End-of-week update

These Seven Sicknesses, a.k.a. the Sophocles marathon at the Flea, was highly worthwhile: the treatment of the Oedipus plays seems a bit unstable on the farce-tragedy axis (and I thought the actor playing Oedipus was perhaps the weakest in the show, or at any rate his performance was too campy to be at all moving), but the middle segment of Philoctetes-Ajax is excellent (the Ajax staging is just superb, particularly the handling of the sheep scene) and the concluding pair of Electra-Antigone works very well also.

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long!  He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in.  You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .

(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)

The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time.  However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...

Miscellaneous links:

Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.

And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!

And

Neil Gaiman's post about Diana Wynne Jones brought tears to my eyes!

Alas, my afternoon's family meet-up has been canceled; it might be that I should go to the bookstore and see if I can find a few of the bits of the DWJ oeuvre that I have not read so many times I've practically memorized them...

Saturday link miscellany

What's wrong with No. 10 (the underlying link is highly worthwhile!).

Neil Gaiman on seeing the Dresden Dolls.

Laura Amy Schlitz remembers Eva Ibbotson (link courtesy of Dave Lull).

"My grandmother wore a wig"

I am sorry it has been so quiet round here - too much running, not enough time at home frivolled away on the internet! Hoping to have a bit of blog-intensive down-time over the next few days, but in the meantime, a few tidbits...

Soliloquies in the bath!

Amanda Craig has a nice piece on Neil Gaiman at the Times Online.

If you are in New York and have a few dollars to spare (or even if you do not), go and see Wig Out! at the Vineyard Theater (through November 16). It is quite, quite lovely, a magical evening of theater - it gave me cause to reflect that though it and Cato could hardly be more different, they do have that thing in common that is something elusive and transformative that happens in theater alone and not in novels or poems or essays however delightful they may be. (Here is Ben Brantley's review for the Times.

(NB this show also gave me cause to reflect that the vampire balls in novels by Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton could not exist without the culture of drag balls having been in place first. This play takes you into a richer alternate universe than any but the very best fantasy novels - interesting, it is a thing I rarely think about a play...)