But at least it's a relief to hear of a master-race that isn't blond

I am curious now to read Evangeline Walton's Witch House (1945), because She Walks in Darkness (2013) was my first encounter with her non-Mabinogion fiction and I cannot tell if it is representative or not. It's a slim thriller, very definitely a Gothic—I don't imagine there's any genealogical connection, but I was reminded of Mary Stewart's My Brother Michael (1959) with its murky secrets and echoes of wartime, ghostly ruins and rumors of lost treasure, and vengeance. Everything is charged, threatening. The supernatural might erupt at any moment, like the dead from their broken tombs or Mania from her underworld. It's a historical novel only by virtue of having been written in the 1960's and set in 1950. (The work the narrator's new husband is doing at the Villa Carenni was "begun five years ago, just after World War II ended.") There are weird political undercurrents—I am not sure what to make of the anti-Communism, except that I thought at first it was meant to tell us something about the narrator and then I had to conclude it was telling me something about the author. I am not sure what to make of her handling of the Etruscans, either, except that it's both the strength of the novel and its strangest element.

( Not too much. They called themselves Rasenna. )

I am trying to think now of other treatments of the Etruscans in fiction, speculative or not. Irritatingly, the first example that's coming to mind is Mary Gentle's alt-historical Ilario: The Lion's Eye (2006), where they basically replace Jews ("I would have known that next time there were rumours of Etruscans poisoning wells, or Etruscan merchants cheating their Christian customers, or the city fathers needing a scapegoat and the Inquisition needing bodies for burning—" Speaking of Jewish erasure). The protagonist in Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia (2008), speaking with the future shade of Vergil, associates his ethnicity with his skills as a poet, vates: "I knew that word of course: foreteller, soothsayer. It went with his being part Etruscan . . ." I gave an unwanted gift of divination along with an Etruscan name to a character in a short story of mine because it was the last thing he needed. I bounced off Mika Waltari's The Etruscan (1956) in high school. And there's Orcus' moon Vanth, but for purposes of literature I am not sure that counts.

That can't be it. Recommendations?

This field-bed is too cold for me to sleep

So there was this version of Romeo and Juliet Julian Fellowes was adapting. In his own words. nineweaving and derspatchel had something to say about that. Now that it's out, the A.V. Club just bypassed the language issue and wasted it on technical merits alone:

Though shot on location in Verona (in the dead of winter, if the actors' visible breath is any indication), Romeo & Juliet looks chintzy. The Capulets' masked balls is designed in Pier 1 Imports colors and texture, the lovers' secret marriage is performed in front of a green screen, and when Romeo goes up to Juliet's balcony, he climbs a plastic vine with cloth leaves. Walk-and-talk Steadicam shots abound; along with the hurried pacing (Juliet is dead for barely 10 seconds before the next scene starts dissolving in), they give the impression that the viewer is watching a hacky TV movie on the big screen, the sort of stuff that gives Masterpiece Theatre a bad name.

And I am sorry, because there are certain kinds of bad art I find absolutely brilliant, and then there's bad art that's just upsetting. Like bad food, when you expected at least something edible. It's a sloppy kind of cruelty; it wastes people's time. Not to mention whatever hope those two kids had of a career in Shakespearean drama, in which I assume they must have been at least faintly interested or they wouldn't have taken the parts.

This, on the other hand, actually angers the fuck out of me:

Speaking with the BBC, Mr. Fellowes ("Downton Abbey") has waved away criticisms of his alterations because "to see the original in its absolutely unchanged form, you require a kind of Shakespearean scholarship and you need to understand the language and analyze it and so on." With tongue presumably in cheek or perhaps just a foot deep in mouth, he added that he could do this kind of heavy interpretive lifting "because I had a very expensive education—I went to Cambridge." Recognizing that not everyone enjoys such advantages, he said, "There are plenty of perfectly intelligent people out there who have not been trained in Shakespeare's language choices."

NEWS FLASH, MR. ENTITLEMENT. YOU DO NOT NEED A DEGREE FROM CAMBRIDGE TO ENJOY SHAKESPEARE. OR PERFORM IT. OR PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING ELSE ABOUT IT, REALLY. THE VERY GREAT NUMBER AND VARIETY OF HIGH SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY PRODUCTIONS OF SHAKESPEARE PERFORMED AND ATTENDED BY PEOPLE WITHOUT EXPENSIVE EDUCATIONS SHOULD PERHAPS STAND AS EVIDENCE. OR DO YOU THINK THEY'RE JUST WATCHING THE PRETTY PEOPLE'S LIPS MOVE?

Seriously, why are we still having this argument? All it does is make some people sound like even more snobbish idiots than they probably are. And it annoys the pig.

(One bright thought to be salvaged from the NY Times review. Whenever they get around to casting that Hiddleston Much Ado About Nothing, someone look up Damian Lewis for Leonato. Right around the time the Brattle premiered Whedon's version, I ran into a review that called Clark Gregg's Leonato "everything you want in a father." Yeah, right up to the point where he disowns you for a whore and falls off the misogyny cliff with your fiancé.)