Some things that have happened recently...

... in the last 24 hours or so.

Last night I went to this thing: http://www.secretcinema.org/
And they showed this movie: http://www.cinematical.com/2008/01/19/sundance-review-anvil-the-story-of-anvil/
And afterwards, the band played, and for the encore, they were joined by this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_ian

Today, thanks to a complicated mental calculus involving the fact that it is Presidents' Day, and it is reading week (the UK equivalent of spring break, save that it happens every term), and I didn't sleep well last night, and it was sunny and in the mid-forties and I really didn't want to go to the library, I played hooky and walked around London instead. I wound up visiting Pollock's Toy Museum, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, and the Tate Britain, none of which I'd ever been to before. I also intended to visit the Royal Academy of Art and the Banqueting House as well, but the Banqueting House was closed for an event, and I can never work up the enthusiasm for the Royal Academy's exhibitions to make myself pay the comparably high admissions prices. So I bought some macaroons from Laduree in Burlington Arcade, and ate them as I sat in front of the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds and watched for people coming in and out of the nearby Society of Antiquaries. Then I went to Fortnum and Mason, which was eerily subdued. It is possible that £70.00 for 125g of tea looks a bit... conspicuous in these times.

Anyway, as stated, I made it to the three museums above-named, as well as the Samuel French theatrical bookstore, where I bought a copy of one of my advisor's books (There are plural advisors each with plural books; I merely bought one book authored by one advisor) with only a slight twinge of guilt (as I was not doing anything at all dissertation-related). By the same calculus whereby I justified taking the day off in the first place, I figure that buying it from an independent specialist bookstore must count as some sort of good deed, and also, as the title does not mean what I suspect whomever stocked the book thinks it means, no one else in that store was likely to buy it.

I don't know if I could have picked three more different London institutions all laying claim to the title "museum". The first I visited, Pollock's Toy Museum, is clearly a labor of love, perhaps a half dozen small rooms crammed full of toys and other childhood epherma from the last century and a half. Some of the rooms were loosely organized around a theme-- there was a girl's room, with dolls and doll houses, and a boy's room as well-- while others were more of a curious mix: optical illusions with tin models, for example. The exhibits, I have to imagine, have remained largely altered since their installation, and there's a minimum of interpretive material apart from the pamphlet you're handed upon paying your four pounds at the door. If there is a curatorial principle, it's got to be additive: twelve dollhouses are better than ten, and fifteen is better still. The Pollock whose name graces the establishment was a specialist in toy theaters, to be purchased as kits and constructed from heavy stock, and the museum has what I was told is the finest collection of such theaters anywhere, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. It reminded me a bit of the Sloane House museum in its elevation of theme over taxonomy. Yes, everything on display here is a toy of some sort, or could at least be classed as such under a fairly generous definition of the term, but the point that the museum makes is "look at all these toys!" rather than encouraging you to consider individual objects in the collections, and connect them either to other objects at hand, or some larger historical or cultural context.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum, by contrast, is an almost totally commercial affair. But it is also a deeply fascinating thing, because how can you have a museum of a fictional man? It's either deeply cynical or totally deep, and I'm not entirely sure which.

(Because I am lazy, I am copying an earlier attempt to describe the Borgesian infinite-regression effect going on here. The transcript has been edited to remove references to certain faculty members and also the Spice Girls.)

megan: So, I went to the Sherlock Holmes Museum today.
Brooke: !!!!
robert downey jr. is playing watson in an upandcoming remake OMG
but anyway TELL ME ABOUT IT
megan: !! re RDJ.
Um, it's very strange, right?
Brooke: the museum?
megan: Because Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character.

megan: Anyway, so you go in, and you're in the gift shop.
Brooke: yeah
megan: You have to walk up to the til in order to get tickets for the museum.
So, it's basically a gift shop first and foremost.
Brooke: for things made out of tweed and pipes I hope
megan: Yes. Lots of tweed, lots of pipes.
megan: And anyway, you go upstairs, and the first rooms you're in are Holmes bedroom and study, meticulously recreated from the descriptions in the books.
Brooke: oooooooh
Brooke: handsome
megan: And there is a man there, who is dressed up as Sherlock Holmes, and he invites you to look around the room and take pictures and sit in his chair and try on the deerstalker and bowler hats provided for the purpose.
There's real fires in the fireplace, tea in the cups, etc etc.
Brooke: oooh
is he handsome
megan: The whole thing is VERSIMILITUDE, it's like a disney attraction.
No, he is old.
And doesn't look like I think Holmes should look.
Brooke: damn
megan: But anyway.
Brooke: he needs to be dignified and middle ages and handsome
megan: So you go in the other room, which is I think supposed to be a parlor or study, but it is likewise furnished in high victoriana.
megan: Except that there are copies of the novels in the bookcase.
Brooke: that's confusing
Brooke: it's like that with
the charles dickens thing at macy's
where all bookshelves in the recreated world of a xmas carol are copies of an xmas carol
IT IS A PET PEEVE OF MINE BECAUSE IT IS NOT TEXTUALLY FAITHFUL.
Brooke: The only book you can do that with is Don Quixote.
HEH
megan: also maybe Borges?
Brooke: yeah that's true
and certain goosebumps books.
megan: But it gets even WEIRDER.
megan: Because then you go into the other rooms, which are full of wax life-size wax figures representing the villains from the stories.
megan: And then also in the same room is a big book of letters written by (mostly American) schoolchildren asking for Holmes help in solving mysteries.
Brooke: aw(l)
megan: And then in the final room there's a wax figure of Watson WRITING HIS NOTES on Holmes' cases, and a big display case with artefacts from said cases.
I can't decide whether it's brilliant or incoherent.
Brooke: it's a museum about the making of itself
it's infinite
you can find god in it
just like spice world
megan: Except it doesn't document any factual things.
It's a real museum of fictional events!
Brooke: the museum ends with a room that is about how it is going to be made
EVEN MORE COMPLEX
it sounds awesome
did you buy anything
megan: no.

So, as you can see, strange. But useful insofar as it does make me think about the conditions of fictional historicity (the attention to accuracy, accuracy as a kind of textual exegesis). I wonder if Jean Baudrillard ever got around to visiting, because this is the simulacrum pretty much spot-on.

The last of the three I visited was the Tate Britain. I've been to the Tate Modern a few times, mostly because it is conveniently located and a reliably warm and free refuge from the oft-chilly south bank. And, well, turns out the Tate Britain is really lovely. I've run out of steam now, so I won't go on at length, but I really appreciated the fact that it's such a varied collection, both in terms of historical scope and style. As per usual, they did not have a postcard for my favorite painting, which was definitely the following:


Lucretia Borgia Reigns in the Vatican in the Absence of Pope Alexander VI
The image isn't so great, but in person the colors-- the reds and the golds-- are absolutely striking, and I love the juxtaposition of all the cardinals with the incongruous woman at the center. You appreciate the regal nature of the scene at almost the same moment you realize what's so scandalous about it. But aesthetically speaking, I think it's the symmetry that I really love.

After finishing up at the Tate, and realizing that my capacity to absorb visual stimuli had been taxed to it's limit, I came back here and managed to continue assiduously avoiding any real work. Dinner was particularly awful this evening, but the fact that valentines day truffles are half off at the grocery store and-- surprise-- loaded with whiskey makes up for some of it.

Candy!

Hello friends. I would like to take a moment to talk about a subject near and dear to my heart, and that subject is candy. But Megan, you say, what about your trip to Paris, where you visited the catacombs and ate the most delicious clementines known to man? What about your subsequent trip to Michigan, where you neglected to mention your trip to the catacombs to your friends who would have harmed small children for a similar opportunity? What about your whirlwind tour of the finest that West Philadelphia has to offer, and your subsequent journey back to Grand Rapids in luxurious first class, proving once again that standard rates and rules do not, in fact, apply to you? What of your joyous noel, knee-deep in lake effect snow? What of your turbulent journey across the Atlantic, and your jet-lagged adventures in post-Christmas sales and mass market retailing, including your trip to Westfield Shopping Mall, Europe’s largest, and also to the UK equivalent of Hobby Lobby? What of the questionable events of New Year’s Eve, and the even more questionable decision to teach yourself to knit? What about the paradigm-shifting fritjes you had in Antwerp, and the world’s oldest surviving printing press?

Well, tough. This is what you get for now.



Before Christmas, my friend Chris and I made a deal: I'd bring him back candy from the states when I went back over Christmas, and he'd return with some candy from Manchester. This is what he brought me. If you click through to the photo on Flickr, you can see what I thought of each.

I finally got around to spending a few hours in the National Gallery yesterday afternoon, after a visit with a few students to the Saatchi Gallery. It's difficult to convey how striking the space is, even apart from the paintings on the walls: the main galleries have high, even soaring ceilings, and the walls of all the rooms are painted or upholstered in rich, highly saturated colors.

I skipped the medieval galleries, I'd like to say because I was short on time and want to return for an extended consideration of just those rooms, but really because my taste in visual art is pretty firmly bourgeois. Holbein to Turner is where it's at. Mancestral, I know.

Anyway, as I said, this was a quick trip, where I allowed myself to look at the paintings that interested me most and enjoy them, rather than worry about contextualizing or analysis the artworks or my own response to them (thanks, Bourdieu! And I'll have you know I spelled "Bourdieu" right on the first try). The setting encourages this, I think: compared with, say, the white walls and plain lines of the Tate Modern or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery seems designed to promote appreciation rather than analysis.

Here are a few of the paintings that struck me the most.


Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards (1875), by Ignace-Henri-Theodore Fantin-Latour.
She looks like such a badass.


Self Portrait, about 1645, by Salvator Rosa
Bought the postcard of this one. Check out the inscription, which means "be quiet, unless you have something to say that's better than silence." He looks like a philosophy grad student.


Saint Margaret of Antioch, 1630-4, by Francisco de Zurbaran
I am beginning to believe I have a thing for portraits where the subject looks directly at the viewer.


Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures, about 1620. This is a genre of painting that's always appealed to me. I like the combination of intertextuality-- many of the paintings are identifiable as works by prominent Flemish artists of the period-- combined with the fantasy setting and the miniaturization of what would have been massive canvases.


Allegory of Grammar, 1650 by Laurent de La Hyre
Surely there must be other depictions of grammar from this period, but I've not seen them, and as such I'm not quite sure how to interpret this one. Why is she watering plants?


A Scene on the Ice near a Town, about 1615, by Hendrick Avercamp
It's all about the red sash of the woman in the lower left corner.

Looking over this, it appears I could be said to have a thing for early seventeenth century painting.

Dates for my diary, as they say

Things I mean to do in the near future, in no particular order:

- Indian Highway, contemporary Indian art at the Serpentine Gallery
- The Photographers' Gallery, finally open in their new location
- GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy of Art. I also mean to see their collections more generally, and the Byzantine art exhibit they've got on right now.
- Adrian Tomine at the Institute for Contemporary Art
- Too Much is Not Enough, a group show about fandom, at the Transition gallery
- The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising. They've got an exhibit on right now about 60s candy packaging, what could be better?
- Films of Fact, vintage science documentaries at the Science Museum.

The British Library Reader Bulletin
IN THIS ISSUE
The Library's news on a conviction for theft
LIBRARY THIEF CONVICTED

Mr Farhad Hakimzadeh, a former British Library Reader, is due to appear at Wood Green Court today (Friday 21 November). Hakimzadeh has pleaded guilty to ten counts of theft from the Library, and asked for further charges to be taken into account. He has also admitted theft from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Sentencing in this case is expected later today and you may have seen coverage of the case in this morning's press.

Hakimzadeh used considerable skill, deceit and determination to steal leaves, plates and maps from collection items. In many instances his thefts were initially difficult to detect. The items he mutilated are mainly 16th, 17th and 18th century items, with a lesser number of 19th and a few 20th century items. The predominant subject area is the West European engagement with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul [Mughal] empire (roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh), and western travel and colonisation / exploration.

Readers should be assured that theft from the British Library is an extremely rare occurrence. As Readers will appreciate, we are a library, not a museum. We are committed to making our collections available in the interests of scholarship and research, and to do this an element of trust is necessary. Hakimzadeh fundamentally betrayed this trust.

I know that Readers will share the anger we feel about this crime. The Library takes very seriously its duty to protect the collections for your use, and for the generations of Readers to come. We have zero tolerance of anyone who harms our collections and will pursue anyone who threatens them with utmost vigour.

The successful prosecution of Hakimzadeh follows a thorough and detailed investigation by Library staff and the Metropolitan Police. This led to the recovery of some of the items stolen by Hakimzadeh, and civil proceedings are now underway to recover further items and to seek financial compensation.

The Library has been heartened by the generous co-operation it has received during this investigation from a number of institutions and from other libraries in this country and abroad.

Should any Reader have a concern about the security of a collection item, please do speak to a member of Reading Room staff.

Dame Lynne Brindley

Chief Executive Officer

The British Library

While it must be true that most art thieves have a studied area of expertise, I am posting the above mainly so you can all see the context for the following sentence: "The predominant subject area is the West European engagement with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul [Mughal] empire (roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh), and western travel and colonisation / exploration." Also NB that the CEO of the BL is a Dame. Apparently, the heads of Oxford and Cambridge UP's are also either Dames or Sirs, depending.

So what have I been up to, you ask, if not slicing out items from sixteenth-century books? Let me tell you , it's been positively dialectic over here, what with the highbrow and then the lowbrow and back to highbrow again with nary a stop in between for the decidedly middlebrow pleasures of dissertation work. I imagine myself nimbly skipping over the mis en abyme that is Spenser, but alas, I feel that is both inevitable and that we need to give more studied considerations for the reasons Spenser's Chaucerian imitation in the Shepheardes Calender manifests itself in specifically lexical ways (you like that? Yeah.).

Anyway, I digress. Instead, a quick digest:

Highbrow: Impressing the Tsar, contemporary ballet from the Eighties Future at Sadler's Wells.
Lowbrow: Bonfire night! Fireworks! Really close to my head!
Highbrow: Contemporary Chinese art at the Saatchi Gallery. I hope Mr. Saatchi likes his contemporary Chinese art, since it may be a while before he can sell it at anything other than a loss.
Lowbrow: A trip of Odyssey-like proportions on the night bus back from Brixton.
Highbrow: Delirium an adaptation of the Brothers Karamazov from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Not the best play I've seen here, but perhaps the most ambitious and certainly the most exciting and therefore one of my favorites. The production's focus did, um, wobble a bit with the introduction of some interpretive dancing in the second act but what can you do? They get an A for effort.
Lowbrow: Louche drinks and arguments about Freud and Chaucer with a bookseller/would-be-writer in Joycean hat and glasses. A friend of John Shurmer-Smith's, obviously.
Highbrow: Tea tasting at Samuel Johnson's house, courtesy Twinnings Tea. I sat in an uncomfortable chair for thirty minutes and learned why only Philistines drink anything but Twinnings. Then I myself drank a lot of Twinnings tea, most of which was quite nice.
Lowbrow: Taping for a BBC sit-com. To be honest, I found the show to be insipid and the taping process tedious. But, on the plus side, I don't think I'll ever have the urge to go to one of these things again.
Highbrow: Two Vaclav Havel one-acts at a theater in Richmond it took forever to get to on the Tube (it didn't help that there was "a body on the tracks at Victoria station"-- I didn't need to know that!).
Lowbrow: BOWLING! I remain obsessed with the British take on classic American culture, especially since it usually involves playing really good music and drinking decent German beer.

Going to Edinburgh with the students this weekend; it is supposed to snow. And Ben is coming in just four days!

---

In which I write blog posts all day instead of reading

Item: I took a walk down Oxford Street after dinner tonight. All the big department stores have their Christmas displays out, some of which are quite clever. In fact, the Christmas seasons starts sort of insanely early here.

Item: I have a new hat! I like it very much! It goes well with my new coat.


Item: This is not for girls, so obviously I had to try it. I don't even know what it is, yet, though I suspect it to be chocolate of middling quality.


Item: Muji. Have I mentioned how obsessed with them I am? They have a lot of small stocking stuffer type gifts for Christmas, stuffed toys, gadgets, games and the like. They also have a City in Bag building block sets: you can get Tokyo, Paris, New York, London, and the set below, which is labeled "Mystere." You've got Stonehenge, a pyramid, some Easter Island statues, the Loch Ness Monster, the Nazca Lines, the Sphinx and some sort of temple. I love it. I am happy to have it sitting on my windowsill.


Item: all of this should give you an idea of how much work I got done today.

More crisps

Walkers Sensations: Oven Roasted Chicken with Lemon and Thyme. I readily believe that real thyme was near this product at some point. The lemon is understated, mostly discernible in the aftertaste. The chicken flavor is there throughout, but not overpowering. The overall taste is savory, rather than salty, which is offset nicely by the citrus. Subtle, but pleasant, and miles away from Walker's regular range roast chicken flavor. The mildness of the flavoring means the taste of the chip itself comes through (unlike the sechuzan spice flavor, where it was completely overpowered), and the two are naturally complementary. I was concerned about how the meaty taste would mesh with texture of the crisps, but it suits the thicker kettle-chip style Sensations crisps very well.

This is the last of the Walkers Sensations range that I've been able to find in individual serving packages. I'm excited try the other flavors, especially Carmelised Onion and Balsamic Vinegar (maybe with some goat cheese?) and Vintage Cheddar and Red Onion Chutney. But there's a whole world of unfamiliar junk food out there!