I'm RL swamped, and quite exhausted, hence not mucih in the way of fannish existence. (Also, even while the impeachment came to its predictable ending, there in fact politicians in Germany competing with US Republicans in spinelessness and lack of ethics as well as common sense. I might make a separate entry on what happened in Thuringia and is still ongoing, if ever I find the time.) But the latest DW episode was great fun, and thus I briefly resurface to say so.

Not least because I actually was dissatisfied with Big Finish's take on Mary Shelley; this was one of the rare cases where I really prefer the tv version. And while the other times when a genre tv show tackles the Haunted Summer, I had the impression they were confusing watching Ken Russell's movie Gothic with research (looking at you, Highlander), this time the scriptwriter clearly had actually read up on what was happening on those rainy days in 1816. The original quotes worked in weren't just the poetry but from letters. (Mind you, I could quibble with some artistic liberties, beyond, err, the general premise of this being a Doctor Who episode with monsters, but I could see the point of them and they were minor. Including the one where Byron in rl had a deformed foot and thus would have been unable to dance. (There was a reason why he was majorly into swimming.) (As opposed to poor Shelley.)

(( Very minor other quibbling. )

"Famous work of literature inspired by RL event" can get obnoxious if it's, say, Jane Austen meeting a RL Mr. Darcy. So what DW did re: Mary and Frankenstein was a delightful surprise for me. ( Spoilers will write a story to curdle the blood. )

Overall, easily my favourite episode of the season so far.

Monday saw me visiting another bunch of dead Victorians - or perhaps more accurately dead Georgians who made it into Victoria's reign and some additional Victorians - at Kensal Green Cemetery, more on that below the cut complete with photos; and before you ask, that is the end of my morbid cemetery exploration during this particular London trip.

On the other hand, hitting the London theatres continues; on Monday I also met up with kangeiko and saw A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney at the National. Neither of us knew anything about the play other than the name of the author, the title and that it was now considered a modern classic. My main reason for wanting to see it was that Lesley Sharpe plays one of the two leading roles. Now that I've watched it, though, I am in awe that a play like this could be created and staged in 1958, by a female author, and so utterly unlike the simultanous plays of John Osborne & Co. In fact, depressingly it still stands out compared with much of today's theatre, tv and cinema output, many decades later. First of all, the main focus is on a complex mother-daughter relationship. Secondly, the daughter, Jo, has an affair with a black sailor, Jimmie, and later has a gay friend, Geoffrey, who moves in with her. The mother, Helen, had Jo when she was young and the two at times act more like bickering sisters than like mother and daughter, with Jo as the responsible one; Helen is also in and out of relationships which more or less provide her income. Inevitably, Jo, too, gets pregnant. And yet: Nobody committs suicide or beats each other up or gets murdered. No one is slut shamed. And not because anyone is living in an idyll or life is kind. The program had a line about the characters being "different types of survivors in a world that doesn't throw anyone lifebelts", and that's true, and yet it is not a cynical play. The characters and their relationships come across as three dimensional and true, and no one feels like a vehicle for the author's rant on issue X. Now I'm all the more frustrated Shelagh Delaney didn't go on to write many more plays (though she did write one more play and some radio and tv scripts, as a quick googling tells me). What a talent! Yes, some writers have only one perfect work in them - see also Harper Lee - but those are the exception; most, given the opportunity, can do more.

As for the production, I thought both Kate O'Flynn as Jo - who is on stage in most scenes and so really needs to be good - and Lesley Sharpe as Helen were fabulous, and so was their supporting cast. The staging and costumes went for the time the play was written in and set, i.e. late 50s, and yet it didn't feel "period" in the sense of feeling distanced; it never played into nostalgia, being too sharp and witty for that. In conclusion: if you're in London for the next two months, try and catch it!

Yesterday was no theatre day because I was invited to a wonderful friend of mine for dinner, a lovely old lady who is one of the most amazing people I've known, and who'll be 90 next year. She's originally from Munich where her father was a very respected lawyer. You may have seen his photo, because when the Third Reich arrived, her father made the mistake believing in justice and complained to the police about harrasment. In response, they made him run through Munich in his underwear with a sign around his neck saying "I am a Jewish pig and will never complain to the police again". (Last year at the anniversary of the so-called "Reichskristallnacht" the photo got reprinted in a lot of Munich-based media again.) Anyway, Bea's parents then got her out of the country via the Kindertransport to England, hence her ending up here. I met her over a decade ago and we've been in contact ever since; she's so full of life and charming and optimistic that you're moved and humbled by her very presence if it wasn't that she's far too animated and drawing response not to enjoy oneself just for the good company.
(I cried once anyway, years ago, because sometimes the awful horror of it all overwhelms you anew.)

Anyway, yesterday evening I visited her and her family, and we had a great evening. It included an anecdote about an encounter with the royals apropos a Holocaust museum/exhibition opening here in London, where Bea and other surviving children who came to England through the Kindertransport had been invited and were presented to the Queen and Prince Philipp. Said exhibition included a model of Auschwitz, with the huts all in white, according to Bea. Says Philipp, gesturing towards the Auschwitz model: "And where do you live now? Not there anymore, right?"

.....

Tuesday was good for hanging out with friends, though; lunch I spent with kathyh at a pub which was an amazing relic of the turn of the (19th into 20th) century full of art deco. Originally we met at the Modern Tate and were planning to have lunch there, but it was too crowded, it being half term in Britain this week, which I hadn't known but which explained all the children I encountered. Generally speaking, I prefer the Tate Britain because of the Williams Turner and Blake represented there, but I did want to see the Richard Hamilton exhibition, which included his series of pictures called "Swingeing London" (sic, it's a pun) using the photo of Robert Fraser and Mick Jagger handcuffed to each other when arrested during the 1967 drug bust, and his design for the Beatles' White Album. (The cover, obviously, is just white, but the exhibition also had the original for the inside poster that came with the LP and was based on a collage of photographs culled from their archives. Today in the age of the cd (well, the age of Itunes, I guess,now), you can't make out individual photos,far too tiny, but in the big A3 size original where all the photos are in their original size, too, you can, and my inner Beatles obsessive was not a bit embarrassed to be able to identify many of them. (Both the original cover design and the original inside poster design were said to be on loan from a "private collection", which I guess means Paul McCartney.)

And now for the graves of Victorian writers (guess who still gets flowers and who doesn't?) and the sisters, wives and best buddies of Mr. Mad, Bad and Dangerous To Know himself, Lord Byron (those would be the Georgians I mentioned earlier. And because they are adorable, some of Sunday morning's pelicans, whose ancestors supposedly came to St. James Park with the Restoration and Charles II.

( Collins versus Thackeray versus Wilde (mother of Oscar) )

It turns out I was mistaken about the total absence of cats in Venice. This noon when strolling I spotted not only one but two: a black and white and an absolutely beautiful and large red. Clearly the later's name must be Tiziano.

Yesterday I took the one and only daily boat to San Lazzaro degli Armeni. Which used to be leper's colony and a Benedictine hospital, and then it was given to an Armenian order instead in the 18th century. Whereupon it turned into one of the central sources of Armenian culture world wide. This was where books in Armenian were printed at a time they were forbidden under the Turks in the Ottoman empire. They have the third largest collection of Armenian manuscripts and the first in terms of quality anywhere, including a fifth century one, written only twenty years or so after the Armenian alphabet was invented. There are some non-Armenian manuscripts there as well, such as a thirteenth century Qu'ran or a letter by the Russian Czar Peter the Great, but mainly it's an Armenian treasure hoard. It's also still a monastery, albeit like in most places in the world a shrinking one - sixteen monks and four novices, and like I said, there is only one boat from Venice per day, and you're only allowed to enter the monastery as part of a guided tour.

It's a big red building rising from the sea, and there is a small sailing boat in the mini harbor where the vaporetto parks, called, inevitably, Armenia. The interior is restrained baroque, with a beautiful general library, where they keep the printed books, an extra modern room where they keep the ancient hand written manuscripts, two small rooms with items relating to Armenian culture such as the sword of the last Armenian king, the death mask of the founder of the order, paintings by the brother of one of the order who went on to become a Romantic painter in Russia, etc., and one beautiful study room in is named after Byron (as in Lord Byron, the poet), who used to come here for eight months on a daily basis for a crash course in Armenian. He also helped the monks composing the first Armenian-English dictionary during the years he lived in Venice (Just in case you were wondering whether Byron was interested in things other than sex, drugs and rock'n roll poetry.) Byron's room boasts of the most unusual item in the monastery's collection, which wasn't there yet when he was: a mummy. Said mummy came to the monks via the Armenian Boghos Bey, who was Mehmed Ali's secretary of foreign affairs and trade. (Mehmed Ali being the ruler of Egypt at the time.) Boghos Bey, in turn, got it from one of the earliest archaeologists, Giovanni Belzoni; Belzoni and his wife Sarah lived for a while in Boghos Bey's house when they first came to Cairo, and this was Belzoni's way of saying thank you. Which is how the body of an Egyptian priest ended up in an Armenian monastery on an island near Venice. They have put the casket in an extra glass container, so you do see the actual body, which is wrapped in an undestroyed net made of glass pearls, basic colour blue and patterns with the obvious suspects as symbols - the scarabeus, most prominently. Bear in mind that in 1825, nobody could decypher hieroglyphs yet; this was still to come. Nobody had any idea who he was, this long ago dead man, when he came to San Lazzaro. The mumified body is black, a bit smaller than your avarage person today, and one has to wonder, doesn't one, who will look at our own dead bodies in three thousand years. If anyone.

You can see the Venetian skyline from San Lazzaro, but if Byron really at one point swam the whole way back to the Canale Grande, as local legend has it, this was quite a feat. (Byron was majorly into swimming, not least because that was one sport where his lame foot was inconsequential.) Much closer is the next island, San Servolo, where there used to the hospital for the victims of the plague, and then for the insane. These days there is still a museum for mental illness there, but mostly it's part of the university.

Speaking of things university, while the International Festival of Literature is over, there are still lectures going on, including one tonight by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson of Shakespeare scholarship fame, in which they promise to demolish the Oxfordian heresy. While they're preaching to the choir with me, I'm looking forward to hearing them!

diotimah reminded me of this from Beppo:

'Tis known, at least it should be, that throughout
All countries of the Catholic persuasion,
Some weeks before Shrove Tuesday comes about,
The people take their fill of recreation,
And buy repentance, ere they grow devout,
However high their rank, or low their station,
With fiddling, feasting, dancing, drinking, masking,
And other things which may be had for asking.;)“


(See: I told you Byron can be terrific fun to read and is anything but a "Byronic" writer in the usual sense.) Now I tend to avoid Carnival, or Fasching, as it's called in Southern Germany, but there were two exceptions. You might say I've had the two perfect Carnival experiences already: Venice and Rio de Janeiro. Afterwards, anything else can be only an anticlimax.




For further proof, I'll link you to my old pic spams and descriptions.

Venice I

Venice II


Dancing through the Sambadrome in Rio

honorh has posted her account of the Tsunami and its aftermath in Japan , and I urge you all to read it.

***

For no particular reason, today I woke up with a pang and thought that I missed Donna Noble, and her interaction with the Tenth Doctor. Oh Donna, you're still my favourite New Who companion and I suspect will not be dethroned soon. It's not that I love the others less, but you more, to misquote from Brutus who probably never said it anyway, but if Shakespeare writes speeches for you, who cares? Seriously, though. I fell for Donna in The Runaway Bride during the rooftop scene and only loved her more every time she came back on screen. And the dynamic between her and the Doctor was golden. If I can't have more Donna and Ten, I'd love to watch Beatrice and Benedick at least, as as played by Tate 'n Tennant on the London stage, but time and budget are against me, and it is most frustrating.

***

It's still poetry month, and my unfulfilled desire for a trip to London as soon as T & T grace the stage of course brings Robert Browning to mind:

Home Thoughts, from Abroad

O, to be in England
Now that April 's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom'd pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge—
That 's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

"The first fine careless rapture" is such a great phrase to be used in various contexts. Anyway, that was Browning's sentiment from abroad. A generation earlier, Byron wasn't nearly as homesick when reflecting on England from Italy, and though his was written many years earlier, it almost reads as a parody of the Browning poem. It's witty Byron at his best, from Beppo:

I like on Autumn evenings to ride out,
Without being forced to bid my groom be sure
My cloak is round his middle strapp'd about,
Because the skies are not the most secure;
I know too that, if stopp'd upon my route,
Where the green alleys windingly allure,
Reeling with grapes red waggons choke the way, ---
In England 't would be dung, dust, or a dray.


I also like to dine on becaficas,
To see the Sun set, sure he'll rise tomorrow,
Not through a misty morning twinkling weak as
A drunken man's dead eye in maudlin sorrow,
But with all Heaven t'himself; the day will break as
Beauteous as cloudless, nor be forced to borrow
That sort of farthing candlelight which glimmers
Where reeking London's smoky caldron simmers.


I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
With syllables which breathe of the sweet South,
And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in,
That not a single accent seems uncouth,
Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural,
Which we're obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.


I like the women too ( forgive my folly ),
From the rich peasant cheek of ruddy bronze,
And large black eyes that flash on you a volley
Of rays that say a thousand things at once,
To the high dama's brow, more melancholy,
But clear, and with a wild and liquid glance,
Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes,
Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies.

(...)

"England ! with all thy faults I love thee still,"
I said at Calais, and have not forgot it;
I like to speak and lucubrate my fill;
I like the government ( but that is not it );
I like the freedom of the press and quill;
I like the Hapeas Corpus ( when we've got it );
I like a parliamentary debate,
Particularly when 'tis not too late;


I like the taxes, when they're not too many;
I like a seacoal fire, when not too dear;
I like a beef-steak, too, as well as any;
Have no objection to a pot of beer;
I like the weather, when it is not rainy,
That is, I like two months of every year,
And so God save the Regent, Church, and King !
Which means that I like all and everything.


Our standing army, and disbanded seamen,
Poor's rate, Reform, my own, the nation's debt,
Our little riots just to show we are free men,
Our trifling bankruptcies in the Gazette,
Our cloudy climate, and our chilly women,
All these I can forgive, and those forget,
And greatly venerate our recent glories,
And wish they were not owing to the Tories.

Two reviews written a while ago, which I hadn't gotten around to posting yet, about two historical novels by the same author I enjoyed a lot, set in two very different periods.


( Restoration, Stuart family drama, and a first person narrative )

( Byron, Shelley, Keats: you don't want to be a woman who loves them, but it makes for a great ensemble story )

Randomly, while watching a season 3 House episode: so, does House get an incest case at least once per season? If so, are we sure David Shore isn’t the alias of a fanfic writer? (Come to think of it, the only time House has been wrong about suspecting incest was the case with the teenager having nightmares. This strengthens my suspicions about Shore.)

Which is as good a place as any to do the obligatory “my take on incest in multifandom” post which everyone seems to write sooner or later. I’m afraid mine will be a bit boring, but here it goes. (Oh, yeah: spoilers for Carnivale, Twin Peaks, Jacobean drama and Romantic poet drama of the rl variety, no spoilers for Heroes, Supernatural and three shows created by Joss Whedon beyond basic character constellations.)

( Now you see it, now you don't... )