s: “What strange sound went gliding along the banister at whose foot the transparent apple was dreaming.” The author is Robert Desnos, a surrealist poet and member of the French Resistance who died in Terezin, soon after the Liberation. Fifty years on, I suppose he might have been quite pleased to find his poetry alive and well on a Selfridges receipt.
It’s not as if parliament has banned the statues (which are, after all, publicising Gormley’s forthcoming show on the South Bank). That might be a cause for complaint. They just think it’s inappropriate to have one at Westminster. Seems entirely reasonable to me. That this should provide evidence of the “impoverished intellectual climate of the capital” suggests someone who’s just searching for a whinge. As indeed does the first part of her column. A talk to her sisters in Saudi Arabia might help.
[And that Robert Desnos line. Good for Selfridges and all that, but really, that surrealist juxtaposition of disparate images, “the banister at whose foot the transparent apple was dreaming” – that’s just leaden.]
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