Mary Beard
I was once enshrined on the “Worst of the Web” list of another art blogger (who shall remain nameless). So just at the moment when I’ve decided to slow down (have I done that yet?), it was nice to make the “excellent blog” list of a colleague I greatly admire, Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge, classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and the “wickedly subversive commentator” of A Don’s Life—a wide-ranging blog with a fixation on ancient Greeks and Romans.
Mary had generously singled me out previously on BBC radio. Her feisty posts always attract a long string of comments, including this one reponding to Sunday’s “excellent blog” post by another erudite blogger, the anonymous “Heresiarch” at Heresy Corner:
Interesting list. By a strange sort of circularity, something I wrote
was picked up by Lee Rosenbaum‘s CultureGrrl several months ago, thus
leading to my first moderate “hit”. The blogosphere is smaller than you
think.
But Mary, did you catch that other comment, repeating the “too much blogging can kill you” theory? Keep your vitriol up, cholesterol down, or else “blog slog” could turn into blog clog.
Meanwhile, we can enjoy surfing Mary’s picks, which is what brought me to the hilarious “20 Things to Do With Matzah” video (below), courtesy of Dorothy King‘s PhDiva, another of Mary’s “excellent blogs.” Those of you (like me) who have just gotten back to eating bread again will appreciate this, whether you have Ph.D.s or not. Who needs Adam Sandler? We’ve now got Michelle Citrin and William Levin (or is it William un-Leaven)?