I Am Five Fairies.

I spent the last week helping put on this awesome thing. Next year, you should definitely come. We had good music and good readings. In the evening devoted to A Midsummer Night's Dream I was five fairies -- the unnamed one from II.i, and the four (yes, in the same scene) that Titania tells to pamper Bottom in III.i. It was also a real privilege to hear the music of both the Collège that hosted the event, and that of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Bassano, who treated us denizens of the savage Vendée to their own lovely music and more interesting information on the possible identity of the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets.

I also got to hear Bach's Suite No.3 in C Major played on a viola. It was beautifully and I cannot describe it.

I am still beavering away on Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit, which is awesome. As in, unexpectedly and somewhat unprecedentedly epic in the sense of "vast and sweeping." His style is amazing -- in a way, it seems to prefigure Faulkner in his long sweeps of gorgeous rhetoric, of "telling" rather than "showing" with reckless abandon, upon which the kibosh is then put with a single, brief sentence -- often only two words long. The characters have the kind of figured, semi-divine strength I expect (and find) in something like the Gormenghast trilogy, but which are here rendered as street people and secret histories in the singularly muddled late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England. (And yes, it is hilarious to read English words in French, as they suddenly appear like Vikings in Versailles.)

Also, have you read my poem yet? If you haven't, I wish you would -- I think it's pretty good, and it was very, very kind of the good editors and editrices to accept and publish it so handsomely. 

I'm knitting a sock right now, and it's completely addictive.

Forthcoming:  Probably a post on re-reading The Filth by Grant Morrison et al. over the course of two nights.