So many amazing lines in today’s Rakesfall reading. I was stopped in my tracks by the wordplay on “self” and “selvage” here: 👹

Visiting my mom and looking at books from my great-aunts’ collection, I found this inscription on the flyleaf of an edition of Paradise Lost (printed in Boston in 1825). My great-great-great-grandmother copied out the last lines of the poem on this page. Commonplacing in the wild!

This paragraph (from Rakesfall chapter 14) captures some of the disorienting feeling of reading thw novel itself. We swim in confusion! 👹

I wish Sam Ezersky would talk to more medievalists (see also: the Spelling Bee doesn't recognize UNCIAL as a word).

An hour and a half later, the second column is now headed "World Leaders Remember Graham," but it's still blank.

As someone who both studies commonplace books and keeps them from time to time, I couldn't resist adding this one to my most recent stationery order. Haven't decided what's going in it, but I love the little bookmark that lets you keep your organization scheme ready to hand.

DYING.

Getting ready to see New Camerata Opera’s production of Joseph Bologne’s L’Amant Anonyme tonight! www.newcamerataopera.org/lamant-anonyme (this time with alt text)

That exhibition was also where I learned that in 1990 Hockney arranged what he called a "Wagner Drive" along the Pacific Coast Highway, with a whole operatic soundtrack timed to the views, and you can probably imagine my delight. www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/chronology/1...

RIP, David Hockney. I still regularly think about the big show of his work I saw at the Met in 2018, and how color and light burst into his paintings the moment he moved to California, and how he brought that color and light back with him to Yorkshire in the 2000s.

Rosemary's genealogy lecture (complete with transparencies!) was far and away my favorite thing about this week's episode of Widow's Bay. Apparently I'm Rosemary, at least when it comes to pointing at family trees and spotting the lesbians.

So ready for this!

Finally catching Heartbeat Opera’s production of Barber’s VANESSA! (I’ve actually never seen this opera before so I’m pretty psyched.)

This is a cat checkpoint; relinquish your most recent cat picture on your phone. 🐈 (Not my cats; met these beauties at a cafe near the Library of Congress in DC.)

I especially love this moment right here. Suddenly the narrator's voice gets more lyrical than it has been, and then you realize: that's all coming from Anne, who knows a ton of poetry and loves "all the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country" (from chapter 5). 🛁

Wow, the way this paragraph simultaneously indicts Elizabeth Elliot and the circumstances that made her what she is. “The prosperity and the nothingness”! #inthenavy

So tonight @wynkenhimself.bsky.social and I were wandering around the NY Antiquarian Book Fair, and we got to see this amazing object: a herbarium of seaweeds (ca. 1900, from California) bound in cross-sections of whale vertebrae. My first thought was "I have to get a picture for the 🐋 crew!"

German Expressionist Moby-Dick (with songs? and a Puckish clown?) at BAM: not entirely sold on the whole concept but it did capture a certain level of Melvillean weirdness!

The incredibly brilliant green on the trees this time of year goes some way towards making up for the horrendous tree pollen situation. I walk and marvel (and sniffle and cough).

And London:

And Vienna:

I haven't looked at every city everywhere, but here's one from Paris:

I started doing this because I was looking at New York on the map, zoomed in on Lincoln Center, and found these three (#2 is clearly responding to #1, which I love, and also referring to one of my own favorite operas):

I dug out my old Oxford World's Classics paperback that still has my undergraduate underlinings in it. I actually quite like their choice of cover illustration -- it's from a portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn, apparently. 🛁

Finally seeing Joyce DiDonato’s master classes in person!

It’s approaching Kaija Saariaho opera o’clock:

Let’s gooooooooo

T minus one hour, starting the Lisolde countdown now!

Do we need a cat break? Because I met these two today outside a cafe where I had lunch:

Also, I’m trying to use this writing balcony* as much as weather permits: *technically just a hotel room balcony. still nice, though.