I blame Stephen Fry.

.

For some reason, every time I look at photos of Flynn and me from our EPIC ADVENTURE WEEKEND, I break out in BABOOSHKA and arabesque around the living room. “Babooshka…Babooshku…Babooshku…” See. Told you.

Happy Birthday Bunny.

I love you.

B.
xx

p.s.
A squirrel took this photo.
I am dead serious.

Before he became “The Darcy to End All Darcys” the ridiculously talented and RADA-trained Matthew Macfadyen contributed to the DVD ‘Essential Poems (To Fall In Love By)’.

A naughty little someone has posted his readings to YouTube.

I am very glad of it.

W.B. Yeats.
When You Are Old.
Read by Matthew Macfadyen.

William Carlos Williams.
This is Just to Say.
Read by Matthew Macfadyen.

William Shakespeare.
Sonnet 29.
Read by Matthew Macfadyen.

I close my eyes and sigh. What a voice.

I don’t often think of Blossoming Souls when I think of Proust. Most often it’s just this is heavy and Steve Carell. I know that’s terribly silly and unfair. But that’s Rorschach for you.

“I hold the blank page headed Friday November Thirteenth to the light of that day. There seems to my eye some discrepancy between the two. There, outside is the day; as it happens, bluish, cloudy, still and fine. Here is the page; white, smooth. How am I to bring about a marriage between them? But let me try, with a pen, dipped in ink.” -Virginia Woolf

I thought it something that I should be reading this on my own Friday November Thirteenth. I’m in America, in the South, but the week has been full of what The Euro calls Proper Northern Weather. And by ‘Northern’ I mean , of course, the North as referred to by the M5 – The North of England.

I was inking in my own diary this afternoon, something I rarely do anymore. My last handwritten entry was over three months ago. I wrote about John Malkovich as The Great Buck Howard.
— — — —

Friday 13 Nov 2009: She stopped remembering today. Or yesterday, maybe. Maybe even before that, to be honest. But I didn’t know it then. I know it now. That she stopped remembering. Today. My lovely little grandma.

B.

Words on monitors, made of ones and zeros, never seem as real as those made from pen and ink or impressions on ribbon.

Someone died and I was sitting on a set of concrete steps that belonged to a neighbour thinking “I’ve been ostracized and I don’t even care.” My head hurt from the weight of itself and when I tried to turn it, to unstick the glue that made it stuck, I saw the neighbour whose steps I sat upon and it was Nick Clooney.

I thought ‘this is childhood’ because he was always in mine. Smiling. Sitting on a stool and talking up silver screens and things. Making me feel a little better about the varnished walls and green shag carpet that made me feel so bad.

Nick Clooney.

He sat down beside me and said “just breathe” and I said “they call it putting on airs if you don’t have a criminal record.” It was true and we both knew it and I tried to breathe like he told me to do. Because breathing is a true thing too.

When I think of everything there is to know and learn, I get so excited my stomach hurts.

This evening Steph and I went for sushi but had profiteroles and petite fours instead. Then we watched The Hours and talked about Virginia Woolf and listened to the radio broadcast she did for the BBC in 1937. After that we looked through the photo album of Virginia’s father, Leslie Stephen, and wondered at paintings by her sister Vanessa.

We decided to read Mrs Dalloway together and then to buy “Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf”, but only once. We reminisced about our time in Bloomsbury when we walked past the Tavistock Hotel every morning and every night and sat in Gordon Square just because our feet hurt and we could.

There are too many things I want to read and so much more I want to say but my stomach really does hurt from the profiteroles and I’m just flat out tired. The lady in the photo is Julia Jackson Duckworth Stephen, Virginia’s mother. Something about her reminds me of my own mother when she was young. I think it’s the eyes.

“I’ve never liked talking about art or literature in general, and I’ve always hated artists who talk about their work rather than doing it.”
-Orson Welles

The man voted Greatest Director of All Time by the British Film Institute essentially said that he didn’t dare think about deconstruction and criticism of art and literature because such things would occupy his mind with what were, ultimately, unworthy distractions for any artist.

There’s a lot of talk between The Euro and I about the relationship between acting and writing fiction and the shared goals of the two. The word ‘truth’ is thrown about a lot.

Here Welles tells the interviewer that he doesn’t believe acting (writing fiction) is anything except convincing the audience (reader) of something that isn’t true. This may seem to fly in the face of Stanislavski and all those literary Russians I love so much, until one makes the ‘artistic truth vs. affective memory/emotional truth’ distinction. You’ll also want to remember that Stanislavski was greatly influenced by Tolstoy and the Count didn’t care much for overly cerebral artists…which is what Welles seems to be saying too.

-Chekhov