Closing tabs

Quiet summer on the blog - Facebook is getting the sort of idle thought that used to show up here, and I think there is no point resisting the drain in that direction.  Have a lot of open tabs to close, as well as a light reading update that I will write separately.  Funny summer in life - I have done no substantive work of my own, it's all life stuff (apartment declutter, 100 runs in 100 days, family Disney trip etc.) and other people's work stuff - but I am going to have to accept that sometimes I have to pay attention to things that are not a book that I am writing....

The Clown Egg Register.

The beautiful afterlife of Edward Gorey's mink stroller coat.

Starbucks card value exceeds money on deposit at many financial institutions.

Eighteenth-century note-taking (and the interesting underlying link).

Secrets of the London Library.

Roger Luckhurst on trouble in Lovecraft Country.

Sheep View 360.

Baroque wigs of paper.

No relation

"Davidson's representatives claim it is the first-ever intellectual property dispute over wigs."

Hair-raising

A 1768 account of hair-dressing from The London Magazine, or Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer, as given in Julia Allen's Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale: Sport, Health and Exercise in eighteenth-century England:

When Mr. Gilchrist opened my aunt's head, as he called it, I must confess it's effluvias affected my sense of smelling disagreeably, which stench, however, did not surprize me, when I observed the great variety of materials employed in raising the dirty Fabrick. False locks to supply the great deficiency of native hair, pomatum with profusion, great wool to bolster up the adopted locks, and grey powder to conceal at once age and dirt, and all these caulked together by pins of an indecent length, and corresponding colour. When the comb was applied to the natural hair, I observed swarms of animalculas running about in the utmost consternation, and in different directions, upon which I put my chair a little further from the table, and asked the operator whether that numerous swarm did not from time to time send out colonies to other parts of the body? He assured me that they could not; for that the quantity of powder and pomatum formed a glutinous matter, which, like limetwiggs to birds, caught and clogged the little natives, and prevented their migration.

Wiggish

Good article at the FT about cinematic hair (site registration required):

Warn was also a hair designer on The Great Gatsby, a follicular showcase featuring 300 extras – only 100 of whom sported their own hair. “Director Baz Luhrmann is very pro-hair, he loves it and wanted the styling to be extreme,” says Warn. “But, because he was shooting in 3D and HD, we had to be really careful about stray hairs, so it was a like a military procedure to keep each hair in place.”

"My grandmother wore a wig"

I am sorry it has been so quiet round here - too much running, not enough time at home frivolled away on the internet! Hoping to have a bit of blog-intensive down-time over the next few days, but in the meantime, a few tidbits...

Soliloquies in the bath!

Amanda Craig has a nice piece on Neil Gaiman at the Times Online.

If you are in New York and have a few dollars to spare (or even if you do not), go and see Wig Out! at the Vineyard Theater (through November 16). It is quite, quite lovely, a magical evening of theater - it gave me cause to reflect that though it and Cato could hardly be more different, they do have that thing in common that is something elusive and transformative that happens in theater alone and not in novels or poems or essays however delightful they may be. (Here is Ben Brantley's review for the Times.

(NB this show also gave me cause to reflect that the vampire balls in novels by Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton could not exist without the culture of drag balls having been in place first. This play takes you into a richer alternate universe than any but the very best fantasy novels - interesting, it is a thing I rarely think about a play...)