Day: December 21, 2005

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Culture Other

Magnum photo-essays

Magnum in motion has photo essays with audio commentary. The only one I’ve watched is the ‘Inner-City Youth, London’ one – which I would certainly recommend. I found it via GRIMETIME. I’ve downloaded a few grime tracks recently; it was PopText that started me in that direction by posting a few tracks from the brilliant Lady Sovereign. Starting from her and clicking on Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought’ links helped me find Kano, Roll Deep, Wiley, Lethal Bizzle and of course Dizzee Rascal. All of whom are worth checking out if you like hard, fast hip-hop.

And even if you don’t give a fuck about the music, check out the Magnum photos.I expect the other photo-essays are good too, I just haven’t looked at them yet.

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Culture Other

Szirtes on the myopia of poets

George Szirtes has an interesting post up at the moment, which starts:

One of the reasons I became a poet rather than a novelist is, perhaps, because I have a far stronger sense of events – nature as event, phenomena as event, objects as event – than of people. To most poets I suspect other people are a kind of myopic blur.

Whether it’s true for all poets or just him, the post is worth reading. No permalinks, so if you’re reading this some time in the future, you need to track down the entry for 20.12.05 .

Categories
Culture Other

more folk wisdom

On the subject of folk wisdom:

I’m reading a book called Mutants which mentions a C17th book called Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, enquiries into very many Received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths, in which Sir Thomas Browne investigated a lot of received ideas, like the fact that ‘a King-fisher hanged by the bill, sheweth in what quarter the wind is by an occult and secret propriety, converting the breast to that point of the Horizon from whence the wind doth blow’.

Ain’t th’internet marvellous?