Last night we attended Sarah Vowell's reading/talk, which was all kinds of cool. Really must read her books. Though I don't think it will be quite as fun as her reading them aloud. :-)

She chose a Lincoln-assassination-related passage for the first reading, prefaced by an entertaining tangent about how dumb it was from a PR standpoint for Booth to pull the trigger on Good Friday. Something to the effect of "thus ensuring that a President half the country hated on Friday would, by Sunday morning, be eulogized in every Easter sermon." Which is a really, really good point, and one I don't remember if I ever thought about before.

If I did, it would have been while I was devouring research getting ready for These Honorable Men, and that was 1995, so it's a little fuzzy. I read about the whole topic, of course, but mostly I was focussing on any mentions I could find of my character, Booth's "secret fiancée," Lucy Hale. (The linked article just happened to be the first Google hit I got this morning, and is really cool, but has the same oddity from my perspective as the one I'm about to explain...)

( This is me, therefore it's kinda long. )

It's a curious thing, that people seem to find it essential to characterize such a person as a beauty, even if she wasn't. Which feeds tangentially into the Lizzie project, as one of the threads I'm playing with is how she started out being perceived as quite plain and/or odd-looking, but became defined as the Pre-Raphaelite stunner. Complete with a certain amount of revisionism going into the story of her "discovery" by Walter Deverell, who was looking for red hair and a girl who could be convincing as a boy (i.e. Viola-as-Cesario). All pretty much because Rossetti said so, and saw her that way, and painted her that way.

Funny all the things popping up lately that resonate with that watershed year. Maybe just me, or maybe the Universe trying to tell me something. :-)

(Of course, now I'm trying to picture any kind of happy dance being remotely appropriate to Lizzie. It's not working very well.)

For two or three years, one of the "hopefully this will come back into print" books on my Amazon list has been Lucinda Hawksley's Lizzie Siddal: Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (which I've also seen with a title something like "Original Supermodel").

Well, I just discovered this blog, which has an interview with Hawksley, and by following the link there have discovered that it's actually BEEN back in print, and wasn't matching up with my Wish List item because it has yet another new title!.

And now it will be on its way to my house next week! \o/

In the meantime, I have decided that this just isn't something I can write on the computer, so I've printed out Lizzie's poems and the bits and pieces I had written so far and put them in the zippered leather binder that I usually use to keep all my costume designer admin stuff together for a given show. Cleaned all the Barnum stuff out of it (hey, it's only been a year and a half!) and will now be schlepping it around with me. Let's see if a little tactile use of an actual pen will help kickstart this thing again...

Title of a poem by Elizabeth Siddal. Also, approximately one-tenth of the time I have wanted to write and mount a one-woman show about her. I have now outlived her by five years, though I hit the genetic lottery such that most people have difficulty believing that. Seriously, even in a bar where the policy is to card under 30? Getting carded at 37 is just plain silly. I am bound and determined to get this thing done before 2008 is out. No, really.

It finally clearly dawned on me today -- and it was one of those "well, DUH" moments -- that the last couple times I stalled out, it was while attempting to read Dante's Vita Nuova. Which is something I really need to do, because it's a necessity to deal properly with Gabriel's idolization of Dante and the occasionally slightly creepy "Lizzie = Beatrice" thing that went on in his head until well after her death. And that had WAY too much bearing on their relationship to not deal with it. (Albeit most likely in a bit of a subversive way. Because Gabriel could have done with a bit more subverting in his own time, quite frankly.)

And I've tried. I've really, really tried. And I am just a bad, unworthy Pre-Raphaelite geek.

Because my problem is that the Vita Nuova, at least in the translation I have on hand (around her somewhere, but not exactly sure where at the moment, so I can't tell you which one that is), is BORING AS LINT.

So I beseech you, O all-knowing Magic 8-Ball flist... Anybody know a good translation? Better yet, is there an edition with the Italian and a good translation side by side? Because I have the book of Veronica Franco's poetry done that way, and it rocks. My Italian is too shaky to do without the translation entirely, but I like to be able to tell what the poetry is supposed to sound like.

Those of you I know to be early-modern geeks of various stripes are mostly Brit-focussed, I know. But I figured it was worth a shot before I go hunting blindly on the intarwebs.

Pretty please?

Time Out Chicago article about Gorilla Tango Theatre, the venue where you'll find me for two more Thursday evenings. Has a brief quote from our director/producer, who's also on the theatre's staff.

It's an interesting read if you're stagefolk, and an interesting concept that I'll certainly be keeping a close eye on. Dan's philosophy reminds me a bit of Steve Guyer of Shadowbox Cabaret in Columbus, but without the resident cult ensemble. (Disclaimer: I do not actually consider Shadowbox to be a cult in any serious sense of the term. But the reasons it's sometimes regarded as one are...a bigger topic than I meant to digress onto. So, um, no.)

In both cases, my gut reaction is probably the same as that of anyone who's spent a couple decades up to their eyebrows in small-time theatre: "Profit? Isn't that kind of...icky?" But objectively, I can't think of any reason it intrinsically should be. Certainly GT's extremely flexible model for making their space available is a very shiny lure. My immediate thought when I first heard about it was hey, that could actually work for the long-neglected (but I'm going to figure out how to write it, dammit!) Lizzie Project. Maybe it'll get me back to wrestling with the darn thing...

Sniffly. Hacking. Headachey. Pitiful. About to rack out at absurdly early hour for lack of energy to sit at computer or read or even sprawl on couch and watch tube.

Great accomplishment for the evening: Posting 19 Wicked icons in iconaddicts, none of which were actually made tonight. As that would have required energy.

Primary occupation of the evening: Soaking in tub reading Dante and getting pruney. Will have to go back and start over (Dante, that is; the pruneyness was quite thorough) because brain isn't registering. Hoping to convince brain to get back into Lizzie project brainspace. Vita Nuova necessary part of process, hasn't been read since college. Wondering if I can get my hands on Rossetti translation. Although I still want to reread a standard one too, since Gabriel, being Gabriel, was bored by the prose commentary and didn't bother to translate it. Which I had known but forgotten before reading it in the introduction to the edition I have. *snerk* There were a lot of jokes about what PRB really stood for; pity I can't think of anything that would indicate perpetual adolescence. (Although it's implied fairly well by one guy writing to another that a third thought it meant "Penis Rather Better"... can't recall who the writer, recipient and subject of that observation were, though I'm pretty sure Gabriel was involved somewhere.) Although most of them eventually grew up. Even Gabriel, to some extent, although I think about 75% of him remained arrested at about 19 until the day he died. *rolls eyes*

The snarkiness of which Lizzie was documentedly more than capable? Going to play a substantial role in this piece by the time I finish writing it, methinks. I'm playing with the idea of using the anecdote about the tribulations of picking up money someone mailed to her in France, which is freakin' hilarious, as a starting point, and seeing what I can build around it, rather than trying to begin at the beginning of the play/monologue/whateveryoucallit and writing until I come to the end. I really have only a vague general idea how it's going to be structured at this point, so I should just play with the pieces that are strongest in my head and see if I can't figure out how to get them to come together.

Which reminds me...my various references for this project are what I forgot to put on my list to bring back from Columbus last weekend. Must put on list for next time. Must acquire higher proportion not written by Jan Marsh. Not that I have anything against her, by any means. I actually agree with a lot of her assertions. But the woman is nothing if not prolific on the subject, and I need more representation from other writers to balance it out.

Okay, I said I was going to bed. I'm going to bed. G'night folks!

For those who Feared The Pink? All gone.

Been thinking about "the Lizzie project" off and on a lot recently. For those who don't know, I've wanted for several years to create a one-woman show and/or film project about Lizzie Siddal, best known as the model for John Everett Millais' Ophelia (see default icon) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife. She was also a poet and artist in her own right, and thus has the benefit of leaving us probably the most complete voice of her own among the women associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle. There's so much contradictory stuff said about her by everyone who ever met her, and even by herself, and I've been pretty endlessly fascinated with her since college.

I've also now outlived her by over a year. So if I'm ever going to do this project credibly, it needs to be fairly soon. *wry g* Right now I'm considering taking a mini-hiatus from auditioning this summer, unless something crops up that I desperately want to do, both to make the whole house prep/house sale/house hunting/moving thing less stressful, and maybe to get back to working on this piece. I haven't written a word on it in a couple of years.

And of course, I have no other projects in the works. *wry g* But this one has been circling back around in my head more strongly, so we'll see what happens.

ETA: Somebody posted a Pre-Raphaelite mood theme to iconsensual many moons ago. I thought I'd bookmarked it, but can't seem to find it now. Anyone know where I should look?