south bank

A very grey, murky, drizzling walk down the South Bank today.  On top, Big Ben that will not bong - no chimes at midnight to usher in Brexit because, as you can see, it's shrouded in scaffolding.  Then an itinerant musician, sitting on the rapidly disappearing beach, throwing bread at gulls and pigeons.

The object of the walk?  Tate Modern, to see the huge Kara Walker Fons Americanus, her huge reworking of the 1911 Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace - about which Woolf writes, or riffs on, so memorably in Orlando - reconfiguring it so that it's about the Black Atlantic; the place of slavery, water, violence in the history of Empire.  This meshes straight into my class this semester: I call that part of today Class Prep, even if I like the ideas somewhat more than the sometimes rough-edged, sometimes slick work itself (though nb that unlike the Vic Memorial, this is deliberately, unarguably eco-friendly).