Note: This post is really just for me to try to jot down and organize all the information/recommendations/advice I’ve received about London so far. AND MORE ADVICE IS MORE THAN WELCOMED!
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Here, I’ve narrowed down the Blake historical sites to only the ones I want to see most:
St. James’s Church: (10) Where Blake was baptized. The font still survives.
Westminster Abbey: (10) Where Blake practiced drawing. Monument to Blake in the Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.Will probably end up here on a bus tour!
Royal Academy, New Somerset House: (9) Where Blake studied and occasionally exhibited his work. Original building.
13 Hercules Buildings: (7) Where Blake produced the Songs of Experience. House demolished in 1918.
17 South Moulton Street: (10) Will be here on Tuesday!
St. Mary’s, Battersea: (10) Where Blake married Kate. Original building.
Okay, this might be really silly/crazy/touristy, but a tour in a vintage bus plus tea time? That just sounds so ridiculous (in a good way, I think)!
Won’t have time for this on Monday or Tuesday, so will have to do either Wednesday or Thursday.
Location: Starts at Harrods, 87-135 Brompton Road, Knightsbridge.
Time: Starts at 1 p.m, for 5 hours.
Price: £49
Includes: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, The London Eye, Westminster Abbey, Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, Nelson’s Column, Hyde Park, the Houses of Parliament, The Royal Albert Hall, a cruise on the River Thames, and tea/scones at Harrods.
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Jack the Ripper Tour
Might have time for this on Monday, or otherwise on Wednesday.
Option #1: Every night at 7 p.m. Outside exit 4 of Aldgate East Station. £9. 2 hours.
Option #2: Every night at 7 p.m. Outside exit 4 of Aldgate East Station. £9. 2 hours.
Option #3: Every night at 7:30 p.m. Outside exit 3 of Aldgate East Station. £9. 1 hour, 45 minutes.
Tentatively, I think I might go to the Tate and V&A on Tuesday, the bus tour and possibly Jack the Ripper on Wednesday, and then the British Museum and Blake historic sites on Thursday.
Location: Millbank.
Time: Open daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Price: Free (except for special exhibitions).
Taking photos not allowed.
Need to find out more about the renovated Blake rooms!
Need to figure out what else I’d like to see at the Tate!
“Fresh leaf tea in a pot and bone china, scones with clotted cream and jam, finger sandwiches and tasty cakes… could anything be more British than afternoon tea in London.”
Location: 41 Great Russell Street (opposite the British Museum).
As you may know, for the past couple months, I’ve been busy planning for my trip to Cannes and London. I’ll only have 3 full days in London, so I’m trying to figure out the best schedule that will allow me to fit everything in. For my British followers/readers, any advice would be incredibly appreciated.
Monday
Arrive: Hello London!!!
Take public transportation from Heathrow to hotel; check into hotel and get situated.
Since I’ll be exhausted from the film festival (and if I don’t get in too late), I think I might take a bus tour of London. That way, I can relax and cover all the basics in a short amount of time and hopefully won’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything. If I don’t have time to do a bus tour Monday, then I’ll do one Tuesday morning/afternoon and maybe do a Jack the Ripper tour instead.
Tuesday: Special Event Day!
I’m not exactly sure how I’ll spend a good chunk of this day yet. Like I said, I might take a bus tour of London. Or perhaps check out the London Eye, Covent Garden, Sherlock Holmes Museum, Royal Botanic Gardens, etc. on my own. I have to look into the different types of bus tours and schedules!
Leave some time to relax and possibly nap in the late afternoon.
★Tate: I recently contacted the Tate about their William Blake collection and was absolutely delighted to hear that the renovated Blake rooms are scheduled to open May 14th and will very likely include The Ghost of a Flea — talk about perfect timing!
British Museum: I would like to visit the British Museum’s Print Room (Department of Prints and Drawings), where one can access Blake works without an appointment. According to the Chair of the Blake Society, Tim Heath: “…you are able to hold in your own hands some of Blake’s original (and now priceless) illuminated books. It is one of the secrets of the city.”
Victoria & Albert Museum: According to Naomi, the V&A has “…four of Blake’s ‘fresco’ paintings on display permanently, as well as a good collection of watercolours which you can see in their Print Room (no appointment needed).” Would also love to see upcoming exhibit called David Bowie is (March – July)!!
I need to figure out the easiest way to walk and which sites I would most like to see (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 meaning “I absolutely must see this!”).
28 Broad Street: (7) Where Blake was born. Original building no longer survives. Tate: “Old houses that survive… give a good idea of what Blake’s house looked like.”
St. James’s Church: (10) Recommended by Tim. Where Blake was baptized. The font still survives.
Mr. Pars’ Drawing School in the Strand: (5) Where Blake was sent to study at age 10. Demolished in Regency times.
31 Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn: (8) Where Blake at age 14 became apprentice to an engraver. Original building demolished in late 19th century. Tate: “…but the next-door houses (of brick rather than stone) give an idea of its original appearance).
Westminster Abbey: (10) Where Blake as an apprentice practiced drawing ancient tombs (such as King Edward I) and monuments. Monument to William Blake in the Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.
Royal Society of Arts: (5) Where Blake admired James Barry’s murals The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture. Original building.
Royal Academy, New Somerset House: (9) Where Blake studied and exhibited his work on several occasions. Also important location for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, if I’m not mistaken. Original building.
Green Street, Leicester Square: (5) Where Blake moved after his marriage. Original building no longer exists.
28 Poland Street: (6) Where Blake moved after dissolving his partnership with James Parker. House rebuilt in the late 19th century.
13 Hercules Buildings: (7) Where Blake lived during his most productive years and produced the Songs of Experience. House demolished in 1918.
17 South Moulton Street: (10) Where Blake “…suffer[ed] his bitterest disappointments. Fame and financial success continued to elude him, and he sank into poverty and paranoia.” Will be here on Tuesday!
Fountain Court, Strand: (7) Where Blake lived until his death and produced his illustration to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Original building no longer exists.
St. Mary’s, Battersea: (10) Recommended by Tim. Where Blake married Kate. Original building.
Bunhill Fields: (9) Recommended by Tim. Where Blake is buried (in an unmarked grave). Tate: “A small monument now stands at the approximate site where Blake was buried.”
Paolozzi Newton: (6) Where a statue based on Blake’s Newton stands.
Friday
Depart: Back to San Francisco!
Now that I’ve laid everything out, the next step is to narrow everything down into a manageable plan!
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My head is spinning from all these award nominations!
Thank you so much to Eszter (felteddreams.wordpress.com) for nominating me a second time for the Liebster Award! Don’t forget to check out Eszter’s amazing felt/embroidery/quilting creations.
To view the post from my first nomination, click here.
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Rules
Post eleven facts about yourself.
Answer the questions the tagger has set for you and create eleven questions for people you’ve nominated.
Choose eleven people to give this award to and link them in your post.
Go to their page and tell them.
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Eszter’s Quetions
1. What inspired you to start blogging?
Well, I started this particular blog to keep track of my various creative projects and to organize my thoughts a bit.
2. Is there one thing you wish you could change about yourself, what would it be?
I’m never good at answering this sort of question. Even if I could magically change something about myself, I don’t think I would.
3. If you could meet someone famous who is still living who would it be?
This is a really tough question because I don’t want to jinx my chances at Cannes.
4. What was the most interesting class you ever took in school?
Another tough question since I went to New York University: Gallatin School of Individualized Study and took a number of amazing courses including “Dante’s World,” “Virtue and Villainy: Melodrama,” and “Globalization: Promises and Discontents.” The most life-changing class I ever took was “Yellow Peril: Documenting & Understanding Xenophobia” taught by the amazing Jack Tchen. For this class, I wrote a painstakingly researched 25-page paper (plus 5 pages of works cited) about Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Girls. Jack’s new book Yellow Peril: Understanding Fears of “the East” and What We Can Do About It is coming out at the end of February, so check it out if you’re interested!
5. What did you want to be when you were little?
I think I always wanted to be a comic book artist/graphic novelist/mangaka since I was in elementary school up through high school graduation. I drifted away from comics/graphic novels/manga in college, but as you can tell from The Poet and the Flea have regained my passion.
6. If you could decorate your work-space however you wanted, what would be your feature color?
Well, when I moved to San Francisco, I really got to decorate my workspace and I wouldn’t really change a thing (other than that it sometimes gets way too hot and there’s no air-conditioning). My room is mostly made of various shades of blue with splashes of yellow, tan, and salmon. It’s pretty funky!
7. If your life were a book, what would be the title?
Radiant Pessimist™ (this will also be the name of my future production company — I have Laurence Harvey to thank for that one).
8. What one happy memory do you have always coming to mind?
I don’t really have one memory that always comes to mind. But I recently thought of a childhood memory (when I was maybe six or seven years old) that I really hadn’t thought of for a long time — me and my dad bobbing in the ocean off of Kiawah Island. I remember that my nose was really runny, ha ha ha.
9. Do you prefer to read actual books or use an E-reader?
Actual books, hands down! It’s just not the same experience with an e-reader. The tactile feeling of a book, the smell of it, the typography and placement on the page, the action of turning from page to page… I really have a hard time reading on my iPad.
10. If you could keep only one item from your wardrobe, what would it be?
I’ve only worn it once, but the skirt of the prom outfit my grandmother made me. She died September 2011, so I’m extremely reluctant to let it go.
11. If you win some millions in lottery, what would be the first thing you buy?
I wouldn’t “buy” anything per se. I’d rather fund a full-length film of either my own script or that of a close friend.
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Nominations
Can’t I just nominate all my followers? You’re all so awesome and talented!
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My Questions
I liked the questions I wrote last time, so I’ll use them again…
What is the strangest dream you’ve ever had?
What is/was your favorite subject in school?
When you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Who is your role model?
What is your favorite holiday?
What is your least favorite vegetable?
What is your guilty pleasure?
Are you an optimist or pessimist?
What are your short-term goals/New Year’s resolutions?
What did you last eat?
Do you have any special and/or bizarre talents?
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Disclaimer: I do not own any of the following images or video!!
One of my favorite operas is Jacques Offenbach‘s The Tales of Hoffmann(Les contes d’Hoffmann). This opera is a fantastical retelling of the life of the German Romantic author E. T. A. Hoffmann, casting Hoffmann as the protagonist of his own stories.
Placido Domingo performing the “Chanson de Kleinzach” aria.
Désirée Rancatore performing ”Les oiseaux dans la charmille.”
Through The Tales of Hoffmann, I developed an interest in Hoffmann and his stories, quickly leading me to Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny. In Freud’s essay, he uses many of the same Hoffmann stories as Offenbach, but in this case to prove a psychological point (not that Offenbach’s opera isn’t deeply psychological). If I remember correctly, Freud even mentions Offenbach’s opera.
Portrait of E. T. A. Hoffmann
I’m sure you are all wondering, “What does all this have to do with The Nutcracker?” Well, little do most people know, E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote in 1816 one of the earliest versions of The Nutcracker story, entitled The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (Nussknacker und Mausekönig).
Alexandre Dumas was also a fan of Hoffmann, employing allusions to Hoffmann’s stories in The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas even went as far as creating a revision to Hoffmann’s Nutcracker in 1844 called History of The Nutcracker (Histoire d’un casse-noisette), or The Tale of the Nutcracker.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, Hoffmann’s Nutcracker was adapted to ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, perhaps the most famous incarnation of the tale. I write this post because my dad purchased tickets to the San Francisco Ballet to see The Nutcracker at the end of the month. Perhaps later I’ll add my thoughts on the production to this post.
Tchaikovsky’s music is always wonderful, if not a little too overplayed for the holidays. A lot of people tend to associate The March from The Nutcracker or The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy not with Tchaikovsky, but with the thousands of Christmas commercials that use these pieces. This also happens with The Chinese Tea Dance from The Nutcracker with Disney’s Fantasia and The Sleeping Beauty Waltz with Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.
I believe the most creative and exciting production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut. The Hard Nut is set in 1950s America with a very retro feel inspired by the comic artist Charles Burns — a strange but brilliant compliment to the classical music. I hope to one day be able to attend a live performance.
Advertisement for The Hard Nut.
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This is an idea I had a while back for a comedic blog about my Bubbie and her antics. If you all enjoy this, perhaps I’ll write a few more, such as how Bubbie voted entirely Democratic except for Mitt Romney because she thinks he’s handsome or how Bubbie now has a crush on Jake Gyllenhaal because he’s a “nice Jewish boy.”
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Much Ado About Bubbie
Bubbie (noun): A term of endearment for a Jewish Grandmother.
Example: My Bubbie doesn’t keep kosher outside of the house.
My sister Sydney, Bubbie, and me.
Bubbie’s Mad About Hamm
My Bubbie Isabelle has a crush on Jon Hamm.
Just like the rest of the family, Bubbie tunes into Mad Men every Sunday night to watch the admen of 1960s Madison Avenue drink, smoke, whore, and gossip – not to mention dish out sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic dialogue by the second, all of which (with the exception of the anti-Semitic variety) go unprotested by my Bubbie, a true product of the time.
To me, the series is a literary masterpiece on film regardless of how small the screen. To Bubbie, it’s just another one of her “weekly stories,” on par with General Hospital and The Young and the Restless.
Jon Hamm plays the brooding protagonist slash advertising genius, Donald Draper, on the show. Ever since reading in The Kansas City Star that the handsome actor is a St. Louis native, Bubbie – who’s lived in Missouri for over seventy years – has harbored a vicarious pride for Mr. Hamm. Much to my family’s embarrassment, this is not Bubbie’s first crush on a man that is at least a decade younger than my dad.
One time on vacation, while my family was checking into the Waldorf Astoria for a night, Bubbie was mesmerized by the dazzling charm and good looks of an Israeli desk clerk.
What a five-foot tall, eighty-something-year-old – complete with her teased-and-set helmet hair, her rhinestoned schoolteacher sweaters, and her constrictive girdle that makes her waddle – would want with a thirty-something-year-old desk clerk was not exactly a welcomed thought in my thirteen-year-old brain.
…a thought that was only exacerbated by the phrase Bubbie used to convey her attraction to the young man:
“He can put his shoes under my bed any day!”
Bubbie employs the same phrase in regards to Jon Hamm.
Whenever I phone Bubbie, my curiosity always gets the better of me. I can’t help but ask her what she thought of the most recent episode of Mad Men. And just like that, she goes off on her classic rant.
Firstly, Bubbie is angry at the show for not portraying the 60s how she remembers it, what with the show’s excessive drinking, smoking, and sex in the office. “When I worked in an office, they didn’t do that kind of stuff!”
Furthermore, Bubbie not only treats Jon Hamm as if he truly exists during the 1960s, but as if Jon Hamm is accountable for his character Don Draper’s actions. Whenever Don Draper does something that Bubbie doesn’t approve of (for instance, whenever Don has sex with a woman he’s not married to – an incident that occurs almost every episode and with what seems like a different woman every time), Bubbie is not only upset with but in disbelief that Jon Hamm would do such a thing, as if she’s oblivious to the profession of acting.
That’s when Bubbie whips out yet another one of her famous phrases, this time to express her disappointment with Jon Hamm’s behavior:
“Why, it’s disgusting!”
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Disclaimer: I do not own any of the following images!!
“The Black Brunswicker” (1860) by John Everett Millais
“Isabella and the Pot of Basil” (1868) by William Holman Hunt
“Found” (1865–1869, unfinished) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
One of my more recent obsessions is with the artists know as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it’s most famous members being John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Like many of my obsessions, the Pre-Raphaelites have been floating around the periphery of my awareness for some time, perhaps years. My interest was peaked only recently (this spring) by the Legion of Honor‘s stunning exhibit “The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860 – 1900,” featuring works by not only the Pre-Raphaelites but also their contemporaries, students, and successors (including William Morris, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, etc.). This exhibit picked up the threads of some other interests of mine, such as Charles Dickens’s companion and fellow writer Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone, The Woman in White, etc.). The exhibit also inspired me to dig deeper into the lives of these eccentric Victorian “Renaissance” men!
An easy way to learn more about the Pre-Raphaelites is through the BBC six-part series Desperate Romantics (2009), featuring a cast of lovely men and women (Aidan Turner, Rafe Spall, and Amy Manson to name a few) and gorgeous period costumes. While at times exuding a contemporary (as in 21st century) feel in the vein of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), the series is very painstakingly researched yet thoroughly enjoyable to watch. It’s a series I’m just itching to re-watch and show to all my friends.
Aidan Turner as Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Another wonderful way to enjoy the Pre-Raphaelites is through the online comic Pre-Raphernalia: The Pre-Raph Sketchbook Cartoons of Raine Szramski (preraphernalia.blogspot.com). This series is another painstakingly researched yet thoroughly enjoyable journey into the bizarre history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with plenty of cameos by Rossetti’s pet wombat named “Top.”
My most recent encounter with the Pre-Raphaelites is surprisingly through the British footwear brand Dr. Martens. Dr. Martens has teamed up with Liberty of London to create shoes and purses featuring William Morris’s celebrated “Strawberry Thief” textile design. My birthday’s coming up, so I’m hoping to get my paws on one of these timeless purses!
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Portrait of E. T. A. Hoffmann
