Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 58

The Bookshelf Sale was so much fun, we’ve decided to have a part 2 on Saturday.

Only a dozen people turned up, but they left with cartloads of books and dvds. Our first customer was Clem, and she carted away some of the best stuff. Wait, we’re making a new flyer.

What have you done?! This is what we think of Brexit.

Remembering the lovely Anton Yelchin

from Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— […]

Penny Dreadful comes to an end. Where do we get our Victorian Gothic weirdo fix now?

Only watch this video after you’ve seen the final episode. Is there any heroine in Victorian horror fiction or outside it who has worse taste in men than Vanessa Ives? Yet that is one of the reasons why we love her. Apart from the fact that she is portrayed by Eva Green, who is so […]

Great books, fabulous tchotchkes, ridiculously low prices at our Bookshelf Sale on Saturday, 25 June.

This silver teapot is perfect for your Downton Abbey cosplay. Remember to let it tarnish slightly because anything that looks too new is tacky. We have no idea who this is, but now you can claim him as your ancestor! “Oh yes, that’s my great-grandfather, the Viscount Harington. You know my cousin, Kit? Yes, he’s […]

Trapped in a Beijing metaphor

Saffy: That’s what happens when you’re away on my birthday. Saffy turned 16 last June 15. The day after ASEAN foreign ministers took a swipe at Beijing and then took it back because the Malaysians didn’t want to offend Beijing, I found myself in a taxi in Beijing, in the middle of a quarrel that […]

Mrs. Christ? Did Jesus have a wife? Did Dan Brown get something right?

(Historian Karen L.) King called the business-card-size papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” But even without that provocative title, it would have shaken the world of biblical scholarship. Centuries of Christian tradition are bound up in whether the scrap is authentic or, as a growing group of scholars contends, an outrageous modern fake: Jesus’s bachelorhood […]

Back from Beijing

Random snapshots while I recover from a week of trudging from one site to another. Fried scorpions! Not. Fat cat in a houtong. The Condom People. L-R: Edna Abong and Lucien Dy Tioco of the Philippine Star, our director Pepe Diokno. Ooh la la. The antique market. Where being duped is part of the experience. […]

What does it mean to be a human being in the digital age?

Attendees of the Qingdao International Beer Festival taking a selfie with a smartphone, Shandong province, China, August 2015. Ian Berry/Magnum Photos Virginia Woolf’s serious joke that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” was a hundred years premature. Human character changed on or about December 2010, when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone. […]

Bloodline: A family drama gets swamped in the telling

Flash-forward is the new flashback. On every episode of Bloodline, we are reminded that the good son John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler) will dispose of the body of the bad son Danny Rayburn (Ben Mendelsohn) on a boat in the Florida Keys. Did John kill Danny? The very first words we hear on the show are: […]