26 Tuesday Jul 2016
Last night, after rehearsals, it was far too hot to go home – and, the rehearsals having gone passably well, we weren’t in the mood to disperse yet anyway. So we sat, more or less in the dark, in the garden of our makeshift rehearsal room. We sat in a circle, and began to tell each other the combination of Sonnets 55 and 81 that ends the play.
We all said it in turn, the game being to do it as differently as we could from the person before us. Again and again we said it… Continue reading
23 Saturday Jul 2016
Posted in Things
So it seems that Old English had about twenty different verbs for the act of sparkling/glittering:
ablican, ascimian, bliccettan, blyscan, brodian, brogdettan, glitenian, (ge)lixan, ræscan, ræscettan, scimian, scinefrian, spircan, tytan, scimian, blican, glisnian, spearcian, twinclian…
Say what you will, but I find there is something appealing in a language with so much sparkle to it…
And yes – I do love the Historical Thesaurus.
16 Saturday Jul 2016
Tags
christopher marlowe, Open Source Shakespeare, searchable works, the Literature Network, William Shakespeare
You know when you know there is that perfect bit in Shakespeare, that line about this or that? You know the speech you need is there, somewhere – but can’t exactly place it, let alone find it… Continue reading
07 Thursday Jul 2016
Posted in Things
Tags
adventure, alternate history, Davide Mana, GG Studio, Hope and Glory, Role Playing Game, Savage Worlds, Short Stories, steampunk
Alberto Bontempi
And today for something different – as in no theatre and no Elizabethana…
Hope and Glory is a role-playing game setting for Savage Worlds – but also a collection of stories set in what will be the game’s world.
What world, you ask? Continue reading
05 Tuesday Jul 2016
Once upon a time, I went all the way to Jesi with my mentor, to see a seldom-produced opera based off Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas.
It was my first real two-day opera trip, and I was very excited. I was green enough at the game to blissfully ignore that usually, if an opera sinks into oblivion, there are good reasons… Filippo Marchetti’s Ruy Blas had enjoyed a certain success back in its day (and I’m speaking of 1869), and then was forgotten and never resurrected, until that time when the small and courageous Teatro Pergolesi decided on a revival.
So all the way we went, a tad adventurously, and attended the resurrection of Ruy Blas – together with no more than other twenty opera-lovers… I’d say the experience was rather unremarkable, and indeed it was, music-wise, but as staging goes… well. Continue reading
21 Tuesday Jun 2016
Tags
anachronism, English language, historical thesaurus, History, Oxford Thesaurus, University of Glasgow, writing
Do you know the Historical Thesaurus of English?
It’s a project of the University of Glasgow, providing information on the history of nearly 800000 words. It… Continue reading
04 Saturday Jun 2016
I think I’ve mentioned this before – but, as a Saturday thought, I’ll post a bit of the Author’s Greeting from George Garrett’s Entered from the Sun – the Murder of Marlowe.
It’s an irritatingly wonderful book, by the way, and one of these days I’ll have to write about it at some length. For now, let’s content ourselves with this… Continue reading
19 Thursday May 2016
First, you have to know that a risotto is a first course of rice cooked with a variety of ingredients. In my corner of Northern Italy, it’s pork sausage and grated parmesan, basically – and it’s not just a staple food. In the words of my friend Milla, who moved here nearly twenty years ago, “it’s far more than a dish. It possesses quasi miraculous powers. It sates hunger, cures all ills, seals friendships and celebrates any and every occasion.”
In other words, it’s a persecution
Now don’t mistake me: it’s quite delicious. My troubles are with the way it’s made the focus of all social and cultural life… At times it seems that, here around, nothing can be done without risotto – and that the safest way to keep local folks quiet and reasonably attentive for an hour or two, is to promise plenty of risotto afterwards.
Oh, all right – I’m slightly exaggerating, but not all that much. The fact is, I’m being bitter and sarcastic, because… Continue reading
07 Saturday May 2016
Posted in Things
Farrar, Straut and Giroux’s Work in Progress is always a source of interesting and thought-provoking reading material.
Lately I’ve been musing quite a bit about readers’ expectations and writers’ attitudes when it comes to fiction, truth and reality. So when I opened the WiP newsletter and found a post on the subject by Guillermo Erades, it felt like a piece of serendipity. And I know it’s nothing of the sort – a lot of writers find themselves musing inevitably about this – but indulge me. It’s Saturday, and I like my serendipity. Continue reading
05 Thursday May 2016
Once upon a time, in late Nineteenth-Century England little John Masefield lived a happy childhood, with a loving family and a love of books. Then his parents died, and the boy’s guardian, an aunt out of Dickens, sent him off the Conway, the training ship of the Merchant Navy, to cure him of his “book-obsession”.
Young John, you know, had “too much imagination”.
It could have been worse, because the lad loved the sea, and the Conway proved to be a congenial environment, where tutors and fellow students liked his turn for storytelling… Except, poor John was not made for the rigours of service. Once a petty officer, he embarked on his first transatlantic ship, and the voyage was a nightmare of ill-health, fevers and dizzy spells – awfully dangerous, when you are expected to spend half your life climbing up and down the rigging… Continue reading
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