Movie music

I had to stock up on cough drops, but Rheingold was appealingly vulgar and very watchable.  And as L. said, the machine hardly creaks at all...

Grumpy at lung ailment and not having run for a week, but I am on the mend, I think tomorrow will mark a return to full-on exercise.

Also: mother's ruin!  (Via Sarang.)

Closing tabs

Very glad to be home again, but so tired that I really do not know what to do with myself!  (But probably it would be a good idea to get off the computer!)  Assignments to mark and letters of recommendation to write, but cannot face them quite yet...

Closing tabs:

Caroline Dworin's lovely and poignant piece about growing up inside of a stage set.

An interesting piece by Colleen Mondor about her book The Map of My Dead Pilots.

"Books do furnish a room"

At the LRB, Alan Bennett's life in libraries. Interesting reflections, too, on the problem bookshelves pose for set designers in the theater:

Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I’ve written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking in character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

That someone’s working library has a particular tone, with some shelves more heterogeneous than others, for example, or (in the case of an art historian) filled with offprints and monographs or (with an old-fashioned literary figure for instance) lined with the faded covers and jackets of distinctive Faber or Cape editions, does not seem to occur to a designer. On several occasions I’ve had to bring my own books down to the theatre to give the right worn tone to the shelves.

Nordic Birds

Peter Robins asks what proportion of Swedish remaindered books end up at Ikea.

(Hmmm, I do not think it is a silly question, although it has an attractive air of superficial frivolity - now, though, I have a yen for a more concrete answer!)