I find lately that I don't write anything down, because nothing that goes through my head seems worth recording. I have written three successors to this statement and erased them all. I don't know what that goes to show.
I am reading Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1960). It is full of Brechtian weirdness, which I wouldn't have guessed from seeing the film once in high school—the play is introduced, partially narrated, and commented upon by the device of the Common Man, who takes all the small nameless roles from More's steward to his executioner and is in his own dissociative way as primary a figure as Thomas More or Richard Rich or the King; he is a cross between a mystery play's Everyman and the stranger who leans over to talk to you during the slow bits, and I wonder now if he affected the Boston Lyric Opera's recent production of Les contes d'Hoffmann, which I never wrote about, either. The staging too is abstract and self-referential, a property basket, a history book; the jury that convicts More is composed literally of the Common Man's various hats. On the page at least, it works amazingly well. By its mystery echoes, it accentuates the fact of More's sainthood, which for obvious reasons cannot be mentioned within the frame of the action itself, and the alienation effect somehow grounds the intellectual abstracts of the dialogue: this is not past and done with, this is immediately relevant, and to you, too, there in the third row. Off the page, I can see how it wouldn't have transferred to film at all, unless you wanted to make something more like Orlando than Becket. Amadeus presents a similar difficulty, and in that case I much prefer the stage version to the screen. I still want to re-watch A Man for All Seasons (1966), as I meant to do in March when Paul Scofield died, especially now that I will recognize the rest of its cast, like Wendy Hiller, Robert Shaw, and John Hurt. And now that I have connected A Man for All Seasons to Robert Bolt who wrote the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), I can be sorry that he never did adapt A Wrinkle in Time; it goes on the shelf of alternate histories alongside Powell and Pressburger's Earthsea.
Is this the longest night? I thought it was tomorrow, also the first night of Hanukkah. I'm so disconnected, I can't tell where we are in two calendars. Go on, ask me the date in Attic months; I think we're in Gamelion. Or we're about to be in Gamelion. The moon's waning. Look out for the sun, anyway.
I am reading Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1960). It is full of Brechtian weirdness, which I wouldn't have guessed from seeing the film once in high school—the play is introduced, partially narrated, and commented upon by the device of the Common Man, who takes all the small nameless roles from More's steward to his executioner and is in his own dissociative way as primary a figure as Thomas More or Richard Rich or the King; he is a cross between a mystery play's Everyman and the stranger who leans over to talk to you during the slow bits, and I wonder now if he affected the Boston Lyric Opera's recent production of Les contes d'Hoffmann, which I never wrote about, either. The staging too is abstract and self-referential, a property basket, a history book; the jury that convicts More is composed literally of the Common Man's various hats. On the page at least, it works amazingly well. By its mystery echoes, it accentuates the fact of More's sainthood, which for obvious reasons cannot be mentioned within the frame of the action itself, and the alienation effect somehow grounds the intellectual abstracts of the dialogue: this is not past and done with, this is immediately relevant, and to you, too, there in the third row. Off the page, I can see how it wouldn't have transferred to film at all, unless you wanted to make something more like Orlando than Becket. Amadeus presents a similar difficulty, and in that case I much prefer the stage version to the screen. I still want to re-watch A Man for All Seasons (1966), as I meant to do in March when Paul Scofield died, especially now that I will recognize the rest of its cast, like Wendy Hiller, Robert Shaw, and John Hurt. And now that I have connected A Man for All Seasons to Robert Bolt who wrote the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), I can be sorry that he never did adapt A Wrinkle in Time; it goes on the shelf of alternate histories alongside Powell and Pressburger's Earthsea.
Is this the longest night? I thought it was tomorrow, also the first night of Hanukkah. I'm so disconnected, I can't tell where we are in two calendars. Go on, ask me the date in Attic months; I think we're in Gamelion. Or we're about to be in Gamelion. The moon's waning. Look out for the sun, anyway.
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