In 1975 I recorded, on one of the two B sides of a vinyl LP (Words & Music, produced by Hansjorg Mayer) some of the pages of the first version of A Humument. I spoke them into a huge hairy ball of a microphone amidst a tangle of wires and cables.

A sudden wave of critical attention (noted here) has tended to concentrate more often on the words rather than the images of the book. I was particularly touched by the appearance of a page on the cover of the Poetry Review announcing a fine article by Chris McCabe. Time, I thought, for Jolson to sing again especially as Tom Service had just shown me the recording device he uses for his BBC interviews, a cordless microphone no bigger than a Mars bar.

Here for a start, in full son et lumière, is a page I've just finished. More to come and, to quote the quote from Dickens that was the original title of The Waste Land, I do the police in different voices.

The fifth edition of A Humument is reviewed by Chris McCabe in the current issue of Poetry Review, Autumn 2012, (guest edited by Charles Boyle), which can be purchased online at this link. 

And here follows a round up of recent reviews, all viewable online but each of these publications worthy of your subscription.

'Every Day of my Life is Like a Page'
Review of A Humument by James Kidd
Literary Review
Issue 400 July 2012
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/kidd_07_12.php

'Were there but world enough and time': Tom Phillips on A Humument
interview with Andrew David King 
September 7 2012
The Kenyon Review
http://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/09/tom-phillips-interview/

'Double Act' Review of A Humument by Adam Smyth
London Review of Books
Vol.34 No.19 October 11 2012
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n19/adam-smyth/double-act

Tom Phillips: An Interview
Adam Smyth and Gill Partington
London Review of Books online
October 4 2012
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2012/10/04/tom-phillips/tom-phillips-an-interview

and in case you missed it back in May
'A Humument. Long Revision'
David Jennings
19th May 2012
The Spectator
http://www.exacteditions.com/read/the-spectator/19-may-2012-31229/50/3/

Only Connect, Watercolour, 2012

Were I to write my memoirs I would naturally refer to my meeting with E. M. Forster. It was all too brief. In fact he only said two words to me when, on the Speech Day of Henry Thornton Grammar School in 1954, he handed me the Art Prize. He was the guest of honour because of his ancestral connection with the Thornton family who 'with labours philanthropic', as the school song declared, 'had loosened slavery's chains / throughout the sultry tropic.'

The two words were not those celebrated above, my constant mantra and a leitmotiv of A Humument. They embodied a more enigmatic and personal message for, as I took from his hands the huge Phaidon Leonardo da Vinci, he said them twice, ‘Fine choice… fine choice.’ Our ways parted. I never met him again. But I have for almost sixty years pondered that sibylline utterance 'Fine choice… fine choice.’

Art has long been happily married to uncertainty. Science, however, has only recently (and somewhat reluctantly) become its suitor. It is now almost a hundred years since Einstein said that 'God does not throw dice' (der Alte nicht würfelt were his actual words). I suspect that what he meant was that wherever randomness and indeterminacy seem to crop up we have merely failed as yet to find the certainties that must lurk beneath the aleatoric disguise.

Mallarmé's formula, in his famous poem of 1897 Un Coup de Dés, is a more subtle evocation of what I think of as Quantum Poetics. By somehow squaring the dice throw ad infinitum (Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard) he returns to a neat zero.

Translating Mallarmé's opening statement 'A throw of dice will never do away with chance' I made a rearrangement of its words paraphrase Einstein; 'Away with chance. A throw of dice will never do'. Thus in essence (and within a square) they disagree to agree, leaving the equation in a state of suspended resolution.

Einstein & Mallarmé Throw Dice, watercolour, h25.5cm x w25.5cm, 2012

The tweet that advertised this blog entry sums it up:-

When Mallarmé meets Einstein dice are rolled
and physics learns what poetry foretold.

as trailered on Twitter...

Once more down these mean streets a man must go
(John Walters and Jake Auerbach in tow).

20 Sites is always its own adventure, a curate's egg of surprises, disappointments, frustrations and glee. This very weathery year it occupied a patchwork of sessions on adjacent days, partly to dodge rain, partly to ease knees and partly to fit in with my two companions, Jake Auerbach filming and John Walters chronicling (the beginnings of an entourage?)

In every year there is some singular redemptive moment that renews my faith in the crazy scheme so hastily concocted forty years ago. This year's epiphany was one for the age of Twitter and tweet. Reaching the somewhat glum site 15, a personless scene of council spoilage slowly re-neatening itself, we saw in a facing window a crisp notice saying '#obart'. Could this be a distant echo, such as those heard in ancient Arcady, of the large signboard saying OBART that had not been in evidence for well over thirty years and which had given 20 Sites its original name? Electronic contact provided an enigmatic addendum 'you have arrived'.

We knocked on the door and Mrs Obart emerged regretting her husband's having missed the magic assignation.

This simple gesture was as touching as if the art school had put up a banner saying 'Welcome Back Tom'. I was moved. The project's title has now been reinstated. In some special sense I had arrived: thank you Mr & Mrs Phil Wilce.

 Photograph: John Walters

Surprisingly my design of an Olympic coin (see blog Nov 2011) elicited no tickets from St. Sebastian & Co. But sport in this season of Murray worry is not to be denied and, through the kind agency of Patrick Hughes (a frequent and wily opponent on the green table) I now have a ticket for the table tennis on Sunday 29th July. It thus seemed about time A Humument serviced both ping and pong. The latter is hard to find in the prose of W. H. Mallock yet I did discover it lurking in the middle of 'sponge' (on page 286) which may be the only word in English in which it is secreted. 

 

...as tweeted 13th July @TomPhillipsArt

A Humument now features ping and pong.
How can it have ignored them for so long?

It was a fine idea of my friend Bernard Moxham, Professor of Anatomy at the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, to celebrate with art the terminal largesse of those who donate their physical remains to science.

I eventually came up with an idea for a memorial which fits the budget and I hope does sensitive honour to their generosity. The first task had been to devise a fitting text neither too long or too official in character. After a good few tries, skating on the thin ice of the sentimental over the deep pond of banality I decided on

                                  ALIVE WE THOUGHT BEYOND OUR LIVES

                          TO GIVE OUR BODIES AS A BOOK FOR YOU TO READ

This was to be etched on veiny red marble with a surround of a stone more earthily green and organically patterned. The two marble elements to be separated by a shallow linear trench filled with bone.

I showed the watercolour design (seen here) to Matthew Nation (of Taylor Pearce) who gladly offered to help me with the technicalities with his usual skill as he had done with the Conflict Memorial in Westminster Abbey.

This week I headed for the Taylor Pearce workshop in New Cross clutching a plastic bag full of the bone fragments I had gathered (ask no questions) to be crushed into powder. Strange cargo to be carrying on a 36 bus crowded with people phoning or being phoned. Hence the tweeted couplet:-

Who is this fellow who nobody phones
on the 36 bus with a bag of bones

The whole memorial, appropriately horizontal and about as long as a modestly sized human being, is to be installed in early August on the wall of the College's dissecting room. Perhaps one day (now not too far away) I should elect to join those dedicated stiffs in the land of my fathers.

Commissioned by the University of Sussex to commemorate its 25th anniversary in 1986 A Course in Sussex shows six excerpts from university life, each one a collaged page from A Human Document.

In a feature announcing the print in Bulletin, the University of Sussex newsletter, Tom Phillips is quoted as saying "University is a place one comes to change into oneself".

Twenty five years later this second version, A Course in Sussex II was commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the university. 

Tom Phillips will be speaking at an event to launch this new edition on 28th June 2012  from 6.30 - 8pm 3rd Floor, Bramber House, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QU

 

Tom Phillips will be giving a talk about the exhibition 'The Remains of the Day' at Flowers East on Tuesday 3rd July 7pm - 8.30pm.  The show continues until 7th July 2012.

The Remains of the Day II ( Lussuriosi), Oil & assemblage on canvas

Signed copies of A Humument and of the recent Bodleian books can be had from Review Bookshop.