Sharing understanding
I bought a book the other day. One of those impulsive, compulsive purchases that leave me feeling like I’ve done something good in the world. Of course the feeling is altogether misguided. Later, while reading the paltry balance on my bank statement I grudgingly admitted that I hadn’t done the world a favour at all. I continue to contribute substantially to the culling of unsuspecting forests the world over and in similar murderous vein my bank balance is rapidly dwindling. And it’s my bank balance that does not have a single dedicated organisation campaigning for...
Read MoreSelves and Others
> Ekman had tracked down a hundred thousand feet of film that had been shot by the virologist Carleton Gajdusekin in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of the footage was of the tribe called the South Fore, who were a peaceful and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, a hostile and murderous tribe… (From Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink) This excerpt reeks of the sort of old fashioned cultural imperialism popularised by the writings of Livingstone and Stanley and reworked today by the likes of Asne Seierstad. ‘Peaceful and friendly and hostile and...
Read MoreAfter reading The Language of Things
> The Language of Things is a remarkable book, well worth its rather hefty price tag. It begins as a critique of contemporary consumerist culture with witty one-liners and knowing insights into what exactly makes us go shop-shop. Many of the points Sudjic punches out within the first few pages echo some of my deepest reservations against my own spendthrift, accumulating ways. Never have more of us had more possessions than we do now, even as we make less and less use of them. The homes in which spend so little time are filled with things….They are our toys: consolations for the...
Read MoreTapping up the appeal of the moleskin
> Any kind of object can offer a soothing quality…. The Moleskin notebooks, with their characteristic hardcovers, rounded corners, slender proportions and built in elastic band, are to this decade what the Filofax was to the 1980s. Their appeal is not the neurotic organising impulse of the Filofax, but in the faint memory that the notebook contains of a simpler past- not our own necessarily, but a more generic idea of what life was once like even if it never was. On the band that goes round them below the shrinkwrap, they also describe themselves as the ‘legendary notebook of...
Read MoreAre you a crafts(wo)man?
I’m reading Richard Sennet’s The Craftsman. I’m intrigued by the idea he explores, “The desire to do a job well for its own sake-as a template for living.” It hasn’t been easy reading, very heavy in philosophy with frequent meanderings through personal experience but I’m determined to get into the meatier bits of the book. So far, I’ve especially enjoyed the following passage: All craftsmanship is founded on skill developed to a high degree. By one commonly used measure, about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master...
Read More“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” Marcel Proust
Nooj, excuse my tardiness. It’s not quite a list of my favourites as much as the twenty most memorable books I’ve read: The Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Sula by Toni Morissen Ake by Wole Soyinka Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (not my favourite Auestenian but one of those books that come to define you) Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (by far, Austen’s masterpiece) Persuasion (personal resonance) Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte...
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