No, not those, those are my time-travel trousers

[sovay]

1. My poem "Taking the Auspices" is now online at inkscrawl. The rest of the issue is impressive, too—selkies, Catullus, cities in translation.

2. I still don't know that I'm going to see Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), but I will take any excuse to read an interview with John Hurt, especially when he talks about weedkilling and Facebook: "I think people should be protected from being made to feel that they want to know what somebody famous had for breakfast."

3. Counteract Orson Scott Card; help rachelmanija list queer main characters in genre YA. Also, write Hamlet slash.

4. Courtesy of someone I met, appropriately, on Sunday at Tea: chap-hop.

5. lesser_celery and I are starting Millennium (1996–99) tonight.

Comments

[sovay]

And why is Benedict Cumberbatch in everything lately? And Tom Hardy, really?

Tom Hardy I think will be fine, but Benedict Cumberbatch is about ten years too young for Peter Guillam—when Percy Alleline refers to him repeatedly as "young Peter Guillam," it is heavy-handed and paternalistic, not an accurate reflection of the forty-year-old with an undergraduate look, but all the wear and tear of accumulated years with the Circus and then his networks in North Africa, hanged to a man. One of the reasons Michael Jayston works so well in the part is that boyish lightness in his bones, except around his eyes where you can see the skin is beaten thin, the fine cracks to either side of his mouth; he's tough and quick-moving, but in five years he won't be able to pass for "an undergraduate sculling on the river," or even thirty.

I cannot imagine anyone else as Smiley—if Gary Oldman can pull off Guinness' anonymity, it will be a chameleon coup. I cannot imagine anyone else as Jim Prideaux.