25 Thursday Nov 2021
Posted in Theatre
Tags
dress rehearsal, Noises Off, Opening Night, Philip Henslowe, Shakespeare in Love, stage superstitions, theatre
Us – after dress. Or tech. Or whatever it was.
So the play opens tomorrow night.
We had dress rehearsals, last night – or perhaps not quite… I mean it in that Noises-Offish way, you know: if this is tech, when do we do dress? And if this is dress, when do we do tech?
Yes, well… Continue reading
11 Thursday Nov 2021
Posted in Books
Do you remember my hunt for George Soane’s The Eve of San Marco?
Well, it took some tenacity – but in the end I found it, in its whole dubious three-volume glory, published by Gale as, for some reason, anonymous work. Continue reading
05 Friday Nov 2021
Posted in Theatre
The real-life Bea
Oh dear. Oh goodness me. Oh Spirit of the Bard…
I’m going to play again.
As in, on the stage. On the Tiny Theatre’s stage. Before an audience.
I’m going to play Bea. Continue reading
28 Thursday Oct 2021
Posted in Lostintranslation
My favourite way of learning languages is by reading – and no, you are not surprised.
And of course it may take some time before one is proficient enough to really read – but I find that, once I have the hang of basic grammar, one great way to reach that level of proficiency is what I like to call the Rosetta Method: reading the same text in a language I know, and then in the language I’m learning. I love the way it makes me see the language in action, while at the same time forcing me to work out the different cogs-and-wheels of different languages… Continue reading
21 Thursday Oct 2021
Over the years, and very much by trial and error, my rather difficult relationship with science fiction has come to work essentially like this: I give a very, very wide berth to everything dystopian and pre/post/apocalyptic; I’ll let myself be tempted by some carefully chosen, strictly past-bound time travel* now and then – and that’s it.
Now, please, let’s not go into whether time travel is proper sci-fi or something else or its own genre, shall we? Let us just observe that my last foray, Murray Leinster’s Time Tunnel,** was published and marketed as such in 1964 – and leave it at that. Continue reading
15 Friday Oct 2021
So they’ve been tidying up the Company’s extensive collection of books, plays and whatnots over the summer – and, as has become the case these past few years, everything and anything that isn’t in Italian has been set aside for me.
And I really mean anything: I once ended up with a book of plays in Serbian. Nobody had an inkling of when, how or, more relevantly, why on earth it had landed in the Company’s library – but, quite regardless, it went in the “Clara” box. That I don’t know a single word of Serbian didn’t seem to matter much. For the record, the book is still somewhere in my shelves – obviously unread but there… Continue reading
07 Thursday Oct 2021
Posted in Things
Tags
Like most people in Italy, I studied some Art History for three years, back in Grammar School. A couple of hours a week or so, starting on the third year…. and I remember that I’d been looking forward to it – if in a rather hazy way. I didn’t quite know what to expect – but, at fifteen, I had no doubts that a subject with “history” in its name just had to be wonderful.
Still perhaps some little doubt would have been in order… Continue reading
30 Thursday Sep 2021
Posted in Scribbling, Stories
Tags
I’m sure you know how it goes.
You are working on a project. A long term one. Longer than you planned at first, perhaps – but sometimes things have their own way of stretching into something else, and… and… oh, you do know how it goes. Continue reading
16 Thursday Sep 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
It’s raining.
For the first time in forever, it rains. Nothing dramatic: a rather gentle, grey, whispering thing. Most Septemberish – the sort that begs for poetry…
And because I had this very, very hazy memory of blind drops crawling on roofs – with no earthly idea of what it could be from, I made good use of the power of the Net, and discovered Elizabeth Bishop’s Song for the Rainy Season.
11 Saturday Sep 2021
Posted in History
Tags
Where were you twenty years ago today?
I was at work – another work, another life, really. I ran my family’s smallish timber-trading company, back then, and I was working in the office when my cousin called. She was sobbing. “Look at the news. Look at the news!” was all she said. Continue reading
