It's been a while...

I had two days with no internet connection, thanks to dodgy wifi.
It was the router. Not my router - I don't have a router - it was the router for the back half of the complex. I am House-like in my ability to diagnose small networking issues.

Sans internet, I have been reading and catching up on a few things. Also, I have reformatted my MP3 player and added new stuff.

All in all, a busy couple of days.

I have read: Women in the Middle Ages by Frances and Joseph Gies.

I have a series of their books, which I find really easy to read. They have an engaging style; in this case they focus on a series of women from the 900s to the 1500s, taking a look at the lives of women from queens to peasants and covering all the variations in between. Margery Kempe pops up - my favourite religious nutter - because as well as representing women who make their spirituality their lives she was also quite the entrepreneur at a time when women were not supposed to be. F&J also rely quite heavily on material culled from primary source docs, which is always a favourite thing of mine in a history text, and they have a way of finding the small joys involved in people's lives. They also explain quite a lot about where all their information comes from, so you get a decent picture of how it all worked.

The end result is a clear picture that what we think we know about women from 960 onwards is probably wrong. It turns out that although the male chroniclers of the times might have tried to downplay women, they were as important and involved in the world then as they are now.

I have been watching: All kinds of things.

I got the Shakespeare Retold DVD set (thanks Becca!) and have consumed it. After having watched most of it - there are four plays in the set and I have seen three - I wrote some stuff about it intending to put it up on this here blog as one post. Instead, edited highlights.

Like everyone else in the UK my first exposure to Shakespeare was at school and, like everyone else, I found his plays hard going. At first.
After seeing Star Wars, it was actually hard to imagine a world without special effects that could bring the imaginings of the writer to life, but after reading Julius Caeser and Henry V, I realised what it was that Shakespeare was doing. The man had no technology to wow the crowds, no special effects to bring his scenes to life - all he had were words. So he used them.

If you're going to be slapped around the face by the power of language, there are few better ways to do it than with Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Retold gives you another way to look at the Bard. Like many of the great writers in the English language - well, like many of the great writers - he tells a story. In the Shakespeare Retold series, the writers have the unenviable task of throwing away the language (for the most part) and working with the characters and structure of the plays, modernising them, bringing them firmly into the 21st century and making them accessible to an audience that might not have that love of language.

It is not an enviable task. Shakespeare is still The Man.

What this collection of short films does is reaffirm that his plays stand the test of time; they can be translated, updated, re-written and the structure remains sound, the stories remain entertaining and vital. Hollywood is still strip-mining The Bard for ideas and occasionally his plays appear in unexpected forms, as teen comedies, as buddy movies. It's rare these days to see a Shakespeare being told in the original form, but it doesn't matter because do what we may, the stories refuse to lay down and die.

McBeth, for example, no longer has a castle and there are no Scottish kings here. Instead James MacAvoy plays Joe McBeth the chef, a Michelin starred chef toiling in the kitchen of the restaraunt owning celebrity chef Duncan. Duncan is king of his domain, right enough, but it's McBeth who puts him there and keeps him there. The terrible, awful downward spiral of Joe McBeth makes compelling viewing; from brilliance to ambition to murder, to his tortured guilty fall, the story is as relentless as a war drum. That all of this takes place in a kitchen and draws us into a world of TV chefs and the very finest cuisine while still being visceral and powerful is a tribute to the cast and writer, but you can't ignore the production team. There's a lot of shadow around; MCBeth emerges from darkness like some predatory fish breaking the surface of a moonlit sea. The contrasts between the stark, steel kitchen and those times when McBeth and his wife are alone, when the lighting becomes soft and subtle, are wonderful. The camera takes every opportunity to showcase MacAvoy, who gives a wonderfully physical performance without falling to the temptation to chew the scenery. It's compelling stuff, and very much recommended.

A Midsummer Night's Dream has adaptation issues. The play is about love, magic and faeries, and it's set in Athens. So the adaptation plants it firmly in Center Parks, keeps both the magic and the faeries and sticks closely enough to the events and characters that if you know the play you'll see clearly that the writer kept all the important bits, although he played with a couple of characters. Peter Quince and Bottom, notably, have changed. Here we get Johnny Vegas as Bottom; gone is the bombastic man full of his own importance and certain of his rather uncertain talents and instead he is replaced with a classic of British culture - the comedic Northern Loser. Peter Quince, on the other hand, takes on the role of arrogant blowhard. It works, largely thanks to casting Vegas and (the bloke from the Fast Show who played Monkfish). Demetrius and Hermia, Helena and Lysander remain unaltered, although Bill Paterson and Imelda Staunton get to play a rather older Theseus and Hippolita who have already been married for some years and are on the edge of splitting up. Oberon and Titania quarrel, but over who's in charge rather than an Indian page boy, and Puck is...

...well, Puck is Dean Lennox Kelly. It's a rather more modern Puck than we're used to but DLK unviels the core of the character. Puck is a mischievous creature, and the core of mischief is malice. Puck torments humans because they are stupid and easy to mess with. He loves it. At one point, as Oberon attempts to get things set right, he warns Puck that no one is to get hurt. The result of Puck's machinations is a brawl. DLK turns to the camera and with a smile says
"Oberon's got this 'no one gets hurt' thing going, but I wanted to see a punch-up and you wanted to see a punch up..and, come on!"
He's also a big user of natural recreational chemicals, commenting at one point that his night has been far too busy and he's "off to pick a load of mushrooms, have a big brew-up and get a bit of a wobble on", which accounts for his inability to get things right. He also, as in the play, gets the last word, commenting
"You might be offended. Some people get offended, no reason. If you were offended, I can come round to your place and sort you out. I'm not lying."
If it weren't for the pleasant smile on DLK's face, if not for his slightly fuzzy, slightly dazed Rave Casualty demeanour, you might feel threatened. You should feel threatened. Puck's a bastard.

I still need to watch Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew, so more on that score when I get to them.

...and...more, generally, later.