Happy Thursday everyone! It's been raining most of the week here in Richmond but we're off to Virginia Beach for the weekend so hopefully it'll be a little nicer (I've never been to Virginia Beach and I'm looking forward to it). But in the meanwhile, let's look at what I've found lately at the stores!
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About a year and a half ago, podcasters John Hodgman and Elliot Kalan did a limited series recapping the 1976 BBC adaption of Robert Graves' 1934 novel about the Roman emperor Claudius and his rise to power, I, Claudius. I'm a fan of both of their usual comedy podcasts (Judge John Hodgman and The Flop House, respectively) so gave it a listen but realized about 10 minutes into the first episode that I've somehow never actually watched I, Claudius! My interest in Romans is mostly about the Republic, so I think I just never got around to it (and god knows how available it was after the initial PBS airing here in the States. So I filed it in the back of my mind to eventually get to it. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I ran across this at Oak Park Records in Illinois! The cast of this is kind of nuts for 1976; Derek Jacobi, Siân Phillips, Brian Blessed, John Hurt, a shockingly young (and still with hair) Patrick Stewart and so on. I'm sure it looks very much like the filmed-on-video BBC of the day, for better or for worse, but I'm used to that anyway. And it also includes a little documentary about Alexander Korda's attempt to film the novel in 1937, narrate by Dirk Bogarde, the kind of extra I always love to see.
Fair warning, you'll want to turn your volume down. I, Claudius is streaming on Hoopla and Acorn (and once again, if you love TV from the Commonwealth, Acorn is a must-have streaming service, shockingly cheap like Shudder).
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I was in Charlottesville over the weekend, which has some very good bookstores in it's pedestrian mall area. Daedalus Books had a whole wall of vintage Penguins so I indulged myself. I love random stuff published in WWII that related to army regulations and such so this was a nice little find, jam-packed full of stuff about how to wear you uniform and gear, how much your dependents back home would receive (a whole whopping $28 for a wife but no children), what various decorations at the time meant and so on. It's weirdly interesting to flip through. Oh hey, if you owed alimony that was $20 a month to your ex-wife.
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My other find at Daedalus was G. K. Chesterton's The Flying Inn, a 1914 novel about a future Britain that has imposed a version of Prohibition that the protagonists are trying to evade. I'm not sure how advanced the deeply stupid Prohibition movement in the USA and Britain was at this point (the US would pass the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, a year before the Nineteenth Amendment that assured white women the right to vote, and let that soak for a second) but the temperance movement that started in the 19th century was in full throttle at the time and I'm sure Chesterton's usual gentle acerbity will be in full force here.
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OK, this one is completely a blind buy based upon a recommended-by-staff shelf at The Book Table in Oak Park, and all I can do is post the picture of the back and this is 100% going to be some of my beach reading this week. I mean, that's right up my alley.
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Finally, a kind of blind buy based on a previous work, we get to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Master of the House. I only know Dreyer from his brilliant and searing Joan of Arc, a masterpiece of a singular performance, so I'm honestly curious to see how he handles a domestic life comedy. This was apparently a huge success in 1925. The only name I really know from it is Astrid Holm, who was also in The Phantom Carriage and Häxan, both of which are definitely not comedies. So I'm curious to dig into this one.
Master of the House is currently streaming on HBO Max, the Criterion Channel, and a terrible print on YouTube.
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