Just reading the reviews of the TN in the park is very depressing.  They used to do good theatre there.  Of course, the same can be said of the city.  Now, it's just a means of repeating the sensibilities of the television.

Incidentally, after much mulling, I'm more certain than ever that in the letter and the gulling conceit, we were meant to hear "cross-gartered" as wearing a cross, and "yellow starchings" as the ruff.  The joke is that M misunderstands.  Both the starched ruff and the cross would have been provocative political symbols.  (And possibly "Lady of the Strachy as misprint for Stark(ch)y.")

Nowhere in the variorum. 

Quite a week, last week.  For some reason, absasmurfly everything that could go wrong from an admin POV did go wrong.  Including, most significantly for my purposes, an unforced error or two.  

By the weekend, was reduced to what a Victorian prime minister might have called a state of mild nervous prostration.  But decided to observe the American holday by sleeping in after a placid Sunday, and now it's back to the fray.

Absolute discipline.  Some people might call my approach characteristic of national socialism, others might call it characteristic of a Soviet commissar.  The choice in those instances would be revealing of the speaker.  But it is necessary to have the intensity of focus and being that was deivided between those two (and then reconciled, as Rory noted, at an extended academic seminar called the battle of Stalingrad).  By divine edict, Eden isn't an option.  Find the grace.

A peculiar 24 hours, weather-wise.  Strong cold winds from the south suddenly appeared yesterday afternoon.  Storms in the air, battles perhaps, in the sense of meaningful things contending.  The air marked by the acrid smell of the southern air here.  Then, apparently, the victory of calmer things, and clean air and sunshine, presumably from the north.

Wandered through one of the malls.  Not quite the glittering and flashing desire-machines of the country to the northeast, but a solid place.  I seem to be able to sense the thread that goes from the market-based modern malls of the country to the southwest, through places like this, and to the north.  Perhaps my imagination, but it seems the vehicle of  one of the local social sensibilities, tracing out its idea of what a great, good place might be, and so it might be in some tension with the other groups.  Instead of coffee from a small, century-old tin pot, digital espresso machines costing hundreds of dollars arrayed between the televisions and the laptops.  Such things can be built from private notions of perfection, or in imitation of distant models, or against the proximate others.  In the last case, it might have that character for the others as well.  An amiable tabernacle, though.

Stopped in at a shrine of a local saint.  Whenever you see a sign or a photo on the wall indicating that a pope stopped in here to pray, you get the sense that you might be in a worthwhile place, as opposed to the place across the street.  Or perahsp not.  Perhaps he's just indicating the neighborhood.