Reading room, Bristol Reference Library

Reading room, Bristol Reference Library, originally uploaded by aesop.

From a set of photos I took for the forthcoming book on the library, which celebrates its centenary this year.

The Amber Room

A question on, of all things, University Challenge, last night, was about The Amber Room, the famously lost treasure-room made of gilt-backed amber. It was a present to the Russians from the Prussians, and disappeared following WWII during which it was looted by the invading Germans. Various theories exist claiming that the work does or does not any longer exist.

It seemed to me that it might make a fine starting point for a book. Given my recent reading on hermeneutic analysis and the ways in which hermeneutics approaches objectivity, I thought something examining the history and possible continued existence of an object seemingly 'lost in time' (a thing I see in a lot of Stephen Poliakoff's films) would be an interesting way of exploring issues of being in an artwork. I propose not to produce something documentary so much as a poetic exploration. This would sit alongside my current projects; the 'windmill' project, 'Whistling Copse' and the version of 'The Three Ravens"

blogbits

I've decided not to use Typepad's own reading list plugin anymore, since I already use LibraryThing, which has more useful bits and pieces, and can generate an almost identical RSS feed which now appears to your left. Less successful has been my attempt at using my iScrobbler list to generate a list of recently-listened stuff. The feed updates rather sporadically and there's the combined vagaries of iTunes, iScrobbler, LastFM and, finally FeedDigest to contend with. The only wonder is that anything gets through all that at all. I wish I could produce feed of individual sets in Flickr, too: that way I could use them as gallery pages. In fact, there's an example of a lovely gallery system running off of Slideroll, which now allows you to drag and drop stuff straight from your Flickr account. One day soo, I hope Geoff, slideroll's creator, will make it possible to post the flash interface onto other pages.

Update: he has! Also, the Flickr import now includes sets. Good work Slideroll. Carry on!

Great website

Dino Felluga's Introductory Guide to Critical Theory does an outstanding job of presenting material on various linked critical disciplines (Gender & Sex, Marxism, Narratology, New Historicism, Postmodernism and Psychoanalysis) and covers lots of ground on many of the most significant figures in the various fields, whilst making explicit links between them. Each field has a taxonomy, and the occurrences of the words therein are all linked back to their explanation.

I've yet to see another public-accessible website that does such a good job of expounding these fields, and while it claims to be introductory, I learned a lot in my first couple of visits, which certainly won't be my last.

Holden's silence

a slideshow of the images used in my book Hoden's Silence.