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

[thisbluespirit]

I loved the Actors' Shakespeare Project's 2010 Timon of Athens, but it was an irreproducible experience, having undergone some significant textual revision in order to turn it into a real play.

I mean, the BBC Shakespeare has Jonathan Pryce and it probably is about as good as you can get with a faithful representation of what it is, and if I had at least read something about it first, I'd have had a much better experience. But up until then, I'd have fun going in blind on the rest, so I just blithely went in knowing nothing. Not a plan!!

[sovay]

I mean, the BBC Shakespeare has Jonathan Pryce and it probably is about as good as you can get with a faithful representation of what it is, and if I had at least read something about it first, I'd have had a much better experience.

I'd read it beforehand and along with everyone else in my party liked the revision better! We were very impressed with it! The most important alteration was actually a genderswap, which does not have to make that much of a difference in Shakespeare, but here was close to play-saving. Also an incredible bit of business with a parsnip.

But up until then, I'd have fun going in blind on the rest, so I just blithely went in knowing nothing. Not a plan!!

All right, that couldn't have helped.

[thisbluespirit]

a genderswap, which does not have to make that much of a difference in Shakespeare, but here was close to play-saving. Also an incredible bit of business with a parsnip.

A genderswap would definitely make a big difference to it! And I feel that Jonathan Pryce would have loved to have a parnsip to play with, lol. He was hard done by, evidently.