Words, words, words...

Ms TN has not been idle this week. Oh no. She's been dragging her jetlag out to no less than four openings (not ideal for the first week back, but no matter). All of which will be reported on in due course. The "due course" is because I've also been sitting underneath a pile of plays, reading until my eyeballs fry into little blasted hollows in my skull, for the RE Ross Trust Play Awards, which I am co-judging with Tom Healey and Patricia Cornelius. Back to normal reportage next week. I hope.

But there's no shortage of reading to be had for you lot. For example, megablogger Chris Goode at once reminds me that I didn't write about a couple of knock-out exhibitions I saw in London (the Cy Twombly retrospective at Tate Modern and a modestly exquisite exhibition of small press poetry, Certain Trees, at the V&A) and removes the necessity for doing so. As the man says: "Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons at Tate Modern is, simply, the best exhibition of modern painting I've ever seen. There are some quite incredible things here, and unlike many survey shows spanning such a long trajectory in an artist's work (from the very early 50s right up to 2005), there is absolutely no period where you feel anything other than excitement at Twombly's intrepid and affectionate sensibility."

Some fascinatingly ambivalent responses too to Black Watch, which finally hit London, and which I'm ever more sorry I missed when it was here in Sydney. And other stuff. Lots of other stuff. If you find your eyes watering, you can just do what others do, and print out his posts to read on the bus.

Elsewhere, Ming has got her hands on Chris Mead's Platform Paper on ethnic playwriting, and is wondering why Australia is so behind the eightball, compared with the UK, in at least addressing the issues of representation. And George Hunka over at Superfluities Redux has, among other things, been thoughtfully reviewing recent New York productions of Sarah Kane and Howard Barker. Much of the rest of the US blogosphere is navel gazing about centralism, regionalism and sustainability. All good solid stuff circling around the problems of making art in an era of crass corporatism and economic depression, especially in a nation without solid governmental funding, but somehow it seldom lets the rest of the world in to the conversation.