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Losing my body with one ancient word
Rabbit, rabbit, belatedly! I entered my birthday month in a state of technological snafu such that I wrote my most recent review entirely on someone else's computer using a widget apparently meant to replicate the effect of Post-It notes. I feel smug about succeeding, but also slightly as though the finished product should have been held together with thumbtacks and red string. The snafu itself has been sufficiently resolved that I can use my own beloved and tenacious machine again and the process consumed almost all of the previous day. In the late afternoon I finally read Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1938), which I had encountered a few years ago through its semi-faithful film version Hotel Reserve (1944); the novel is much funnier in that its narrator makes about as good a counterintelligence agent as can be expected of your average mild-mannered teacher of languages legally blackmailed into the job—he's a shambles and knows it, fantasizing his way into investigations and facepalming back out of them—and much scarier in that it never forgets that for all the farce of his amateur spycraft, Josef Vadassy is a stateless refugee whose papers are never in order and whose home is wherever he can make it in the margins of the country that hassles him the least and therefore while the political consequences of failing to catch the real spy at the Hôtel de la Réserve remain traditionally, ominously vague, the personal cost of being deported back to the regime that shot his family for dissidence is immediate and acute and his state of nerves throughout the entire affair is not, even when the character is ruefully taking stock of his failures with lines like "I may be unlucky, but I find that my enterprises never proceed along classical lines," really funny at all. The film follows on Hitchcock, the novel on Kafka. The Treaty of Trianon gets name-checked once again. Vadassy comes from Szabadka, which became Subotica, where Emeric Pressburger had family before the Holocaust. Man, I hope Vadassy made it through WWII. Have some links.
1. Stephen Fry on Georgette Heyer: "If Bridgerton and other less strait-laced and tightly bodiced dramas and novels can give us the style of the Regency without its abominable injustices and stifling hierarchies, and with lots of extra romping and fizz, why do we need a writer like Georgette Heyer, whose diligent, almost academically precise researches and immaculate ear for language, custom and historical detail result in texts that are so much denser and more demanding of concentration and memory than the lighter, less substantial fare now on offer elsewhere?" I do not actually disagree with his answer, because I like it best myself when the author does the research, but I do have a couple of contemporary Regencies I want to send him.
2. Laura Kern on Three Cases of Murder (1955). I kept wanting to write about that film for years just for Wendy Toye's "The Picture," so I am glad someone did.
3. Ian McDowell interviews Edward Burlando: "In the closet days, homosexuals called themselves Friends of Dorothy. I was briefly a literal friend, or at least acquaintance, of Dorothy, although I didn't actually know Miss Garland as well as I knew Miss Hamilton."
This upcoming week is going to be full of early-morning doctor's appointments, which I resent on multiple levels.
1. Stephen Fry on Georgette Heyer: "If Bridgerton and other less strait-laced and tightly bodiced dramas and novels can give us the style of the Regency without its abominable injustices and stifling hierarchies, and with lots of extra romping and fizz, why do we need a writer like Georgette Heyer, whose diligent, almost academically precise researches and immaculate ear for language, custom and historical detail result in texts that are so much denser and more demanding of concentration and memory than the lighter, less substantial fare now on offer elsewhere?" I do not actually disagree with his answer, because I like it best myself when the author does the research, but I do have a couple of contemporary Regencies I want to send him.
2. Laura Kern on Three Cases of Murder (1955). I kept wanting to write about that film for years just for Wendy Toye's "The Picture," so I am glad someone did.
3. Ian McDowell interviews Edward Burlando: "In the closet days, homosexuals called themselves Friends of Dorothy. I was briefly a literal friend, or at least acquaintance, of Dorothy, although I didn't actually know Miss Garland as well as I knew Miss Hamilton."
This upcoming week is going to be full of early-morning doctor's appointments, which I resent on multiple levels.
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Tell me about Regency female idiom!
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We even get a glimpse of male idiom in John Thorpe--which matches with a lot of printed matter of the period. But Isabella Thorpe is a delicious example of female idiom. Most of it is exaggeration, but the phrases of it, the way it's used, was very much female language. And it's there in so many period publications, letters, etc. But Austen exaggerated slightly for effect.
If you read a lot of period material and then go back to Heyer, you discover that she had gradually reshaped the Regency characters' language at the substrate: most of her heroines are Bright Young Things in period dress. Austen's female characters don't use male idiom. They use their own. Heyer's admire mannishness and borrow freely from masculine idiom and custom, but within their class and style, just like Bright Youmg Things. And her male characters find that hot, just as Heyer's contemporaries did.
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“Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”
LOL, yes. I think Marianne also shares that a bit?
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Nine
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I can't count on it forever, but he is stubborn.
*hugs*
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And successfully?
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Awesome!
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Early-morning doctor's appointments, ugh.
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Thank you!
Early-morning doctor's appointments, ugh.
The worst. One needs to be coherent and one wants to be asleep.
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Do it!!
This upcoming week is going to be full of early-morning doctor's appointments, which I resent on multiple levels.
:(
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My sole hesitation is that I don't want to be creepy at him, but it's really tempting.
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Thank you.
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B) Bertie! Bertie! Long may he compute! May his processors and fan collaborate robustly!
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He should read all the Cat Sebastian he wants, though! She's really good!
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Ten points for deflection!
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Edit because this might accidentally have read cranky, and it's actually complimentary, I just don't have many adjectives in the tank right now.
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You're putting them all into the aspidistra.
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Oh, Stephen Fry.
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I hope he can tell he's got a fan club.