Indian mothers-in-law – Interesting article on Indian family culture.
Why the French are miserable – Excerpts below, much more in the article.
Romantic miserabilism was experienced as a form of pleasure. “Melancholy”, wrote Victor Hugo, “is the happiness of being sad.” It was treated as a noble state, a higher aesthetic condition. “I do not pretend that joy cannot be allied with beauty,” wrote Baudelaire in his diary. “But I do say that joy is one of its most vulgar ornaments; whereas melancholy is, as it were, its illustrious companion.” Much of this tradition is firmly fixed in today’s French mind. Hugo’s poem “Melancholia” is required reading for French lycée students, as is Alfred de Musset’s “La Nuit de Mai”, whose narrator laments that “Nothing makes us so great as great sorrow.”
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Perhaps the best exemplar of miserabilism among contemporary French fiction writers is Michel Houellebecq, the controversial Goncourt-prize-winning novelist, in such nihilist works as “Whatever” or “Atomised”. His characters invariably lead empty, often sordid, always disillusioned lives. “In the end,” writes Mr Houellebecq in “The Elementary Particles”, “there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.”
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Perhaps the French need dissatisfaction and thrive on doubt. “There is a certain pleasure taken in being unhappy: it’s part of an intellectualism of French culture,” says Ms Senik. “Malaise and ennui are to France what can-do is to America: a badge of honour,” wrote Roger Cohen in the New York Times recently. Pessimism does not preclude pleasure. All that sitting around at pavement cafés, looking fashionably discontented, can be fun. Optimism is for fools; sophisticates know better. Bleak is chic—especially when opening another bottle of Saint-Emilion and reaching for the three-tier cheese trolley.
A short history of hotels – I must have visited dozens of hotels this year and spent lots of time there (business travel, meeting, personal travel, dining, sightseeing, etc.), so it’s interesting to learn more about the industry.
In the future the hotel may offer neither bland uniformity nor authentic warmth but a proliferating number of experimental worlds in which to insert yourself. Who do you want to be next time you hand over your passport and check in?
Special report on museums – Are we in the golden age of museums? The museum boom in China seems wasteful. I just realize from the article that I’ve visited all the top 3 most popular modern art museums, and 6 of the top 10. But I still don’t understand contemporary art. Think I should read up more before visiting next time.
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