The long-awaited Address Book by Sophie Calle is finally published in English

I found an address book on the Rue des Martyrs . . . I will contact the people whose names are noted down. I will tell them, “I found an address book on the street by chance. Your number was in it. I’d like to meet you.” . . . Thus, I will get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances. I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him.

—from The Address Book by Sophie Calle

Based on an address book that French artist Sophie Calle found in the streets of Paris in the early 1980s, this controversial book has finally been released in English. Perhaps Calle's best known work is her 2007 Venice Biennale French Pavillion installation Please Take Care of Yourself, which has been exhibited worldwide. In 2009, Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective of her work.

Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, Calle copied the pages before returning it anonymously to its owner. She then embarked on a search to come to know this stranger by contacting listed individuals. Her written accounts of these encounters with friends, family and colleagues—juxtaposed with Calle’s photographs—originally appeared as serial in the newspaper Libération over the course of one month in 1983. When Pierre D., the original owner of the address book, learned about the work and its appearance in the newspaper, he threatened to sue. Calle agreed not to republish the work until after his death. Now it has been almost thirty years since its original publication in France and it is ready for the first time in English.

Source: Siglio Press

Happy Birthday to Nancy Mitford!

Today would be Nancy Mitford's 108th birthday. Born on November 28 1904, she was the oldest of the six famous sisters, a member of 1920s high society, and an English novelist, known for titles such as Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.

 

Nancy shared many of the foibles of her characters. After a five year relationship with a homosexual Scottish aristocrat, she married the Hon. Peter Murray Rennell Rodd. The marriage was a failure; her husband was unfaithful and couldn't keep a job. She later fell in love with Colonel Gaston Palewski, Chief of Staff to Charles de Gaulle, and following the war, moved to Paris to be closer to him. The largely one-sided affair, which inspired the romance between Linda Talbot and Fabrice de Sauveterre in Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love, lasted until Palewski's affair with and eventual 1969 marriage to Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord, the Duchesse de Sagan. She remained in France for the rest of her life.

 

She died in Versailles in 1973 and is buried alongside three of her sisters in Oxfordshire.

 

Here is one of my favourite quotes from The Pursuit of Love, describing one woman's troubled search for the one: “Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him.” 

 

 

 

 

 

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

I have recently just finished reading 'The Glass Room' by Simon Mawer, a novel loosely based on Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic. The book follows the fictional family of the Laudauers, a successful Jewish car manufacturer and his Aryan wife Liesel, from their honeymoon in Venice in 1929 to the early 1990s. They commission architect Rainer von Abt to design the modernist Laudauer House, on a hillside near a provincial Czech town. Referencing Adolf Loos's famous dicta that 'ornament is crime', the building embraces modern living with the 'Glass Room', 'der Glasraum', alongside rich onyx walls and bespoke furniture. But the family are soon ousted from their masterpiece by Nazi troops, the building slipping from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet, but always having a gravitational pull to its owners. 

The real building, Villa Tugendhat was commissioned by Fritz Tugendhat (1895-1958) and his wife Grete (1903-1970), who both came from Jewish German families of industrialists and traders who had lived in Brno for several generations. Grete was the one primarily interested in living in a modernist home, saying, “I truly longed for a modern spacious house with clear and simple shapes. My husband was horrified by the idea of having rooms full of objects and cloths as he had known from childhood.” Mies van der Rohe was employed in 1929, designing a free standing three-storey Villa, with an open interior, harmonised by a rich palette of materials. The Tugendhats said at the time, “He consequently explained the importance of utilising noble materials in Modernist structures, in particular, which do not contain decorations or ornamentation, this having been a neglected idea up until then by even, for example, Le Corbusier.” The centre piece, the Onyx wall, honey-coloured and marbled yellow, was mined from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco in North Africa. 

I have never actually been to Villa Tugendhat, but it is definitely on my list next. I certainly enjoyed the book- the description of the interior spaces and how they effected each of the characters- even Liesel when she is old and blind can recognise the Glass Room, the Glass Volume or der Glasraum. 

Grete Tugendhat                                                   Fritz Tugendhat

 Images

Also don't miss a small exhibition on Villa Tugendhat at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place. Don't expect much from the exhibition, but it is interesting nevertheless to see the black and white photographs of the Villa. Find details here.

Apologies for the neglect

I'm writing a couple of essays for my Masters, be back soon x 

In the meantime, some writer's rooms of their own...

Roald Dahl

Dylan Thomas

George Bernard Shaw

Images

Stop, Look, Listen: Three things to do this week.

STOP. Brain: The Mind as Matter at the Wellcome Collection

This major new free exhibition, starting from 29th March to the 17th June, explores what humans have done to brains in the name of medical intervention, scientific enquiry, cultural meaning and technological change. Featuring real brains, artworks, videos and photography, 'Brains' asks not what brains do to us, but what we have done to brains, focusing on the bodily presence of the organ rather than investigating the neuroscience of the mind.

LOOK. Gillian Wearing at the Whitechapel Gallery. 

From the 28th March to the 17th June, the Whitechapel Gallery is showing the work of Turner Prize-winning YBA artist Gillian Wearing, whose films and photographs explore our public personas and private lives. Drawing from early fly-on-the-wall documentaries and reality TV, Wearing's portraits reveal a paradox- given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, the liberation of anonymity allows us to more truly ourselves. 

Image

LISTEN. Writing Madness on BBC Radio Four.

Vivienne Parry takes her diagnoses of literary heroines into the 20th century and the age of Freud, the Great War and the explosion of the 'sciences of the mind' focusing on three great works of fiction, including Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. On Saturday 31st March from 11.30am-12pm. 

Image

The New House, Bricks and Mortar, Farewell Leicester Square

I have recently read three Persephone Books, which I would like to recommend- The New House by Lettice Cooper, Bricks and Mortar by Helen Ashton and Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller. I recently did a similar post on the Bloomsbury Festival Cream Tea and Conversation afternoon which you can find here. Persephone Books, on Lambs Conduit Street is a delightful bookshop and publisher focusing on the neglected fiction and non-fiction works by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget.

Farewell Leicester Square:

Betty Miller wrote this, her fourth novel, in 1935. In the novel Alec Berman escapes from his restrictive Jewish family in Brighton, and although he has a successful career as a film-maker (perhaps modelled on that of Alexander Korda) and marries the very English Catherine, he always feels a 'Dago: Jew: Outsider.' 'Yet,' continued Neal Ascherson, 'the rejection is not really the refusal of a snobbish Gentile world fully to accept him. The rejecting force comes from within himself.' 'A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,' wrote the Guardian, 'not the violent prejudice of Mosley's fascists, but the discreet discrimination of the bourgeoisie.'

The New House: 

'All that outwardly happens in The New House,' writes Jilly Cooper in her Persephone preface, 'is over one long day a family moves from a large imposing secluded house with beautiful gardens to a small one overlooking a housing estate. But all the characters and their relationships with each other are so lovingly portrayed that one cares passionately what happens even to the unpleasant ones. 'The New House, first published in 1936, reminds me of my favourite author Chekhov, who so influenced Lettice's generation of writers. Like him, she had perfect social pitch and could draw an arriviste developer as convincingly as a steely Southern social butterfly.'

Bricks and Mortar:

'Helen Ashton has the power of writing about people as though she had known them all her life. One feels that one has lived next door to Martin Lovell ever since the day when he first set up house with Letty in chambers on the north side of Gray's Inn Square' wrote the TLS in 1932. Unusually, Bricks and Mortar is about the life of a London architect from the 1890s to the early 1930s; it is, as well, about a 'very decent, simple, sweet-minded creature' who realises that his marriage has been a mistake yet makes the best of things: because he has dignity, commonsense and kindness, and is 'very much in love with his profession', he has his own special brand of heroism.

ARCHIZINES at the Architectural Association

The Front Member's Room of the Architectural Association plays host to his month's exhibition, ARCHIZINES. Curated by Elias Redstone, ARCHIZINES celebrates the recent resurgence of independent architectural publishing, promoting 60 different magazines, fanzines and journals from across the world. These varies from photocopied and print-on-demand newsletters, to full-colour magazines and thickly bound journals by architects, artists, critics and students. The arrangement of the exhibition allows the visitor to read each of the magazines, along with video interviews questioning the role of printed matter in the digital age. 

Images: Elias Redstone

Cream Tea and Conversation at Persephone Books for Bloomsbury Festival 2011

As part of the Bloomsbury Festival this year, Persephone Bookshop on Lambs Conduit Street hosted a hour of cream teas, beautiful book design and conversations about women writers. Persephone Books is a delightful bookshop and publisher focusing on the neglected fiction and non-fiction works by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget. The afternoon was a chance to speak to the owner's of the shop, as well as like-minded readers and interesting Bloomsbury residents. I was recommended Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller and The New House by Lettice Cooper. 

Farewell Leicester Square:

Betty Miller wrote this, her fourth novel, in 1935. In the novel Alec Berman escapes from his restrictive Jewish family in Brighton, and although he has a successful career as a film-maker (perhaps modelled on that of Alexander Korda) and marries the very English Catherine, he always feels a 'Dago: Jew: Outsider.' 'Yet,' continued Neal Ascherson, 'the rejection is not really the refusal of a snobbish Gentile world fully to accept him. The rejecting force comes from within himself.' 'A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,' wrote the Guardian, 'not the violent prejudice of Mosley's fascists, but the discreet discrimination of the bourgeoisie.'

The New House:

'All that outwardly happens in The New House,' writes Jilly Cooper in her Persephone preface, 'is over one long day a family moves from a large imposing secluded house with beautiful gardens to a small one overlooking a housing estate. But all the characters and their relationships with each other are so lovingly portrayed that one cares passionately what happens even to the unpleasant ones. 'The New House, first published in 1936, reminds me of my favourite author Chekhov, who so influenced Lettice's generation of writers. Like him, she had perfect social pitch and could draw an arriviste developer as convincingly as a steely Southern social butterfly.'

Images: My Own

Kai and Sunny- The Flower Show

From the 3rd to the 26th of June, StolenSpace Gallery on Brick Lane will be showcasing the latest work from artists Kai and Sunny. Their intricate, natural and sometimes sinister work has earned them commissions for David Mitchell book covers, art direction for Alexander McQueen and advertising campaigns for global brands such as Apple. The show at the StolenSpace Gallery features intricate monochrome silkscreened images which explore the structure, shape and complexity of flowers. As part of the exhibition, the multidisciplinary duo are selling the below A3 limited edition box set featuring delicately letter-pressed images with a new story by award-winning author David Mitchell. As described by Kai; "We loved the idea of marrying literature with our images. Sunny and I are both huge fans of David Mitchell's work and because of our history with him, having designed covers for his books, we felt it was right to approach him for this project. We sent over our images and asked if he'd be interested in writing a short story exclusively for us based on the images. We were so pleased he agreed and even more happy when we read the story - it sits with the images perfectly."

Images: Creative Review