I'm almost halfway through reading Robert Hughes's Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History (2012); while it's entertaining and interesting enough in its way, it's not a patch on Hughes's magnum opus The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding (1986).

As usual, I'm finding that Rome's index is only partially complete; if only I ( Read more... )

I've pretty much made my peace with my hard drive becoming infected and needing to be wiped before being resurrected a few years ago, save only for two things: one, a mild regret over the loss of my final post on David Copperfield (in which I was arguing that the book's subtitle should've been "I Get Hard for Retards," given the titular hero's ( Read more... )

From Monday, 4 April through Thursday, 19 April, I read Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Roman Dusk (NY: Tor Books [Tom Doherty Associates, LLC], 2008 [copyright 2006 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro]; ISBN: 978-0-7653-1393-5; 352 pps.); this is yet another installment in her series of novels about the millennia-old, "compelling" vampire Count Saint-Germain (the 19th ( Read more... )

Just read a very puzzling item in the April 2009 (Vol. 318, No. 1907) issue of Harper's Magazine, in its "Findings" feature, wherein the editors offer tidbits of the most interesting articles from various scientific and technical journals from the previous month:

"In western Iran, the growing popularity of taqaandan, a pastime in which the top ( Read more... )

I've no doubt that I'm overlooking the blindingly obvious (d'accord: hence the adverb "blindingly"...), but I thought I'd state my confusion any way:

1. Why is Seneca's Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii translated into English as "The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius" if pumpkins are a New World fruit (that's most usually treated as a vegetable; ( Read more... )

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I discovered a pretty nifty radio play that BBC Radio 3 aired this past Sunday (1 October): Let Me by Howard Barker, whose oeuvre is self-described as "Theatre of Catastrophe;" set in the 5th century A.D. (or C.E., if you like) a few years before the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Let Me is the story of a septuagenarian named Copolla who is ( Read more... )

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(With apologies to Gene Wolfe.)

The mixed blessing of cataloguing your books on a site like LibraryThing is that it can make you feel a bit like a kitten chasing leaves in the wind: nearly every book you pick up to dutifully record in your database cries out to be read now, daddy, now, while a few others beg to be re-read ( Read more... )

Finally resumed my sloooooow slog through Anthony A. Barrett's Caligula: The Corruption of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990 [first published in the UK in 1989 by B.T. Batsford Limited]; trade paperback; ISBN: 0-300-07429-8; 334 pps.); I'd set it aside out of frustration at how many frickin' highlighters I was using on it (five, all ( Read more... )