Time jumps like some magic rebound

[sovay]

I am not sleeping at all. I can't think. I am very tired of it.

1. I was in the middle of a work crunch last week when I read that Helen Dunmore had died. Once again, I hadn't even known she had cancer. I'm not even sure I knew she was a poet as well as a novelist. (The poem quoted at the end of the obituary is excellent.) I had discovered her a few years ago with The Greatcoat (2012), a breathtaking ghost story set in the echoes of World War II; she followed it with the post-WWI The Lie (2014), a messier, equally haunting novel about a young veteran whose shell-shocked eidetic memory matches the way time seems to have crazed and jumbled in the wake of the war, like the mud-caked apparition he keeps seeing of his oldest friend and first love and commanding officer who died on the Western Front. "Things ought to stop once they're finished, but this won't stop. They say the war's over, but they're wrong. It went too deep for that. It opened up a crack in time, a crater maybe. Once you fall into it you can't get out again." I was reminded of Nick Murphy and Stephen Volk's The Awakening (2011). I am not at all surprised to see from her bibliography that one of her early novels was titled Talking to the Dead (1996). I had just been coveting the paperback of what I thought was her latest novel, Exposure (2016); it didn't look supernatural, but it might surprise me. She has one last novel and one last poetry collection. I'm sure I'll track them down. I just didn't want a last anything from her for a long time to come.

2. In the wake of Delta and Bank of America pulling their sponsorship from Shakespeare in the Park's Trump-inflected Julius Caesar, I hope everyone remembers that five years ago the Acting Company staged an Obama-inflected Julius Caesar which nobody seems to have boycotted for proxy-assassinating the President of the United States and the lesson here—aside from double standards as usual—is the multivalence of the play, which is why people keep performing and reperforming it against all kinds of different political backdrops and I trust it will outlast most of them, especially the current administration.

3. How did it take me until tonight to learn that the Ronald Reagan impression on the 12" mix of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes" was performed by Chris Barrie? (The civil defense broadcast is Patrick Allen doing an impression of himself.) He also imitates Mike Read as well as Reagan on the 12" mix of "The Power of Love," but that was less weird for me. It wasn't already on my iTunes.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

1. Ah, I'm sad to hear that. I'm now not entirely sure whether I really read any of her books - I think so, but one of her children's titles, when I was working. (I read a lot for work/book selection, and some of them have blurred, and the ones I can think of hers I know - the Ingo books - don't stand out, but something evidently did, even if I don't know what it was.)

2. *side-eyes people* (Also, yay, JC! I kind of hesitate to mention that at the risk of sounding worryingly obsessive, but, er, you do know that the BBC 1979 Julius Caesar has David Collings as Cassius, right? (It is simultaneously both awesome and hilarious. My favourite bit is where the guy who dies on top of Cassius at the end, falls dead on him the wrong way round and Richard Pasco has to stand there and continue to give the speech as if he's fallen the right way round. I expect they were threatening to switch off the lights & there was no time for a retake.)

3. I didn't know that, but then he would have been doing Spitting Image at the time, so he would have been a fairly logical choice. (Also, yay, you like Red Dwarf? How did we avoid each other this long??)

And, btw, as I may forget otherwise, I was watching a Thriller episode yesterday and thinking it was v S&S-ish and then realised, no, literally, it looked just like the A1 set. And then realised that while Thriller had some ITC involvement, it was made by ATV who made S&S only a few years later, so it probably was part of the same set. (No wonder time shenanigans happen - what do you expect if you re-use part of a house that's been occupied by a black magician who's lived for 150 years by taking life from other people? Steel would have been even more frowny if he'd known.)

[ashlyme]

1. Goddamnit! I'll have to read something by her. Either "The Greatcoat" or "The Lie" sound good.

3. Rimmer/Reagan - I hadn't known that until you told us. Grief!

[choco_frosh]

I am not sleeping at all. I can't think. I am very tired of it.

I am so sorry. I hope that when the weather breaks, if not sooner, things will get better.

[gwynnega]

I clicked through to Chris Barrie's Wikipedia entry and started to laugh when I read that one of his roles was "Trevor, the director of the mock panel show 'Ooer, Sounds A Bit Rude' in episode two of Filthy, Rich & Catflap." (I vaguely remember that episode!)

I've never watched Red Dwarf, but I watched a ton of Spitting Image.

[dhampyresa]

2. Brutus remains an honourable man.

[landofnowhere]

So Shakespeare in the Park is suggesting that a hypothetical Trump assassin would be haunted by the ghost of Trump? That sounds like a serious deterrent... I'd take Banquo's ghost instead any day.

[asakiyume]

I'm exhausted by ideological wars penetrating everything, but that double standard is infuriating.

[sami]

I have chronically acute insomnia issues. I cannot recommend melatonin pills highly enough.