19 January 1596: Walter Hay, a goldsmith, brought up on charges per the Elgin Kirk sessions for playing bowls and golf (obviously an athletic enthusiast) on a Sunday when he should have been attending to the sermons in the kirk. Five pounds and a promise never to do it again. The eldership of the church…
Tag: history
Daft Days & Discipline
In these daft days between the Yule and Hogmanay celebrations it’s easy to lose track of time, as Fergusson suggests. He also claims this is the time to enjoy ourselves in all the usual ways: Let mirth abound, let social cheerInvest the dawning of the year;Let blithesome innocence appearTo crown our joy;Nor envy wi sarcastic…
Review: The Conjuring of America
THE CONJURING OF AMERICA: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic Lindsey Stewart Legacy/Hachette, 2025 I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Stewart carefully builds up the history of Black Women’s Magic from its African roots to the Americas and Caribbean, through the years of enslavement and then the Great Migration, right…
Recent Reads
I have been diving into eighteenth century France for some reason (…circumspice) and my reading has veering into the historical, albeit through fiction. No surprise: I learned most of my history from fiction — books, television, films — because Americans are not generally taught history so much as a narrative of Manifest Destiny. Which is…
Irreverent Tarot Ep2
Another #TarotTuesday flick up: this one takes a quick look at a strange 1911 tarot, Le Tarot de la Reyne which I came across at the Beinecke while looking for something else (what? who knows?! knee deep in figuring out a thing that remains a bit amorphous but deals with tarot history). The queen in…
Irreverent Tarot Ep 1
Because having eleventy million things to do is not much different than doing eleventy million and one, I decided to start a micro-podcast to share weird tarot things that have been obsessing me as I dive deeper into the history. The first one has to do with this nineteenth century deck — so-called Egyptian, as…
Old Friends
Also at the McManus but a bit different from the art upstairs; though some new ones here, too:
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…
Film for a Friday: The Sorrows of Satan
Thanks to Angela (check out her fab writing at the Cultural Gutter), I was introduced to this interesting novel by the famous-but-largely-erased author Marie Corelli. The Sorrows of Satan was a sensation upon its release and a scandalous bestseller, so it’s typical that it has been overlooked despite its broadly appealing topic — Faustian bargains…
When Chastity Flame was just a Spark
I know I seem to have a new idea every minute and to change gears just about that often, so it’s kind of funny to see that some obsessions stay with me a very long time. The roots of my Chastity Flame novels are deep. The first novel I wrote in high school was also…