Laurence fondles the leather-effect binding of his complete works of Shakespeare, ‘a part of our heritage’, simultaneously using the volumes to display his refinement and his guest’s lack of taste. If the book goes digital, perhaps it makes this act of snobbery performed in Mike Leigh’s ‘Abigail’s Party’ less likely.

A couple of new technical advances have made the newspapers recently. Amazon can turn your i-Phone into an e-book  for free with their Kindle software. 300,000 books are available. A swipe of your finger re-enacts the turning of paper pages digitally. The Nintendo DS also now has a ‘game’ that allows you to read hundreds of classic novels, while the speakers emit the crackle of a mimetic fireplace. The irony is that this sound-effect will actually consume energy created by the burning of coal many miles away. Sound, but no heat. Do paperbacks store more CO2 than online books constantly consume - backed up in several locations at once and always open? But the wastefulness of paper books wasn’t the only assumption in the print and radio discussions prompted by these announcements.

Panels, such as on Radio 4’s Open Book, could have explored the properties of these inventions logically; their benefits and defecits compared to paper books. Instead we witness a sort of ‘conversation re-enactment society’, general assumptions uncritically repeated in programmes dominated by nostalgia. It occurs to me that what is lacking in these commentaries is a precise analysis of the properties of each kind of reading platform.

The most obvious misconception is that paperback books such as Penguins perform an archival role. In fact they strip out many parts of the book-machine to make them competitive in price. This was the Penguin revolution; quality texts at an affordable price. An archival book has hard covers, lifting the pages above the acidic shelf. The paper is acid free. The pages are folded and stitched. There are endpapers that act like a doormat for the fingers. Bands support the book block itself. The spine may be arched to support a thicker book as it hangs above the shelf. The edges may even be gilded with stainless gold leaf. All these processes are removed in the paperback. But this is not a complaint. One might even argue that most paperbacks last too long. Will a Dan Brown be read and re-read? Will it have notes scribbled in the margin? Possibly by conspiracy theorists, but they probably use pile upon pile of notebooks instead.  Many American journals and academic books continue to make use of the more enduring features; we should not imagine that a paperback and an academic tome are the same machine because they both use paper. They don’t even use the same paper.

In academic research the electronic book brings many advantages, especially in note-taking, cutting and pasting, live-searches of the text better than any index. Hyperlinks to other texts and information… However, this brings to light other possibilities routinely overlooked in the media. Our regard for texts as concrete and unchangable and our definitions of authorship are shaped by the fact that a book is printed and then that is that. If another edition is made, minor changes occur, but with the text remaining live, what stops the reader intervening? Why shouldn’t I re-write one of my own books one morning, even after publication? A physical restraint has become a matter of etiquette. Is this the constant positive refinement of the evolutionary process or the constant revisionism of the Totalitarian view of History? All history adopts the needs of the Party. But I suppose for a panel talking for twenty minutes about the joy of sniffing pages, the territory of the ‘exploded book’ would have caused seizures.

The problem with the e-book is that it is not going far enough. It does not threaten the book, be it the archival machine, the disposable paperback or something inbetween. Obsolescence merely frees these formats up for new purposes. This is also the formative time for the form of the e-book, but it is nostalgia for the paper reading experience that is threatening to make e-reading inadequate. Manufacturers should stop trying to make e-readers look like books, with corny page-turning animations. If they are convenient we will use them. But book design is a phenomenological tradition that takes careful evaluation. Traditionally the central margin of the left page is set and then the top, outside, and foot margins increase in size as you go round by 20%. The opposite is the case for the facing page. This double spread has been around since Medieval times and forms part of the reading experience. It gives room for your thumbs. Yet electronic readers are often single column affairs. What does this imply? Design is not just a matter of paper vs. screen glare.

The reality is that the possibilities for publishing, text composition, and authorship are so radically different that we can’t even see them. We’re even doing some of them already without realising.  This period is a massive opportunity for small presses. Without the confusion of the paperback as primary text-delivery platform, people are grasping that there is a particular place for a well made paper book with original content; they are actually seeing what a book is for the first time. This is the opposite of nostalgia, it is the grasping of the relevant place for a technology in our time. In the same vein we should jettison the nostalgia for paperbacks and ask ourselves which features do we not want to lose in the next generation of electronic reading technology, making it a superior format to the paperback for the quick read. If we continue to encourage the crude approximations of page turning and dog-earing instead of platforms equipped for a transfigured compositional and reading industry, we are losing the essence of traditional book technology. It is like saying you will buy a car, but only if it looks like a horse and is limited to four miles an hour. And it’s not like we shot all the horses.

Laurence returns the complete works of Shakespeare to the shelf saying, ‘Of course, not the kind of thing you can actually read…’ I suspect he is the intended audience for the Nintendo DS Classics Library. It probably won’t be long before someone is showing me theirs and demonstrating how it re-creates the sound of an actual log-fire. Or is it the gentle crackle of a book-burning?

Dreams often allow us to do things that are impossible in waking life: hovering in mid air, walking across Antarctica, becoming a character in a film, sipping tea with a famous actor, sharing jokes with a relative who has been dead for years, speaking unknown languages flawlessly, travelling to places not found on any map… But perhaps the most interesting dreams are those that include our everyday surroundings and then transmute these places to varying degrees, changing their geography and sometimes even their identity.

A while ago I dreamt of a neighbourhood in which I had previously lived. Graham Street (which connects City Road to Regent’s Canal and is lined with apartment buildings) was transformed into a fair ground with shops, a giant Ferris wheel and crowds of visitors. I remember looking up at the sky at the storm clouds that were gathering on the horizon. I walked under the Ferris wheel with its white box-like cars towards the high rise where I had formerly lived, which was now about twenty stories taller and its dull concrete exterior was much brighter. After I entered the building and looked out a window facing City Road, I saw a sea extending northwards from the spot where there had formerly been a seedy café and through to the horizon. The shoreline ran parallel to City Road and waves crashed into the road with such force that it seemed not long before they would submerge it.

When I then drove by this high rise in real life a few weeks later, it seemed as if this grey building was hiding its former self, as if the tall and bright building from the dream belonged to a previous era which I had glimpsed in my dream. I began to look for traces of the fair ground and to search out the location of the missing Ferris wheel. But the gleaming new apartment blocks now disguised this site. It was like looking for an ancient battle site lying hidden under a forest or a city street. The missing sea also seemed belong to distant past that was now obscured.

In another dream, I was on a train speeding through some wheat fields spotted with poppies outside Warsaw when the train stopped suddenly. Looking out the window, I saw mountains covered in snow and far in the distance, a coastline. The loudspeaker announced that we had reached the Danish/Polish border. All the passengers were told to get off and passports were screened by a border guard sitting behind a wooden table half covered in snow. The situation was very convenient since I happened to be heading to Denmark. In the dream a realisation struck me: despite the fact that Denmark doesn’t share any borders with Poland, it can sometimes be found on the outskirts of Warsaw, if approached from the right direction. This thought seemed like a practical observation to note for the future; since all countries sometimes temporarily drifted to other locations, I should find out where the schedule for these shifts can be found and if I’m lucky, I might catch some convenient connections.

Geographical rearrangements in dreams have also altered my perception of places. One place about which I repeatedly dream throughout the years is the small town of Langhorne on the outskirts of Philadelphia where I grew up. With each dream the geography of the place changes: Roads end where they have never ended before and a dense thicket covers the hills where houses once stood. A nearby hospital progressively diminishes in size and moves slightly further from the main road. A forest has replaced the main shopping area and a creek has turned into a waterfall, almost as if nature were reclaiming any developed areas. Perhaps because I haven’t been to the town for many years, these dreams seem now to be the most current experience I have of the place. If I travelled to Langhorne now I would expect to see some of these thickets, forests and waterfalls.

In W.G. Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz, the protagonist describes a view of the Rhine valley from a train window as strangely familiar. This image of the river had haunted him in his dreams throughout his life, although he could never identify the location. He realises that he must have had seen this landscape only once before, as a child making the same train journey. Although he had forgotten the original image, it served as a blueprint for haunting dreams of an unidentified place. Perhaps in looking at the place he had seen more often in his dreams then in actuality, the Rhine valley seemed to him to be more closely related to them than to the long forgotten memory. Perhaps for him too, dreams had left their traces on the “blueprint”, just as drifting Denmarks and sea waves crashing into City Road have left a mark, even if only a fleeting one.

Sometimes you look at a name and you just know there is an anagram in there.

‘Tiger Woods’ also helps us ponder the danger of hubris with ‘I god’s tower’ and the inevitability of decay with ‘grows to die’, much like many celebrity careers.

We are very pleased to announce the publication of the second book by ‘The nth Convention’ testing, among other things, just how different a second edition can be from the first.

This book is another manifestation of the work ‘The nth Convention’ have been undertaking since a collaboration in Leipzig in 2005. Conversations held at the time that encompassed science, literature, conspiracy theories, the Cold War, and architecture led to sculpture making, photo taking, film making, psychic drawing experiments… The latter became a metaphor for making work ‘as one mind’, making a truly shared body of work. This time the focus is on unravelling the CMYK printing process. Operating like the distinct dots that merge optically to form a full colour picture, the artists have worked together on this test-card-like volume of screenprint experiments and transcripts to create a truly confusing architecture.

Not every page is accessible without the use of a knife.

The book is covered with thin card, wrapped in a poster-print, and comes in a hard blue cloth covered slipcase with ribbon. The silkscreen CMYK prints are divided into three sections with transparent architect’s mylar paper.

We will hear more from The nth Convention in 2010.

David Helbich (second from left) recently gave an email interview here with Eirik from Oslo’s Ultima Festival about our plans and the shared interests that drive the InterInterInter collaboration.

Hearing David Cameron’s speech at the Conservative Party conference, I felt the urge to liberate the avant-garde, existentialist poem that lay behind the surface, a hidden subtext:

I want to get straight
To the point.
We all know
What I want to talk about.
Don’t get me wrong,
I’m ready for that
But I tell you this.
I know that.
I know about
Liam Fox.
We need a strategy.
We need to be clear.
Frankly, time is short.
And I have something
Else to say.

We could have played it safe.
When I stood on that stage
It was to lead Eric Pickles.
I am not a complicated person.
I have some simple beliefs.

I want everyone
To understand
That’s twice as big.
Right now.
We have three choices.
I know there are some who say:
PENSIONERS.

I got an email.
But it never happens.
Well.
Let’s be clear.
I always put the same questions
To attractive Ken Clarke.

It is a plan to boost.
This is what it means.
There’s nothing to stop me.

In Britain today
We must be the people
Who release Gordon Brown.

We’ll start with what is most important.
I believe that a stable cannot be neutral.
I don’t live in some fantasy land.
It’s about what we all do.
It’s about the way we live.
It’s about our crazy signals.

But no -
It’s not funny.
We have got to turn it around
We’re going to make it clear
So we have to reform
So we will never change
But that doesn’t mean
But it’s not a machine
It has got to stop
That’s why we can look the British people in the eye and say…
the progressive thing to do in a way that brings the country together showing

leadership at the top we’re all in this together which is why we’ll have made

some tough choices in British politics is out of date and it has to

meet challenges head on and show tough country and

together leadership and community tough and

challenges meet we’ll make some British

progressive politics head challenge

family tough challenge country

challenge challenge challenge

More on the experimental modernism of David Cameron later.

The tale is told of a propaganda film where Stalin, wandering along a country lane enjoying the sunshine, comes across a peasant with a broken down tractor. Bizarrely he rolls up his sleeves, inspects the engine and soon it is up and running again. The intention of the propagandist is clear but, as Zizek has pointed out, what the film ends up provoking us to wonder is what kind of system is this that is so broken that the head of state needs to roam the countryside replacing spark plugs and getting cats out of trees.

I recall this story today hearing the news about ‘the Brown blur’, our PM, who has failed to get the facts straight in a hand-written note of condolence to a mother whose son was killed in Afghanistan. But of course the story as reported misses the point, merely describing his ineptitude and provoking a debate over whether he really cares or not. What we should be asking is how a PM should demonstrate his care. He should certainly not be writing little notes. How about forming a war cabinet? Or describing more specific and achievable war aims? How about withdrawing from the process of corrupt ‘State Building’? More troops and equipment would go down well with all service families.

What the row does successfully suggest, though, is that Brown’s focus is on scoring political points with the war instead of winning it. Each decision is weighed against electoral concerns rather than facing up to the cost of securing one’s borders. What enrages me on another Remembrance Day is that we persist in the nineteenth century practice of recruiting the economically disadvantaged, preferably from the North, so Middle Class w***ers can get on with selling houses to each other blissfully ignorant of the process by which we remain safe in our beds. This leads to a situation where war aims are not realised because they make the voters uncomfortable. The (next)  PM must redefine war aims immediately, decide if we can afford to pull out on the basis of the international risks, and then put in place the resources to win.

The poppy has become an increasingly ironic symbol. A reminder of the waste of a generation in the trenches, it has now come full circle to Afghanistan, where, as in India, the British government in collaboration with the East India Co. cultivated an illegal Opium Trade designed to bypass Chinese sovereignty and make lots of money. The poppy fields there were part of the deliberate destabilisation of the region for profit. And indeed the country was also the buffer zone between the Raj and the Russian Empire. May the poppy serve not only as a reminder of the government’s failure to remember not to waste young lives for the sake of votes, but also a reminder that we are are literally and metaphorically reaping what they sowed over a hundred years ago.

Recently I read about the latest commission for Tate’s Turbine Hall, an installation by Miroslaw Balka. Entitled ‘How It Is’, after a prose work by Samuel Beckett, the piece was described by one critic as “a darkness you struggle to measure, or rather a darkness that measures you.”

Through the secondary sources of online photographs and descriptions, I began to form a seemingly concrete image of the piece, a kind of preliminary version of the installation. The future experience of walking into this black void became almost palpable: A huge steel box-like structure stands in the Turbine Hall. Raised from the ground by several metres, it rests on stilt-like beams that allow one to walk underneath the structure. As one enters through the ramp on one side a giant black space looms ahead. It is silent and the air is heavy with the smell of felt (not unlike in Joseph Beuys’ felt-lined room).

As one walks further into this seemingly unending space, the sounds from the main hall are drowned out. The interior walls are curved and form a spiral-like labyrinth (somewhat reminiscent of Richard Serra’s pieces).

Once inside this dark labyrinth, one has no guarantee one will be able to return the way one had come. The curved corridor continues, until the entrance disappears from view. The darkness is intractable. Then suddenly around another corner a faint light glimmers, the sounds of the hall return and one is back at the entrance ramp.

I doubted that this was the piece Balka had created. I knew that when I would see the actual installation, it would be like travelling to a city which one has only read about. The imagined version of this void would dissolve once confronted with reality, or perhaps it would become a projection.

The former was the case when I went to see ‘How It Is’. From the back the structure looked like a giant container of a freight train. The black steel entrance ramp was the size of one of the walls of the structure and gave off a hallow sound when one walked on it. Stepping onto it was like stepping onto a stage or into a territory where other rules governed. I followed a few people inside and watched their contours disappear into the blackness. For a while they remained barely discernible, only because they happened to be wearing white. There was no smell of felt, the walls were lined with black velvet. My eyes almost hurt because of the lack of anything to see. There was no way of telling how far the back wall was or if there was a back wall at all, but I knew there must be some sort of a boundary to this void.

I treaded slowly, aware how uncertain everything had suddenly become. Then the flat velvet surface of a wall in front of me touched my hand. There had been no labyrinth; the space followed the form of a box. I turned around. What the art critics failed to mention and what I hadn’t foreseen was what happens after one turns around. This, it seemed, was the heart of the piece. The Turbine Hall’s light was streaming in from the entrance defining the floor and the contours of the other people. The space that was so uncertain and overwhelming a few moments ago was suddenly illuminated and clear. From within the darkest darkness, everything else was marginally brighter, everything was visible.

 It has been a month of corners.

I suppose it began with looking down the Landwehrkanal from the corner of Luetzowufer and Klingelhoefer Strasse and realising for the first time just how close the Bauhaus Archive building is to to Potsdammer Platz. Potsdammer Platz, during the inter-war years was the busiest crossroads in Europe. However up until the fall of the wall in 1989 it was more or less a no-man’s-land. Since then, the massive rebuilding program at Potsdammer Platz has become a symbol and the ‘Showcase of reunified Germany’. From my vantage point on the Herkules Bruecke I could see clearly the profiles of Daimler Land and the Sony Centre, while in the corner of my eye the slightly sunken archive building; This view prompted a wave of questions to rush into my head, but I will come back to these a little later.

I’m not sure if I have ever given corners too much thought. A snap response makes them sound a bit bleak; you’ve painted yourself into a corner; go to the corner and face the wall you naughty child; we’ve got you cornered come out with your hands up.

I suppose it’s how you look at what a corner is though. These examples suggest to me something draining, life-sucking and concave, not something convexly pushing forward and outward? Actually, can I describe a sharp angled thing like a corner as being a curve?

A year or so ago Michael Wedgwood was obsessed with making simple drawings of just 3 lines; they were of the letter Y or the letter Y inverted. He liked what opened up from making these basic marks; both could be read as corners; one a corner to the floor and the other, a corner to the ceiling. Further to this, when a simple 2 line 90 degree corner is drawn out on paper I read it as either a 2 stage move; the end of something and then the beginning of something new or as a sweeping continuation of the same something.

Bruce McLean once told me about one of his favourite works made by Lawrence Wiener which he found,’ critical, intelligent, self-referencing and very succinct’. He describes it so, It was in the last room of The American Art Show at the Royal Academy, as you came round a corner into the room, opposite a statement said – TO SEE and as you turned into the gallery at 90 degrees on the facing end and last wall and piece in the show, it said, AND TO BE SEEN.

The month of corners continued when I found one in the street; a big multi-angled one made out of MDF. Berlin is a fantastic city for finding household goods (no longer needed by one party) which are put out in the street for others to take and use. I moved to Berlin with some basic necessities; clothes, books and records, over the past year I have supplemented these with several chairs, lamps, a hoover, a carpet, a clothes rail, a double bed and a printer; all clean, usable and found neatly stacked on the pavement with the note, FUR GESCHENKE. But what fascinated me about this board with two specific cuts taken out of it, was the intention of the person gifting it. Did they think someone might take it as a piece of timber, to refashion for another use or did they believe someone may take it to fit in an identical corner of their home? It remained propped against a wall on Choriner Strasse , each day I would pass and consider its intention. One sunny afternoon I took the time to make a quick drawing of it while starting to wonder if I may have the perfect corner to house it in the flat. Then after a week it disappeared. Taken away as rubbish, taken as timber or now sitting in the corner of someone else’s flat? I will never know.

Finding virtual corners in a city is one thing but some city centres such as Glasgow or Manhattan consist of nothing but, and this then becomes an essential part of that cities orientation; I’ll meet you on the corner of Sauchiehall and Lexington. Berlin, though not in any way a grid, has some good corners like the junction of Saarbrueke Strasse and Schoenhauser Alle, where a week ago I discovered a modest memorial stone to Karl Liebnecht. It was surrounded by conkers from a solitary horse chestnut tree that stands above and from which I collected a large bag of them thinking they could be roasted and eaten only to be informed by a friend that they are poisonous (perhaps then, a Karl Liebnecht memorial conker tournament instead for next year?).

The Dorotheenstaadtischer Friedhof (cemetery) is the final resting place of several German notables of the Arts. Around one specific corner can be found not only Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel but the finally rested bones and ashes of Heinrich Mann, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau who had been hounded around the world of the last century for their beliefs, politics and work. The Brechts’ corner looks like a leafy double bed with the two engraved boulders acting as headstones looking like pillows.

My favourite corner of the Alte Nationalgalerie is on the ground floor. Entering the first room on the left hand side you are immediately confronted by one of Gustave Courbet’s wave paintings (Die Welle, 1870) The best position to look at the painting is from the doorway, however, in a busy gallery this is impossible. So I have taken to sitting on the polished wooden bench to the left, where one can slide back along into the corner next to the door frame. From this angle you can view, undisturbed, the odd picture of two horizontal slabs, which freeze and flatten this mighty natural force.

But, back to my original corner on the Herkules Brueke. Since July this year, three German institutions, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, have been celebrating the 90^th anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus. This has seen an exhibition and a series of events under the banner of, Bauhaus. A Conceptual Model which has taken place in the hall and ground floor galleries of the Martin Gropius Bau. During this time the Bauhaus Archive building has been emptied of its exhibits and simply shown as a work itself, under the title of, Schoen angesehen or A beautiful sight. I have to confess that over the summer, whenever I had passed the building on a bike ride over to Charlottenburg or Schoeneberg, I’d mistaken it for being closed for renovations. This meant stopping off for a quick pee and a look at the postcards in the only part of the building that appeared open.

It would appear from reading the Exhibition’s accompanying newspaper, that 30 years on, the Archive building is not big enough for the ever growing collection and that something larger needs to be built for this purpose. This would then leave the original one, reconfigured from a Gropius blueprint to act as perhaps a library and a research centre. I have to say that I have always been underwhelmed by the Archive building and have found its spaces cramped and dark (the latter, apparently needed for preservation conditions), and completely at odds with the innovation and enlightenment of the objects, drawings and ideas on display.

The programmed debates listed at the back of the paper, have not only focused on the turbulent history of the school, but have also been debating the Bauhaus’s relevance in the world today. I had my own meditation on this while looking towards Potsdammer Platz, (post toilet und postkart) that goes under the banner of What If.

What if in 1989 the Bauhaus Archive building had been emptied and all the contents had been asked to make its way over to the barren waste land of cold war Potsdammer Platz and burrow down into the sandy soil?

And what if then, in the Spring , just like Paul Klee’s Pflanzen auf dem Acker picture of 1921, each idea and notion began to push its head out of the ground with the promise of something new and challenging to act as the founding structure of a new unified Germany at the heart of Europe?

The blurb accompanying Bauhaus a Conceptual Model says The Bauhaus is Germany’s most successful contribution to international art and culture of modernity in the early 20^th Century, it also goes onto say that, Its dissolution in 1933……….as a laboratory and workshop of modernity was destroyed by a deliberate political act…….Considering the intentions of what the new Potsdammer Platz was hoped to symbolise, I could think of no better and poignant foundation stone than that of the Bauhaus; its history and its monumental legacy left to the rest of the world which was forcefully fragmented through ignorance and prejudice of the then political climate of its homeland. I would also add that I have nothing against the Architect Renzo Piano, but why ask him to coordinate this prestigious and culturally significant project when you have the work of the spiritual Godfathers of modern architecture and Design in abundance and in your possession? That is a little like choosing to book the Bootleg Beatles to play at your birthday party when you could have the Beatles.

So what if, following the Spring growth contemporary Architects, Artists and Designers were invited onto this site to study these new shoots and collaborate in helping them grow into something more like a living workshop than a Museum (this was indeed Gropius’s said intention and hope for the original Archive building).

And what if then the site began to grow into a network of never seen before Restaurants, Bars, Cafés, Hotels, Libraries, Theatres, Swimming pools, Concert Halls, Walk Way, Gardens and Sports Halls, etc. each with its own workshop/college and production centre attached, training and apprenticing a new workforce/student body, attracted from all over unified Germany and beyond.

What if you could enter a café and not only buy a cup of coffee, but also the cup you were drinking it out of and the chair you were sitting on?

What if you could go to the toilet and leave having bought the toilet you had used and the towel you had dried your hands on?

All wrapped, packed and replaced by the attached workshops as part of an economic learning exchange.

And what if Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Licht Raum Modulator really was and not just an old quirky film dragged out now and again and shown at selected art institutions.

What if the names Lego, Imax and Hyatt were the names Schlemmer, Breuer, and Feininger?

Yes what if? All this and more was being constantly generated and regenerated at the former busiest crossroad in Europe

Actually, is a crossroad a place where four corners meet?

After recently coming across Novalis’ statement that the true reader must be an extension of the author, I began thinking about how readers become the final “producers” of the “screenplay” they’re reading and more specifically, about how the settings in novels and stories are constructed in the reader’s mind. While reading the first volume of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ not too long ago, I had imagined the setting of the fictional town Combray to be based on the neighbourhood where I live, Ealing. My flat, located in a two-story ex-council building, became not unlike a stage on which the narrator’s childhood house in Combray was constructed. My room had become the narrator’s bedroom. It lost its stacks of papers, books and Ikea-esque furniture and acquired high ceilings and long curtains that flanked the now wooden-framed windows. The narrator’s “magic lantern” which would project colourful figures of a medieval knight and castle, now cast these figures onto my wallpaper. The view from the windows changed from that of a small back garden with a clothes hanger to that of a vast garden with an orchard visible in the distance. My room on the ground floor had now moved to the first floor and was found at one end of a long corridor lined with paintings in ornate frames. At the other end of the corridor was a staircase which lead down to my living room where, the narrator writes, the family would entertain dinner guests. The view from this dining room window incorporated my neighbour’s trees through which could be seen the distant steeple of Combray’s church.

This hybrid house and neighbourhood came into being as I began to modify my flat and surroundings to more closely match the descriptions of the narrator’s house and surroundings. I hadn’t consciously decided to base Combray on Ealing, rather, the spatial arrangement of my neighbourhood and street had simply “appeared” in Proust’s descriptions. The fact that I read most of the book at home might explain why the surrounding environment had somehow become part of the novel. With other novels it seems that the settings are usually based on familiar places: those from everyday life, those remembered from childhood or settings from films.

Last year I had a similar experience of my surroundings being used in imagining a place. While travelling on a train at dusk somewhere in southern Poland, the landscape outside the window seemed to have seeped into Borges’ short story, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, which I was then reading. The narrator describes the history and structure of the utopian world, Tlön, which he learns about from a single volume of an encyclopaedia of Tlön. The existence of this planet, though, remains uncertain throughout the story. Created (or imagined) by a secret group of scientists, this world is governed by a Berkeleyan idealism. On Tlön, novels and stories have plots that include all possible variations. Objects can cease to exist once someone forgets them (once a doorway disappeared after a beggar who would visit it often died). The snow-covered fields I saw from the train window began to provide an image of Tlön and it became a planet whose external features would solely consist of fields of snow, occasional railroad crossings, derelict small railway stations, signal boxes and forests, all in a perpetual dusk. (Other objects and places perhaps had already disappeared as a result of being forgotten.) The story continues on to describe how the press then spread the discovery of the literature about Tlön and soon after our world was obliterated by Tlön. Its history replaced our history, its language would soon replace English, Spanish and French. The world would become Tlön. It would become vast expanses of snow and railway track at dusk.

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cites, Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the cities he has seen in his travels. By the end of the novel, it becomes apparent that all the cities refer in fact to Venice. One of the cities, Baucis, is a city entirely built on stilts projecting from the ground and extending above the clouds. Marco Polo states that one possible explanation for the placement of the city above ground is the inhabitants’ love for the earth as it was before they had existed. Consequently they prefer to observe the uninhabited earth with telescopes. If Baucis’ inhabitants prefer to observe from a distance, then maybe they are like readers, looking down into another place or planet, their view of it partly obscured as a result of that distance and partly created through their imagined presence in that other space.

Julie Rafalski is an artist living and working in London, especially in video.  Is she Polish? American? Perhaps  ‘European’ makes more sense. Julie Graduated from the Slade in 2006 and has contributed to the Henningham Family Press since 2005. In one film she asked Polish contacts what was missing under Soviet influence, but soon conversation turns to what is missing today; the oppressed exchange one lack for another.