The Lion of Chaeronea

Reading The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, by the great Peter Brown. Like so much of his work, it brings home the profound differences between the ancient Mediterranean mindset and our own, as well as the complex ideological disagreements and conflicts that lurked behind even such a commonly expressed view in antiquity as "sexual continence is good". (As I, a classical philologist by training, take baby steps into the worlds of late antiquity and early Christian studies, I continue to be both amazed and slightly intimidated by the sheer amount of stuff I don't know.)

Title: The Valkyrie Artist: Peter Nicolai Arbo (Norwegian, 1831-1892) Date: 1869 Genre: mythological painting Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 243 cm (95.6 in) high x 194.5 cm (76.5 in) wide Location: National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo, Norway

Thanks. I really appreciate it.

I'm tired. I'm just so, so tired. I have nothing more profound to offer than that. Forgive me.

Sometimes it frustrates me that I have all this knowledge rattling around in my brain and no decent outlet for it. But that, I suppose, is life.

Evening Attire. A portrait by the African-American photographer James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), made of an unknown sitter in Harlem, NYC, in 1922. Now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Title: The Old Model (Old Spanish Woman) Artist: Robert Henri (American, 1865-1929) Date: between 1911 and 1913 Genre: portraiture Movement: Ashcan School Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 60.9 cm (24 in) high x 51 cm (20.1 in) wide Location: Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, USA

Title: The Baptism of Christ Artist: Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari; Italian, 1528-1588) Date: 1550s Genre: religious art Period: Italian Renaissance (Cinquecento) Movement: Venetian School Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 116.8 cm (45.9 in) high x 85.7 cm (33.7 in) wide Location: North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, USA

Billie Holiday - I'm a Fool to Want You (Official Audio)

Some music for your Saturday night. Enjoy.

Current fiction reading is Fallen Angel, a 1945 novel by Marty Holland (the pen name of Mary Hauenstein, a movie studio typist turned crime writer). It's a deliberately seedy look at love gone crooked, in the vein of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and was itself adapted into a movie by 20th Century Fox, with Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, and Linda Darnell. (For the screen rights to this, her first novel, Holland was paid $40,000 -- the equivalent of $600,000 today. Not a bad deal.) Recommended for crime fiction fans, film noir aficionados, and those who (like me) are both.

I'm watching a 1952 movie called Untamed Women. It's about a lost tribe of Amazons, descended from Druids, who do battle with Neanderthals on a volcanic island overrun by dinosaurs. ...No, really, that's the plot. (As often, the "dinosaurs" are portrayed by lizards with fins glued to their backs, in footage swiped from 1940's One Million B.C.) All I can think of is the brilliant bit in Tim Burton's Ed Wood where Ed improvises a movie plot around random snippets of stock footage. "We open on a series of explosions. No one knows what's causing them, but they're upsetting all the buffalo..."

Fjallkona (The Lady of the Mountain), the personification of Iceland. Engraving by Johann Baptist Zwecker, printed as the frontispiece to the English translation of Icelandic Legends by Jón Árnason (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866).