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Marvellous stuff! It’s such a joy to pick up a book like this, a book so fluid that it feels like it was written in a single sitting. I read it in less that 24 hours. For a book to be simultaneously a great work of literature and a page turner is almost unheard of. Classic novels are, by definition, heavyweight. Their subjects are meaty, and take time to digest. Not ‘The Moon & Sixpence‘ though. It’s subject matter is definitely meaty, but Maugham’s treatment of it makes digesting it as simple as drinking a glass of milk. And this despite the reader knowing well in advance exactly what’s going to happen.

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I am halfway through the task of illustrating ‘Blakes Road‘, the book I am currently writing. I’m illustrating the book as it is, in part, a paean to William Blake, and Blake illuminated almost every page of his own books, so I feel I should do the same.

Here are a few of them:

1. A field with a wooden signpost in the foreground;
2. The “Shelley’s Fountain” sculpture in Horsham, with a branch of McDonald’s behind it;
3. The Croydon Flyover;

I’ve seen many things online over the years but few as impressive as this simple and unassuming webpage:

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/

Not because of irony, or some boring 404 gag or anything as banal as that; I just love it. It’s so graceful, elegant & simple, and there’s something about its visual & textual language that’s near Biblical, in a quietly Puritanical way. Clearly Random House are as keen to publish quality online content as they are to publish traditional content.

I sincerely hope that dead links & cyber backwaters like this are never lost from the Internet; it would become a much poorer place without them.

as well as the work i produce and discuss here i also have a commercial life too. i’m a freelance flash & flex developer and maintain a professional blog on just that subject over at richtextformat.co.uk. the subjects discussed on these two blogs occasionally overlap and this is certainly the case with a presentation i witnessed last week given by jonathan harris at brighton’s annual ‘flash on the beach‘ conference. it turned out to be a very controversial lecture and everyone seems to want to give their impression of it, including me.

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there have been a few times over the past few years when i come on here and apologised about being busy and not being able to update as often as i would have liked to. i have again been idiotically busy these last few weeks but i have to say for once not with tiresome domestic or business matters. true, i have been working evenings and weekends for my present client, but i’ve also been tramping through london’s abandoned dockyards, building impromptu beach sculpture, dreaming up a truly genius idea for public artwork and creating my first truly awesome piece of generative art. not bad for a damp february! i also built an art-game late last year that i haven’t had the chance to release yet!

i’ve been desperate to blog about it all but really just haven’t had any time. i mean, it’s nearly midnight now and i’ve done nowt but code and sleep for days, weeks. i’ve been doing the high-pressure freelance paying gigs so solidly for the past 6 months that it’s beginning to affect my health and so next week, when my present contract finishes, i’m hoping to get away for a few days of r&r and document all this. just a simple room in a b&b in some anonymous town  somewhere. yeah, just me… and my mac… and a wifi connection… and a box of k-nex, my sketchbook, camera, stop-motion animation software, a duffle bag of science, art, software & mathematics textbooks and my favourite faber-castell drawing pens! :)

earlier this year i visited the moholy-nagy/albers exhibition at the tate modern. these two men were part of the teaching staff at the bauhaus, the twenties german interdisciplinary design school which rewrote the rules of aesthetics [along 90 degree angles]. reading back today through some notes i made at the exhibition, i came across this [edited] passage:

the exhibition is marked by a near absense of humanity. these images are null, a mid-grey creates a depthless paradigm, an endless monotonous note. it’s not boring because it’s not anything much. e and i feel that it’s [partly] a [subconscious] reaction to WWI; a state of stunned shock, a coma, a withdrawal from humanity now that humanity has shown the worst it is capable of. is it any surprise that gropius, in this state of shock, went on to sack the beardy-weirdies, go cubic and export his new right-angled paradigm to the boardrooms of capitalist america, where a lack of humanity is a veritable virtue?

now let’s meet our housewife:

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when i saw this image i had to get straight on the train. that i did, i left work that very afternoon and took the first train to london:

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