An innocent abroad

[shewhomust]

"Dazed after leaving London first thing in the morning and landing before noon on an island that seems more Scandinavian than British, I ask the taxi driver taking me across Orkney if the tractor turning up brown matter is cutting peat. 'Ah no,' comes the sing-song reply (Glaswegians think Orcadians sound Welsh). 'That's manure spreading.'"

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones visits the Pier Art Gallery in Stromness for a piece on a travelling exhibition of Artists' Rooms; he seems to have liked it, but that opening paragraph is deliberate self-parody, surely? And a bit on the broad side, even so.

Here's another chunk, with a new interpretation of the purpose of Maes Howe:

"Outside Stromness there is a neolithic burial chamber called Maes Howe, its severe and perfect architecture achieved through dry stone walling. Here, in a room dedicated to the contemplation of the infinite, a shaft of light breaks in once a year on the Winter Solstice, making this one of the world's oldest pieces of time-based art."

Comments

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

"making this one of the world's oldest pieces of time-based art" a...most marvellous line, there!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

"a room dedicated to the contemplation of the infinite"?

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Not too bad either...I feel, you know, it´s like how he feels how the ancestors felt, that make those lines sorta great. Feeling thoroughly Neanderthalean through reading this, I must (yes, even I must things at times!) have me a both mystic&magic, mind-widening drink of our ancient not to say; darned old and gone for quite some almost eternal time as in Blake´s bleak world, ancestors whose unwashed nosehair has caused all these butterfly accident´s in wise old China (a country of which I am the hitherto unknown heiress btw) that have led to our ongoing crisis on which I really need to contemplate right now in a green room full of the infinite: J&B´s garden.
With a glass of rosé. "Prost gute Frau" as we say in (historical) Mordor where east & west once secretely met behind an iron curtain which was the stuff the Neanderthal nosehair was made of, ALAS!