Epiphanies
Jan. 8th, 2014 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI've probably said before that as far as I'm concerned, Christmas isn't over until Twelfth Night; and for the past several years, we have closed the festive season with Phantoms at the Phil, an evening of new ghost stories read by their authors at the magnificent library of the Lit & Phil, Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society. Which happens on Twelfth Night, January 6th.
Except that I was having this conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
valydiarosada, while she and D. were here over the New Year, and she pointed out that Twelfth Night isn't January 6th: if you count twelve days from Christmas Day, you get to January 5th. January 6th is the Feast of the Epiphany, which is not the same thing as Twelfth Night: by the time the Magi arrived, Christmas had already ended. Why did I not know this? I should have known this. At some level, of course, I did know, I'd tried to make the figures work, failed, and forgotten about it. Ah, well...
So on Monday we marked the end of the festivities with the ghost stories which are traditional to the Feast of the Epiphany. The Library was packed: Phantoms always sells out, but the seats seemed to have been crammed in more tightly than ever. Perennial apparitions Gail-Nina Anderson and Sean O'Brien were joined by Margaret Wilkinson, who I think of as a short-story writer because I have 1956, her collection of interlocking stories and associate her with the 'Save the Short Story' campaign; since then she seems to have been mostly writing plays, but was delighted to be asked for a short story.
Gail-Nina Anderson read first, and for once her story wasn't 'untitled'; it was called Twelfth Night, and began with a character who shared D.'s name and maybe a little more (a taste for real ales with silly names, for example) but who had been transformed into the narrator's brother. The story devoted some scene-setting to a discussion of Twelfth Night, the date, and Twelfth Night the play, and then having softened you up with entertaining dialogue and thought-provoking stuff about the play (twins and ghosts, gender and identity), gathered all the threads together and tied them in a spooky little bow.
I thought at the time how well Margaret Wilkinson read: on reflection, perhaps it's more that as a playwright she is accustomed to writing text to be delivered orally. Her story, Living in the Here and Now, is written in the second person present tense, which on the page tends to alienate me; in this medium, and in Margaret's slightly sardonic tone (she gives full weight to an apparently neutral "you think", and when she came to an incidental reference to twins I could hear her eyebrow rising) it seemed less mannered, more immediate.
Sean O'Brien read last, after the break: his The True Story was the grimmest of fairy tales, and it came as no surprise that it, too, featured twins, two beautiful sisters in a cottage deep in the woods. "Did the message go round. the password is 'twins'?" I asked, though I knew the answer would be 'no'.
After which we - the readers,durham_rambler and I, S., frumpo and H. - headed out into the Monday night in search of a restaurant that would consent to serve us, and ended up the only customers in the cavernous splendour of Portofino. Evidently, the holidays are over.
Except that I was having this conversation with
valydiarosada, while she and D. were here over the New Year, and she pointed out that Twelfth Night isn't January 6th: if you count twelve days from Christmas Day, you get to January 5th. January 6th is the Feast of the Epiphany, which is not the same thing as Twelfth Night: by the time the Magi arrived, Christmas had already ended. Why did I not know this? I should have known this. At some level, of course, I did know, I'd tried to make the figures work, failed, and forgotten about it. Ah, well...So on Monday we marked the end of the festivities with the ghost stories which are traditional to the Feast of the Epiphany. The Library was packed: Phantoms always sells out, but the seats seemed to have been crammed in more tightly than ever. Perennial apparitions Gail-Nina Anderson and Sean O'Brien were joined by Margaret Wilkinson, who I think of as a short-story writer because I have 1956, her collection of interlocking stories and associate her with the 'Save the Short Story' campaign; since then she seems to have been mostly writing plays, but was delighted to be asked for a short story.
Gail-Nina Anderson read first, and for once her story wasn't 'untitled'; it was called Twelfth Night, and began with a character who shared D.'s name and maybe a little more (a taste for real ales with silly names, for example) but who had been transformed into the narrator's brother. The story devoted some scene-setting to a discussion of Twelfth Night, the date, and Twelfth Night the play, and then having softened you up with entertaining dialogue and thought-provoking stuff about the play (twins and ghosts, gender and identity), gathered all the threads together and tied them in a spooky little bow.
I thought at the time how well Margaret Wilkinson read: on reflection, perhaps it's more that as a playwright she is accustomed to writing text to be delivered orally. Her story, Living in the Here and Now, is written in the second person present tense, which on the page tends to alienate me; in this medium, and in Margaret's slightly sardonic tone (she gives full weight to an apparently neutral "you think", and when she came to an incidental reference to twins I could hear her eyebrow rising) it seemed less mannered, more immediate.
Sean O'Brien read last, after the break: his The True Story was the grimmest of fairy tales, and it came as no surprise that it, too, featured twins, two beautiful sisters in a cottage deep in the woods. "Did the message go round. the password is 'twins'?" I asked, though I knew the answer would be 'no'.
After which we - the readers,
durham_rambler and I, S., frumpo and H. - headed out into the Monday night in search of a restaurant that would consent to serve us, and ended up the only customers in the cavernous splendour of Portofino. Evidently, the holidays are over.
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no subject
Date: 2014-01-08 11:04 pm (UTC)Irrelatedly, did you hear that it was colder in America than it was on Mars?
no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 09:57 am (UTC)I had not heard that comparison (red planet is warm and cosy, surely, it's red!). The Mayor of Hell (it's in Minnesota, I think) was on the Today programme, talking about the weather, and no-one thought it necessary to explain that,folks, those temperatures are Fahrenheit...
no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 06:25 pm (UTC)phonesmall mobile computer and everything...no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 08:05 pm (UTC)