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selenak: (Cat and Books by Misbegotten)
Aka a 2022 novel set in the Appalachians during the late 1990s and early 2000s with the euphemistically called "Opiod Crisis" very much a main theme, and simultanously a modern adaptation of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. The last Copperfield adaptation I had seen or read was the Iannucci movie starring Dev Patel in the title role which emphasized the humor and vitality of the novel and succeeded splendidly, but had to cut down the darker elements in order to do so, with the breathneck speed of a two hours mvie based on a many hundred pages novel helping with that. Demon Copperhead took the reverse approach; it's all the darkness magnified - helped by the fact this is also a many hundred pages novel - but nearly no humor. Both adaptations emphasize the social injustice of the various systems they're depicting. Both had to do some considerable flashing out when it comes to Dickens's first person narrator. No one has ever argued that David is the most interesting character in David Copperfield. As long as he's still a child, this isn't noticable because David going from coddled and much beloved kid to abused and exploited kid makes for a powerful emotional arc. (BTW, I was fascinated to learn back when I was reading Claire Tomalin's Dickens biography that Dickens was influenced by Jane Eyre in this; Charlotte Bronte's novel convinced him to go for a first person narration - which he hadn't tried before - and the two abused and outraged child narrators who describe what scares and elates them incredibly vividly do have a lot on common.) But once he's an adult, it often feels like he's telling other people's stories (very well, I hasten to add) in which he's only on the periphery, except for his love life. The movie solved this by giving David - who is autobiographically inspired anyway - some more of Dickens`s on life and qualities. Demon Copperhead solves it by a) putting most of the part of the Dickens plot when David is already an adult to when Damon/Demon is still a teenager (he only becomes a legal adult near the end), b) by making Damon as a narrator a whole lot angrier than David, and c) by letting him fall to what is nearly everyone else's problem as well, addiction.

Spoilers ensue about both novels )

In conclusion: this was a compelling novel but tough to read due to the subject and the unrelenting grimness. I'm not saying you should treat the horrible neglect and exploitation of children and the way a rotten health system allowed half the population to become addicts irreverently, but tone wise, this is more Hard Times than David Copperfield, and sometimes I wished for some breathing space in between the horrors. But I am glad to have read it.
selenak: (Resistance by Aweeghost)
During my historical podcast hopings, I came across one that in its Q & A sessions suggested his dream cast for a multi season lengthy HBO style series on the French Revolution: Timothee Chalamet as St Just, a younger Tom Hanks or Bradley Cooper type as Louis XVI ("someone who can be both sympathetic and frustrating at the same time"), Anthony Hopkins as Mirabeau, Christan Bale as Marat, Henry Cavill as Lafayette and Adam Driver as Camille Desmoulins, with Margot Robbie as Marie Antoinette. The podcaster had no idea whom to cast as Robespierre which frustrated him. Now, I can see all of these (though Hopkins is too old for Mirabeau by now, and for that matter everyone other than Chalamet is pushing it, age wise - Louis and Marie Antoinette were both in their mid to later 30s when they were executed). and the key prominent revolutionaries other than Marat and Mirabeau were in their early 30s when they died as well. I think it's in Mantel's Place of Greater Safety that someone observes that many of the lead revolutionaries being nearly all relatively young (lawyers, most of them) when rising to power, with no practical experience in death, has a lot to do with how the Terror came to be.

(BTW, there's now a trailer for a new movie about Napoleon by Ridley Scott, starring Joaquin Phoenix as N. Bonaparte. On the one hand, can totally see the casting, and also, the two worked well together before in Gladiator. Otoh, Joaquin Phoenix while right for Emperor Napoleon in his downfall years is too old now for young Bonaparte on the rise in the final years of the Revolution, and the age does matter in how he came across to his contemporaries.)

Anyway, back to the podcaster's dream casting for a multi season Game of Revolution: I think Bale as Marat would be a great choice, and Chalamet having a go as Antoine "Angel of Death" Saint-Juste should be worth seeing, but I'm going back and thro on Driver as Desmoulins. I mean, acting wise, sure, but he's a bit too athletic? Then again, many actors hit the gym regularly for professional reasons, resulting in a body shape an 18th century guy who isn't a soldier would not have had. And of course Margot Robbie could both the frivolity and the strength in adversity. But I do think that a multi season series on the French Revolution should go with younger actors in all the main parts, letting them age along with the seasons, and reserve the established stars for cameos (i.e. parts for people who are only around briefly), thus preserving the poignancy - and making it more difficult for people not already familiar with the French Revolution to know who's going to be prominent, who is doomed and who'll make it out alive despite the odds. Also, of course: Olympe de Gouges and the female revolutionaries should get actual appearances and roles beyond "briefly mentioned" (if mentioned at all). I would say "also General Alex Dumas", but that depends on where you do the cut off point - the two most common ones are eitherh Thermidor because of the death of Robespierre and the end of the Terror (though by no means the end of purges and bloody weeks - they just came from non-left corners thereafter), or some years later Brumaire (Napeolon goes from General to First Consul Bonaparte). If the former, then there's not enough narrative space, if the later, absolutely.

Because of how important rumors and paranoia and the urgent belief in conspiracies were to people of all ideological persuasions, it could be a very timely series in many respects, but I bet there would also be a lot of fannish fury once the cast starts to get killed off at an increasing pace. And I can just hear the complaint about former fan favourites like Lafayette suddenly holding the idiot ball to get the plot where it's meant to be, and/or acting ooc (Champs du Mars massacre, cough).

On an unrelated note, here's a good article about Victorian writer Wilkie Collins. From which I learned that when Wilkie was in a health crisis, his bff Dickens offered to finish No-Name for him so Wilkie could make the deadline. (Collins declined.) Dickens swore he could do it in a way so readers wouldn't notice a difference. Honestly, I doubt it. Dickens was in many respects the superior writer, but not when it came to female characters. Especially those between 20 and 40. I don't think the main one from No Name would have made it out of her novel in a relatively happy ending if written by Dickens, or at least not without emigrating to Aiustralia. And I can't see Lydia Gwilt (from Armadale) writing her snarky diary entries in a Dickens novel. At all.
selenak: (Livia by Pixelbee)
Started but won't finish: the latest miniseries take Great Expectations, starring Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham. It's one of those productions which in theory sound good - colourblind cast, scriptwriter coming from successful original show (Steven Knight) - and in practice is just a mess. Also one that's mostly filmed in grey, both the marshes that form the landscape of the early episodes and London (the end of the first London based episode is where I stopped). Estella's dresses are sometimes the only dots of colour.

Great Expectations: The G.R.R. Martin Version ) See, Dickens is anything but subtle with his own moral lessons, but he knew how to interweave them with compelling characters and a good yarn. Removing the vitality of the characters in favour of "here are the evils of 19th century British society in human form" in overdrive does this adaption no favours, and there's only to much leisure time I have, so, goodbye, tv series (despite Colman being excellent as the creepiest, most predatory of all Havishams).

Whereas what I go through at quick pace because it's compellingly, emphatically and wittily told while being no less critical of the society it describes (and ours): A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, by Emma Southon. As with Southon's biography of Agrippina the Younger, I consumed it in audio form, not least because that struck me as eminently suited to her style of writing, which is very conversational . This book basically uses murder in its many many aspects as a read thread through several centuries of Roman history (from the 2nd century BC to the end of the Antonine period, to be precise - Southon stops before the Third Century Crisis) to provide us with a social history of Rome. Individual chapters: "Murder on the Senate Floor", "Murder in Roman Law", "Murder in the Family", "Murder in Marriage", "Murder in the Slave State", "Murder by Magic", "Murder in the Imperial House", "Murdering an Emperor", "Judicial Murder". Behind those chapter titles hides a clever, somewhat surprising and incredibly effective structure, as Southon starts her book with the most prominent asassination (Caesar), then goes back to the Gracchi, and forward again, instead of building up to it. The reason why this is effective is because it's not actually the prominent murders among the elite that lie at the heart of the book, but the wives getting killed by their husbands who weren't part of a ruling family, the every day violence against slaves on whose backs the entire system was built, and the gruesome executions (be they in the arena or by cruxifiction) that remind one all over again what inspired Collins' Hunger Games.

(Of course, the written sources mostly were written by and focused on the Senatorial class, but for example tombstones manage to provide glimpses of other stories, like the couple of Imperial slaves who managed to get permission to have a tombstone for their infant baby son, or the freedman mourning his wife who like him started out as a slave.)

The big difference to the Dickens adaption cited above is that while Southon is no less dedicated to exposing the baked in injustices (seedy underbelly would be the wrong term, really, because there was nothing hidden about, not least because it wouldn't have occured to the Romans there was something to hide) of the Roman society, she does so while keeping everyone human, and sketches out the legal and belief systems for context really well. The generally flippant narrative tone comes with deep empathy that manages to keep it real that everyone killed was a person in their own right with a story and feelings, not a moral lesson or a joke.

Now, some of her takes I could argue with. (I mean, I agree that whether you're categorized as a good or a bad Emperor by historians who were senators definitely had to do with whether you managed to provide the Senators of your own time with the illusion that you cared about their opinion, or rubbed their noses into the fact they had no real power, but I wouldn't have chosen Caligula vs Hadrian to illustrate that point, because Hadrian, while counted among the Five Good Emperors by tradition, was very much disliked by the Senate of his time and had a very mixed press among historians.) And there's one big glaring mistake early on - Cicero didn't execute Catiline without a trial, he did this with several of Catiline's followers. Catiline himself died in battle against the forces led by Cicero's fellow consul Antonius Hybrida. (See also Sallustius for describing his last stand.) And Emma Southon doesn't just make this mistake once, she's referencing it two or three times. (Because these executions without a trial came back to bite Cicero big time, and played their part in the continuing decline of the Republic. But, again, Catiline himself wasn't among the executed.) (After this mistake, I wondered whether there might be others I missed, but as far as I could tell, no.)

None of these nitpicks take away from how immensely readable (listenable?), enjoyable and moving I found this book, though. And she may have swayed me on a couple of topics. (The question as to whether or not Livia arranged anyone's death, to be precise.) Plus, I really need to get around to reading Apuleius one of those days.
selenak: (Default)
A first crop of Yuletide stories I loved:

Historical Fiction:

And flies with Swallow's Wings: Scenes from a London cookshop. This is a great take on one of the more intriguing anecdotes re: Anne Neville and Richard III, and to say more would spoil the story.

Periapsides: Five things Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn could have been to each other.

An action for reclaiming an inheritance: in which Terentia hires a lawyer, young Cicero, to represent her in a lawsuit, and I absolutely adore this take on her - and everyone else who shows up in this tale set in the last years of Sulla's reign.

Andor:

All Blue and Gold and Glittering:
In search of a present for Mon Mothma, Tay Kolma pays a visit to an antiques shop he’s been told she’s fond of.

There is a World beyond this Place: Twelve things Cassian Andor misses most in prison.

The Body/Stand By Me:

Summer in the City In the summer of 1964, Chris gets Gordie to come with him on a different kind of adventure.

A Christmas Carol:

The Price of Salvation: The fate of his old partner who after all saved Scrooge is not something Scrooge just accepts. Especially since the ghost of Jacob Marley keeps coming back...


The Expanse:

A Fresh Start: in which Drummer and Avasarala learn to deal with each other.

Ten Lullabies: great ensemble portrait through the theme of lullabies.
selenak: (Servalan by Snowgrouse)
Speaking of warnings, where to begin with Blake's 7?



Also, the Guardian tells you where to start with Charles Dickens, making a "the fan favourite", "the best one" etc. list. Turns out I have more Stephen King opinions than I have Dickens opinions, but no Hard Times?
selenak: (Not from Nottingham by Calapine)
Everyone else seems to reply to this question with the Muppets version. Now, I like the Muppets version and admire its cleverness, but my favourite Christmas Carol adaption is actually not any of the film versions, but the audio recording of Patrick Stewart's stage performance. Not, I emphasize, the made for tv 1999 adaption where Stewart plays Scrooge; no, I mean the stage solo version he did for the RSC in 1993, and for which he won an Olivier. Alas I did not have the chance to see it on stage, but a kind soul gave me the tape - this was when tapes were still a thing - and I loved it. The key difference here is that Patrick Stewart doesn't just play Scrooge, he recites Dickens' prose - a very different thing - and the way he brings those lines to life, the versatility of it, is nothing short of amazing. To quote from this review : You notice at once that there aren’t many actors left like Stewart these days, actors who can speak with such exemplary power and clarity. When he declares: “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner”, every word, every syllable, is made to count. He relishes all the glorious energy, flavour and humour of Dickens’s prose, and Scrooge suddenly seems to stand before us in all his grotesque glory. (...) In the course of the show, Stewart plays some 40 characters, ranging from the falsetto innocence of Tiny Tim to the disgusting squalor of Old Joe, the greasy rag-and-bone man in his filthy lair. Has the ghost of Marley ever seemed more pitifully sad, the joy of the Cratchits’ Christmas celebrations more touchingly merry? I beg leave to doubt it.

Stewart also proves a virtuoso when it comes to pace and mood. There are rapt passages here when the whole audience seems to be holding its breath as Stewart lays bare the darkness of Scrooge’s soul and the terrible urgency of turning it to the light. But then he will suddenly relax into humour and vitality, picking up the narrative thread, barreling through the action and imitating the chimes of the bells (“Ga-doing, Ga-doing”) with almost childlike enthusiasm.


And that's why even the mere audio recording is my favourite adaption of A Christmas Carol.

The other days
selenak: (Emily by Lotesse)
This was the first movie I saw in the cinema since February, and I've been curious about it for a year now. It's, as advertised, a breathless, fast paced, wildly inventive version of David Copperfield, directed by Armado Ianucci, with a great cast multiethnic cast (colourblind in the British stage sense, hence, for example, Nikki Amuka-Bird as Mrs. Steerforth - who in this version is an amalgan of herself and Rosa Dartle - and Aneurin Barnard as her son).

The hero of his own life? )

Briefly

Dec. 21st, 2019 06:22 pm
selenak: (Goethe/Schiller - Shezan)
In the middle of the few-days-before-Christmas business, I discovered that for the first time in many a year, I will get a Yuletide Treat, and also, I'm pretty sure re: the fandom, so imagine yours truly running around with a wide smile of delight today. I can't wait! (For the official assignment gift as well, of course, but the treat was such an unexepcted bonus this year.)

Speaking of fanfiction look forward to, [community profile] startrekholidays will open soon, I think, and then I'm pouncing here.

Armando Iannucci, who directed the latest screen version, on why we should (re)read David Copperfield. I'm with him there. The bit about Uriah Heep is especially interesting.
selenak: (Emily by Lotesse)
The three stories I wrote for this year‘s Yuletide were:

1.) My Assignment:

Icebound (13024 words) by Selena
Chapters: 7/7
Fandom: Order of the Air Series - Melissa Scott & Jo Graham, 20th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Mitchell Sorley/Stasi Rostov
Characters: Mitchell Sorley, Stasi Rostov, Henry Kershaw, Leni Riefenstahl, Max Schirmer, Franz Schrieck, Hans Schneeberger
Additional Tags: Yuletide, 1930s, Adventure & Romance, Foreshadowing, Films, Antisemitism, POV Jewish Character
Summary:

Spring of 1933: Mitch and Stasi hadn't planned on spending their honeymoon dodging bears and icebergs. But the pilot supposed to do the hair raising stunt flying on the German-American movie "SOS Iceberg" has fallen sick, the leading lady may or may not be possessed, and there is a ghost bent on revenge involving the new German leader...



My recipient requested Stasi and Mitch from the Order of the Air novels by Melissa Scott and Jo Graham. Since I adore the novels, and also their characters, this was a joy to write. The reason why it‘s also tagged for 20th Century RPF is that other than Mitch, Stasi and briefly a friend of theirs, all the other characters are historical. The novels themselves, which start in the 1920s and by now have reached the later 1930s, are adventures involving flying, archaeology and supernatural elements, and they give both cameos and important roles to figures of history. My beta, who hadn‘t yet a chance to read them, told me she had no trouble following the story, which gives me the hope it‘s understandable for fans of the book and not-yet-readers of same alike.

Read more... )


2.) Treat for a friend who had a tough year the first:

Selkie Bride (10911 words) by Selena
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Emily Peggotty/James Steerforth, David Copperfield/James Steerforth, Emily Peggotty & Martha Endell, Emily Peggotty & Daniel Peggotty, Emily Peggotty & David Copperfield, Emily Peggotty/ Ham Peggotty
Characters: Emily Peggotty, James Steerforth, Littimer, Daniel Peggotty, Ham Peggotty, Clara Peggotty, David Copperfield, Martha Endell, Mrs. Gummidge
Additional Tags: POV Female Character, Misses Clause Challenge, Character Study, Crossdressing, Power Dynamics, Yuletide Treat, Complicated Relationships, Yuletide
Summary:

In which Emily Peggotty becomes the heroine of her own life, and the villain, too.



When I saw [personal profile] likeadeuce in her Yuletide letter had requested David Copperfield, and spefically Steerforth, David/Steerforth and had added that if Emily was to show up, she‘d want her to have her own agenda, inspiration struck. Me being me, the result is a story about Emily first and foremost, with David/Steerforth a subplot, so to speak, but years of personal aquaintance had made me reasonable certain ‚Deuce would not mind.

Emily is one one of Dickens‘ takes on that very Victorian trope, the seduced woman promptly punished by fate, though as opposed to many another Victorian fallen woman she makes it out of her novel alive and actually well. Still, it struck me upon rereading how much he keeps the adult Emily (as opposed to the child Emily) off stage, so to speak - she‘s mostly reported or talked about, and since the narrator is David who is canonically clueless about women (and a lot of men as well), this provided me with ample room for fleshing out the character. And canon gave me a lot to work with, actually. (For example: Rereading the novel, it far clearer than I had recalled that Emily really did not want to marry Ham quite independent from the Steerforth factor. Also, according to Littimer she became fluent in French, Italian and possibly German in a very quick time, which says a lot about her linguistic gifts and smarts. And while David insists on seeing her as utterly helpless, it stands to reason that a woman who can make it back from Naples to London on her own without any money to start that journey with has good surival skills.)

Providing Emily with a story of her own while still keeping with all that happens in the novel, and trying my hand at plausible Dickensian dialogue for Steerforth was a very enjoyable challenge, and I loved meeting it.


3.) Treat for a friend who had a tough year the second:

Ash and Iron (6291 words) by Selena
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Rome (TV 2005)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Atia of the Julii & Servilia of the Junii, Julius Caesar/Servilia of the Junii, Atia of the Julii & Octavia of the Julii, Mark Antony/Atia of the Julii, Octavia of the Julii/Servilia of the Junii, Servilia of the Junii & Cato the Younger
Characters: Atia of the Julii, Servilia of the Junii, Octavia of the Julii, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cato the Younger, Terentia (c. 98 BCE–5 CE)
Additional Tags: Backstory, Character Study, POV Female Character, Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide Treat, Yuletide
Summary:


Atia would never concede victory to Servilia, in anything.



[personal profile] kangeiko asked for Atia and Servilia (in their Rome incarnations) in her letter. While the feud between these two ladies in central to the tv show they‘re in, it hasn‘t been covered all that much by fanfic, so I couldn‘t resist, and returned to Rome for some more fanfiction. It even gave me the chance to include one of my favourite anecdotes about the historical Servilia, as well as the fact that this anecdote and the birth of the later Augustus both happened during Cicero‘s consulate, in the year of the Catiline Conspiracy. Rewatching some of the Atia and Servilia centric episodes was an added bonus for me.
selenak: (Ashoka and Anakin by Welshgater)
Trailer spotted: The Man Who Invented Christmas seems to be trying to take the Shakespeare in Love approach to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol. The following thoughts occured to me in no particular order:

- Dan Stevens is actually made to look like a young Charles Dickens and has something of that manic energy, but:

- as Dickens' favourite daughter Kate Perugini put it, writing to George Bernard Shaw: "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a jolly, jocose gentleman walking about the earth with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch you would greatly oblige me."

- no such luck, Kate, not with this movie. Though Dickens really wasn't

- I know I complain about Mark Gatiss written episodes of Doctor Who a lot, but his very first one, The Unquiet Dead, actually did something more interesting with the basic idea of Dickens + Christmas Carol + supernatural elements than this trailer indicates

- why is it that "based on a true story" movies that tackle author plus famous work always feel the need to pretend the author in question had writers block and/or dire difficulties before hitting on the inspiration for the famous work? Do we blame Stoppard for this one, too? Finding Neverland did it as well, and it's just as untrue here (neither Barrie nor Dickens were when writing Peter Pan and Christmas Carol respectively in any type of financial or inspirational difficulties)

- the idea of Charles Dickens, of all the people, having writers' block is hilarious, though, because his problem was more the opposite. Neil Gaiman in the Sandman story Calliope lets Dream curse a writer with literally unending inspiration (spoiler: it's not a boon when you write your fingers bloody because you really can't stop), and Dickens wasn't quite there, but nearly.

Mind you, the film makers are probably safe to assume most tv watchers know zilch about Dickens' biography. But not for the first time, I wonder whether a miniseries wouldn't be a great format to tackle that, Dickens in his morally ambiguous complexity, covering the whole life from child-of-a-conman Charles to celebrated writer, philantropist and terrible husband Dickens going on one last reciting tour. Abi Morgan did a good job with The Invisible Woman, taking one particular part of his life, and she has tv experience, so she'd be my first choice to write such a series.

Meanwhile, in another fandom, to wit, Star Wars:

Balance Point: now by now there are some stories in which Force Ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi haunts Vader, but this story is the first one which lets someone else who used to be close to Anakin Skywalker do so instead, and executes that premise beautifully.Spoilers for Star Wars: Rebels ensue. )
selenak: (Partners in Crime by Monanotlisa)
Which is a not-really-memoir, a collection of autobiographical stories, several of which have been earlier published, here arranged not in linear order but thematically, in a way. Le Carré puts himself in the observer role in most of the stories, which are focused on the various people, famous or not, he encounters. For all that he's a superb raconteur about them, he keeps his own emotions about the people he describes mostly in check; understatement is the name of the game. The big exception, and unsurprisingly the chapter that got the most attention in reviews when this book was published, comes near the end, in the tale of his dastardly conman of a father, Ronnie, a born life ruiner (and occasional beater, but the devastating damage Ronnie does both to marks and to his family is usually non-physical in nature), and his absent mother Olive, who left him and his brother with Ronnie when our author was five and whom when reencountering her as an adult he never quite managed to form a relationship with, not least due to her habit of addressing him as Ronnie. Lé Carré is far too self aware not to realise the connection between spying, being a conman, and being a writer, and thus warns the reader early on, re: veracity of the stories he's about to tell:


““I’m a liar . . .Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists.”


Ronnie and Olive remind me a lot of Charles Dickens' parents, for all that Dickens and Le Carré aren't really much alike as writers; the parallel extends to adult Dickens' senior embarassing his son by writing out cheques in his name till Charles had to publish an advertisement in the papers to say he wasn't countenancing this, while Ronnie uses his son's novelist successs in a similar manner (and even signs the novels), to the novelist sons putting their fathers in more bearable form in novels while in rl living in an uneasy tension between trying to avoid their fathers and being unable to let them go. While carrying a less obvious but as deep-seated grudge against their mothers due to what they see as an utter lack of affection. Le Carré's terse description of Olive as the mother without a scent (he can't remember what she smelled like because she never hugged him) says it all.

But the Ronnie (and Olive) chapter comes, as mentioned, near the end of the book; Le Carré knew of course it was the most emotional and the climax. Earlier, we're treated wrily and drolly to such gems as lunch with Rupert Murdoch (who wanted to know who killed Robert Maxwell) being his over the top tycoon self, Alec Guinness, whom Le Carré befriended due to Smiley, being as gentlemanly and enigmatic as you want him to have been, with the occasional one liner to his fellow actors when they go over the top, Yassir Arafat putting on a show (in more senses than one) while Le Carré is busy roleplaying himself as Charlie, the herone of Litlte Drummer Girl, and so forth. Of particular interest to me and a red thread through the book is Le Carré's life long fascination with all things German. He was stationed in Bonn in the 50s, is fluent in the language (and says these days he can't focus on a book for longer than an hour, except if it's in German), keeps coming back here and provides German locations as guest spots in many of his novels. His descriptions of the many, many old Nazis on all levels of the administration in the 50s and 60s is dead-on, I'm afraid. (Just recently, our justice department published a study on how many former Nazis were there in the post war justice system until the 70s. Over 77 percent, I kid you not. Even allowing for the usual argument (which is: well, non-Nazi German lawyers and judges were hard to come by in the 1950s; not untrue, but there were the emigrés, who found it harder, not easier, than the Nazis to get those kind of jobs if they were willing to return, plus there was no encouragement of the younger, less tainted generation), that's devastatingly high. As for the reformed spy network, you probably had to search for a non-former Nazi with a flashlight. Le Carré's description of Gehlen, who founded it and got the US licence for it is wickedly on point. He also can't resist some sarcasm re: the US and British attitude, which was as he sums up that as a Nazi, you were per definition not a Communist, and so okay in the Cold War era CIA's book. (Ignoring that Gehlen was a fantasist and that having a dark past makes you easily availablef or blackmail,with the end result that according to Le Carré 90 % of the German agents working in Eastern Europe were really working for the Stasi. Which I'm completely ready to believe. Competence isn't something the BND was ever famous for, even after the Nazis died out. In an account of a more recent German episode, he maks me cringe because that one concerns the German citizen tortured at Guantanamo, and I remember the (non-)reaction from our governments all too well.

Like Le Carré's novels, The Pigeon Tunnel features far more men than women, though the occasional memorable woman makes it through, like Yvonne, the original for Tessa in The Constant Gardener. Someone I'd like to have read about more is his younger half sister Charlotte Cornwell, who inspired Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl and who, since she's an actress, he wanted to play the character in the movie version, which didn't happen. (Not a fan of Diane Keaton he.) Unfortunately with the exception of saying this about Charlie, he doesn't talk about her, or his other siblings really, other than saying his brother Tony was basically his only source of affection in his childhood (Ronnie and Olive weren't). Various ladies with the designation "my wife" are spotted at the edges of these stories, but as I said, for the most part, Le Carré manages to remain deepy private in this collection, taking the not unreasonable position that describing all these other people is where his and the readers' interests allign.

All in all: highly readable, and no, you don't have to be into his novels to enjoy it.
selenak: (Scarlett by Olde_fashioned)
Some of the loot from my recent London trip:

Effie Gray, which I mostly wanted to watch because Emma Thompson wrote the script. She also plays a supporting role, but given her script for Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility was superb, I was looking forward to this other effort in the writing department. It's a cinematic take on a notoriously bad Victorian marriage, that between our title character, played by Dakota Fanning and John Ruskin, played by Emma Thompsons rl significant other, Greg Wise, in a far cry from his Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Between ridiculed as a a pretentious fob in Mr. Turner and depicted as an occasionally pitiable and otherwise tyrannical creep here, Ruskin had a bad cinematic 2014, all the since what he was actually famous and beloved for - and the Ruskin-influenced people included artists as diverse as Tolstoy, Wilde and Shaw - is hard to get across in a movie that's not really about him: philosophy and art criticism are hard to dramatize, which means that when Ruskin's suffocatingly overprotective parents keep harping on his genius, an audience not versed in Victoriana is bound to wonder "genius in what?"

No matter. Effie, who, me being a German, inevitably reminded me of fictional Effie Briest, the heroine of Fontane's novel of the same name, marries Ruskin at age 16, has one of the weirdest documented wedding nights when the sight of her naked body ends any attempt at sexual relations before they really start (biographers' speculation as to what exactly put Ruskin off go from the sight of Effie's pubic hair - on the assumption that Ruskin's only familiarity with the female body before this event would have been via paintings, which tend to avoid said hair -, to speculating she was menunstruating to suspecting body odour, finds herself as an ornament in the Ruskin household without anything to do or any companionship to engage in, starts to develop depression and physical ailments and finally, after falling for painter John Millais, gets some legal advice and sues for divorce based on non-consummation and impotence (which is why we know about the wedding night), which is granted, to the scandal of the age. Thompson in her script puts the emphasis on Effie's disintegrating marriage to Ruskin and final escape, not on the romance with Millais (down to the ending, which isn't Effie rushing in Millais' arms but Effie in her getaway chaise at liberty at last -, and on the suffocating, life less atmosphere in the Ruskin household. All of which is depicted sensitively, but also at length, and hard to bear before Effie finally has had enough, good as the actors are. Reminds me of Henry James' novel Portrait of a Lady in that way. Not one that I'll rewatch.

Dickensian: a witty Dickens/Dickens crossover show in 20 episodes, each episode only half an hour long. Basically glorious Dickens prequel fanfiction, with characters from various of his novels resettled to live all in roughly the same London area and crossing paths. This sometimes works perfectly and sometimes feels very forced, as such a premise is wont to do. The actors are clearly having a ball. The main plot threads holding the whole thing together: the "Who killed Jakob Marley?" murder mystery, with Inspector Bucket on the case, Miss Havisham (here given the first name of Amelia) taking on her father's heritage and being schemed against by her brother Arthur and dastardly future Great Expectations villain Compeyson, and the Barbary sisters, Frances and Honoria, whose tortured relationship with each other makes for one of the most compelling subplots. I thought Frances looked familiar in the pilot but not until the credits rolled on did I realise that she was played by Lucy Saxon herself, Alexandra Moen. Then there's the subplot involving Fagin, Nancy and Bill Sikes, which works, and the comic relief one of the Bumbles, which really doesn't (their scenes are easily the most obvious filler element of the show, but then, Dickens wrote lots of filler scenes due to the monthly installment format), not to mention cameo appearances from other worthies.

Like I said, there's some filler stuff, but I marathoned it these last days because it never ceased to hold my interest, and it certainly makes me want to check out Bleak House, the novel Honoria and Frances are from, which is a Dickens novel I haven't read yet. Plus I salute headwriter Tony Jordan and the actors for coming up with a take on Fagin which solves the eternal dilemma that otoh the Dickens original, an unambiguous villain, is hard to render because of the various antisemetic tropes used, but otoh the Oliver! musical version of Fagin as a lovable rogue is white washing and prettifying all the exploitation of children that Dickens was in a genuine rage about and misses the point of the character. Dickensian's Fagin is a hardcore villain and truly exploitative, but he does have some non-exploitative emotions, and is also clever and not be messed with. And the scene where he and pre-Reformation Scrooge encounter each other is a true delight.
selenak: (Bardolatry by Cheesygirl)
Overheard, just the other day, near Marble Arch while having lunch, the following conversation:

Aged Father: "What about the Roma who were here last time?"
Daughter (my age, Tory politician). "We're not calling them that, Dad, we're calling them agressive beggars of Eastern European Origin. And we got rid of them."

And thus you know you're surrounded by conservative England. There was a lot of interesting talk during that lunch otherwise, on all types of subjects from the EU to Dickens to Thomas Mann, but that part was the only point where I felt positively Orwellian.

Thursday also saw me watching Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play written by Gina Gionfriddo and performed at Hampstead Theatre. It occurs to me that means that out of five plays I watched during my time in London, three were written by women (Red Velvet, A Taste of Honey and Rapture - Blister - Burn, respectively), and today I also watched a film, The Invisible Woman, which was written by Abi Morgan and based on the book by Claire Tomalin. The times, they are (hopefully) changing. Which was partly the subject of Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play starring Emilia Fox (which is why I went) and Emma Fielding, and focused on women and their choices, and different generations of feminism. Rapture-Blister-Burn with spoilers ) It's not a play that offers some amazing new insights but it it's one that offers a very funny depiction of the inevitable imperfection of current day female life (in all its variations). Who says feminists are without a sense of humour?

Thursday was very rainy, so I first went to the National Gallery (me and half of London, but as opposed to the National Portrait Gallery, I hadn't visited the NG for years, and I did want to see some of these paintings in non-printed form again), which was, despite all the other people, a very relaxing thing to do. When wandering around the Impressionists, I was struck again by how many of them sat out the Franco-Prussian war in Britain, which was probably the most sensible thing to do, but can't have been that comfortable an exile, since they all went back once it was over.

Then I watched The Invisible Woman, because non-blockbuster foreign films which weren't co-produced with German money take sometimes a year or so before they get shown in our cinemas, and I really wanted to see this one, for various reasons: I had read Claire Tomalin's Dickens biography, which impressed me in its even handedness and vivacity, Claire Tomalin's report about how the film came to me, and the various reviews which assured me on what were the two most criticial points for me in advance to know: that this film would not excuse Dickens' behaviour by demonizing or denigrating his wife, that it would not play out Nelly against Catherine, on the one hand, but on the other that it would also manage to show just why so many people cared about Dickens as a person, not "just" as an author. (Because otherwise Nelly looks foolish.) And because Nelly's personality always eluded me in the biographies, I hoped for the film, which is after all fiction, to help out there. Which it did. The Invisible Woman with spoilers )

My last London play this year was The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the new Sam Wannamaker Playhouse, which is an addition to the Globe; an indoor Jacobean playhouse where the Globe company can now stage plays in winter, too. I had tried for the Duchess of Malfi, their first play in the new house, about which I'd heard great things, but it was completely sold out, so last night I could watch the premiere of the next play, Beaumont's rarely performed Knight of the Burning Pestle. I had never seen it on stage before, and haven't read it though I knew one or two scenes from books about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre - since it is a play-within-a-play type of drama, which breaks the fourth wall with gusto, it gets quoted as an (of course dramatically exaggareted) example of what the stage practice of the day would have been. As it turns out, it is ideal for this particular theatre, which is build similar to the Swan in Stratford, only completely in wood, modelled on the Blackfriars Playhouse. So as opposed to the Globe, you have this relatively small space, with the basic archetectural structure of a refectory with a nod to an alehouse, all in wood. I'd been warned about the hard seats, but let me tell you, for the Bayreuth-trained theatre and opera enthusiast, this was downright comfortable by comparison. Also the play was very much about audience participation; the other thing I was told was that for the Duchess of Malfi, everything was completely dark except for the candles used for lighting. Not so here; the doors were always open, partly because at some points the characters ran off stage and through them and back again, but also because the audience reactions were part of the play so you needed the audience to be visible.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle presents you, among other things, with a London citizen, a grocer, his wife and his apprentice going to a play, not being content with what they watch as they don't like the hero and taking over the plot, inserting a new character, their apprentice, in it who is to have all types of glorious adventures which suspiciously resemble Don Quixote (a book which was out in Spanish but not yet in English at the time so there is some debate whether Beaumont had read it) while the actors try to stage their original play (which is about a London merchant's apprentice being forbidden to marry said merchant's daughter and after all sorts of shenanigans getting together with her anyway), which doesn't fit the demanded adventure plots at all. It's the kind of thing which sounds hopelessly confusing when written but when staged as it was last night really is hilarious, with the whole audience cheering Rafe on when he has his Quixotic adventures and adoring the Citizen and his Wife who were the heart of the performance and sat among the audience commenting when they weren't on stage trying to help the actors/their characters. They are basically Jacobean fandom living the fans-know-everything-better-anyway dream (which tells me Francis Beaumont must have been lectured by fanboys and fangirls a lot), and presented with great affection. Instead of the usual break ca. halfway through a play, for this play we got three interludes that lasted about four minutes during which there were on stage dances, and during which also food and drinks were sold as well (yes, you could, in the true Jacobean spirit, eat and drink during the performance, though at one point one of the actors of The London Merchant went down to the Citizen's wife and took her food away, and one longer, fifteen minutes interlude announced as "privvy break". Like I said, this was pretty much the Rocky Horror Show type of live performance audience experience, Jacobean style, and terrific fun from beginning to end.

Today: the sun has come back! Will walk a while before heading off to the airport - my flight is in the afternoon. What a trip!
selenak: (Band on the Run - Jackdawsonsgrl)
Sadly, the weather, as of easing me in to my departure, remained on the cold and cloudy side, so I paid the Dickens museum a visit, where, as with the Tower, I hadn't been since I was 21. It is as a I dimly remembered a really well reconstructed Victorian house, and the three things which struck me most this time were:

- Dickens's reading desk with a manuscript for his vaunted public readings, full of crossed out print and handwritten sentences over it
- the serpent ring which Kate Dickens gave to her sister, Georgiana Hogarth, as a very pointed present (Georgiana stayed with Dickens and sided with him in the infamous separation after he kicked his wife out) - it is so large a ring that Georgiana must have had thick fingers, btw
- the bust of Dickens' eternally broke father John and on the opposite side of the room a drawing of Wilkins Micawber from David Copperfield ; the fictional Micawber looks so remarkably like John Dickens (who was his real life model), that I suspect either the artist who made the illustrations knew Dickens's father (possible), or conversely the artist who made the bust knew the illustration (even more likely)

With the occasional drop of wetness in either watery or snowy form from the sky I decided to indulge myself and round my time in London off with what was basically a Beatles tribute band going through their entire career, the show Let it Be. Not a musical, as there was no plot or pretense at dialogue, aside from the occasional quip, but the songs themselves and the musicians in costume as appropriate to whichever period the songs hailed from. (Though they stopped short of fake beards of depression for the final year.) It was great fun, though it was a bit distracting that the Paul player was not left handed! Other than that, though, they had the body language for each Beatle down, and the voices were pretty good. The sheer range of songs, the development within a few measly years, reminded me all over again why the Beatles are my favourites. Since it was a matinee performance but still completely filled, I was in company in that regard.:) Most bewildering moment: first the George, while their Paul is moving from bass to piano, says the next song was never written to be played with an orchestra arrangment (boo, hiss, Phil Spector!), but to be heard like this, cue "Paul" playing piano and singing The Long and Winding Road... and then, after the first two verses, up pops the cursed Spector arrangment on playback in the background. I swear, it's a conspiracy.

But anyway: it was a good way to say goodbye, and I'm heading towards the airport now, with a much heavier suitcase full of books and dvds I did not arrive with. Oh, to be in England, now that April is there.:)
selenak: (Scarlett by Olde_fashioned)
As a postcript to yesterday's review, something I mentioned very briefly but which tickles me so much that I have to provide a lengthier quote to the general public: Dickens' attitude towards France and all things French, which for a 19th century novelist wasn't just refreshingly non-jingoistic (which is rare), but was openly admiring (which for a novelist who in this year, apropos his 200th birthday, has been declared the incarnation of Englishness is just delicious) and contained an interesting self-criticism regarding his own characters.

In May 1856 he had a fierce disagreement with Miss Coutts' companion, Mrs. Brown, on the subject of the French. When she spoke against them, he praised their openness about social problems, telling her that a leading difference between them and the English was that 'in England people dismiss the mention of social evils and vices which do nevertheless exist among them; and that in France people do not dismiss the mention of the same things but habitually recognise their existence.' Mrs. Brown cried out, 'Don't say that!' and Dickens insisted, 'Oh but I must say it, you know, when according to our national vanity and prejudice, you disparage an unquestionably great nation.' At which Mrs. Brown burst into tears. A few months later he wrote to Forster grumbling about the constraints placed on English novelists compared with the French - he named Balsac and Sand - who were able to write freely and realistically, while 'the hero of an English book' was 'always uninteresting - too good'. Dickens went on to tell Forster that 'this same unnatural young gentleman (if to be decent is to be necessarily unnatural), whom you meet in those other books and in mine, must be presented to you in that unnatural aspect by reason of of your morality, and is not to have, I will not say any of the indecencies you like, but not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men!'
selenak: (Default)
Barring special subject cases like serial killers and/or genocidal dictators, biographies tend to err on one of two extremes: either they're hagiographies, blending out much if not all that's disagreeable about the subject, or they're bashfests magnifying the flaws to the nth degree and hardly bothering with anything not contemptible the person in question might have done. Of course, the platonic ideal of biographies is basically one which on the one hand is empathic and makes it clear in non-abstract terms why the reader should care about this person but on the other doesn't shy away from depicting the flaws in a non-prettifying manne. If you feel up to the task, I congratulate you: I'm not sure I could in a non-fictional manner. Not least because there's the additional trouble of actual lives rarely following a good narrative arc with a clear climax and a convenient ending, and the narrative pretense of objectivity (whereas novels never claim to be objective to begin with; they're fiction).

All the same, every now and then you come across a biography that comes very close to or even fulfills said ideal. The latest one I have read is Claire Tomalin's take on Charles Dickens, and since she gets into the ring there with some classics of the biographical genre, not to mention with the fact her subject was someone famous for his memorable characters and superb atmospheric descriptions, this is an even more remarkable feat. Speaking of Dickens' work, one of the Victorian cross connections Claire Tomalin makes which had never occured to me before is that Jane Eyre was published two years before David Copperfield, and that while we have no written down comment from Dickens on the former, he very likely read it (his best friend John Forster did, who suggested to write David Copperfield as a first person narrative like Jane Eyre, something Dickens had never done before; and of course his friend and biggest rival, Thackeray, who praised it to the skies). The childhood chapters of both Jane Eyre and David Copperfield are among the most remarkable in 19th century literature, managing to put the reader firmly in the pov of a child, sharing the outrage of said child when confronted with adult injustice, the vivid imagination taking flight from small details. For her part, Charlotte Bronte read David Copperfield and though she wasn't a Dickens fan per se (she prefered Thackeray and had some justifiable criticism of Dickens' female love interests), she did love David Copperfield and was delighted when her publisher suggested to her that there were similarities between it and her own earlier novel. (You could also add that both Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, like many later authors of children's books, actually did not get along particularly well with children as adults - they drew on their own childhood memories to create the intense child's povs in their novels.)

But what makes Tomalin's biography really outstanding is that she pulls off the next to impossible: selling the reader on Dickens' non-literary good qualities - most prominently his passionate, life long outrage at social injustice and fight against it, not "just" by writing about it but by campaigning, creating alternatives (his most remarkable achievement there lay in persuading the millionairess Angela Coutts to create a home for prostitutes and to remain involved with the organization and supervision), and always being open for individual cases as well - while also describing, in full, his dark side, most prominently his marriage and separation from his wife, which was a Victorian patriarchal nightmare, but also his, to put it mildly, uneven track record when it came to his children. In many ways he was like the cliché of a social worker, fighting tirelessly for strangers but being incapable of dealing fairly with his family. And yet both the Dickens are real: the one who by chance ends up in the jury of a case where a maid, herself born in the workhouse, gave birth on the stairs of the home where she was serving between letting visitors in and having to serve at dinner and who was accused of having killed her baby. (Her defense was that the baby had been born dead.) This was presented to the jurors as a typical case of female immorality, and one of the jurors called for the utmost rigour of the law. Dickens managed to talk the rest of the jury around to a "found dead" verdict re: the baby, got the young maid a good barrister, sent her some food to prison and persuaded a previous employer of the girl's to promise to take her in again after the trial. This was Dickens at his best: "determined in argument, generous in giving help, following through the case, motivated purely by his profound sense that it was wrong that she should be victimized further", as Claire Tomalin puts it.

On the other hand, you have Dickens at his worst: the Dickens who, when he falls in love with a young actress and reaches the breaking point of his marriage, isn't content to simply leave his wife (or rather, make her leave - he was the one who kept the house and family), no, after twenty two years of marriage, eleven children and two miscarriages, he has to punish her for existing, declaring her a bad mother who only fakes her affection for her children (because that was the only reason he could think of to give to the public for the separation), making the children choose, attacking her in the press and not even writing her as much as a condolence letter when one of their children dies. The Dickens of whom his favourite daughter, who had an intense love/hate relationship with him, said: "My poor mother was afraid of my father. She was never allowed to express an opinion - never allowed to say what she felt. (...) We were all very wicked not to take her part. Harry does not take this view, but he was only a boy at the time, and does not realize the grief it was to our mother, after having all her children, to go away and leave us. My mother never rebuked me. I never saw her in a temper. We like to think of our great geniuses as great characters - but we can't. (...) My father was like a madman when my mother left home, this affair brought out all that was worst - all that was weakest in him. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home."

Both sides of Dickens are real, and Claire Tomalin somehow manages never to lose sight of either, and not to use one to negate the other. She also manages to make the whole marriage up to the point of the situation feel like the type of disaster which is brought about by both the characters of the participants and the society they live in. Catherine never was very clever, but she lived in a world where feminity was more often than not defined as being pretty and ornamental. She often suffered from post natal depression and grew stout, but with eleven full term pregnancies, two stillbirths and an increasingly estranged husband who on the one hand made it clear he didn't want more than three children but on the other despite having medical friends and a curious mind never seems to have tried methods of contraception while continuing to see her as his only morally acceptable way to have sex, it's hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Not so coincidentally, the high point of the Dickens marriage, the one time where all of Dickens references to Catherine in his letters are unambigously affectionate and approving without even hidden sarcasm, was the time of his first journey to America, the only time in their twenty two years of married life together when she wasn't pregnant or just post birth, their children and his friends were absent back in England, and they could share something other than sex (indeed Tomalin speculates the reason why Catherine wasn't pregnant during all those months in the US as opposed to all the other time of their marriage might have been that Dickens decided they shouldn't risk even the possibility), discover America together and be companions rather than the husband and wife they were at home.

Given that Claire Tomalin has written a biography of Ellen Ternan (Dickens' later day mistress who was the trigger but not the cause for the separation) before, it's surprising but perhaps inevitable (so many letters destroyed!) Ellen "Nelly" Ternan remains the most shadowy women in the story, with virtually everyone else from Dickens' mother to his first love Maria Beadnell to the unfortunate Catherine to her two sisters who had their own peculiar relationships with Dickens to Katey, Dickens' daughter coming across much more vividly. Claire Tomalin is also good with the social and literary context, with unearthing some against-cliché details as Dickens' love and respect for for French literature, France and many of the French (his youngest son even said he liked them better than the English), which given Dickens is usually cast as of all the Victorian novelists the most English of the English is fairly amusing. (Also, he didn't have much time for the monarchy and had to be persuaded to go when Queen Victoria eventually wanted to meet him. He used the opportunity to cut loose about the evils of the English class system, which seems to have impressed her enough to mention it repeatedly afterwards in her diaries.) When the real life characters have obvious counterparts in Dickens' novels, she's good with both the parallels and differences, notably with Dickens' parents, whom he split up in the lovable Micawbers (who have their mannerisms and eternal in-debt-ness but who are in now way to blame for David Copperfield having to work, and thus are unambigously loved by him) and the hateful Murdstones (putting David to work, which Dickens' real life parents did when he was ten, near eleven, and he never forgot or forgave that while struggling with the fact a benevolent family novelist shouldn't remain angry at his parents). Mr. Micawber can finally turn over a new leaf and emigrate to Australia; John Dickens remains in England, continues to slide from financial disaster to financial disaster, no matter how much his now famous son supports him, and eventually even forges Charles' signature on cheques so Dickens has to put an add in the papers saying he won't stand for cheques written by his father. Ouch. Given his deeply ambigous feelings about his parents, it's probably logical Dickens had a shaky hold on fatherhood. As mentioned before, he hadn't wanted more than three children, and preferably no sons (he wanted daughters and got both sons and daughters). Eleven children arrived, only one of whom died as a toddler, and the connection between that (the survival, not the death) and all the fictional children being killed off to great effect in Dickens' novels was drawn by biographers far earlier than Tomalin. As long as they were small, he did play with them and show interest, but later the younger boys were sent off to a boarding school in Boulogne and remained there despite all of them disliking the school immensely, which makes Dickens' public accusation of Catherine as the parent unable to care for her children even more infuriating than it already was. Of the older children, he quarelled violently with his namesake Charley because Charley was the only one of the Dickens children to openly defy their father and choosing to live with his mother when they separated, and both resented and blamed himself for the marriage Katey made, because he thought (correctly) she married mostly to get away from home, not because she was in love with the man in question (his friend Wilkie Collins' brother). (Cue deeply Freudian scene where Dickens younger daughter Mamie finds him weeping into Katey's marriage dress the morning after she left for her honeymoon.) Katey's memorable outburst about her father decades after his death comes at the end of Claire Tomalin's biography and thus ends it as it begain, in complete shades of grey:

"I know things about my father's character that no one else ever knew; he was not a good man, but he was not a fast man, but he was wonderful! (...) I loved my father better than any man in the world - in a different way of course - I loved him for his faults. My father was a wicked man - a very wicked man."
selenak: (Nina by Kathyh)
As Yuletide nominations are almost upon us again, it occurs to me that clearly the thing to ask for this year is Shakespeare RPF. As in, starring Will from Stratford. A good start has been made, and welll, if it's good enough for Shaw, Stoppard and Oscar Wilde...

What else to ask for? Last year there were some fabulous historical stories starring the Borgias, written before the tv s how(s) (there is a second one, recently broadcast on German tv, but alas, it is as dreadful as the one with Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo is great), which unfortunately might mean this year the writers would be all Borgia'd out, which is a shame because I'd like some fanfic based on the tv versions. Specifically about the Lucrezia and Giulia Farnese relationship, which was one of my favourite aspects of the tv show, and surely the fandom is small enough to qualify. And still on a historical note, I'd love someone to write about James Boswell for reasons explained here. Any episode of his life would be fun, but my dream would be about his defense of Mary Bryant. And because the third season of Being Human unjumped the shark and grew a beard so spectacularly that I'd love stories set during same or after. Preferably Nina-centric, but anything goes... as long as it's not a fix-it for the the very plot decision that made the season so good.

What to offer: something I don't have to do new research for and am well versed in already, because I'll be on the road for most of November and December. If they nominate DS9 and B5 again, I'll definitely offer, and there are always the Greek myths. And the Beatles. And Orson Welles. Plus I might as well do my bit for the Shakespearean cause.

Speaking of rare fandoms: came across a superb Great Expectation fanfiction in two parts called Star which you can find here and here. It's a first person Estella point of view post novel, it deals with Estella's mother, it accomplishes the miracle of feeling true to Dickens' novel yet bringing in what Dickens never did, a distinctly female perspective, and the characterisations of Jaggers, Herbert Pocket and Pip all feel so very right. It's the kind of thing I wish I had asked for if I had been smart enough to know it really needed to be written!


Lastly: why people would even consider the man writing the following poem was named Chistopher, Francis or Edward, I don't know, because:


Sonnet 135 Whoever hath thy wish, thou hast thy Will

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea all water, yet receives rain still
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.
Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one Will.
selenak: (Amy by Calapine)
Yesterday was mostly spent helping with the laundry and starting the daunting package of mail around after three weeks of travelling, but I did manage to squeeze some of the tv I missed in, to wit, one Doctor Who episode. I still don't dare reading my flist for fear of being spoiled until I've caught up, but here is a link I got from reading online newspapers:

Claire Tomalin about Charles Dickens and writing biographies, a very interesting interview, especially if like me you're intrigued by what biographers choose to focus on and what not, and how they relate to their subjects. It's also intriguing in terms of Tomalin as a female writer - she has some sharp things to say about Peter Ackyroyd and his treatment of the women in Dickens' life. And in terms of "it's a small world" - I didn't know Tomalin is married to another writer I much appreciate, Michael Frayn.

Now, on to reviewing DW again, several weeks after broadcast.

You're trying to make me into you )
selenak: (Sternennacht - Lefaym)
Quote of the day: "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a jolly, jocose gentleman walking about the earth with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch you would greatly oblige me." Kate Perugini, nee Kate Dickens, to George Bernard Shaw about her father Charles.


Moving on to comics: Wil Wheaton blogs about favourite comic collections. His include Neil Gaiman's 1602 and Joss Whedon's run of Astonishing X-Men.

Fringe: Double Helix is an amazing look at Walter Bishop, vid-wise.

Back when an edition of Ted Hughes' Letters was published, I wrote a review. At the time, the BBC did a program with Richard Armitage reading excerpts of said letters, and he did a superb job. (Both because he's a good actor and because of their shared Yorkshire background, I thought the choice of him reading Ted Hughes was inspired.) What I only just found out is that you can download parts of the program at Armitage's website. The available excerpts include the letters he wrote to his sister Olwyn and to Sylvia Plath's mother Aurelia shortly after Sylvia killed herself. Someone put them on YouTube using footage of the film Sylvia. (I wasn't keen on said movie for various reasons, but okay.) But listen to Armitage's voice and the attempt by a young Hughes to phrase the unspeakable:

selenak: (Obsession by Eirena)
Found via [personal profile] hradzka, a great quote from Charles Dickens about himself, given to a young Russian journalist named Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1862:


"'He told me that all the good simple people in his novels [like Little Nell] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live for, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life.'"


As I said in my review for Girl in a blue dress, Dickens' behaviour towards his wife was really horrible, and you have the paradox of an author being able to describe, with great skill and sympathy for the victim, Edward Murdstone terrorizing his wife, David Copperfield's mother, into losing any sense of self-worth and joie de vivre, and a human being to seemed not to recognize that he was doing a very similar thing. Now that quote given to a future fellow novelist speaks of much greater self awareness on Dickens' part ("attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live for" points pretty much to one person), and much as the act of creation often is subconscious rather than conscious, I'm not really that surprised that Dickens did the mirroring-into-the-villains thing deliberately rather than by accident. (Mind you, given that Uriah Heep or Miss Havisham are infinitely more interesting creations than Little Nell or Oliver Twist, it's an argument for the lack of vitality in "how I would like to be" characters owing something to the uncomfortable identification for villains as well.)

The quote is actually from this very interesting article about the question whether or not it matters to us, as readers, to discover favourite authors as not only flawed but sometimes downright unpleasant human beings. Whether it colours our reading, and why it should matter more than the awareness of the same thing about one'd dentist or a boing engineer, where it wouldn't influence the treatment of one's teeth or the use of the airplane the engineer co-build. I don't think there is a general answer to this; it's something each individual has to decide for themselves. It's certainly easier when the artist in question is dead, and you don't have the problem of supporting their livelihood by buying the books, attending their concerts etc., i.e. for example I can listen to recordings of Wagner operas or go to performances, when doing the same with a living, breathing Richard W., composing at the same high level but also spouting vicious antisemitism as he used to, would make me feel complicit in a way it just doesn't with him dead for more than a century. Or to use the Dickens example, I can read the novels without feeling I'm supporting spousal abuse. Though this might not be true for all dead artists and all their creations. I remember talking with [personal profile] rozk years ago about a similar subject, and she said the one work of literature which she really couldn't read the same way anymore if something theorized about its author were to be proven fact beyond the shadow of a doubt would be Alice in Wonderland (if it could be proven that Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson was an active pedophile). I think I agree on this point. Still, in general the "enjoy the work, even if the creator was rotten" theory for dead artists works for me.

With living artists, it becomes infinitely more difficult, and here the most recent example in the public consciousness isn't a writer but a director, Roman Polanski. After his thirty-years-delayed arrest last year, it seemed to me that there were two equally wrong arguments made, one pro and one anti Polanski; many of his defenders took the line of his deserving forgiveness due to the merits of his art, while some of the opposing camp instead of sticking to the irrefutable "rape is rape" argument also saw it fit to add what amounts to an "and Chinatown isn't that good anyway" argument. Now, I haven't seen all of Polanski's films, but I've seen several. On tv, not in the cinema, because the awareness of what he did made me not wanting to support him financially, and yet I was curious enough about the films in question to tune in when they were broadcast on tv. Between Dance of the Vampires, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, MacBeth (actually the first Polanksi film I saw, in school, as part of comparing various film versions of the Scottish Play), Frantic and The Ninth Gate, I came to the conclusion he is indeed in excellent director who produces the occasional dud (The Ninth Gate, I'm looking at you). That some of his films are good and some great, deserved classics, doesn't change anything about the criminality of his actions. The Ninth Gate isn't bad because he raped a 13-years-old, Frantic isn't good because he raped a 13-years-old. They both fall and stand in terms of characterisation and storytelling. If any of these films had had a Very Young Girl/Older Man theme, I don't think I could have made that work/author division even in a situation where I wasn't paying for watching them, but they didn't. That was my personal line to draw; others may draw it elsewhere.

And yet I'm not sure whether I agree with the conclusion the article about writers reaches, which is: But if we can't be good - and it seems that we can't - then it's not a bad thing to try to make something out of what is missing in us, or at least to see how others do it. And if we readers are complicitous - well, that's not a bad thing either. Because this seems to me a fall back on that "great art owes something to horrible deeds" position again. Sometimes it may; Dickens drawing on his own dark side to create some of his villains being a case in point. This doesn't mean one can handwave his behaviour. (Or, the other extreme, deny he was a great writer at all.) Sometimes there is no connection between an artist's dark side and his creations; I don't think Wagner would have composed any differently if he hadn't been an antisemite (he wasn't always one, you can pin point the time when he became one pretty accurately), though you could make an argument for his penchant for married women helping with the creation of Tristan and Isolde, but that's really not on the same scale as writing diatribe after diatribe about "the Jews" because you can't get over Meyerbeer's success in Paris. Either way: ideally every book/composition/film/other work of art should be judged on its own merits, independent from the creator's person, but in real life, all too often it just isn't possible to make that distinction, and I simply am not sure whether this is a good or bad thing because I keep wavering on the subject myself.

****

On a more cheerful subject: [personal profile] meddow has been watching the entirety of DS9 in recent weeks and after finishing it has made a great Kira character vid. It's odd, while I like Kira (quite a lot), she never was one of my favourite DS9 characters. Still isn't, but in recent years I've become aware of just what an amazing creation she was, and how sadly rare all that was accomplished still is. Kira was a female regular with a complicated, very dark backstory and an on screen character arc that went through all seven seasons; she had no romantic relationship to her show's nominal leading character and was still absolutely crucial to the show, arguably the actual main character, but even if you disagree with that assessment, she was the most important character in terms of screentime and narrative weight after Sisko, and she might have gotten more screentime than him, I didn't count the minutes. Now, can you think of any current show where the female lead is at no point of the story involved in a romantic relationship with the male lead, or where at the least her relationship with said male leading character isn't the most important one in her life? Any? Kira's storyarc was never about her love life, but she was never presented as asexual, either, her various romantic relationships were simply part of her story without ever dominating it, or depriving her of personality, or making all her other non-romantic relationships seem less important or non-existant. (Alas, Pod!Aeryn Sun in the fourth season of Farscape. Among others.) So yes, Kira was an amazing creation, and [personal profile] meddow's vid captures some of the reasons why beautifully.

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