Jingle jangle
Jun. 23rd, 2009 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarielWow, ages since I've posted. I've been busy tippy-typing away, currently putting final touches to a short story which I've been thoroughly enjoying and may write more about at some point, if it all turns out as planned. We have taken to going into Starbucks each day to work, and the exceptionally lovely folks there have adopted us (and another regular too): we are having coffee tastings there almost every day. It's been really busy in there since Easter, all these people revising for exams... and now the tumbleweed wafts gently between the tables, and only we old-timers remain hunched over our bitter draughts to reminisce about the way things used to be. I imagine it'll start filling up again in September.
Yesterday's coffee tasting didn't happen until after 3pm. I should have known better (a dose of espresso takes about 12 hours to work its wicked way with me), but I couldn't resist. As a result, I was wide awake until 4am this morning (just in time to hear the birds get up). The upside of this was that I had time to polish off Sarah Waters' astonishing, marvellous, breathtaking, unputdownable The Night Watch. Oh, it was all "Little Gidding"! Tongues of fire and doves descending and ends that are beginnings! I was disappointed to see its 3.5 rating on LibraryThing, so I blethered about it briefly there and gave it a socking great 5 stars, which has made no difference to its average. Bah.
Um, what else have I been up to? We have been having a Powell and Pressburger retrospective, seeing some that I haven't seen in the past, including the terrific propaganda film 49th Parallel (for which Pressburger got an Oscar). I have had a biography of Pressburger on the shelf for YEARS, so I started on that late last night as the night watch ended and the sun came up. It's written by his grandson, Kevin Macdonald who directed The Last King of Scotland... and is also an Oscar winner. (I wonder how many other families have multiple Oscar winners?) All life is linked (a line said in B7 by Kathleen Byron, who also played the Mad Nun in P&P's Black Narcissus). There, I'll stop being nerdy now.
Have also started watching mid-80s BBC Civil War drama By the Sword Divided. Even though Gareth Thomas, Janet Lees Price, David Collings and JULIAN GLOVER are regulars [1], I've never seen it before. For some reason, the whole Civil War period is a blank to me. I think hearing about the plague village of Eyam at an impressionable age scared me off the seventeenth-century. Because it is DAMN SCARY. Middle ages scary, but with bigger fucking guns. Anyway, the people who brought us By the Sword Divided also helped bring us Upstairs, Downstairs and the Granada Sherlock Holmeseses, so I feel I am in safe hands as I dip my toe into worlds beyond the ken of the sociologist. All part of general thinking I am doing right now about historicals, my current favourite wisdom on this being from Peter Dickinson, in the introduction to his children's novel, The Dancing Bear (set in Byzantium!, no less): "I have had to invent quite a lot, partly because I am not especially good at finding things out..." Words to live by.
[1] Did anyone else see Julian Glover doing his one-man Beowulf on the Michael Wood thingy on BBC Four? I wonder how much to hire him and a hall and have a feast?
Yesterday's coffee tasting didn't happen until after 3pm. I should have known better (a dose of espresso takes about 12 hours to work its wicked way with me), but I couldn't resist. As a result, I was wide awake until 4am this morning (just in time to hear the birds get up). The upside of this was that I had time to polish off Sarah Waters' astonishing, marvellous, breathtaking, unputdownable The Night Watch. Oh, it was all "Little Gidding"! Tongues of fire and doves descending and ends that are beginnings! I was disappointed to see its 3.5 rating on LibraryThing, so I blethered about it briefly there and gave it a socking great 5 stars, which has made no difference to its average. Bah.
Um, what else have I been up to? We have been having a Powell and Pressburger retrospective, seeing some that I haven't seen in the past, including the terrific propaganda film 49th Parallel (for which Pressburger got an Oscar). I have had a biography of Pressburger on the shelf for YEARS, so I started on that late last night as the night watch ended and the sun came up. It's written by his grandson, Kevin Macdonald who directed The Last King of Scotland... and is also an Oscar winner. (I wonder how many other families have multiple Oscar winners?) All life is linked (a line said in B7 by Kathleen Byron, who also played the Mad Nun in P&P's Black Narcissus). There, I'll stop being nerdy now.
Have also started watching mid-80s BBC Civil War drama By the Sword Divided. Even though Gareth Thomas, Janet Lees Price, David Collings and JULIAN GLOVER are regulars [1], I've never seen it before. For some reason, the whole Civil War period is a blank to me. I think hearing about the plague village of Eyam at an impressionable age scared me off the seventeenth-century. Because it is DAMN SCARY. Middle ages scary, but with bigger fucking guns. Anyway, the people who brought us By the Sword Divided also helped bring us Upstairs, Downstairs and the Granada Sherlock Holmeseses, so I feel I am in safe hands as I dip my toe into worlds beyond the ken of the sociologist. All part of general thinking I am doing right now about historicals, my current favourite wisdom on this being from Peter Dickinson, in the introduction to his children's novel, The Dancing Bear (set in Byzantium!, no less): "I have had to invent quite a lot, partly because I am not especially good at finding things out..." Words to live by.
[1] Did anyone else see Julian Glover doing his one-man Beowulf on the Michael Wood thingy on BBC Four? I wonder how much to hire him and a hall and have a feast?
