Dept of, Miff once more at the British Library: okay, I finally got to see the manuscript I ordered the other week (after being 'processing' it was 'returned to store', I ordered it again and lo and behold, it was in due course 'ready for collection' in the Manuscripts Reading Room.). Alas, it contained nothing of relevance to my research. However ( Read more... )

Having a young man wearing nothing but rather skimpy shorts outside the kitchen window repointing the bricks surrounding it was probably the opening scene in one of those stories of tasteful erotica by litry laydeez writing under pseudonyms: but really, I found it entirely too blushmaking to be undertaking the washing-up while gazing at his barely ( Read more... )

As a result of a train of thought which need not detain us further (especially as I am unable to reconstruct it in any kind of detail, but riffing off from seeing The Marriage of Figaro at the weekend*) I came up with the band name The Amorous Butterflies (?Cherubino and the -? or just The).
But find it hard to imagine what kind of band it would be ( Read more... )

It is probably no news to my dr rdrz that I am not infrequently exasperated by narratives about the history of psychiatry/madness which make it All About Teh Wymmynz, with particular ire reserved for any kneejerk association with Female Creativity.

I am also so very over the fictional trope of the woman who has gone right over the edge of nervous ( Read more... )

I'm sure I have hymned before the necessity, if not the actual pleasures, of boredom, but whatever, I think it bears repeating.

Article in today's Guardian G2 as to whether large swathes of great works of music, literature are too long, full of makeweight, and really, really, deserve to be ruthlessly cut.

Quite early on there seems to me to be a ( Read more... )

Work computer: 'Google+ no longer supports your browser.' Soddit.*

***

In other news, further to my Dee-snark the other day, Leif Jerram finds Damon Albarn's opera about the Elizabethan Renaissance man John Dee visually stunning but very frustrating:
It started with the entrance of an impressively trained crow. As we left, the audience were saying ( Read more... )

From
( Read more... )

Courtesy of rysmiel: in the form of
1. If you'd like to play along, reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. You then list (and upload or link to the video, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Then, as I'm doing here, you'll post the list to your journal with the instructions.

The letter he gave me was N: five was no ( Read more... )

Search fails at finding the piece in The Observer Review anent this: Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, which is happening at the Bloomsbury Theatre (which is, of course, within the Student Union building of the godless institution in Gower St). This aroused in me the question of whether there would be any George Eliot, in particular 'O ( Read more... )

Five topics from chickenfeet2003

ImperialismA recurrent theme in human history - except, empires are all different, and even the nominally same empire is different at different points in its chronological existence. The only thing they have in common (I hazard) is that they are not monolithic, that they represent at any given point an equilibrium of balancing ( Read more... )