The ceremony, attended by scholarly Indian visitors, enabled the poet to assert that the only famous countries were Java and India because both contained many religious experts.
Then, after glancing about at his more immediate surroundings, he walked toward the center of the room, where, beneath a ring of lights, stood a massive circular table divided by clear-glass partitions into a number of semi-private segments, at some of which scholarly-looking visitors sat reading.
Scholarly anonymity and peer-recognition has cleaved to visitor numbers and the art of "name recognition" – and the new breed of museum personnel often encourages this promotional inferno: take New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator Klaus Biesenbach, whose show about the singer Björk earlier this year was berated as a big celebrity schmooze.
Admittedly, there's little that can be done about the Capitol's mistakenly symmetrical facade, and very few visitors will come armed with the relevant scholarly articles, so well-versed interpreters are crucial.
Most of the effort of the previous Tory government had been placed on trying to get museums to be, as far as possible, financially more self-sufficient; less dependent on government funding and much more on the marketplace; more visitor-oriented and less dominated by narrow scholarly and professional concerns.
The museum's original 1961 building by Philip Johnson was expanded in the late '90s into a visitor-friendly place — during my visit a volunteer demonstrated old camera equipment and encouraged visitors to handle it — which the curators balance with scholarly shows.
The most powerful and daring part of the book, in fact, is the extended daily discussions between Konrad and a chat-room visitor using the pseudonym David, who pursues the anti-Nazi argument with a scholarly precision equal to Konrad's.
Scholarly discoveries turned up.
Scholarly and fascinating.
"This real scholarly guy.
