I was reading Coco Khan's column in Guardian Weekend today, which is about guilty pleasures: I’ve always found it strange that people feel guilty or embarrassed about harmless fun. I tell myself I see through it: that the notion a woman mustn’t eat cake is more about patriarchy than personal responsibility; and deriding certain music is, at worst ( Read more... )

I have, of late, my dearios, deplored the rise of the Reading Is Good For You (rather than a fun activity) You Should Be Doing It To Improve Yourself discourse -
- but I see we still have people who have not yet got that memo, and are absolutely appalled that their daughter is reading and reading a lot (as a fast reader, I know and cringe at that ( Read more... )

If I could ban any phrase, it would be that overused, viscerally irritating, and far-from-innocent term, the Guilty Pleasure. No one should feel guilty about what they eat, or the pleasure they get from eating; the only thing to feel guilty about (and even then I don’t recommend it) is the failure to be grateful for that pleasure.
Go, Nigella: 'it ( Read more... )

Because when I see a list of 12 books to entertain, challenge and inspire if you’re confined at home due to Covid-19.
And no 2 on the list is Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain????!!!!
Life is too short even without a raging pandemic is all I'm saying.
Okay, I daresay that people do think that being in isolation is a great chance to get stuck in on ( Read more... )

Article about the value of boredom for children during school holidays
Am of the opinion that, if not actual boredom, a certain amount of days that are quiet and routine and even monotonous can be a very good thing for the grown person, as well.
And on the matter of over-scheduling stuff, I was pretty much aaaaargh at this:
Want to Be Happier? ( Read more... )

London’s oldest bookshop chooses first instalment of Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles, The Warden, as best novel published since the shop’s opening in 1797.
Okay, will cop to having read Very Little Trollope (possibly only the one in my VictLit undergrad course?) - for years I said I was saving him for my old age: I still am...
But, really, I ( Read more... )

I am still chewing over a conversation that happened some several weeks ago with a complete stranger, in which they expressed the opinion that a certain wellknown woman (wellknown, at least, in the circles of which we and other participant in the conversation could be presumed to be part) who came out some years ago with a public statement about ( Read more... )

I am in a bit of a grouchy frame at the moment, between the domestic situation and not sleeping terribly well and feeling a bit overburdened by Other Stuff which my time and energy is not coping with very adequately (okay, I got the edited ms of Textbook off to editor, but I still have That Abomination, the marketing questionnaire, passively- ( Read more... )

Do I feel that someone's been following me around taking notes? Okay, that Twitpic thing about decoding Britspeak does omit some classic instances of hedgehog-speak. Not to mention 'charming' and 'what a charmer'.

***

Could one not weep with pleasure at these instances of official generosity and reparation?
Subject line: N/AThe United Nation and ( Read more... )

Have been given to think about that human tendency to frame differences in preferences and personal choices as questions of morality, and really, they're not. While I concede, with Pauline Kael, that 'taste [is] the great divider', it's usually ethically neutral.

(This may heark back pretty much to my thoughts on 'guilty pleasures'?)

Somebody's ( Read more... )