I have cramps. And a headache. And a sore wrist. And I am sleepy.

[marnanightingale]

So, light on content today.

Celebrated Fat Tuesday by going out with iclysdale to the outdoor shops. I now have some new light hikers, three merino tshirts and a big floppy knit cardigan, all of which I am Very Pleased with.

Tomorrow Lent begins; I think I shall give a lot of clothing to charity.

Then we came home and made pancakes (of course) and sausage and bacon and watched Locks and Quays, which is a charming little BBC show about travelling by narrowboat through the Leeds-Manchester canal.

Tomorrow iclysdale is off to Memramcook, New Brunswick, a place I once narrowly escaped a life of quiet domestic desperation in, back when I was 24 or so.

For now, I am going to bed, but here are some Robertson Davies quotes:

"Charity is the last lesson we learn. That is why so much of the charity we show people is retrospective."

The Manticore

The Gypsies are not a numerous people, and so the statistics concerning their extermination are unimpressive; if you are impressed chiefly by numbers: there were just a few less than half a million who died thus, but when one human creature dies a whole world of hope and memory and feeling dies with him. To be robbed of the dignity of a natural death is a terrible deprivation.

Half a million Gypsies dead, at the command of this gadjo world; who weeps for them? I do, sometimes.

I do.

The Rebel Angels

... William Prynne's Histrio-Matrix, the Player's Scourge or Actor's Tragedie (1632), a fat book of more than a thousand pages, which forms an admirable compilation of all the Puritan arguments against the theatre. The work is a classic of abuse and a monument to the misplaced scholarship and zeal of its author. Unluckily for Prynne he referred to women actors as 'notorious whores' meaning a group of French actresses who had appeared at Blackfriars in 1629; the reference was taken to apply to Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies who were about to perform a pastoral at Whitehall. She made a Star Chamber matter of it and Prynne was fined 35,000 pounds, set in the pillory, shorn of his ears, branded and imprisoned for life. The SL on his cheeks he construed as Stigmata Laudis [marks of glory] and bore bravely; it is pleasant to know that the life sentence was revoked by the Parliament of the Commonwealth, for although Prynne was a small-souled and cantankerous zealot with a maggot about homosexuality, he was a courageous fighter and a master of invective.

Shakespeare's Boy Actors

It is particularly displeasing to hear professional critics using the term "layman" to describe people who are amateurs and patrons of those arts with which they are themselves professionally concerned. The fact that the critic gets money for knowing something, and giving public expression to his opinion, does not entitle him to consider the amateur, who may be as well informed and as sensitive as himself, an outsider.

A Voice from the Attic


Also, I understand that to the south of us there were Goings-On of a Political Nature today. Have some mood music, with my love: Save This House, Spirit of the West.

And so to bed.

Comments

[spiffikins]

<3's SOTW

/meanders off to find her faithlift album...ooh, and the one with the symphony....

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

I've read Histriomastix. It is a masterpiece of batshit.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Is it batshit enough that I want to read it?

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

Not really. All you really need to read is the title page; the rest of it is just variations on a theme. It actually gets really boring after a while if you aren't reading it as part of a thesis on antitheatricality.

(Anyway, I don't think there are any editions out there unless you have EEBO access...)

[eruthros]

*g* I listened to a lot of Spirit of the West during the 2006 mid-term elections here to your south. "Save This House" and also "D for Democracy." Because SotW = awesome.

[white_hart]

I do love the little boating programmes they do. I always seem to manage to miss them, but occasionally they have a whole series on cable on a Saturday afternoon.

(For this, you get the icon of me working a lock!)

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*swoons*

Lock-keeping = hawtness. :)