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The Abstract and (not so) Brief Chronicles of Lichtenberg
It’s been a rather painful process, but I have finally read Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Briefe aus England in their original German. Although the lack of available translations forced my hand, I’m glad that I spent some time on this: not only has my German improved because of it, but I also – I suspect –…
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Missed Chances
Again, I’m going to start this blog-post with an apology. My latest lack of publications is the result of devoting all my spare time and energy to the writing of a great many applications for post-doctoral positions. Those same applications have, however, inspired this little text, so it’s not all bad news. I want to…
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Antony Sher, Beside Myself (2009)
I bought Anthony Sher’s autobiography on a rainy day in Stratford-upon-Avon, and have just finished devouring it. What follows is shameless filleting of the text, a collection of Sher’s ideas about actors and acting that I found sufficiently interesting to refract them through my own prose. As this is a very anecdotic book, it seems…
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Francis Gentleman & Bell’s Shakespeare: A Short Bibliography
This is a new kind of post. I wrote to the mailing list C18-L a few weeks back asking for details of books and articles about the Irish actor, orator, teacher, and critic Francis Gentleman (1728-1784) and his work as the editor of John Bell’s 1774 edition of Shakespeare. I got a few, very useful…
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Adventures in the BNF
I spend a lot of time in libraries, but have – shockingly – never really written about them on this blog. This post will change that, as I’ve spent the last week familiarising myself with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (or, as everyone calls it, the BNF, pronounced ‘bay-enn-eff’), and have all sorts of things…
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On having your pencil ready
I have been reading Joseph Roach‘s Cities of the Dead recently. It’s amazing, and I’m learning a great deal. While there will probably be a blog post dedicated to the text in the near(ish) future, I wanted to write today about something else instead. It all begins with an innocuous pair of sentences about halfway…
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Update
I’ve let things languish here a little, but my excuse is that I am (still) writing a great deal elsewhere, and simply don’t have the time to put pen to paper (keyboard to blog?) these days. That said, this post is about all the other stuff I am writing, it’s specific aim and its larger…
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Commemorating Shakespeare
To join in the celebrations of Shakespeare’s birthday, here is a repost of something I wrote in 2012 for the Royal Shakesepare Company as part of their ‘Happy Birthday Shakespeare’ collection. The date of an author’s death is always more important than that of his birth. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be…
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Metaphors for writing
I’m busy writing the first draft of chapter one, and so have had neither time nor inclination to write much for this blog of late. That said, all my thesis-scribbling did inspire this post, for it occurred to me, as I sketched the umpteenth plan for spending this section’s allotted word count, that I now…
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Millennium Actress (Sennen Joyû)
Without a doubt, and for reasons that will soon become clear, Satoshi Kon’s 2001 masterpiece is one of my favourite animated films. The story is relatively simple: we watch a film journalist, Genya Tachibana, and his unnamed cameraman interview the famous retired actress Chiyoko Fujiwara about her life whilst a series of earthquakes shake the…