Category: Uncategorized
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Rock Steady: One More Not-So-Serious Look at Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Part Three)
We’ve made it, folks! After years of dragging my feet, I am done with the entirety of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, and I’m here to give you a slightly unserious summary of the last ten books! In true wrap-up fashion, Pliny is presenting us with his final pharmacological thoughts, some miscellaneous facts about water…
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My Best Reads of 2025
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all who celebrate! Here we are at the end of another reading year, so it must be time to drop my favorite books list again. I don’t feel like my best-ofs this year are as diverse as some in the past, but I had a couple that were similar…
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When the Corn is as High as an Elephant’s Eye: A Not-So-Serious Look at Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Part Two)
As promised, this week we’re back with Pliny the Elder and his Natural History, and we’re here to tackle Books 12-27, the dreaded plant books. Since we’ve already introduced Pliny and his general deal, we’ll pretty much delve straight in, but if you missed the first part, you can find it here. As with the…
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A Renaissance Friendsgiving: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron
“For a long time I have cherished all the many excellent gifts that God bestowed upon you; prudence worthy of a philosopher; chastity; moderation; piety; an invincible strength of soul, and a marvelous contempt for all the vanities of this world. Who could keep from admiring, in a great king’s sister, such qualities as these,…
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Gods, Gods, Gods! : Mythological Hijinks with ‘Divine Egypt’ at the Met
I’m coming to my blog schedule late this week because we just got back from another short trip to New York City, and I’m still trying to get organized in the aftermath of that. Aside from some other activities, including scoring extremely good lottery tickets to Six, we burned another entire day at the Metropolitan…
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More Midcentury(ish) Roman Historical Fiction: John Williams’ Augustus and Evelyn Waugh’s Helena
Because I thought that with Daughter of Scorpions’ publication this spring, I was finally leaving the historical ancient Mediterranean behind (…we’ll see—I’ve been having intrusive thoughts recently about a fifth God’s Wife book…), I’ve been reading a bunch of other people’s Rome-adjacent novels. In February, we talked about two of them, Thornton Wilder’s The Ides…
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Old is New Again: Mishima Yukio’s Five Modern Noh Plays
A few years ago here, we talked about the Japanese theatrical genre of noh (aka, the one with masks). While kabuki (the one with makeup) was and remains the more well-known and popular stage form in Japan, the older and more technical noh, born as it was from Shinto temple rituals, has deep roots, and…
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A Not-So-Serious Look at Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Part One)
Like with the English literature canon, I have reached a point where I’ve read a lot of the “normal” stuff in the Classical canon, and I am now left with plumbing the depths of the more esoteric stuff. Pliny the Elder’s massively influential Naturalis Historia (Natural History) may not, at first blush, seem like a…
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All The Art We Do Not See: Curating From the Margins of the Art World
It might be 85 degrees outside, but technically it is almost fall here in Pittsburgh, and about time for us to return to the Carnegie Museums and see what they have going on. I haven’t been down to the Science Center yet since their big name change/reopening, in part because they’re cycling through all of…
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Giraffe City: Cusae and Egyptian Municipal Administration
“We are leaving the Arsinoite now, afibi-t.” She lifts her face to the breeze, her eyes closed. “What strategia does Memphis open to?””The Heptanomis,” I reply, trying to coax a dragonfly onto my fingers. “And the last is the Thebais.””Very good. What is the administrative division beneath the strategia?””The nomes, Aetia.””And how many of them…
Sarah Holz 