Monday, January 09, 2012

summer, now

[...] that the corpse of Laurence Sterne was "stolen from its resting place and recognized - just before dismemberment - on a medical school dissection table at Cambridge" (J. Barnes, "To the music of time", TLS Dec 9 2011, p.5) || At a performance of Twelfth Night in Covent Garden, [Castlereagh] was hooted and hissed at so loudly that the play had to be stopped. Another time, he took refuge in a draper's shop in St Martin's Lane where he was pelted with mud and vegetables until the Bow Street runners came to his rescue. (F. Mount, "Forever unforgiven", TLS Dec 9 2011, p.3) || When Elizabeth, the daughter of James VI and I, married the Protestant Frederick, Elector Palatine and - briefly - King of Bohemia, in 1613, their lengthy wedding festivities included twenty performances by the King's Men, Shakespeare's company, including seven plays by Shakespeare, among them Much Ado (twice), the lost Cardenio, and The Tempest, with its central concern with rulers, legitimacy and self-government. Frederick's nickname, "The Winter King", arose because his tenure in Bohemia was less than a year; the pan-European war that it sparked, however, lasted Thirty Years. (R. Morse, "Ghetto Bard", TLS Dec 9 2011, p.15) || Opinion was divided as to whether she had left me, and I didn't know for sure myself, as we don't discuss such things. The evidence seemed to be that she had, given that she no longer lived here, but we continued to visit [...] I developed a fussy bachelor personality about the house [...] (H. Williams, "Freelance", Ibid., p.16) || The theologian Rudolf Otto described primitive religion as an encounter with the mysterium tremendum, a fear and trembling in the face of impersonal, fickle and ultimately unknowable divinity. (P. Bebergal, "Pits and Purgatory", Ibid., p.19) || "I pass my days, reading, shopping and yawning." ||