summer reading

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I will finish The Book of Merlyn and Claudius the God before I go off to college. I will. I will. I will, dammit.

if i say on my blog that i'll read them, that's sort of like accountability, right?

    (you remember how a few months ago I read The Once and Future King and also I, Claudius? The nice thing was that my mother randomly had the sequel to the former lying around and my dad had the sequel to the latter lying around. And I don't think either of them had the first books. Little bit weird there.)

    Also, speaking of my mom, she herself has started up a blog of her own (hurray!) which I am now going to link to. It's called Roller Derby with the Saints, and she's got a couple posts up and they are beautiful, articulate, thoughtful posts. (she must be so ashamed of me oh gosh) It's heavily theological (Christian, specifically) and is and will be well worth reading.

    Hopefully she does not abandon the thing once she goes back to school in one month. (HEY MOM KEEP WRITING K.)

    EDIT later this same day: One of my best friends has just dropped by and loaned me a copy of Dear Enemy (the sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster) after apparently remembering something I had said about thinking about maybe reading it several weeks ago. Oh lawks.

I, Claudius: The Totally Chill Death of Thrasyllus

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I didn't intend to quote I, Claudius more than I have, but this paragraph which I have just read in chapter 28 recounting the sudden death of Tiberius Caesar's trusted go-to prophetic fortune-teller dude Thrasyllus is, like, a thing of beauty.

Thrasyllus died. His death was announced by a lizard. It was a very small lizard and ran across the stone table where Thrasyllus was at breakfast with Tiberius in the sun and straddled across his forefinger. Thrasyllus asked, "You have come to summon me, brother? I expected you at this very hour." Then turning to Tiberius he said: "My life is at an end, Caesar, so farewell! I never told you a lie. You told me many. But beware when your lizard gives you a warning." He closed his eyes and a few moments later was dead.

    SO. RAD.

    Seriously, can you - I don't even - how is - just imagine looking death in its tiny lizard face and being like "whatevs". He is SO CHILL.

    Part of its greatness comes from its context; it takes place after a long, depressing chunk of story in which all the good people are dying horribly and Tiberius is fuckin' the whole Roman Empire over and betraying people and "legally" taking people's estates for himself and being greedy and sexually depraved and his bestie Nerva has just starved to death for some reason (note that Nerva was the third person to starve to death in the space of the first half of that chapter) and everything is falling to pieces. And then out of the blue Thrasyllus, an awesome but unimportant dude, is sittin' eating his breakfast and a lizard comes and climbs onto his finger and is like "sup" and Thrasyllus is like "sup" and then says a couple cryptic things to Tiberius and closes his eyes and dies. Like a boss.

    And then I'm like "....do that again."

    Trying so hard to imagine Tiberius' face while that goes down right now.

    Trying so, so hard.

I, Claudius: Oh No She Didn't

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    There are actual tears of laughter in my eyes right now.

    I'm reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves, and Claudius and this jerk Sejanus have just arranged for Claudius' 13-year-old son Drusillus to be betrothed to Sejanus' daughter. Without running this idea by Claudius' dear grandmama Livia first. I'm going to quote the passage describing how that turns out, because it's stunning and horrifying and mindblowingly awesome and I cannot stop laughing.

    There was great alarm in the City when it was known that Sejanus was to become related with the Imperial family, but everyone hastened to congratulate him, and me too. A few days later Drusillus was dead. He was found lying behind a bush in the garden of a house at Pompeii where he had been invited, from Herculaneum, by some friends of Urgulanilla's. A small pear was found stuck in his throat. It was said at the inquest that he had been seen throwing fruit up in the air and trying to catch it in his mouth: his death was unquestionably due to an accident. But nobody believed this. It was clear that Livia, not having been consulted about the marriage of one of her own great-grandchildren, had arranged for the child to be strangled and the pear crammed down his throat afterwards. As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

    The last sentence is possibly the funniest thing I have read in all my years.

    CONTROL FREAK MUCH THERE LIVIA

hrmm

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Have just been reading the livejournal pages of people who are friends with somebody on lj who I stalk. Am now looking at my own, new little blog here and seeing it as weird.

    Not so much the content (hah) as the format, though. I write letters/posts to you mainly because my mom told me several times over the course of last year that I should totally write letters to you, when I'd be enthusing and grinning and wiggling over how awesome you were and giggle-squealing about how much I loved you and so on.

    This is just how it worked out. I'm pretty sure she meant paper-and-ink-and-expensive-postage letters or something. The woman has strange ideas.

    (She told me a few times that I should write to David Burke back when she and I were on our big Sherlock Holmes kick. Love that man. Never did anything about it.)

    I've been meaning to write more lately anyway, so it's a nice little arrangement. (I keep meaning to write fiction, but "creative nonfiction" aka blather keeps getting produced instead. Woe.)

    Anyway the question that I raised to myself today was, how long am I going to be able to slip in enough Harriet-centric or Harriet-related posts to justify the way the blog is presented?

    (I know, it's rather early days to wonder that, but this tiny little nook of the internet is the only potentially long-term thing I feel like I have any real control over and so I muse and brood and fuss over it.)

    Any by Jove, Dame Harriet, but the movies and TV shows you've been in are fearfully obscure. I've gotten my hands on the easy ones already, but soon I will have to start blind-buying things off Amazon and irritating my family by surreptitiously stuffing things into the Netflix queue because they have HW bit-parts. (And then not always watching them immediately.)

    At some point I'll have to go back over things I've already seen but saw pre-blog and write second impressions, I suppose. I'll make my sister watch Macbeth, huurhurhurculture. Although I'd want to watch it again anyway after your book, which I for some reason have not finished. (It it sitting squashed underneath I, Claudius and a collection of Lovecraft.)

I, Claudius

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So a few weeks ago I was directed to the BBC's new radio drama adaptation of I, Claudius because through some means my mother had heard that you were in it.

    Can't think why I haven't mentioned this before. I listened to all six episodes, the first two at once and the remaining four as they became available online every week.

    Anyway. You were excellent in it. Your Livia made me really appreciate your Fanny Dashwood-from-Sense and Sensibility as being, in fact, a pile of kittens and happiness. (You get the most amazingly nasty roles sometimes. Honestly.)

i love this picture to bits and also it makes me want a live-action version of the story filmed with you in it, you can play Livia again, actually you should just play everyone

    (Tom Goodman-Hill playing Claudius oddly reminded me of Edward Petherbridge playing Newman Noggs. Great fun.)

    I have recently bought an actual copy of the actual I, Claudius in its original papery form, because I rather liked the radio drama and as I don't really like getting books from the library when I know they're going to take forever to read and they're cheap used anyway. I'm a couple chapters in and I think it's going to be lovely.

this is the copy I got, except on mine the background is more greenish. he looks so sulky I am sorely tempted to draw a curly little french mustache upon his upper lip and give him something real to sulk about. (image linked from here)

[UPDATE a couple weeks later: Just found this picture and it has you in, like, a different pose. I'm not sure why Caligula, Claudius and Augustus are all in that same position - and in almost the same clothes, too - but for a photoshopped family portrait it is still pretty awesome.]

 (photo linked from here)