"When you've got them down on the mat...

... stand on their fingers". This was the instruction Supervisor gave me at our meeting yesterday. I had very politely suggested in a chapter of my thesis that an established critic had misquoted a text and this was what made his argument work.

Supervisor: What you're saying is, he's misrepresented the text to fit his argument, isn't it?

Autumn Song: [hesitantly] Yes, I suppose so.

Supervisor: Well just say that then. When you've got them down on the mat, stand on their fingers. He would do it to you.


Well, yes, I guess he probably would. But still, it makes me slightly uncomfortable to suggest such a thing about those better qualified than myself. Nevertheless, it seems to be true (see, there it is again, a reluctance to make this claim) - it is true - he misquoted, deliberately or not, and for that reason amongst others his interpretation is unsatisfactory and I disagree with his argument. And rather like the world at large, if we all agreed on everything, life would be very dull. Still, in all such situations, I'd suggest rational conversation rather than standing on fingers. That isn't nice.

Drilling, hammering, banging

Please, I can't take any more drilling. Make it stop.

My (shared) office is surrounded by drilling, hammering, banging and other sounds of building work. The offices across the corridor are having a makeover, as are the offices in the next corridor on the other side. So, if it's not happening on one side, it's happening on the other. Or, if we're really unlucky, it's happening on both. And, to make matters worse, the builders are playing bad music. Loudly. Presumably so they can hear it over the drilling, hammering, banging and other sounds of building work.

I could work at home, but my Not So Crazy Neighbours (who are actually related to Crazy Neighbours who live on the other side) are doing D.I.Y., which means there's drilling, hammering, banging and other sounds of building work there too.

I can't decide if the banging in my head is an echo of the building work, a result of the building work, or a symptom of being in the final stages of my PhD...

Much Ado about Something

On Friday my Aspiring Author friend and I went to an outdoor performance of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It had been rainy weather all week (although nowhere near as bad as it's raining Down South) but it didn't rain on Friday and we made it through the performance without getting wet. The actors were pleased about that too - they'd been on tour for a number of weeks and this was only their seventh 'dry show'. Aspiring Author and I laid out my burst airbed (useless for sleeping on, but brilliant as a large waterproof outdoor rug) on the mud - despite it being a dry day, the grass was still boggy from the week's rain - and settled down in front of the loch, amongst the fold away chairs and picnic tables of other audience members to watch the performance. (A moment of panic coming back from a trip to the ladies before the performance started when I had lost Aspiring Author in the forest of such chairs and tables that had grown up in the brief time I was away.)

Illyria (the acting company) are very good. We've seen them before and were expecting great things. We weren't let down - although I think I preferred their performance of Comedy of Errors two years ago, maybe because I know Much Ado better and had a clearer idea of what I thought it should be. Occasionally the actor playing Benedick was a little too much Branagh-esque for me, but those moments were few and far between. There was an arresting moment when Don Pedro proposed to Beatrice and she turned him down. I've never thought about this as anything other than comic; Branagh's film version laughs it off immediately. Illyria chose to present it with all the awkwardness turning down a proposal from such an important man would have carried way back when... Leonato's anger when he heard Hero was unchaste was also extremely well done - the actor was very controlled, but gave out all the venom of Renaissance misogyny in the mouth of a let down and publicly embarrassed father.

All of the actors work very hard - there were only five of them playing all the parts, and playing different characters convincingly too. They even worked out ways to have two characters played by the same actor on stage at the same time. Very impressive. With only one woman in the cast taking the role of Beatrice (amongst others - the rest were male parts) the other female roles had to be taken by men, which is authentic for Shakespeare's time, but not often seen these days. They had a very clever matching up of characters whereby the actress playing Beatrice also played Claudio, and the actor playing Benedick also played Hero. I think that brought a new dimension to the play that I hadn't considered before. No one in the cast played fewer than three parts, and some took more than that. The cast also sell their own performance programmes and souvenirs, and mix with the audience at the end of the interval (they're quite fond of sharing your picnic - if you go to one of their performances, and I would recommend them, do take some spare strawberries!).

It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, despite it getting a little chilly and the midges coming out to see what was going on.

I hope Illyria get more dry shows for the rest of the tour. They shouldn't have to work that hard and fight the weather.

'A baggage for all gamesters'?

Here is a brief passage from Act V of John Ford's The Ladies Triall (1638), a play that I'm currently writing about in my thesis. Martino finds his niece Levidolche with Benatzi, a man that he does not know she has already married (Benatzi is actually her first husband in disguise whom she marries a second time - she has, since first marrying him, been seduced and abandoned by one man and rejected by another, and been staying with her uncle since). Martino lets loose this tirade against her:

Oh thou monster
Thou she-confusion! are you growne so rampant,
That from a privat wanton thou proclaimst thy selfe
A baggage for all gamesters, Lords or Gentlemen,
Strangers, or home-spun yeoman, foot-posts, pages,
Rorers or hangmen, hey day, set up shop,
And then cry a market open, toot, and welcome.


They don't write rants like that these days! Although sometimes, as a fellow Teaching Assistant just pointed out to me, undergraduate essays (critical and creative writing) come frighteningly close...

(Lest you think Ford is the misogynist this quotation might imply, I have to defend him by saying that the play actually attempts to knock down some of the contemporary cultural and social assumptions about gender and sexual misconduct upon which Martino's outburst is based.)

Rainy days?

With my faith in the basic, underlying goodness of people sometimes rattled but never lost, it was really nice to see this footage of baseball players helping out groundsmen in trouble covering the field during a sudden storm, over at lawmummy. It shouldn't be unusual or news-worthy, but it probably is, so I'm sharing it with you. Have a lovely day!

Admiring the view

I bumped into some friends yesterday whilst walking little dog. They are about to move away from the beautiful place we live (a city that can have you in the countryside in ten minutes) to a city which is , well, a city. Maybe an interesting city, but it is a (fairly large and very urban) city nevertheless. They said they were just out for a walk enjoying the sunshine and they realised that they're going to miss the scenery. They hadn't really noticed it before and taken it for granted, but now they're about to leave they can see what they have here. Another one of my friends quite regularly tells me that they don't notice the scenery either - it takes a visit from their parents who comment on the amazing views from the Castle (walking, this is 5 minutes from my house), to remind them how lucky they are.

I don't understand this at all. I am always aware of the view, the scenery, the history and how lucky I am to live here, of the facts that I can have the convenience of town/city living, manage pretty well without a car or driving licence, and take little dog for a walk well away from the traffic and never be too far from home. I often tell geographically distant family and friends that they should visit here to see the historic places or just to enjoy the scenery.

I guess what I'm saying is, look at the place where you live. If you're lucky enough to like where you live, make sure you appreciate what you've got, while you've got it. It's too late when you have to move away. I already know I'll be sad to leave, whenever that might be.

Levels of good - 2

I forgot 'quite good' the other day. Any suggestions for where 'quite good' might fit into my list?

(This wasn't Supervisor's overall judgement of the introduction - it was a discussion that didn't involve any of my levels of good. It seems we're working under a different scheme now, and nobody told me what that is...)