"We cross our bridges when we come to them, and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.
Saw Trevor Nunn's revival last night at the Haymarket and adored it. It's a very wordy play (I must admit I've never read it; I've seen the film, but even that was years ago) and yet it didn't feel overlong or difficult to understand - the direction and the performances made it feel fun and witty, plus Jamie Parker and Sam Barnett's chemistry was astoundingly good. I've seen both of them on stage before but together they were something else. It was actually my third time seeing Barnett on stage, as I first caught him in Dealer's Choice a few years back at Trafalgar Studios and then in Women Beware Women at the National, which I found actually a pretty disappointing production, though he was good in it. Oddly, Parker was in The National's preceding Middleton revival - The Revenger's Tragedy, a couple of years previously, which I adored. We sat terrifyingly close to the front, with all the blood and gore that entailed, and Parker made a very stoic and yet very present-feeling Hippolito. He has a lot of gravitas and I'm sad I missed his productions at the Globe, especially as I've never seen anything there.
However, wonderful theatre or no wonderful theatre and regardless of the excellent catch-ups I had with two excellent friends, the HIGHLIGHT of my brief soujourn to London was the Lynchian nightmare that is the M&M World shop in Leicester Square. So much unecessary sweet-based merch. Why is the green M&M "the sexy one"? Why did I just manage to find a website for said website that features said cartoon lady doing a sexy dance? So many questions, so little time. IT HAS FOUR FLOORS. Nobody needs that many M&M-themed boxer shorts/dispensers/hoodies/oven gloves/etc. Some of the products they'd put M&Ms on were so obscure that we didn't even know what they were.
Showing posts with label theatre misc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theatre misc. Show all posts
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Friday, 12 August 2011
fringe benefits
The Edinburgh Fringe is one of my favourite places in the world. Although that statement does come with the caveat that there are a bunch of places in the world I still haven't been, it cannot be denied that the Fringe makes me so excited I do that thing where my hands wave about and my voice goes all high-pitched; let me tell you, the internet, that is MIGHTY EXCITED. I've been every summer for the last four years, either watching or performing, which I suppose makes it my annual holiday destination in much the same way that some people visit the south of France every year or whatever, except that it rains a shit ton more in Edinburgh than on your average holibags location of choice (I got back yesterday morning and some of the things I own are still damp). When I think of the best and the worst theatre and comedy that I've seen in my life, so much of both have been at the Fringe - trapped in tiny hot rooms where the door's too near the stage and there's too much audience on either side of you, thinking, 'can I leave? no, no, I can't possibly, but when will this end'; packed into venues that used to be conference rooms and backs of pubs and myriad other things, crying with laughter; stuffing my face with too much pie. I include the bad as well as the good in my remembrances because in a lot of ways they're just as important. I like that I've seen terrible, terrible things in Edinburgh because I like that it exists as a platform for Anyone Who Wants to Make Theatre to just do it and it's right that inevitably some of those things don't work. If theatre was easy, there'd be no point slogging away at it, would there? It should be hard. It should fail sometimes. That's why it's art.
This year I went to the Fringe for six days, travelling up with my boyfriend on Thursday night, on the overnight coach from London to Edinburgh, which was a little bit rough, because how can it not be, but better than I expected. We arrived at 7.30am and saw shows pretty solidly for two days. Some had been made by our friends, some by people we were fans of and with some of them we had absolutely no idea what to expect; in addition to this, we socialised, had a few drinks, ate pie (how many times can I mention pie in this blog? Let's get a tally going: ii), got flyered a LOT and went on and on about how beautiful Edinburgh is. I have been known to shriek "look at the VISTAS" almost constantly in that city. Look at them though!! After he went home to do Real Life Stuff (i.e. earn money like a grown-up), I stayed on for a few extra days with my friends, who are working at the Pleasance and being put up in student halls. I've been a punter and a performer at the Fringe but I've never been staff, and I've got to say that while it looks awesome in lots of ways it also looks super tough - my friends are flyering for sometimes twelve, thirteen hours a day on the Pleasance's street team and I am amazed they're not dead. Be nice to the flyerers, guys; you've been in the rain for ten minutes between venues, and yes it's shit, but they've been in it all day for the last million days. The older I get, the more I realise the extent to which hungover students are the glue holding the Fringe together.
Anyway, I could go on and on and ON about how great Edinburgh is and how much I love it - you may have guessed this - but that won't get us anywhere and, contrary to appearances, I do actually have stuff to get done. So I'm going rely on the preserve of the blogger, i.e. some arbitrary self-imposed rules, and instead name my Top Five Fringe Shows 2011. Although I've talked about theatre a lot here, I'm actually a massive comedy fan too - I just find the former easier to talk about because I know more about how it's put together and works, whereas I love comedy in the same way I love magic, in total ignorance of how they have managed to do this thing - so I was almost tempted to do three comedy and three theatre. But five is the perfect arbitrary self-imposed number, I'm afraid. So, in no particular order (and entirely subjectively), here are my five favourite shows from this year's Edinburgh Festival:
1) Translunar Paradise, 15.40 at the Pleasance Dome, then touring the UK I think? A beautiful story about love and bereavement told entirely without words, using only mime, live accordion music, masks and movement, and it made me cry lots. There are only two actors (and one accordionist) on stage, playing a couple who have grown old together - the actors use incredibly realistic hand-held masks in the old-age sequences which can easily be removed to show that the line between youth and age is actually not a huge one. It was just stunningly performed and all I can say is that if you have the opportunity to see it, you should take it. Aside from being charming and ridiculously well staged, rehearsed, directed and performed, it is genuinely one of the most moving pieces of theatre I have ever seen.
2) Alex Horne: Seven Years in the Bathroom, 20.20 at the Pleasance Courtyard. Alex Horne has a very likeable manner and I was pretty certain that I would enjoy the show even before it began, because just watching him talk is enjoyable. I've been aware of Horne for a little while; I'd seen We Need Answers, his BBC4 forgotten sports programme and was generally aware of his involvement with the Cowards/Mark Watson ex-Footlights set. But this show far outstripped my expectations - in addition to his engaging persona, Horne's chosen conceit works really well. It is that the average man will live for 79 years and spend 7 of those in the bathroom, and he then breaks down not only the average amount of time spent doing most things (sleeping, eating, driving, whatever) but also divides the hour of his show into the equivalent percentages of time spent doing these things. If that makes sense. So, 5 minutes in the bathroom, however many minutes 'working' or 'dreaming'... He eats a Rustler's burger, gets an audience member to paint his portrait and another to do the housework, a panda talks with his voice - it's really quite something. And the main thing, of course, is that it's very, very, very funny. Also on the night we saw it he accidentally covered two audience members in sauce and I nearly fell off my chair.
3) Swamp Juice, 14.00 at the Underbelly. A very charming, weirdly exhilarating show, ostensibly for kids, but also for wide-eyed grown-up kids like me. Bunk Puppets, the company, had a piece up last year called Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones, which was also very beautiful and even made me do a little cry (this list is making me look like a wussy, but in reality I am extremely tough and manly and in my defence I was quite hungover that day); both are one-man shows performed by Mr. Bunk himself, a semi-mute clown character played by Montreal's Jeff Achtem. In both shows, he brings a bunch of shadow puppets to life; Swamp Juice is more narrative-based than its predecessor and the finale is stunning - first he brings the puppets out into the audience, with various audience members having to hold things up to create the scenery, and then HE MAKES THE SHADOWS GO 3D. I think Swamp Juice is my favourite for that reason (you've never heard a room of so many adults go "ohhh my gooooodddd" with such pure amazed happiness), but Sticks and Stones is returning to the Fringe for a brief run at the Udderbelly towards the end of the month and is also very, very worth watching. In conclusion: I love puppets so so much and Bunk Puppets shows are better than real life.
4) Humphrey Ker is Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher!, 19.15 at the Pleasance Courtyard. All three members of my favourite sketch troupe The Penny Dreadfuls have gone solo this year, which is sad in some ways (no Penny Dreadfuls show!) and great in others (three hours of Dreadfuls instead of one!), but mostly it is Interesting. I've been a big fan of theirs since 2008 - can't recommend their Brothers Faversham radio show highly enough - and seeing the very different directions all of their shows have gone in is fascinating. Thom Tuck's confessional Straight to DVD show, in which he discusses straight-to-DVD Disney films and heartbreak, and David Reed's Shamblehouse, off-the-wall one-man sketch comedy featuring a moving doughnut acrobatics tale, are both very funny and very much worth watching, as well as being admirably different to what I think of as characterising their previous work. But Ker's show is just so silly, so tightly written, packed with ridiculous accents and a tiny Romanian dog that it was one of the highlights of my Fringe. It's slightly Milliganesque in its pure beautiful silliness and it made me laugh so, so much.
5) The Behemoth, 16.45 at the Pleasance Courtyard. I'd seen John-Luke Roberts and Nadia Kamil do a few bits and pieces at Latitude 2009 and 2010 and couldn't wait to finally see their whole show because they just make me laugh so much; I saw John-Luke Roberts' solo show last year and loved it, but seeing them together is even better. Much like my last recommendation, it's glorious silliness throughout, right from the beginning, which features a truly special rendition of Stand By Me. After we left, my boyfriend was like, 'You know when you can tell from the first minute that you're going to like something...?' In addition to the show being generally hilarious, Roberts and Kamil have a fantastic rapport and make each other laugh a lot on stage, which I LOVE. I adore the transience of comedy, the feeling that the performance you see is special for you as an audience, so when something goes awry or people adlib it is just my favourite thing, and they were great at it. Also (and here's a shallow extra point for you), ALL of Nadia Kamil's outfits are super awesome. Ugh it's hard to talk about comedy, isn't it? Because just saying "it was really funny!!" doesn't really sum up why that is true, but we quoted this show a lot throughout the rest of the Fringe because it is packed with good stuff and I can't wait to see future offerings from them.
Some honourable mentions of things that very nearly made the list go to Death Song by You Need Me theatre company (I've seen and adored everything YNM have done after stumbling across How it Ended in 2008 and definitely not crying everywhere because, as we have discussed, I am So Manly), the brilliant Max and Ivan are Holmes & Watson and high-energy one-man-show Bane. Also I wanted to mention LUDS' Cagebirds, 13.35 at Greenside, which everyone should definitely see, but I felt this blog post had come a little late to do so properly, as it closes tomorrow; nonetheless, it's full of my friends and they're all bloody great in it, so GO if you can.
In conclusion: Edinburgh is great, I love lots of stuff, my body is still trying to process all the pie carbs I put into it (pie tally: iii) and I'm not sure my brain has recovered yet from two overnight coaches and lots of late nights. Bring on the next Fringe please.
This year I went to the Fringe for six days, travelling up with my boyfriend on Thursday night, on the overnight coach from London to Edinburgh, which was a little bit rough, because how can it not be, but better than I expected. We arrived at 7.30am and saw shows pretty solidly for two days. Some had been made by our friends, some by people we were fans of and with some of them we had absolutely no idea what to expect; in addition to this, we socialised, had a few drinks, ate pie (how many times can I mention pie in this blog? Let's get a tally going: ii), got flyered a LOT and went on and on about how beautiful Edinburgh is. I have been known to shriek "look at the VISTAS" almost constantly in that city. Look at them though!! After he went home to do Real Life Stuff (i.e. earn money like a grown-up), I stayed on for a few extra days with my friends, who are working at the Pleasance and being put up in student halls. I've been a punter and a performer at the Fringe but I've never been staff, and I've got to say that while it looks awesome in lots of ways it also looks super tough - my friends are flyering for sometimes twelve, thirteen hours a day on the Pleasance's street team and I am amazed they're not dead. Be nice to the flyerers, guys; you've been in the rain for ten minutes between venues, and yes it's shit, but they've been in it all day for the last million days. The older I get, the more I realise the extent to which hungover students are the glue holding the Fringe together.
Anyway, I could go on and on and ON about how great Edinburgh is and how much I love it - you may have guessed this - but that won't get us anywhere and, contrary to appearances, I do actually have stuff to get done. So I'm going rely on the preserve of the blogger, i.e. some arbitrary self-imposed rules, and instead name my Top Five Fringe Shows 2011. Although I've talked about theatre a lot here, I'm actually a massive comedy fan too - I just find the former easier to talk about because I know more about how it's put together and works, whereas I love comedy in the same way I love magic, in total ignorance of how they have managed to do this thing - so I was almost tempted to do three comedy and three theatre. But five is the perfect arbitrary self-imposed number, I'm afraid. So, in no particular order (and entirely subjectively), here are my five favourite shows from this year's Edinburgh Festival:
1) Translunar Paradise, 15.40 at the Pleasance Dome, then touring the UK I think? A beautiful story about love and bereavement told entirely without words, using only mime, live accordion music, masks and movement, and it made me cry lots. There are only two actors (and one accordionist) on stage, playing a couple who have grown old together - the actors use incredibly realistic hand-held masks in the old-age sequences which can easily be removed to show that the line between youth and age is actually not a huge one. It was just stunningly performed and all I can say is that if you have the opportunity to see it, you should take it. Aside from being charming and ridiculously well staged, rehearsed, directed and performed, it is genuinely one of the most moving pieces of theatre I have ever seen.
2) Alex Horne: Seven Years in the Bathroom, 20.20 at the Pleasance Courtyard. Alex Horne has a very likeable manner and I was pretty certain that I would enjoy the show even before it began, because just watching him talk is enjoyable. I've been aware of Horne for a little while; I'd seen We Need Answers, his BBC4 forgotten sports programme and was generally aware of his involvement with the Cowards/Mark Watson ex-Footlights set. But this show far outstripped my expectations - in addition to his engaging persona, Horne's chosen conceit works really well. It is that the average man will live for 79 years and spend 7 of those in the bathroom, and he then breaks down not only the average amount of time spent doing most things (sleeping, eating, driving, whatever) but also divides the hour of his show into the equivalent percentages of time spent doing these things. If that makes sense. So, 5 minutes in the bathroom, however many minutes 'working' or 'dreaming'... He eats a Rustler's burger, gets an audience member to paint his portrait and another to do the housework, a panda talks with his voice - it's really quite something. And the main thing, of course, is that it's very, very, very funny. Also on the night we saw it he accidentally covered two audience members in sauce and I nearly fell off my chair.
3) Swamp Juice, 14.00 at the Underbelly. A very charming, weirdly exhilarating show, ostensibly for kids, but also for wide-eyed grown-up kids like me. Bunk Puppets, the company, had a piece up last year called Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones, which was also very beautiful and even made me do a little cry (this list is making me look like a wussy, but in reality I am extremely tough and manly and in my defence I was quite hungover that day); both are one-man shows performed by Mr. Bunk himself, a semi-mute clown character played by Montreal's Jeff Achtem. In both shows, he brings a bunch of shadow puppets to life; Swamp Juice is more narrative-based than its predecessor and the finale is stunning - first he brings the puppets out into the audience, with various audience members having to hold things up to create the scenery, and then HE MAKES THE SHADOWS GO 3D. I think Swamp Juice is my favourite for that reason (you've never heard a room of so many adults go "ohhh my gooooodddd" with such pure amazed happiness), but Sticks and Stones is returning to the Fringe for a brief run at the Udderbelly towards the end of the month and is also very, very worth watching. In conclusion: I love puppets so so much and Bunk Puppets shows are better than real life.
4) Humphrey Ker is Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher!, 19.15 at the Pleasance Courtyard. All three members of my favourite sketch troupe The Penny Dreadfuls have gone solo this year, which is sad in some ways (no Penny Dreadfuls show!) and great in others (three hours of Dreadfuls instead of one!), but mostly it is Interesting. I've been a big fan of theirs since 2008 - can't recommend their Brothers Faversham radio show highly enough - and seeing the very different directions all of their shows have gone in is fascinating. Thom Tuck's confessional Straight to DVD show, in which he discusses straight-to-DVD Disney films and heartbreak, and David Reed's Shamblehouse, off-the-wall one-man sketch comedy featuring a moving doughnut acrobatics tale, are both very funny and very much worth watching, as well as being admirably different to what I think of as characterising their previous work. But Ker's show is just so silly, so tightly written, packed with ridiculous accents and a tiny Romanian dog that it was one of the highlights of my Fringe. It's slightly Milliganesque in its pure beautiful silliness and it made me laugh so, so much.
5) The Behemoth, 16.45 at the Pleasance Courtyard. I'd seen John-Luke Roberts and Nadia Kamil do a few bits and pieces at Latitude 2009 and 2010 and couldn't wait to finally see their whole show because they just make me laugh so much; I saw John-Luke Roberts' solo show last year and loved it, but seeing them together is even better. Much like my last recommendation, it's glorious silliness throughout, right from the beginning, which features a truly special rendition of Stand By Me. After we left, my boyfriend was like, 'You know when you can tell from the first minute that you're going to like something...?' In addition to the show being generally hilarious, Roberts and Kamil have a fantastic rapport and make each other laugh a lot on stage, which I LOVE. I adore the transience of comedy, the feeling that the performance you see is special for you as an audience, so when something goes awry or people adlib it is just my favourite thing, and they were great at it. Also (and here's a shallow extra point for you), ALL of Nadia Kamil's outfits are super awesome. Ugh it's hard to talk about comedy, isn't it? Because just saying "it was really funny!!" doesn't really sum up why that is true, but we quoted this show a lot throughout the rest of the Fringe because it is packed with good stuff and I can't wait to see future offerings from them.
Some honourable mentions of things that very nearly made the list go to Death Song by You Need Me theatre company (I've seen and adored everything YNM have done after stumbling across How it Ended in 2008 and definitely not crying everywhere because, as we have discussed, I am So Manly), the brilliant Max and Ivan are Holmes & Watson and high-energy one-man-show Bane. Also I wanted to mention LUDS' Cagebirds, 13.35 at Greenside, which everyone should definitely see, but I felt this blog post had come a little late to do so properly, as it closes tomorrow; nonetheless, it's full of my friends and they're all bloody great in it, so GO if you can.
In conclusion: Edinburgh is great, I love lots of stuff, my body is still trying to process all the pie carbs I put into it (pie tally: iii) and I'm not sure my brain has recovered yet from two overnight coaches and lots of late nights. Bring on the next Fringe please.
Friday, 19 March 2010
a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day four
This one is late, i.e. it's now Saturday and all the photos are from Friday, but by the time I got back to my room at half three this morning I was just like ughhhhh sleep please. Ended up seeing a Beatles tribute act in the cavern with flatmate/halls friends, which was mad and surreal and far, far more fun than it had any right to be. oh yes.
9.53; Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip Ease My 10am Lecture Pain
15.32; Eating Some Lunch, Listening to Ben Goldacre Talk About Rentokil
19.01; Red Onion Puff Pastry Tarts And Roast Potatoes, Victoryyy
21.24; Rehearsing Again, Roisin Looks Coy With A Ladle
23.10; Briefly Home To Dump Stuff & It's Time For Some Pro Plus
00.39; Somehow End Up In The Cavern Watching The Mersey Beatles
01.25; You Know You Twist So Fine
01.52; Pile-On In The Street I Don't Even Know
Off to see Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip tonight. Exciting!
9.53; Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip Ease My 10am Lecture Pain
15.32; Eating Some Lunch, Listening to Ben Goldacre Talk About Rentokil
19.01; Red Onion Puff Pastry Tarts And Roast Potatoes, Victoryyy
21.24; Rehearsing Again, Roisin Looks Coy With A Ladle
23.10; Briefly Home To Dump Stuff & It's Time For Some Pro Plus
00.39; Somehow End Up In The Cavern Watching The Mersey Beatles
01.25; You Know You Twist So Fine
01.52; Pile-On In The Street I Don't Even Know
Off to see Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip tonight. Exciting!
Monday, 1 February 2010
in the first taxi he was alone tra-la.
The great housing debate seems to have wound itself mercifully down and, though the whole process has been (and continues to be) fraught with bizarre difficulties, we should, SHOULD, be going to sign the contracts in about an hour. I am excited/terrified/convinced that something will go wrong. What an unpleasant thing house-hunting is! The whole fuss was combined with a rotten fortnight of exams and basically I'm pretty freaking excited that January's in the past, not least because February is looking pretty good.
Tonight is the drama society's first meeting of the semester - I can't wait to go and see everybody again - and then this weekend I've a friend coming to stay. The future's bright/orange, is what I'm saying. She arrives on Friday and then the two of us are going, with one of my flatmates, to see Ghost Stories at the Liverpool Playhouse. HMMM. It's supposed to be the Scariest Play Ever to Scare, and we're all gigantic cowards, so I'm sure it will be an interesting experience. Also, gigantic coward I may be, but I love horror (good horror, I mean. I'd take From Beyond the Grave over Hostel any day of the week), and I adore both of the writer-directors' work. Jeremy Dyson's books of short stories are brilliantly creepy and funny by turns, and I do believe he's also adapting my favourite Jonathan Coe novel for telly at the moment, as well as being one quarter of The League of Gentlemen - so, an all-round-excellent chap, then. And Andy Nyman, perhaps best known for his collaborations with Derren Brown, is... Yeah.
So, I've been thinking a lot about scary things, this week, and unnerving things, and (as ever) trying to pick this week's piece of writing. I might've chosen an extract from one of Dyson's short stories - there's a particular one about the London Underground in Never Trust a Rabbit that just ended me when I was fifteen - if I'd not stupidly left my copies at home. In the end, I decided on a piece by Louis MacNeice.
Couldn't find it online anywhere, so I had to type it up, which has slightly cut down the amount of time I have to talk about it, but basically: MacNeice was a successful poet of the 1930s whose work faltered after the war, as happened to many of his contemporaries, and recovered in an interesting and rather melancholic way. He wrote a body of poems belonging to a genre he termed "the thumbnail nightmare": brief, unnerving little pieces, and sparse in explanation. Perhaps my favourite of his thumbnail nightmares is this, written in 1961:
After the Crash
When he came to he knew
Time must have passed because
The asphalt was high with hemlock
Through which he crawled to his crash
Helmet and found it no more
Than his wrinkled hand what it was.
Yet life seemed still going on:
He could hear the signals bounce
Back from the moon and the hens
Fire themselves black in the batteries
And the silence of small blind cats
Debating whether to pounce.
Then he looked up and marked
The gigantic scales in the sky,
The pan on the left dead empty
And the pan on the right dead empty,
And knew in the dead, dead calm
It was too late to die.
Perhaps a little less subtle than Macneice's more well-known "The Taxis", but I still think it's beautifully done and something about it gives me the shivers.
Have to run now, unfortunately, but before I do: people who've been reading for a while (if there are any, etc etc) may remember my friend Celia, who I mentioned I used to talk to a lot about a lot of things, but we'd both gotten terribly busy lately and it was all a dreadful shame. WELL. It turns out, she actually came across this blog, and meant to call me for ages, and yesterday evening we had a lovely catch-up; after we got off the phone, I booked some train tickets to go and visit her in March. Which is rather a nice postscript, I think, for anyone who likes that sort of thing.
Tonight is the drama society's first meeting of the semester - I can't wait to go and see everybody again - and then this weekend I've a friend coming to stay. The future's bright/orange, is what I'm saying. She arrives on Friday and then the two of us are going, with one of my flatmates, to see Ghost Stories at the Liverpool Playhouse. HMMM. It's supposed to be the Scariest Play Ever to Scare, and we're all gigantic cowards, so I'm sure it will be an interesting experience. Also, gigantic coward I may be, but I love horror (good horror, I mean. I'd take From Beyond the Grave over Hostel any day of the week), and I adore both of the writer-directors' work. Jeremy Dyson's books of short stories are brilliantly creepy and funny by turns, and I do believe he's also adapting my favourite Jonathan Coe novel for telly at the moment, as well as being one quarter of The League of Gentlemen - so, an all-round-excellent chap, then. And Andy Nyman, perhaps best known for his collaborations with Derren Brown, is... Yeah.
So, I've been thinking a lot about scary things, this week, and unnerving things, and (as ever) trying to pick this week's piece of writing. I might've chosen an extract from one of Dyson's short stories - there's a particular one about the London Underground in Never Trust a Rabbit that just ended me when I was fifteen - if I'd not stupidly left my copies at home. In the end, I decided on a piece by Louis MacNeice.
Couldn't find it online anywhere, so I had to type it up, which has slightly cut down the amount of time I have to talk about it, but basically: MacNeice was a successful poet of the 1930s whose work faltered after the war, as happened to many of his contemporaries, and recovered in an interesting and rather melancholic way. He wrote a body of poems belonging to a genre he termed "the thumbnail nightmare": brief, unnerving little pieces, and sparse in explanation. Perhaps my favourite of his thumbnail nightmares is this, written in 1961:
After the Crash
When he came to he knew
Time must have passed because
The asphalt was high with hemlock
Through which he crawled to his crash
Helmet and found it no more
Than his wrinkled hand what it was.
Yet life seemed still going on:
He could hear the signals bounce
Back from the moon and the hens
Fire themselves black in the batteries
And the silence of small blind cats
Debating whether to pounce.
Then he looked up and marked
The gigantic scales in the sky,
The pan on the left dead empty
And the pan on the right dead empty,
And knew in the dead, dead calm
It was too late to die.
Perhaps a little less subtle than Macneice's more well-known "The Taxis", but I still think it's beautifully done and something about it gives me the shivers.
Have to run now, unfortunately, but before I do: people who've been reading for a while (if there are any, etc etc) may remember my friend Celia, who I mentioned I used to talk to a lot about a lot of things, but we'd both gotten terribly busy lately and it was all a dreadful shame. WELL. It turns out, she actually came across this blog, and meant to call me for ages, and yesterday evening we had a lovely catch-up; after we got off the phone, I booked some train tickets to go and visit her in March. Which is rather a nice postscript, I think, for anyone who likes that sort of thing.
Monday, 4 January 2010
i don't really remember, but i think it is called 'auld lang deslang.'
Note(s) to self:
- stop being awake at super unsociable hours. Half three, sober, finishing an essay? What are you doing with your life? Remember how to write in the day like normal folk do instead of only being able to crack on with anything once it's past midnight.
- finish a damn book. You like reading, remember - that's just about the only reason you picked that degree.
- oh, yeah, and er look into changing that degree while you're on it. whoops
Tomorrow I am going to get up and learn how to function like a real human person again! The festive bit of the year is over and now we have a shiny new one, and it's more than a day old, it's all properly broken in and undeniable and really here, just like such greats as, oh, 2009, 2008, 2007-- you get the picture. Anyway, the long and short of it is that I am no longer allowed to stay up until all hours talking to friends about nothing or listen to Radiohead at 5am and go mental, or any of that sort of nonsense At All. It's business time.
And then, in a couple of days, I get to go see some theatre! I am seeing this and this and this, all for free, because of this. amazing. Part of me's looking forward to going back to Liverpool and part of me is already sad about being so far away from London again, because look, look at all the lovely free plays. ;_;
One of the first things I did in 2010 (after going to bed at 5am and waking up at 10, completely unable to sleep) was some tidying and a bit of light washing up - so I'm taking it as a sign that it's going to be a year for conquering shit. Although I did go back to the mass of duvets once all my friends had woken up, and then I barely moved for the rest of the day, so it's swings and roundabouts I suppose?
(At the start of 2008, I was woken up by my friend's super-excited flatmate bouncing on the bed, then climbing in between us with his chilly limbs. 2009, I was dragged from sleep by a different friend continually getting up to vomit, coming back to bed and then getting up to vomit again. so, ah. Low-key, this year, for one thing.)
- stop being awake at super unsociable hours. Half three, sober, finishing an essay? What are you doing with your life? Remember how to write in the day like normal folk do instead of only being able to crack on with anything once it's past midnight.
- finish a damn book. You like reading, remember - that's just about the only reason you picked that degree.
- oh, yeah, and er look into changing that degree while you're on it. whoops
Tomorrow I am going to get up and learn how to function like a real human person again! The festive bit of the year is over and now we have a shiny new one, and it's more than a day old, it's all properly broken in and undeniable and really here, just like such greats as, oh, 2009, 2008, 2007-- you get the picture. Anyway, the long and short of it is that I am no longer allowed to stay up until all hours talking to friends about nothing or listen to Radiohead at 5am and go mental, or any of that sort of nonsense At All. It's business time.
And then, in a couple of days, I get to go see some theatre! I am seeing this and this and this, all for free, because of this. amazing. Part of me's looking forward to going back to Liverpool and part of me is already sad about being so far away from London again, because look, look at all the lovely free plays. ;_;
One of the first things I did in 2010 (after going to bed at 5am and waking up at 10, completely unable to sleep) was some tidying and a bit of light washing up - so I'm taking it as a sign that it's going to be a year for conquering shit. Although I did go back to the mass of duvets once all my friends had woken up, and then I barely moved for the rest of the day, so it's swings and roundabouts I suppose?
(At the start of 2008, I was woken up by my friend's super-excited flatmate bouncing on the bed, then climbing in between us with his chilly limbs. 2009, I was dragged from sleep by a different friend continually getting up to vomit, coming back to bed and then getting up to vomit again. so, ah. Low-key, this year, for one thing.)
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