Students — and probably not only students — often praise Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale for being “more realistic” than the “Knight’s Tale.” With its love of…
From the 1928 silent film The Viking, whose true star is Natalie Kalmus, responsible for the technicolor. (if you’re better than I am at making gifs,…
In 1974, in “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag wrote: Triumph of the Will and Olympia are undoubtedly superb films {they may be the two greatest documentaries…
National Squirrel Appreciation Day came and went, as it always does, with me in the yard, hiding my nuts, and missing my chance, again, to…
Hi gang! Years back, I submitted a Frankenstein’s monster of a couple conference papers for a collection to be called Fragments toward a History of a Vanishing…
On a whim, I decided to join my wife by getting an eye appointment. I told the optometrist, “well, no, I’ve never had glasses. Last…
Being poorly read, I feel no shame at having never heard of the great Louis Bromfield, whose novels were the thing some 80 years back, and who…
Massenet’s Thaïs, perhaps better known, to some of you, from Hroswitha’s play “Paphnutius,” features our holy harlot staring into her mirror, feeling her beauty fade, and…
Here’s a T-O Map from the Mandeville epitome that begins that famous fifteenth-century Carthusian miscellany, British Library Add 37049, f. 2v. (also famous for including the…
From Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 149(558), page 172, a 10th-c. manuscript. Drawn at the very end of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Here we see the four element,…
