"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."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

#ChthonicThursday: Asphodelus

The asphodelus is a perennial plant with tall, white clusters of flowers that resemble a pinecone, and Homer’s Odyssey indicates it as a plant connected to Hades and the afterlife. When the Romans thought the Greek vision of the afterlife was a tad too bleak and came up with something to convince people to die in battle for King and Country, they divided the afterlife between a place for the bad and a place for the good. Somehow, fields of asphodelii ended up being the place where you keep people who haven’t been neither good nor bad. A place for useless people, you might say.

Read more on today’s feature.
Summertime

The Path You Have to Sing

Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, “a creature larger than storm clouds,” descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the

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August 8, 2026 6:00 am
movies and tv

But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge

I’m sure you’ve read enough analysis of Nolan’s Odyssey to last a lifetime, and you don’t need another European ranting that he changed stuff, so I’m not going to. Instead, I’d like to talk about the movie in itself, as an independent work, granting the

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August 7, 2026 1:48 pm
Summertime

A Pilgrimage With No Shrine

The full German title of today’s book is Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt — “The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage” — and it was written by W.G. Sebald, a German-born writer, essayist, poet, and literary scholar who lived much of his life

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August 7, 2026 6:00 am
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The Path You Have to Sing

August 8, 2026

Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, “a creature larger than storm clouds,” descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the

Read More

But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge

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I’m sure you’ve read enough analysis of Nolan’s Odyssey to last a lifetime, and you don’t need another European ranting that he changed stuff, so I’m not going to. Instead, I’d like to talk about the movie in itself, as an independent work, granting the

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The full German title of today’s book is Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt — “The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage” — and it was written by W.G. Sebald, a German-born writer, essayist, poet, and literary scholar who lived much of his life

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