I’ve dreamt of this day since Piccadilly Terrace, when we argued metaphysics

I had a wonderful day. I know.

I woke up at a godforsaken hour to find that a copy of A Mayse-Bikhl has been acquired by the National Library of Israel. It would make a better story if I choked on my tea from seeing the e-mail, but that was while reading something innocuous like Pat Barker at breakfast and just silly.

I was awake at a godforsaken hour because I was meeting two friends who do not have livejournals so that I could accompany them to a flea market at the Somerville Armory and they could show me Ken Russell's Gothic (1986). I did not find any clothes at the flea market, although I seriously considered a nonfiction LP about the moon landing called One Small Step (1969) just because it was narrated by Wernher von Braun and Chet Huntley, and a full orchestral score of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, hardcover, pocket-sized, and leatherbound. I didn't have a justifiable use for the latter and the former would probably have worked best as an unserious gift for some fan of Tom Lehrer, but they were very tempting on sheer grounds of weird. I tried on some cargo pants, but they didn't fit.

I did buy a candid photograph of George VI and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in Canada. For eight dollars. The dealer knocked two-thirds off the price because I recognized the subjects without taking the picture out of its sleeve and because I had been studying another photo of an American city street to see if I could tell the year in which it was taken from the movies on the marquee. (I couldn't, but I remembered the titles: H. M. Pulham, Esq. and Come Live with Me. So, 1941. Also, somebody liked Hedy Lamarr.) I just saw there's now a stage version of The King's Speech; I cannot imagine the unspeakable hipster cred I am going to rack up by saying I liked him before it was cool, but fleurdelis28 and nineweaving will back me up on this.

(There is a stamp on the back of the photograph: "Scott Camera Craft Ltd.—1018 Douglas St.—Victoria, B.C.—Mar. 5 1941." Someone has also pencilled in, "King George VI + Queen Elizabeth 1941," but the internet tells me the royal tour was in 1939. It is possible the film was only developed later. Help? Canada?)

There was a watercolor I couldn't afford in the consignment store where they bought their Green Man chair afterward. (Richard de Menocal.) There were bison burgers for lunch. There was fig-tasting mead from South Africa. Gothic is a hysterical laudanum dream of the Romantic poets at the Villa Diodati and I enjoyed it greatly, even if I really feel I should research the actual Claire Clairmont now. I don't know if I needed Byron/Polidori with Gabriel Byrne and Timothy Spall, but now that I've had it I don't feel I should complain.

The timing even worked out such that ratatosk could pick me up afterward and introduce me to shape-note singing at Christ Church Unity in Brookline, which was my first choral anything in nine years (I had to think about it), not counting Suor Angelica. It's hard for me to evaluate whether I liked the experience of an art form I was so patently bad at, but it was certainly worth going to. (I even ran into someone I knew from Tea.) We had late dinner at City Girl Cafe and generally hung out until it became necessary for me to come home so that I could take out the trash, write this, etc. I wound up singing "Ten Cents a Dance" for him and derspatchel and Abbie the Cat, who I think was unimpressed.

I am exhausted, but I don't want to kill anything. This is okay by me.

Oh, and go see Measure for Measure. Even the actors who aren't sock puppets are good.