DON GIOVANNI

On his role in the Barcelona standoff between anarchists and the Republican government: "If this was history it did not feel like it. It was more like a bad period at the front, when men were short and we had to do abnormal hours of guard-duty; instead of being heroic one just had to stay at one’s post, bored, dropping with sleep and completely uninterested as to what it was all about"--Homage to Catalonia

We put on Don Giovanni the weekend before last at the Miles Nadal theatre near Spadina station. It was pretty fun.  I missed the Saturday afternoon performance because I thought it was in the evening! (I told people afterward that I hadn't been feeling well.)

I finished reading that book about the Spanish Civil War and also read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.  Now I'm reading Periodic Tales:  The Curious Lives of the Elements, a book by Hugh Aldersey-Williams about the history of man's relationship with various chemical elements.  I got it in London over ten years ago and only got around to reading it now.

Last Tuesday John P. and I saw Neil Jordan's Marlowe with Liam Neeson as Raymond Chandler's detective.  That was pretty fun too.

Saturday I saw the Chinese movie Hidden Blade just because I needed to get out of the house!  It's a pretty confusing story about Chinese spies working for the Japanese occupiers during World War II and turning double agent--the sort of thing where two of the earliest scenes turn out to be flash-forwards to scenes at the end.

I ran out of Cipralex and only got replenished today, so I had some more vivid dreams.  In one I was a graduate student in London (like I really was in the mid-'90s), but then the story changed and I became like Peter Sellers in Being There, becoming a "star" for no good reason.  In another I was visiting a theme park near Niagara Falls with a World War II theme with an actor performing a Joseph Goebbels speech! (I was reading about Goebbels on Wikipedia...)