Silk yoga: drawing for charity

The email of doom. 'We're doing our fundraising auction and looking for prizes. I wondered if you might offer to do a sketch for someone.'

I refuse, pointing out that no one would bid and my humiliation would be total.

My virtual arm is then wrenched out of its virtual socket, so I end up at a charity do in Inner Temple Hall. The architect of my doom is Joanna Kennedy, chief executive of Z2K which campaigns for vulnerable debtors. Z2K is sharing the event with the Bar Pro Bono Unit.

Someone I know is sitting next to me. She asks, 'How's your life going?'

Don't moan.

'It's going very well,' I say.

'What, your life?'  

Joanna rocks up, beaming: 'You've had a bid for £X.'

I visualise some blotto Rumpole who's just done well at the bookies.

Then the quiz. I'm mostly rubbish but am the only person in the room to attribute a quotation to Kipling: 'And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.' Look, he's being ironic.

Afterwards, my top bidder gets in touch. Rebecca Stubbs QC of Maitland Chambers. How will this work out? I hope she wants me to draw a cat or a house or something. I don't want the full beam of a sitter's attention.




I meet her in chambers. It's not one of the mouse-ridden sort. She has a lovely airy room with a good light. She is self-aware but not self-conscious. And she has solved my problem. Being a multi-tasker, she has decided to get on with her yoga. 


Her style of yoga demonstrates why she is very successful in a brutally competitive field. She is driven. Gutsy. Powerful. She has stamina and total concentration. 

I can just pursue my private struggle, chewing off my lipstick with the stress of it all. She tolerates my ink-spills (hastily mopped up) and my swearing. I leave wet drawings to dry all over her room until the next day. She doesn't mind. 

If the QC market collapses she would do well as an artist's model. It's all about core strength and focus. 

 There will be two digital reproductions from this set of drawings in a solo exhibition at Senate House (London) starting in June, held under the auspices of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

Book noise and a suicidal entomologist: Senate House Library

I get The Fear when Hannah Thompson describes how she makes soundscapes out of the general racket in Senate House. It's too much like O-Level physics.

At school I switched to physics-with-chemistry, a pantomime-horse subject for people with soft-boiled science brains. I ended up at the sort of college which tolerates women who read without noticing that the porridge is boiling over.

Today Hannah works ferociously in her studio in Senate House. She is the Leverhulme-funded sound artist in residence, recording upheaval in the life of the building as London University institutions move around the Monopoly board.

Hannah is preparing for a performance on 2 June. She's scouting for a violinist to join her in the Bach Double. Contact her if you think you're hard enough.



She is also creating a soundtrack for the exhibition of Senate House Library treasures, Shakespeare: Metamorphosis. Around the building, staff members' recordings of Shakespeare gobbets are set off by movement sensors in Pound Shop plastic boxes customised with a soldering iron.






Outside Hannah's studio is an installation by Tom Phillips, The Library at Elsinore. The painted-over books - real ones with titles from Hamlet - compete with the cacophany of signage.










 This is how it was displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2007 (below):

In 2008 it was exhibited by the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall, North Yorkshire. Where next?

I go home on a sweltering Heatherwick Routemaster, which rhymes with design disaster, reading The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W. N. P. Barbellion.

He describes the almost-sound that Hannah's instruments can't capture: 'The Porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire - the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing. It makes me shudder to think of Lamb's Essays being carted about as if they were fardels.'

Fardels, a word from Hamlet. Later in the journal: 'The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her stockings be downgyved.' Hamlet again. The current of words, the ocean of association.

For details please see Senate House Library and School of Advanced Study websites. Earlier blog posts here.

I have a small exhibition in Senate House under the auspices of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies starting in June. No sound but enough rope.

A Bard-ass show at Senate House Library

It’s all about the hang. Displaying a work of art draws attention to its context. 

This unlabelled sculpture in Senate House highlights the circuit breaker. They embody the tension in the building between art and function.

I’m on my way to the exhibition Shakespeare: Metamorphosis. 

Sir Peter Hall described Shakespeare as the heavyweight champion of the world: no one can go the distance with him. Someone who took exception to Shakespeare’s immortality was Tolstoy.  In Tolstoy on Shakespeare (1906), he complains of ‘an irresistible repulsion and tedium’.

Hamlet ‘has no character whatever...During the whole of the drama, Hamlet is doing, not what he would really wish to do, but what is necessary for the author’s plan.’ 

Eh? Watch out for that train, Anna.

He does a hatchet job on King Lear, complaining that ‘all the characters speak in a way in which no living men ever did or could speak.’

He sees veneration of Shakespeare as ‘an hypnotic state’, dismisses the oeuvre as ‘trivial and immoral…aiming merely at the recreation and amusement of the spectators’ and blames the Germans for bigging up the Bard. 

George Orwell, writing while engaged in wartime propaganda, steps in to referee. His essay Tolstoy and Shakespeare describes Tolstoy’s carping as ‘one of the greatest pieces of moral, non-aesthetic criticism – anti-aesthetic criticism, one might say – that have ever been written’ but points out that Tolstoy is on the ropes. ‘Tolstoy criticises Shakespeare not as a poet, but as a thinker and a teacher…’ but ‘Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or poem or play or what not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning – a residuum of something we can only call art.’

Senate House was Orwell's model for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Senate House Library website refers to ‘our infamous Room 101’. But that’s just propaganda. The inspiration for the room which contains the worst thing in the world was not here but in Portland Place where Orwell got bored out of his skull in committee meetings. Still, to reflect the room’s overtones of psychological manipulation, the exhibition links it to Othello. Its usual tenants have been dislodged.

Today, a photographer is recording the set-up.

The best way to prepare for this beautifully presented compilation of Senate House Library treasures is to look at the engaging miniature films under the Timeline heading made by the curators, Dr Karen Attar and Dr Richard Espley.

The exhibition celebrates how Shakespeare thrives on reinvention, his and ours. And it’s a stonking display of world-class scholarly librarianship, past and present, in an age when public libraries are being dumped on volunteers. 

Elegant captions steer you from early sources to the digital era. A taster showcase three floors below starts with Ovid’s Metamorphoses – one of Shakespeare’s lifelong sources, now required to carry trigger warnings for a certain type of student.

The display uses ceiling suspension and screens to crack the problem of the noli-me-tangere Travertine walls. A shadow falls on Hamlet - 

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

The way out takes you past some busts: William Shaen, lawyer and social reformer...










...Augustus De Morgan, mathematician...

 …and, tucked away, the radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham. His real preserved head and, separately, his auto-icon (the dapperly dressed, waxen-headed skeleton) are up the road in UCL. 

This bust is inscribed with his motto, plurimorum maxima felicitas – literally, ‘of the most, the biggest happiness’. As Bentham put it, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.’

He also pointed out that the smaller the majority, the greater the infelicity. And so we totter towards a referendum – still clutching for moral support at the genius of our global propagandist, our agent of soft power rooted in Stratford-upon-Avon.

For details of Shakespeare: Metamorphosis and related events, please see the Senate House Library website. Back at the kitchen table, something is forming: I have an exhibition in Senate House starting in June, under the auspices of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

Twangling instruments: the first sound artist in residence at Senate House Library

"Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips."  - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Senate House - the brutal/Deco University of London tower for which Georgian terraces were razed - is an Orwell-Shakespeare mash-up in the hands of Hannah Thompson, the sound artist in residence. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell uses Shakespeare to represent the opposite of the valueless life on Airstrip One. 

Senate House is Orwell's model for the Ministry of Truth: his first wife Eileen worked there, in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information, during the war. 

Nineteen Eighty-Four predicts that by 2050 the Bard will be a goner except in translation, but he's clinging on and in this anniversary year the building celebrates him vertically. 

Hannah has installed motion sensors in the lifts to activate recordings of the staff reading Shakespeare, although passengers have been accidentally muting the system by fiddling with it. Please leave it alone.

I don't know how many of Hannah's readers chose to record 'When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes', the sonnet which Shakespeare wrote for me personally, but I was one of them.

Ditto 'Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes' which I dedicate to the building's uncompromising walls and floors of Travertine, a stern but vulnerable substance, sallow, pockmarked, utilitarian, noble, tragic. 

Any staff and contract workers who'd like to record some Shakespeare should contact Hannah in her fourth floor workshop.  

Translations are welcome: Hannah already has a clip from Julius Caesar in Twi, a dialect spoken in Ghana. And on Wednesdays she holds open house, so pop on the earphones and listen to her mesmeric collages of Senate House sounds from eerie to regurgitatory.  

Today Hannah is visited by linguist, model and Dallas aficionado Gavin (@gavinodivino) who quizzes me attentively about the 1980s.

I'd never been inside the building until this year but for me the words 'Child Rowland to the dark tower came' have always circled it like rooks. (Give yourself one point for King Lear, another for Browning.) Now I'm collecting other people's anecdotes. 

Ahead of the pack is a wistful remembrance of being seduced with silent efficiency by a librarian and wafted up to what my friend describes as 'a secluded balcony'.

'What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail...' - Nineteen Eighty-Four

Hannah Thompson's project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, commemorates a time of upheaval for the building. For details and information about the exhibition Shakespeare: Metamorphosis, please see the Senate House Library and School of Advanced Study websites. 

And if any newcomer takes exception to my personal blogsnark, rest assured that I know about the pain of underfunding in higher education and the misery of looking after an old building.