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I'm exhausted, and you may have noticed that we were attacked by skeletal automata
Oh, look, if I get eleven hours of sleep the previous night (as I did, and dreamed of carnivals), I stay up and write things.
1.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
strange_selkie sent me a timesink. I have been playing my first computer game since high school: Gravity Falls' Rumble's Revenge. Dipper flails at things with his hat and does the Lamby Lamby Dance. Mabel uses her sweater sleeves and Waddles comes out (produced, apparently, from the hammerspace of her sweater) when she's really on a roll. I played once through as Mabel, went back as Dipper and was doing even better until my browser crashed when I hit Rumble McSkirmish with a ham. If this is word salad, watch the show. I raved about it back in September and my opinion hasn't changed. I'm just waiting for the rest of the season!
2. Oh, right: fuck you, desktop notes. Last January I said I loved everything about Lev AC Rosen's All Men of Genius (2011) except its Malvolio. I haven't read the novel since, but I imagine I will still consider this true on re-read. Most of what I remember turned out to be delightfully more thoughtful than the thumbnail summary of "steampunk cross between Twelfth Night and The Importance of Being Earnest" suggests; the premise reads like a Yuletide request that got away from its author, but it's a novel in its own right, with a third plot interweaving and emerging between the source materials and all three full of genre commentary and shout-outs to other Shakespeare, Wilde, and literary mad science of the time (invisible cats!). I love the witty hinging of the two stories together, so that both plots work out simultaneously with the same characters playing different roles in each: Violet is most obviously a version of Shakespeare's Viola when she wins a scholarship to Illyria College en travesti as her brother Ashton (who in this story never forsakes his lover Antony), but she is also Wilde's Ernest, leading a double life in city and country (fictitious cousin who is really her brother included), while Ernest, Duke of Illyria, the young headmaster who finds himself disconcertingly attracted to his newest pupil, is at once Orsino and—despite his name—Gwendolen. His ward Cecily falls as hard for the supposed Ashton as Olivia for Cesario, but finds her affections shifting as from Jack to Algernon. The witty, musically-inclined Jack Feste (he keeps trying to create a singing ferret) figures as both Algernon Moncrieff and his namesake fool. I can't trace some of the other characters, like the stammering Curio or the narcissistic Valentine, and I'm not actually sure why Illyria's Professor Bracknell is a coarsely spoken jackass rather than an imperious senior fellow, but the idea of embodying the perpetually invalid Bunbury as an accident-prone inventor who spends more time in hospital than out ("But he didn't mind, in the end. It was all for science; and, besides, he had fixed himself up. The mechanical kneecap prototype he had put into himself had since helped many others") is very clever. The novel even uses the split between stories to illuminate some of its characters: I am especially fond of the reinvention of Twelfth Night's Maria as the independent Miriam Isaacs, Cecily's governess, who dresses severely for her job and splendidly at night when she steals out to drink with the older students of Illyria including Toby, her lover, a man she will never marry, because that is not what she desires from him. She is Persian Jewish, widowed once already; she fits nowhere nearly within the hierarchy of the school or London society, and it is a point in the novel's favor that it does not feel bound by convention to make her some kind of tragic outsider, falling between the cracks. Like Violet in Ashton drag, she needs more than one side to her life and she gets it.
The Twelfth Night characters in general are sympathetically handled. I imagine Rosen being touched by "I was adored once too," because Sir Andrew Aguecheek gets a major upgrade as Drew Pale, heir to Pale's Perfumes—vague, easily distracted, and prone to inopportunately falling asleep, he's also kind-hearted, difficult to worry, and his status as a relative nouveau riche with a grandfather in trade makes another one of Rosen's points about class. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Malcolm Volio is a nasty piece of work who does nasty things and meets a nasty end and even the letter plot wherein our gang of protagonists fake a heavingly romantic correspondence from his crush-object Cecily doesn't move the reader to pathos or schadenfreude so much as a sigh of my God, man, and you're supposed to be a genius? I understand the parallel. Malvolio the steward was the Puritan personification of order, given the comedy boot because he comes down so hard on what he condemns in others as intemperance and frivolity and then busts out like June all over himself at the drop of a letter; Malcolm Volio embodies all the worst traits of the Victorian age, repressive, exploitative, full of nothing but contempt for women, foreigners, and anything he considers weaker than himself—in a way, he is exactly that model of steampunk against which Rosen is writing. (He is also the closest thing the book offers to the traditional stereotype of the mad scientist, as he constructs lethal soldier-automata in secret, dissects invisible cats without a twitch of emotion, and plots, no joke, he inherited an evil secret society from his father, to rule the world.) Malvolio the steward is part of the strict sorrow lockdown of Olivia's mourning and Viola's loss: he has to go if the revels are to be successfully concluded. In a world in which Violet will be recognized by her true name and gender as a genius, Malcolm the patriarchal twit cannot triumph. The problem is that as a plain villain he's simply much less interesting.
One of the reasons I love Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996) so dearly—not that it's made any difference to my failure to write it up for three years—is that it does not shy away from the bittersweet in its topsy-turvy love-games, Anakreon's μανίαι τε καὶ κυδοιμοί; it recognizes that one of the bitterest is what happens to Olivia's steward and instead of softening the outcome of his subplot or defusing the cruelty by making him a caricature, it gives us a Malvolio (Nigel Hawthorne, my definitive interpretation until such time as anyone directsderspatchel in the part) who is both insufferable and vulnerable. Alone in his room at night, in his sober dressing gown and the secret indulgence of yellow stockings, what he's reading is a gazette titled Amour. He may be self-righteous, censorious, and inexcusably insulting of Feste, but he's as much of a romantic as any other character in this chaos, just way more repressed about it. Watching him melt into a fatuous daydream of life as Count Malvolio with a fawning Sir Toby and "a day-bed where I have left Olivia sleeping" is indeed very funny, especially when he goes zooming off among the hedges with an appalling expression of manic delight ("Jove, I thank thee: I will smile!") fixed to his face; it's also the emblem of his precariousness, because no one can be that much of a puritan for sixty years and then break into passion safely. You fear for him, that the false madhouse could become the real thing. The camera does some beautiful cross-cuts between Sebastian mistaken for Cesario, wondering aloud whether he's dreaming or mad that he comes to Illyria for the first time in his life and a beautiful woman throws herself with all apparent recognition into his arms, deciding ultimately to embrace the dream if it's the one and madness if the other and in the meantime let Olivia take him to her marriage-bed, and Malvolio locked in the garden shed as the disguised Feste catechizes him to the degree of his insanity and the steward insists with rising hysteria that he is not mad, not mad. One is the nonsense of a fantasy, the other of a nightmare. Both are the consequences of love. Malvolio's won't be requited, either, and depending on how the ending is played he'll leave the stage either seething or in shame. (Nunn hints slightly that he might recover and begin to move on with a better sense of himself, which is a serious piece of empathy to convey via the placement of a toupée, but I imagine this is an unusual addition.) His torment doesn't give him a free pass for being a little tin tyrant over his staff, but it is not merely passed off—as Sir Toby would have it—as a well-deserved good laugh. There is not any such depth in Rosen's Malcolm Volio, especially once the killer robots show up, and I think All Men of Genius suffers for it. I would still tell you to read the book despite him. It's fast-paced, it's funny, I'm only slightly surprised it's a novel rather than a stage play (or some other form of drama) like its sources. Maybe it was something about the budget for steampunk.
3. January 15th. Happy ninety-fourth anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. In six years, commemoratively, I am going to make some epic cookies.
1.
strange_selkie sent me a timesink. I have been playing my first computer game since high school: Gravity Falls' Rumble's Revenge. Dipper flails at things with his hat and does the Lamby Lamby Dance. Mabel uses her sweater sleeves and Waddles comes out (produced, apparently, from the hammerspace of her sweater) when she's really on a roll. I played once through as Mabel, went back as Dipper and was doing even better until my browser crashed when I hit Rumble McSkirmish with a ham. If this is word salad, watch the show. I raved about it back in September and my opinion hasn't changed. I'm just waiting for the rest of the season!2. Oh, right: fuck you, desktop notes. Last January I said I loved everything about Lev AC Rosen's All Men of Genius (2011) except its Malvolio. I haven't read the novel since, but I imagine I will still consider this true on re-read. Most of what I remember turned out to be delightfully more thoughtful than the thumbnail summary of "steampunk cross between Twelfth Night and The Importance of Being Earnest" suggests; the premise reads like a Yuletide request that got away from its author, but it's a novel in its own right, with a third plot interweaving and emerging between the source materials and all three full of genre commentary and shout-outs to other Shakespeare, Wilde, and literary mad science of the time (invisible cats!). I love the witty hinging of the two stories together, so that both plots work out simultaneously with the same characters playing different roles in each: Violet is most obviously a version of Shakespeare's Viola when she wins a scholarship to Illyria College en travesti as her brother Ashton (who in this story never forsakes his lover Antony), but she is also Wilde's Ernest, leading a double life in city and country (fictitious cousin who is really her brother included), while Ernest, Duke of Illyria, the young headmaster who finds himself disconcertingly attracted to his newest pupil, is at once Orsino and—despite his name—Gwendolen. His ward Cecily falls as hard for the supposed Ashton as Olivia for Cesario, but finds her affections shifting as from Jack to Algernon. The witty, musically-inclined Jack Feste (he keeps trying to create a singing ferret) figures as both Algernon Moncrieff and his namesake fool. I can't trace some of the other characters, like the stammering Curio or the narcissistic Valentine, and I'm not actually sure why Illyria's Professor Bracknell is a coarsely spoken jackass rather than an imperious senior fellow, but the idea of embodying the perpetually invalid Bunbury as an accident-prone inventor who spends more time in hospital than out ("But he didn't mind, in the end. It was all for science; and, besides, he had fixed himself up. The mechanical kneecap prototype he had put into himself had since helped many others") is very clever. The novel even uses the split between stories to illuminate some of its characters: I am especially fond of the reinvention of Twelfth Night's Maria as the independent Miriam Isaacs, Cecily's governess, who dresses severely for her job and splendidly at night when she steals out to drink with the older students of Illyria including Toby, her lover, a man she will never marry, because that is not what she desires from him. She is Persian Jewish, widowed once already; she fits nowhere nearly within the hierarchy of the school or London society, and it is a point in the novel's favor that it does not feel bound by convention to make her some kind of tragic outsider, falling between the cracks. Like Violet in Ashton drag, she needs more than one side to her life and she gets it.
The Twelfth Night characters in general are sympathetically handled. I imagine Rosen being touched by "I was adored once too," because Sir Andrew Aguecheek gets a major upgrade as Drew Pale, heir to Pale's Perfumes—vague, easily distracted, and prone to inopportunately falling asleep, he's also kind-hearted, difficult to worry, and his status as a relative nouveau riche with a grandfather in trade makes another one of Rosen's points about class. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Malcolm Volio is a nasty piece of work who does nasty things and meets a nasty end and even the letter plot wherein our gang of protagonists fake a heavingly romantic correspondence from his crush-object Cecily doesn't move the reader to pathos or schadenfreude so much as a sigh of my God, man, and you're supposed to be a genius? I understand the parallel. Malvolio the steward was the Puritan personification of order, given the comedy boot because he comes down so hard on what he condemns in others as intemperance and frivolity and then busts out like June all over himself at the drop of a letter; Malcolm Volio embodies all the worst traits of the Victorian age, repressive, exploitative, full of nothing but contempt for women, foreigners, and anything he considers weaker than himself—in a way, he is exactly that model of steampunk against which Rosen is writing. (He is also the closest thing the book offers to the traditional stereotype of the mad scientist, as he constructs lethal soldier-automata in secret, dissects invisible cats without a twitch of emotion, and plots, no joke, he inherited an evil secret society from his father, to rule the world.) Malvolio the steward is part of the strict sorrow lockdown of Olivia's mourning and Viola's loss: he has to go if the revels are to be successfully concluded. In a world in which Violet will be recognized by her true name and gender as a genius, Malcolm the patriarchal twit cannot triumph. The problem is that as a plain villain he's simply much less interesting.
One of the reasons I love Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996) so dearly—not that it's made any difference to my failure to write it up for three years—is that it does not shy away from the bittersweet in its topsy-turvy love-games, Anakreon's μανίαι τε καὶ κυδοιμοί; it recognizes that one of the bitterest is what happens to Olivia's steward and instead of softening the outcome of his subplot or defusing the cruelty by making him a caricature, it gives us a Malvolio (Nigel Hawthorne, my definitive interpretation until such time as anyone directs
derspatchel in the part) who is both insufferable and vulnerable. Alone in his room at night, in his sober dressing gown and the secret indulgence of yellow stockings, what he's reading is a gazette titled Amour. He may be self-righteous, censorious, and inexcusably insulting of Feste, but he's as much of a romantic as any other character in this chaos, just way more repressed about it. Watching him melt into a fatuous daydream of life as Count Malvolio with a fawning Sir Toby and "a day-bed where I have left Olivia sleeping" is indeed very funny, especially when he goes zooming off among the hedges with an appalling expression of manic delight ("Jove, I thank thee: I will smile!") fixed to his face; it's also the emblem of his precariousness, because no one can be that much of a puritan for sixty years and then break into passion safely. You fear for him, that the false madhouse could become the real thing. The camera does some beautiful cross-cuts between Sebastian mistaken for Cesario, wondering aloud whether he's dreaming or mad that he comes to Illyria for the first time in his life and a beautiful woman throws herself with all apparent recognition into his arms, deciding ultimately to embrace the dream if it's the one and madness if the other and in the meantime let Olivia take him to her marriage-bed, and Malvolio locked in the garden shed as the disguised Feste catechizes him to the degree of his insanity and the steward insists with rising hysteria that he is not mad, not mad. One is the nonsense of a fantasy, the other of a nightmare. Both are the consequences of love. Malvolio's won't be requited, either, and depending on how the ending is played he'll leave the stage either seething or in shame. (Nunn hints slightly that he might recover and begin to move on with a better sense of himself, which is a serious piece of empathy to convey via the placement of a toupée, but I imagine this is an unusual addition.) His torment doesn't give him a free pass for being a little tin tyrant over his staff, but it is not merely passed off—as Sir Toby would have it—as a well-deserved good laugh. There is not any such depth in Rosen's Malcolm Volio, especially once the killer robots show up, and I think All Men of Genius suffers for it. I would still tell you to read the book despite him. It's fast-paced, it's funny, I'm only slightly surprised it's a novel rather than a stage play (or some other form of drama) like its sources. Maybe it was something about the budget for steampunk.3. January 15th. Happy ninety-fourth anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. In six years, commemoratively, I am going to make some epic cookies.
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A toothsink?
Nine
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I plan for there to be survivors!
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Nice. At least maybe they can get drunk somewhere together.
I saw a Twelfth Night for my birthday two years ago: it was full of water and its most memorable character for me was its Feste.
Ever since I've been thinking about the inevitable but somehow non-existent Jacobean sequel Malvolio's Revenge.
Should anything come of your thinking, please let me know!
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That's an excellent line--at the drop of a letter ^_^ Funny in lots of ways.
no one can be that much of a puritan for sixty years and then break into passion safely. --I think you're right, but this is getting me thinking about our stereotypes in this direction and what the realities are/could be.
Nunn hints slightly that he might recover and begin to move on with a better sense of himself, which is a serious piece of empathy to convey via the placement of a toupée --love this. Big things in small, small gestures.
Re 94th anniversary--if you should need testers for any prototypes (because surely you will be practicing, so as to work up to a true culmination of a cookie?), just shout.
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Thanks. It just turned up with the rest of the paragraph.
--I think you're right, but this is getting me thinking about our stereotypes in this direction and what the realities are/could be.
Like what? Assumptions we make about what people will be like in love, based on what they've been like out of it?
Re 94th anniversary--if you should need testers for any prototypes (because surely you will be practicing, so as to work up to a true culmination of a cookie?), just shout.
So noted!
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And then there's sensuality--I think it's assumed to go along with eroticism and is sometimes confused with it, but I think you can have one without the other.
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Large soft molasses cookies, the flat kind, not the small humply kind, please. With sanding sugar on the tops.
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You shouldn't be; I gave it to
because I think the problem was I referred constantly back to the source material and was doing so much brainwork that I ended up comparing the novel instead of enjoying it as much as I could have on its own merits.
How did you find it compared?
Large soft molasses cookies, the flat kind, not the small humply kind, please. With sanding sugar on the tops.
Oh, for God's sake, what kind of baker do you think I am? The point of the molasses cookie is the chewiness. I am the same way about oatmeal and chocolate chips.
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One of the things I adore about Twelfth Night in general is how well it handles being reinterpreted (perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play), even without a reinvention like Grossman's (the Harvard production last Spring at a rock festival, with Feste as a pot dealer, remains one of my favorites). Malvolio has such potential for tragedy underlying his humor, and there's such a fine line directors can walk when it comes to how cruel they want to be (or, perhaps, how merited that cruelty is).
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I lost like two hours straight.
Malvolio has such potential for tragedy underlying his humor, and there's such a fine line directors can walk when it comes to how cruel they want to be (or, perhaps, how merited that cruelty is).
Agreed.
(I don't know about more reinterpretations than any other, although maybe it's just that I haven't seen enough: one stage production, one film, and a lot of reading on my own time. I tend to think of Hamlet and The Tempest as the big rewrites, but again that could be chalked up to exposure. I'm still waiting for a Midsummer Night's Dream that does the fairies the way I want them.)
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File under Top, Hard Act To with a reference to Dirt, Aw Gee Kick
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Ron Lacey directing, ideally.
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3. January 15th. Happy ninety-fourth anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. In six years, commemoratively, I am going to make some epic cookies.
Thanks! To you and yours as well! Epic cookies would seem very appropriate for six years in the future. I look forward to hearing of your recipe-development process.
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I remember they were. I just wish I'd taken more plot out of the dream.