(no subject)
Feb. 4th, 2024 10:34 amIt's been a week of gifts and delights for me! First, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol bound my story "Suradanna and the Sea" -- published online in The Fantasist in 2016, but never available in a print version -- into a couple of really beautiful physical books as their first bookbinding project, and sent me one of the copies, which arrived yesterday.
Up until The Iron Children, "Suradanna" was the longest thing I'd ever written/published and I think perhaps the best, and I am so unbelievably delighted that it will now get to live in my house and not just on my computer, and thatsophia_sol chose it of all the things that live on the computer to bind. I have just been Gazing at it all morning and will probably spend the rest of my Sunday doing so at intermittent intervals.
And, speaking of things that live on the computer: it's Festivids time and despite being a criminal who never actually posted my Festivids letter I have received not one but not two vids as gifts:
1. An Eye for An Eye -- this is a Romeo + Juliet (1996) vid that's using all of Luhrmann's symbolism to make a really interesting and thoughtful argument about the meta-arc and cosmology of the play; it's an extremely cool work of vid-as-essay and is definitely going to be living in my head whenever I watch the movie again
2. Boys Keep Swinging -- all I can say about this frankly is that my cross-production Twelfth Night fanvid last year walked so that this vid could RUN, I am just rolling gleefully around like Scrooge McDuck in my pile of Rosalinds, PLEASE go check it out, it's everything that I always want As You Like It to be!
AND, speaking of Shakespeare -- this last one is not a gift for me in particular except for all the ways that it is, but I have been having the world's best time with Emails from an Actor, a real-time readalong of various books published from Within The Experience Of Participating In the 1964 John Gielgud-Richard Burton production of Hamlet.
The two books in question are Letters from an Actor by William Redfield, a moderately famous actor who played Guildenstern in the show, and John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton In Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals, by Richard L. Sterne, who had more or less just graduated acting school at the time and was playing A Gentleman.
The joy of Redfield is that he has five million opinions about everything, especially his colleagues. He will drop into monologue at the drop of a hat and it WILL contain some of the wildest sentences that you have ever seen in your life. We are only one week into the project and I have already forced people to experience a number of Redfield quotes against their will, ( which I will give you a sampling of here )
The joy of Sterne is that, while his prose is very restrained and documentarian compared to Redfields, he SECRETLY SMUGGLED A TAPE RECORDER DISGUISED AS A BRIEFCASE with him into every rehearsal so he's putting down direct quotes. Many of these are just genuinely interesting thoughts and conversations about Hamlet staging but also sometimes they're completely different from the 'Gielgud said' as reported by Redfield, which is just a great time every time for me personally.
I know many of us at this juncture are burned out on email newsletter fiction but if you have any interest in Hamlet, in the actual process of putting together a theatrical production, or in wild and funny opinions held by B-tier theatrical actors in the 1960s, I cannot more highly recommend this experience.
sophia_sol bound my story "Suradanna and the Sea" -- published online in The Fantasist in 2016, but never available in a print version -- into a couple of really beautiful physical books as their first bookbinding project, and sent me one of the copies, which arrived yesterday. Up until The Iron Children, "Suradanna" was the longest thing I'd ever written/published and I think perhaps the best, and I am so unbelievably delighted that it will now get to live in my house and not just on my computer, and that
sophia_sol chose it of all the things that live on the computer to bind. I have just been Gazing at it all morning and will probably spend the rest of my Sunday doing so at intermittent intervals. And, speaking of things that live on the computer: it's Festivids time and despite being a criminal who never actually posted my Festivids letter I have received not one but not two vids as gifts:
1. An Eye for An Eye -- this is a Romeo + Juliet (1996) vid that's using all of Luhrmann's symbolism to make a really interesting and thoughtful argument about the meta-arc and cosmology of the play; it's an extremely cool work of vid-as-essay and is definitely going to be living in my head whenever I watch the movie again
2. Boys Keep Swinging -- all I can say about this frankly is that my cross-production Twelfth Night fanvid last year walked so that this vid could RUN, I am just rolling gleefully around like Scrooge McDuck in my pile of Rosalinds, PLEASE go check it out, it's everything that I always want As You Like It to be!
AND, speaking of Shakespeare -- this last one is not a gift for me in particular except for all the ways that it is, but I have been having the world's best time with Emails from an Actor, a real-time readalong of various books published from Within The Experience Of Participating In the 1964 John Gielgud-Richard Burton production of Hamlet.
The two books in question are Letters from an Actor by William Redfield, a moderately famous actor who played Guildenstern in the show, and John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton In Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals, by Richard L. Sterne, who had more or less just graduated acting school at the time and was playing A Gentleman.
The joy of Redfield is that he has five million opinions about everything, especially his colleagues. He will drop into monologue at the drop of a hat and it WILL contain some of the wildest sentences that you have ever seen in your life. We are only one week into the project and I have already forced people to experience a number of Redfield quotes against their will, ( which I will give you a sampling of here )
The joy of Sterne is that, while his prose is very restrained and documentarian compared to Redfields, he SECRETLY SMUGGLED A TAPE RECORDER DISGUISED AS A BRIEFCASE with him into every rehearsal so he's putting down direct quotes. Many of these are just genuinely interesting thoughts and conversations about Hamlet staging but also sometimes they're completely different from the 'Gielgud said' as reported by Redfield, which is just a great time every time for me personally.
I know many of us at this juncture are burned out on email newsletter fiction but if you have any interest in Hamlet, in the actual process of putting together a theatrical production, or in wild and funny opinions held by B-tier theatrical actors in the 1960s, I cannot more highly recommend this experience.
