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Saturday
Dec082007

The Guardian's Triple-Threat Match

Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, Pigsy lookalike mainstream arts programming despot Mark Lawson continues his quest to expunge deep insight: 'Lord Lucan, a 70s news sensation, could not plausibly have been the subject of his hyper-real reporting for the practical reason that, at the end of chapter one, the storytellers couldn't answer the simple question of where he went next.'

Quite. The paper maintains form by decrying the lackadaisical nature of teachers teaching poetry to disinterested small people: 'The most popular "classic" in primaries is William Blake's The Tyger, with a small minority also using poems such as Daffodils, The Ancient Mariner and The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Poems by Benjamin Zephaniah are the most likely contributions to understanding other traditions.' Thank fuck for Carol Ann Duffy, that's all I can say.

Speaking of whom, Iain Sinclair is nothing like Carol Ann Duffy because she is a lesbian. Robert Mcfarlane has the pleasure of his company in a traipse through a segue of London. They talk of many things, including five intertwined rings that look like rip-off novelty loo rolls. Also they talk of the man Stephen Gill: 'Gill's new book is Archaeology in Reverse, and its 100 uncaptioned images were taken on the same cheap camera. For about a year - between the beginning of work and the completion of the fence - Gill haunted the Lower Lea on bike and on foot, watching as the first stages of the Olympic vision were rolled out. The result is a remarkable book that, in Gill's phrase, records the "traces and clues of things to come". His subject is the imminence of mass construction, rather than its realisation.' Mcfarlane does well, except for naming the piece London fields.

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