In Bruges, dir. & written by Martin McDonagh (2007)

I don't think that I ever want to meet Martin McDonagh. I don't want to meet him because I do not want to know what a man like that is really like. A genius. An extraordinary playwright, who turns his hand to making a short film, and wins an Oscar, and who turns his hand to his first feature and comes up with In Bruges. It is not easy to take all of that in.

In Bruges is quite simply a marvellous film. I went with no expectations; I'd read no reviews, and heard one good report from a friend. I knew that Colin Farrell was in it, which slightly put me off, given the silly public profile he has. And then he goes and pulls of a performance that was sensitive and wonderful.

Two hit-men, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) hide it out in Bruges after a botched job that has resulted in the death of a child, an innocent bystander. They are to await instructions from the boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), but neither have any idea why they've been sent. Eventually, Harry telephones Ken and orders that Ray be killed, for killing the child. "You can't go 'round killing children, it's that simple", he says later in the film. But Ray has already hit rock bottom, and just as Ken is about to shoot him, he sees Ray lift a gun to his head. He stops him just in time, Ray sees Ken with the gun, and realizes that a hit has been ordered on him. They sit and talk it out. This is one of the very powerful scenes in the film, where Ray explains that he cannot go on living with himself for the death of the child. He breaks down, crumbles really, and it's quite something to see how Farrell controls it. Ken wants to give Ray another chance, a chance to make things right, to do something good and so lets him go. He then rings Harry to say that the job has not been done, and gets himself washed and dressed awaiting the furious, murderous, psychotic Harry to come and kill him. The way that Ken resigns to Harry is heartbreaking and I think that Gleeson does it beautifully.

There are several more twists and turns, and I won't go any further because they are rather enjoyable. That's what's so interesting about this film. There's a huge element of caper about it: Harry says to the hotel owner, as he and Ray, armed, are confronting eachother: "This is the shootout!". That kind of funny, meta-fictional, postmodern cleverness is nodded at, but not allowed to overpower. He's actually just telling her what they're doing, not making a comment on the characters' fictional self-awareness. It's something that postmodern never is, sincere. The film is shot in the beautiful city of Bruges, and the setting is a huge part of the story. Ray hates it, Ken loves it, and Harry has sent them there because of a childhood visit he remembers with nostalgia. The city is almost another character. McDonagh has taken the quiet anonymity of Belgium, more precisely its best preserved medieval city, as this wonderful, unnoticed, ancient place. Ray, narrating at the beginning, says that he didn't even know where Bruges was, there's a pause as the audience asks themselves the same, and then he says: "It's in Belgium". Harry's wife has the same question before he leaves, "Where is Bruges anyway?".

I suppose that is what the film is about, places we don't go, or places we don't notice anymore. Ancient places. Like the extraordinary scene where Ray and Ken walk around the art gallery enjoying the torturous hellish Bosch and those images of death handing a note to a man, his time is up. The literalness of their lives, shooting people for money, is given this deeper texture through the allegorical figures in the paintings and they are faced with deep questions of justice, innocence and guilt. We are not being asked to judge the two as hitmen, since we're assured that most of the people they kill are bad, or have killed themselves. Even the priest has done something. But the innocence life of the boy can never be brought back, the injustice, the sin of it is somehow absolute, irrevocable. And Harry orders the hit on Ray not because he's dangerous to him, but out of honour. Ray killed an innocent boy and so must die. Ken knows that he must sacrifice his life to give Ray a chance, and it is his love for Harry and his sense of honour that moves Harry and prevents him from killing Ken. And then Harry, the most furious man in the film, perhaps turns out the be the most honourable man in it.

Ancient, beautiful, unnoticed places: honour, justice, innocence, guilt. Like Bruges.

English as a Foreign Language, or I Can't Live Anymore

The Space Between Words: Further Thoughts on Garage

Last Friday Garage was released in the UK, with a premier at the Curzon Soho and a Question & Answer session with Lenny Abrahamson, Mark O'Halloran and Anne-Marie Duff. I went down for it and was looking forward to seeing the film again. The questions afterwards were interesting to compare with what had been asked in the Dublin Q&A session I went to. It also provided the opportunity to hear Mark, Lenny, and Ann-Marie Duff talk about their own experiences with the characters. While the Irish audience was concerned and responded to the death of the small town, the English audience was far more struck by the language of the fim, its rhythms and cadences. I think that was an interesting thing to see and confirms in my mind that its spareness and its linguistic purity makes it universal. This idea of linguistic purity, of a spareness that highlights the simplest of words as being the most profound was something that struck me upon a second viewing. Josie has a way of internalizing the language of others that is just fascinating. And his way of saying 'Now' was noted at the Q&A. It is a very Irish thing. It can mean, 'I agree', or 'I don't agree', or a host of other possibilities somewhere in between. The way that Josie's language can fill with significance, however, renders that now into something more elevated. It seems to create a temporality around him where a past and a future have collapsed into a continuous present of observation and reaction. His friendship with David is wonderfully expressed in a scene in which Josie comments on the colour of the sky and David looks up, agrees, and describes it as 'beautiful'. Later, in the bar, Josie asks the barman did he see the evening sky, and is told that there was no time to be looking out at the sky. Josie says that it was beautiful. The lyric sensibilities of the barman do not stretch to sharing the moment and so Josie simply shares it with us. David has given him a vocabulary to describe what he had already noticed. Josie, who is training David in, showing him how to run the garage, is being trained by David in how to describe the world around him.

There's much more to say. The physicality of Josie struck me again, and the way in which this adds to his reality, to his thereness, his facticity, if that makes sense. His face is as expressive as a stream in which each character watches both himself and a reflection of the world pass by. Everyone sees themselves, or a fleeting image of themselves, in Josie. His otherness is us.

Go to see this film. You will not be sorry.

Meet Jo Bach

Experts have reconstructed the face of Bach from his bones, according to a recent Reuters report. The Scottish forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson did the work, and he's rather interesting looking, really. Very expressive. Though it does look a little like he's listening to a beginner play one of his cello suites!
Interesting how we often desire to have a likeness, to search for a good likeness of the face, for our heroes. (See the recent attempts to reconstruct the face of Dante, for example)

Ernesto Illy (1925-2008)

Ernesto Illy, the grandfather of coffee, died earlier this month. He combined a scientific rigour to the development and making of good coffee with a flair for style. A PhD in chemistry, experience on the road selling coffee, Ernesto became managing director of Illy in 1956, the company his father had founded in 1933.

From the Times obit:

'For him, the water temperature should be between 90C and 95C and the coffee the sand-sized grinds of exactly 50 beans roasted at 220C, with 25ml to 30ml of espresso then extracted from it under 9 atmospheres of pressure. The temperature of the coffee to be sipped must be between 80C and 85C, and Illy even designed the shape of a cup for the ideal taste. Milk and sugar he regarded as contaminants.'

Other obits can be read here & here & here.

Dante and the Church & Dante and His Literary Precursors, Four Courts, 2007

My prive scilence over the past few weeks has been due to a hectic HT, but I thought I'd better send a flare up just so that you know I'm alive. Things have been busy here this term, both teaching and getting to interesting lectures. Caroline Bynum Walker gave a lecture at Schools last evening entitled "Visual Matter: Christian Materiality in the Later Middle Ages". Fascinating stuff. Last week Derek Pearsall came to talk about the C-Text of Piers Plowman, a new edition of which will appear with Exeter UP next year. Greatly anticipated.

In other news: I just picked up s/h copies of these two collections of essays, each originally comprising lectures delivered at the Annual Dante Lecture Series at University College Dublin. This lecture series is the main outlet for Dante research in Ireland and its organizers and participants, as well as the UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, are all much to be commended. Both of these collections merit attention. I'm still making my way through them, but I greatly enjoyed George Holmes' 'Dante and the Franciscans' (pp. 25-38) and Alexander Murray's 'Purgatory and the Spatial Imagination' (pp. 61-92), a very fascinating and broad account. I am next going to read Catherine Keen's 'Fathers of Lies: (Mis)readings of Clerical and Civic Duty in Inferno XXIII' (pp. 173-207).

The other volume on Dante's literary precursors has twelve essays. Again, I'm still making my way through it, but have already greatly enjoyed A. Teresa Hankey's 'Dante and Statius' (pp. 37-50, though I'm unconvinced) and Peter Hainsworth's excellent 'Dante and Monte Andrea' (pp. 153-177, and I am convinced). Next will be Claire E. Honess, 'Dante and Political Poetry in the Vernacular' (pp. 117-151).

I guess the appearance to two volumes at once must have to do with the RAE last year. One curiosity (as opposed to a criticism): The Dante and the Church convention for citing the Commedia is Petrocchi's edition, but in Dante and His Literary Precursors, it is to Sanguineti's new edition. I'd love to know if there were any philological reasons for the discrepancy. Also it uses Gorni's Vita nova, and De Robertis' Rime, but in the SISMEL edition of 2005 rather than the 2002 Edizione Nazionale published by Le Lettere, while the Church volume simply refers to the Ricciardi Opere minori for everything except the Commedia. So between the two volumes, we're getting everything, I suppose.

A McGonigle Watch at Appleby's

I recently became interested in the work of the McGonigle brothers, Irish watchmakers. I get e-mail updates, and they recently let us know that they had left a watch into Appleby's in Dublin for viewing. Since I had never seen one in the flesh, I thought I'd go in to have a look. There are two, including a beautiful platinum model. They are just beautiful, incredibly poised in design and with a really dynamic face. They feel really modern actually, and quite edgy. This is all the more remarkable considering that they are so traditional, crafted with painstaking attention to detail. They make, I believe, about four watches a year. Money would be vulgar to talk about considering the kind of watch we're talking about. It's a work of art. That's all. If you're interested I really recommend a visit to see this marvellous watch.

I should also say that the chap who looked after me there, and I did not catch his name, but I should have thought he's an Appleby, was extremely helpful and courteous and spoke with care and in detail about the watches. I greatly enjoyed the visit, and was given good reason to trust them.

Call for Papers: Light: Aspects and Approaches

Another wot got away

I thought I nearly had it. A tad over-priced, but I was willing. Postage cost a disgrace, but that's the way of it. And then a message, the bookseller regrets that this book is not in place: it may have been sold to a customer who walked in off the street, or the seller's database has not been updated. So that's that. I know it will come up again; it'll be in the window of a charity shop, or I'll find it online again and I'll be that person who walked in of the street and gets it in time. Patience with books leads to good collections.

It was Guglielmo Gorni's edition of the Vita nova for the 'Nuova Raccolta di classici italiani annotati', published by Einaudi, in 1996 (ISBN: 8806132253). I must admit I find myself convinced by his renumbering of the chapters. Numerology is always a tricky one to argue, because it's so flexible and can be made to perform incredible acrobatics for you that just work somehow, but the patterns around the number 9 are very stimulating and compelling. See too his article ''Paragrafi' e titolo della «Vita Nova»', Studi di filologia italiana, 53 (1995), 203-222 for an account. There's something very economical about his argument and his critique of Barbi's assertion that the divisions are inconsistent in the extant manuscripts is powerful. (Cf. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta, 'From Manuscript to Print: The Case of Dante's Vita Nuova', in Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies, ed. by Theodore J. Cachey, William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies, 1 [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], pp. 83-114, for another view, of considerably more shaky philological foundation).

But I cannot complain. Lately I've been finding some lovely things here and there. Kenelm Foster's The Two Dantes (London, 1977), in lovely condition, and a very good pb of his Petrarch (Edinburgh, 1984). The former I found before a visit to Cambridge last week. I took it as a good omen for my journey, and it was indeed a good omen. While in Cambridge I found a lovely copy of Gordon's The Double Sorrow of Troilus (Oxford, 1970), and Barron's Trawthe and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered (Manchester, 1980).

Francesco Petrarca, De insigni obedientia et fide uxoria, ed. Albanese (1998)

This gorgeous little facsimile of Florence, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 991, prepared by the excellent Gabriella Albanese was published in 1998 by Edizioni dell'Orso (Alessandria); she is also responsible for writing an introduction. It appears to be out of print now, but I shall certainly keep my eyes open for it as I'd love to own a copy. The manuscript is rather unusual in that it comprises just 22 ff of Petrarch's Latin translation of Dec X. 10, the story of Gualtieri and his patient wife Griselda. Very few single volume 'monographs' of the work exist, being much more frequently compiled with other material into a miscellany. Its format is unusual, 18 cm X 12.5 cm, written in a humanist script that is light and spacious.

"L'elegante mise en page del testo, infatti, vergato in scrittura umanistica, a piena pagina, con uno specchio di scrittura arioso, di gusto classico, il formato decisamente moderno e 'petrarchesco' di «libretto da mano» ne fanno un maneggevole libro di lettura, scritto al contempo con eleganza e chiarezza, che ripete da vicino teoria e prassi della riforma del libro voluta e imposta da Petrarca negli ambienti delle più avanzate avanguardie umanistiche" (p. 39).

Perhaps most interesting is its unfinished iconographic programme, with blank spaces at key scenes. Albanese includes an analysis of these empty scenes and a comparison with other illuminated manuscripts with pictorial representations of these very moments in the text. This is a fascinating study and a fascinating manuscript and both are worth looking at carefully.

Theory of Everything

Apparently, a surfer named Garrett Lisi has just discovered the Theory of Everything. And central to it is E8, a very complex group of symmetries that if written out in tiny print would cover the size of Manhattan. Needless to say, I have not got the foggiest idea what any of this is about. I just think the picture is pretty.

But even more exciting, apparently, is that they've just figured out how to plug in an enormous blender in Switzerland called the Large Hadron Collider, and they can now actually test this guy's theory of everything. Isn't that amazing? Testing a theory of everything. I don't even know what that means, never mind what it might answer. But if you look at the picture you go a little dizzy after a while.

Renaissance Siena: Art for a City; National Gallery London, until 13 Jan

The National Gallery recently restored a triptych panel by the so-called Master of the Story of Griselda of the sequence for which he has become famous. The curator was so struck by its quality that he decided to put together a larger exhibition entitled Renaissance Siena: Art for a City, and the result is an extremely enjoyable collection of work. Siena was often considered the second city in Tuscany in terms of power and influence after Florence, and there is no doubt at all that this secondary position is reflected in the quality of the art it produced. But in a way that is what made this exhibition so enjoyable. You are seeing how a relatively normal Italian Renaissance city got on with creating its saints, its iconography, establishing its authority in artistic terms with the best artists it could grow at home and import from elsewhere.


What I went to the exhibition to see was those recently-restored panels detailing the Griselda story and it was certainly worth it for that. The panels are thought to have been produced for a double wedding in the Spanocchi family and would have decorated the nuptial bedchamber. It would seem that they were placed in a row as they are all lit from the left. The first panel details Gualtieri out hunting and seeing Griselda (left background, and left middle ground). He goes to Griselda father to ask permission for her hand in marriage (right background), takes her outside, has her stripped naked (left foreground), and then marries her in her sumptuous bridal clothes (centre).


The second panel details Gualtieri's supposed killing of their two children (left background), his seeking a divorce (under the left arch), showing her the forged papal bull giving him permission to divorce her (under the central arch) and her scandalous disrobing (under right arch). She goes home in her camicia, or undergarment, to her father who is waiting for her.


The third panel details the wedding banquet. Gualtieri has asked Griselda to return to the castle and prepare the household for his impending wedding (left background). She agrees and welcomes the wedding guests, including the supposed bride and her brother (far background). Under the far right arch Griselda speaks to Gualtieri, explaining that he should not test his new wife like he did another (i.e. her). Under the far left arch Gualtieri reveals that is was all a test, a test that she has passed, and he embraces her (rather awkwardly). The central two panels details the restoration of order and Gualtieri and Griselda's re-marriage and happily-ever-after moment.

These are fascinating panels, not just for the very interesting representation of marriage, such as is discussed by Christiane Klapische-Zuber in "The Griselda Complex", but also the marriage iconography being used in such a specific nuptial context (see Baskins on Italian cassoni etc). Also, the artist has clearly created a very uneven composition, where there is much skipping and jumping between scenes, where one is often unsure what is happening, where clothes and headgear must be read in order to understand who's who. These are such vital concerns in the story that it represents an interesting example of a rich textual background informing the visual tradition. The animals playing on the floor in the final panel provide a wonderful marginal commentary to the story too, with chained monkeys and bears and such looking at various characters. One wonders at the central panel and its use of a forged papal bull in the context of often delicate relations with Rome. The bull is the central point in the panel, the vanishing point, clearly indicating that it is upon this authority that Gualtieri acts. As the central panel it balances the two others, provides their centre of gravity, or their fulcrum. Interesting too is the theory that the final panel was produced first, in time for the wedding, and that he others were added later. In the Spanocchi house, then, the resolution came first, and the problems were represented later. Given that the wall would have been prepared to receive the panels in advance, a bride might well have had a sense of foreboding at the two empty panels waiting for a story, explaining how Griselda ended up like that. I am troubled too by the awkwardness of Griselda's embrace of Gualtieri in the final panel. It speaks volumes in a scene in which she says nothing.

Go to see this exhibition.

Guillermo Martínez, The Oxford Murders (Abacus, 2005)

This novel is Martínez's first to be translated into English and is the winner of the Planeta Prize in Spain. Last year they filmed some of it here in Oxford and I thought I'd give it a read and see what the fuss was about. Only now I get around to it, having picked up a cheap copy at the Oxfam booksale on Saturday morning. The story revolves around an Argentinian post-doctoral student who arrives in Oxford to work with a famous maths don. He lodges with a little old lady who gets murdered and whose murder appears to be one in a series that follows a mathematical logic. Can they identify the series and predict the next murder or will the killer be too clever for them?

The maths is quite interesting, the plots has been competently sketched, apart from a clunky ending, but the characterization and writing is terrible. And I mean, really terrible. It might be a question of something being lost in translation, but the characters all lack any depth or interest. I know that often these kinds of books will rely on plot and conceit to carry them, so we're supposed to think that the maths makes up for the lack of characters. Oxford is supposed to be a wonderful setting, but unfortunately it's all a little heavy-handed, with lots of silly mistakes like porters emptying bins in dons' rooms in Merton. It felt far too like what Dan Brown did for Rome with Angels and Demons. And if the maths were done in a more clever way, he might have pulled it off. But unfortunately it is all pretty straightforward, and the maths doesn't come out of it in any mysterious way, as it should have. It seems liked a missed opportunity, and I'm afraid to say that I recommend that The Oxford Murders be your missed opportunity.

Garage, 2007; dir. Lenny Abrahamson, written by Mark O'Halloran

Last Thursday I got a chance to see Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O'Halloran's new film Garage. [Thank you Margaret!] Based on what I have already said about Adam and Paul and Prosperity, I suppose it is going to be pretty obvious that I am an admirer of the work this collaboration has been producing. With Garage I think we move into something rather more serious, not just in terms of subject-matter, but also in terms of art. There is a beautiful pace to the film, a rigorous slowness of the surrounding landscape that is part of the characters and their lives.

The story is simple. Josie works in a garage, looking after the few passing customers and waiting for business to pick up. He is treated like the village idiot, though often it is clear he is perfectly self-conscious. When his boss suggests that he work longer hours, he sends the son of his new girlfriend to work with Josie. The two strike up a friendship and Josie and the young man sit talking about nothing in particular, drinking cans and looking out at the closing evening. The rest of the film is tragic and heartbreaking, moving inexorably to a terrible end; I can't reveal more of the story without spoiling it.

There is a great great delicacy to the performances, and Pat Short is simply astonishing. His Josie is wonderfully played, physically vivid, and emotionally charged. It will be impossible to consider him 'just' a comic actor from now on. The filming is wonderful, mixing lush green countryside with harsh fluorescent internal lights. The desolation of the small town almost becomes a part of you at the end of the film. And its silence overcomes you. It is too desperate for expression, for tears.

It would be condescending to those involved to praise this film as a great new Irish film. This is a great and beautiful film. It was an enriching experience to see it.

Fifth International Dante Seminar

On Thursday and Friday I went to the Fifth International Dante Seminar entitled Dante Etico e lirico. There were some fascinating papers delivered, with highlights being a stunning contribution by Robin Kirkpatrick and George Corbett on the use of Dante in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, and another being the marvellously erudite and rich contribution of Claudia Villa on the eclogues, Par 22 and Giovanni del Virgilio. Lots of famous people there, the usual putting faces to names.

Very happy also to have learned about the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies, which looks very interesting and dynamic. There is also a podcast, the first of which deals with key moments in Inferno 1.1-3. It is very good and worth listening to.

100 Words and Pictures That Define Time

This is Jonathan Harris, a sickeningly talented young web artist who has developed all sorts of fascinating web-based concepts, seeking to explore and understand the human world through the artifacts people leave behind on the Web. It's nice kind of variation on the idea of found art.

One of his websites is the beautiful 10X10, which takes the top 100 words being used in cyberspace during any one hour. It creates its own kind of narrative, at once isolated and beautiful, yet completely fleeting and plugged in to what we're hearing. It generates its own logic of strangeness while remaining oddly familiar. I think it's a brilliant idea; it makes you look at the world differently. It's marvellous.

Prosperity, dir. Lenny Abrahamson, written by Mark O'Halloran (RTE Television, 2007)

The past two weeks have seen the first two episodes of RTE's new drama Prosperity, directed and written by the highly talented Abrahamson and O'Halloran and being aired on Monday nights at 21.30 BST on RTE Network 2. They have also been made available by RTE online, along with lots of other info on the series as well as the scripts. Those without access to Network 2 are strongly urged to watch it online. The quality of this drama is uncharacteristic of RTE and it surely represents a high-water mark for the season, and for future Irish-made drama. The series explores they way that the new-found prosperity experienced in Ireland has not brought everyone with it. Many of the scenes serve to reinforce this: the boys walk across their crumbling estate with the skyline crowded with cranes, testifying to the building boom that has not reached their own high-rise flats. Stacey hangs around a shopping centre full of people buying things she cannot afford.

Each episode is someone's story: the first, Stacey's Story; the second, Gavin's. Stories are the heart of this drama, not plots. Stacey is beautifully rendered as a young mother passing each day with her baby wandering the streets and hanging around the Jervis St shopping centre, dealing with problems that might not even occur to some: finding a place to change the baby; finding a way to charge her mobile telephone after losing her charger; trying to be alone with her on-off boyfriend and father of the child.

Gavin is a young boy who wants a new toy and cannot afford it. He and his friend Conor play truant from school and spend the day trying to find a few euro to make up what he has saved and buy the toy. The boys meet a young mother and try to sell her the beer they have stolen. Instead they barter a can for three cigarettes and sit looking at the rabbit that Gavin has stolen from a neighbour's back yard. The story follows the boys as they make their way through the day, a day that culminates with a confrontation with the friend of one of Gavin's neighbours and an absolutely stunning and shocking final scene.

The stories run in parallel, and in each episode you will see a reprise from an earlier episode, so they weave in and out of each other, a bit like the dynamic of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Trois Couleurs. There are some stunning shots, like the beautiful portrait of Gavin looking at his father with a strong sunlight behind his face. Anyone familiar with Abrahamson and O'Halloran's Adam and Paul will recognize many echoes in this episode and there's much more to say about the way that O'Halloran has chosen to explore the themes of innocence and child-like language in both of these works.

Something very very special is happening in Prosperity.

Ian Sansom, The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books (Harper, 2005)

The Mobile Library is the first in a series featuring “one of literature’s most unlikely detectives”, Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian sensitive type who arrives in a small Northern Irish village to take up a position that just might make his CV look passable. Everything that can go wrong does to wrong in his first twenty-four hours. Not least of his problems is that the books have gone missing, and in order to get out of his contract, he must find them.

Sansom is a very smart writer and there are many laugh-out-loud moments in the book. I like the twist of a Jew trying to navigate all the religious and political sensitivities in the North. I like the way this detective is an outsider. I like some of the characters in the book.

But I’m not sure that it is a sincere book. And sure, perhaps it is not meant to be. (I can just hear the cavils now about sincerity...but not to sound too much like one of Sansom's characters, you'll know it when you see it). It is a book that just screams something like “Postmodernity can be fun kids”, and I have at least three problems with such a statement. There are some genuine moments, certainly, but my overall impression was an unsettling sense of being manipulated by cleverness rather than invited to share in the playfulness.

Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (Verso, 2002)

In these nine reflections on the idea of distance and historical inquiry, Carlo Ginzburg, the noted historian and intellectual makes his way through a variety of fascinating topics from diverse fields with great ease and coolness. The concept of distance is examined from several perspectives. In in the first essay, entitled 'Making It Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device', he opens by discussing Viktor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose and his definition of art as a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant. From here he takes us on a wonderful journey from Proust, Marcus Aurelius, Antonio de Guevara (who?), Montaigne, La Bruyère, Tolstoy and many more as he examines the idea of ostranienie or de-familiarization. This gives some idea of the range that Ginzburg provides in his meditations. This only works when the author has complete control over his argument and over his material, and both happily coincide in this book.

A long chapter on 'Myth: Distance and Deceit' takes us from Plato to the Nazis without time for breath in between; another on 'Representation: The Word, The Idea, The Thing' opens with a fascinating discussion of funerary practices in the late middle ages and the use of effigies of the dead and examines the idea of an oscillation between representation as substitute and as mimetic evocation. One of the most facscinating meditations, Chapter 4, 'Ecce: On the Scriptural Roots of Christian Devoational Imagery' opens with a marvellously stimulating discussion of the role of Old Testament (and prophetic) citations in the Gospels, and wonders if it is useful to use the term testimonia to describe these citation strings. His conclusion is that it is the citations that generate the narrative and not the other way around.

Further chapters are: 'Idols and Likenesses: A Passage in Origen and its Vicissitudes'; 'Style: Inclusion and Exclusion'; 'Distance and Perspective: Two Metaphors'; 'To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance'; 'Pope Wojtyla's Slip'.

I look forward to keeping this book closeby and returning to it and ruminating further on the many fascinating things Ginzburg has to say. I recommend it.

The Francis Bacon Studio, The Hugh Lane, Dublin

After Bacon's death in 1992, his heir, John Edwards, wanted to donate his studio and papers to a gallery where it the studio might be re-housed and studied. Edwards approached the Tate, who apparently dithered for several years. Edwards turned around and offered it to the Hugh Lane. They did not dither. The studio was dismantled and rebuilt in Dublin with forensic precision, every item catalogued and meticulously photographed. The result is a huge digital archive of everything, books and pictures, thousands of objects that have made their way into his work in one way or another. Being an Irishman, it is very appropriate that the Studio return to the city of his birth. And going to a gallery that houses a collection bequeathed by Sir Hugh Lane that itself had some trouble finding a home seems oddly poignant and appropriate. Dublin did not make the same mistake twice, it would seem.

The Studio, at number 7 Reese Mews in South Kensington, was not just his studio but also where he lived. Perry Ogden was asked to photograph the studio before it was to be moved to Dublin. These are now on display and comprise shots not just of the studio but also of his kitchen and his bedroom and living space. I found these images very affecting I must say. There was a stunning simplicity about the space, and just a few photographs dotted around of those most important to him. There were many photographs too of his own work, and it is clear that in his living space he meditated often on his own iconic work. In his later years he became very wealthy and owned various other properties, but this was where he lived and worked for thirty years. And despite the money to complicate his life with beautiful objects and posh fixtures, he has a tiny studio with his bath in the kitchen and his bed in his living room.

There is something extremely interesting about seeing an artist's workspace. Over the past few months The Guardian have been doing a Writer's Room series in which a writer will talk a little bit about their own workspace. Bacon does refer to the mess he works in and how important that mess is. The studio has been rebuilt so that you take one step inside it, with a perspex glass door keeping you out. A couple of other peep-holes allow views of other parts of the studio. It is disconcerting too to watch the empty studio, with ripped canvases and torn bits of paper all over the floor. Like seeing a room full of potential creativity rather than seeing something Bacon meant us to see.

There are several paintings on display, a highlight being the work you can see in the photograph above, a figure that appears to be Bacon himself. It is a typical work but clearly quite unfinished. And that was one of the most moving points of the Bacon Studio. He was still working, and had more work to do.