Two Miles High

The Woman in the Bower

'The Lady of Shalott'

Rosamond was always a tender domestic image, a doomed image. Tennyson may have had something like this in mind when he wrote the poem, The Lady of Shalott (1842), where his heroine tires of life in the nunnery and goes out into the world to experience her carnality and mortality.

Homer's Women

Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott'

The Lady is a lonely and doomed figure and Tennyson used her in several poems and plays, just as he used Fair Rosamond. This painting of The Lady is by John William Waterhouse in 1888. The implication I'm making is that The Lady resembles Calypso, or even Penelope,

Poison Pen Letters

'The Lady Vanishes'

The IMDB one-liner for Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is "While traveling in continental Europe, a rich young playgirl realizes that an elderly lady seems to have disappeared from the train." Echoes of Agatha Christie's disappearance? Vanishing women is a fascinating metaphor in itself,

Voices and Saints

The Late Medieval 'Book of Hours'

The image below shows the Archangel Saint Michael in action over Mont-St. Michel in "The Book of Hours" (Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry), which was illuminated during Joan of Arc's lifetime. Books of Hours were in their heyday 1200-1500. They were the personal prayer

Beauty & the Beast

'The Legend of Briar Rose'

The Legend of Briar Rose is a series of paintings by Edward Burne-Jones (exhibited in 1890) that evoke the Sleeping Beauty legend. Here are three of the four, showing the briar rose overwhelming everything. The painting above shows Sleeping Beauty herself. The second shows a knight who has fought his

The Woman in the Bower

'The Lion in Winter'

The Lion in Winter film posters from 1968 are above and below. Curiously Peter O'Toole had played Henry II earlier, in 1964, in Becket. Mediocre movie, although it was successful commercially and it won three Academy Awards, perhaps because of its great cast: Peter O'Toole, Katharine

Precious Bodily Fluids

The Little Ice Age

Many of the events in this chapter took place against the backdrop of a mini-Ice Age in Europe, from the 16th century or even earlier through the mid-19th, being at its worst between 1560 and 1660. In 1608, the Thames froze over at London. It did so again several more

Sacred Prostitute

'The Lord of the Rings'

Tolkien's and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings is about the renunciation of power, of getting rid of the Ring. Evil must be destroyed - a mainstream Christian vision - and it must be destroyed in England. In Oxford perhaps? Now, I acknowledge that many

The House of Incest

The Lost Generation

The "Lost Generation" was really all over by the time Anaïs Nin finally managed to get something going in the early 1930's... But were they really lost? It's a vanity expression really. The expression derives from Hemingway, shown above, who attributed it to Gertrude

Sacred Prostitute

The Lost Tomb of Jesus

In March 2007, the Discovery Channel show produced by James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici declared that Jesus’ family tomb had been discovered (back in 1980) and that Yeshua (Joshua/Jesus) son of Joseph, Maria (Mary), Mariamene e Mara (Mary Magdalene), Judah son of Jesus, Jose (Joseph, brother of Jesus), and

A Tale of Two Women

'The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (México), Diego, Me and Señor Xolotl'

My favorite Frida Kahlo painting is from 1949: El abrazo de amor de el universo, la tierra (México), yo, Diego, y el Señor Xolotl.

Vampires in Venice

'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa'

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Polish nobleman Jan Potocki, is one of literature's least known masterpieces. It has been compared with The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights, but I would go with From Dusk till Dawn 1-3. Or Don Quixote. Or Borges as filmed

Alice's Mirrors

'The Marquise of O'

Heinrich von Kleist, one of the most fascinating of German writers, committed suicide here on the shores of Kleiner (Little) Wannsee in 1811, near Potsdam, in what is now the distant outskirts of Berlin. He was only 34 and he was not alone. After a final picnic, the former military

From Russia with Love

'The Master and Margarita'

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century and still so few people know about it. Maybe the Russian movie of 2024 will help reverse that, if it ever gets released here. It was a box office hit in Russia in

How to Look at a Naked Lady

The May Queen

Lady Godiva fits comfortably into the folk traditions of old England, which persist today as local communities revive them. Dating back to Celtic and pre-Christian times, May Day was associated with the end of the winter, the coming of the sun and springtime sexual urges. Some would say the Maypole

Precious Bodily Fluids

The Mignons

Were Italian, Spanish, Gascon and French cultures in the 16th century sophisticated but decadent? That perception certainly arose in Elizabethan England, in the decades before Shakespeare's plays. In France, for example, courtly behavior at the court of Henri III from 1574 until 1589 scandalized the English, with the

Voices and Saints

The Military Genius of Joan of Arc

Ostensibly a peasant girl from the provinces, she demonstrated superb tactical skills in warfare at Orléans and in subsequent skirmishes and she had an intuitive grasp of how to manage the propaganda war, knowing how and when to threaten the English generals with ultimatums and divine retribution, how to make

Poison Pen Letters

'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd'

This bestseller of 1926 ensured that mystery writing and detective fiction would never be the same again. Christie broke the traditional barrier between writer and reader, the “fourth wall,” completely baffling the reader until near the end when Hercule Poirot indicts the storyteller himself. The shock waves were felt far

The Judgment of Paris

The Noctambule

Literally “sleepwalker” or “nightwalker” or perhaps “night crawler” in French – referring to those who like to ramble in the city at night, hence “noctambulism.” The Noctambule is a venerable tradition in French Gothic arts, music and literature that had its heyday back in the 19th century when it referred mainly

Homer's Women

Homer's 'Odyssey'

Although attributed to the poet Homer, who may have lived around 700 B.C.E., the Odyssey was forged into its brilliant form by oral storytellers over many hundreds of years. Then it was written down and reshaped again and again. Set in a time when a pantheon of gods

Alice's Mirrors

'The Origin of the World'

Enter through the narrow gate. The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road is clear, and many choose to travel it. But how narrow is the gate that leads to life, how rough the road, and how few there are who find it – Matthew 7:13-14. Is there

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

The Pearl of Great Price

The Pearl of Great Price was a popular biblical image in the 19th century - even Melville used it in one of his unpublished poems ("the Little Pearl of Price") - and Hawthorne names Hester's daughter Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Long before this, the pearl

Homer's Women

'The Penelopiad'

Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca after 19 years. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad asks: would Penelope want him back? Is marriage an outdated institution, better suited to the days when people died in their 40s and 50s after raising children? With longer life-spans do we become bored with our

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

The Philosopher's Stone

The Philosopher's Stone entered western European alchemy from the Arab and Islamic world, where the Black Stone of Mecca was held sacred. The Philosopher's Stone seems like a secular attempt to find spiritual values in precious stones in much the same way the Church encouraged relics

Precious Bodily Fluids

The Plague

As Romeo discovered in Mantua, Italian cities had sophisticated quarantine systems in place, to keep some people in and others out. Quarantine derives from the Italian "quaranta giorni" (40 days) and the first lazaret (plague hospital) was built in Venice in 1423 on the island known today as