But, alas, I cannot concur with David Mitchell:
[T]he key to being entertained, I've long thought, is not to look for excellence but to identify the genres you love enough to enjoy even mediocre or poor examples. Get into medical drama, for example, and you'll never be short of viewing, unless you only like it when it's good.

Because I only do like ( Read more... )

Adults who enjoy reading children's books are "retreating from the disappointment of life", according to a Cambridge University academic.

Like all books for 'grown-ups' are about life-is-real-life-is-earnest and Deep Thoughts, as opposed to comfort reading, time-passing, wish-fulfilment and escapism.*

Plus, nul points for someone who is at one of ( Read more... )

All day at a conference, which I enjoyed in spite of its massive time overruns. As far as I could tell my own paper (which I had timed beautifully) went well. There was one paper which was way too long for its slot, and one that covered familiar ground, but others that were on a range from good to excellent.

Also, a chance to get together with ( Read more... )

Have just been reading (yes, I am gradually making my way through the pile of 'TBR for Textbook Revision Purposes'!), Claire Langhamer's Women's Leisure in England, 1920-1960 (2000).

Excellent work, though most of it is probably fairly peripheral to the actual project, except for the stuff on young women, courtship, etc. (Apparently the 'monkey ( 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... )

I realise that one of my sources of pleasure is making connections between apparently separate and distinct things among my various fields of interest.

Today I introduced a historian of late C19th-early C20th metropolitan philanthropy to the concept of 'hurt/comfort' in the context of a relationship between two philanthropic/activist women in which ( Read more... )

Further to discussion on last night's post, thinking further about fun and pleasure.

I think that over the time I have been posting here I have made my views on the importance of fun and the non-guiltiness of pleasures quite clear: what with floating a panel on the topic at Wiscon on top of all that.

There may be things which people do for fun ( Read more... )

(Okay, that is my gesture towards Talk Like A Pirate Day, which normally makes me want to post like one Dr S Johnson - though wouldn't he have made a great pirate? with Hester Thrale as his pirate's moll?)

I just want to do a gluttonous rave about the artichoke bottoms in olive oil with garlic at the Trattoria al Rivetta.

Not on the menu. They ( Read more... )

Such is the power of a-synchronicity, that it was only after making yesterday evening's post that I picked up Katharine Whitehorn's Only on Sundays, which of course fell open at the essay 'As Rich As You Feel', the vague memory of which lay behind much of my thinking in that post.

This piece is not only about what makes people realise 'they were ( Read more... )

I don't know where this originated but I've been seeing various posts across my reading list alluding to someone apparently going on about The Poor spending money on stuff that's not totally necessary - rather than putting anything left over from the necessities into a savings account, presumably.

This makes me somewhat incoherently raging WTF.

( Read more... )