From Vanity Fair: this image featured in its collection of the best pictures from the magazine this year. It is not of some inaccessible Oxford college, or of the stolovia at Downton Abbey, or even the language laboratory at the Higher Technical School in Khimki.
It is, wait for it: the main reading room of the central branch of the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue. It is open to you, me and Joe Citizen, which is what real culture is all about: complete freedom of inquiry, thought and expression.
Who needs Santa when the North Pole is all around you, its contents catalogued on the Dewy Decimal system? (well, er.... hem!)
It is, wait for it: the main reading room of the central branch of the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue. It is open to you, me and Joe Citizen, which is what real culture is all about: complete freedom of inquiry, thought and expression.
Who needs Santa when the North Pole is all around you, its contents catalogued on the Dewy Decimal system? (well, er.... hem!)
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| Note, as with all pictures in this blog, you can click on it to expand to full screen |
A kind Russian friend gave me the magnificent Russian Museum 2013 calendar, the one with Boris Kustodyev's 'Merchant's Wife Drinking Tea'on the cover. There is a strange - for a leading cultural institution - mis-translation of 'rusalki' as 'mermaids'for the July picture. Surely any dictionary would have told them that mermaids have fishes tails and live only in the sea? What would you have used: 'water nymphs/sprites'? 'Nereiads'?
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