***Queens' Arts Festival 2013***

8.3.13-11.3.13

Queens' Arts Festival 2013 launches in less than three weeks! The long weekend of celebrating the arts in Cambridge runs from Friday 8th March to Monday 11th March. A wide variety of workshops, performances, recitals and tours will be available for free and open to all members of the university.

Their website is www.queensfestival.co.uk and you can find them on facebook at www.facebook.com/queensartsfestival for details of the weekend's timetable.

They are also looking for submissions for art, photography and short films for our exhibition and screening on Sunday 10th March. Please e-mail Lizzie Hedges at [email protected] for more information.

“Let me tell you a few things about myself. Not much, but enough. In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence.”

“I never knew my mother till I was 21. I act like a gent but I am wonderfully badly born. My father was a confidence trickster and a gaol bird. Read A Perfect Spy.”

“I hate the telephone. I can’t type. I ply my trade by hand. I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. Three days and nights in a city are about my maximum. I don’t see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink.”

“Apart from spying, I have in my time sold bathtowels, got divorced, washed elephants, run away from school, decimated a flock of Welsh sheep with a twenty-five pound shell because I was too stupid to understand the gunnery officer’s instructions, taught children in a special school.”

“I have four sons and thirteen grandchildren. It is forty years since I hung up my cloak and dagger. I wrote my first three books while I was a spook; I wrote the next eighteen after I was at large.”

“A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.”

“And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.”

“Thank you for your interest, your support, and kind words. Happily, I am deeply engrossed in a new novel. Sadly, this means that I can no longer devote the time and care necessary to responding to enquiries on this website. Please accept my sincere apologies, and address any professional problems you may have to my agents, Messrs Curtis Brown. With best wishes, John le Carre.”

Taken from: www.johnlecarre.com/author

Procrastinating? Want to learn more about Libertines front man Pete? Curious about the damaging effects of long-term drug abuse? 

Here is yo ticket. 

The gulf between language and experience is something ever-present, endlessly considered and ultimately irreconcilable. It is highlighted all the more by the gap between language and language; that is, for example, Russian and French, or even English and Welsh. Translation is complicated by the presence of words which defy literal translation, words which exist only in a certain language system. Does the experience not exist because there is no word for it in a given language? How does one approach an 'unspeakable' or 'untranslatable' experience in language? 

'The Unspeakableness', a project by Pei-Ying Lin, considers these strange gaps between human emotion and expression and attempts to bridge the gap with a rather lovely, slowly expanding, 'Untranslatable Words' database (http://untranslatable.peiyinglin.net/data.html). It includes videos of native speakers discussing a given word in the original language, as well as a brief attempt at an English 'definition'. 

The project delves into various issues of language and translation, considering multilingualism and the association of different languages with certain emotions as well as the presence of the 'untranslatable' words, and can be found online here: http://uniquelang.peiyinglin.net/

Japanese artist Shintaro Ohata's combinations of canvas and sculpture literally jump out at you. Find more of his work here:

http://yukari-art.jp/en/shintaro_ohata_en