Toronto - Ipswich - Bratislava - Vienna
5 July 2010 in
I’ve been away a fair amount of late.
I attended Book Summit 10 in Toronto a couple of weeks ago; it was a great day full of interesting conversations. It was great to meet Dominique Raccah from Source Books - we shared a panel at the end of the day. I was surprised to hear writer Robert J. Sawyer claim that writers won’t be able to make a living from writing ‘within a decade’; maybe he’s seen the future, but if he has, I intend to look the other way. I do think that the it is important for the industry to be thinking creatively, and optimistically, about the potential for new forms of storytelling - and ways to make a living from said forms.
I did a couple of events for Ip-Art, the Ipswich Arts Festival; I’d been the judge of their short story competition, and I read my commissioned short story as well. I spent the following day working with students and teachers on talking about a big digital storytelling project I’ll be doing with 5 Ipswich schools in the forthcoming academic school year.
Then I went off to Bratislava to work with Lubica Cekovska on our opera of ‘Dorian Gray’.
Whenever I go to Bratislava, the National Theatre flies me in and out of Vienna, but I’ve never actually been to Vienna, so this time I left Bratislava a day early and spent twenty-four hours in Vienna. My student Leo Thompson lives there, and he took me on a tour of the city on the back of his motorcycle, which was great fun. I managed to cram in two art galleries and a walk around the city centre; I found Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial sculpture in Judenplatz hugely moving. It is ugly and squat and very very affecting.
But a highlight for me was the Kunsthistorische Museum; this museum has a number of Velazquez paintings. Not Las Meninas, of course, which is in the Prado, but it does have a series of three paintings of the Infanta Margarita Theresa, the little princess at the centre of Velazquez’s great painting. The portraits of Margarita Theresa depict her aged 3, aged 5 as she is in Las Meninas (wearing the same dress, but with a much more solemn expression), and then aged around 8; once painted, these pictures were sent out to tour the royal families of Europe as a way of showing off the Infanta’s potential as a future wife. This series of portraits astounded me.
And now I’m home again.
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