Described by critcs as a ‘perfect metaphor for the increasingly interconnected and complex character of the 21st century’, “Rabies” employs a broad lexicon of drawing techniques together with a precise, muscular abstraction to investigate the intersection of politics, architecture and history and the way these forces shape the formation of our social identity.

Great images.

Virginia Woolf | Inspiration | Reading List

About a year ago my friend and I decided to start an office book club. Given that it’s mostly only me and him that’s ever in the office, it was just us in the book club. The rule was the book had to be under 200 pages. We selected ‘Anthem’ by Ayn Rand from a list of books under 200 pages.

I read the book fairly quickly. I read some of it on a train. I enjoyed it, but didn’t love it. I enjoyed the process of ‘reading a book’. The physical process of having a book with you and turning to it in a quiet moment, something I’d not done for a while.

I decided I wanted to read another book, and returned to To The Lighthouse; a novel I had tried to read twice previously and given up both times around page twelve. It had been a few years since I last attempted it and I’m not sure what compelled me to try it again, but I went for it. For the first sixty pages I hated it. I really hated it. It was so wordy, dense, and nothing seemed to be happening. I just wanted the characters to go to the bloody lighthouse already. I struggled and struggled… when suddenly it clicked. There’s a dinner scene and the characters’ internal streams of consciousness are ricocheting around the pages masterfully, so seamlessly it’s dizzying. It was beautiful and unlike anything I’d ever read before. After sticking with Woolf for (what felt like) so long her writing style suddenly made sense to me. It was like a beautiful vision suddenly coming into focus; I understood! The sentences became joyous and I enjoyed every word she chose, and I swallowed the rest of the book and was left in a daze. I thought about the novel and its ideas often; it had a magically profound effect on me, one I’d never experienced through literature before.

Over the next six months I went on to read many other Woolf novels. I read her essays and articles (Middlebrow is my favourite) and I took many, many trips to the library. Barbican has volumes of her letters and diaries, and I’d go on a Saturday and read them for hours. I read as much as I could.

Woolf unlocked a new world for me. I read intermittently growing up, but I’d never read anything I’d considered profound and personally touching (although I did read Anna Karenina which was pretty engulfing for a while, I felt a mixture of sorrow and joy upon finishing it). Woolf changed that for me, and from the back of that I was sent on a huge literary adventure. The rush I gained after finishing Lighthouse was so nutritious and wholesome, I felt fed, inspired and my mind was left buzzing. It was thought provoking and enriched my thought process in my day to day life, my perceptions and understandings. I wanted to find that feeling again, and so I was inspired to begin reading.

Before I read To The Lighthouse my knowledge of literature was very poor; beyond a basic general knowledge I simply knew nothing. With Woolf, she opened the door and showed me a whole new solar system in the Galaxy Of Things I Can Be Interested In And Adore. There is so much to explore and I’ve learned so much as a result.

Below are the novels I’ve read in the past twelve months (I’ve made bold my favourites). As a reference, in the four previous years, from 2008 to 2012, I only read six books. Below are over 30 titles. I credit the list to the feeling I got from To The Lighthouse, and wanting to feel that again.

Anthem    Ayn Rand    1937
To The Lighthouse    Virginia Woolf    1927
Cat’s Cradle    Kurt Vonnegut    1963
Orlando    Virginia Woolf    1928
Candide    Voltaire    1759
Candide, Part II    Campigneulles & Laurens    1760
Wuthering Heights    Emily Bronte    1847
Heart of Darkness    Joseph Conrad    1899
The Waves    Virginia Woolf    1931
Far From The Madding Crowd    Thomas Hardy    1874
We    Yevgeny Zamyatin    1921
The Sound And The Fury    William Faulkner    1929
Mrs Dalloway    Virginia Woolf    1925
Silas Marner    George Eliot    1861
A Room of One’s Own    Virginia Woolf    1928
Animal Farm    George Orwell    1945
The Celestial Omnibus    E.M. Forster    1911
Therese Raquin    Emile Zola    1873
The Master and Margarita    Mikhail Bulgakov    1937
The Hearing Trumpet    Leonara Carrington    1960
The Island of Doctor Moreau     H.G Wells    1896
Ulysses     James Joyce    1922
Nana    Emile Zola    1880
The Road    Cormac McCarthy    2006
Sons and Lovers    D.H. Lawrence    1913
The Year of Magical Thinking    Joan Didion     2005
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man    James Joyce    1916
The Fall    Albert Camus    1956
A Confederacy of Dunces    John Kennedy Toole    1980
Notes From Underground    Fyodor Dostoevsky    1864
Infinite Jest    David Foster Wallace    1996
The Sun Also Rises    Ernest Hemingway    1925
Wise Blood    Flannery O’Connor    1952
Night and Day     Virginia Woolf    1919
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter    Simone De Beauvoir    1958
Cassandra    Christa Wolf    1984
Swann’s Way    Marcel Proust    1913
Winesburg, Ohio    Sherwood Anderson    1919

I’ll always be grateful for Virginia Woolf.

Here is some great footage of Mariam performing my favourite Wildbirds song, My Heart, with a full orchestra:

And here it is in its original arrangement, with Andreas’ and Mariam’s incredible steel/pan drum energy explosion. So fantastic. Definitely watch this too, if you’ve never heard the original version before, as the orchestral arrangement is very different.

Posting the end of a book could generally be regarded as a “spoiler”, but given that the passage doesn’t really reveal anything of the plot, and that it’s not plot driven book to begin with, I feel that this can be considered an exception.

Here it is, the bold parts made me clasp at my heart:

Alas! in the acacia-avenue—the myrtle-alley—I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what once they had been, wandering to and fro, in desperate search of heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun’s face was hidden. Nature began again to reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds passed swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after another, on the great oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonaic majesty, seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

—————-

Beautiful. I can’t wait to read volume two.

Likes to talk, but not too much.
Is lazy most of the time but with occasional bouts of energy.
Loves to be sassy.
Loves cuddles.
Loves to eat and is a bit overweight
Purrs a lot
Is stubborn
Is a little bit stupid
Thinks he or she is actually a human or some other animal.
Likes to sit on laps.

In year eight at school (age thirteen) we had an ICT project where you had to design a marketing campaign, of sorts, for a film. You had to provide detailed info about all the characters, the plot etc etc. I don’t really remember the ins and outs of the task, I just remember you had to pick a film though and stick with it throughout your project.

I think it says a lot about what an obnoxious child I was, that I refused to pick a film and instead chose to make my project about MONKEY ISLAND. I was met with no resistance so, unlike everyone else who did their projects on films (as intended) I did mine about a trilogy of video games.

I encountered various problems along the way – largely because all the guidelines for the project were aimed at film campaigns. I seem to remember it was a project we worked on for ages, maybe three months or something. I wonder if anyone actually read what we were doing, because I have a feeling my project was something like 60 A4 pages long.

I remember really enjoying being able to include images of the characters:

Unfortunately I don’t think Youtube was on my radar so much as a 13 year old in 2003, or else I’d definitely have listened to the theme music on repeat -

It’s just TOO GOOD!

I do remember a point during the project where my confidence in my selection of project topic wavered, but I was too deep in to start again.

This fansite has been on the internet for yonks, and I used it massively as my main resource during the project.

I played the beginning of each of the three games countless times, but I only completed them once or twice each. In Monkey Island three I seem to remember being stuck inside a snake for literally weeks. I spent so long clicking around the screen.

Got out though. Natch.

But I hope to get back in good habits and muscle up; here are some photos from the weekend.

Me and my friends, Alan and Odhran in Alexandra Palace…

And my friend Gerlin, from my perspective on the grassy hill…

My namesake, Anika performing at ATP:

Big Freedia -

Prince Rama -

More from ATP are here. After that I went to shoot Major Lazer at the Roundhouse -

Major Lazer really know how to put on a great show. More photos here.

So does this man! VAN DYKE PARKS -

Performing at The Borderline.