By Marije Huging In March, the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the UK’s most prestigious book award for women writers, for which the winner gets 30 000 pounds, was released. The drama that ensued earlier this month regarding the prize has something larger to say about literary prize culture, and it’s entering into…
In Praise of Ali Smith and Leonora Carrington
By Marije Huging There was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party. There was once a woman who got locked up in a…
Olivia Laing and Loneliness at UCR
By Marije Huging ‘Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person (…) Like depression, like melancholy or restlessness, it is subject too to pathologization, to being considered a disease. It has been said emphatically that…
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
By Marije Huging When at home, I often admire my dogs, who nap approximately 12 to 14 hours a day, with a sense of jealousy. With no immediate dangers surrounding them, the animals manage to relax and be comfortable 50 % of their day- whilst me, on the other hand, cannot exactly say the same…
Beating the Winter Blues
By Marije Huging During the last week of a UCR semester, my head usually feels strangely detached from my body, like a little homunculus living in an empty shell. This is what exams, presentations, and what seems like an endless array of papers (that I actually wrote in two days) feel like. During this time,…
Smallest cinema of the Netherlands!!!!
By Marije Huging When walking drearily on the almost-empty streets of Middelburg after a 16:00-18:00 class, you realize that you forgot to buy food. So you go to the supermarket in the dark to pick up ready-made pasta, a vegetable for nutrition, and some candy, which you can open on the way back for comfort…
Whilst Online Shopping Sites Are Doing Well in This Season, Local Businesses Are Not Exactly Thriving.
By Marije Huging I must say, writing about Arts & Culture whilst the government has just shut down the entire sector is not the easiest thing. As I was about to write something about the opening of the smallest cinema in the Netherlands located in Middelburg (!!!), the cinemas closed, so an opening is not…
Explaining Things to My Hamster
By Marije Huging On many evenings during corona, sitting alone in my room – or, not entirely alone- I pass the time by watching series. In lonesome solitude one night (except for the company of a small rodent), I began to reminisce of my time as a fourteen-year-old girl, addicted to Gossip Girl, which in…
The Upside Down and the instagrammable museum experience
By Marije Huging This summer, the largest Instagram museum in Europe, started by a popular Dutch Youtuber Anna Nooshin, opened its doors in Amsterdam. ‘’The Upside Down’’ experience contains 15 rooms filled with 25 decorum and installations, all made for people to take the perfect picture for Instagram. The opening of this grand establishment also…