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Showing posts from October, 2010

A Sustainable Future for the Rollerball Museum

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Since May, the cultural workforce in the UK has been nervously anticipating the onslaught of the dark regime that now governs the country. The disaster that this will be for British culture is universally accepted – except maybe by intestate liberals in denial, who for the sake of realism can be ignored as hopefully they will be for a generation - Charlie Brooker commented in the Guardian this week that the liberals represent the acceptable face of abuse but we have to hope that they are treated as unacceptable for many years to come. The only question in most people’s minds is the degree of destruction we face. I think that the most telling comparison I have heard is with the Conservatives' last ideological attack: the destruction of the labour movement and the closure of the once mighty mining industry: culture’s future looks remarkably like the fate that befell the wasteland of pit villages and blighted a generation of workers. My epigrammatic assessment is that this governmen

Moomin Valley at Bury

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Magical Moominvalley 23 October - 15 January 2011 To celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Moomins Bury Art Gallery has recreated the feeling of visiting Moominvalley itself. The world of the Moomins, created by Finnish artist Tove Jansson has delighted and captivated children and adults alike for the last 65 years. Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson created the white hippopotamus-looking creatures whose adventures have been translated into 34 languages. Jansson wrote and illustrated eight books about these eccentric creatures, the first of which The Moomins and the Great Flood was published in 1945. Tove Jansson was a prolific illustrator and less well-known for her work produced in newspapers. Her beautiful drawings of the Moomins will be shown alongside a collection of rare examples of Jansson’s illustrations published in Finnish daily newspapers, as well as illustrations of JR Tolkein’s The Hobbit and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The exhibitions will appeal to children

The Other Room

Tuesday 19 October 6pm FREE The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, The Engine House, Chorlton Mill, 3 Cambridge Street, Manchester M1 5BY. JEROME ROTHENBERG, ALLEN FISHER, MAGGIE O'SULLIVAN

Ron Silliman's Text

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Ron's neon text extracted from his poem Northern Soul which, I think, is part of Universe, begins production. www.textfestival.com

Back from Finland

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A great week in Tampere. The Tragedy of Althusserianism started badly - so badly in fact that within a couple of days of arriving and struggling hopelessly, I seriously considered giving up the writing break and flying home early. I found an internet connection and started costing up flights. Then returned to my computer, and as if the threat of stopping turned on a tap, 19 sections of the poem poured forth. "ichnologic years after inserting one mental state into another, the space between but the excuses as color-naming systems deviate from the predict of universal forces would predict" I was very pleased to see Karri Kokko again and to meet Satu Kaikkonen . I gave Satu a copy of Reykjavik and she gave me 3 fabulous hand-made books (one of which featured the namepoem pictured here) and a couple of visual poems (which are now both on the wall in the apartment). (Picture:Karri and Satu) We had lunch together, and agreed their participation in the Text Festival, and then vis