Odd Saint: Valentino

My source is Valentino; The Last Emperor, a recent documentary (Netflix Wonder) about the year leading to the great designer’s retirement.  It is a great movie because it lets us peep into the lives of the very rich, and the very creative.  There is also a strong subtext about the changing tides of fashion: now [...]

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Gold Saint: The Munro

Dearest Millicent,
As we have our odd saints, I offer a new category, a kind of hall of admiration and esteem, tentatively labeled Gold Saints.  The first great beacon? Alice Munro.  You know why.  Why even start the long list of sighs and pangs the great woman bestows in us? Well, today she delighted me in [...]

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Odd Saints: Daisy Steiner (a la Jessica Hynes)

Dear Millicent,
As a Hulu wonder, I have discovered the Simon Pegg/Jessica Hynes vehicle Spaced.  In doing so, I think I may have found a female equivalent of Jez from Peep Show.  Here, both roommates (Pegg and Hynes) are Jez, but it is a special delight to see the female character take hold.  She is ambitious, [...]

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Respect the Cock

Dear CF,
I learned yesterday that in my city one can legally own no more than 12 chickens. This puzzled me. Why 12? At first I thought it might have to do with egg packaging—grocery stores do tend to sell chicken thighs and breasts in packages of six or twelve. Maybe we’ve just internalized the base-12 [...]

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A Very Great Company of Radiating Pencils

Dear CF,
It has always been a great fantasy of mine to draw well.  It has also been a great fantasy of mine to work in a messy and unhygienic laboratory where Kimwipes and agar have not yet been invented, where there aren’t Biohazard containers or sharps disposal boxes, and where one could (not that one [...]

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Odd Saint: Louisa Trotter, The Duchess of Duke Street

There are lots of reasons for Gemma Jones’ performance as Louisa Trotter to gain an Odd Saint nomination, but I think it can be summed up for two reasons alone:

I just spent three hours crying while watching the miniseries (I’m on season 2, and the whole thing has been fairly brutal).
They drink champagne like water [...]

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Odd Saint: Cordelia Gray

I just discovered PD James this week while doing my best to lie flat and keep my lungs in my chest (I caught one of the mutant colds of the season).  Have you heard of PD James before? Apparently, she is a bestselling grand dame of mystery fiction.  The book I picked up was An [...]

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Crooked Piece of Man. Or, Odd Saint: Sir Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne was born in 1605 in London’s Cheapside. He went to Oxford, became an apprentice-physician, but stayed invested in religion and what it meant to be a religious practitioner of the healing arts. He ponders—often thoughtfully and sanely—his own temptation to follow typically “Catholic” conventions, like kneeling or removing his cap in church, [...]

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The Massive Continuity of Ducks

Dearest CF,
I enthusiastically second your nomination of Harriet Vane for Odd Saint, maybe the oddest of them all. This morning I’ve been thinking about Rereadings—that delicious readerly indulgence that Anne Fadiman explores in her book of the same name—and about the particular pleasures of rereading Gaudy Night.
Why does it  reward revisitings so richly?  For one [...]

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Odd Saint: Harriet Vane

Dear M.,
I wasn’t sure whether to title this one to the grand Dorothy Sayers, or to her body on the page, Harriet Vane.  Sayers is sure to get her own Odd Saint tribute soon (did you know she wrote Guiness ads?), but it is Mizz Vane that is making me dizzy at the moment.   As [...]

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