Last night I dreamed about one of my favorite opera arias, "Depuis le Jour" from Gustave Charpentier's Louise. (I also dreamed of being in an airport and not knowing where to go...) Some years back I saw Aria, a movie with about a dozen famous directors putting famous opera arias to music. Most of it was junk, but there was one wonderful bit: Derek Jarman's "Depuis le Jour"! I'll have to find his Caravaggio movie someday.
Yesterday was the latest Reading Out Loud Meetup. I've moved the location for my Meetup events to the Robarts Library on the U. of T. campus because the previous place was hard to find. The new place is a bit noisy, but in good weather it'll be easy to move outdoors.
This month's topic was the always reliable poetry, and the event was titled "Rhymes for Our Times." I read Burns' "To a Field Mouse," Frost's "Home Burial," "Le Morte d'Arthur" from Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and William Cowper's "John Gilpin," which my mother liked, especially the verse "Said John, 'It is my wedding day and all the world would stare, If wife should dine at Edmonton, and I should dine at Ware.'" And I read the first eighteen stanzas of my translation of Luis Vaz de Camoes' Lusiades!
On the weekend I saw the second North and South miniseries, set in the Civil War. (Jean Simmons was really the best actor in it.) I really didn't buy the final reconciliation theme. Biggest historical goof: the news of Lincoln being shot being announced in the daytime, when everyone knows he was shot in the evening! Biggest casting howler: Wayne Newton as the commander of the Confederate military prison!
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