Link salad
Well, this is a real head-banger: Was it ever going to work - forming a 21st-century 'tribe' online with odd trips to a Pacific island? Decca Aitkenhead investigates. Boy, this one has 'unexamined assumptions' written all over it in neon, pulsating, capital letters.
Two years ago, a pair of young British internet entrepreneurs decided to start their own 21st-century tribe. They would lease a tropical island, and set up a website called Tribewanted.com. Anyone could pay to join their tribe, and membership bought the right to visit the island for up to three weeks. On the website, the tribe would exchange ideas about how their island should be run. On the island, members would live as a sustainable eco-community, and learn the traditions of the indigenous people. Each month, a new chief would be elected to oversee the project, but all major decisions about life on the island would be reached collectively by online vote....
They[would like to know who 'they' exactly are who were doing the building] have built a village in the traditional Fijian style - a grand bure, or thatched barn, surrounded by smaller bures - with a rainwater-gathering system, kitchen shelter and compost toilets. Solar panels and a wind turbine provide enough power to light the kitchen and charge small batteries, and vegetable gardens, pigs and chickens provide some of their food....
Before the palangi - white people - arrived, Vorovoro's only inhabitants were the family of a neighbouring island's tribal chief, Tui Mali, from whom Vorovoro has been leased. The family's two houses have now been joined by a scattering of huts housing the dozen or so Fijians who have come to work for Tribewanted. The women cook while the men help the palangi build, fish and learn the complex rituals of tribal culture.
But the first big surprise is that there doesn't seem much actual work to do. The days start with a 7am bell, summoning everyone to breakfast where hangovers and insect bites are compared. Near the dining area is a blackboard on which Chief Alisi chalks her suggested activities for the day. These tend to be pretty undemanding - "collect firewood", say, or "grate coconuts" - and are largely ignored. The staff assure me this is only because it's Christmas time. "If members just want to lie in a hammock and read all day, well, that's cool..." Chief Alisi says, not sounding as though she entirely means it. And, in fact, most of us do spend the days playing chess, reading books or lazing about.
And is anyone else grued out by the debate on the website as to 'whether women should use a "moon cup" rather than tampons', having read the accounts of the state of personal hygiene maintenance pertaining in this tropical island paradise? See also, massive doublethink on sustainability, the irony that they have to take a boat to get online. Also, anyone else get the vibe of Lord of the Flies cultishness waiting to happen?
Everyone should read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, argues Toril Moi. Ooops: I failed to wish Simone a happy 100th on Wednesday.
From Jonathan Swift to Joe Klein, writers have gone to great lengths to hide their identities and cannily exploited the ensuing public speculation. John Mullan on how anonymity is often a sure route to notoriety. Though possibly preferable to the cult of personality that demands a cute, or at least cool, looking young person for the cover photos and media photo opps.
One splendid aging lady on a splendid even older lady: Katharine Whitehorn on Diana Athill.
Is it awful of me to think that these Wartime Notebooks sound far more interesting than the actual novels of Marguerite Duras? Am philistine.
Kathryn Hughes on Anne Fadiman and the essayist tradition.
A long-time curator writes from Behind the scenes at my museum (the Natural History Museum in London).
I so like this in the letter column, having read too many books in which the dread phrase 'he/she/they must have' appears far too often:
As the author of The Head Gardeners, I read with interest Andrea Wulf's review ("Growing pains", December 22). Her main criticism is the lack of an "examination of what motivated these men". The fact is that the head gardeners did not record the whys and wherefores of their career decisions beyond what I did recount, and this being a factual book, I did not speculate.
Yay, go Toby Musgrave!