You said I got a '90's Volvo and their whole discography

[sovay]

Okay, on an unfamiliar antibiotic and the aftershock of the concert and next to zero sleep it appears that I do not have the mental wherewithal to write any further about movies today, so please enjoy this thoroughly charming article: "Antonio Salieri's Revenge." Shaffer's Salieri has been important to me for twenty years, but I have in fact heard and enjoyed the music of the real, neither murderous nor mediocre one, and I don't see the point of resisting this description: "Salieri is one of history's all-time losers—a bystander run over by a Mack truck of malicious gossip."

Comments

[sovay]

Yeah, Shakespeare's histories have that problem in spades.

Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958) is in no way a faithful representation of Bronze Age Greece, but it shaped the ways I think about sacrifice and consent to this day. It feels real right down to its dyes and pottery. And that makes it a little dangerous, because it's got Renault's characteristic issues with women soaked through it as deeply as the sea.

[kore]

I feel that way about her Alexander novels -- "yes, this is how it happened." She is dangerously convincing. (Persuasive?)

Renault's characteristic issues with women soaked through it as deeply as the sea

that is lovely.

[sovay]

She is dangerously convincing. (Persuasive?)

I tend to say "plausible," but I know what you mean. That must be the way it was, wasn't it?

[kore]

In that Mary Renault bio that came out a while back (much longer than I thought, ahahah) the author talks about scene with someone using a stigil and how one part of the skin is "always" left for last, and it's details like that "always" that give her work such uncanny authority.