(Not having seen The Guardian this past weekend, I can only assume that Tom’s cartoon is a reference to this).
Comments closedTag: england
James Wood On Not Going Home
In an essay for the London Review of Books, critic James Wood considers what is to be an immigrant and the desire to return home even though one can’t:
When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.
I’ve lived in Canada for over 10 years now and I don’t have a ‘home’ to return to either. My parents no longer live where I grew up. My friends are scattered across the UK. Yet I still get pangs of homesickness at surprising moments — walking in a Toronto park on a rare foggy morning, or the smell of urban wood smoke — and it is a strange experience to feel nostalgic about a place that no longer exists and never really quite did. I know the England (and Scotland) that I miss is a fictional place — one that exists at least in part in books, film, and music as well as my memories — even as I miss it. It doesn’t mean my feelings aren’t real, it just means that I know I can’t go home again. And it’s all right.
Comments closedI am not dead; I am in Herne Bay
At the London Review of Books, Brian Dillon considers Marcel Duchamp’s vacation in English coastal town of Herne Bay (and other unlikely historical connections between Kent and Europe’s 20th-century experimentalists):
Details about Duchamp’s time in Kent are scarce. We know that he travelled as chaperon to his 17-year-old sister, Yvonne, and stayed for most of August at Lynton College while she learned English… During or soon after his holiday at Herne Bay, Duchamp made four drawings and a couple of notes that all relate to The Large Glass. The drawings are prototypes of enigmatic – animal, mechanical or anthropomorphic – elements in the achieved work: the ‘pendu femelle’ (an apparently female form that hangs at the top left) and the ‘sex cylinder’ or ‘wasp’ that attends it on the right. There is a colony of rare digger wasps at Reculver, which has excited some Duchampians, but the more obvious link to Herne Bay is in the notes. Duchamp tore out and kept a small photograph of the illuminated pier and wrote, apparently describing a potential backdrop for The Large Glass: ‘An electric fête recalling the decorative lighting of Magic city or Luna Park, or the Pier Pavilion at Herne Bay.’
Who would have thought it?
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