Last week I pointed out that Saint Lucy's feast day (December 13) is celebrated differently in Sweden and in Sicily. Sicily has processions and food, but Sweden has candles and breakfast in bed. Generally (meaning if you look it up on Google), this Swedish idea is attributed to the "fact" that Saint Lucy's feast day [...]
Dante and Saint Lucy
Saint Lucy's Feast is on December 13. It is celebrated in Sweden with young girls wearing wreaths in their hair and serving cinnamon buns to their family early in the morning. In Syracuse, in Sicily, in Italy where she lived, it is celebrated very publicly and over several weeks. But people want her to be [...]
My new obsession
For the last year I have been writing a book about Dante and the Divine Comedy. I am not an expert and that is the point of the book. I tried to read the Divine Comedy many years ago and got stuck. This time around I kept working on it until I understood how to [...]
Reading for Writing
I just finished reading The House of Green Turf - a romantic thriller by Ellis Peters. She is better known as the writer of the Brother Cadfael mysteries. I have read lots of commentary on how to become a (better) writer and one of the most consistent pieces of advice is to read in the [...]
Locked out
Just to say that I've been locked out of this site for months because my email was blacklisted. And how do you find out about something like that? Since they aren't emailing you ??? ... but I finally got through to WordPress and the problem is fixed. Of course it doesn't help that I have [...]
Janey's blog 