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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Monday, June 2, 2014

Free French Fiction!

Well, not quite, but close. Gastien, the cost of a dream, free on Kindle today. Part of a series. (And don't we all love series?) Eye-catching cover. I always like seeing the Eiffel Tower on a cover. And free offers on books with a lot of good reviews.  (History! Sex! Artistic dreams!)  Author Caddy Rowland is a painter herself, and I love the way she describes painting ("Making love to the color.")

Blogging Shakespeare--All Shakespeare, all the time

One of the things I love about the Internet is that even if your interests are really fringe, you can find your tribe. So if you're  a  shakespeare geek (which really isn't that weird) who wants to talk about different productions of a favorite play--say, The Tempest--you can always go online to find someone who has an opinion about the Ellis Rabb staging of the play in San Diego versus the Stratford festival version with Christopher Plummer as Prospero. And somewhere out there is someone else who saw the L.A. production of the play starring Anthony Hopkins, Stephanie Zembalist, and Ken Marshall, who was then hot thanks to a television miniseries on Marco Polo.

In 20111, the Education Portal has a great list of Top Ten Shakespeare blogs here. The list begins with Blogging Shakespeare (run by the people at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) and is rounded out by the Bard Box, a collection of online Shakespeare videos. Bard Box shuttered a couple of years ago but the site is still up and many of the links work. If nothing else, it's a great place to start looking for online videos. (Last year I stumbled across an online posting of a Hamlet production with a young, unknown Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing Laertes. He was just coming into his prime when he died, the age of all Shakespeare's really great parts for middle-aged men.  And we'll never get to see him perform them, damn it. But I digress.

I'm just a Shakespeare geek wannabe compared to the bloggers who post all Shakespeare all the time. Check them out!  And while you're at Shakespeare geek, check out some of their t-shirts, like the one pictured, 'It's all fun and games until somebody captures Gloucester and puts his eyes out."

the Play Shakespeare Never Wrote

Shakespearean actor Geraint Wyn Davies as King Arthur
Or did he?
I always wondered why Shakespeare never wrote his version of the King Arthur legend. It has all the elements he loved--a tragic love, ambitious men (Mordred is Iago's ntural son!)m a flawed hero.
the Bard borrowed from all kinds of sources but never wrote his version of England's national myth. And that seems a shame.
But as it turns out, there is a significant community of scholars who think he DID tackle the subject. I found this interesting articleon Tyler Tichelaar's "Children of Arthur" blog  about a play called The Birth of Merlin that may very well be a "lost" play, one of almost 40 plays with disputed authorship.
Wikipedia calls the play "Jacobean" and attributes it to one William Rowley.  If you're saying, "Who?" you're not alone. I looked Rowley up and according (agani) to Wikipedia, Rowley was mostly known for plays he wrote in collaboration with other, more successful authors.
According to the synopsis, the play was full of magic, 17th century special effects (devils!!) and and was a fast-paced crowd pleaser.
It seems to me that the Arthurian story cries out for an epic play that is serious and important. I sometimes find myself impatient with the rough humor of Shakespeare's comedies (and I purely hate Falstaff), so the notion that The Birth of Merlin is kind of wacky is a bit disappointing.
If you're curious (I am), you can download the play's text here.


Saturday, May 31, 2014

Coriolanus...Hiddleston versus Fiennes

Coriolanus is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and I didn't come to appreciate it until long after I was out of school.  (My introductory Shakespeare class was taught by a noted Shakespeare scholar who was hands down, the most boring teacher I ever had.) In a way, the title character, a Roman general who hates the plebian rabble, is a hero for the one percent. In one of the play's most famous lines, he compares the idea of plebians controlling patricians  as crows pecking on eagles. Caius Martius sees himself as an eagle and his inability to deal with the "crows," much less respect them leads to his downfall.


There is currently a very good versions of the play available on dvd. Tthe 2011 version directed by and starring Rafe Fiennes as the title character is terrific. It costars Vanessa Redgrave as his mother, one of the great middle-aged female characters in the Shakespeare canon and Gerard Butler as the enemy who becomes an unlikely ally. (He's good too.) Fiennes is terrific. I don't think he's been this good since Schindler's List. It's a ferociously masculine peformance and his rage at the rabble is mesmerizing.

there's also another version of the play currently making the rounds of the specialty movie circuit, a filmed play version from England's National Theatre starring Tom Hiddleston. I missed it when it played locally, and I can only hope that it'll be available for home viewing soon. I would have said Hiddleston was a bit too young to play the character, but as you can see from the trailer below, he inhabits the character like he was born to it. (Anyone who saw him in The Hollow Crown already knows what a strong Shakespearean actor he is, and his Coriolanus looks like a treat.) Cojpare the two trailers and you decide.




Friday, May 30, 2014

Return of Summer of the Shakespeare...

It's going to be an amazing summer for Shakespeare geeks and I have decided the way to celebrate it is to embark on the long-delayed stories I've wanted to write for my "Shakespeare Noir" collection. Over the course of the summer I'll publish the stories here and tie them together with various and sundry posts about what's going on in the Shakespeare-verse. Yes, it will be all Shakespeare, all the time. At least for the summer.  And you know Shakespeare is still relevant when he has his own "Hey Girl" posters.

A Picture Launches a Series!

Photographed by NejroN
I spend a lot of time looking at images. I'm a fan of Pinterest (which was a total surprise to me) and I also like to browse the stock photo banks like Dreamstime and Big Stock. Because I've got a couple of books coming out soon and they need covers, I activated a month's subscription over at Big Stock and have been happily downloading images for the past week. And that's how I cam across this image. It's one of maybe a dozen using the same models in a variety of poses and (in the woman's case) vintage dresses.
I took one look at those photos and I saw a series about stylish vampire lovers (Think The Thin Man meets The Hunger). His name is Theo. Hers is Miranda. Or maybe she is Thea and he is James. Perhaps she was Russian in a former life,.
Perhaps he was a Robber Baron.
They've been together ... a long time.
I could find out their real names, but that would feel like I was stalking them. To me they are Miranda/Thea and James/Theo and they have inspired me to write a new series of books.  Thank you!

Friday, May 23, 2014

Starry Starry Night--A fantastic picture of the Milky Way

I'm a city girl and in the city, the sky hardly ever gets dark enough to see the whole blanket of stars out there. But a few years ago my best friend and I went to New Mexico and there I saw the Milky Way for the first time. it was awe-inspiring in the old, mythic meaning of awe. When you see the Milky Way, especially for the first time, you understand why ancient people made it a part of their myths. I saw this photograph on cnn.com this morning. It's like something out of a fairy tale.  You can see a whole gallery of such images here.