And then a bank of cloud comes over the region of Aquila

[sovay]

I have the best brother ever.

Ever since Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code became one of the first plays I bought for myself in high school, I have been looking fruitlessly through used book stores for the biography Whitemore used as his primary source, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983) by Andrew Hodges.

Tonight, for my birthday, my brother handed me a copy. He ordered it somewhere off the internet; it's a solid, jacketless hardcover, slightly foxed around the edges, and it appears to have had something spilled on its endnotes. (I find this appropriate.) I read about a quarter of it when I wasn't rehearsing for Sunday's concert tonight. It's wonderful.

Possibly I will even get my non-stupid Turing poem written one of these days. But mostly I will like this book.

Comments

[sovay]

I've seen him live half a dozen times, and talked to him the once (the RSC used to bring their entire Stratford season up to Newcastle for a sort of festival, and you often found yourself in the little studio theatre sitting among the cast of one show as they caught up with another production they hadn't managed to see yet).

Lucky!

I have never been in the right country to see him live, but the Coolidge Corner is telecasting the National Theatre's King Lear in February: I'll definitely be buying tickets for that.

I did know about Turing from other sources

I knew about the Turing test and computable numbers; I had somehow missed everything else.

(For example, I have just learned from Andrew Hodges that Turing and Wittgenstein knew each other. I can't believe Derek Jarman didn't do a short film about that.)

(I met his partner-for-life as well, so I already had him settled in my head as part of my gay pantheon; I'm not sure when he came out publicly.)

No idea. I do remember when I found out that Ian McKellan had a crush on him at Cambridge, which I think is wonderful.

Um, we should perhaps continue magnificently to ignore the fact that he is a devout Oxfordian...?

Yeah. Him and Mark Rylance! I got nothing.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I met Mark Rylance the same way, when he was a young hopeful (come to think, it may even have been the same season - was he Ferdinand to Jacobi's Prospero? Maybe they were plotting together even then...)