Category: Uncategorized
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Book Release + Sale Announcement!
I try not to spam all of you with too many promotional posts, but I did want to let everyone know that my next book, The Flight of Virtue will be available for purchase this Friday, (2/3/2023) at all online digital retailers for the ebook ($2.99) and Amazon for the paperback edition ($14.00). For a […]
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Canada Emptor: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush and the Early Immigrant Literature of the Great White North
“Home! The word had ceased to belong to my present it was doomed to live for ever in the past; for what emigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home?” – Susanna Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush (Chapter II) As I’ve mentioned a few times, I spent the overwhelming bulk of […]
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A (Fake) True Story: Lucian and the Birth of Modern Sci Fi
“To put yourself in another man’s shoes and say what he would of said was a regular exercise of the schools, but to laugh in your sleeve as you said it was not the way of the ordinary rhetorician.” – A.M. Harmon (introduction to Phalaris) Okay, as promised, we’re going to talk about Lucian (c. […]
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Reading in Review: My Best Books of 2022
Well, my lovely readers, we’ve managed to make it to the end of another year, and while all signs point to 2023 not likely to be existentially any easier, making it to the new year is always to be commended. I had intentions of doing an entry on the satirist Lucian this week, but I […]
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Accidental Adventures in Antiquity: The Works of Ausonius
“For when the Emperor Octavianus was reigning, they [the Golden Age poets] vied with one another in presenting him with their works, and set no limit on to the number of the poems which they composed to his praise. You may be sure that though he may perhaps have admired these authors as much as […]
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The Seven Against the Seven Hills: The Ancient-Medieval Mashup of the Roman de Thèbes & the Roman d’Eneas
“If lord Homer and lord Plato, and Virgil and Cicero, had concealed their knowledge, there would never have been any talk of them. For this reason I do not wish to keep my intelligence hidden, or to suppress my knowledge, rather does it please me to recount something worthy to be remembered.” — Roman de […]
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Pandemic, Populism, and Panorama: The 58th Carnegie International
I’ve already talked about how a relatively provincial city like Pittsburgh ended up with a world class modern art museum (robber baron blood money). What you may not know is that aside from creating the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) itself, Gilded Age steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) also championed formal exhibitions of contemporary art […]
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Travels with Hadrian: Julia Balbilla, Her Poetry, and Ancient Tourism
In my entry about the two(?) Sulpicias, I said that she/them were the only Roman women poets that we have a record of—but that’s not strictly true. We have one more, the equally sketchily-known Julia Balbilla (72 – after 130 CE), but perhaps what we can mean is that the Sulpicias are the only Italian […]
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Death Becomes Her: Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe & Clitophon
“Alas, Leucippe, how often have I seen you die!” – Leucippe & Clitophon (VII, 5.2) “The first time you came back from the other side, I thought it was the most phenomenal thing I’d ever heard. And the second time, I thought, ‘Wow! What are the odds?’ And the next four times I thought, ‘Well, […]
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Archetype and Innovation: The Little Clay Cart and Classical Indian Theatre
“The rapacious greed of prostitutes robbed you of everything. No age has heard of a prostitute wanting to have compassion on another or to spare the passions which in a certain way they are able to consume.” – Fulco of Deuil to Peter Abelard (12th century CE) “Such a woman, the jewel of our city, […]
Sarah Holz 