Wishful Thinking and Happy Birthdays
Happy Birthday to me, well, almost happy birthday, tomorrow's really my birthday.
Feeling kind of down today, it seems like everyone's busy and I'm stuck being not busy. Didn't get paid last week (it's a long story involving my boss's bank), and I'm looking for another job on the off chance that this bank problem becomes a sort of permentant fixture.
On the other hand, I'm at the British Library, which is a perfect place for reading and writing and well constructed. If only internet weren't so expensive.
Went to see an exhibition at the Tate Britain yesterday, it was The Gothic Imagination: Fuseli, Blake, and the Romantic Imagination and while I thought that much of the exhibit was rather good, I wish it were a bit more intertextual, drawing better connections between these paintings (or the style of the paintings) and later writers and artists. At the end of the exhibit, the curator did something of the sort, showing clips of movies which drew inspiration from Fuseli's "The Nightmare" (which someone had no idea what they were writing about when they said that the subject of the painting is not definite, or didn't bother to look up nightmare in the O.E.D and know that the word referres to incubi and succubi which were thought to sit upon a sleeper's chest and drain away their (sexual) energy through the night). Yet, that seems as if it were the simplist element that could be pulled from the exhibit. There certainly is a connection between the paintings chosen and film, especially those from German Expressionism and any later films which were influenced by them, but the technical influence, the use of mise en scene, and lighting, and techinique are ignored for sensation.
More delightful was going into the bookshop attatched to the exhibit and seeing my favorites, including Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Angela Carter's Fairy Tales, Marianna Warner's from beast to blonde, and Katherine Briggs collection of English Folklore and Fairy Tales, as well as Edward Gorey. That, my friends, is heaven to me.
Feeling kind of down today, it seems like everyone's busy and I'm stuck being not busy. Didn't get paid last week (it's a long story involving my boss's bank), and I'm looking for another job on the off chance that this bank problem becomes a sort of permentant fixture.
On the other hand, I'm at the British Library, which is a perfect place for reading and writing and well constructed. If only internet weren't so expensive.
Went to see an exhibition at the Tate Britain yesterday, it was The Gothic Imagination: Fuseli, Blake, and the Romantic Imagination and while I thought that much of the exhibit was rather good, I wish it were a bit more intertextual, drawing better connections between these paintings (or the style of the paintings) and later writers and artists. At the end of the exhibit, the curator did something of the sort, showing clips of movies which drew inspiration from Fuseli's "The Nightmare" (which someone had no idea what they were writing about when they said that the subject of the painting is not definite, or didn't bother to look up nightmare in the O.E.D and know that the word referres to incubi and succubi which were thought to sit upon a sleeper's chest and drain away their (sexual) energy through the night). Yet, that seems as if it were the simplist element that could be pulled from the exhibit. There certainly is a connection between the paintings chosen and film, especially those from German Expressionism and any later films which were influenced by them, but the technical influence, the use of mise en scene, and lighting, and techinique are ignored for sensation.
More delightful was going into the bookshop attatched to the exhibit and seeing my favorites, including Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Angela Carter's Fairy Tales, Marianna Warner's from beast to blonde, and Katherine Briggs collection of English Folklore and Fairy Tales, as well as Edward Gorey. That, my friends, is heaven to me.
posted by jillie @ 8:32 AM
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