Current reading

Right now I am reading a novel by Padrika tarrant called "The Knife Drawer."  Tarrant gave a reading from the novel at Cafe Writers in Norwich last year and it made me go out and buy the book. I won't give too much away about it here as I have been asked to write a review of it for Peony Moon, but I will say that it is dark, disturbing, riveting and quite unlike any other novel I have read - I would highly recommend it, you will never view mice or cutlery in quite the same way again.

Museum of Life

I have been very remiss about doing my blog of late. It seems that I find it difficult to function creatively without some kind of deadline to work to. You would think that freeed from the constraints of the busy term I would have oodles of time to blog away to my hearts content. But it just doesn't seem to work like that. One of the reasons I suspect is that I am more motivated when I am busy and another of course is that busy lives are more intersesting and therefore give a person more to blog about.

That said I have done some interesting things recently. Hunchermuncher and I went to a very odd arts event at Norwich arts centre a week or so ago called "Rub me up the Wrong Way" which was aninteresting mix of dance and performance artists culminating in Gwendoline Robin exploding as the human firework. Most of the performances were enjoyable except that of Hugh O'Donnell who crammed cheese sandwiches up his arse accompanied by a tape loop of the song "I don't know what to do with myself" and then barfed into a bucket. Maybe I am getting old but I JUST DON'T GET IT.

I did however GET Karton Bott's brilliant installation at Norwich Castle Museum. Bott has created an exhibition entitiled "Museum of Life" which I thought was brilliant. Bott has created two very different settings in which he has displayed some of his extensive collection of everyday objects. In the first room he has made a meandering path through the objects that are spred out on either side, and in the second the objects are displayed on towering floor to ceiling shelf units and in glass museum display cases. This is a fascinating exhibit and effects the viewer on many levels - the most obvious being that we identify with the objects themselves. My son and I found ourselves spotting things that were familiar - that we owned or had owned or were local. Then we were identifying cultural items and wondering which country things were from. In the second room Bott has grouped objects - foe example toys, photographic items, objects relating to the war.

This exhibition contains too many items for a viewer to possibly see and comprehend on one visit and I suspect that even if you visited ten times you would still spot artefacts that you hadn't noticed previously.