June 19, 2017 at 9:20 pm (Artists and Writers, Plays, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: Emma Rice, England, inspiration, London, Mondays, Shakespeare, summer
This year, self was fortunate enough to catch two plays at Shakespeare’s Globe: Twelfth Night and Tristan and Yseult.
Both plays were terrific. But only one was truly unforgettable, because self watched it her last night in London, that fabulous city.
Here’s an excerpt from the Tristan and Yseult programme, written by Director Emma Rice:
Love, I celebrate it, practise it, mourn it, and fight for it.
But my appreciation and experience of this most seductive of topics is dwarfed by Shakespeare’s understanding of love. My mind spins when I imagine how his life must have been: how hard he worked, how far he travelled, how dark and scary the landscape he lived in was. If I close my eyes and propel my imagination back in time, I hear the tectonic plates of the planet creak, I see the ground opening up and Shakespeare clambering out of a deep crack in the earth’s surface, dusty, desperate and gasping for air . . . then, with the clarity of clear water, he sings from the earth he was born. Shakespeare gave voice to desire and to grief, to parenthood and to marriage. He charted the waters of courtship and the loneliness of a failing marriage. He mourned for us, married for us and betrayed for us. He gazed fearlessly into the human existence like no other, before or since.
Shakespeare’s Globe, Just Before the Start of “Tristan and Yseult,” June 2017
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 12, 2017 at 1:46 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: humor, Mondays, novel, reading lists
Hugely enjoying this Jonathan Evison novel from a few years back, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! Turns out Evison isn’t even remotely close to being the age of his protagonist. That is what happens when you have imagination!
pp. 94 – 95:
“I feel so strange,” says Harriet. “Am I . . . dead?”
“Not yet,” he says, examining the television remote. “Trust me, you’ll know.”
“Should I be frightened?”
“Won’t do you any good,” he says, setting the remote aside. “Don’t bother planning.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 5, 2017 at 10:30 am (Conversations, destinations, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Places, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, flash fiction, humor, Mondays, Paris, short story, writing process
Self worked on this story in Paris. It’s about the end of the world, naturalement.
A pink bathosphere named Pinkie Pi (Joke, joke, joke!), navigated by a pair of squabbling men, is the last to leave the surface of the planet (A new city awaits on the Ocean Floor):
We’re going under.
When?
Today.
Just like that.
Oui. N’est-ce pas. What do you think?
You’re talking about under.
That’s what I’m saying, oui.
That down there, on the ocean floor, we can — je ne sais quoi.
Yes.
In the shift and roll of waves . . .
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 5, 2017 at 8:15 am (Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: London, Mondays, novel, reading lists
Yes, we’re getting ahead of ourselves again, but hey, it happens . . . The reflective mind is a pinball, pitching and careening, rebounding off anything it makes contact with.
— p. 29, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison
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May 22, 2017 at 1:46 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Food and Drink, Places, postaday, Traveling)
Tags: art, happiness, Mondays, museums, Paris, postaday, postaweek, Wordpress
It was a gorgeous day!
Self strolled down the Champs-Elysees. She saw a shrine on the sidewalk, draped with French flags and flowers. Oh. So that’s where the policeman was shot.
She bought a salad from a brasserie and decided to eat in the Tuileries, right in front of the Musee L’Orangerie (where the Monets are) but she did not bother lining up for a ticket. She hates lines.
Instead, she sat outside, watching people:
The Tuileries, Monday Afternoon: Is that a Brancusi? Or a Picasso? Or a Henry Moore?
The wide avenues were alive with strollers, and the trees were so green:
And guess what she saw, over on the other side of the Place de la Concorde:
Iconic: 22 May 2017
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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May 22, 2017 at 9:40 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Hawthornden, Mondays, poetry
Rivers fascinate self.
Here’s a poem about rivers from Joan McGavin’s second collection, Passing Arcadia Close (Oversteps Books 2017).
Self met Joan 2012, in Hawthornden.
SALT
by Joan McGavin
The changing taste of rivers
told me where I was heading.
How could I fail to swim faster?
I’d hugged the coast for hours,
kept the lap of landbound waves
to my right, where the tang of fresh water
mixed in with salt would flood
the roof of my mouth
at each estuary.
At night I dozed in the hammock between waves
or beached and slept away from houses
but within earshot of tides.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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May 22, 2017 at 8:14 am (Books, Family, Memoirs, Women Writers)
Tags: history, memoir, memories, Mondays, South-East Asia, Vietnam, Vietnam War
Early 1960s. The “war” was the Vietnam War, which pitted the North, where Moi’s parents were from, against the South, to where they fled:
How long does it take for a mother to read Alone in the World and The Story of Perrine to her child? My mother read to me almost every evening, because my parents went out only three or four times a year, and never had guests. It was wartime, but that doesn’t explain it — war had only just begun and nobody imagined at the time that it would last some 15 years and that we’d face shortages of everything, especially freedom, the basic freedom to move around as we chose.
This sense of frugality was something my parents were born with, just as others live with a heart murmur or an irregular heartbeat. It was the region of their birth, the North, that had triggered this simmering anxiety.
At bedtime, my mother would decide on a number of pages, but I would beg her to carry on, and she was always happy to continue the story of Rémi the abandoned child or of Perrine Paindavoine, an orphan searching for her family . . . From one episode to the next, in those days before TV series, I traveled from one family to another, and from town to town, in the comfort of knowing I would fall asleep sated with emotions.
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April 24, 2017 at 4:27 pm (Books, Personal Bookshelf)
Tags: bestsellers, historical fiction, historical novel, history, Mondays, novel, reading lists, Roman Empire
Cicero’s great enemy is Catilina. Catilina is dispatched, as self knew he would be (She’s read about Catilina’s dispatching in both SPQR and Tom Holland’s Rubicon). But, as Harris writes a few pages earlier, No victories in politics are permanent (This is a paraphrase; self has little time to be hunting up the exact page, as the day is almost done and she hasn’t met her day’s writing quota).
Still, Harris manages to make Catilina’s defeat exciting:
- It was a terrible carnage and Catilina was in the thick of it all day. Not one of his lieutenants surrendered. They fought with the ferocious abandon of men with nothing to lose. Only when Petreius sent in a crack praetorian cohort did the rebel army finally collapse. Every one of Catilina’s followers, including Manlius, died where he stood; afterwards their wounds were found to be entirely in the front and none in the back.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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April 17, 2017 at 10:19 am (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, art, inspiration, Ireland, Mondays, writing process
Writing. Writing and reading. Like mad.
Also, checking Facebook, lol
The card on the MacBook is from Jacinta Oreilly, an artist from Dublin.
The small picture taped to my keyboard is from Bernadette Burns, an artist from Skibbereen, West Cork.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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April 10, 2017 at 8:31 pm (Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, grief, history, Ireland, Mondays, reading lists, Roman Empire, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
An old enemy of Rome’s, Mithridates, kept attacking and retreating, attacking and retreating. Pompey, unable to finish him off, struck “across the desert for Petra . . . but midway, he was halted by dramatic news: Mithridates was dead. The old king had never given up on his defiance, but . . . when his son turned against him and blockaded him in his chambers, Rome’s arch-enemy had been cornered at last.”
Just to show how wily Mithridates was, he had slowly been building up an immunity to poison by ingesting it in small quantity, for many years. But when his son sided with Pompey, he attempted to poison himself. It didn’t work. He was finally “dispatched by one of the few things to which he had not cultivated an immunity, the sword point of a loyal guard.”
His body is carried back to Pompey by his son.
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