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Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Lessons in Polyamory
I am trying hard not to be faithful. I am trying to keep my options open. I fall in love too easily. When I find someone I like I am all in right away, head down at the archives, taking notes for a biography. I need to learn a thing or two from the legendary Lost Generation…
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Iced Oysters and Iced Champagne: The Life of Isadora Duncan
When Isadora Duncan’s mother was pregnant with the dancer, she could eat only iced oysters and iced champagne. Isadora danced her first dances in the womb, she claimed, under the influence of those effervescent bubbles and slippery molluscs. And she kept right on drinking champagne and dining on luxuries until her dying day. She would buy buckets of champagne…
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Hunger March Party
The problem of hunger rarely plays a significant role in food blogs. The genre inclines toward fantasies of plenty rather than narratives of need. There are blogs devoted to cooking on a budget, but even they emphasize pleasure not deprivation. (And of course there are blogs about hunger as a social and political problem, but they don’t have much to…
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Is Blogging Scholarship?
Is Blogging Scholarship? A provocative question for a blog title, but not the deepest, which perhaps is a characteristic weakness of the blog as a medium. Ask a foreboding question, which hints that strongly negative views may follow after the link, in order to attract clicks. Whether you answer the question (or whether the question is well formulated) is…
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Charity and Sylvia now out on Kindle!
My new book, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, is now available for sale on Kindle. Publisher’s Weekly calls the book “beautifully written” and “an utterly absorbing love story.” Read the full review here. Charity and Sylvia is the tale of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage in early…
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The Apostle of Voluntary Restrictions: Raymond Duncan
I fell in love with Charity and Sylvia, the subjects of my last book. And I feel seduced by many of the figures of my new research, including problematic characters like Norman Douglas, a pederast as well as an epicure. But I will never fall for Raymond Duncan, who was not only a megalomaniac, but who also preached the…
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The Rendezvous of Epicures: New York
When I decided to expand my research from a focus on Paris to include Capri as well, I didn’t realize that this path would eventually bring me back home to New York. But Rose O’Neill, designer of the kewpie and former “Queen of Bohemia,” showed me the way. Historians, as a group, tend to be splitters not…
Café Brevoort, Capri, Djuna Barnes, drinking, Floyd Dell, Greenwich Village, Harry Leon Wilson, historicism, Hotel Brevoort, James Huneker, Jell-O, John Glassco, kewpie dolls, Kiki de Montparnasse, Louise Bryant, M. F. K. Fisher, Margaret Sanger, Morley Callaghan, New York City, Nina Hamnett, prohibition, Rose Cecil O’Neill, Thelma Wood, transnational history -
Lost Recipes of the Lost Generation
Thelma Ellen Wood was stupendously tall, sexually irresistible, and a wonderful cook with a propensity for rum and coke. Many authors who crossed paths with Wood wrote lavish accounts of her body as a dish, but none bothered to record her favorite recipes. – Most readers encounter Wood through the eyes of her jealous lover…
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A New World of Delights: Capri
After an hour in Naples, I had dreams of returning to rent an apartment for a month. After a morning in Capri, I had dreams of buying a villa and staying forever. I’m not the first visitor to feel that way. Virginia and Mamie Pepworth-Norton, the elderly American lesbian heroines of Vestal Fire, Compton Mackenzie’s 1927 roman…
Axel Munthe, Blue Lagoon, Capri, Compton Mackenzie, Friederich Krupp, history of food, history of sexuality, Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, John Clay MacKowen, Mark Twain, Norman Douglas, Romaine Brooks, Shirley Hazzard, South Wind, Suetonius, The Innocents Abroad, Tiberius, Venus in the Kitchen, Vestal Fire -
See Naples and Die
February kept me so busy with work that I had to learn a new French phrase: date limite. The French sounds a lot less morbid than deadline — or ligne morte — but I think the English better captures the anxiety I suffered wondering if I could get through everything. At least “deadline” suggests the possible cardiac outcomes of my…
Historian. Novelist. Greedy Woman. 