The Resurrection Slot:
Dennis Potter - The last acre of truth
February 15th, 1993 | The Resurrection Slot, Encounters, Englishness and British national identity, Articles GeneralIt was, in its own way, vintage Potter. There he was last week at the press screening of Lipstick On Your Collar: it was one of those buffet meals which is bound to be incredibly stressful, not least because holding plates and forks is nigh on impossible for a man with his condition. But then he started to talk and the flow, once started, carried him off and he only had to open the next day’s paper to see the result. Throwing conventional media tact to the wind, he had laid into Michael Green, chairman of ITN, for donating money to the Conservative Party. And then he had started to make disclosures that he really did regret about his wife’s recent illness.
‘The problem,’ he remarked, ‘is that I have been a recluse for so long, and you forget how to behave in public’…
Enthusiasms & Aversions:
Andrzej Krauze comes to London
November 17th, 2007 | Enthusiasms, Art & its applications, Articles General
In 1987, some five years after he and his family settled in London, Andrzej Krauze made a large and memorable drawing called ‘Refugees from East Europe’. It showed a couple, with suitcases and a pair of young children, standing on the platform of a London Underground station, apprehensively gazing around at the new world into which they had just been discharged. It is a stark image: autobiographical yet also evocative of a wider history of displacement…
Alan Yentob’s ‘Imagine’ or ‘Take this man off the telly’
July 2nd, 2003 | Kulchur, Aversions, Articles GeneralOne day in June 2003, the arts editor of the Guardian asked me to review the first three films in BBC1’s new arts strand ‘Imagine’. I watched them in dismay and wrote this piece. It was published on 2 July 2003. For the BBC’s reaction see ‘Who are you…’ under ‘Conversations with Patrick Wright’, pp. 26-8. Read article here»
Zaha Hadid in Cincinnati
June 6th, 2003 | Enthusiasms, Art & its applications, Articles General
On the opening of Zaha Hadid’s Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. Published as ‘Look what I built’, the Guardian, 2 July 2003, pp. 12-13. Read article here»
Mrs. Daphne Buxton creates twentieth century England’s first new common
September 2nd, 1995 | Englishness and British national identity, Enthusiasms, Articles GeneralRushall is a small Norfolk village, not far from a somewhat larger settlement named Dickleburgh. It has a church, some council housing built at a polite distance from the village proper, a few farms and a pub. There were airships here once, but today Rushall’s most historic site is a hedged meadow on the other side of the parish.
Beyond the wooden gate, which bears a notice about the village fete, an elderly lady is walking through long grass, pointing out various features as she goes. The man next to her stoops occasionally to pick up twigs, which he then holds in a curious, vaguely anthropological manner…
On the United Nations Association
July 1st, 1995 | War & peace, Enthusiasms, Articles GeneralTHE United Nations is not in good shape. Great hopes were entertained when the Berlin wall came down in 1989, but these have given way to global half-heartedness, evident in the caveats hedging tributes paid this week in San Francisco, where the UN Charter was signed 50 years ago.
The genocide in Rwanda contributed to this disillusionment - as did the impotent UNPROFOR tanks of Sarajevo, already called beached white whales several years before the Bosnian Serbs purloined some, thereby completing the humiliation. From Angola to Chechenia, the news mocks the UN’s pastoral symbolism of white doves crowding the sky…
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News & Previews:
Passport to Peking: a Very British Mission to Mao’s China
‘Around us, in the stands, beam the mild faces of the Fighters for Peace, faces that we have seen above a hundred platforms. Gold-rimmed spectacles misted with emotion, cheeks creased with years of well-meant service in this cause or in that, shirts defiantly open at the neck, badges in lapels, and there in the middle - could it have been? - an M.C.C. tie…’ (Hugh Casson)
Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 27 October 2010
Event 321. China in Cheltenham
I’ll be at the Cheltenham Festival, giving an illustrated talk about my new book, Passport to Peking, at 1600 on Sunday 17 October 2010.
Golden Handcuffs Review - another brilliant issue!
The Winter-Spring 2009-10 issue of Lou Rowan’s Golden Handcuffs Review, a book-length journal of contemporary writing published in Seattle, has just come out… A memorial issue dedicated to the poets Robin Blaser and David Bromige and the artist John Manning, it includes a memorable interview, dating from 1976, with the ‘Objectivist’ poet George Oppen and his wife Mary, who describe their travels in interwar France, avoiding Gertrude Stein and other fixtures of expatriate Bohemia with the help of a horse and cart. Also here is a highly engaging meditation by Paul Pines, called ‘The Death of Posterity’, and affectionately concerned with the many more or less distressed artists’ widows to be found in the Chelsea Hotel, their rooms crammed with the unwanted works of their late husbands… Besides much more from the USA, there is a section of work from the Sheffield-based poet, publisher and bookseller, Alan Halsey, and various interesting material from France (Jean Daive’s ‘Walks with Paul Celan’), Italy (Dacia Maraini), and Argentina (Maria Negroni). . My article on Robin Blaser’s libretto for Harrison Birtwistle’s ‘The Last Supper’ - ‘Facing up to the Subterranean Stream’ - gets another outing (I try to ensure that it gets better at each appearance). There is also a notice berating appreciative readers for not subscribing… In this case, surely, a truly culpable oversight… See here»
Zelazna Kurtyna- October 2009
The Polish edition of Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War is published by Swiat Ksiazki, Warsaw, October 2009.
Iron Curtain - not just the Berlin Wall
A paperback edition of my book Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War appears on 29 October 2009. OUP have timed its release to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the overthrow of the Berlin Wall, and I hope it helps to complicate the simpler and more triumphalist versions of that story. It has been suggested (not least by the Retort group in their tract Afflicted Powers; Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War) that the ‘fall of the wall’ went on to become an unquestioned ‘policy motif’ in the background of later decisions concerning Iraq. Understood in its longer history, the ‘iron curtain’ was never only a matter of the closed and armed frontier dividing Europe. It was a theatrical metaphor which had to do with the control of information and the power of propaganda and official deception, none of which necessarily evaporated in 1989.
Recently added:
Saving ‘Versions’ - with no thanks to Microsoft »
My requirements from word-processing software are pretty simple. I still reckon that the most amenable I’ve ever used was the ‘Word’ for Macs programme that I had on a Macintosh SE way back in the Dark Ages. I remember feeling impressed that it had been worth anybody’s time to come up with an invention that seemed so perfectly suited to the requirements of writers, students, and other characteristically unmoneyed types. Having transferred to PCs at a time when Apple seemed to be going nowhere (between the first Powerbooks and the G2s as I recall), I’ve since reconciled myself to ‘Word’ as it comes bundled up in Microsoft Office. I have done this despite the fact that my software nowadays seems to think, quite wrongly, that it knows who I am. Increasingly, it is convinced that I should be writing business letters, or corporate reports in which ‘bullet-points’ and tables feature prominently…
Remembering Colin St John Wilson’s answer to Prince Charles - an article for Architecture Today »
I wrote this piece earlier in the summer (it appeared in Architecture Today 209, June 2010) . Having gone back, after several years, and seen the present state of Charles’s ‘model’ development at Poundbury in Dorchester, it seems all the more important to remember that the ’Modernism’ against which it is designed to speak was never […]
Just Keep Digging: a conversation about Memory and the Framing of Heritage »
The final version of this conversation with Jeremy Davies is to be published in a special issue of Memory Studies (Vol. 3, No. 3) entitled ‘Nostalgia and the Shapes of History’, edited by Nadia Atia & Jeremy Davies, and scheduled to appear in October 2010.
‘Nixon in China’? Yes, but what about Clement Attlee in Hangzhou eighteen years earlier? »
It’s not just admirers of John Adams’ opera, who have come to believe that western rapprochement with Communist China began with President Richard Nixon’s visit of 1972. I’ve been researching an earlier attempt to lift the ‘Bamboo Curtain’ - this one carried out by Clement Attlee and other leading members of the Labour Party in 1954. The full story of this forgotten mission, which also involved the philosopher A.J. Ayer, the physicist J.D. Bernal, the novelist and classicist Rex Warner, and the artists Paul Hogarth and Stanley Spencer, is reconstructed in my forthcoming book, Passport to Peking, to be published by OUP in October 2010.
Gone with the Berlin Wall? »
I wrote this piece on the disappearance, or otherwise, of the Iron Curtain as a brief ‘essay’ for the BBC World Service’s arts programme, ‘The Strand’. It was broadcast to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the overcoming of the Berlin wall on 10 November 2009.
The Monkeys of Gibraltar - Osbert Sitwell on the case for a cull »
I’ve been reading a lot about China recently, which is how I came upon a characteristically rambling volume by Osbert Sitwell, entitled Escape with Me! An Oriental Sketch-Book. He opens this account of his pre-war travels in Cambodia and China by remembering how, as a child, he used to visit his paternal grandmother in her ‘large, honey-coloured’ mansion in Surrey…
Better forgotten? - an interview on the ‘concept of heritage’ »
I can’t be entirely sure when this was recorded, but my diary suggests it was on 8 February 2008…
‘Absolutely’ - a modest contribution to Media Studies »
Why do intelligent people sometimes go gaga on radio? And what happened to Melvyn Bragg on the morning he picked up the wrong piece of paper?
Against Clio: Vernon Lee on ‘The Muse of History’ »
‘I know the Muse of History is a sycophantish partisan; a pretentious, often ignorant humbug. She dotes on Satan, cloaking in exemplary denunciations what psychiatry might call a sadistic taste for works of his which only dirty the memory and spread retaliative infection to the feelings…’ Vernon Lee, writing at the end of 1918.
On Civil Defence and the staging of modern politics »
“In 1964, three British women stepped into the role of ‘civil defence volunteers’ and entered a model shelter next to the Guildhall in York. They spent 24 hours in their miserable hollow, listening to simulated regional broadcasts beamed in from a van outside. They slept for a few hours in a specially sandbagged ‘core’ area intended to protect them against fallout, cooked a meal on a primus stove and swallowed aspirins for their headaches. After a single day they were plainly demoralised. As the Times wrote of the widely reported exercise, ‘even that basic feminine impulse to make frequent cups of tea deserted them. . .’”
Prompted by the idea of ‘rehearsal’ presented in Tracy C. Davis’ book, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Duke 2007), I suggest a wider account of how theatrical techniques have emerged from the playhouse to shape public life and the political sphere.