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The eclectic scholar Kathryn S. returned to join host Nick Jeelvy on the latest broadcast of The Writers’ Bloc for a discussion on Orientalism — what happens when Western man gazes eastwards — and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)
Napoleon’s North African-attired Consular Guard: a hard look to pull off
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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
2. Rage Militaire: Franco-American Zouave-mania
“His parents taught him to be a cavalier, but the life of the Zou-zou he much did prefer.” — anonymous Confederate verse
“The city,” one Richmond, Virginia newspaperman enthused, “was yesterday thrown into a paroxysm of excitement by the arrival of the New Orleans Zouaves — a battalion of six hundred and thirty, as unique and picturesque looking Frenchmen as ever delighted the oculars of Napoleon the three.” (more…)
George Barbier, “Eventails (Fans)”
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Twentieth Century Studios is threatening to release a remake of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937). And if Kenneth Branaugh’s previous outing as the Hercule Poirot character in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express was anything to go by, best to avoid it. (more…)
Winslow Homer, The Woodcutter, 1891.
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I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods sometime in college. I found it more Flannery O’Connor than Marvel Studios, but it’s hardly surprising that the latter interpretation seems to have driven the new television series’ production team (but I haven’t watched). (more…)
Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: a modern take on the motifs of the weird nineteenth century.
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It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind;
Still we be the children of the heather and the wind.
Far away from home, O it’s still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie. [1]
Even below the Missouri-Compromise Line, the mornings now have a delicious coolness, faltering on the edge of a “chill,” and I found myself yearning for an old-fashioned, nineteenth-century ghost story. (more…)
