Linkety-linkety
Words of wisdom:
Sometimes Guy Browning's 'How To...' columns hit nails right on the head:
There is generally held to be a deceitful and manipulative element to cunning but being considerate requires exactly the same mental processes, only for nicer ends.
Ditto Oliver Burkemann's 'This Column Will Change Your Life':
But there's a slightly less obvious problem with the current vogue for simplicity: a lot of it isn't particularly simple.
Minimalism takes effort. Perfectly organised storage systems need to be constantly maintained; spotless kitchens need to be kept spotless. The Real Simple fantasy implies that a light and airy physical space will make it easy to achieve an inner airy lightness, but if you're using lots of energy to keep your environment that way, it's self-defeating. Likewise with so-called "information overload": I've proclaimed the virtues of an empty email inbox here before, but if digital clutter (or any other kind) doesn't bother you, finding time for purgation will complicate, not simplify, your life. Perhaps a truer simplicity lies in learning to stay calm amid the chaos: not in engineering your environment so that it makes you tranquil, but in reducing the degree to which your tranquillity is dependent on your environment; not keeping the kitchen spotless but learning to tolerate spots; not downshifting to the country, but growing less bothered by the bad aspects of city life?
Other words of wisdom in Mary Beard's piece on Hadrian:
Traveller, patron, grief-stricken lover, art collector, clear-thinking military strategist. How do we explain why Hadrian seems so approachably modern? Why does he seem so much easier to understand than Nero or Augustus? As so often with characters from the ancient world, the answer lies more in the kind of evidence we have for his life than in the kind of person he really was. The modern Hadrian is the product of two things: on the one hand, a series of vivid and evocative images and material remains (from portrait heads and stunning building schemes to our own dilapidated wall); on the other, the glaring lack of any detailed, still less reliable, account from the ancient world of what happened in his reign, or of what kind of man he was, or what motivated him.
'[L]ives can be saved by trusting social rather than just medical remedies': short notice of The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight Against Aids, by Helen Epstein.
Codfish moments:
Can one at all trust the reviewing capabilities of someone who can perpetrate this wild and wholly inaccurate generalisation?
The Return offers welcome evidence that women's fiction is getting more ambitious, marching into the realm of big events traditionally colonised by men, in particular military action.
Less the modern Mitford than a Jilly Cooper clone? Because Nancy did not need
a vague but wildly eventful plot - involving abortions, affairs, secret parents, rape and, just to give it a timely kick, environmental causes
Just the affairs.
And journos have the nerve to diss on blogs: Remembrance of flings past: What happened when Tanya Gold tried to track down her ex-boyfriends?
Not perhaps quite codfish-worthy, but I could be less bothered that: It's a curious fact that Browning himself hardly wrote any poetry during the 15 years of his marriage, given that a similar thing could be said about so many women writers and artists in other fields, for often much longer periods.
Also of interest: Marina Warner on the Wizard of Oz.