to the stars - are holding a uniform sale next month. 250,000 items, almost all genuine issue, dating from 1900 onwards. I predict that the queue will be huge, and entirely worth it.

* Photo by chrisjohnbeckett, used under Creative Commons.

runs on without you

Today is National Poetry Day, and I'm just squeaking in before midnight...

~~

I keep coming back to this as a favourite London poem, and this is both a fabulous reading, and a fabulous presentation of it : Benjamin Zephaniah reading The London Breed

~~


For a total change of pace, here's some John Burnside: a contemporary Scottish poet whose work has a way of winding its way into my memory and my heart.

Dark Green
(From Myth of the Twin)

There is always a place on the way
where the path curls in the dark,

into the smell of dust
and the stillness of nettles.

There is always a litter of stones
or a broken roof

a few steps into the shade;
an empty skull, a ribcage stitched with grass,

barely a trace of vapour that had lived
before you came:

a remnant of mucus and water, hatched on a bone,
like the silver-and-eggshell perfume after a birth,

or the whisper that swells and recedes in the quick of your mind
when you wake in the day, and the bright dream runs on without you.

********

Or something more traditional? Maybe Christina Rossetti?

This section of Goblin Market, for example:

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy."

~~~~~~~

* Newspaper blackout poem 'All In A Night's Work' by Austin Kleon, used under Creative Commons.

Like the ribs of a broken umbrella

London, like many big cities, is already made up of many overlapping versions of itself, so the idea of one more, just a slip-though-the-cracks away, is fertile ground for fiction.

A while back, I picked up Black Tattoo, by Sam Enthoven , which is a YA fantasy book, set not just in London, but in parts of London I'm very familiar with. (The author used to work at a bookshop just up the road.) While talking about it with a friend, they were started to discover I'd not read Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville. I hadn't even heard of it; had no idea he'd ever written a YA book, but I'm really glad I tracked it down. I haven't been so charmed or entranced with a London story since Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

Gaiman's London Below is quite different to Miéville's Ab-Cities (London is not alone in having an alter-ego - there's also mention of No York, Parisn't, Lost Angeles, Sans Francisco, Helsunki, Hong Gone, Romeless ...) but they share that same kernel of one more 'other London' which is so terribly tempting. After all, the London experienced by premiership footballers is just as unfamiliar and impenetrable to me as Un Lun Dun, and rather less interesting to me!

Not only does Un Lun Dun touch on many of my favourite fantasy elements, subverting the standard 'prophesy and the chosen one' line, for example, it's also alive with Miéville's love of language. This is a space where the puns can run wild (quite literally) - 'un-brellas' and the very word 'binja' amuse me far more than I should probably admit in public.

I wish I could buy all of these books for work's collection, but leisure reading isn't our focus, so, instead, if there are any of my students reading this: Westminster Libraries have multiples of all three.

* Photo by m.by, used under Creative Commons.