Arts Diary: A Titanic sinking feeling as Wullie the bard plays on

With all the Titanic centenary palaver it’s surely time to remember the poet William McGonagall’s classic response to the disaster?

Actually, McGonagall died in 1902, ten years before the ship sank, but that hasn’t stopped several plausible parodies circulating on the internet, some sneaking their way onto Titanic websites and even books, as the genuine work of Dundee’s master of doggerel.

One, The Wreck of The Titanic, contains this memorable verse:

They were heading t’wards Americ’s shore

In the middle of the night,

When the lookout spied an iceberg,

Which gave him quite a fright.

My favourite, The Lamentable Titanic Disaster, goes:

Oh, mighty Titanic! It grieves me to say

That over fifteen hundred lives were taken away,

When the ocean did drown your passengers so happy and gay,

Which happened on the fifteenth day of April in the year 1912,

When brave Captain Smith cried, ‘Every man for himself!’

A third version, Praise the Titanic, reads:

To the lifeboats the passengers hurried at speed

But could not all fit in, so some ended up deid...

And many other casualties were the people in steerage.

They would not have been there had they been in Burke’s Peerage.

Slices of history

Sculptor Louise Gibson travelled from Edinburgh to the Olympic Park site in London to gather material for one of her latest works, Site Cut 2012. Gathering hats, gloves, visors and other workers’ cast-offs, she encased the objects in a cube of amber toned resin, had it sawed into slices, and ground them down into a polished, precious finish. “It’s a portrait of some of the people that constructed the stadium,” she says.

Gibson’s unconventional approach to sculpture earned her a second-year prize at Edinburgh College of Art, where she graduated in 2009, and she has now been chosen as the winner of the inaugural Grove Artistic Bursary.

The cash award is a slender £1,500, but it means Gibson takes a prominent place among 24 artists showing Olympic-themed work in the gardens of The Grove, in Hertfordshire, in May.

She is also showing Landfill 2012, for which she collected objects of “thermal set” plastic – the kind that can’t be melted down – like old telephones, hard hats, toys, watering cans, even fridge magnets. These objects, too, have been cast and sliced into cross-sectional sculptures.

The state of China

Two leading contemporary Chinese writers of fiction, Xu Zechen and Annie Baby, are to join Scottish author Alan Bissett next Thursday for a discussion on urban survival, industrialisation, and economic shocks.

Xu Zechen is the author of four novels, including The Gate of Midnight, to Running Through Zhongguancun, and two short story collections, including How Ducks Fly, which are award-winners at home and are translated into German, Korean, English and Dutch. His work focuses on migrant workers and other characters on the edge of new urban China.

Annie Baby, whose real name is Li Jie, became an internet sensation after she started publishing short stories online in 1998, when she was just 24. She writes of the “worries, loneliness and disorientation” of Chinese adolescents.

lDetails at www.confuciusinstitute.ac.uk/chinesewriters