GREAT LITERATURE RETITLED TO BOOST WEBSITE TRAFFIC, and why people came sniffing around my blog this week

Not too long ago, Mike Lacher had this great little piece for McSweeney’s:

GREAT LITERATURE RETITLED TO BOOST WEBSITE TRAFFIC

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7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism

The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World

8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream

6 Shockingly Evil Things The Turn-Of-The-Century Meatpacking Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know

5 Insane Ways London Could Become a Dystopia (And How It’s Not That Far From Reality)

1 Weird Thing Caddy Smells Like

I, on the other hand, wrote about Africa for the win. Common search terms for this blog:

1. Luanda girls 

2. Luanda money

nascimento de uma nação

Congratulations to historian Carlos Serrano, who was awarded the National Prize for Culture and Arts on Friday in Luanda for his book: Angola –  Nascimento de Uma Nação. Um estudo sobre a construção da identidade nacional.  

But the title Angola – Birth of a Nation has the misfortune to echo that of D.W. Griffith’s celebratory film on the Ku Klux Klan (an extremist white supremacy group in the United States.)

anything can be sold

photographers hired to take pictures at an academic conference in Luanda have been taking pictures of the audience and sell them outside of the lecture hall as glamor shots.

Naturally my own suspicions are confirmed– academic lectures are the place to seen and be seen. But in the spectacle of the viewer being viewed and buying himself as the viewer, there are an alarming number of audience members looking weird, nodding off, etc. Is this the red carpet for the life of the mind, or are these souvenirs for the tourists?