Also at the McManus but a bit different from the art upstairs; though some new ones here, too:
Category: history
Frida @ the Broad Art Museum
On a short break (thanks Louise) I hied myself over to MSU to see the (relatively new) Broad Art Museum as it was featuring an exhibit on Frida Kahlo. The exhibit included photos and letters, mostly between Frida and her family, although with some of her doctors, too. It was an intimate sort of set…
Empty Met & Heavenly Bodies
Thanks to Bertie, we headed down to hit the Met before hours to enjoy the last day of the Heavenly Bodies exhibit, then ran up to the Cloisters to see the other location. Oddly enough the medieval setting worked well with the fashion inspired by the church. And there was even a good bit of…
Disreputable Magic
My thoughts have turned perhaps inexorably to the intersection of crime and magic in the Middle Ages, as my interests seem to intensify where they overlap. Or it just amuses me as I turn my mind to other topics to exercise different muscles in my head (so to speak). Missing Strange & Norrell (the series;…
Re-Imagining the Olympics
The 2012 Olympics are over. If you weren’t in the UK you might not have been aware of just how transformative these two weeks were. That I’m even talking about it is evidence enough. Like many of my geek and writer friends I’ve often found myself in the position of fighting against the popular attention…
Profiled at Eden Baylee’s Blog & News
I am profiled over at Eden Baylee’s blog today. Drop by and say hello to find out what lurks inside my mind lately. I suppose it’s the usual sort of thing, but Eden has some interesting questions that I have not had in an interview before, so maybe you will learn a few new things…
History Witch: Anglo-Saxon Death
I think the impulse that defines an academic nature is that one responds to difficult moments by turning to the past to see how others have coped with similar times. So still reeling from unexpected grief, I turn to history as I contemplate the ways we deal with the inevitability of parting from those we…
BitchBuzz: Women’s Dangerous Desires
Just a tad bit too late to make it into the column, two news stories today: HarperCollins has a new erotica imprint, Mischief, and the Wall Street Journal has another gasping-for-the-shock-of-it story about what women read on their Kindles (oooh, scandal!). All this frothing shows the ultimate futility of the attempts to stuff women back…
Mary of Nijmeghen
Mary — or Mariken van Nieumeghen as it is in the original — is a play that shows up in the early sixteenth century. My students read it this week and (among other things) we talked about how one might adapt it to a modern movie and came up with a really good plan. They’re…
Chanctonbury Ring at Midsummer
Liz and I sallied up the rather muddy and slippery slope to Chanctonbury Ring today, which was a bit more daunting than we assumed. In part that was due to the lack of signage. In fact we initially drove past the parking area because there was no warning for the picnic area, just a small…