Beautiful, loving, literary tribute to Ninagawa for Electric January the 15th

For a description of the Electric January Project, click here.

This is undeniably a LONG read, but once you start in, it may happen that you will love that it is long, because it means the beautiful, soft, humorous voice of the author will be in your mind and your thoughts for that much longer.

Media: Article

Location/Length: A lovely journal called ‘The Point’/About 15 pages

How I found it & Reason for Sharing: This is one of those articles I filed away in my ‘Good Stuff/To Read Later’ folder and recently pulled out for an examination.  I filed it, I am certain, when I was doing a course on Drama and Audience for my MA in English.  The course asked us to look at various interpretations and stagings of Shakespeare, from Classical Elizabethan to Leo DiCaprio to…Ninagawa.  

I share this because it’s a piece that really surprised me for its sleekness, honesty, and elegance.  I know very little about Japan, even less about Japanese theatre, but the author of this piece introduces us by leading us by the hand through the classroom and the streets of Tokyo to her experience. It is lovely, but mysteriously so.

What I love: There are lines that connect this article to Helena Bonham-Carter.  Those lines are obvious to those who wish to find them.

Let Them Misunderstand

Electric January the 13th: Helena Bonham-Carter: The Poetry Years

Really, what’s not to love?

For a description of the Electric January Project, click here.

Media: Poetry, and a Great Deal of Charm.

Length/Location: This beautiful room. And YouTube.

Found/Share: Reading poetry is one of life’s pleasures. Reading it aloud is an additional layer of delight. Listening to Helena Bonham-Carter read poetry may be the best of all.

These poems are lovely and they make you laugh, if you let them.

I am also including this additional video (audio) of Helena introducing a screening of A Room With A View at the British Museum. Totally worth your time.

 

 

Epiphany Post for Electric January the 6th

Click here for a description of the Electric Janury Project.

This post is an homage to one of the best weblogs out there, Eleanor Parker’s A Clerk of Oxford. So many great things have found their way into and out of that blog that, for today’s Electric January post, I wish to highlight not merely her Epiphany post (one of several), but the goodness that is the blog itself.

Media: Blog/Website

Location/Length: A Clerk of Oxford

How I found it and Reason for Sharing:  The Clerk of Oxford blog appeared in my life about the same time I began my MA in English Studies. As the entire degree was online, I spent a fair amount of time looking for reliable websites and weblogs that would assist me in my writing and research. In addition to having a really great name, A Clerk of Oxford also took on the role of surrogate tutor: I really feel as though much of what I now know about medieval literature and manuscripts came from Eleanor Parker.

Epiphany, for the uninitiated, is the Last Day of Christmas. Remember that crazy-long song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’? Well, this is it, the last one, the day (or night?) we celebrate the arrival of the Wise Men before the Christ-child.

This particular post really struck me as ideal for our time, and for the year following the one we just left behind. There were in the last year so many Thorns and, for many, so few Roses. This post is a dedication to the Roses that grow from thorny branches, and that deliver sweet fragrance to our Faith, Hope, and Love. To believe in the Christ-child means to believe that He was hunted His entire life, sought after by Herod, only to die under Pilate. The Thorns were not metaphorical for Him, but the Rose is eternal in Him.

What I Love: Growing up in what can only be referred to as ‘low church’ (one of the lowest, I think), the concept of Epiphany was occult: hidden, secret, a bit dangerous, and definitely appealing to an aspiring Catholic* like myself. When I discovered such a thing as the Church Calendar I nearly burst out of my skin; that there could be (and was, and is, and ought to be) order in the way we attend to our Worship was something akin to Epiphany: A manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being. (OED)

*I am not Catholic but Anglican, which to some is like the worst of all worlds, but I digress.

The image below links to the Clerk of Oxford blog.  (But so does this.)

By Jean Fouquet – http://expositions.bnf.fr/fouquet/grand/f049.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=143434

 

 

Truth is stranger

I’ve just finished reading a fantastic article from the TLS about a little-known Russian author who (more than likely) forged an account of the ‘lost years’ of Jesus’ life.  While this sounds utterly sacrilegious–and in a way, is–it is also an attempt at an exoneration of the Jews’ part in Jesus’ crucifixion–by a converted Jew.

The man who wrote this account, Russian-born Nicolas Notovich, had been living in Paris for many years and had encountered great discrimination and seen great evil done, both by and to the Jews.  The author of the article, Marcel Theroux, writes with great clarity and turns a side-note of history into a very compelling read. Thus, I spent about 20 minutes this morning utterly engaged in another world and viewpoint on humanity.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-post-truth-gospel/