dog-days

14 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

My wife's best friend has been a principal at the Royal opera House, never been to see her. Feel a bit shady but she's never been to watch me lock up baddies either. 

Do you sell tickets?

I'd nominate The Marriage of Figaro for an entry into opera. The libretto is based on the work of a cynical French playwright (Pierre Beaumarchais, amazing biography) and is much stronger than most opera librettos, if also equally bananas. I liked the David McVicar staging with Erwin Schrott in the title role (2015); it was filmed and is sure to be floating around online somewhere. If you can overlook the obscurity of the composer, it's really worth checking out. 

As for Wagner I liked Patrice Chéreau's Ring Cycle, which was also filmed though to an eighties TV standard, and had Gwyneth Jones as Brunhilde. Have yet to see any Wagner live. Find the composer's views deeply repellent and the work sometimes irritating and soporific, but undeniably he was gifted. 

2 hours ago, Tears of Lys said:

I'll bet you'll enjoy the opera much more with your best friend! 

What are you going to see, BTW?   

Was just thinking how much nicer it is to go to the theatre/opera with a good friend than with a stranger or near stranger who has their own agenda. Have been trying to twist the arms of my limited number of contacts here into going to the theatre with me but to no avail. 

Fun blog entry about Doctor Who fans at Chengdu. Sadly their musical introduction to the panel doesn't seem to have been recorded. 

Caught up to the end of episode three by watching in twenty minute instalments. Contrary to general sentiment, I prefer Majors's performance as Timely – it feels more reactive and connected – though his stammer-avoidance pattern seems to be a bit off. I can't work out which sound is meant to be causing him trouble. If it turns out the stammer is an affectation, then that's some seriously good work from Majors, but I don't think it is.

As He Who Remains, he seemed to be doing a piece of theatre acting -- the sprawling over the table, for example. Plus his meeting with the Lokis seemed to go on forever and involved lots of him speechifying/delivering exposition. 

I just found out that the informal word for bumblebee in Welsh is 'buzz shit-dog' cachgi bwm. So quaint and folkloric. I love my sort-of second language. 

11 minutes ago, RhaenysBee said:

I finished Blonde. It’s the most ponderous, narcissistic, overdone mess I’ve seen in ten years. Andrew Dominik must have never heard the phrase less is more. It’s over-written, over-directed, over-edited, over-acted and overall overwhelming - it’s this sentence, but on the screen and for 3 hours. This is an objectively bad movie and I could fill page after page why. It suffers from a chronic and severe lack of self-awareness, it is neither respectful, nor graceful to Marilyn Monroe’s memory or its own underlying themes. It’s offensively long for no good reason, it can’t keep a plot, it can’t tell a coherent story, it expects you to know Marilyn’s biography at the same time as changing/omitting vital events of it. It’s a visual hodgepodge that does nothing for the atmosphere or the storytelling, half of it is pseudo-artistic garbage that should have landed on the cutting room floor and the other half is still a splintered mess. The characterization of Marilyn Monroe is a stagnant renter’s beige graph, there are no ups, no downs, the movie and the life it depicts don’t pulsate, it’s a flat line of neurotic misery which kills any chance of tension, investment or you know, just basic interest. Now I don’t claim to know anything about the truth of Marilyn Monroe’s real life, but I can tell you this doesn’t work in a 3 hour long movie and that it’s hella demeaning and disrespectful toward Marilyn. As for the acting, I genuinely believe that Ana de Armas would have the acting range to do justice to playing Monroe if she were given a decent script and direction. What we got instead brings to mind an interview with Emma Thompson in which she recounts the best piece of direction from her career to be “don’t sigh, don’t cry”, or if you must, do it once and with meaning - not for 3 hours straight. And yes I do think that Pam and Tommy was far more intelligent, nuanced, respectful and graceful to the real people and the essence of that story than Blonde and the mainstream criticism of that show was being the opposite, so there’s that for scale. 

So you wouldn't recommend it, then?

My mother's a confirmed Ricardian, loyaultie me lie and all that. I'm actually quite fond of Henry VII in so far as I am of any late medieval/early modern ruler (and am now going to hide). The biography of him by Thomas Penn The Winter King was a very enjoyable read, though it almost certainly overemphasised his sympathetic qualities. 

Anyway, I read Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins back in 2021 and enjoyed it. It was dense, psychologically acute and had a great snobbish and sinister Oxford that was interesting to think of in comparison to Philip Pullman's (somewhat) cosier version.

I picked up Windmill Hill, her next book, when I saw it in the library; in part because of my memories of her earlier work and in part  because it promised eccentric old ladies and miniature dachshunds. And bloody hell, it definitely delivered on the second half of that sentence. When I read the acknowledgements at the end, it wasn't a huge surprise to learn that Atkins has a dachshund of her own; some of the most vivid writing in the book is about them and the feeling of loving them:

Quote

Gordon was back at the window already, nose sponging the glass to come in. Had he even gotten to the bottom of the plank? If he did his business on the kitchen floor again, Mrs Baker would be furious, but Astrid couldn't bear his 'Cathy Come Home Look'. 

Astrid is a former actress, now 82, having once been the more successful half of a theatrical couple. Her career ended and his took off, following a Stewart of McKellen-like trajectory, and in murky circumstances, the details of which the author holds out as bait for the reader to keep them going through a lot of less plot-driven material.

As the main point-of-view character, Astrid is scatty, interested in humans, and generally sympathetic. Much of the novel's present is set in an airport and her background is told entirely through her reminiscences, and sometimes through memories within memories. Each chapter begins with a letter, either from a nineteen twenties bohemian who once inhabited the titular windmill or from someone angry with her for being a nineteen twenties bohemian living in a windmill. Many are funny: 

Quote

..she stumbled across Daphne <...> painting a young male poet (she is recreating The Birth of Venus. The poet was unclothed). <...> It did not help that the East Sussex Mothers of Choir Boys group happened to be passing on their annual wildflower walk just as she came upon the scene. Hearing her screams, the young man leapt up and, well, you can probably guess in which direction he turned.

Despite all the good things, of which there are many, the book rambles much like its main character does. At times, it was a little hard to believe that the same novelist produces both this and the intense Magpie Lane, and made me wonder if she'd changed her editor. The main villain, a working class mobster, isn't very convincing – very cardboard. He even gives a short 'and that's why I'm an evil bastard' speech. I think Lucy Atkins may have even less experience of the rougher side of life than me. Also, the end is rather too pat – Victorian, almost, in its neatness and in its slightly heavy-handed symbolism. 

I don't think it's a disaster: I'm still asking myself – "Was this a romantic novel, or was it an anti-romantic novel? Or a mixture of both? What was it saying?" with the sense that it was saying something more complicated than:

I’ll put no trust in men, not in my own brother
so maids if you would love, love one another

It also left me wanting to watch documentaries about windmills and to visit the Jack windmill in Sussex, the inspiration for the one here.

However, it does need a stricter editor. 

Patsy the sheepdog sheepdogs through two feet of water

20 minutes ago, felice said:

It is weird to see Novelette go to a work that wasn't even available in English translation. 

Yes, surprised fan ingenuity didn't produce an informal one ahead of the awards. The Chinese text was apparently provided in a Word document in the voter packet. 

Two old women in 1970 reminiscence about their teenage years. Rational dress, a difficult headmistress and bicycling inappropriately. 

ETA: Names are Effy Jones and Berta Ruck.

Just now, sifth said:

This show is a lot of fun. This is legit the only MCU show, that I look forward to seeing each week.

Isn't it the only MCU show you can look forward to seeing each week? 

Unless I've lost my grasp on the Marvel release schedule, which is very possible. 

My mother used to regularly tell me that I was the favourite of her offspring. (She didn't have a huge number to choose from). 

I wouldn't say I feel sympathy for the priest in question, who is an arsehole and a fossil one to boot; however, I do regret the way supermarkets and big chains in the UK have united behind American TV and Film's Halloween, while other traditions have mostly gone -- guising and souling, for example.* And of course, it's become yet another excuse for selling random plastic crap. And for the disgusting pumpkin spice latte to appear in coffee shops. What's wrong with a decent, old-fashioned shot of rum, ffs? 

I know some people here hate bonfire night for good reason, but I love it since some of my happiest memories from childhood are from November 5th with bonfires, sparklers and truly hazardous tooth-breaking treacle toffee; I'll be sad if it gets replaced by plastic pumpkins.

* Whatever happens on the 31st inevitably seems to involve kids walking round nagging people into giving them stuff. Possibly the original purpose of the festival was as a contraceptive. Record sign-ups to novitiates in monasteries and nunneries followed on November 1st...

Czech priest stomps on a display of children's pumpkins (twice)

Also a clue as to why the Czechs tend so much towards atheism/agnosticism. (Though I guess there's an off-colour joke to be had there about how British vicars and priests have treated children. If only they'd stuck to smashing pumpkins, really). 

5 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

How did we find this book? Did someone else mention it? I can’t remember.

Jerol recommended it in my winter reads thread, but I think I may have seen it mentioned before then -- maybe on a dreamwidth blog. 

1 minute ago, Fragile Bird said:

Lol, I was just going to post about this book. It’s a bit silly, a bit fluffy. I’m halfway through. An orc’s heart’s desire is to run a coffee shop in a town where no one has heard of coffee. And of course, people get hooked fast!

 

Yes, if it were a Terry Pratchett novel, Dungeon Dimensions would certainly be involved. The way iced cinnamon buns are discovered as the perfect accompaniment to coffee within a few days of opening is surely too good to be true. (OK, Baldree does kind of justify that it in the plot.) 

It's a very fluffy book, though I feel it does its stuff well and unashamedly. Not deep, not challenging, but very welcome escapism. 

Had a cold this week so took a break from Windmill Hill by Lucy Atkins to indulge in Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree. Thought it was well-paced and engaging, fluffy but not to the extent that it annoyed me. Just the kind of thing you might want to read if you're lying in bed with no energy paracetamol'd to the eyeballs. 

The author has apparently written a prequel, which is an odd choice – it just removes the big selling factor of the original (i.e. what makes people happy? Coffee and pastries. Are fantasy fans people? The balance of probabilities says yes. Then what they need is the coffee shop fantasy sub-genre) and instead turns it into generic fantasy. 

ETA: Ok, I've investigated, and the next book is a prequel, but it replaces the café with a bookshop. I can see the thinking, but would still rather it was a sequel. Not that I feel any kind of successor is really necessary. Legends and Lattes isn't that kind of book. What it did feel it could spawn easily, and now that I know the author is also a game developer, maybe will, is some sort of Stardew Valley-esque sim. 

Cold now gone so back with the Atkins. 

Haven't read it yet, but have heard good things about it. 

Helen McDonald and Sin Blaché's Prophet is £2.99 on Kindle (UK).

Helen McDonald is best known for writing H is for Hawk, which I loved (nature/literary history/personal history/fun facts about goshawks mash-up).

Feel bad about using Amazon, but am doing it anyway. If you have more money than me, it's also available on bookshop.org

Russell T Davies says he wants to write 'a darker LGBT drama'. Given how harrowing the last episodes of It's a Sin were, I'm a bit scared at the prospect. 

1 hour ago, RhaenysBee said:

The Crooked House - I have a feeling that Agatha Christie is just not my cup of tea. The Kenneth Branagh Poirot adaptations bored the life out of me as well, but I blamed the direction and the all star cast. Well The Crooked House, with a less A list cast, and with Julian Fellows who I absolutely adore because Downton Abbey has a special place in my heart, also bored the life out of me. Sure the last 15 minutes was interestingish, but it dragged on way too much, it failed on the atmosphere front and neither of the leads managed to carry the movie. Oh well. 

Hope the worst is over soon!

The Branagh Poirot adaptations bore the life out of everyone, and I'm not just saying that because I think he's overrated. (Boarders: don't tell me to watch his Shakespeare films. I've seen them. They aren't appalling, but they aren't good either. Plus I generally think actor/director deals with the director also playing the lead are a terrible idea. Exception: Coriolanus with Ralph Fiennes.) 

Re: Christie. I've never read the books, but I've liked some of the film/TV treatments. In particular And then there were none featuring Tywin Lannister. Also quite liked the Malkovich Poirot. I've got a bit of a thing for the 'retired detective/general/assassin comes out of retirement and aces it' trope; see also McKellan's Mr Holmes. 

Don't want to start a new thread just for this; anyway, the British Library in London is holding a load of fantasy-related events in October and November, and many are going to be available online. 

More information and schedule

I checked out after ten minutes of Loki episode 2 to go watch Futurama instead. Mobius and Ourobouros are fun, but in general it's too frenetic – not enough time for character moments or building atmosphere. Loads of exposition pushed into episode 1; then masses of running around with things happening because someone thought they'd look cool rather than because they have narrative heft. It feels like an unremarkable sort of video game. 

19 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

 

Wasn't sure if it was a spoof or not. Had imagined that these days the Doctor Who theme was one bloke of any gender with a computer. Are they actually playing the instruments or just miming? 

It was okay, but the core theme could have been allowed more prominence. 

The boards are quite a tough place, especially down this end. I've had an account since 2007; I've had this account since 2011 and I'm still a newbie and more of a tourist than a full member. 

Since you sound quite stressed, I guess you are real, so I apologise for letting my cynicism determine my words at the start in a post that now seems to have been vanished by a mod. Mea culpa.

Legends and Lattes (orc barbarian opens coffee shop) is 99p on amazon.co.uk on Kindle.