I get my family—I get a rest
Today's primary events: doctor's appointment in the early afternoon and on either side taking Autolycus to and from the vet with the invaluable assistance of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks (and later Fox). This process began at five-thirty in the morning and concluded at five in the evening. At one point a taxi was involved. I have slept half an hour since yesterday. I immensely appreciate spatch ordering dinner.
(Autolycus is home safe, fed and washed, and now being hissed at by his sister who if she follows the usual pattern will tell him he smells funny for about the next four days, then groom his ears violently and forget all about it.)
It appears to be an unforeseen side effect of Cleopatra (1963) that I have had the entire score of Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum rotating through my head for the last forty-eight hours; Carry On Cleo (1964) is probably the missing link. As a person who grew up on the original 1963 London cast of Forum with Frankie Howerd rather than the original 1962 Broadway cast with Zero Mostel, I will never cease to be delighted by the existence of Up Pompeii! (1969–70), but I am disappointed that all the episodes currently available on YouTube are the cropped-and-zoomed kind in hopes of evading official notice. So much for staring at that any time soon.
On a different note entirely, it was only last night that I realized Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) contains the earliest instance I have personally seen in fiction of that seasonally appropriate horror trope, the carnival of the dead. That novel is seriously underrated as a work of the uncanny.
That's it for mental capacity around here. I am going to lie on a couch until the pizza arrives.
rushthatspeaks (and later Fox). This process began at five-thirty in the morning and concluded at five in the evening. At one point a taxi was involved. I have slept half an hour since yesterday. I immensely appreciate spatch ordering dinner.(Autolycus is home safe, fed and washed, and now being hissed at by his sister who if she follows the usual pattern will tell him he smells funny for about the next four days, then groom his ears violently and forget all about it.)
It appears to be an unforeseen side effect of Cleopatra (1963) that I have had the entire score of Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum rotating through my head for the last forty-eight hours; Carry On Cleo (1964) is probably the missing link. As a person who grew up on the original 1963 London cast of Forum with Frankie Howerd rather than the original 1962 Broadway cast with Zero Mostel, I will never cease to be delighted by the existence of Up Pompeii! (1969–70), but I am disappointed that all the episodes currently available on YouTube are the cropped-and-zoomed kind in hopes of evading official notice. So much for staring at that any time soon.
On a different note entirely, it was only last night that I realized Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) contains the earliest instance I have personally seen in fiction of that seasonally appropriate horror trope, the carnival of the dead. That novel is seriously underrated as a work of the uncanny.
That's it for mental capacity around here. I am going to lie on a couch until the pizza arrives.
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Thank you for the mention of Lud-in-the-Mist, which is new to me and sounds fascinating.
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I managed to read Stardust before Lud-in-the-Mist, which in hindsight was the right if inadvertent choice, because the other way around I don't think I would have liked Stardust very much at all. I bounce consistently off Gaiman's prose fiction, however, and understand that many readers do not feel this way.
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I thought of Tolkien the first time I re-read The Hobbit after Lud-in-the-Mist: Bilbo and Nathaniel are both ordinary, middle-class, ostensibly conventional people who are weirder than they (allow themselves to) think.
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Thank you. He is a very important cat to me.
Thank you for the mention of Lud-in-the-Mist, which is new to me and sounds fascinating.
It's a book I really love. It wasn't one of my early imprints; I discovered it in college and wondered where it had been all my life. (For bonus points, my rather creased Ballantine paperback copy originally belonged to the Brandeis Comics Science Fiction Club, predecessor of the Brandeis Official Readers Guild of which I was a co-founder. The BCSFC had ceased to exist by the time I was an undergraduate, its collection dispersed to the used book stores of Boston where I found Lud-in-the-Mist. The dearth of speculative fiction in the university library was not to be borne, so we started our own library. I'm honestly really happy it's still around. It even has a permanent home in the new student center and doesn't just float between officers' dorm rooms.) It's a deeply weird, deeply numinous novel with a cozy-seeming surface and strange mythic roots and some of it is terrifying and some of it is silly and some of it is satirical and some of it is sweet and my favorite character is the protagonist, which is rare for me and novels. Mirrlees' partner was the groundbreaking classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison whose work with the Cambridge Ritualists set the template for a lot of fantasy and folk horror; Mirrlees herself was one of the few fantasists until very recently to make use of the old folkloric association between Fairy and the dead; the book has a lot of the otherworld in it. But whichever world it's in, a lot that I find very beautiful, and something new (like the carnival of the dead) every time I go back to it. "There is a land where the sun and the moon do not shine; where the birds are dreams, the stars are visions, and the immortal flowers spring from the thoughts of death. In that land grow fruit, the juices of which sometimes cause madness, and sometimes manliness; for that fruit is flavoured with life and death, and it is the proper nourishment for the souls of man."
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'The prologue'...............
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I mostly know what he sounds like! I need to see more of him.
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Frankie was a very funny man.
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That's still neat!
Frankie was a very funny man.
I really don't know him for anything other than A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but as an early imprint it was pretty indelible. "That's for those of you who have absolutely no interest in pirates."
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It holds up for me, and I've noticed something different in it on each re-read, which I tend to consider a good sign.
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Thank you! I slept into the early afternoon today, which I feel was justified.
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LOL, whoops? (My few memories of Up Pompeii suggest that probably not watching it is best: "And now... the Prologue!" is all that matters. Although I think it or the film did have Barbara Murray in it.)
I do hope you get more sleep soon. :-/
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I'm willing to believe it wasn't as good as its concept, although I will probably still want to find out for myself. Nonetheless, the fact that a BBC spin-off of a Broadway musical based on Roman comedy not only existed but ran for two seasons and a film will always make me happy, because what on earth?
I do hope you get more sleep soon.
Thank you.
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My memories of it aren't all that great, and I adored the Carry Ons, dodgy as they are, so it is something I'd approach with some wariness... But OTOH, those are vague & old childhood memories, so I really can't say. At least one for Frankie Howerd's "And now... the prologue!" But I'm not sure how well that bore repeating every week! I do recall watching one of the films, though, which I seem to remember was about a Medieval descendent of Lurcio's, and was called Up the Chastity Belt, so um... (We quite liked it at the time, but we were probably about 10 and 11 - my sister and I, that is.)
But, yeah: it's like when you pick up a series and all the established fans tell you not to watch episode 10, but you have to watch episode 10 just to find out why you shouldn't watch episode 10.
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So much this. I've owned two copies and read it at least thrice and I've not seen that as a carnival before. Though I've often thought that the dead and the fey could be the same thing. And wondered whether it might have been an influence on The Shire. The first reading I almost saw it as a fey-tinged detective novel. I love Nathaniel.It's a bittersweet book, the other side of the coin of "Goblin Market", and I wish Mirrlees had written just a little more fantasy. And wonder if just one bite of the fruit would hurt...
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I think very much so. As far as I can tell, she's the major exponent of this idea in fiction until Susanna Clarke.
And wondered whether it might have been an influence on The Shire. The first reading I almost saw it as a fey-tinged detective novel. I love Nathaniel. It's a bittersweet book, the other side of the coin of "Goblin Market", and I wish Mirrlees had written just a little more fantasy. And wonder if just one bite of the fruit would hurt...
Yes on all of this. Nathaniel is one of the rare protagonists I love. The book is a mystery and a Mystery and I would have loved to see what more Mirrlees wrote beyond the fields we know. I still need to track down her long modernist Paris: A Poem (1919).