"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
As we have seen with Aphra Behn, the Restauration period started challenging some of the concepts around women’s desire in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, with delicate examples of transgender and what we now know to call non-binary relationships taken into account. Anne Finch's late production...
Undervalued as an author till the 1970s, Aphra Behn is not only a feminist icon but her works around women’s sexuality are an exquisite example of sapphic poetry. 240 years after her death, Virginia Woolf will remember Aphra in her independence manifesto A Room of One’s Own: All...
Well, I said I was going to share some notes for Pride Month, didn't I? Here they are. I'd like to start with an amazing author and intellectual: Christine de Pizan, an Italian poet who worked in France at the beginning of the XV Century, is...
10. Chapter 10 We ended last week with a victory of the Minamoto: Taira no Shigehira was captured and he's paraded around the Capital - Aida style - alongside the severed head of his warriors. The idea of retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa is to offer him in...
Even if he's known for his Alices, Lewis Carroll privately produced and printed a huge amount of pamphlets, writings and pieces. Among the over two hundred pamphlets, twenty of them are the reinvention of original games, as he seemed to have a knack for finding...
Last week, I left you with Chapter 5 of the Heike Monogatari, the grand epic our earless monk was singing to the very same ghosts of the disgraced clan. Let's see how it continues, shall we? 6. Chapter 6 Upon the death of retired Emperor Takakura, it's time...
In Chapter VIII of Alice in Wonderland, Alice finally gets back to where she started through a door in a treetrunk and eventually arrives in the beautiful garden she had seen through the keyhole of the first chapters. There, we meet one of the most...
Last week we saw one of the stories narrated by Lafcadio Hearn: the story of the earless minstrel. If you recall, the minstrel found himself telling the epic story of a family downfall to the ghostly court of the dead of that very same family....
Do you work in the construction industry? Have you ever found yourself covering up something in a space that needed to open in five minutes? I know I did, and I know this is why all my sympathies go to the poor guys painting the...
People over at Twitter called for Folklore of our local places, so I thought I'd unearth some of my favourite Italian folk tales. 1. We invented Cinderella I'm sure all of you are familiar with Cinderella and similar tales, but few know that the oldest tale of...
