From Venice, With Love

And a pit stop at Sotheby's

Dear Reader,

I’m thrilled to have you here for the first ever newsletter from girl with the golden pen – thank you!

Each week, I hope to give you a window into my writing life. At the moment, we are T-four months from the launch of Double or Nothing on September 1st, my first Double O novel expanding the James Bond universe. So many exciting things are happening that I want to share with you. (Where I’m not sworn to secrecy under pain of death. That said, I’ve been told one state secret in my life and I immediately divulged it to my mother.)

This past week, I’ve been marking student papers with my academic hat on as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. As the only thing more mind-numbing than marking* would be reading a description of marking, I’m immediately going to break my own rules and go back a week or two, to…

Venice!

Like many people, I haven’t left the UK since before the pandemic, and it was quite literally a dream come true to be sitting in a Venetian square eating melon in the sunshine. In fact, the whole long weekend in Venice felt like a dream, from the moment the Alps rose below the aeroplane, etched by clouds and separated by sparkling lakes, to the suspended minutes in which land turns to lagoons, a teal and terracotta geometry.

Although air travel now carries the frightful reality of both the pandemic and the climate crisis, I can’t help but still feel in awe of being aloft. Ian Fleming writes about air travel with such beauty and suspense for a readership to whom flying would have mainly represented an out-of-reach experience. Those passages have always resonated with me, and did all the more so after such a long period at home.

Fleming was with me too as we made our way into Venice itself. I absolutely love this description from his Bond short story ‘Risico’:

But at last there was Mestre and the dead straight finger of rail across the eighteenth century aquatint into Venice. Then came the unfailing shock of the beauty that never betrays and the soft swaying progress down the Grand Canal into a blood-red sunset…

The beauty that never betrays: what an apt line for a city that seems to emerge every morning from imagination. I was there to attend the preview of the Art Biennale with my sister Rosie, herself an artist (with a BEAUTIFUL substack I urge you to check out titled A Nomadic Rose). I’m incredibly grateful to the organisers for inviting us along. Have you ever been to the Venice Biennale, art or otherwise? It was my first time and I was absolutely spellbound.

‘The Milk of Dreams’

The central exhibition, ‘The Milk of Dreams’, is curated by Cecilia Alemani, the first Italian woman to hold the position. Taking its title from Leonora Carrington’s surrealist text, the exhibition focuses on three thematic areas: ‘the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.’ This vision of one’s body and how it relates to our digital and earthly environments felt poignant after three UK lockdowns and personally two bouts of Covid.

‘The Milk of Dreams’ invites you to imagine new futures – mournful, alien, optimistic, wild, built, magic – and to participate in different ways of seeing the present. It fuelled my imagination and filled my head with stories.

Walking through the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, and the Arsenale complex, we encountered over two hundred artists from 58 countries. Art created all over the world right now, nationalities and forms placed in dialogue with each other usually separated by the rigid and often colonial delineations of geography or periods adhered to in many Western galleries. It’s almost impossible to choose, but I think my favourite pieces were Gabriel Chaile’s monumental anthropomorphised pots and clay ovens.

National Pavilions

Besides the central exhibition there are the national pavilions. If you love architecture, as I do, the national pavilions in the Giardini offer a gigantic pop-up version of Rice’s Architectural Primer.

Over the decades, countries have designed buildings to represent and house their artistic ambassadors to the Biennale. So you might stroll between Venezuela’s brutalist hulk and the airy modernist white of the Nordic Pavilion, this year radically transformed into the Sámi Pavilion; the Russian Pavilion, like a miniature Winter Palace, closed and dark after the artists and curator resigned in protest against the invasion of Ukraine; to the nearby Italianate English country house of the UK; and then on to the jutting contemporary surfaces of Australia.

And that’s only the outside of the buildings. Inside, artists selected by each nation draw you into their worlds. If you have a chance to go, my favourites were Switzerland and Malta (both for what happens when art sets fire, in a good way); Saudi Arabia; Serbia; the Sámi Pavilion; and the US and UK, for which both Simone Leigh and Sonia Boyce won Golden Lions.

A Roof with a View

The organisers were kind enough to invite us to celebratory cocktails with the President of the Biennale held in Ca’ Giustinian, a fifteenth-century late Gothic palace overlooking the San Marco Basin. It was a chance to wear a dress that’s been waiting in my wardrobe since March 2020 to attend a party, and also to pretend to be a spy among high-ranking military and naval officers and state officials. As ‘a last treat for you’, we were taken up to the closed roof to see the view. Reader, I gasped.

In the footsteps of Bond

If you’re a Bond fan, Venice is a site of pilgrimage, the setting for short story ‘Risico’ and scenes in the films of From Russia With Love (1963, though only as rear-projection), Moonraker (1978) and Casino Royale (2006).

We were staying behind San Marco, and sadly I can neither report a rogue gondola nor a clock-smashing ninja. Because the films stitch bridges, canals and streets across the islands into single scenes, there is a constant sensation of stepping in and out of a film reel (tossed casually by Sean Connery into the water, naturally).

Most exciting was visiting Conservatorio di musica Benedetto Marcello, whose courtyard graces both Moonraker and Casino Royale. I had IMMENSE fun pretending to be Sir Roger Moore following Dr Goodhead from the glass showroom across the cool stones before transforming into Daniel Craig weaving through pillars in pursuit of Vesper. Those towering walls give one a feeling of secrets parcelled away, a sense of hush and excitement all at once. It’s the perfect container for movie magic and I felt spirited into the stories I’ve dreamt of inhabiting for so long.

Goodbye to Venice

My last stop was Harry’s Bar, where in ‘Risico’ James Bond pretended to be ‘a prosperous writer who lived high and well’, and in the now I pretended to be James Bond. I arrived as crates of food were unloaded from boats and heaved into the kitchen. Too early for a dry martini, one of the bar’s specialities, I ordered what Bond describes as mud – a pot of tea – and tried to capture everything we’d experienced and all my ideas with the help of my golden Bic. (I should add it doesn’t have a real solid gold cap á la Fleming – at least not yet).

To me, Venice is a city that invites imaginative collaboration – invites you to dream to the rhythm of its canals, in and out, constantly finding new waters and discovering forgotten wells.

Like a dream, it couldn’t last. But I can’t wait to return.

…and a stop at Sotheby’s

On the way home from Venice to Edinburgh via London, I stopped in an Sotheby’s, where I was lucky enough to be shown their collection of Rolex Submariners and Omega Seamasters. I tried not to drop anything. More on that another day…

And that’s all for now.

By next week, I might have been brave enough to place the proof edition of Double or Nothing on my James Bond bookshelves. It’s currently hovering ever-closer…

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From Kim, With Love x

PS If you enjoyed this newsletter, why not…

*I hasten to add I love my students and it’s a privilege to read their work, but marking conditions are not kind to the brain!