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Comes a river running wild that will create an empire for you
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For Austen’s heroines, independence – however “abominable” – often begins on foot. Elizabeth may be the most iconic of Austen’s pedestrians, but she is far from alone. Across Austen’s novels, women are constantly in motion: walking through country lanes, walled gardens, shrubberies, city streets and seaside resorts.
These are not idle excursions. They are socially legible acts, shaped by class, decorum, and gender – yet often quietly resistant to them.
In an age where walking is once again praised for its physical and mental benefits, Austen’s fiction reminds us that these virtues are not new. Her characters have been walking for centuries – through mud, across class boundaries and against expectation.
This is why the re-emerging idea of "slow looking" in art galleries and museums is such a wonderful one; it encourages intense observation, attention to detail, reverence for art, skepticism about what first glances reveal, appreciation of learning, respect for the subject [...] I appreciate that some reading this might say: "Oh, it's very well for a bunch of academics to sit and stare at squirrels or fish for hours a day — most of us don't have time." But we don't hesitate to spend several hours on screens.There is something a little bit ironic that I read this article on my “pulsing, popping” screen but the point remains.
This is in an era where we are being constantly bombarded with news and information, some of it deeply disturbing, much of it skewed and false. Consuming anything slowly, paying deep careful attention, has become profoundly counter-cultural.
Anything that serves as an antidote to chronic distraction, that pulls our gaze from pulsing, popping screens to quieter skies surely should be applauded.
Ruby Granger’s mornings, with her casement windows and leisurely breakfasts reading and trips to feed the hens, reminded me of one of my all-time favourite of aesthetically-appealing things: the intro for The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends.And I’d titled my post with a lyric from the show’s theme song: On the wild and misty hillside.
I stared at the dagger and wondered if I should risk it… Of course I should. I was an agent. Taking horrible risks was part of the job. We might as well have put it on our business cards.
“They told her it was all in her head. She was imagining it. She was getting older, after all. Maybe she’d spent too many years looking for mysteries that weren’t there.”
And, suddenly, Maggie wasn’t talking about Eleanor anymore. “You know, if mankind has one universal superpower, it’s gaslighting women into thinking they’re the problem.” It was actually a great comfort, knowing that if it could happen to Eleanor, then maybe Maggie could forgive herself for not realising it was happening to her. “To the world, Eleanor was just an old woman who wasn’t quite as sharp as she used to be. But even if that were true” – Maggie didn’t even try not to grin – “half of Eleanor Ashley is still worth two of most people.”
Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."
Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.
Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.
There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.
In Greenwood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. It was in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.