K for Kitty's calling V for Victor

I am fascinated by the closing track of NMC's Britten to America: Music for Radio and Theatre (2013), "Where do we go from here?" It comes from the episode of the same name of the BBC's Britain to America (1942–43), scripted by Louis MacNeice and broadcast in January 1943; it was performed originally by jazz legend Adelaide Hall and I had no idea Benjamin Britten had ever written anything that sounded so much like a Broadway first-act finale. Part of it's the vocal style of Mary Carewe, who recorded it for this centenary project in 2013, but the rest is the song itself and its orchestration. On the page it looks much more straightforwardly—curious yet apprehensive—about international relations. Listen and you can imagine it sung by one of a pair of lovers, questioning the future of their relationship against the backdrop of a world in constant, global conversation with itself. Who knew there was such a thing as the geopolitical torch song? Even its closest relative on this album, the Gershwin-out-of-Kipling-esque "Roman Wall Blues," doesn't sound so much like musical theater. I kind of want the rest of the show it belongs to, which I doubt is going to oblige me by retroactively coming into existence.

Some have learned the way to turn themselves to trees

It is amazing how much the dominant note on returning from any masked walk in the cold is "Oh, thank God, now I can blow my nose." Yesterday we left the house late enough in the day that spatch got some incredible dusk-lit pictures of the part-demolished high school and it was too cold for me to take my hands out of my pockets without a better grade of gloves. This afternoon we made a point of bolting from the house before sunset hit. I took a bunch of photos, but almost none of them came out as I wanted, more than documentary. Rob took a carefully, quickly unmasked photo of me. I did not at that time think to blow my nose.

( Dance till dawn among the ruins of a burning Troy. )

Everything else I had planned for the day was crashed by pain, but the mail brought me a substantial hardcover of The Book of Dragons (ed. Jonathan Strahan, 2020) courtesy of selkie, so I should be fine on the couch for a while.