Link time!
Kathryn Hughes, A museum is not an iPod: There's something unique about visiting a real exhibition in real time that you miss online:
According to a new study, led by London School of Economics academic Tony Travers, 42 million visits are made each year in the UK. Apparently this beats the number of people who watch Premiership and league football.
Who'da thunk?
[T]here is something irreplaceable and unique about visiting a bricks-and-mortar museum in real time, rather than gutting its content electronically from home.
And (I might add) exploring actual handleable archives rather than the items pre-selected and digitised on repositories' websites...
Hughes is also captivated by MT Anderson's tale of an African child-prodigy's search for identity in Enlightenment-era America, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.
Interview with Doris Lessing: for someone who has put so much of her own life into her books, she is remarkably (though perhaps understandably) given to being teasingly opaque.
I've been rather skimming Zadie Smith's pieces on writing and reading, but there are some points I rather like in today's concluding article:
In writing schools, in reading groups, in universities, various general reading systems are offered - the post-colonial, the gendered, the postmodern, the state-of-the-nation and so on. They are like the instructions that come with furniture at IKEA. All one need do is seek out the flatpack novels that most closely resemble the blueprints already to hand. There is always, within each reading system, an ur novel - the one with which all the other novels are forced into uncomfortable conformity. The first blueprint is drawn from this original novel, which is usually a work of individual brilliance, one that shines so brightly it creates a shadow large enough for a little cottage industry of novels to survive in its shade. Such novels have a guaranteed audience: an appropriate reading system has been created around the first novel and now makes room for them.
....
[I]f you read exclusively in the post-colonial manner, then only a limited number of books will interest you and even those that you are promised are within the genre will often disappoint and irritate, failing to do all the things you had expected they would.
And then it will come to pass that some writers, knowing your taste, will begin to write novels to please you - novels that feel almost as if they have been written by committee. These are the big idea books and for the young particularly, armed with the reading systems for which they paid good money in college, such books look awfully tempting. A success, on these terms, is one that fulfils the model; a failure, the book that refuses wider relevance. System readers create system writers, writers who can unpack their own novels in front of you, pointing out this theme and that, this subtext, this question of race, this debate about gender. They have the Sunday supplements in mind and their fiction is littered with hooks, ready made for general discussion, perfect for a double page feature.
But what of the novels that don't give themselves easily to such general public discussion?
....
Far from the system critic there is another critic, let's call him the corrective critic, who prides himself on belonging to no school, who feels he knows his own mind. He is essentially meritocratic, interested only in what is good, and good for all time. If a reputation is artificially inflated he will deflate it; if another is unrecognised he will be its champion, regardless of fashion.... His criticism is the expression of personal taste and personal belief - the most beautiful kind of criticism, in my opinion. But there is something odd here: he fears that his personal taste is not sufficient. It is not enough for him to say, as the novelist has, this is what I love, this what I believe. He must also make his taste a general law.
....
He has decided there is only one worthy mission in literature. It is a fortunate coincidence that it happens to coincide with his own prejudices and preferences.
Search on for 'feral man' as mystery deepens over woman lost in jungle for 19 years
Very creepy: Achmat is accused of genocide, for successfully campaigning to get access to HIV drugs for the South African people.
Oliver Burkeman, The joy of giving
The other day, I learned of some breakthrough psychological research which proves that contributing to good causes stimulates the same parts of the brain as receiving large sums of money - only more so. Giving to others, it turns out, really may be the key to happiness. About 35 minutes later, I ran into a charity mugger, collecting for a human rights organisation, and became consumed with a quasi-homicidal rage that only worsened as he trotted after me down the street, stoking fantasies of breaking his clipboard in two and dropping it in pieces at his feet.
Theory of the gift and the creative spirit.
Liz Hollis, When Toys Take Over. Is it really the case that the modern child doesn't play with the boxes the toys came in instead of the toys themselves? O tempora, o mores, etc.