words, words, words ...

As the monkey said to the typewriter.

Alice says that's illogical rubbish, and we should put "as Hamlet said to Polonius" in the fishmonger scene (Act II, scene 2.) Which just proves my point! Anyway, what on earth has it has got to do with fish? They certainly can't type.

Yes. Let's get back to the point. Alice has been exceedingly busy with wordiness of late. Click the photo to see what I mean.

Eventually, after much muttering to herself and scribbling - not to mention late nights (I told her she should go to bed earlier, but did she take any notice?) - she was ready for leading the Book Group discussion on Earthly Powers. [See previous post here.] In the event, everyone had read it to the very end, and it all went very well. Of course, they were fortified in advance by the tea and delicious cake provided the group's hostess.

They discussed the nature of Good and Evil and Free Will and all that intellectual stuff that's pretty pointless as far as I can see. I mean, human beings can be remarkably vicious, whatever they believe, and whoever you like to blame for it. Just watch the news.


Alice says the meeting for the Shakespeare Group "followed hard upon". She's insisted on a quotation (again!) from her favourite play - but you'll have to look it up, I can't explain everything for you. She had to prepare for reading a poet and various messengers and servants in Timon of Athens. No, I'd never heard of it either, but it is in the Complete Works. What's more, it seems it's quite topical - all about money and financial disasters. They've even put on a cleverly modernised version at the National Theatre. Alice is superciliously sniffy about any such "messing about" with the Bard. Oh dear, Ivory Towers.  It sounds like fun to me. She should go and see it at the cinema when it's beamed out live!

Now, guess what the group did, half way through the afternoon?  This tea and cake obsession is clearly another one of those incomprehensible human social rituals. Like talking about the weather, even when it's pouring down all over you. Alice thoroughly enjoys these groups, cakes and all, and she's had some jolly good parts to read - Brutus in Julius Caesar (a noble and eloquent, if murderous Roman); Paulina in Winter's Tale (a faithful servant with a sharp tongue); Hotspur in Henry IV (an impetuous warrior); John of Gaunt in Richard II (an aging partriot who, on his death-bed, tells off the King); and, her favourite so far, Lady MacBeth (a gloriously nasty piece of work). She says she fancies a go at Polonius - doing him serious and slightly sinister, not a parody of a silly old ex-actor and intellectual. I wonder why that is?

Normal service will be resumed...

...in due course. I was concerned people would think I'd given up on this blog, or that Alice and I had had a falling out, so I begged her to let me explain the recent gap.

Anthony Burgess

Alice has been absolutely furiously reading away, preparing to present an enormous tome (600 odd pages!) to her Book Group. It's Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess - he's the one famous for A Clockwork Orange. But Alice insists that's not at all typical of his work, and people only know of it because of the Kubrick film, and the shock-horror response it provoked. She says Earthly Powers is a mature and important book. She's also a fan of his Shakespeare novel, Nothing Like the Sun (which is very much shorter!) Recently she's been reading the man's two volumes of autobiography as well. She certainly doesn't do anything by halves once she gets going.

Sometimes I worry about her. She ought to be having a bit more, well, you know - fun and frivolity.

Socrates philosophising with Alcibiades and others

If you recall, Alice studied Philosophy (as well as English) when she was younger. She got into it at school when she read a translation of The Symposium because someone said it was "naughty". In fact it was a revelation of logic and seriousness. She discovered there the wonderful Myth of the Three Sexes, and fell in love with Socrates because he asked Awkward Questions. Like her. But here it was approved by Plato, rather than frowned upon by bewildered grownups.  I just wanted to know! [Alice] Mind you, Socrates came to a nasty end, condemned to death for corrupting the young. Yet he still kept philosophising, even while the hemlock did its work.

At university, one of the lecturers apparently told Alice's class that in the first year they would be inoculated with the philosophical disease, and then spend three years being cured of it. What a bizarre waste of brain power, I say. But Alice insists it was all very edifying and good training for the mind.

Moreover, she came away knowing there were still Three Important Questions in Life: God (or not); Free Will (or not); and the nature of Good and Evil (or shades of grey) in the world. And that, she says, is what Earthly Powers is really all about. Which is one of the reasons this is the third or fourth time she's read it over the years. Plus it's quite funny in places. (Alice doesn't laugh at very much, apart from Fawlty Towers or Eddie Izzard - oops, I mean, of course, that her sense of humour is very discerning - so the book must be humorous too, as well as covering these big themes.) It's also, she maintains, exceptionally well written. Let's hope her Book Group fellows enjoyed it too, assuming they all managed to get to the end...

Anyway, don't give up on us - we'll be back in a while.