The Resurrection Slot:
Brick Lane’s Day of Killing
May 26th, 1992 | The Resurrection Slot, Art & its applications, Articles GeneralA few days ago, a poster appeared in East London’s Brick Lane proclaiming a ‘Day of Killing’ to be held once a year, or whenever ‘the population level becomes dangerously high’. The event would be open to anyone able to hold a gun, and those with disabilities would be permitted to kill by proxy, so long as they had completed the appropriate form and submitted it one week in advance.Download article»
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:
The Stephen Bann Effect
A conference at the Department of History of Art, University of Bristol, 20-21 June 2009.
I first came across Stephen Bann as an undergraduate at the University of Kent in the early 1970s , where he was widely known as the man responsible for placing various intriguing contemporary sculptures around that still very new campus.
I took a seminar with him. Entitled ’Education and the Idea of Culture’, it was a fascinating survey that advanced through Arnold, Newman, de Tocqueville and Eliot, and then invited surviving participants to glance, perhaps with some trepidation, into the emerging political melee known as ‘cultural studies’.
The Bristol conference has been organised as a tribute to Stephen on his retirement. On the second day I will be giving a talk entitled ‘Vernon Lee and the Unclothing of Clio’ - a title I take, none too subtly, from Stephen’s own early book, The Clothing of Clio.
Going Back to Dalston: Ruins and Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire
In the late eighties, when I lived in Dalston, I would sometimes venture out with Iain Sinclair to investigate various sites and events in East London. He was then writing his novel Downriver, and I was at work on A Journey Through Ruins: the Last Days of London, both first published in 1991. Different as they are, the books are connected in their use of East London to track the impact of Margaret Thatcher’s government.
On February 26th 2009, Oxford University Press will be issuing an expanded trade paperback edition of A Journey Through Ruins (find details and ’sample’ the new introduction, ‘Going Back to Dalston’»). The Oxford edition also includes five new chapters drawn from articles written for the Guardian in the early 1990s. On the same day, Hamish Hamilton will publish Iain’s new book, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire. Iain and I will be participating in a number of launch events around the same time.
At 2 pm on 28 February 2009, we will be joining George Jones and the historian (and former Chief Executive of the London Borough of Hackney) Jerry White for a panel discussion at the ‘Space for Thought Literary Weekend’ at the London School of Economics»
AT 6pm on 5 March 2009, we will be speaking at the Museum of Docklands»
At 7.30 on 24 March 2009, and thanks to the initiative of OpenDalston, we will be doing the same at Cafe Oto, 19-22 Ashwin St, Dalston, E8 3DL.
At 7.30pm on 26 March I will be joining Rachel Lichtenstein, Michael Rosen and Sheila Rowbotham at the Bishopsgate Institute for a discussion with Sinclair organised by the Newham Bookshop»
Related matters
Read Sinclair’s ‘A Small Catalogue of the Uncurated’ on untitledbooks»
For the facts about Jules Pipe CBE, the Labour mayor of Hackney, and his dire Olympian decision to ban Sinclair from speaking at the borough’s public libraries, see the Hackney Citizen» And this»
For a local response to the recent fate of Dalston Junction and the street that stands at the centre of A Journey Through Ruins, which is now (as I describe in the new introduction) largely demolished by the council and other powerful interests, read OPENDalston» and the De Beauvoir Association»
On Living in an Old Country - again
26 February 2009A revised and expanded paperback edition of On Living in an Old Country will be published by Oxford University Press on 26 February 2009.
It will contain the original text plus a new introductory essay reviewing the argument about ‘the heritage industry’ that followed first publication in 1985. Also included is ‘Sneering at the Theme Parks’, a conversation on the same subject with Tim Putnam, first published in Block in 1989 and presently posted here under the theme ’Heritage & History’. Read details and also the new introduction, ‘Heritage and the Place of Criticism’ here»
“What is the state of public history today?” I will be participating in this event, organised by the Raphael Samuel History Centre, at the Institute of Historical Research in London, at 16.30 pm on 27 March 2009. details.pdf
Recently added:
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.
‘A Museum of Embryos’: The Great Exhibition and London’s Chinese Junk »
‘What perspectives do the British bring to bear when they think of China? And how much of that distant land, once known as legendary Cathay, do they actually see, beyond their own prejudices…?’
Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge’s farewell to the Western Front »
Baldridge (1899-1977) was an American artist whose illustrations appeared in The Stars and Stripes, the official paper of the American Expeditionary Force, during the last year of the First World War. This drawing, which anticipates the rise of what is now called ‘Battlefield Tourism’, is reproduced from Baldridge’s fine autobiography, Time and Chance (1947) - a book that, after so many years of George Bush Junior, should be attributed to the ‘other’ America, from which we look forward to hearing more…
‘Bach’s Christmas Music in England and in Germany’ by Vernon Lee »
This is the long-forgotten article in which the iron curtain was first taken from the theatre and converted into a political metaphor. It was published in the London-based Suffragist magazine Jus Suffragii, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1 January 1915, p. 218. I count it among the key writings of the First World War. It can also be read - against Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and other latter-day polemicists - as an example of how secular-minded and even atheist writers may engage religious subjects without merely resorting to furious denial. An account of Vernon Lee and her article’s sources, context and influence is given in my book Iron Curtain: from stage to Cold War.
Emanuel Litvinoff’s Journey Through a Small Planet »
‘When I was nineteen the whole world flashed around my ears, all my false standards of values crumbled, everything that I had been sure of - the touch and quality of stone, the meaning of eating and sleeping and suffering, the texture of civilisation, all collapsed and left me in darkness. The world no longer existed. I was dead in some nightmarish way. . .’
–Emanuel Litvinoff to his younger brother Barnet, 9 July 1940.
Time to rewrite your lecture notes, Charles King »
A letter published in the Times Literary Supplement.
Real England? Reflections on Broadway Market »
Over the years many people have tried to list the essential characteristics of Englishness, but what about the sense of threat and danger that so often serves to frame such lists? I wrote this article for Made in England, a website based on a collaboration between the BBC and Arts Council England and launched on 23 April 2008