I got a tiny little bit done this evening on Moonlight, just a couple of lyrics and some accompaniment for “Dream Land.” I’m in one of those phases where nothing’s coming and I don’t have the focus to make it happen.
In other news, I am extremely disappointed that David Wilson’s new play, John Wallace and the Vampires, is not being performed this Friday night after all. It’s only being performed on Saturday night, and I have a social engagement for then. Dang it.
On the other hand, I now own autographed copies of Curse of the Vampire and Wrath of the Vampire. I went to Scott’s Bookstore this afternoon and had the author all to myself. We chatted about Mrs. Marjorie Hatchett, our drama teacher in high school and a tremendous inspiration to us all, albeit clearly in different ways. David was ebullient and chatted freely about the issues the Grantville Playmakers have been encountering in their creative journey. Shame on the Grantville City Council! And shame on those no-loads who commit to a production with the GPers and then back out at the last minute. I cannot imagine such shoddy behavior.
I have read the first page or two of Wrath of the Vampire, and all I will say is that this roman à clef is living up to its predecessor right off the bat. It is everything you think it might be.
My reading of Tolstoy may be interrupted for a while.
This Wilson chap’s ascendancy must have come after we departed Newnan. I’m unfamiliar.
Hie thee to Scott’s and get both books. You will not be disappointed:
(Our hero Adam is chatting with the pretty new Methodist minister, Jennifer.)
Now imagine a whole book of this. And vampires!
“Mon frere, mon semblable!”
An uncanny encounter! Is he not your peer in age? Is he not one of the precocious band nurtured and sheltered under the eaves of Hatchett’s tutelage? He may be your dopleganger, your shadow self. The words to your music.
The New York Times book review section (I think it was NYT and not the “other one”) had an interesting article by one of the W&P translators. Have you noticed any of the attempts to reproduce the collision of French and Russian languages in the text?
Wow. All that poetry, and vampires, too?
Yes, David and I were actually in a journalism class together. He is a year or two older than I. I can accept that he might be my doppelgänger. What disturbs me is that I might be his.
Yes, it was the NYTBR piece that prompted me to buy the new translation. Their handling of the clash is interesting. They throw a great many more phonetic representations of people’s accents into the mix. I’ve always seen Denisov’s speech impediment represented by ‘w’ substitution, but these translators say that he “swallows” his r‘s and represent that as “Ghrostov, you ghrotten ghrat,” which is visually disturbing. I guess they wanted to avoid the preciousness of the the “Wostov” thing.