Xenotopia

Sky Garden

The Descent of Language at The Welcome trust

Suffragettes at The Empire

Frieze Masters Michael Borreman talk

First Sacred Harp at St Georges Church Bloomsbury

Turner Contemporary and Shell Grotto in Margate

Sexology at The Welcome Trust

Chatsworth House

Derbyshire Caves

The Cambridge Folk Festival

The Cats Knickers at Walthamstow Garden Party

Eye of The Needle: Art, Stitch, Partnership and Protest

Speakers:
Cornelia Parker, Ele Carpenter, Sarah Corbett, Sue Prichard and Susan Stockwell.

Paul Barron 1960 template for communications for nuclear war: centralized, decentralized and distributed: a concise lexicon.

Sewing circles were the internet.

Cornelia spoke about the back of tapestries, she had used opposite values and sewn dictionary definitions back to back.

also using sewing to enable a peaceful frame of mind

Forest Poetry Performance at Vestry Lates

Nottingham Contemporary and Nottingham Castle (Arts Council Collection)

WM- constructivism exhibition

From her wooden sleep...Ydessa Hendeles at the ICA

Marlene Dumas and Sonia Delaunay at The tate Modern

WML Yinka Shonibare and Hannah Lowe

The poem opens ‘perfection is terrible it cannot have children’ this refers to the model German women that Plath was noticing everywhere as well as the inanimate mannequins. Using the mannequin restriction of not having a womb, live model woman risk their perfection by becoming pregnant

In "The Munich Mannequins" Plath refers to the lives of women and how they are seen by others, specifically with regard to how biological functions related to childbearing are perceived to define them. The first line of the poem, "Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children," refers both to the appearance of the culturally ubiquitous live German models and that of inanimate mannequins. Just as mannequins cannot procreate, nor can their live counterparts risk their "perfection" by becoming pregnant. Plath suggests that perfection itself "tamps the womb," and goes on to describe the emotions she associates with menstruation the cycles of menstruation symbolized by the moon.

Literary critic Pamela J. Annas argues "The Munich Mannequins" describes "particularly well the social landscape within which the "I" of Sylvia Plath's poems is trapped".She supports this ultimately through highlighting the domination of the artificial (mannequins) over the real (women) and the male society's transformation of women into puppets, and unnatural figures, representing their "disgust with" and "fear of women".She goes on to say that the winter setting in Plath's nature-themed poems represent a period of hibernation before spring and rebirth, while in the context of this city poem, a harsher, social, male-dominated setting, the winter setting represents death instead.

 

THE MUNICH MANNEQUINS

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb

Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of life

Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,

The absolute sacrifice.
It means no more idols but me,

Me and you.
So, in their sulphur loveliness, in their smiles

These mannequins lean tonight
In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,

Naked and bald in their turs,
Orange lollies on silver sacks.

Intolerable, without mind.
The snow drops its pieces of darkness,

Nobody’s about. In the hotels
Hands will be opening doors and setting

Down shoes for a polish of carbon
Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.

O the domesticity of these windows,
The baby lace, the green leaved confectionary,

The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stoiz.
And the black phones on hooks

Glittering
Glittering and digesting

Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.

The next thing is a bird dressed as an old woman – on the idea of 7 shapes of women. Tonight I'm presenting mannequins and birds. Mannequins tend to be younger women. These birds are old women in diguise. This is from the magic shop

Trickster mythology.

he became and remained everything to every

 man—god, animal, human being, hero, buffoon, he who was before good and evil, denier, affirmer,

 destroyer and creator

in the collection the life and songs of the crow

Crow is wandering around the universe in search of his female Creator. In the

 second part of the collection he meets a hag by a river. He has to carry the hag across the river while trying to answer questions that she puts to him, mostly about love.

Lovesong is one of the poems which is Crow’s attempts to answer these questions. When he reaches the other side of the river the hag turns into a beautiful girl.

 

Adventures of The Black Square at The Whitechapel

Kate at The Tate

Camden Arts Centre and V&A wedding exhibition

Unacceptable Behaviour - WML

Yinka Shonibare Q&A at WIlliam Morris

Lakeside Arts Centre

Wollaton Hall Nottingham

Blackhorse Road market 1st Birthday

Poetry Cafe Stanza Forest Poets vs Enfield

Golem at The Young Vic

Ruths Recommendations

Alice Oswald Winter Solstice and Memorial and Dart

Modern Women Poets and Consorting with Angels by Deryn Rees-Jones

Sylvia Plath: Ariel and Colossu

Sean Borodale’s Bee Journal 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/anne-sexton
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/her-kind

Lorraine Mariner’s Furniture

Toon Tellegen’s Raptors translation by Judith Wilkinson  

Odd Blocks by Kay Ryan 

Rosemary Tonk’s work Iliad of Broken Sentences was doing the rounds when her work was still unavailable (except in the Rare Books section of the Po Lib). She died recently and I believe Carcanet are doing a Selected

Terror and Wonder The Gothic Imagination at The British Library

Highlights there were many:

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole and the animation by Jan Swankmeyer

The Faerie Queene

The Four Zoas

Gomenghast

Tintern Abbey ' something sublime and awful about large edifices tumbling to pieces'

Vathek- William Beckford

Edmund Burles

Mysteries of Udolpho

Sublime to mean inspiring and disturbing, immense grandeur terror and power

the writing of Anne Radcliff

Blackhouse

Frankenstein illustrations by Lynd Ward

Basil's concepts of doubles

The Dark Blue

The Tell Tale Heart

The Innocents (ghost obscured by the rain)

The Willows

Temper of Time (illustrations by Leonard Baskin)

Witch Wood

The Monk

Paula Rego & at The House of Illustration

Highlights

Prince Pig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facetious_Nights_of_Straparola


The Straw House

Jane Eyre

No-where lab - Camerless workshop

Constructing Worlds and Walead Beshty at The Barbican

Sigma Polka, Conflict Time Photography, Late Turner and The Turner Prize at The Tate

Highlights
Sigma Polka
photocopies
artist on stick in frame
use of textiles
experimental video


Highlights
Kikuji Kawada photobook: The Map (Chizu) images after the Hiroshima atomic bomb
'The repetition of the act of opening and closing makes the images appear and disappear'

Highlights
The Archive of Modern Conflict

Bedford Physical Training College

Canadian carte de visite

Khevssurian Warriors

http://www.peeruk.org/FionaBanner.html