Business Lunch, Soho
Quote of the Day
“America is a mistake – admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.”
- Sigmund Freud
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Alison Krauss | Down To The River To Pray
Long Read of the Day
Getting the Essay Back: Two Memories
Lovely essay by Richard Farr about being a student — and finally learning what it’s about.
Here’s an excerpt:
He makes small talk briefly and then dips into his briefcase to return my essay on Descartes’ Discourse on Method. He watches me as I survey the red ink. There’s a lot of red ink.
“This is bad,” he says. “Really remarkably bad, though in an interesting way. Tell me, do you take notes during lectures?”
“Of course — some anyway. I don’t try to take everything down.”
“That’s a step in the right direction. It would probably be better if you didn’t take notes at all.”
“That seems extreme.”
“I’ll get more extreme in a minute. Have a sandwich.”
“Thank you.”
“The highest aspiration of most undergraduates is to regurgitate accurately whatever the instructor has said. So they scribble furiously, hoping not to miss anything. This makes it impossible to spend any time thinking. When the time comes to regurgitate, some do it accurately, some less so. And that’s all there is to it.”
He shrugs and takes a sip of tea. “Good students don’t regurgitate…
He’s right. They don’t. Do read it.
Books, etc.
A colleague had this with him at our Centre’s Xmas supper, and as various conversations went on around me I opened it and started to read. In no time I found myself starting on Chapter 2 with no idea of what the people around me had been talking about!. It’s an original and intriguing little book about how the architecture of home has shaped, and continues to shape, our psyches and our societies. So I bought a copy as a housewarming present for one of my sons, who has just bought his first house — after renting for years.
My commonplace booklet
Making the real Thomas Cromwell stand up
Like millions of others, I recently watched the final series of Peter Kosminski’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Inevitably, I spent a good deal of time afterwards lamenting how little I had known of Tudor history, and brooding on the enigma that was Thomas Cromwell. And then I stumbled on this short talk by the Tudor historian, Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose biography of Cromwell came out in 2019. Which in turn prompted the thought that his book might make a rather good Xmas present for some of the friends and family members with whom I’ve discussed the novels and their TV adaptations.
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