Bloggogriff

Owen and I have gradually been exploring the museums around Dundee. Today we went on our second visit to the McManus Galleries . The McManus is an incredible mishmash of a museum - some old art, some contemporary art, some natural history, some cultural history, and some fairly random collections of stuff that various colonizers brought back from across the globe during the Age of Empire (shrunken heads! seriously!). One of the "stars" of the collection is the complete skeleton of a humpback whale that swam up the River Tay in 1883. "The Famous Tay Whale," it is called. Or would you rather look at artifacts from the Roman period? Maybe an authentic Dundee Football Club uniform from the 1950s, or is Victorian portraiture more to your taste? (Dante Rossetti was the biggest name I noticed among the permanent collection, although I'll admit to being less than expert on Scottish painters.) The big draw right now is Titian's "Diana and Actaeon," which t...

A number of people have been asking me lately when I would get around to posting something new. Pictures of the apartment? Tales of adventure? Vicarious experiences of an exciting kind? The truth is, life's been a bit tough the last few weeks, and I haven't had the mental energy to post. Our stuff still hasn't arrived, so the apartment has about as much visual interest as a room at the Holiday Inn. We don't have a car yet, so there haven't been many trips further than the fifteen-minute bus ride to the city center (and I keep forgetting to take the camera when we do go out). But more fundamentally, I've just been wretchedly, woefully homesick. Homesickness, as my mother would undoubtedly attest, is not a condition to which I have often been subject. High school summers away at GHP and TASP only convinced me that a good thousand miles or so from home would be an excellent location for college. A junior semester at Oxford not only cured the depression I had often ...