If you cannot understand my argument, and declare: It’s Greek to me, you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is father to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare;
if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare;
even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.
"pedestrian"; "flâneur"; a "gentleman stroller of city streets"; "lounger"; "saunterer"; "loafer"; a "person who walks the city in order to experience it"; an "idle man-about-town"; a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking".
The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. -Walter Benjamin,"The Flâneur"
BEN BRYNMOR FOWLER
Currently living in Ebisu, Tokyo. A lover of city living & city walking, cinema, music, fiction, currently writing a PhD on contemporary theatre in Britain and Germany, and developing an intense relationship with apple gadgets.
OTHER HOMES:
http://www.scoop.it/t/british-and-german-theatre-today
Instagram username: IBKHOV
Northstar, Marvel’s first openly gay character, to marry beau in upcoming comic
Wedding bells will ring this summer for Marvel Comics’ first openly gay hero, super speedster Northstar.
The New York-based publisher said Tuesday that Canadian character Jean-Paul Beaubier will marry his beau, Kyle Jinadu, in the pages of Astonishing X-Men No. 51, due out June 20.
;-)
Chris Caldwell, “Against Snoopy”:
Charlie Brown is optimistic enough to think he can earn a sense of self-worth, and his willingness to do so by exposing himself to fresh humiliations is the dramatic engine that drives the strip. The greatest of Charlie Brown’s virtues is his resilience, which is to say his courage. Charlie Brown is ambitious. He manages the baseball team. He’s the pitcher, not a scrub. He may be a loser, but he’s, strangely, a leader at the same time. This makes his mood swings truly bipolar in their magnificence: he vacillates not between being kinda happy and kinda unhappy, but between being a “hero” and being a “goat.”
The hero and the goat have and always will be one and the same.
So excited about my new book at bedtime. Geoff Dyer’s ‘Zona’ - as the dust jacket describes, it’s a book about a film about a journey to a room. Tarkovsky’s Stalker to be precise. Perhaps the best film ever made.
Quoting Shakespeare, by Bernard Levin
a celebration of books
how better to mark world book day and shakespeare’s birthday than a trip to one of the largest bookstores in tokyo?! KINOKUNIYA books, tokyoshinjuku branch, is a palace of literature, sprawling over seven floors. on the top floor is a remarkable foreign language section that contains the most wonderful selection of world literature - even the german reclam titles that i loved in berlin. add to that a huge selection of japanese manga in english and i know i’m definitely going to be whiling away many hours in this place.
i just had to pick a manga book. so i went for a shojo beat manga title called OTOMEN, whose blurb particularly caught my attention. i feel a need to reproduce it in full here:
ASUKA MASAMUNE IS A GUY WHO LOVES GIRLY THINGS - SEWING, KNITTING, MAKING CUTE STUFFED ANIMALS AND READING SHOJO COMICS. BUT IN A WORLD WHERE BOYS ARE EXPECTED TO ACT MANLY, ASUKA MUST HIDE HIS BELOVED HOBBIES AND PLAY THE PART OF A MASCULINE JOCK INSTEAD. RYO MIYAKOZUKA, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS A GIRL WHO CAN’T SEW OR BAKE A CAKE TO SAVE HER LIFE. ASUKA FINDS HIMSELF DRAWN TO RYO, BUT SHE LIKES ONLY THE MANLIEST OF MEN! CAN ASUKA EVER SHOW HIS TRUE SELF TO ANYONE, MUCH LESS TO THE GIRL THAT HE’S FALLING FOR?
well, this also happens to be the first book in a series following Asuka’s adventures. i’ve got a feeling I might need to start collecting! i also used the opportunity to pick a cloth book cover from the wide variety of designs on offer. as the couple on the tube demonstrate, it’s incredibly difficult to spy on what other people are reading. everybody wraps their literature in paper or material covers - i’m told it’s to do with the love of privacy here. looking over the shoulders of certain men on the crowded journey home, i suspect these jackets might also serve to conceal some rather more saucy reading material. well, i’m kind of glad that i don’t need to display the nature of my research into shojo manga every time I take out my copy of OTOMAN on the commute…
The Theory and Practice of Lunch by Keith Waterhouse
You can’t get any more British than Waterhouse. And this freewheeling cycle of ebullient essays celebrating the ritual of lunch is a necessary bathroom volume, to place on a shelf beside the toilet, in whatever country the british gentleman might find himself. Every paragraph is sheer delight. Breakfast is my favourite meal, but Waterhouse convinces me that going out for lunch can be the most decadent and rewarding of pursuits. Indeed, it is ‘the institution of lunch itself, over and above its edible parts’, that Waterhouse finds so agreeable, its social dimension:
‘It is a mid-day meal taken at leisure by, ideally, two people. Three’s a crowd, four always split like a double amoeba into two pairs, six is a meeting, eight is a conference… A little light business may be touched upon but the occasion is firmly social. Whether they know it or not, for as long as they linger in the restaurant they are having an affair. The affair is lunch.’
Not only that, lunch can be the very definition of free will:
‘Lunch being an absolute. In its perfect state it is incapable of anything but the most superficial of changes or improvement… it is a prime example of that, which if it did not exist it would be necessary to invent… lunch is a celebration like Easter after winter. It is a conspiracy. It is holiday. It is euphoria made tangible… Lunch, as opposed to dinner, is where you can invite a charming lady without her boring husband, or a fascinating man without his boring wife. Dinner is an obligation or even a retaliation. Lunch is free will.‘
And his diatribe against fussy waiters trying to hurry one along needs to be read:
‘By the coffee stage, tablecloths are supposed to look the worse for wear. If the cloth does not look as lived in as Spencer Tracy’s face, then the lunch has been a failure. It should bear the honourable scars of battle – wine stains, soup stains, olive oil stains, spilled coffee, cigar burns – and be strewn with campaign debris in the way of bread crumbs, spilled salt, wine corks, toothpicks, sugar cubes, chocolate mint wrappers, cigarette packets and what have you. The waiter who obliterates this impressive detritus is as a vandal wrecking the Albert Memorial.’
LET’S GO OUT FOR LUNCH!
I think i gotta make a sheet fort soon and read comic books with a flashlight. OLD SCHOOL
-sigh.-
mini theatres of the imagination…
