intertext

Today we went and had an Art Experience.

Ever since I saw there was going to be an exhibition of Ithell Colquhoun at Tate Britain I had the intention of going to it but somehow we never got round to it until this final week (and I still have not read the book on her I have).

But at least I did get to it.

'engagement with the surrealist movement... fascination with the intertwining realms of art, sexual identity, ecology and occultism'.

Mix them up, shake and stir. She left the Official Surrealists because they made an edict that you were apparently not allowed to belong to other organisations if you were a True Surrealist and she was not about to quit her various occultist movements -

- of which there were several and one wonders a bit whether they were at all contradictory....

- but her work remained pretty surreal and involving unconscious picture-making and various methods that brought random patterns into the mix.

There was a v early work from her time at the Slade which was Judith and Holofernes, and one wonders how many women artists since Gentileschi have been moved to depict that, eh.

The ticket also admitted to the Edward Burra exhibition - I found it a tad odd that while the labelling on Colquhoun's work mentions eroticism and her involvement with women this element was not mentioned re Burra in spite of the saucy Marseilles sailors, doing designs for ballet, etc, which rather had my period gaydar pinging.

We had vaguely thought of doing the Lee Miller photography as well, but the previous were already quite enough and that has only just started.

We did flaneuse a bit about the galleries generally and spotted a portrait of Emma Hart (later Hamilton) as Circe: nothing like that hideous reconstruction recently posited, hmmmm?

Bread made this week (because last week's developed mould, sigh): a very nice loaf of Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour.

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, Marriage's Light Spelt Flour, perhaps overdid the raisins a bit, mace a bit too subtle? even though is new supply.

Today's lunch: seabass fillets which I cooked thusly (think this is a bit better with plaice, though): served with miniature potatoes boiled and tossed in butter and dried dill, steamed asparagus with a sauce of melted butter, lemon juice and lemon zest (I now have a zester that actually zests), and cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds.

Doesn't appear to be online yet, but apparently, according to piece in Guardian Saturday, there is this horrid new trend for people to outsource chatting up to chatbots - I immediately thought CyberCyrano, because there were not a few instances when after meeting up with the silver-tongued smoothie who had been romancing them, what was discovered was a tongue-tied ditherer.

Like, I'm pretty sure there used to be guides to useful lines of chat, but this is taking it to a new level, where at points it seemed like you had chatbots pitching their woo to one another....

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Also o tempora, though I wonder whether this is in fact a new pattern at all: report on crime in London - apparently crime central is actually Knightsbridge, at least for luxury watch, handbag and jewellery theft. Because that's where they are.

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But good news about tortoises: Baby giant tortoises thrive in Seychelles after first successful artificial incubation.

What I read

Finished This Real Night and went straight on to Cousin Rosamund (1985).

Then a change of pace: Simon R Green, Stone Certainty (Holy Terrors Mystery, #2) (2025): less about the Horrors from another dimension than the horror of being stuck in a remote stone circle with a bickering TV crew.... not bad.

Angela Thirkell and CA Lejeune, Three Score and Ten (The Barsetshire Novels #29) (1961), in order to be completeist. This was at least less all over the place than Love At All Ages, which one suspects was down to CA Lejeune, undervalued film critic of the day who was apparently a neighbour and pal of Ange from the War years but the 2 bios I have just mention that they were friends and not much else (not that they did movie nights together or whatever, only that Lejeune was massive Barsetshire fangirl), barely that she got this into publishable condition.

KJ Charles, All of Us Murderers (2025). I have been a bit less whelmed by Charles' more recent work - maybe just me, or maybe because the bar is set so very high?

On the go

Simon Goldhill, Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History (2025) - having been there and done that, lo, these many years, about what do we mean, to talk about queer or homosexuality historically, found the intro a bit woffly, but now we are on to Oscar Browning and JK Stephen things are moving a bit more.

Up next

A bit spoilt for choice with my birthday books.

This was posted over at agonyaunt but I see the post is locked so not linking there. It's I was asked to provide proof that I wasn’t involved with my husband’s death" (second one down here at Ask A Manager):

I woke up next to my husband in May and found he was dead. I am a teacher in training and the university I go to is well aware of the situation. I have a tattoo on my neck which is the last message he wrote to me, and one day a colleague at work said, “Do you have your name on your neck?” I explained the situation.
Last Friday I was pulled into a room by myself with no warning and asked if I had a letter from the police clearing me of his death. I was told I had overshared at work, and due to the nature of the death (he was only 49 and died unexpectedly) they would like to see a letter from the police clearing me of any wrongdoing. I became extremely upset, and told her I wouldn’t go any further than this unless HR was there to document the conversation and take notes. She then followed me into the car park and asked me not to leave as she “didn’t want me to leave like this.” I told her I was too upset to talk and she still asked me to stay.
I’m only three weeks into my course and am terrified they will look for any reason to throw me off. Am I making a mountain out of a molehill?

Why even mention the police? One assumes a doctor was involved and provided a certificate that it was a natural death. These happen. At much younger ages than 49.

(And ugh at the pursuing upset person.)

In a former former workplace the I think under 30 husband of a colleague died very unexpectedly of an asthma attack. Our sympathy was somewhat limited by the fact that she was having an affair with a colleague and was visibly ungriefstricken, but we didn't go around muttering 'she done 'im in' rather than making bitchy remarks about merry widows.

There was the famed fitness guru who dropped dead during a marathon.

There was some instance I think I commented on when scandalmongering tabloid journo was trying to drum up a case that some gay celeb had died in Sex Orgy because fit young men don't just drop dead, whereas in fact there are known syndromes that cause that.

But perish the thort that this should stop somebody who fancies themself - well, NOT Miss Marple, would Miss Marple have been anything like so crude if she had the slightest suspicion?