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Just the green wave going by
"Does anyone still celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day?" I wondered, before it occurred to me that I could just ask the internet and discover the answer was yes. In keeping with my haphazard observance of the holiday, have an admiring gifset of Robert Newton heroically impersonating a wrecker in Jamaica Inn (1939) and Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir, and Ed Trickett on "Soon May the Wellerman Come," which is neither a pirate song nor even a chantey, it's a tall tale of a shore-whalers' song from New Zealand, but I was immensely entertained when it took the quarantine internet by storm. I was listening to it along with the rest of its album last week.
I dreamed of a polite conversation with a stranger who was surprised in a slightly skeptical way to hear that I had been writing and publishing short fiction and poetry for more than twenty years, which I suppose suggests my state of mind regarding what no longer feels like it passes for my writing career. I am reminding myself that I have some sort of (multiply tested as such) miserable cold and may be concomitantly low in spirits and should take a walk or something while it's this autumnally bright. I bet it isn't helping that my college reunion for which I did not RSVP because I was too sick to know whether I had any chance of attending is coming up.
I dreamed of a polite conversation with a stranger who was surprised in a slightly skeptical way to hear that I had been writing and publishing short fiction and poetry for more than twenty years, which I suppose suggests my state of mind regarding what no longer feels like it passes for my writing career. I am reminding myself that I have some sort of (multiply tested as such) miserable cold and may be concomitantly low in spirits and should take a walk or something while it's this autumnally bright. I bet it isn't helping that my college reunion for which I did not RSVP because I was too sick to know whether I had any chance of attending is coming up.
no subject
I cannot let mention of Robert Newton and Talk Like a Pirate Day go by without mentioning my very favorite screen adaptation of Treasure Island, from 1990. It has, of all people, Charlton Heston as Long John Silver, and he is *brilliant*.
"Talking like a pirate" is almost entirely talking like Stevenson's Long John Silver. Like Hamlet, the character suffers from having his dialogue so imitated that the original is now effectively "made of cliches". This particular adaptation is very faithful, so Heston has to overcome that problem. Astonishingly, he *does*, and his delivery is perfectly naturalistic.
The film has many other fine virtues (Oliver Reed! Christopher Lee! The Chieftains!), and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
no subject
You have mentioned it to me before, but I am glad it still holds up! I am willing to believe Heston as Long John Silver; the two most interesting performances I've seen from him were amoral. (He is in fact so much fun as an unprincipled charmer of a proto-Indiana Jones in Secret of the Incas (1954) that I can't believe no one else ever capitalized on his talent for rogues rather than pillars of rectitude, except I guess this production.)