A few things

[regshoe]

raremaleslashex works are revealed are this evening! I'm very excited, both to read my own gift (which has some pleasing tags) and to see what's around the collection. Reveals are at 9pm here, and I could stay up for them but I think I won't—I'll let it be a nice thing to look forward to first thing tomorrow.

If any of you are a) able to go to the theatre in the UK and b) fans of Dracula, this may be of interest: the National Theatre of Scotland are producing a new northeast Scottish-set adaptation, starring Danielle Jam (of the Kidnapped ensemble) as Mina and starting its tour of locations in Scotland and England next month. It looks pretty cool, though I don't think I will go—I'm not that into Dracula and it seems like it'll be a bit horror-ish.

I have cleared up a minor mystery: yes, Robert Louis Stevenson did pronounce his middle name like Lewis with an S, not like Louis without an S. I had heard both pronunciations and also knew that he'd changed the spelling from Lewis, and I was puzzled—why change your name to a different spelling of the same name that suggests a different pronunciation but then keep the same pronunciation anyway? But that's exactly what he did, as confirmed in this biography by a cousin, 'due, it is said, to a strong distaste, shared by his father, for a fellow-citizen, who bore the name in the form in which Lewis had received it.' So there you go. The NTS play, and Isobel McArthur in interviews, did pronounce it Louis, I'm not sure whether due to a lack of research (which was certainly not lacking in general) or because that's just the pronunciation that's most often used now. It's not clear why he dropped Balfour, his other middle name; according to the linked biography he 'loathed' his 'third initial', but surely he can't have loathed the name that much or he wouldn't have given it to Davie! Perhaps he just disliked having so many names—as someone also saddled with excessive middle names, I can sympathise with that.

Comments

[ethelmay]

My main association with it is with the prime minister of that name, of whom I am not a great fan.