“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me…”

My elder brother and I paying bewildered homage to Laurence Sterne, C18th author of *Tristram Shandy* (at the time he was still interred in London. He was moved soon after. To North Yorkshire. As were we...).

Unsurprisingly, given that he spent a lifetime absorbed by Sterne, my father was the most Shandean of men (broadly, a mixture of Walter and Uncle Toby) and his children, though never short of love, became, like Tristram, victims of a whimsical paternal project. Together with our mother (the driving force behind his more digressive nature), they whisked their young family (and library of C18th Sterneana, of course) up to rural North Yorkshire, set up a museum in one of Sterne’s Yorkshire parsonages, and opened it to the public. My brother escaped to boarding school, but, for various reasons, I stayed behind to be unwittingly marinaded by degrees in all things Shandy. As a result, despite never having sat down and read the book from cover to cover, I’ve osmotically absorbed and adopted many of its ideas, while no doubt and in an appropriately Shandean way, enthusiastically misunderstanding and misinterpreting many of them.

With all misreadings acknowledged and with due deference to bonafide academics, Sterneans, Shandeans etc., etc., I am frequently struck by the prescience of many of Sterne’s ideas and their direct relevance to the emerging languages of new (and increasingly interactive) art forms.

Since laying down those flowers on Sterne’s grave (the duffle coat followed soon after), I have spent most of my adult life thinking about and playing with interactive installations, film, video art and theatre.

This blog is a space in which I’d like to kick some of those ideas about (I’m happy to be kicked gently in return). More specifically, I’d like to consider and discuss ideas around the changing relationship between the cultural ‘thing’ (be it a painting, film, play, book, etc.), its ‘author’, and its audience.

I’m not imagining Sterne will make more than the occasional passing appearance here apart from, of course, providing the blog's title. In Tristram Shandy, vol VI, p. 147, Sterne inserts a blank page into his text for the reader to ‘call for pen and ink’ and ‘paint’ their own picture of the most ‘concupiscible’ woman imaginable*. The ‘trick’ of the blank page and its acknowledgement of the reader as an active participant in the creative process encompasses much of what I intend this blog to discuss.

I’ll leave Sterne’s own words to speak for themselves;

At present, I hope I shall be sufficiently understood, in telling the reader, my uncle Toby fell in love:

— Not that the phrase is at all to my liking: for to say a man is fallen in love,—or that he is deeply in love,—or up to the ears in love,—and sometimes even over head and ears in it,—carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:— this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship,—I hold to be damnable and heretical:—and so much for that.

Let love therefore be what it will,—my uncle Toby fell into it.

— And possibly, gentle reader, with such a temptation—so wouldst thou: For never did thy eyes behold, or thy concupiscence covet any thing in this world, more concupiscible than widow Wadman.

To conceive this right, —call for pen and ink— here’s paper ready to your hand, —Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind—as like your mistress as you can —as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you—‘tis all one to me— please but your own fancy in it.

[BLANK PAGE]

—Was ever any thing in Nature so sweet!—so exquisite!

—Then, dear Sir, how could my uncle Toby resist it?

Thrice happy book! thou wilt have one page, at least, within thy covers, which Malice will not blacken, and which Ignorance cannot misrepresent.

*Although in this instance Sterne imagines his reader to be male, much of the book acknowledges a female reader.

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“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me…”

How our shadows lengthen as the sun goes down