“‘What pleases the PUBLIC is always what’s most banal,’ he wrote to his brother in 1883. But nowadays Van Gogh pleases the public enormously. So has he become banal?” Julian Barnes reflects on Van Gogh’s life and work and how our perception of him has changed over time in a London Review of Books podcast. Interested in contemporary art? Check out our own Bill Morris’s piece on the Whitney Museum.
Seeing Van Gogh
The Scanner, Darkly
A used-book flipper, armed with a laser scanner and a PDA, delineates the unease he feels about the odd profession he has chosen.
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British Museum Sound Archive
The Guardian reports that the British Library has made its archive of world and traditional music available online. And it’s free for everyone. What might you hear? “There are Geordies banging spoons, Tawang lamas blowing conch shell trumpets and Tongan tribesman playing nose flutes. And then there is the Assamese woodworm feasting on a window frame in the dead of night.” You might also check out the British Museum’s free online image database. Here you’ll find thousands of images of paintings, etchings, drawings, and artifacts from every country and era of human history, easily searchable by era, country, artist, or subject. In using the database for dissertation research, I also found copyright permissions relatively easy to acquire.
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Huck Finn, Improved
Cartoonist Ruben Bolling has identified some additional ways in which Huck Finn might be cleaned up for today’s delicate readers.
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Byron-ness
Which Lord Byron is the most Byron-y? Let Mallory Ortberg tell you in her rankings of Byron portraits.
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Writerly Personalities
Have you ever taken a Myers-Briggs personality test? (I fall somewhere between ISTJ and ISFJ.) Book Riot reveals the Myers-Briggs types of 101 famous authors.
How Should an Interview Be?
My Millions social media teammate Emily M. Keeler is probably too humble to write a Curiosity about her kickass interview with Sheila Heti. But not I, dear readers! Not I.
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The Hellman’s Virgin
Recommended Reading: Ottessa Moshfegh on eating mayonnaise for the first time.
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the looking glass of this language
This National Geographic piece on the desire to document and preserve the world’s many dying languages is great.
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