Elatia Harris This is the second in an open-ended series of articles on four millennia of saffron history and use. Saffron Mother, Part I looks at the culture that produced the famed saffron-harvesting frescoes on the island of Thera, painted 3600 years ago, in the time leading up to the Thera Eruption, the largest geological…

Elatia Harris I’m due for a significant birthday this week, the one that most women associate with the butt-end of their child-bearing potential. But I shall observe it in the same way I have observed all my birthdays back to the age of 18: I shall spend the day naked in front of a full-length…

Elatia Harris Valentine’s Day approaches. Are we a romantic bunch?  Or, what? Last month, the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge was issued. Learning about the Museum of Broken Relationships in Berlin (it really does exist…), I asked readers to write in with an artifact that deserved to go on view there. It need not be a…

Elatia Harris Around last Newton’s Day, I began considering what to write about in this space once 2008 got underway. It was only natural to think of upcoming holidays that might also be headed for revaluation in the clear light of reason; if Newton had supplanted the Christ Child, then surely Marie Curie ought to…

With apologies to T.C. Boyle Elatia Harris In the light from the only good lamp in the room, my widower sits on his end of our green couch, reading Proust.  I used to read it, too — I’d sit in the dark, scanning for the sexy bits, making Proust go fast.  But my widower’s on…

Elatia Harris Since my early parole from jail — where I’ve done forty of a ninety-day sentence for public lewdness – will take effect on the condition that I attend group therapy, I hardly demurred. It wasn’t the first time I’d been invited into a behavior mod routine, and I entered it gladly, full of…

This post is dedicated to Asad Raza, the first 3QD foodie to ask me about truffles. Elatia Harris The two images above come from distant eras when that rare and coveted underground fungus, the truffle, was in more abundant supply than at present. The gatherer on the left, in the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a medieval herbal…

All photos courtesy of BibliOdyssey. Click on single images to be taken to the page on which the image appears. Paired and triple images are numbered, with links appearing at the end of the article. By Elatia Harris It’s going on 3 a.m., and — quickly! — you need to look at something unfamiliar, striking…

Elatia Harris It’s a day to remember in Cornish, New Hampshire, at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site. The sky is the blue of stained glass at Chartres Cathedral, an impossible color too vivid to be entirely without edge. The sun is high, the shadows are deep, the birches silvery white. Mysteriously, though autumn has arrived…

Elatia Harris Long before my time, my mother was a young artist traveling in Italy, where every year for more than a decade she contrived to spend a cheap but luxurious low season. The dollar was not then merely strong, like a sick man set on a good day, but truly mighty, Americans the affable…

Elatia Harris In the studio on his farm in Manchester, Michigan, Keith Hill makes musical instruments, has done for 35 years.  Until recently, most of those instruments were harpsichords played by professional musicians all over the world.  But then he began questing for the maker’s grail – a violin from his own hands to equal…

Elatia Harris     Last Monday my colleague Michael Blim wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision of a few days earlier – Parents v. Seattle Schools – which would start to expunge any consideration of race from the way our children were assigned to public schools no sooner than many of us were firing up…

Elatia Harris Last weekend in Reykjavik, the renowned French street theatre company, Royal de Luxe, enacted the latest episode in The Saga of the Giants, a outdoor drama for colossal, crane-operated marionettes that has since 1993 unfolded in continental Europe, the UK, Africa and South America. (For a detailed look at the company and a…

When in the fall of 2002 Thalassa Ali was introduced to the crowd gathered for her debut reading at the Brookline Booksmith, a taste-making independent bookseller in Brookline, Ma., her agent, Jill Kneerim, admitted taking many months even to open the manuscript of A Singular Hostage, Book I in Ali’s Paradise Trilogy.  “Thalassa had by…

Elatia Harris Until 1967, when the excavations of Prof. Spyridon Marinatos began to bring it to light, the clock had been stopped on the settlement of Akrotiri, on the Aegean island of Thera – better known as Santorini – for about 3600 years. Volcanic ash from the largest geological event of ancient times, several hundred…

Before reading another line, watch the video, especially if you think you’d rather not. One is hungry for a few facts now. That was the French street theatre company Royal de Luxe in London last May.  The show was The Sultan’s Elephant, created in honor of the Jules Verne centenary in 2005, and performed that…

On a winter’s night in Paris long ago, I ducked into the Grand Vefour – then a charmingly approachable temple of gastronomy, free of the rather strained merriment that signals too much money being spent – and, as one of seven guests of a rich man, sat down to a dinner that would leave me…