2015 — 13 December: Sunday
Early in this retirement skylark I picked up (for a bargain £4-99 in Eastleigh's Oxfam bookshop) a perfect-condition hardback copy of Michael Holroyd's own one-volume abridgement of his four-volume bio of "Bernard Shaw". In it, he sheds considerably further light on the life choices made for Eliza Doolittle by Shaw in the context of much that was going on in Shaw's own complex life just before the start of the First World War as he worked on "Pygmalion". Life bleeds into Art, it seems. Holroyd also amusingly reveals inter alia the shock and horror1 in that real world surrounding Eliza's use of the word "bloody"...
... in Shaw's elegantly didactic fictional one:
The Bishop of Woolwich cried out for it to be banned; Bishop Weldon felt saddened that such a vulgar word had to be uttered by a married lady with children. Scholars and intellectuals duelled in the columns of The Times over the origin of 'bloody'. The Oxford Union met and voted in favour of a motion declaring 'a certain sanguinary expletive' to be 'a liberating influence on the English language', but the Debating Society at Eton deplored 'the debasement and vulgarisation of the commercial theatre'. The Daily Express got hold of an authentic Covent Garden flower girl called Eliza, took her to the play and reported her as being shocked. At 10 Downing Street the Prime Minister received a letter of protest from the Women's Purity League.
I shall next re-watch — though not before breakfast! — the BBC's December 1973 version with Lynn Redgrave in the rôle. (I imported a box set of Shaw classics a decade ago, though why the BBC wouldn't sell it in the UK baffled me.)
A 1983 bonus on the same DVD:
Androcles with a Scottish accent?
When I bought...
... my copy of the book that David Levy — the same chap who started the bet, in 1968, that no computer would beat him at chess for at least 10 years — had managed to turn his PhD thesis into...
... I wasn't that surprised by the topic (it's hardly a new idea in SF, after all). Turns out his second scheduled International Congress [pun unintentional], however, has been banned in Malaysia. Should I be surprised that there's actually a campaign against sex robots?
Today's late lunch...
... will (as ever) win me no prizes for culinary presentation. A lightly-buttered brown-bread roll with delicious reduced-sugar blackcurrant jam as a side-dish to my latest crockpot extravaganza: a tasty mix of a little slow-cooked lamb, with plentiful potatoes, carrots, leek, swede, onion, parsnip, pre-fabricated gravy, stock, tinned tomatoes, and separately-heated peas. Quick, easy, and delicious. Much-assisted by that offshoot of radar technology, too, no matter how real (or unreal) quantum theory may (or may not) turn out to be as a descriptive predictor of the state of Technology Towers and its happily-stuffed grey-haired proprietor.
If Christa could see me now, heh? :-)
The BBC's 1973 Pygmalion...
... barely strays from the original playscript and is very much the better for it. This version has the ending that GBS finally chose — not the ending the public preferred, I gather. But 42 years ago already? Ouch.
Meanwhile, I'm getting tired of seeing this on BBC web pages:
They'll be telling me I need Java next :-)
There seems to be...
... a hole in local reality, allowing free will to leak out. Such an innocent letter heading, too:
Of course, I could only think (that I think) that I half-understand portions of this arcane stuff. I'm no Lensman, after all :-)