(The first half of part three is here.)
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(The first half of part three is here.)
[display_podcast]
(Part two is here.)
Books
Films
Exhibits
“An agricultural people, efficiently tilling fertile soil – and one is reminded of the pre-Columbian Mayans – can live fairly comfortably on an aggregate of forty or fifty days labour a year. Inevitably, however, some organizing genius comes along to make sure that the spare three hundred days are occupied in impressive but largely wasteful undertakings.”
(Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, p. 226.)
“A circumstance worthy of remark is that the name of Rome is familiar to nearly all the Cambodians; they pronounce it Rouma, and place it at the western end of the world.”
(Henri Mouhot, Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China: Siam, Cambodia and Laos during the Years 1858, 1859 and 1860, chapter XIV.)
(Part one is here.)
[display_podcast]
Books
Films
These lists are a little longer than I expected, but it still feels like a slight year; maybe it could be termed a year without a thesis, though some might be visible (the attention paid to science fiction for work at PS1, my predictable reading of Bangkok-related material as the consequence of the move). And this year a much higher percentage of what I read came from libraries of various sorts, with tastes not quite mirroring mine; at any but the very best libraries, you can’t find exactly what you want – as you can now if you’re trying to buy books online – but you do feel more free to experiment with what you find adjacent. Maybe that’s why this list feels disappointing: perhaps it wasn’t wasted reading (in that it’s useful to read bad books to know what good books are), but much of it doesn’t really feel substantive. Distractions, distractions, distractions.
Fiction
Poetry
Other