Lenora Rogers's Blog, page 6
February 14, 2018
Warren Harding: Bloviator of Nostrums and the Founding Fathers
A few men have the gift of speechifying pontifically and saying little. Like Warren Harding, 29th President.
Warren Harding at the podium. Bloviating.
Warren G. Harding: Newspaper Man
Harding was always a hands-on newspaperman.
Warren Harding was one of the most affable men in town. He was easy going, a bona fide glad-hander, and a fellow who fit easily into any social setting. Tall and good looking, he supposedly gained political supporters because “he looked l...
Poetry vs Visual Art in Lessing’s Laocoon
On the 22nd of January 1729, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born in Kamenz, Saxony, Germany. He was a precocious writer, philosopher, publicist, art critic, the first real playwright in theatre history and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment. As a literary theorist, he is well-known for his essay Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). There is a predominant theme in the culture of Enlightenment: that semiotics and aesthetics are...
Kidnapped! I Heart Monsters by D.W. Gillespie
I Heart Monsters
I’ve always been asked why I choose to write horror. Now that my first novel, Still Dark, is out, it’s a fair question to consider. Usually, it’s asked by people who would much prefer I write something pleasant. My mother, for instance. It’s a question that comes with a fundamental misunderstanding of how the creative process works, at least in my case.
The truth is, I don’t really have much of a choice. Sure, I’m the one in control of the how, but not so...
February 12, 2018
Home, Hearth & History
I’m really looking forward to an upcoming exhibition at the Concord Museum: Fresh Goods: Shopping for Goods in a New England Town, 1750-1900, offered as part of a state-wide MASS Fashion collaborative project which will include a fall exhibition at the Massachusetts Historical Society guest-curated by my Salem State colleague Kimberly Alexander: Fashioning the New England Family. I thought I had fashion fatigue, because there have been so many clothing-based exhibitions over t...
LA’s Hottest Choreographers Carnival
Randy Newman : I Think It’s Going To Rain Today
Some days, some nights, Life can be a struggle.
Seems like Easy is getting Harder every day.
Every day.
High water rising everywhere.
Everywhere.
All the hedges blown down – strewn along the road.
You come naked and crying into the world and that’s how you’ll go out.
You inherit a world of trouble.
Flames rise up to scorch the sky.
Every morning you wonder how you’ll get through the hours until the darkness comes and you can somehow sleep.
Every night you wonder how you’...
The Truth about the Eccentric Jane Lewson who died aged 116
Where do we begin with this story? Let’s begin with the accounts of Jane’s life as repeatedly recorded ad nauseum since her death in 1816 and which has entered into folklore … after all, why let the facts get in the way of a good story! Except that for those who read our articles will know we have a penchant for setting records straight.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Jane Lewson died on 28th May 1816, at her home, no. 12 Coldbath Square, Clerkenwell, aged 116. Sh...
February 11, 2018
Dying for Everest: the terrifying icy graveyard on the roof of the world.
I have never climbed a mountain, but the subject of alpine climbing has interested me since I was a kid–probably since it figured so prominently in one of my favorite books, R.A. Montgomery‘s Choose Your Own Adventure novel The Abominable Snowman. Two of my recent works of fiction, Hotel Himalaya: Three Travel Romances and The Valley of Forever, take place partially in the Himalayas, the tallest and most forbidding mountains on Earth. In doing a bit more research on climbing f...
Elizabeth Siddal: The Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel
On the 11th of February 1862, Elizabeth Siddal, an English artists’ model, died in London of a self-administered overdose of laudanum. In the early 1850s, as a young woman, Siddal was painted extensively by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She sat for Walter Deverell’s Viola in Twelfth Night (1850), for William Holman Hunt’s British Girl inA Converted British Family Rescuing a Christian Priest from Persecution by the Druids (1851), for John Everett Millais’sOphelia(1852) – for whi...
The Maiden Stone, Chapel Of Garioch, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
The Maiden Stone, Chapel of Garioch.
OS Grid Reference: NJ 70378 24714. About 1 mile to the northwest of the village called Chapel of Garioch, near Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, there is a very tall carved stone slab known as The Maiden Stone or The Drumdurno Stone, which has Pictish symbols on one side and a Christian cross on the other. This carved stone, standing beside a country road, is thought to date from the 8th or 9th century AD, and was probably carved at t...
