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.

Comments

E-mail Wit on a Lazy Sunday Afternoon

It seems as though practically every business where I've ever bought anything in the past decade sends me e-mails about their products, specials, deal-of-the-week, etc. Normally I delete them immediately, without a second glance. But one this afternoon made me hesitate. I received a "Walgreens Weekly Ad" e-mail. Its subject line read as follows: "We can't stop lowering prices." So instead of hitting "delete," I sent a quick reply: "In that case, I think I'll wait and shop next week." I have no idea whether or not that reply will go to a real e-mail address and be read by an actual human being. But I hope so.

Non capisco!

About once a week I get an e-mail from something called the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. I don't know why. I know nothing about them and have no idea how I got on their mailing list. But I generally take a quick look at the e-mail, because every now and then I see something interesting. The other day I got one of these and saw what appeared to be a potentially interesting lecture today. It was by a professor named Stefano Jossa, currently at Royal Holloway, the University of London. He was going to be speaking on his new book, in Italian, but the title of which in English would be The Most Beautiful in the World: Why Love the Italian Language . It sounded intriguing, it was free, all you had to do was register and get a Zoom link. So I did. It turned out that the lecture was actually being sponsored not by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, but rather by the one in Montreal. But who cares, right? As long as it's not in French, which didn'

The Blessing and Curse of E-mail

I am, in fact, deeply grateful for e-mail. It allows me to be in ready contact with colleagues both in this country and abroad, and to pursue opportunities I would otherwise never be able to. But then there are days like today. My e-mail has been increasingly difficult to keep up with for the last year or so. But just before supper this evening, I looked at how many e-mails I had written and sent today. The total: exactly 100. By now, of course, it's a bit more than that. I spent much of the day trying to reschedule a student trip to Germany that was canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. We were going to travel over Easter; now we will try it next fall instead. Probably about half of the e-mails were related to that. I don't even want to know how many words I wrote today. If they were a book.... Now it's back to real work, reading the first half of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther so that I can put together a mini-lecture for my Humanities students

Plague Time

Search This Blog