Salt on the sill, salt in the sea
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selkie was safely collected from South Station tonight despite the best efforts of some impaired twerp to bounce me off the curb on Route 16. En route, she sent me a shot of the Chesapeake Bay and I sent an autumn sunset in New England. My mother had prepared meat for us when we got in.
ashlyme, it looks like that middle-aged romance you remembered for David Warner may have been in S.O.S. Titanic (1979), all two and a half hours of which spatch and I are now enjoying not even ironically. [edit] Afterward, inevitably, I read Lawrence Beesley's The Loss of the S.S. Titanic (1912).
selkie was safely collected from South Station tonight despite the best efforts of some impaired twerp to bounce me off the curb on Route 16. En route, she sent me a shot of the Chesapeake Bay and I sent an autumn sunset in New England. My mother had prepared meat for us when we got in.
ashlyme, it looks like that middle-aged romance you remembered for David Warner may have been in S.O.S. Titanic (1979), all two and a half hours of which spatch and I are now enjoying not even ironically. [edit] Afterward, inevitably, I read Lawrence Beesley's The Loss of the S.S. Titanic (1912).
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*hugs*
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You kind of always have. You've just been eight hours from taking up the option.
*hugs*
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It's as cold as it should be for November and the light is exquisite.
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Well, well! I probably saw that on afternoon TV and stowed it away. Warner looks good in a Norfolk and fingerless gloves. How was Beesley's book?
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He is frankly lovely as a thoughtful, diffident science master who spends so much of the voyage reading that he won't even abandon ship without a couple of books in his pockets, so obviously a catch that I suspect only his historical reality prevented the consummation of his fictitious affair in the unoccupied cabin helpfully offered by a steward in second class. Get it, Susan Saint James! we cried at the screen and were disappointed when the screenplay dodged, although at least they end the film together, continuing their observations of the different worlds of privilege and class: who gets to find out versus who has always known that the world is strange and unsafe.
How was Beesley's book?
Worth reading! He is a consistently engaging and detailed writer, earnestly concerned with dispelling the nascent myths of the sinking—including one which turned out to be a reality, but it can be understood from his description why he didn't think so—and passionately invested in the maritime reforms necessary to forestall another such disaster; it comes across as an urgent, intelligent, slightly shell-shocked book, which plausibly matches the state of an author less than two months out from almost dying in an ice field when he had just been planning to take a holiday in Canada. He's very good at conveying the unreality of it, not so much the famous illusion of unsinkability than the literal sense that everything about the disaster, from the almost unnoticed jar of the iceberg to the unbearable cries rising from the water after all noise of the ship was suddenly sucked down into silence, was so out of his experience that it didn't feel like a thing that could be happening even as it did. Every now and then he offers an interpretation of behavior that I am not convinced was as rational as all that in the moment, but he seems indifferent to heedless to his personal impression on the reader: he does regard the writing of his book as a duty to the dead, which makes perfect sense to me. He has a teacher's instinct for discussing technical subjects as though they can and should be understood by any reasonably tuned in person and he shows a marked preference in distress calls for "CDQ" over "SOS," which is the kind of lightly crankish opinion that I find endearing. Some of the dialogue in S.O.S. Titanic was either adapted or transferred directly from the text and of course Warner delivers it as well as the more invented interactions. I really am fond of his helpless, self-conscious laugh on finding himself unable to explain why a dressing gown of all things was so important to get off the ship. It could have been for warmth, but it so clearly wasn't: it's the sort of reflex action people take in times of shock and now it's you and your dressing gown in the same boat.
Anyway, *cough*
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You're only enabling my David Warner crush, you know. Not that I'm complaining.
*Anyway, *cough**
Thank you!! I'll watch that on the laptop.
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He had such a good face and it doesn't seem to have mattered that I saw it first employed for Jack the Ripper.
He played Wordsworth in a pair of Ken Russell television films with Felicity Kendal and David Hemmings! Clouds of Glory (1978). I didn't realize Russell had done the Romantic poets before Gothic (1986). With Murray Melvin somewhere in the mix as Robert Lovell. I have to get out from under at least part of my backlog of movies I haven't managed even to mention, but I have to make time for whatever this was.
Thank you!! I'll watch that on the laptop.
Enjoy! I couldn't understand afterward why I had never seen or seriously heard about it as a retelling of the Titanic—it doesn't have a blockbuster budget, but it wears its historical detail unshowily, it works against several popular simplifications of the disaster in ways that are narratively more thought-provoking, and it never falls into soap opera despite the breadth of its cast. It really emphasizes the ordinariness of the voyage until all of a sudden it had turned into the unthinkable. It never rushes the audience with irony. And David Warner is adorable.