Sarah Frideswide
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The Shape of Creative Industries in the UK 2024
It is well known that the creative industries in the UK are in poor shape financially, just ask anyone trying to make a living from them. But it needn’t be so. The creative industries give people the freedom to imagine a life beyond the one they’re currently living, they add richness to people’s existing quality of life, provide jobs and diversity and so on. Far from being the waste of time and money or the luxury which our government perceives them to be, art and creativity are essential to mental health and wellbeing and can be a driver of economic growth.
By Sarah Frideswide3 months ago in Humans
"We, the Drowned" by Carsten Jensen
This is a book that reminds me again why I fell in love with Denmark. It is now vital that I follow through on my aim of learning the Danish language properly so that I can experience this book in its original form, with all of the subtlety and humour that I will have missed from reading it in English.
By Sarah Frideswide6 months ago in BookClub
"Exit Strategy" by Patrick Wright
The cover shows a white space. You can fill that space with many things, but it will always remain an absence. A box where something is not that should be. This collection studies that absence and the ways in which the poet speaker is tied to the one who should occupy it. To explore the unexplorable, Wright draws on physics, nature, architecture, philosophy, mythology and art. The poems look outwards to look in and examine the implosion that loss creates. But variety isn’t the most remarkable thing about this collection, what’s remarkable is its unity. It turns death around and around under a spotlight, a microscope, in the light of unformed galaxies and through, around and before works of art. When someone returns to atoms, do they truly leave? Are they all around us and if they are, can we live without their embodied presence?
By Sarah Frideswide8 months ago in BookClub
Eternity in a Cigarette End
Artists are people who look beyond the veil of the ordinary in life to grasp spiritual truths hidden behind physical reality. They then reflect those truths back out into the world in some digestible form such as words, paintings or songs. There is a sentence in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" which speaks of this to me with particular resonance: "And just for a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven."
By Sarah Frideswide2 years ago in BookClub
