Panderers, philanderers, cupidity, timidity

1. Because the weekend happened, I failed to write up the Boston Lyric Opera's Agrippina, and I still really haven't had enough sleep to do it justice. I will note that it's their best production since last year's The Turn of the Screw, and maybe the best opera I've seen since then: a glittering black bedroom farce, like the Apocolocyntosis by Molière, with the last of the Julio-Claudians become the clowns of a brutal Commedia where all the tricksters are murderers and the only honest man a deluded fool. The lights come up on a bored Nero slouching around his mother's bedroom in silk pajamas, flicking his lighter on and off, on and off. The curtain falls on the clink of champagne flutes raised to Nero's succession, the marriage of Otho and Poppaea, and the eternal glory of the Roman Empire, while everyone smiles and the surtitles helpfully inform us how each of them died (murdered one another, committed suicide). And in between there is a mad scramble of politicking and sex and sudden knife-jolts of bleak realization that are quickly covered up, because it is insupportable to believe that their world is this monstrous, gilded abyss, and it's not funny like I see what you did there, it's funny like I just sprained several ribs. With three countertenors. And Baroque ornamentation. And singers who could act as well as they sang, and who sang very well indeed. (I was particularly impressed by Kathleen Kim's Poppea, Christian Van Horn's Claudio, and Anthony Roth Costanzo's Ottone, but fleurdelis28 and sharhaun had their own favorites: always a good sign.) And perhaps I have just been maligning Handel for years, but decades of Messiah, Judas Maccabaeus, and even Ode for St. Cecilia's Day had really not prepared me for either this razor intelligence (which credit must be shared with his librettist, Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, a man I need to learn more about) or music so sumptuous and ironic, I wanted to learn it on the spot. It did take me a few minutes to adjust to the fact that Agrippina's Claudius is essentially played by BRIAN BLESSED, but you know, it works. The whole thing does. And I'd have totally bought a T-shirt for this opera, too.

2. Yesterday's mail brought my contributor's copy of Jabberwocky #5, in which my flash "The New Alexandria" appears alongside such marvelous things as Shweta Narayan's "Epiphyte," Erik Amundsen's "Black Arrows from the Golden Bow," and Rose Lemberg's "Reap the Whirlwind," to name only a few. It's an older piece; it was written in December 2007, not originally as fiction. I'll mention when it goes online, too.

3. Happy spring. Also, Purim. I brought hamantashn to last night's Single Malt & Song and they vanished.

4. I have learned from the Boston Globe of the existence of J.A. Baird and Claire Taylor's Ancient Graffiti in Context. Want.

5. Anything else I should know about?