Do you read your reviews?

No, this isn't about books at all. When I posted my review of the Cal Shakes performance of Irma Vep, I did a little fan-girl squeeing over Philippa Kelly, the current Cal Shakes dramaturge who also gives the pre-performance "Grove talks" during the dinner-picnic hour before curtain time. Someone pointed her to my post and last Thursday she came over to chat with thread_walker and me and said how much she'd enjoyed the review and had I written any others? So of course I popped off a link to my whole "reviews: live performances" tag, which includes most of this season and a sprinkling of earlier seasons (plus, of course, my Broadway reviews). So you never know who may be reading your reviews!

But the main point of this post is that she asked if I'd encourage people who attend Cal Shakes performances to come for the Grove Talks. Now I rather suspect that the overlap of the set of people who read my blog and the set of people who go to Cal Shakes performances can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand, but here's my recommendation: If you get Cal Shakes tickets, definitely see if you can get there early enough to enjoy a leisurely picnic dinner in the eucalyptus grove before the show (the snack bar has a rather foodie bent and serves excellent offerings, if a bit pricey, or you can bring your own) and very definitely sit in the Grove Talk area (the first picnic area on the left as you come up the hill) so you can enjoy the lecture about the background of the play and the performance. It really rounds out the experience nicely. (And you can join the Philippa Kelly fan club.)

Book Intake: Forbidden Books

I've actually picked up several new books recently, mostly uncomfortably expensive academic press books that were so perfect I couldn't help myself. (I forget sometimes that my "uncomfortably expensive book" is the equivalent of "a good night on the town". Also: these books are well within my mad-money budget, so don't worry on that account.) In fact, they're perfect enough that I'm going to re-start doing Lesbian Historic Motif Project entries. I think that I can keep up with a once-a-week schedule for that without distracting from writing fiction. So expect to see entries in the near future from the collection Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives., the more-male-than-female-but-what-can-you-do Same-Sex Desire in the ENglish Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650, and the too-delicious to pass up Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama.

But the blog title comes from something I picked up at the Concord Library book sale, which I saw signs for when biking back from the coffee shop this morning. You don't expect library book sales to have anything particularly useful -- they're for picking up some cheap reads or maybe an interesting cookbook or the like. But there on one of the shelves was Robert Darnton The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France: 1769-1789, a catalog of forbidden books, who was publishing and distributing them, and a very brief discussion of how the bans were enforced. Since I've had some tangential issues relating to forbidden (or at least discouraged) books in the Alpennia series, it looked like it might be a useful reference for the $0.50 price in question.

And, of course, I mentioned to the folks at check-out that I thought it might be useful for research for my novels and at the end of that conversation I'd distributed my book business cards and had a promise that I'd be contacted regarding doing a reading at the library. I probably should have talked to them some time ago -- local libraries tend to like to support local authors -- but somehow it feels more comfortable having grown naturally out of this sort of interaction. Less pressure.