I am so busy...

... but Stave churches are so cool:

The Feast of the Holy Innocents

Cornelis van Haarlam, Massacre of the Holy Innocents, 1590.

Today is the feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating Herod's massacre of infants as described in Matthew 2:16-18. I just wanted to share a few artworks on the subject.

The theme seemed to appeal to late Renaissance and Baroque artists because of the treatment of violence against the innocent and the drama inherent in the tortured faces of the mothers who try to defend or mourn their slaughtered children. I remember being mesmerized by a set of polychrome figures on the theme by José Ginés in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. The series, given the graphically Spanish title Degollación de los Inocentes ("the throat-cutting of the innocents"), got its power from the naked brutality of the slaughter and the crazed, twisted faces of the women as they tried in vain to either hide their children or fight off the soldiers -- a moment described also by Shakespeare in Henry V:

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.

After extensive googling that resulted not only in the frustration of failure to obtain results but also repeated Mozilla-crashing, I was able to to find only one figure from the series, but it should give you a feel for it:


















And here are some other versions:













Guido Reni, 1611.


















Peter Paul Rubens, also 1611.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

random cool picture

From fons veritatis, Pope Sixtus IV appoints Bartolomeo Platina prefect of the Vatican Library, fresco by Melozzo da Forlì, c. 1477 (Vatican Museums).

Teaching has rendered me with no time to blog -- perhaps I'll sharpen the cyberquill during the holidays. Meanwhile, this is a pretty picture (I love the background -- I have mentioned before how much I love architecture in paintings). I found it on the fons veritatis page on Bartolomeo Platina, Renaissance humanist and author of the first printed cookbook, De honestate voluptate et valetudine. The cookbook was what I was checking on, as some of the recipes have been adapted in the Historical Cookery webpage (h/t Jeffrey Smith). So here it is, it's very nice.

this is why I always feed her when she demands food...

h/t The Quack Doctor.

it's official

Sorry blog activity has been nil... I have been very busy with classes. But! I have an announcement:

October degrees were conferred by Columbia today. I am officially a PhD.

amusing if it weren't terrifying

Qaddafi would be hilarious if he didn't actually hold power over an entire country:

"We want to know who killed [JFK]. Somebody by the name of Lee Harvey and then...another, Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey. Why did this Israeli kill the killer of Jack Kennedy?... The whole world should know that Kennedy wanted to investigate the nuclear reactor of the Israeli demon."
-- Muammar Qaddafi, addressing the UN for the first time. His personal translator collapsed 75 minutes into the 96-minute speech, reportedly shouting, "I just can't take it anymore."

(h/t Doonesbury)

felix triumphator et semper groovius

I realize that although I did comment on twitter, I didn't make it clear on the blog -- I did pass my dissertation defense. It went very well. Some important points and difficult questions came up, but more in the spirit of what I should do when I turn the study into a book rather than as commentaries on deficiencies of the thesis itself.

I was given a "Pass with Minor Revisions" (for the most part typos) and then my colleagues welcomed me into the circle of PhDs by banging on the table and chanting, "We accept him, we accept him! One of us, one of us! Gooble gobble."

defense

Well, today, Sept. 11 (!) at 4:30 PM EST, I will be defending my dissertation before a committee of five professors. Please say a prayer for me.

Today is the feast of St Cyprian, who actually shows up and hangs around in my second chapter as patron of the cathedral of Leon, the bishop of which at one point was also named Cyprian. The chapter section is called "The Two Cyprians." So maybe that's a good sign.

On the other hand, I could swear I saw vultures circling over me on Staten Island yesterday.

So, prayers, please.

the terrible turkish executioner (1904)

By Georges Méliès.

Melies - The terrible turkish executione
by kinetoscope

(h/t Voyages Extraodinaires).

rachid taha

I love this song by the French-Algerian singer Rachid Taha. The video is pretty funny as well. The lyrics can be found here.



He also does a version of "Rock the Casbah" in Arabic!

viva barney

belgian pulpits

O lazy August! When I should be preparing for my fall classes, or comparing microfilms of manuscripts for my research job, or even blogging out my bile towards the politics of the day, I find myself drooping in the heat and hearing the sweet siren call of the sofa, cat & nap. Yet there are things that I have yet to confess to blogdom - such as the fact that I had a surprise trip to Belgium two weeks ago. The reason why I shall leave to another day: I will just say that it involved a cat, a crisis, and a happy resolution. I took a number of photos when I was there, but today I want to share just one category -- beautiful wood and marble Baroque pulpits that seem to have been installed in every church that was around in the seventeenth century. I have no idea why there was a fancy-pulpit-carving craze in the Low Countries in this period, but I suspect it has something to do with preaching, the Counter-reformation and the fact that Belgium was right on the frontier between Protestant and Catholic Europe. Anyway, beautiful stuff and here are my photos.

oh no!

He wasn't really born in the United States! He isn't a legitimate medievalist! Where's the long form, Liam?



Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator (h/t TPM).

new post on frammenti e rovine

Dies Irae at the Elmore Ranch.

jazz mass

At America Magazine, a video about the Jazz Mass at my parish:

new (old) story...

at frammenti e rovine.

feast of st benedict

Happy Feast of St Benedict!

In his honor, I am embedding a 1965 video of The Monks -- like Benedict himself, ahead of their time.

new post on frammenti e rovine

The Lion in the Machine.

new blog for old stories

Many of my regular visitors have given a glance at my old ugly geocities site which features fragments of my creative writing. It seems that Yahoo is closing down geocities later this year, so to save my imaginative progeny, as well as to present them anew and more attractively, I have created an ancillary blog, frammenti e rovine. I will add one story/fragment to the blog at a time, starting with The Fog. My plan is to canibalize the old site, but who knows? New creations may appear. Enjoy.