Sir John Soane's Museum

We are all sitting at home right now looking for ways to fill all our spare time, right? Well, I have got one for you.

One of my favorite museums in London is the Sir John Soane's Museum. Soane was an important and influential architect, and he left his home to the country as a museum. It includes tons of visual surprises and fascinating details, and is also home to a remarkable sculpture collection, an important series of Hogarth paintings, and other odds and ends. Very, very neat.

The house has been restored to its original condition, and you can watch the first of three videos about the process. The other two will follow in the coming weeks. This is a great treat. Watch it.

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Chinese Painting

The Wall Street Journal has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic. Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing. (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting." I thought they were quite interesting. The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before. Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen...

Paris Cafes Open Again

Now this is good news: I just read in the Times that cafés in Paris are once again able to open for outdoor service . I've never even been to Paris, but that is still a welcome sign. I have written before--it probably deserves another reflection sometime--that this lockdown has not been a big deal for me. I worry about the college, and naturally I'm not thrilled about a salary cut forced by the college's losses. But in terms of my day-to-day life, the lockdown is more or less irrelevant. It makes grocery shopping more of a pain, and it keeps me away from my office, but otherwise interferes with little that I want to do. But the thing that I do miss is the opportunity to get to Europe once in a while. I had to cancel a planned trip to Germany with students over Easter. And this very morning, as it happens, I was supposed to arrive in Poland for a conference of the Austrian Studies Association. Alas, those trips were not to be. And ...

Dursli

Back to Gotthelf! I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink. Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ). This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor. But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution. Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

Plague Time

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