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A landscape submerged
The St. Elizabeth's Day Flood, c. 1490-95 During the night of 19 November 1421 a heavy storm caused rivers to surge, dikes to overflow and large areas of polder land in Zeeland and Holland to be...
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Sussex Waters
I had been looking forward to 'Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water' at Pallant House but was sadly too ill to go down and see it. The catalogue is interesting though, with an overview of the...
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Örö
I have been reading Rob St John's Örö (available via Bandcamp), a book based on fieldwork and experiments undertaken during two periods as an artist in residence on the Finnish island of Örö, in...
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Atlantic Flowers
Last year I bought the latest New Arcadian Journal, Atlantic Flowers: The Naval Memorials of Little Sparta. 'The upland garden of Little Sparta is evocative of distant seas. Atlantic Flowers offers...
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Jena before us in the lovely valley
“Jena before us in the lovely valley”This is the beginning of Gottfried Benn's poem 'Jena' (1926), translated by Michael Hoffmann and reprinted on the Poetry Foundation website. The words were his...
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Drinking the Rivers of Dartmoor
A few weeks ago I saw this at the National Gallery's excellent exhibition themed around Saint Francis of Assisi. It reminded me that I hadn't had a chance to note here anything about the recent Richard...
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Rheinterrasse
Photograph of the Rheinterrasse on the third floor of the Berlin Vaterland building, with its view overlooking the river between Sankt Goar and the Lorelei rock. (Source: Wikimedia)In July 1930 Antonin...
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Pure blue in the dawn
Robert Macfarlane on Twitter, three days ago: Ah…Cormac McCarthy has died today. A giant of a writer, who wrote with a pen of iron, torqued language into new forms & worked the rhythms of prose...
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Distant mountains and steep torrents
I have been reading Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge, a fascinating account of late Ming courtesan culture, translated and edited by Wai-yee Li. It mainly comprises two literati memoirs - Reminiscences of...
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Sunlit emptiness
West Lake, HangzhouSource: WikimediaI've just read Love & Time: The Poems of Ou-Yang Hsiu, a slim volume of J. P. Seaton translations published by the Copper Canyon Press in 1989. It includes...
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Ocean waves and mountain echoes
Kuncan, Origin of Immortals, 1661I've been looking into the art of Kuncan (or Kun Can, 1623-73), a Buddhist monk who lived in and around Nanjing. In Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, a book...
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The Airfields of Lincolnshire
The cover of Simon Cutts'The Small Press Model is a photograph of his 'forgotten one-word poem' which can be found outside Skellingthorpe, 'A History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire'. It comprised...
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The Eight Mountains
I recently watched The Eight Mountains which I'd been looking forward to since reading Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian:This rich, beautiful and inexpressibly sad film is about the friendship...
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Lake Superior, Cascade River
Sugimoto Seascapes at the Hayward GalleryI wrote about Hiroshi Sugimoto's seascape photographs here in 2007, referring to some online images at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum. Checking back just...
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Uncultivated regal hunting grounds
Awrangzib Hunts Nilgais c. 1660I've just read Julian Bell's new book on Adam Elsheimer, Natural Light. He talks about the paintings I referred to here in 2006, when I visited the Dulwich Elsheimer...
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Salt Island
Mónica de Miranda, Salt Island, 2022 (detail)I recently went to look around RE/SISTERS A Lens on Gender and Ecology, at the Barbican. In this exhibition the politics goes well beyond environmentalism...
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Branches Waving in the Current
Back in October I was fortunate to be able to attend a book launch for Michael Wood's new book In the Footsteps of Du Fu. He gave an excellent speech on Du Fu's life and importance (not everyone...
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Conway Castle - Panoramic View
Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. RailwayI've been reading Bryony Dixon's book The Story of Victorian Film which can be seen as an extension of the brilliant free-to-access...
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Scenery-Killers
Derangements of My Contemporaries is Chloe Garcia Roberts's 2014 translation of Li Shangyin's Za Zuan ('Miscellaneous Notes'). This work is a delightful oddity in literary history - the most obvious...
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Renamed City
Talking this weekend with my teenage son about holiday ideas, we agreed that the place we would both most like to visit is St. Petersburg. I wonder when that might be possible again... I have never...
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Radical Landscapes
Back in 2022 Tate Liverpool held an exhibition of 'Radical Landscapes'. I didn't make the effort to go because it sounded like I would be familiar with a lot of the work as well as the underlying...
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Cloud tracks and tide-ripples
Last weekend I went to Cambridge to see the Kettle's Yard exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends. Laura Cumming wrote in her review last November 'I can hardly think of a more...
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The purple glow of evening
Carl Gustav Carus, Woman on a Balcony, 1824 (used as the cover for OUP edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho). The Mysteries of Udolpho is one of those famous novels like Wuthering Heights or...
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Mirror of Holland
This morning I walked along our local canal, with bright sunny weather creating reflections of the barges and bridges, the buildings of Hoxton and Haggerston, a few trees and many joggers pounding down...
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A Tale of the Wind
Mentioning Bert Haanstra, a Dutch documentary maker, in my last post reminded me of the great Joris Ivens. I referred to him back in 2008 when I wrote about the city symphony films being made in the...
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