A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
It's going to shock those of you who don't work in libraries, I know, but book records aren't always correct. Even *gasp* the Library of Congress sometimes makes mistakes. Honestly, if you can't trust the Library of Congress, who can you trust?
I need to thank my co-worker Leigh for providing me with most of my "cataloging disasters" material.
Don't get me wrong; I like Harry Potter. It's just that I never had any aspirations to be a teenage boy wizard impersonator.
Poor Shprintze and Bielke. Totally overshadowed by their big sisters, most of the time nobody even remembers they exist, let alone their names. While their fates are considerably less rosy in the Sholem Aleichem source material, I like to think that they settled down nicely in New York and continued to cause Tevye mild fatherly headaches with their nontraditional choice of suitors.
This comic is inspired by the Stratford Festival's 2013 production of Fiddler on the Roof. Now, I've seen Fiddler more times than I can remember, but I have no hesitation in declaring Scott Wentworth the best Tevye I have ever seen. They've extended their run of Fiddler until October 27. Get your tickets now! And then send me one.
I've reached a level of rock climbing experience where I can usually see very clearly in my mind what I need to do in order to make a particular move. Unfortunately, I'm also at a level of rock climbing experience where my body often completely refuses to cooperate with my mind's grand plans. Either way, it's massively entertaining.
In other news, I just saw a local screening of the National Theater's recent modern-dress production of Othello . I am not really a fan of either Othello (apart from the last scene, which is always dynamite) or gratuitous modern dress, but the whole package worked surprisingly well. Also... Emilia. Can we talk about how much I love Emilia in that last scene? I'm going to rewrite Othello so it ends with Emilia stabbing all these idiotic men in the face and driving off with Desdemona into the sunset, Thelma-and-Louise-style.
I work in a library, therefore I must love books, right? Well... there are books and then there are books. Context really is everything.
For the record, I don't have anything personal against Bosnian serials. They are just a convenient stand-in for all the troublesome, hard-to-catalog books with bad or non-existent records that regularly plague our office. (I'm not saying that I don't know people who do actually have vendettas against Bosnian serials, mind you...)
If you must know, my personal nightmare involves the delivery of twelve disintegrating boxes of Vietnamese books. I still get jumpy when I hear the mail cart approaching.
I actually can guess what my father's thought process probably was. He had already taken me to see a live performance of Johann Strauss Jr.'s operetta Die Fledermaus , which I had enjoyed, despite falling asleep in Act 3. Logically enough, he assumed I'd also enjoy Jacques Offenbach's operetta The Tales of Hoffmann . What he neglected to take into account is that the former involves champagne, a masked ball, mixed identities and a happy resolution, whereas the latter involves doll dismemberment, death by dueling, death by poison, death by singing too much (not joking) and ends with its protagonist in a drunken stupor, having lost all the women he had ever loved.
27-odd years later and I actually really enjoy The Tales of Hoffmann film. It has absolutely fantastic, proto-psychedelic visuals, the dancing (featuring Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine) is gorgeous, and the special effects, for 1951, are tremendously effective. If you want a really weird-but-fun evening's entertainment, take a look at it.
Something deep inside me still freaks out when I see Robert Helpmann or hear the villains' theme from Hoffmann , though.
In other news (which I've mentioned already, but for the sake of argument let's still call it news), I've set up a Facebook and Twitter page for this webcomic/blog/thing. Give my fragile, new-blogger ego a boost and like and/or follow me. And then tell all your friends to do the same. That's not obnoxious, is it?
