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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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 ...

Chinese Painting

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Alias, or Real Life

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Plague Time

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