Please can I just vent my frustration? I have to write up an hour-long meeting in which the chairman pronounces 'griev-ance' as 'griev-i-ance' all the way through.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 01, 2008
Thoughts on the National Portrait Gallery
I was in London yesterday and went around the National Portrait Gallery, which suited me quite well, as far as art galleries go as, having no visual imagination whatsover and being congenitally unable to engage with art on any level more sophisticated than, 'that would make a pretty notelet,' or, 'that would (not) look nice on my wall,'* I quite enjoyed being able to go around looking at people I'd heard of. They had all the portraits of the Tudors that I knew from history textbooks, the stock ones of Richard III and Henry VII who glowered at each other across my A-Level classroom and the one of Mary Queen of Scots looking rather shifty that always hung next to the virginal Elizabeth I with her flowing hair and white-silver robes. I enjoyed the 20th century portraits too, and even went so far as to notice that the one of T S Eliot was rather fragmented and disjointed and didn't make sense (in a good way!) rather like his poetry. I also learnt a bit more about Lady Ottoline Morrell, which has retrospectively informed my reading of Life Class by Pat Barker (which is a superb book and everyone should read it).
I was rather dismayed by the unapologetic metrocentricity of it all though. Had I not already known that George/Robert Stephenson (can't remember which the picture was of) came from Newcastle and built the Stockton-Darlington railway and the Liverpool-Manchester railway, I would have thought he/they was/were only famous for building the first railway into London (from Birmingham to Euston, in, I believe, 1837). Similarly, I would have come away under the impression that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was only famous for gaining work experience on the Thames Tunnel with his father and ignorant of the fact that the Beatles came from Liverpool.
Otherwise I rather like London. I'm currently rethinking my life. Suggestions on a postcard please.
* This is my penance for being such a literary snob. Or my salvation. Every time I'm tempted to chastise people who read trash, I remember that my visual faculties are only capable of appreciating the airport novels of the art world (I like realism and don't care about technique!) and that this isn't due to any laziness or lack of academic rigour on my part.
I was rather dismayed by the unapologetic metrocentricity of it all though. Had I not already known that George/Robert Stephenson (can't remember which the picture was of) came from Newcastle and built the Stockton-Darlington railway and the Liverpool-Manchester railway, I would have thought he/they was/were only famous for building the first railway into London (from Birmingham to Euston, in, I believe, 1837). Similarly, I would have come away under the impression that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was only famous for gaining work experience on the Thames Tunnel with his father and ignorant of the fact that the Beatles came from Liverpool.
Otherwise I rather like London. I'm currently rethinking my life. Suggestions on a postcard please.
* This is my penance for being such a literary snob. Or my salvation. Every time I'm tempted to chastise people who read trash, I remember that my visual faculties are only capable of appreciating the airport novels of the art world (I like realism and don't care about technique!) and that this isn't due to any laziness or lack of academic rigour on my part.
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