Why should a London public like my work? My constatations of life have dubious international backgrounds; they contain nothing about British birds' nests, wild-flowers or rock gardens; they are 'machined' with a Franco-American modernity that must be disagreeable to the inhabitants of, say, Cheltenham. To them, on account of the 'time-shift' and ( Read more... )

Animal emotions, wild justice and why they matter: Grieving magpies, a pissy baboon, and empathic elephants
Marc Bekoff. Emotion, Space and Society. Volume 2, Issue 2, December 2009, Pages 82-85A few years ago my friend Rod and I were riding our bicycles around Boulder, Colorado, when we witnessed a fascinating encounter among five magpies. ( Read more... )

Werner Herzog is to set up a film school: a weekend course for $1,450 (£882). He explains:The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted. It is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock-picking or forging shooting permits in ( Read more... )

How rubbish is Google Books? Very rubbish says Geoff Nunberg. To quote one of several examples:The first ten hits for Leaves of Grass are variously classified as "Poetry," "Juvenile Nonfiction," "Fiction," "Literary Criticism," "Biography & Autobiography," and mystifyingly, "Counterfeits and Counterfeiting."
Saw Ivo Pogorelich tonight, the Belgrade ( Read more... )

"You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another." Build My Gallows High (aka Out of the Past) 9pm this Sunday on BBC Four. Mitchum! Kirk Douglas! Jane Greer!

Roger Ebert reviews G.I. Joe:"G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" is a 118-minute animated film with sequences involving the faces and other body parts of human beings. It is ( Read more... )

Bad interviewee: Rob McClennan interrogates poet Charles Bernstein2. How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry is non-fiction.

4. Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Yes.

5. Are public readings part of or ( Read more... )

during genuinely apocalypic episodes of history - say, Central Europe in 1945-46 - most non-uniformed men and women are too busy trying to keep going to classify their predicament. That is why, contrary to the champions of air power, civilian populations in great cities did not wilt under the bombs and fire-storms of the Second World War. ( Read more... )

If you're engaging with the internet gurus who are very evangelical about Web 2.0 you'll hear a very good argument. And that's for the first time in history, millions of people around the world can have a voice. They can input all their thoughts into this system, and people can read them unmediated by anyone. Now, that's interesting, and it's a ( Read more... )

Iain Sinclair offers a critical but largely incomprehensible review of Peter Ackroyd's Thames: Sacred River:Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher's Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby's Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium ( Read more... )

Prada made all the clothes in vibrant colour, photographed them in black and white, then remade the clothes matching exactly the resulting greys.*