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No, not those, those are my time-travel trousers
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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lesser_celery and I are starting Millennium (1996–99) tonight.
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Earl Grey? Yes, please!
Other Kenjari used to watch Millenium, and he enjoyed it quite a bit.
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And yay for Milennium! Fair warning: As with every serialized narrative, it take a few ep.s to find its feet, but I think you'll nevertheless be able to enjoy aspects of it right from the get-go. I often think it plays a lot better removed from its fin-de-siecle context; what seemed like haphazard commentary on current events takes on a certain historical flavour, allowing us to be vaguely nostalgic rather than been-there-seen-that about certain now-classic tropes. But one way or the other, Frank Black's a fine, mournful protagonist trapped in a world of horrifying symbolism--your kind of guy.;))
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*snugs*
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re: "Auspices"
Gorgeous. Thank you.
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Never; I think when it aired originally, the only show I was watching was Babylon 5.
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Thank you!
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No!
"Keep your sodding coffee in a proper copper coffee pot . . ."
I am so entertained. Thank you.
Other Kenjari used to watch Millenium, and he enjoyed it quite a bit.
Another reason!
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Thank you!
I don't know why my brain suddenly came out of remission in August, but I'd like it to stick around for September, please. (I realize this metaphor sounds as though I'll die of it. Right now, I'll take that chance.)
I often think it plays a lot better removed from its fin-de-siecle context; what seemed like haphazard commentary on current events takes on a certain historical flavour, allowing us to be vaguely nostalgic rather than been-there-seen-that about certain now-classic tropes.
I love when art becomes accidentally documentary, especially when it was aiming for a different kind of topicality entirely.
Frank Black's a fine, mournful protagonist trapped in a world of horrifying symbolism--your kind of guy.
At least I have good taste when I'm obvious!
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I apologize to your teeth, but for the rest I'm honored!
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Thank you.
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You're very welcome! I could do no less.
As if his highest plot, to plant the bergamot
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Thank you!
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I'm very glad!
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Thank you for introducing me to chap-hop. I... I think I'm in love. Skinny men with goofy facial expressions and British eyebrows, shirtless and wearing pith helmets? Gets me every time. *seeks out everything else by these people*
And on a much less fun front:
Oh, Orson Scott Card, no. Bigotry AND bad writing? He offends my senses in a specific and repulsive way.
Back in 2004 at Viable Paradise, I wrote a story called "Johannes and the Dane" based on one of the instructors' plot bunnies. It's not the deepest thing ever, but I remember it as being funny, and it involves Hamlet/Horatio. (Dr. Faustus might take us into problematic predatory-gay-guy territory, and I'll have to check whether his role is offensive to present-day self before I go any further.) It later went the rounds of every magazine I knew and got turned down from all. Since then I've sometimes thought of making it free on LJ for a special occasion. To Hell With Orson Scott Card Day might be just that occasion.
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Have you seen Near Dark (1987)? It's an interesting vampire film that stars a lot of the Aliens cast, including Henriksen. It's directed by Katherine Bigelow (who did The Hurt Locker), and never uses the word "vampire". Despite a little 80s cheesiness, it's worth a look.
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Three episodes in: awesome.
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I may propose it as a chaser to Millennium. I've never seen anything by Kathryn Bigelow, and it's always sounded like a good place to start.
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It really is like someone created an entire genre for your id. Mazel tov!
*seeks out everything else by these people*
(Dr. Faustus might take us into problematic predatory-gay-guy territory, and I'll have to check whether his role is offensive to present-day self before I go any further.)
Please do post if it has not been visited by the Problematic Fairy. And if by some sad chance it has, I submit a formal request for new and shiny Wittenberg slash; bonus points if Mephistopheles looks in on the plot at some point and just wanders off, shaking his head.
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So far we've had Yeats and Auden; I'll take it.
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Dude. I look forward.
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All right, thank you!
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heheh.
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I am looking forward to seeing what they will do with that film, though I do not think that d|p is terribly interested in seeing it. In all other things, we agree, but our taste in movies is often north and south.
Orson Scott Fucking Card. I feel as though he is that man, that creepy, creepy man who exists in a corner somewhere doing foul little things and you do your best to ignore him because he's clearly had some awful damage that put him in that corner. Then you find out he hasn't, but now you ignore him because he is embarrassing but every once in a while someone comes in, points to the corner and asks "what is that funny little man doing?" And then you look and OH MY GODS I CANNOT UNSEE THAT. He's like the avatar of a very specific application of the Motif of Harmful Sensation.
The gorgon's asshole, perhaps.
I wish I wasn't remote controlling my work desktop from elsewhere to slip into the internet. I enjoyed "Fighting Trousers," and if this something new in that vein, I am prepared to be amused.
Speaking of which, say hello to Lucy Butler for me. Actually, just run. (She shows up near the end of season 1)
Millenium is an interesting show. It was funny to watch when I was watching LOST as well, since Terry O'Quinn plays characters in both whose prime failing is that they steadfastly refuse to listen to someone nearby who is always right.
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Thank you. I do take you seriously.
Any chance of the magazine getting a review in Versification? I have no idea how one goes about that sort of thing, except that I'd love to see the major (and minor) speculative magazines reviewed regularly, not just as chance and taste take them.
In all other things, we agree, but our taste in movies is often north and south.
It's not so much the film itself—the cast is a gallery of character actors to queue for, never mind the source material or the director—as the fact that I consider the original 1979 BBC series to be one of the great Platonic adaptations of novel to film and I can see almost no way of improving on it, except perhaps in the casting of Toby Esterhase. (I am very fond of Bernard Hepton, but he is very little like the slight, silvery, self-acknowledged "creep" of the novel; for which I blame the script more than the actor, since he is nearly pitch-perfect in Smiley's People (1982), where the character is written much more closely to the books.) Six hours is the appropriate runtime for a novel, especially one with such a controlled complexity of stories within stories, plots within plots. Compressed, it might retain the bleak, exhausted busywork of post-imperial espionage where a cold war is no substitute for the lines that everyone once knew drew allegiances comfortingly here and there, where there were never any heroes, but now there are even fewer friends; but I think by necessity much of the individual richness will be sacrificed, the slow accumulation of lies and rumors and the brittle evidence of memory that all together mean something like a horror novel, those fabled things that no one was meant to know. I love Colin Firth, but Ian Richardson looked like Bill Haydon: "The leather patches of his jacket were stitched on like diamonds, not squares, which from behind gave him a harlequin look. His spectacles were jammed up into his hair like goggles. For a moment they followed [Peter Guillam] uncertainly . . . Then he grinned, so that his crescent eyebrows went straight up like a clown's, and his face became handsome and absurdly young." And I am sorry, Gary Oldman is not Alec Guinness, who got so deeply into le Carré's head as Smiley that his acting in Tinker, Tailor influenced the writing of Smiley's People (a hall of mirrors, since Guinness in turn was stealing from le Carré himself). I would like to see the film, but I am afraid it will register constantly as an unsatisfactory, beautifully surfaced kind of Cliff's notes, which would not be fair.
The gorgon's asshole, perhaps.
Thank you for that image.
Someone who isn't me should write the Big Gay Hamlet where Hamlet's father is gay, Gertrude was a dynastic marriage, and that's why he's always off at war, kicking ass and taking Norwegian names, because fighting, he's very good at; trying to be a husband to a woman he never wanted in the first place, who'd much have preferred his brother and doesn't even make a secret of it, not so much.
I enjoyed "Fighting Trousers," and if this something new in that vein, I am prepared to be amused.
This is "Fighting Trousers," I'm afraid, but
Speaking of which, say hello to Lucy Butler for me. Actually, just run.
. . . So noted.
Millenium is an interesting show.
I really should write it up; it just hasn't been a conducive day. Three episodes in, I'm just in love.
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Congratulations!
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I'm none too sure I'll see it, either, but the interview was enjoyable. Thanks for sharing it.
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Good grief. I'm tired of Orson Scott Card already, but his approach to Shakespeare is unbelieveable. I can't believe anyone would do that with Hamlet, even aside from the strangeness of adding massive homophobia whilst reducing the Hamlet-Ophelia relationship to nothing _and_ splicing in a strain of Hamlet/Horatio. If he thinks there needs to be a contemporary version, why not simply retell the sodding story?
His attitude towards Elizabethan language alone makes me sick. Any reasonably educated fluent English speaker is perfectly capable of reading Early Modern English, given modern typefaces and decent glosses. Someone like OSC, who claims to value older traditions of education, ought to reflect on the fact that the grandparents and great-grandparents of many contemporary Americans, products of the culture he idealises, were well able to read the Bible in the Rheims-Douay or King James translations, despite speaking an English not greatly removed from our own. For God's sake, my mother's grandparents knew reams of Shakespeare off by heart; they weren't native English speakers, and neither of them had a college degree.
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Enjoy! I'm curious to hear what you think of it. I never watched it extensively, but I remember watching a few episodes, as a friend of mine was fairly into it roundabouts 1998.
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Thank you!
Someone like OSC, who claims to value older traditions of education, ought to reflect on the fact that the grandparents and great-grandparents of many contemporary Americans, products of the culture he idealises, were well able to read the Bible in the Rheims-Douay or King James translations, despite speaking an English not greatly removed from our own. For God's sake, my mother's grandparents knew reams of Shakespeare off by heart; they weren't native English speakers, and neither of them had a college degree.
You know you're awesome, right? I'm not being facetious.
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Yay!
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You're welcome!
You know you're awesome, right? I'm not being facetious.
Thank you. I'm honoured. (Also, I have to confess, blushing slightly.)
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Alas, I can drink neither coffee nor tea—my reply to "Herbal?" is "Yes, please, unless I want to die"—but I do appreciate the lifestyle in abstract.
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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.
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