I seem to have written some actual blog posts this week, so I may have burned all my blog calories already. But, still, that's the point of weeknotes - persist.
Inspired by Pete Ashton I have started something on blot. I like it. I'm using it as a way of taking notes for things I might blog about, but might not. Only RSSists will be able to follow, so it's always going to have a tiny audience. Hurrah.
As you'll see from the notes on there I have a blog post brewing about energy monitoring. Maybe that'll be next week.
We went to see the public sculpture which always precedes Freize in Regents Park. Some we liked, some we didn't. We were, however, captured by the language used in the descriptions, somehow even more fruity than usual.
I'm always intrigued by the little language tricks that writers use to get this stuff flowing, to get out of the literal and into the metaphorical / nonsensical. Here it's "drawing on X, Y exposes the limits of Z"
"Alludes to..."
"Invite viewers to.."
"Explore" "Confront"
"Explores the psychological resonance"
"Investigates notions"
This sort of thing reminds me of what I think of as 'the Ackroyd Turn' - that ability to slip from talking about something being like something to talking about it actually being that thing. To go from saying the Thames is like a Mother to the Thames Is A Mother, without us noticing the shift. (And making it easy to get another 6 pages of lyrical nonsense away.)
Here's a classic example from Iain Sinclair: "But just as estate agents treat edgeland artists and warehouse communalists as pilot fish for fresh territory, so alphabet-soup quangos plot major regime change for the land beneath London. The shielding fences around the Olympic site, the giant construction projects in Shoreditch and London Bridge, are aped by the shacks knocked up to hide the scooping out of bigger and better basements."
Just as X, so Y - textbook. It lets him imply that it's somehow sinister that the fences used around construction sites are similar to the fences around other construction sites.