This is the best thing of its kind since the Sokol hoax.

Since I wrote about the BBC Shakespeare DVDs two and a half years ago, prices have dropped on both sides of the Atlantic. You can now get the American discs for $99.99 per set, down from $149.99, but that still means paying $389.96 for only 20 plays at Amazon, which comes to roughly $19.50 per play. (One of them is 10% off right now.) The UK box, containing all 37 plays, lists for £199,99, but is on sale right now at Amazon UK for only £81,97, or roughly $128 (US), which works out to less than $3.50 per play. Of course, you will need an all-region DVD player to view them in the U.S., but those are not expensive, and are useful for watching other films not available in Region 1 coding.

The icing on the cake: Amazon UK usually subtracts 15% when shipping expensive items to U.S. addresses, since Americans, not being eligible for the National Health, aren’t expected to pay the VAT tax that finances it. That would bring the price down to less than $3.00 per play, plus shipping, which was fast and reasonably-priced when I bought the set a few years ago.

It’s nice to have all the plays, since the ones not available in the U.S. box sets are precisely the ones you are least likely to see in a theater.

Does a 125th birthday count as a significant anniversary? If so — also if not — today is Alban Berg’s 125th. In commemoration, I’m playing the only really tolerable pieces written by the New Vienna School, Berg’s Violin Concerto and Lyric Suite for String Quartet. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg published a few other pieces that are not just tolerable but very pleasant, but they are arrangements of Strauss waltzes — the Old Vienna School reworked by the New — so they don’t really count.

So what would we call a 125th birthday? A hemi-demi-semi-millennium, of course.

By the way, ‘Alban’ seems an odd name for a German. I mostly know it from the name of the Alban Mount, southeast of Rome. It’s odd that ‘Berg’ is German for mount(ain), though the mountain is apparently not called the Albanberg in German. The ancient Roman name is singular, Albanus Mons, but German Wikipedia gives the plural ‘Albaner Berge’ as the preferred form, with ‘Albaner Hügel’ and ‘Albanergebirge’ as alternatives. I still wonder if Alban’s father was indulging in a pun: perhaps a native speaker can tell us.

When a visiting friend’s cat stuck its head through my bedroom door at 4:00 am, it occurred to me that we could rename her ‘Snoop Catty Cat’. According to Bing, the phrase has already been used 28 times on the web. Better 28 than “about 28,000″, I guess.

Last year, Dr. Esquirol compiled a table of statistics concerning insanity. It reads as follows: “Driven mad by love: two men, sixty women. Driven mad by religion: six men, twenty women. Driven mad by politics: forty-eight men, three women. Driven mad by financial loss: twenty-seven men, twenty-four women. Driven mad by cause or causes unknown: one man, no women.” The last statistic represents our poor friend.

(Theophile Gautier, “The Painter”, in My Fantoms, translated by Richard Holmes)

“Our poor friend” is the painter of the title, the unfortunately named Onuphrius Wphly. Have the proportions changed much in the last 178 years? I doubt it.

Like all artists when they are not looking merely outrageous, Onuphrius was very particular about his appearance. It was not that he dressed fashionably, but he always tried to give his lamentable selection of clothes a certain romantic dash, and a sense of style that escaped the everyday. He took as his model a fine Van Dyck portrait he had in his studio, and in fact the resemblance was almost uncanny. It was as if the picture had stepped out of its frame, or as though a mirror had been stood in front of it.

(Theophile Gautier, “The Painter”, in My Fantoms, translated by Richard Holmes)

I do not know why Holmes prefers ‘Fantoms’ to ‘Phantoms’ in the title of the collection and in the text. I am glad he changed the title of the story, since the French title is one of the worst ever devised: “Onuphrius Wphly, ou les Vexations Fantastiques d’un admirateur d’Hoffmann”.

Proposed motto for the city of Staunton, Virginia:

Staunton: The ‘U’ is Silent

A local convenience store has a sign out front:

Cheeseburgers
Buy 1, Get 1

What’s the best thing about the American Shakespeare Center’s production of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, opening tomorrow night? There’s no way to tell, but the best thing I know before seeing it is that the same actor (John Harrell) is playing Lucifer and the Pope — not to mention the Holy Roman Emperor and the Duke of Vanholt. Whether the implicit parallel owes more to Marlowe or the ASC, and what (if anything) they will do with it, I do not know. I’m looking forward to this play more than most. Dr. Faustus is one of the two books I loved in high school and still love. (The other is Borges’ prose.) I don’t really ‘get’ most of Shakespeare’s plays (especially the comedies) from reading them, but Dr. Faustus has a simple — or at least linear — and powerful plot.

As for my title question, yes: there is one previous use of the phrase. Of course, this will make two.

My Oxford Spanish Dictionary, third edition on CD-Rom, arrived today, 65% off in their Christmas sale. The first word I looked up, ‘navecilla’, was not in it. It must mean ‘little ship’, but it was disconcerting not being able to check. In one 66-line poem of Quevedo, I found two other words that were entirely missing, along with several more that seem to have changed their meanings in the last 400 years. ‘Avariento’ must mean ‘greedy’, but I still don’t know what ‘dina’ means, or even whether it is a noun, adjective, or verb. It’s obviously not a ‘dyne’ (unit of power), the only modern meaning, or a small-d ‘Dinah’, and there is no obvious English or Latin cognate, as with ‘avariento’. Very frustrating. Is there some other Spanish-English dictionary that includes ‘obs.’ or ‘arch.’ words used by well-known older authors?

If you’re looking for a snow shovel three days into a blizzard: Home Depot. Martin’s (our local high-end grocery chain) sold out on Friday, when the blizzard was just getting started. By Monday, Walmart had been out of snow shovels for quite some time. They suggested I try Home Depot, which had large quantities of four different models, all very reasonably priced: the cheapest was $12.95, the most expensive $22.95. I bought the $19.95 model, since it had a metal blade and the other three were all plastic. I probably should have thought about buying a snow shovel earlier, but I rent, so clearing the sidewalk is the landlord’s problem. Of course, getting my car out from under two feet of snow was my problem. I did most of that myself, with just a window scraper, but paid a couple of guys $10 to finish the job. I would show you a picture of the snow shovel I bought, but searching for ’snow shovel’ on the Home Depot site brings up only snow blowers and snow blower accessories.

Perhaps I’m just addicted to bad jokes and cultural allusions, but if I were Terry Teachout, I would have titled his latest post “Top of the world, ma!”.

The view from my front window late this morning:

Renting means not having to shovel the steps, like the home-owner across the street.

The view from my back window:

Prufrock Press “is the nation’s leading resource for gifted and talented children and gifted education programs”. I hope the name is not a literary allusion. Gifted and talented children have enough trouble with accusations of nerdliness and worse: they really don’t need to be associated with J. Alfred Prufrock, who couldn’t decide whether he dared to eat a peach or whether he should “wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach”.

There nearly always is method in madness. It’s what drives men mad, being methodical.

(G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much, VI. “The Fad of the Fisherman”)

Seen on a T-shirt worn by an 8th-grade Latin student (male):

Satan is a nerd.

Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything about politics; and nothing about politicians. He also knew a good deal about art, letters, philosophy and general culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.

(G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much, I. “The Face in the Target”)

One of my Latin II students, a 9th-grader, told the class that she wants to have three sons so she can name them Alvin, Theodore, and Simon. I told her that if she does that she’ll end up spending tens of thousands of dollars on therapy once they figure out the pattern.

“I don’t like men that are always eating cake.”

(Gertrude Wentworth, in Henry James, The Europeans, I)

In three words: very well done. I was going to add “for a little theater production”, but I’ll just leave it at that. The principals, Brian Holsopple as Sweeney Todd and Barbara Spilman Lawson as Mrs. Lovett, were particularly strong: I especially liked her expressive eyes in the mad scenes (not that it’s easy to separate these from the other scenes) and his physical dominance (if that’s the word for it). Morgan McDowell, as Anthony, also struck me as particularly strong, though I didn’t much care for his obviously fake sideburns. I’m told the mop of curly black hair is his own. It took me most of the show to figure out who he reminded me of: Michael Jackson in his late years, but with a real nose and not quite so pale. (My date for the evening thinks he looked more like Elijah Wood as Frodo in Lord of the Rings.) Jayne Gallagher, as Johanna, looked perfect for the part — very 19th century hair and dress –, and her singing and acting were also excellent. Like most of the cast, both are still in high school. Everyone else, including the ensemble, was much more than adequate, though one or two of the secondary characters were a little weak in volume or not as perspicuous in pronunciation as I would have liked. The sets were well done, too: low ceilings meant that the second-story barber shop was only about four feet higher than the first-floor pie shop and basement bakeroom, but they managed that well by sliding the fresh bodies in the barber chair off to one side and having them reappear through a trap door in front. (I’m sorry if that’s a ’spoiler’ for any of my readers.) In sum, well worth the $12 ticket.

There is one more show, today at 3:00pm, so if any of my readers are in the Shenandoah Valley there’s still time to get there. Verona is five miles north of Staunton. ShenanArts’ website is here. I would be there myself, if I didn’t have way too much work with a midnight deadline.