The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: travel

  • The Way of Florida

    The Way of Florida

    Russell Persson’s The Way of Florida is a compact, driving, rhythmical work – a novel, but quite unlike most. The book revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition of the sixteenth century, which saw a group of some 600 Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese explorers arrive on the coast of Florida intent on establishing preliminary colonial settlements and…

  • Crossing Over

    Crossing Over

    Late November in Malaga is beautiful and easy: sun, cloudless skies and highs in the upper twenties. The olive trees bask in the late late heat, the Mickey-Mouse-head-shaped cactuses bloom with geranium-pink blossoms and the tourists still soak up rays outside cafés like solar batteries. But drive two hours inland to Granada and the temperature…

  • Asterisk

    Asterisk

    High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection, their outer limits disappearing into darkness. While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed, I reassess…

  • Zone de sécurité temporaire

    Zone de sécurité temporaire

    There is a strange but commonly used French phrase with no precise parallel in English: entre chien et loup – between dog and wolf. It refers to twilight, when the light has dimmed and one can no longer differentiate between a wolf and a dog (as if it were once so simple to tell the…

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    Anton Newcombe, leader of the psych-rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, is one of my more unlikely acquaintances in Berlin. His recording studio is just a few blocks from my apartment, north-west of Nordbahnhof, where affluent Mitte begins to meld with the predominantly Turkish, working-class neighbourhood of Wedding. I sometimes cycle there for a late…

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    I had no intention of bicycling in the snow, this winter. I started riding just seven months ago to stave off the inevitable corrosion of old age. I have no tolerance of cold. I grew up on the beaches of Sydney, where anything below 15ºC is thought of as gelid. In Berlin, the average winter…

  • Walking in the Sky

    Walking in the Sky

    A small brown kestrel rises over the crest of a hill and pauses, hanging in the wind, scanning the fields below. With a tilt of its wings, it shifts vantage point twice, three times, hangs for a moment, then suddenly slides downwards, a gleam of silver under the high sun. Six foot from the ground,…

  • Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar

    Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar

    On my way back from the gallery I took a train and experienced the usual flicker of annoyance when the conductor began speaking to us as if we were in a plane. He gave the estimated arrival time, pointed us to the safety notices, alerted us to any suspicious looking bags. It was the usual…

  • The Junior Doctor

    The Junior Doctor

    In the middle of a cabbage farm, an hour’s drive from the Andean town of Otavalo, Ecuador, is a small radio station on the ground floor of a farmhouse. Radio Ilumán is the local indigenous radio station, presented entirely in Kichwa. Each week Dr Nadia Montero and the director of Jambi Huasi drive to the…

  • Psychosis in the Andes

    Psychosis in the Andes

    Dr Patricio practices indigenous medicine in a small clinic in the Andes. Sometimes he describes himself as a doctor, sometimes as a yachac or shaman. Here, the two are interchangeable. Western and indigenous medicine inform and shape each other. The clinic in which he practices is called Jambi Huasi, meaning ‘House of Health’ in Kichwa,…

  • Anais Tondeur – I.55

    Anais Tondeur – I.55

    Or, the girl who swallowed the remnants of a forest. “A century ago, a young girl swallowed a pencil.” So begins I.55, a beguiling new book by contemporary artist Anaïs Tondeur, which had its official launch at GV Art in December. Tondeur is not an artist who does things by halves, and the book’s launch…