Sunday Snippet

Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende

I'd been looking around the house for weeks for my old copy of this book. There are a lot of things I'm looking for these days, in fact. This one was easy to replace, the other things, not so much.  I ordered it used from Amazon and it arrived in perfect hardcover condition for the less than the price I paid for the paperback when it was first released as such.

It is a delicious book full of stories, autobiographical detail, myths, lore, poetry, recipes and sweet little paintings about food and its connection to anything and everything erotic and human. 

I will share with you an excerpt from the introduction. (I could not find the painting Allende chose for this section, so I substituted with one by Frida Kahlo.  Further note:  I saw the painting up-close and personal at Tate Modern in 2005. One of the highlights of my museum going adventures.)

 The fiftieth year of our life is like

         the last hour of dusk, 

when the sun has set and done turns

naturally toward reflection.

In my case, however, dusk incites me to sin,

and perhaps for that reason,

in my fiftieth year I find myself reflecting

on my relationship

with food and eroticism; the weaknesses

of the flesh that most tempt me are not, alas,

those I have practiced most.

Follow-up to The Friday Evening Nudes

The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil

Thanks to the curiosity of Linda and Mojo, I was smitten to do a little research on the Ary Scheffer painting I posted last night on the Friday Evening Nudes.

Being a lazy blogger, I didn't even dig far enough to get the title, which would have been instructional in and of itself.

Interesting that I should post this painting pretty much on the heels of The Seven Deadly Sins meme as it depicts Dante's lovers from The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto V. And I didn't even know the title until I started to do a little research!

Dante then asks particularly to speak to two sinners who are together, and Virgil tells him to call them to him in the name of love. They come, and one thanks Dante for his pity and wishes him peace, and she then tells their story. She reveals first that a lower circle of Hell waits for the man who murdered them. With bowed head, Dante tells Virgil he is thinking of the "sweet thoughts and desires" that brought the lovers to this place. Calling Francesca by name, he asks her to explain how she and her lover were lured into sin...read more here from Canto V

As for the Brulov painting entitled Virsavia by Karl Brulov (or Brullov as I've also found it spelled), all I could find was the alternate title Bathsheba, wife David of the Hebrew bible. I'm assuming the rapt admirer is a slave attending Bathsheba in her bath. WP thinks the slave may be female. What do you think?


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Dogs of Lust - The The

I'm playing Kay's Seven Deadly Sins meme. The first of which is - Lust.

So because I'm a pathetically lazy blogger, my contribution is a song. Kinda lame, I know but put on your headphones and turn it up. You know you want to listen to it...