Open up your mouth, but the melody is broken

[sovay]

Only a day or two late, I saw a classic new moon in the old moon's arms as I walked around the neighborhood just after sunset, the reflection-white crescent and its charcoal-colored cradle like an eclipse in monochrome. The sky was its usual clear apple-blue in the east and then sank. I am not sure I have ever had this much difficulty with the early dark between the clocks falling back and the solstice. I am awake most of the days and there still doesn't seem to be any light in them.

I slept last night. I would like not to have to record it as a milestone. It feels a little unnecessarily on the nose that I was woken out of some complex dream by a phone call from a doctor's office. Most of them lately have some unsurprising insecurity in them: slow-motion cataclysm, as if it makes much difference from being awake. Last night, something about a house with tide-lines on its walls, as if it regularly flooded to the beams.

Describing the 1978 BBC As You Like It to spatch made me realize how few of Shakespeare's comedies I have actually seen when compared with the tragedies, the late romances, the history or the problem plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night would be the predictable exceptions in that I am verging on more productions of either than I can count without thinking about it, but I am three Winter's Tales to zero Comedies of Errors. I've seen Timon of Athens and not All's Well That Ends Well. One Richard II and neither of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. It begins to feel accidental that I caught The Merry Wives of Windsor in college.

I really appreciate asakiyume sending me Hen Ogledd's "Scales Will Fall" (2025) and ashlyme alerting me to the trans-Neptunian existence of the sednoid Ammonite.

Comments

[gwynnega]

made me realize how few of Shakespeare's comedies I have actually seen when compared with the tragedies, the late romances, the history or the problem plays

Same. I watched a lot of those BBC productions while I was studying Shakespeare in college (because the audiovisual department had them on tape), but my Shakespeare courses covered fewer of the comedies than the other works. I remember especially loving the BBC Twelfth Night.

[sovay]

I watched a lot of those BBC productions while I was studying Shakespeare in college (because the audiovisual department had them on tape), but my Shakespeare courses covered fewer of the comedies than the other works.

Interesting! I had assumed the opposite cause in my case—studying almost no Shakespeare in school and then never filling the gaps in on my own—but maybe the comedies just don't get as much air time. I did attempt a local production of As You Like It in 2011, but it was open-air and there were too many smokers.

I've actually seen very few of the BBC Shakespeares. I watched the 1978 Richard II and 1980 Hamlet in high school because they contained Derek Jacobi, the 1980 The Taming of the Shrew because Theodora Goss wrote amazingly about it in 2009, and then just now the As You Like It on thisbluespirit's recommendation. I keep meaning to watch the 1979 Julius Caesar, but it's been years and I still haven't gotten around to it. The best version I have ever seen of that play anyway was staged by a high school Latin club in the middle of Union Square for the Ides of March of 2014 and involved audience participation and Roger Corman levels of Karo syrup.

I remember especially loving the BBC Twelfth Night.

I'll have to watch that one. I've seen gifs of it!