Last day in London town

I shifted my lodgings from SE22 (East Dulwich) to W11 (Notting Hill) yesterday, with great thanks to C&C (not the celebrated music factory) for putting me up and putting up with me. Their spare room is now drying-rack-free. I took the 185 bus to Victoria, which was an excellent method of birth control. I can't imagine a version of myself who holds a baby in one hand, folds up a pram with another, and juggles luggage using the hands of willing strangers on a crowded, lurching vehicle.

I am now enjoying a lovely and library-less morning at the lovely flat of my dear old friend the Gasmeter, whose home is on the Notting Hill Carnival parade route and is filled with how-to-get-your-new-baby-around-London books and other lovely things. I shall go for a wander in this extraordinarily overpriced postcode, tube over to Arsenal and see the no-longer-new stadium in which I have shamefully never been, and putter about with very little on my plate.

I've had an excellent trip. I've seen five shows (six after tonight's Pinter at the National), sixteen old friends, two Doctor Teeth gigs, and the insides of four libraries. I've eaten excellent Turkish and Thai food, deconstructed The Dark Knight with the best film-deconstructor I know, and lain on the grass of Cardinal Wolsey's lawn. I've pored over the remains of thirty-two productions of Henry V, and collated the texts of six editions. And I've stayed in London long enough for the tube to stop turning my snot black, which is a bit terrifying. Perhaps most importantly, I've realized that I'm now at a point in my long, happy crawl toward death where when I come to England, I get homesick. Not for America, per se -- I would have no trouble emigrating at all -- but for my particular home, which could conceivably be anywhere on the planet, but happens just now to be in the North American desert. That's never happened before, and I think it must be a good indication of contentment and love. Having enjoyed pints in the King's Arms, the Queen's Arms, the Cardinal's Arms, and the Churchill Arms, I'll be happily back in the arms that matter tomorrow night.

Scrapping

I almost got my teeth knocked out last night in the West End. We emerged onto the street from a performance of Avenue Q, which was delightful despite the egregious choice not to cast Americans as Americans. They did workmanlike jobs with the accents, but it jars a little when they drop out of dialect. Of course, given that they were voicing puppets, perhaps it wasn't the biggest violation of the pure Aristotelian dramatic strictures on display.

Anyway, we emerged onto the street and I declared to my companions with my wonted post-show vigor that I wasn't seeing any more plays that didn't have fucking muppets. At the moment I voiced the phrase "fucking muppet," a quite hard looking bald gentleman elbowed past us and clearly thought I was addressing him. He spun on his heel and attempted glowering eye contact, so we circled the wagons a bit and talked amongst ourselves until he went away. Then we got the 176 bus toward Penge. "One Seven Six to Penge" will be the title of my autobiography, I think. No explanation or anything.

To penge: to throw up a little in one's mouth. From the French penger. Je penge, tu penges, ils pengent.

17 July...on the train

Phew. I’ve spent the last five days in Stratford, which would have been a bittersweetly nostalgic visit to my old stomping grounds if it hadn’t been almost entirely spent in archives and libraries. Still, it was a good time, and it was lovely to catch up with my friend S, in whose sixteenth-century guest room I’ve been crashing on a futon. I’ve been collating theater reviews of the past half century of Henry V productions, and watching the RSC’s video archives of Henrys: Kenneth Branagh’s post-Falklands tortured anti-hero, Iain Glen’s tight-jawed and squeaky warrior monk, Michael Sheen’s uni-student-turned-GI, and Will Houston’s terrifying, grinning bureaucrat of death. Also a bizarre Italian interpretation from the Complete Works Festival last year, starring three speaking characters – which I named Fatty, Baldy, and Frenchy -- screeching speeches in Italian into a microphone (with the supertitles unreadable on the video, of course) while doing the dance of an autistic clown among rows of recumbent white-faced corpses.

I also managed to see two current shows at the Courtyard Theatre, the temporary home of the RSC while they build the main house into an actually usable theater space cum Shakespearean mall complex. The revival of Greg Doran’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its puppetry and a Bottom that reminds me of nothing so much as Lister from Red Dwarf, was as delightful as the Taming of the Shrew is thoroughly, unrelentingly repugnant. Somehow the director, whose name I forget – someone whose teeth should be slowly removed with a ball-peen hammer – made a production that’s even more offensive than the play Shakespeare wrote. Not easy to do, really, but in trying to be “brave” and “edgy” it never managed to be brave or edgy. Even my favorite English actor, Stephen Boxer, was atrocious in this, though to be fair he seemed to be doing the best he could against some abysmal direction. And Michelle Gomez, apparently a well-known sitcom actress, was floundering about unpleasantly at every turn. The low point would be when she offers to whore her bottom to a repulsive and sadistic Tranio for a bit of food. We get it. Misogyny is bad. Sheesh. Mind you, the crowd seemed to be dutifully liking it, particularly the hilarious Jamaican racist caricatures. I hate people sometimes.

Also, Alexander Hleb left Arsenal for Barcelona yesterday. Bastard.

But the train ride back to London is beautiful and green, and for all that everyone hates English weather, I’m liking it as a nice change from desert heat and wildfires. Today I’m taking off from research to see King Lear at the Globe, probably in the rain, and get a bankside pint with another friend-I-haven’t-seen-in-years, with whom I’m staying for the next week in the Big Smoke.

M takes the bar in a week and a half, and so presumably the pressure is mounting. I’ll get home just in time to offer what emotional support I can. I think she’s riding a bit higher, having gotten her class rankings and found out that she got her JD cum laude. I’m extraordinarily pleased for her.

I’m going to try to get some sleep now, between Warwick (home of the castle) and Banbury (home of the cake).

Hyde parking

I went 34 hours yesterday (well, Wednesday to almost Friday) without sleeping in a bed. When you can feel your exhaustion in unnatural ways in the backs of your thighs -- where D.H. Lawrence characters feel their sexuality condensed into points of darkness -- you realize that you've been up too long.

But I'm in London, and very happy about it. Highlights from yesterday:

• Reading and people-watching in a deck chair by the Serpentine
• Walking Upper Street on a Thursday night while wrapped around excellent tapas and finely produced cocktails. Cocktails! What's happened to drinking in England? I had a really good Mojito and the rum was not poured out of an upside-down bottle with a measuring spigot on it.
• Renewing my British Library card and remembering just how friendly they are there (for Londoners, anyway)
• Painting my nostrils the charming shade of gray that only the London Underground can achieve
• Eating a properly awful doner kebab in Euston Street
• Catching up with friends I haven't seen in six years
  

Today I get out of the Smoke and off to Stratford-upon-Avon, for a week of research, theater, tourist-dodging and Midlands accents, but for staying awake long enough to kick jetlag, nothing beats Troynovant.

Brazilian footballers are funny folk

You may or may not be disturbed or incensed by Manchester United's Ronaldo's recent comments that playing a game for a living before thousands of adoring fans for millions of pounds amounts to the equivalent of "modern slavery," but if you (like Ronaldo) are in need of some enlightenment about actual modern slavery, may I recommend Benjamin Skinner's A Crime So Monstrous (Free Press, 2008)? It costs $50 to buy an 8-year-old sex slave in Haiti, apparently, and there are more slaves -- by the common definition of people working for no pay with no liberty to leave -- in North America right now than at any time in history.

I'm glad, at least, that this particular boneheaded soccer player doesn't play for Arsenal. But that doesn't so much help the slaves.

For Harry, England, and Saint George

I will forgo the usual apologies for not having blogged in six months. Quick updates: I'm now on a sort of deadline for my Henry V edition, and I've got four other research projects dancing attendance on my brain. I spent far too much pro bono time contributing dramaturgy and text coaching to the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, but I think I may have helped it into better shape than it otherwise would have been, and it did me good to get my hands dirty on a couple of actual shows again. I managed to squeeze out a decent graduate seminar on Spenser last semester, I saw a real-life royalty check, and got imperceptibly more like a real academic.

My state, like most in this recession, is hit with huge budget shortfalls, the more so because of our insistence on a casino-based, boom-and-bust tax structure. So wholesale layoffs at the universities have ensued, and we have no more marching band, oral history department, and equestrian studies program. The days of wine and roses, or at least Thunderbird and carnations, seem to be over at Quadrilateral State. Also, M just got her JD, but since she wants to do good in the world and work for the gubmint, she may or may not have a job once she passes the bar, which has been all her study this year.

And now, I'm winging my way to England for 17 days, or as long as my quaint little "dollars" will last over there, ostensibly to find documents and images in support of my edition's stage history at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the V&A Theatre Museum, and maybe to look up some 1603-plague-related documents in the Guildhall archives, but really, if I'm honest, to see dear friends I haven't seen in four years or so, go for a ramble in Dorset, cram as much theater/-re in as possible, and put myself outside many a pint.

I'll be flying for fourteen hours, so I'm more or less losing a day, with the eight hour time difference, and hopefully I won't be too shattered to meet up with my old Warwick University Dramatic Society cast of Henry V, which was comprised entirely of 20-year-old women who now presumably have careers and interesting lives and husbands and potbellies. Catching up should be fun. All right, possibly not potbellies. Sorry everyone. I'm projecting my own abdominal fat.

I somehow managed to get a hotel in Bayswater, a block or so north of Hyde park with a view of the Serpentine. Hooray for Hotwire.com, I say. Too bad I'll be spending most of tomorrow/Friday sleeping off jetlag.

More to come.