I drift off dreaming that you might appear

Apparently, this post is a linkdump.

I was not at Boskone this weekend. But I spent yesterday afternoon with rushthatspeaks and B. (and presently gaudior) and today at the MFA with Eric, so I can't call it a failure. I now own a kind of novel by E.E. Cummings. The capitalization keeps confusing me.

I agree very much with the last sentence of this review; I am on the wrong side of the Atlantic for Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem and I resent it, because the play sounds fascinating. Also, Mark Rylance. Anyone on my friendlist seen it?

Moment of Marblehead a few nights ago in the shower: while I had been thinking that some of Elsa Lanchester's songs reminded me of Gilbert and Sullivan, the chances are much better that some of Gilbert and Sullivan is reminiscent of music-hall. Many of the songs I like best—and not even the patter ones; see "When Fred'ric was a little lad," "When a felon's not engaged in his employment," "The law is the true embodiment," "Said I to myself, said I," "If you give me your attention"—are character-sketch monologues of a style that would not have been out of place at the Canterbury or the London Pavilion. Even some of the duets fit this pattern: "I once was a very abandoned person" and "Miya sama, miya sama" do not really advance the plot so much as they synopsize their narrators. They are self-contained; they don't end on cliffhangers. "My eyes are fully open" ends in metafiction, so you might as well perform it anywhere you like. (The Pirates of Penzance does). Anyway, I'm sure there are reams of literature on the interaction between G & S and popular song, but it took running out of hot water to make me think of it. I'm now curious about the half-life of these songs as standalone performances pieces. I would imagine it's fairly high.

(I was on a bus, not in the shower, when I figured out why the recent tendency to talk about crappy behavior in terms of the "monkey brain" annoys me. It's the old language of souls and bodies, merely transplanted into an evolutionary context: instead of pure spirit vs. sinful flesh, it's ape instincts and human reason. Can we just lose the dualism at the door, please? I think this is why I prefer terms like "wiring," which can mean anything from a neatly clicking binary switch to a spectacular kludge.¹ There's no assumption of morality in the machine.)

Dick Francis! And last month Robert Parker. Thank God for Felony & Mayhem, because this year is really doing a number on future birthday presents for my mother.

Ave atque vale, all, goodnight.

1. Not to be confused with the cludgie. Although there are days when one's brain feels like that, too.

Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air

My poem "Heaven and Sea, Horatio," otherwise known as the drowned Hamlet poem, has been accepted by tithenai and mer_moon for their guest-edited issue of Mythic Delirium.

The Army, the Navy, the Church, and the Stage

Oh, damn it: John Reed, patter baritone of the D'Oyly Carte.

He was ninety-four; I can't really argue. But I had just looked him up a few days ago, having finally acquired a recording of the 1968 D'Oyly Carte Pirates of Penzance (and therefore been on a limited-resource Gilbert and Sullivan bender), and was obscurely comforted that he was still alive. His Lord Chancellor features twice in last night's linkdump. Literally, I was just listening to him.

I suppose that's as good a note to go out on as any.

"Love, unrequited" (Iolanthe, 1960)

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo'd by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety . . .

"If you give me your attention" (Princess Ida, 1965)

To ev'rybody's prejudice I know a thing or two;
I can tell a woman's age in half a minute—and I do.

"I am the very model of a modern Major-General" (The Pirates of Penzance, 1968)

But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.