Feature: Modern Magic

I wrote this feature ("For my next trick") about stage magic and scepticism for Prospect magazine. Two of the most interesting magicians I spoke to were Luke Jermay, who read my mind alarmingly specifically in Finsbury Park's Costa Coffee, and "scholarly magician" Todd Landman (of Essex University's political science faculty by day). They follow in a long tradition of magicians, stretching back to Houdini, who make no claim to supernatural gifts. Yet audiences impressed by the shows' artistry find themselves caught between a desire to believe and the will to doubt.

Here's an excerpt:

In his “scholarly magic” shows, Todd Landman uses tricks to make people reconsider the way they think. He says that, for a recent trick he performed at a party, he stopped a woman’s watch. She said, “‘That’s fantastic, you stopped the second hand for five ticks.’ But others were staring at me with their arms crossed over their chests, and said: ‘You didn’t stop her watch; you suspended our belief in time for five seconds.’ So I ask: which is more plausible? I love that grasping for explanation.”

Recommends: Detective Weekend

First published in Prospect (Issue 193) 

Sleuths! The English Riviera Festival of Crime and Thriller Writing
Various venues in Torbay, 18th-21st April, Tel: 01803 665 800

Although most fictional detectives are eccentric loners, crime fans are an ever-expanding mass. Witness the cult following of Danish TV thriller The Killing or the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which has spawned a film franchise and inspired a clothing line by H&M. But the Queen of Crime is still Agatha Christie, whose books have been translated into over 100 languages (a world record) and whose play The Mousetrap is the longest running (from 1952 to the present) in the West End.

The fourth annual Sleuths! crime-writing festival takes place over a long weekend in Christie’s hometown, Torbay. On the Sunday her grandson Mathew Prichard will present a talk about the letters she wrote while on a round-the-world trip in 1922.

This year’s headline act, however, is Colin Dexter, who created one of the best-known sleuths of his generation: Inspector Morse. Having killed off Morse in 2000, Dexter recently revisited the inspector’s youth in the prequel Endeavour, and he will talk about the crime-ridden Oxford of his books at the festival. Alongside the talks, there will be writing workshops, a mystery trail and a psychological thriller play performed by the Bijou Theatre Company.

Review: Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn

First published in the Times Literary Supplement

Dingy flats and rented rooms are Leontia Flynn's territory in Profit and Loss. Anyone who has spent the first decades of their adult life (Flynn points out: "these days we're classed as youth / till 44") in academe or poorly paid work will recognize the succession of neglected digs she describes with a comic sense of bravery. Several of the poems in the first third of the book use the same opening gambit: "I once lived in a house ...". The effect is sometimes curious ("I once lived in a house with rusted locks"), sometimes macabre ("I once lived in the house of an infamous death"), and, cumulatively, deadpan. There is a trace of the stand-up comedian's patter in the movement of Flynn's best verse. Her most surprising opening lines are understated, with a faintly amused delivery, and she is not averse to a bawdy punchline in poems whose titles, at least, give some warning: "The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail" and "The Vibrator". The ease with which she moves between registers is most impressive in the book's centrepiece, "Letter to Friends", a long conversational poem modelled on Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron". Her manner is airy, though rarely arch like Byron's or Auden's in his "Letter" - she has a knack for working clever rhymes into the ode stanza without sounding self-satisfied, often invoking brand names in pairs such as "artefacts" / "Filofax" and "Apple" / "grapple".

Despite the collection's grim settings and even grimmer context - "a scary month for news" from the banking crisis to "the Church of Rome, / its awful crimes" - Flynn often strikes an optimistic note, and that note rings true in some of her more inventive conceits. Flynn's line in "The Girl Upstairs" celebrates the fact that "the rising wind / rumbles the bins and makes the drinkers shout" and neatly absolves the loud culprits, even as she tells us she is the girl crying in the poem. Meanwhile her description of a "mid-price, brick mid-terrace" in "The Dream House" would be flatly sarcastic if its "loving grubby marks" were not transformed by her vision of "some mythic beast in a distant land" beginning its "trek towards their life".

Recommends: The Walking Artist

First published in Prospect (Issue 190)  

Hamish Fulton: Walk
Turner Contemporary, Margate, 17th January-7th May

For Wordsworth, Dickens and Dr Johnson, walking was an essential part of creative life. But Hamish Fulton is not just an artist who walks: he describes himself as a “walking artist.” In 1973, he covered the 1,022 miles from Duncansby Head on the coast of Scotland to Land’s End on foot in 47 days. By the end of the trip he had decided he would “only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks.”

In the last 40 years, Fulton has climbed Everest, retraced Sitting Bull’s footsteps at Little Big Horn and walked 106 miles without sleep on Kent country roads. The walks, he says, shift “where the mind’s located,” like a form of meditation. His shows are typically minimalist: vast gallery spaces house photos from his journeys, alongside sketches and spare, haiku-like descriptions.

“Walk,” Fulton’s first solo show in nearly a decade, brings out the political dimension of his work, the Romantic idealist. In 2009, Fulton, who usually walks alone, began to choreograph walks in which hundreds of people took part—walking single file, a metre’s distance from one another, in silence. His slowed-down group walk in support of Ai Weiwei this year was collective action as art; its geometry is worth seeing this winter in Margate.

Review: Sidereal by Rachel Boast

First published in the Times Literary Supplement

The poems in Sidereal are full of people who cannot sleep. The opening lines of “Pinnacles” are characteristic of the exhausted wakefulness of Rachel Boast’s speakers: “And as there is no chance of sleep / you’ll spend the hours considering all the sounds / rain could be against the fabric of the tent ...”. Boast rearranges impressions and images like someone on the brink of sleep, merging Confucius, Canaletto and fencing terminology in another poem, but the effect is not dreamlike. She builds up “precision”, “skill” and “accurate intent” in the poem’s slender two-line stanzas until “you are ... / foregrounded in broad awareness”.

The attraction of night-time for Boast is, above all, the cosmos, and the parts of it which are not visible in sunlight. The epigraph from Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes the keynote: “unmeaning they / As moonlight on the dial of the day”. It is fitting then that her collection takes its title from the sidereal day, which is based on the Earth’s relation to the stars rather than the Sun. She has a light touch with the technical language of astronomy, which she balances with conversational circumlocutions and anchors with plain, subtle rhymes. In “The Hum”, a poem about the process of writing, the effect is intimate:

Then in that way you have
When you persist, like a siderostat,
In fixing me in your view
What I’ve kept hidden becomes visible to you

A drawback of Boast’s sharp-witted, poised verse, however, is that she is too easily “habituated to the Vast”. The phrase, set in italics, is borrowed (again from Coleridge), and the feeling comes at several removes. Boast is most comfortable describing unwieldy emotions in the second person, as though addressing herself calmly. It is, perhaps, too easy to conclude “Agrarian Song”, a poem which captures the spirit of a warlike “god of the soil”, with a glance at the heavens: “Plant in me / the effort of your dark songs. / Constellate them”. But when the crotchety note of the long-term insomniac surfaces in her poems, Boast is more mischievous, even bracingly rude. She says “good riddance to the English apology” in the placidly titled “Peace and Plenty”: just what is needed to disrupt the solar system.

Recommends: Rabindranath Tagore

 
First published in Prospect (Issue 189)

Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Painter
Victoria & Albert Museum, 11th December-4th March, Tel: 020 7942 2000
 
The 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth this year has seen a resurgence of interest in his work. Yet two of his most prominent champions, Amartya Sen and Amit Chaudhuri, have complained that his poems—written in Bengali and difficult to translate—are under-read in the west.

Unlike his poetry, Tagore’s paintings do not suffer from the language barrier; he even declined to give them titles. An exhibition opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December offers another approach to this extraordinary figure, who had already won the Nobel prize for literature when he took up painting in his sixties.

Tagore’s early sketches—doodles he drew around the crossed-out words and revisions on his manuscripts—are some of his most immediate works. They show fantastical creatures, which he would later describe in a typically poetic fashion: “a bird that can only soar in dreams” or “a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence.”

On loan from Visva-Bharati University, many of the paintings on show have never been displayed outside India, where Tagore’s work has been a major influence on artists such as Jamini Roy and Eleena Banik. This exhibition, one of only a handful in Britain since the 1930s, is a rare chance to appreciate Tagore first-hand.

Recommends: The Genius of Illumination

First published in Prospect (Issue 188) 

Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination
British Library, 11th November-13th March 2012, Tel: 01937 546546

The illustrations in Henry VIII’s personal copy of the Psalms are as revealing as the annotations he made in its margins. On display at the British Library from November, the drawings show a stout, doublet-clad figure—indistinguishable from the Tudor king—doing battle with Goliath and posing as King David. Jean Mallard, the artist and scribe, clearly knew how to flatter.

The library’s first major exhibition of illuminated royal manuscripts—beautifully decorated, handwritten volumes collected by the kings and queens of England—gives a fascinating insight into their owners’ lives. Ranging from the 9th to the 16th centuries, the exhibition includes a parchment roll nearly five metres long, tracing the genealogy of the royal family back through William the Conqueror and the Anglo-Saxon kings. One of the most intriguing manuscripts is a 13th-century bestiary describing real and imaginary creatures, accompanied by moral lessons. A lion’s skull, excavated from the Tower of London’s moat, is displayed alongside it as a reminder that the king of the beasts had his place at court, among the exotic animals of the royal menagerie.

The manuscripts on show are remarkably well preserved, having remained hidden from view in private collections for centuries. This vibrant exhibition offers a chance to appreciate the beauty of the handmade book, but also to see some of the best surviving examples of medieval and Renaissance decorative art as art in its own right.