Midori Snyder's Blog, page 64

Anne Siems: A World Of Wonder

It is easy enough to get lost in Ann Siems paintings, a world of verdant gardens, ghostly lace, and beautiful folkloric portraits. Siems paintings employ different elements of 18th and 19th century art. Her subjects are stylized childhood figures, with...

The Hilarity of Hark! A Vagrant

Certain blogs are just too good to be missed, so for all you history nerds, historical fiction authors, or just crazy people who want a laugh, I give you Hark! A Vagrant, the comic blog of Kate Beaton, a Canadian...

The Voynich Manuscript: Magic, A Garden of Women, and a Secret Language

I am sitting at my desk transported by the digital images of the Voynich Manuscript, created sometime between the late 15th century and early 16th century. It is a most magical text, written in an unknown language or perhaps a...

The Sumptuous Kitchens of the Ottoman Empire.

I know -- the first of the feasting holidays has passed and many of us are even now trying to get back into clothing that once was loose. The number of small containers of leftovers has just about disappeared in...

Excerpt From "In Praise Of The Cook."

Here's a bit of a longer article "In Praise of the Cook," that I wrote for the Journal of Mythic Arts on the cook in fairy tales and cooking itself as an alchemical activity. My family have gathered for this...

The Talking Dead: Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

This is a republished review I wrote a number of years ago of this terrific novel by Mexican author Juan Rulfo. It is one of the most eerie and dream like stories...beautiful and appropriately haunting. This morning I received a...

And Now for the Monsters!

I admit, I am sort of playing catch up here -- mashing all my Halloween and Dia de los Muertos posts on a single day. We have family visiting for this month and all I seem to do these days...

A New Take On Muertitas

I am pretty much in awe of these gorgeous sculptures -- perfect for Day of The Dead (recently celebrated here in Tucson with great abandon!). The artist Krisztiana, inspired by the elaborately decorated sugar skulls, has created four beautiful sculptural...

Flannery O'Connor's Voice: Part II

A few years back, I posted about an amazing find of a 1959 audio file of Flannery O'Connor giving a lecture on "Some Aspects of the Grotesque In Southern Literature," -- taken mostly from her terrific essay in Mystery and...

Listening to the Whale: Reading Melville With The World

I simply must recommend" Moby Dick Big Read," an astonishingly ambitious (and incredibly successful effort) by artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare in conjunction with Plymouth University to post a daily audio chapter of Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick...