Dan

So this is one of my relatively new friends this year...although it seems like destiny that we would have met at some point this year. Dan does floorball with me, but also PhotoSoc...and this is taken at one such training session.

Was the session on portraits? No. But the things that we were taking pictures of macro-wise were things that I could very easily set up back at chez moi so I thought I wouldn't waste a good portrait! These training sessions are pretty much ran once a week, but are obviously not compulsary so you can go only if the session interests you. So because it sounded like a bit of fun, I headed over with Chandru, meeting Dan there. The macro set-ups were interesting to have a play around with, especially the dropping dice/marbles/dye into a vase, and playing with bubbles is also fun. As Axel nicked my camera for the first part of the session (I think it was the lens he fancied...), I had nothing to do but play with blowing bubbles with Eve. Apparently I look very cute when I blow bubbles...I wouldn't know, no pictures have surfaced as of yet!

The rest of the day was spent working, as ever. It seems like all I do at the moment is work. Not fun. Was strange to not have to be travelling from somewhere back to Warwick on a Monday which is usually the case! The normal Shakespeare lecture was great, entitled 'Shakespeare's Bottom; Folk Comedy and Authority' and was all about the mystery plays that would have filled the streets in Shakespeare's formative years, and also about Will Kempe as platea, clown. Will Kempe being one of Shakespeare's original company who was always cast in the role of the clown. To talk about the role and function of the clown is interesting, as it is "to cut down intellectual pretension and to draw attention to what Mikhail Bakhtin has called “the material bodily lower stratum,” that is, the world below the belt and the sphere of human appetite, thus allowing the spectator to distance himself/herself from high-minded activity and discourse. The opposition functions particularly well… in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the myth of romantic love is subverted through the debunking and the bungling of Pyramus and Thisbe by the mechanicals’