Clowning Around
It’s confusing, being an “Italian American” visiting the homeland for the first time. The culinary staples of your childhood are only available in the most touristy trattorie, and it’s honestly difficult to find that superlative meal you were promised. You wander around Milan or Naples and wonder why your idiot of an ancestor decided that…
Her Birthday
It’s hard, sometimes, to put things into words. I’ve been stuck for a long time on that Stoppard quote—we are forced to work in a language which makes up in obscurity that which it lacks in style. It is, I think, a true observation, but a bit difficult for a stylist like myself to swallow.…
An Ambiguous Defense
One of the weirdest things I learned as a Boy Scout is that concealment in the dark is relative. That is, if you’re trying to hide in a shadow, it doesn’t actually matter how dark the spot you’re standing in is, so long as the spot in which the person who is trying to see…
Memorial Day, 2024
Two and a half years out, my writing has started to stall. There are only so many big ideas one can develop to the degree that they can be written about, after all, and I’m starting to feel like the well is running a bit dry. The fundamental, base fear is probably something like imposter…
Imagining Truth
I talk to gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist, too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor…. Truth is a matter of the imagination.…
Defining History’s Future
For the past two years, as soon as June came around, I went into the AHA job ads database and access the data for the last year, the first step in writing the AHA’s annual report on academic hiring. For someone who completed his PhD in 2021—in the midst of what I, having an affinity…
Have Etymology—Will Travel
Freelancer is a word with a clear medieval connotation—has lance, will travel—but subtly different from a knight-errant, which suggests the temporary wandering associated with a noble quest. A freelancer is a knight for hire. Its semantic range cannot now be separated from Akira Kurosawa’s stories of ronin and the Hollywood Western’s gunslinger. Both are linked to…
We Will All Go Together When We Go
In 1973, Thomas Andrew Lehrer quit comedy because “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.” Those born after Lehrer’s retirement are likely to be familiar with him because he once sang the periodic table of elements to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” from Gilbert…
Will History Judge?
There’s a lot of outrage going around these days. With all the shouting heads on cable news and algorithmically encouraged doomscrolling on social media, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment. Outrage sells—or at least it gets people to pay attention long enough to click. Consequently, outraged declarations that something is a scandal…
Huzzah for the King!
Everyone assumes that I must despise a Renaissance faire. You know, those things where a bunch of people go into a ramshackle pseudotown in the forest somewhere to dress in a variety of historical or fantasy clothes, guzzle mead, and abuse the English language. Huzzah! They assume this because I am a medievalist, but even…
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Mapper Mundi 