Grinder's Grumblings

  For the past few months my go-to bedtime reading was the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. As part of my decades-long quest to slay the demons from my misspent youth, ploughing through this weighty tome has been on my to-do list for quite some time, and I’m pleased to say that I’m finally through with it, and have moved on to books that are much lighter (Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, at the moment). However it was an moderately-good cure for insomnia, and even good exercise - the book was so heavy that my wrist muscles seem stronger just from holding it all every night for months on end.  But as much as I did not enjoy the book, I did learn a lot from it. And one of the things that I am learnt is just how important the literature of ancient Greece (be it poetry, prose, or drama) is to the entire canon of Western literature. Basically, everything we write today is built off of the writing of the Greeks, or more accurately the misinterpretation of the writing ...

The 2026 Grinder summer season at the Ennotville Library kicks off with Dirty Deeds at Handlebar Dan's House of Old Wives (or how Sally Simple saved the Sarsaparilla Saloon) July 17th and 18th. Thanks to cast member Nick (aka our hero Joshua Jehosephat) for the poster: I thought for this post we’d have some fun, and give you a quick primer on how to enjoy a Gay 90’s Melodrama. These kinds of plays are perfectly enjoyable just as they are, but they’re a lot more fun if you know a little bit about the conventions that shape the genre. So here we go! First, by the term ‘’Gay 90’s’’ melodrama, we mean the 1890’s, and we mean gay in the sense of the term that it meant at that time: happy, silly, and carefree. No offense to anyone who thought it meant something else. This is the "girl-tied-to-the-railroad-tracks" genre, in that there is almost invariably some reference to a train, a railroad, or a railway company of some sort. Some plays feature trains more than others. Acting...