Brain Food
Recently I’ve been mildly obsessed with Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them (2011). It’s a collection of essays about Russian literature and her experiences as a PhD student at Stanford. In the first chapter, ‘Babel in California,’ Batuman describes a conference at Stanford, dedicated to the analysis of the work of Isaak Babel. Like so many academic conferences, it is simultaneously enlightening and farcical.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 
Mar 9
Things that have happened in Johannesburg recently
Things that have happened in Johannesburg – second greatest city after Paris – recently:
A spitting cobra was seen slithering into a car parked at the Gautrain Midrand station. A spokeswoman commented: ‘Specialist negotiators were brought in from the SPCA but the standoff continues.’
At the Maboneng Precinct.
There is a new prophet in Johannesburg.
In Braamfontein.
On Thursday, there were power cuts across the country because the coal supply for the national grid had been drenched with rain.
In Cyrildene, Johannesburg’s second Chinatown.
The trial of Oscar Pistorius in Pretoria ‘has also attracted a new political party called Africa Unite, which says it hopes to attract attention by being outside the court.’
In Hillbrow.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.