April 2010
16 posts
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weekly prompt: the island
The British Library’s exhibition Magnificent Maps opens today. There’s a wealth of treasure to explore online as well as in the exhibition galleries.
Today’s prompt is to respond to Stephen Walter’s ‘The Island’, 2008, which depicts a London-centric view of the world.
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Writer Sarah Salway's top London libraries →
When her planned holiday in Ireland was cancelled because of the volcanic eruptions in Iceland, Sarah treated herself to a busman’s holiday researching for her next book in some of London’s reference libraries.
Of course, the wonderful Wellcome is her favourite, but click through to her blog post to see which of the other four she visited made it into second and third place …
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30/30 prompt: judge a book by its cover
To mark the end of its eightieth anniversary year, Faber is exhibiting items from its archive at the V&A until 30 May.
Today’s prompt is simple: write from a book cover. It could be one from your collection at home, or here are some links:
Faber Archive
Faber Books’ photostream (flickr)
Eighty years of book cover design by Faber & Faber (Guardian.co.uk)
Or, if...
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Weekly prompt: favourite books and left luggage
I can’t believe how often I’ve been up and down to Reading this Spring without realising that the Museum of Reading has an exhibition about my favourite children’s author, Michael Bond, who grew up in Reading. You can find out more about it on the official Paddington Bear website.
There’s a choice of prompts this week:
1. Write about your favourite book or character in a...
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30/30 prompt: dance
User Generated Content (UGC) is becoming more and more important in Libraries, Archives and other cultural organisations.
The Southbank Centre is asking people to upload their “signature dance move” to the Dance Atlas, which is supported by a blog and a map showing the location of different dancers. Already there are some brilliant examples of the serious and less serious kind. Young...
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This week's prompt : uncomfortable reading
Last night I took part in a panel discussion at The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place.
I was really lucky to be able to use images from the exhibition as my slides (many thanks to Maitreyi at the gallery for arranging this).
This is the one I opened with: Girl with Book, 2005 by Oskar Schmidt (hosted on fnart.org, I am sure with permission). I used it to make the point that reading is often...
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Brain Candy's Response to the 30/30 Prompt →
A rebuttal of Klaus Weber’s Source of Abnegation
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30/30 Prompt: In Many Ways These Exhibitions Will... →
While it is closed, the Hayward Gallery has commissioned an innovative poster project, In Many Ways These Exhibitions Will Never Happen.
From the website:
Each participating artist was given a simple brief: to devise a poster for a show to be held at the Hayward Gallery between 2011 and the end of time. No other restrictions were given. Any group of art works – be it real or imagined, from the...
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The next 30/30 prompt will be tomorrow!
Following Karen McCarthy’s lead, I’m going to post my next 30/30 prompt here tomorrow.
Saturday is my day for prompting participants in the challenge, and as I was working out the prompts to use, I realised that I have more than enough to post two prompts a week - the regular Friday prompt and the 30/30 Saturday ones, all themed, of course, around getting the most out of special...
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This week's prompt: where we come from →
The National Portrait Gallery’s photograph of the month shows Professor Stephen Jones by Tom Pope. One of the leading experts in evolution, Professor Jones is pictured with a skeleton from UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology.
This week’s prompt is simple: write about where we come from - it might be in an evolutionary sense, or something specific to your own roots and origins: your...
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This week's prompt: writing on the wall
I’ve spent a lot of this week in the Reading Room of the Wellcome Library, which has a frieze of the names of the great men of medicine. It’s a beautiful piece of sign-writing, marred only by the lack of any great women of medicine up there - not even Marie Curie. Particularly disappointing, since it was only created in 1962, when we might have hoped for a less gendered interpretation...
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