I awoke at 5, 6, 7, and 10:00, and found myself scurrying to meet Camilla 10 minutes in the past.
We breakfasted at Taste and sat in the sun outside another cafe, where a potato shaped woman required us to buy something or leave. Fair enough, except that she had no customers. In her place, I might have considered giving us a free latte and asking us to remain longer. We would have been conscientious shills, I know we would have.
Camilla's morning class was again on Frankenstein, this time on the concept of Gothic. In the Augustan Age, "Gothic" meant archaic, primitive, crude, & irrational; and "classic" meant civilized, perfectly balanced, harmonious. Then the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that fear is a more powerful emotion than affection (he was never a mother, I deduce), and thus the sublime is greater than the beautiful. The idea of Gothic became a political one, with the Northern Races seen as democratic and the Romans as despotic. The Gothic novel, whose height was reached in 1790, 28 years before Frankenstein, was about power and tyranny, about the foreign and excessive, about deviance and incest. The intricacy of Frankenstein mirrors the intricacy of Gothic architecture, the labyrinthine journey to the interior.
We breakfasted at Taste and sat in the sun outside another cafe, where a potato shaped woman required us to buy something or leave. Fair enough, except that she had no customers. In her place, I might have considered giving us a free latte and asking us to remain longer. We would have been conscientious shills, I know we would have.
Camilla's morning class was again on Frankenstein, this time on the concept of Gothic. In the Augustan Age, "Gothic" meant archaic, primitive, crude, & irrational; and "classic" meant civilized, perfectly balanced, harmonious. Then the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that fear is a more powerful emotion than affection (he was never a mother, I deduce), and thus the sublime is greater than the beautiful. The idea of Gothic became a political one, with the Northern Races seen as democratic and the Romans as despotic. The Gothic novel, whose height was reached in 1790, 28 years before Frankenstein, was about power and tyranny, about the foreign and excessive, about deviance and incest. The intricacy of Frankenstein mirrors the intricacy of Gothic architecture, the labyrinthine journey to the interior.
Juicy stuff, so we went to the graveyard afterwards to sit and read. Camilla, the highbrow one of us, is tackling Paradise Lost, and I was delighted by my first Iain M. Banks novel, Matter. The daisies were delicate, the wind sharp, the sun gentle.
Camilla left me at a lunchtime recital of Neal Gow's Scottish dances by fiddler Peter Clark and cellist Ron Shaw. After years of playing fiddle tunes in my living room, I have a sense of their innate danceability of them. A good fiddle tune makes your foot tap, willy-nilly. It fills your head with swirling leaves and the smell of sweaty happy bodies. This stage performance had none of that. It was an art performance instead. Stately, cheerful, but above all lovely and melodic. Once I was able to shift gears, I enjoyed it very much.
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