from the visit.

i and p have photographs from the 14th.

Milo Tindle: There it is! The original blunt instrument, the poker. Right!
Andrew Wyke: Now, steady...
Milo Tindle: Where do you want it?
Andrew Wyke: Don't get carried away. It's not a murder weapon you're talking about, you know!
Milo Tindle: No?
Andrew Wyke: No. We're discussing an object from which I receive, in the classic formula, a glancing blow which will raise a lump, without actually cracking the cranium.
Milo Tindle: Why don't I just keep tapping you lightly on the head with the poker until a lump comes up?

a film with a two-man cast, and the screenplay is shaffer's own.

i'm sure this is all old hat to those who have been with mankiewicz since their tender years, but i have only just watched the 1972 sleuth, and enjoyed it. (the wiki article is all spoilers, by the way, and allow me to recommend watching the thing first).

and in the 2007 film, now, michael caine plays wyke. and harold pinter is doing the screenplay for kenneth branagh. i look forward to watching it, not least because pinter can do marvellous things, and because branagh is a man of very considerable imagination.

i should mention that i have now watched his harry and his benedick, and i do enjoy his shakespeare.
there was also mozart, incidentally, with clean animation-like colours, and stephen fry with words to the english libretto and dialogue.

grief.

the book is very good, of course, not least because krakauer has a great deal of respect, even attachment.
and sean penn has done not a very bad job on the film. although i do believe reasons aren't always attributable, and almost never attributable with such definition.

i think the self-portrait in front of the bus is remarkable.

'So one afternoon I took myself to the Aldwych Theatre and saw a production of King Lear in which he was playing the Fool and I stood for the first time in my life in the presence of truly great acting. It was effortless reality and compassion and humanity and wit and pathos and it was all at the service of the play and of his fellow performers and it was a spine-tingling connection to great art, it was simple and it was profound. And years later I got to know him, and his wife, and I found a remark that he made to her to be very true. He said that you can never be more on stage, than you are in life and by this time I knew in his case it was true. I knew about his enormous heart, his warmth and his intelligence and I knew for sure that what I'd seen all those years ago had been no accident and I was always too shy to tell him because he's like me, he's easily embarrassed, but I want to tell him tonight, because he's here, that I left that performance of his feeling that if any part of my professional career could approach what he did in that role, that I would die a happy man.'
etc.

also enjoyed this, from much younger times.

all because of hamlet.

as for the four-hundred-and-something-year-old, well, no one produces a greater hangover.