But I thought I'd best get some of my thoughts down here before I forget them plus this blog is going to be one of the things my tutors look at when it comes to assessment time which is creeping nearer and nearer and frankly I'm still not that wise about what I have to submit - or rather I am in terms of dates and amounts of words but not in terms of what those words need to be about...needless to say this is top of my list of things to discuss when I next meet with my personal tutor. In particular I need help to flesh out what theoretical contexts I want to situate my work in....
Plus my work - I have been doing lots of reading, lots of looking and lots of thinking which is all work (especially as my work is so historically informed and inspired) but I haven't been doing much work of making - though I did take some photographs on our recent trips to that Whitby and that London (Whitby was mostly on film) and that London was entirely on digital - not because I've had a digital conversion as to paraphrase Charlton Heston 'you will prise my film camera out of my cold dead hands' but because it's much smaller and lighter and the whole point of the London trip (aside from seeing my beloved John Waters and Terror and Wonder at the British Library) was to travel light - so much so I didn't take a paper book with me.
I did have stuff to read on my husbands kindle - it's very easy for me to be a luddite in todays highly digital world as I have a very technical husband who understands all that kind of stuff and who is compared to me a very early adopter indeed but the lack of a physical paper book was nagging away at me. Anything longer than an article I don't feel comfortable reading online - it's just not the same, the weight and the feel of it in my hands isn't right (in spite of the kindle being quite heavy) and it just doesn't smell right either - I have loved books in their traditional paper form ever since I can remember - I could just about manage without my music collection (provided I had a radio to hear R4 and R4 Extra on) but the thought of not having my books fills me with horror. But an electronic copy of something - it doesn't feel real to me or that I own it somehow unless it has some kind of corporeal presence. I don't download music - all the tunes on my at least 8 year old MP3 player is from a CD I own and have ripped to it. Even doing Jane Eyre for WI Bookclub - I preferred to buy a physical copy rather than download it for free....
Even though I knew I'd probably be buying books in that London - I still felt uncomfortable going on a long journey without a book ) I never go anywhere without a notebook and rarely go anywhere without a book, or my knitting in my handbag. The books I got in that London were Photography A Very Short Introduction by Steve Edwards in the Tate - it's small, light and nicely filling in lots of gaps in my knowledge about photography as an art discipline and fits nicely in my handbag and isn't too brain taxing and Camera Lucida - by Roland Barthes which also fits nicely in my handbag but I have yet to begin to read it. That came from a whistle stop almost drive by shop in the Wellcome Collection Bookshop (along with an oven glove with a hand x ray on it and a black skull moneybox) so I did come home with books - plus my husband bought the Terror and Wonder Exhibition catalogue from the British Library.
But I still felt uneasy about not having a book in my handbag before we got there - so imagine my delight when we were walking through Southwark en route to Southward Cathedral to see some of Andrew Logan's work (all of it wonderful, all of it for sale and sadly all of it beyond my budget) when there was a bookcase outside an office with the instruction to take a book and pass it on - and further imagine my delight when there was a copy of the collected Mapp and Lucia stories by EF Benson. I adore them - so much so our cats are named after them: Lucia is the black and white fluffy one and Mapp is the white and tabby one.
So with all this reading I am learning new words though it is a struggle to get them to stay in my memory sometimes - I have had to look up some more than once - but I think I've got to grips with empirical, heuristic and pedagogy now but this isn't just a struggle because it makes my brain hurt but also because it makes me think it makes art and artiness exclusive. The more I learn about visual art and visual art techniques the more I realise it's not so much the visual as the language. But I still worry re the language - partly because I am not yet fluent in its jargon, but more importantly I think the rarefied language of the aesthete and the art world makes it inaccessible and exclusive and I don't like and am uncomfortable with this aspect....
I hope I don't get too caught up in this jargon and forget how to speak down to earth easy to understand english. I did a talk for a troop of Girl Guides last night on the history of cemeteries in Leeds and victorian death customs and I said in my introduction please ask me if I use a word they didn't understand to interrupt me and ask me what it meant - they didn't but that could just be because they were incredibly shy and quiet (v different to the troop I tried to teach how to knit a while ago) but one of them told me at the end 'that was actually really interesting' which I'm taking as high praise indeed....
But back to the words....words, words, words.....I've nearly finished Mourning Dress by Lou Taylor, Death In The Victorian Family by Pat Jelland, have finished Memento Mori The Flats At Quarry Hill by Peter Mitchell, Alexander McQueen Genius of a Generation by Kristin Knox, but still have Photography and Death by Audrey Linkman, the exhibition catalogue from the British Library Gothic Exhibition, Death,Grief and Poverty in Britain 1870-1914 by Julie Marie Strange, The Gothic Subculture by Roberts,Livingston and Baxter-Wright, The Art of Gothic by Natasha Scharf, Dissection by John Harley Warner and James Edmondson.....to really get to grips with....
Other things I am mulling over are why I like the things I do - especially fiction-wise as they are so placed in upper class pre second world war social circles and the upper and middles class death customs of the victorians - a more class ridden socially exclusive society you couldn't wish to be in and in reality that kind of social restriction is one of my all time least favourite things......a bit of a dichotomy there.......mmm back to the list of required reading for college - but they will no doubt make my brain bleed and my nascent class war hackles rise......
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