A Brit a Day [#915]

OK, I got all kindsa things to say about this picture.  1] Spoiler Alert!  Henry V dies!  But an even bolder choice on the part of the BBC production was to open the play with a sequence from King Henry's funeral, thus making the whole of the action a flashback--brilliant.  2] Seeing Tom Hiddleston playing the dead king is one of the most beautiful and disturbing things I've ever seen--he's my New Favorite Corpse [NFC]; and finally, 3] What is going on with the two crowns here?  Was there a special lying-down crown made for not poking the back of his head?  I guess it would be difficult to play dead if you are wincing from the pain of your crown.  "Uneasy lies the head..."  In any event, it seems to be a serious matter for the two costumers on set.  And Hiddleston hasn't even broken character as he lifts his head.  How DO you get in character to play a dead monarch?

A Brit a Day [#888]

Meet Lauren Fox, author of at least 2 novels and this brilliant short story that I stumbled upon on Salon.com the other day:

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/08/fiction_ongry_by_lauren_fox/

Now here's a huuuuuge stretch--Lauren gets to be Brit of the Day by virtue of being married to a guy from Dublin.  I know that's beyond suspect as Britishness goes, but I just had to get her onto this blog.  After all, this blog started off as a platform for my own short stories a million years ago, and you see how far that got.  People like Lauren remind me that there are enough awesome writers out there, writing about the things that needle at me, that I don't have to add my warbling voice to the many others who are singing the song in tune.

Here is how Lauren describes herself on her website:

I was born in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, into a family full of love, support, and very little grist for the dramatic mill. I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a writer, and decided that my best bet was to make stuff up. My first attempts at fiction included a tragic story about a blind Mexican orphan, and a tragic tale about a horse who dies, tragically, in a barn fire. 

 By the time I got to college and enrolled in a few creative writing classes, I learned the adage, “write what you know,” and began churning out stories about the unhappy love lives of young, thin-skinned, near-sighted, sarcastic, curly haired girls. My first published short story, which appeared in a nationally distributed college magazine, used the structure of the game show Jeopardy! to trace the demise of a relationship. (I’ll take ‘the slow erosion of my self-esteem’ for $200, Alex.) I was pleased that I had finally created fiction out of my two favorite pastimes: tv-watching and borderline obsessive pining over unavailable men. 

 After college I moved around a bit, living in Washington, DC and then for a while back in Madison, Wisconsin, bravely conducting field research for my stories about lonely women in their twenties who can’t find a date. In graduate school in Minneapolis, I took a brief detour from fiction and began writing about my family’s history and the Holocaust, which was fun. 

 When I was twenty-six, I met a nice boy from Dublin who put an end to my anthropological studies of loneliness and heartbreak. Luckily, I had gathered enough material to last for a while.

In other words, sisters, she opens her heart and our story spills out.

A Brit a Day [#876]

This is fantasy casting from a fellow Tumblrite.  I'm not completely convinced that it shouldn't be the other way around.

A Brit a Day [#864]

I've been reading Albert Speer's lengthy autobiography "Inside the Third Reich."  One thing that makes the book tolerable [I'm not a big fan of books by crooks] is that Speer is no apologist--he may not have been a sycophant to the extent of some of the others in Hitler's entourage, but he freely admits that he allowed himself to be an idiot disposed by denial and wishful thinking.  At least that's what I'm hearing.

But getting beyond that, I must say that the book is fascinating, and my jaw is sore from all the dropping at the extent of Hitler's megalomania.  Um, really, people around the Fuehrer, did you not notice what was going on?  Could you not see that it would end badly?  Does it really take the hindsight of a time lord to do that?

A Brit a Day [#860]

Cassandra Austen was Jane Austen's sister, and I made her acquaintance through the wonderfully disturbing movie 'Miss Austen Regrets.'  Here is Cassandra's rendering of Henry IV for her sister's manuscript "The History of England."  If you are wondering why Prince Hal's dad looks so ill-suited for life in the 14th century, read on--

The two Austen girls were also tutored at home in drawing and the piano. In 1791, Cassandra produced a series of circular illustrations of British monarchs for Jane's manuscript The History of England, which are noted to have resembled members of the Austen family more than royalty. [Wikipedia]

If you' d like to read more about the Austen girls' manuscript, go here--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_England_(Jane_Austen)

A Brit a Day [#817]

Tom Hiddleston from BBC's 'The Hollow Crown'.

"I feel like one who has suddenly awakened out of a feverish delirium, or like a shipwrecked man who has for many days battled with the waves that momentarily threatened to devour him and finally has found a safe shore."

           --Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, 1870

A Brit a Day [#790]

A Brit a Day [#692]

I just finished reading Beryl Bainbridge's novel, The Birthday Boys, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's tragic march to the South Pole told in turns from the point of view of the five men who died there.  Here is an excerpt from the final section, the words of Captain Titus Oates as Bainbridge imagines them--

And of course that black flag told them that Roald Amundsen and his party of Norwegian explorers had beaten them to the Pole.

The photo of Scott in his Antarctic expedition hut can be opened in another window and examined for incredible detail.  My god, you can almost smell the penguins!

By the by, Beryl Bainbridge was an incredibly talented but unsung author.  She died last year at only 77 of cancer.  Send up some love to her spirit some time by reading one of her books, this one for example, or perhaps An Awfully Big Adventure.

A Brit a Day [#663]

A week ago, I saw Daniel Craig [today's guest Brit] and Rooney Mara in 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.'  It starts to get confusing with the novel in my head as well as the Swedish language film and both of its sequels and now this, but I think I liked it a lot.  I especially liked this scene and how scared Craig's character was to have her stitch him up.  But for me, the best thing about the movie was Trent Reznor's and Atticus Ross's soundtrack.  And guess what? Atticus Ross is English.  More on that tomorrow.

A Brit a Day [#642]

My daughter is reading 'The Scarlet Letter' right now, and--I've said it before, and I'll say it again--the first time I saw this character my mind screamed 'Arthur Dimmesdale!'  There is so much repressed sexuality communicated by those slivers of white collar and cuff...by all those buttons.

A Brit a Day [#639]

If I were casting the role of Philip Marlowe today, I'd choose Henry Ian Cusick, especially as the older, edgier Marlowe of  'The Long Goodbye'.  In the only film adaptation of that novel that I know of, Elliot Gould played him.  Humphrey Bogart, who was cast by God Himself, only played Marlowe once, in the original film of 'The Big Sleep.'

A Brit a Day [#627]

Abandoned by her husband, Raymond Chandler's mother moved her family to London in 1900 when Ray was 12 years old.  He became a naturalized British subject [and thus eligible to be today's Brit] and remained so until he regained his US citizenship in 1956.

Chandler's life story makes your heart ache, and that ache is evident in his masterpieces of fiction.  Joyce Carol Oates said

“The prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action-tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision … The reader is captivated by Chandler’s seductive prose.” 


I'm reading 'The Long Goodbye' right now.  But nothing may be as moving as the last chapter of his life which ends right here in San Diego--

[from Wikipedia]

In 1954 Pearl Eugenie (Cissy) Chandler died after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter Cissy's cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.

After Cissy's death, Chandler's loneliness worsened his natural propensity for clinical depression; he returned to drink, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of his writing suffered.

After a respite in England, he returned to La Jolla. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia (according to the death certificate) in 1959.

Raymond Chandler is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego, California. As Frank MacShane noted in his biography, The Life of Raymond Chandler, Chandler wished to be cremated and placed next to Cissy in Cypress View Mausoleum. Instead, he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery because he had left no funeral or burial instructions.^[12]

In 2010, Chandler historian Loren Latker, with the assistance of attorney Aissa Wayne (daughter of John Wayne), brought a petition to disinter Cissy's remains and reinter them with Chandler in Mount Hope. After a hearing September 2010 in San Diego Superior Court, Judge Richard S. Whitney entered an order granting Latker's request.^[13]

On Valentine's Day (February 14) 2011, Cissy's ashes were conveyed from Cypress View to Mount Hope, and interred under a new grave marker above Chandler's, as they had wished.^[14] About one hundred people attended the ceremony, which included readings by the Rev. Randal Gardner, Powers Boothe, Judith Freeman and Aissa Wayne. The shared gravestone reads "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts", a quote from The Big Sleep. A video of the ceremony is available at http://raymondchandler.info/reunite. Chandler's original gravestone, placed by Jean Fracasse, is still at the head of his grave, while the new one is at the foot.

A Brit a Day [#605]

Eddie Argos and Dyan Valdes, a.k.a. Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now.

I hope my friends, now residents of Berlin, have discovered the novels by Philip Kerr that make up the Bernie Gunther trilogy, collectively known as Berlin Noir.

Enjoy:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Violets

A Brit a Day [#565]

I looked forward to this scene from the first time I read it in the book:  Snape flies away without benefit of a broom.  Who could resist a man who does something as bad ass as that?

A Brit a Day [#514]

Ian Rankin was born the same year as me, but he has been channeling a much older man since 1987. Rankin is the author of the Edinburgh-set crime novels featuring police detective John Rebus. I am reading 64-year-old Rebus's "retirement" novel right now, 'Exit Music.' [Note to self: cast Alan Rickman as John Rebus in the movie playing in my head.] Kinda don't want it to ever end.

A Brit a Day [#501]

Get More: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

At the New York opening of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,' Alan Rickman was awarded the MTV Harry Potter World Cup, signifying Professor Snape's victory as the most loved of all the HP characters. I've made no secret of the fact that I have been a loyal Snape supporter since the first time Alan Rickman burst through the potions class door in HP1. I'll never forgive Chris Columbus for cutting that scene short and then Warner Brothers' hiding that deleted scene in an impossibly labyrinthine game on the DVD.

Anyway, there isn't much I can say about the Snape/Rickman chemistry [pun acknowledged but not really intended] that hasn't been said already. So I'll just be quiet and let the loveliness do the talking.

A Brit a Day [#498]

I'm currently reading 'Around the World in 80 Days' by Jules Verne. Verne's visions and sensibilities have been such an inspiration to me as a designer in the past [not to mention the whole steampunk movement], I thought it was time that I absorb some of lessons first hand. His name and legacy have recently come up when I was reading 'Valhalla Rising' by Clive Cussler.

With this description of Fogg, I present an image of Henry Ian Cusick, stolen from the Darwin bio-pic he did a few years ago.--

He appeared to be a man about forty years of age, with fine, handsome features, and a tall, well-shaped figure; his hair and whiskers were light, his forehead compact and unwrinkled, his face rather pale, his teeth magnificent. His countenance possessed in the highest degree what physiognomists call "repose in action," a quality of those who act rather than talk.

A Brit a Day [#494]

A number of years ago I thought I heard that Alan Rickman was going to perform in a movie called 'Manchester United Ruined My Life.' I waited and waited, and sadly nothing ever came of it, in fact, it doesn't even exist as a project on IMDB. I've recently read the book on which it was going to be based, and I can only guess that the script would have been written by the book's author, the Mancusian screenwriter and producer Colin Shindler.

So at least we have the book, which is delightful with one caveat--you have to have been rabid for a sport or a team at some time for the book's emotional momentum to resonate. Most of us fall into that category, certainly, but it helps if that sports team is a perennial underdog as Shindler's beloved Manchester City FC has been for most of his life.

The book's cover shows that Shindler keeps his priorites straight, for this is firstly a book about family. I can imagine that when Shindler began his screenplay, he might have had Alan Rickman in mind to play his eccentric Uncle Lawrence.

Just for fun, I'd like to add the image from the front of James Blunt's 'Some Kind of Trouble'--

I don't suppose James Blunt supports Manchester City?....

A Brit a Day [#462]

Alex Turner is stepping aside just for today.

I finished reading Seamus Heaney's translation of 'Beowulf' last night, and while I do NOT intend to see the 2007 movie, for all kinds of reasons, I was interested to learn that Brendan Gleeson played Wiglaf. Wiglaf, in the poem, ends up in the morally superior position of being the only one of Beowulf's men who does not run away in fear from the dragon. Brendan Gleeson will always be, first in my mind, Mad-Eye Moody.

A Brit a Day [#458]

Sounds like the opening lines of a great comic book, huh? These are the opening lines of the epic poem 'Beowulf' from a translation that was published in 1999. Today's Brit is it's translator, Seamus Heaney. Heaney is a Nobel Prize winning poet in his own right, and despite being Irish, he is a technical Brit, coming from Northern Ireland. In the introduction to 'Beowulf,' he explains that the music/language of his translation from Old to Modern English owes its life to the 'big voice' of his father's Ulster relatives. I'm very excited to report that I began reading Heaney's 'Beowulf' today, and unlike my high school acquaintance with it, this time I don't think I'll be consulting the Cliff Notes.