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The vault of light as the sun goes down
Philip Terry is an academic at Exeter specialising in the Oulipo and experimental writing - he recently edited The Penguin Book of Oulipo and described the experience in an article for The Irish Times....
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The Path of Perspectives
Last month Dezeen reported on a new landscape intervention by Snøhetta, a 'disappearing walkway' of 55 stepping stones on the Traelvikosen Scenic Route in Helgeland. 'Traelvikosen Scenic Route was...
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Taming the Garden
MUBI was a godsend during Covid lockdowns and is still proving good value for money as far as we're concerned. This week I watched Taming the Garden by Salomé Jashi, a documentary with extraordinary...
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My Road
M. K. Čiurlionis, My Road I-III, 1907Dulwich Picture Gallery has frequently provided material for this blog - see my earlier posts on Adam Elsheimer (2006), Paul Nash (2010), Salvator Rosa (2010), Tom...
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The Hills become blurred
It was good to be able to visit London's Small Publishers Fair again last month, where I have found various unusual landscape-related books in the past (five years ago, for example, it was some Scots...
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Autumn is the End
Today I found myself lying in bed with a cold, listening to an old album by Steven R. Smith, Autumn is the End (1998). The record label describes this as 'an instrumental soundtrack for more...
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House near Gardanne
Paul Cézanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c. 1890This is a photo I took on my phone of a painting in the Tate's superb Cézanne exhibition. I won't attempt to discuss this exhibition (you can read Laura...
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Tidmarsh Mill
Dora Carrington, Tidmarsh Mill, c. 1918 I recently read the new Frances Spalding bookThe Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars. This painting is included in the chapter 'Landscape...
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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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