Which is (mostly) not about books
Dec. 28th, 2019 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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I am now at Onewhero, in the poolhouse, listening to the on-and-off croaking of the pool frogs. Today Justy and Seahearth and I went to Much Ado About Nothing at the Pop-up Globe, which was very nice as an outing, although my feeling about the Pop-up Globe's productions is still that I'd like them half again as much if they stopped doing those grimaces and long-drawn words as bits of comic business and if their bawdiness were more tightly focused. All their forms of broadness seem to get away from them. But it's only a frustration because they're a group (or two groups) of good actors, and there are always bits I enjoy and care about, comic and serious both. Here these tendencies were represented well by Dogberry on the one hand (why? why the banana song?) and Beatrice on the other, with grubby-old-man Don Jon a mixture of the two, suffering from the things I dislike while still being riveting. In the scene where he explains his motives he was wandering around ineptly pissing on walls while his courtier tried to stop him, which was distracting enough that I didn't parse the motives at all and had forgotten who he was until a third of the way into the play. But he had impressive presence, natural and full of energy even when entirely static. In the wedding scene, when his plans seem to come horribly right, you could see in his eyes the laugh he wasn't laughing.
Right at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, clapping the beat of the dance they finished with, I remembered standing in the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens. I've just finished my paper on Dionysos, in whose name there first was theatre. And if it hadn't begun in that way, it would have begun in another way, another shape; and there are other beginnings -- but I still felt like a leaf on the tree.
I'm writing this post on paper (because screens are so good at getting me to steal tomorrow from myself) in the space between blocks of course notes -- possibly the last course notes I'll write, although I'm not sure of it, nor am I celebrating till I've worn the hat.
...
The game of Categories, rapidly coming up with words beginning with a specific letter in various categories, is one I'm very bad at and have never won -- my brain doesn't seem to file like that. But it's not a problem, because the real fun of Categories is in arguing for five minutes about what Ann meant by the category 'things to do with oceans and coastlines' and whether one is allowed to say Australia, or looking up whether Ebenezer is a character in the Bible, or deciding on balance to allow Harod when it was Herod they had in mind (while envisioning heads of John the Baptist on department-store shelves).
...
It is good to be in a household which cooks and has people to cook for. My flat is not ordered like that, and it's less fun cooking for one. Just before the trip I read Kitchen Confidential, (which is a very warm-hearted and complete-feeling book for something you could also describe as an exposé of New York fine dining's seamy side), a few days after finding The Flavor Bible in the local second hand shop. It's a cookbook consisting not of recipes but of lists, with Apple followed by everything a range of consulted chefs thought went well with apple, in bold if they're generally agreed on and in all caps if they're quintessential. My cooking recently is almost all 'what can I do in half an hour from a standing start', and it's very helpful for that. On the one hand, the flavor matches are good ones, and on the other, consulting it gets me thinking, so I'll do something more interesting afterwards even if what I was looking up doesn't apply at all.
...
Things cut for lateness: partially written-out thoughts on Christmas present customs, description of a visit to an impressive reservoir, and the delightful-although-not-without-difficulties one-year-old who was around most of the visit. (I am a step-uncle? It had not occurred to me before that I was a step-uncle).
I am now at Onewhero, in the poolhouse, listening to the on-and-off croaking of the pool frogs. Today Justy and Seahearth and I went to Much Ado About Nothing at the Pop-up Globe, which was very nice as an outing, although my feeling about the Pop-up Globe's productions is still that I'd like them half again as much if they stopped doing those grimaces and long-drawn words as bits of comic business and if their bawdiness were more tightly focused. All their forms of broadness seem to get away from them. But it's only a frustration because they're a group (or two groups) of good actors, and there are always bits I enjoy and care about, comic and serious both. Here these tendencies were represented well by Dogberry on the one hand (why? why the banana song?) and Beatrice on the other, with grubby-old-man Don Jon a mixture of the two, suffering from the things I dislike while still being riveting. In the scene where he explains his motives he was wandering around ineptly pissing on walls while his courtier tried to stop him, which was distracting enough that I didn't parse the motives at all and had forgotten who he was until a third of the way into the play. But he had impressive presence, natural and full of energy even when entirely static. In the wedding scene, when his plans seem to come horribly right, you could see in his eyes the laugh he wasn't laughing.
Right at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, clapping the beat of the dance they finished with, I remembered standing in the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens. I've just finished my paper on Dionysos, in whose name there first was theatre. And if it hadn't begun in that way, it would have begun in another way, another shape; and there are other beginnings -- but I still felt like a leaf on the tree.
I'm writing this post on paper (because screens are so good at getting me to steal tomorrow from myself) in the space between blocks of course notes -- possibly the last course notes I'll write, although I'm not sure of it, nor am I celebrating till I've worn the hat.
...
The game of Categories, rapidly coming up with words beginning with a specific letter in various categories, is one I'm very bad at and have never won -- my brain doesn't seem to file like that. But it's not a problem, because the real fun of Categories is in arguing for five minutes about what Ann meant by the category 'things to do with oceans and coastlines' and whether one is allowed to say Australia, or looking up whether Ebenezer is a character in the Bible, or deciding on balance to allow Harod when it was Herod they had in mind (while envisioning heads of John the Baptist on department-store shelves).
...
It is good to be in a household which cooks and has people to cook for. My flat is not ordered like that, and it's less fun cooking for one. Just before the trip I read Kitchen Confidential, (which is a very warm-hearted and complete-feeling book for something you could also describe as an exposé of New York fine dining's seamy side), a few days after finding The Flavor Bible in the local second hand shop. It's a cookbook consisting not of recipes but of lists, with Apple followed by everything a range of consulted chefs thought went well with apple, in bold if they're generally agreed on and in all caps if they're quintessential. My cooking recently is almost all 'what can I do in half an hour from a standing start', and it's very helpful for that. On the one hand, the flavor matches are good ones, and on the other, consulting it gets me thinking, so I'll do something more interesting afterwards even if what I was looking up doesn't apply at all.
...
Things cut for lateness: partially written-out thoughts on Christmas present customs, description of a visit to an impressive reservoir, and the delightful-although-not-without-difficulties one-year-old who was around most of the visit. (I am a step-uncle? It had not occurred to me before that I was a step-uncle).
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 05:28 am (UTC)I liked Don Jon too. I'm not sure I agree the pissing was a bad choice -- it did set him up as a figure of fun, and it did obscure who he was, his motives, his desires... and it is the kind of choice which I think has spoiled Pop-Up Globe productions before. But here I felt to me like part of a coherent strategy. Make light, make fun, laugh all over the bits and pieces of evil -- and drop all that in one stroke, when Hero is accused. Chance has suited us to Much Ado About Nothing as an audience (ok, not to Dogberry). To me this was an approach suiting that dynamic.
I kind of wanna watch the Branagh and Whedon versions again now. I suspect Thompson and Branagh are still my favourite Beatridick.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 05:41 am (UTC)But anyway I think you are a pretty vigorous leaf as we go, o Agamemnon.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 07:03 am (UTC)I did not see those things in Leonato particularly, I think I was not sufficiently engaged at the moment of his anger to experience his stiltedness as characterful. But I'm very glad you did. I don't think in isolation Don Jon's pissing was a bad idea, necessarily -- it was in fact funny! And I'm perfectly capable of losing track of bits of motive at the best of times in Shakespeare I don't know particularly. I think I'd have liked it if other things around it had shifted.
I hadn't thought about how much better Much Ado About Nothing plays plotwise now than some of the other comedies, you're right.
I was thinking Benetrice might work better, but I think I've come around to the ungainly glory of Beatridick.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 07:44 am (UTC)There was definitely performance before Athenian drama. But the intersection of people putting on characters and interacting according to a script in a built structure seems a reasonable one to call first, for theatre. The question of whether one cares about that is tied up with how some of the works at that intersection were remembered and thought about in the cultures which lead to and through Shakespeare. These lines of influence strengthen by being thought on, and one might want other lines. The leaf-on-tree feeling definitely came after a choice of line; I could have averted it.
I'll hope to keep leafing in the acting sense in days to come!