Can't Sleep, George Bernard Shaw Will Eat Me

During the course of Charles Laughton January, I found a recording online of Don Juan in Hell, with Laughton (the Devil), Agnes Moorehead (Donna Ana), Cedric Hardwicke (the Commander) and Charles Boyer (Don Juan), and have been listening to it a little at a time.

Woke up around 4:30 am realizing that it pretty much typifies what I like and dislike about Shaw -- when I was younger I read his collected plays and found that while I generally liked the scripts, I absolutely hated the essays in which he explained what he'd really meant; and in this piece, those things are pretty much happening simultaneously.

So basically, it's like being at a cocktail party where the conversation gets taken over by a pretentious bore who repeats Ev-Psych stuff from some article he read online, keeps talking about the much cooler party that's going on somewhere else, and possibly quotes that bit about how "Stupid people talk about Things, average people talk about People, and smart people talk about Ideas," even though he himself isn't speaking the language of pure maths. You keep wishing the host would kick him out, but they were friends in college and he can't bear to give up on the guy.

I may struggle on to the end in case it picks up, but since it's not called Don Juan Shuts Up and Lets Someone Else Talk, I'm keeping my hopes in check.

OK, with that off my chest, trying for another hour-and-a-half of sleep before the alarm goes off.

(no subject)

Still plodding along on the Patchwork Flesh submission. I’ve got no idea whether this story makes any sense.


Golden boys and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust

You do sweep, but the dust always collects again, even within the hour. Dust flocks to you. Frank had laughed at your untidiness when the two of you first began dating: Who died and made you king of the dust-bunnies?

I don’t know why I said that, he’d apologized. No, I do – you know how it is when you haven’t known someone long, but you can’t imagine them other than how they are? Not older or younger. I mean, look at you. As far as I know, you might have fallen out of the sky eighteen months ago wearing the clothes you have on now. It’s a kind of perfection, really.

Perhaps he’d been right. You recall shockingly little about your parents. Frank was full of stories about road hockey and his brothers and sisters and his mom and dad. Most of them you have met, and several of them call from time to time to see how you are doing. You tell yourself you are lucky to live in the twenty-first century.