Category: Uncategorized
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Running it Back: Ten (More!) Unusual and Obscure Greek Gods
While the Egyptians were rightfully held by the ancient world as the possessors of the largest (western) pantheon, we know from our previous discussions about the snide remarks of the early Christian writers that the Greeks and Romans were hardly defined solely by the Olympians when it came to the breadth of their synthesized religious…
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Preview for HELIKON QUEENS (+ a secret second project!)
Some of you were probably impressed that I managed to write a book of a more reasonable length in Lady Safflower this past year. But apparently writing for me is like a liquid that will spread to fill a space, so the extra thousands of words that would have been poured into, say, a God’s…
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Teens and Titans Behaving Badly: George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra
Like a lot of people, what I was exposed to in high school was formative for me as a reader. I had been a “serious” reader for five years by then, but I feel like high school was where I had read enough to start having real opinions about what I read. And while many…
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Waltzing Matilda: Helen White’s Not Built With Hands and the Many Faces of Medieval Fiction
I originally was going to start off this discussion with a statement that was something to the effect of, “I don’t read a lot of medieval historical fiction,” but even a cursory glance through my shelves on Goodreads belies that. I’ve actually read quite a bit of medieval historical fiction, which I find falls broadly…
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Goth Girls: More Roman Historical Fiction and Wilkie Collins’ Antonina
Okay, okay—as we hurtle toward fall, we’re finally going to take a break from our Japan Summer (for real this time). You know what we haven’t talked about for a while here? Historical fiction. And you know what we haven’t touched on in even longer? ROME. But despite me photobombing you with His Almighty-ness, the…
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The Beginning of the End: The Shirakawa emperors and the Decline of Heian Japan
“He [Shirakawa] controlled everything except the Kamo floods, sugoroku game dice, and the unruly Mount Hiei monks.” – The Tale of Heike Fortunately or unfortunately for all of you, I want to get through one more major Heian history lesson before I stop hyper-focusing on Lady Safflower content here. So today we’re going to look…
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Beyond Bueller: Day Tripping at The Art Institute of Chicago
So last time I promised you all a “beach episode,” and still made you learn stuff about medieval Japan, which was arguably kind of an abuse of the term beach episode. So this week, I thought I’d give you a real break from our current stream and do a museum entry instead! Because last week…
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In the Uncanny Valley: Yōkai and the Wild World of Japanese Folklore
Okay, y’all have been very patient as we’ve discussed medieval Japanese history and literature the past couple of weeks. And while I have at least one more historical entry lined up discussing the Lady Safflower emperors, I figured you earned a little break. So this week, we’re going to have a bit of a “beach…
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Dispatches From the Margins: The Women Diarists of Heian Japan
I know that I’m behind my usual schedule this week, but I took a self-care day yesterday to get a second look at the Carnegie International. And I’m glad I did, because I was able to get some clarifications on musings I had in my May entry, mainly: 1) yes, asinnajaq’s cross-environment installation in the…
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The Illusions of Peace: A Brief Introduction to Heian Japan
Okay, as promised, we’re going to start some discussions on the general milieu of my latest book, Lady Safflower, and it seemed like the best place to start is with its historical setting: Heian-era Japan (794 CE—1185). And while I won’t be able to hit everything involved in a four hundred year timeframe in a…
