Candygram?

[cleolinda]

@cleolinda: Extremely Crappy Draft: 173,749 words. Enter stage two: Readable Draft.

@cleolinda: Precisely! RT @particle_person: Yes! That is enough words to still have lots of book left when you toss the half that don’t work right!

@cleolinda: I guess it’s not really time for a victory lap yet. Maybe a victory… skip.

@alliancesjr: Admit it, you’

Comments

[glass_radical]

Mark Ruffalo has a lot of feelings about democracy which is....arousing to say the least.

Can't believe how much of a nonissue this is in the news.

[cleolinda]

Yeah... as someone pointed out, if this were the Tea Party, it would be a national crisis.

[glass_radical]

I follow a lot of news outlets on Twitter, NYTimes included and if *Mark Ruffalo* wasn't tweeting, I would have absolutely no sense of the scope of any of it. That's a little weird and wrong.

[cleolinda]

I am pretty much getting my news from Mark Ruffalo and Beth at BPAL's Twitter, with @BreakingNews and the NYT occasionally breaking in. It's kind of wrong, yeah.

[ppyajunebug]

Apparently my aunt and uncle and cousins from South America who were visiting NYC for the first time accidentally stumbled upon the protest while being tourists. My uncle (who speaks no English) got handed a sign that he apparently just carried around with everyone because he had no clue it was railing against the government. I guess I should be glad he didn't get arrested.

[bosswolf]

I am NOT a big fan of Victorian lit (I am a medievalist, I like my stories to rhyme and/or alliterate, tyvm), but I ADORE 'Turn of the Screw'. First read it in my undergrad days, and have read it multiple times since as I get to teach it to first years. And I do mean 'get to'. My opinion changes on it every time I read it, I discover something new each time, and in every discussion I learn more about it (from my first years! whose brains are imploding from narrators! and ambiguity! and sex? and ghosts!? and... etc.!)... I've even learned from this post!

...I really need to watch the film of it.

/ drive by lit-nerding

[cleolinda]

Hee! There's more than one film of it, though--I think there was a recent-ish one with Jodhi May, even. And apparently Marlon Brando was Peter Quint in a 1970s prequel that involved bondage. I don't even know.

[litlover12]

Somehow, that DOES sound like something Marlon Brando would have done in the 1970s.

[keristars]

Just wanted to post and say that The Turn of the Screw is one of my favorite books ever for the reasons you mention here - that you can't pin down a single interpretation, because there's always something a bit off and not quite satisfying to the explanation, and it's all so creepy and disturbing. I like to read it in the middle of winter, right around Christmas. :)

Actually, I saw the Innocents back in 2002 in my AP English Lit class and we all lamented back then that it wasn't readily available on DVD. My teacher had to special order a VHS via ...eBay or something? from New Zealand to get us a copy. I saw that you were sad it couldn't be found on Netflix Streaming (or Gaslight, which is also wonderful), and reminded me of that. I always loved the music in the Innocents and how it's so haunting but whimsical and youthful... it's just a wonderful motif

[cleolinda]

Okay, so I'm not just lazy, it really is hard to find? Wait, apparently there's a DVD that came out in 2005. I'll have to put that on my Christmas list or something.

[keristars]

Yeah, it really is difficult to find (or was). I'd put a lot of effort into trying to get my own copy for a few years, but it was always far too expensive for me, especially since I didn't have a VHS player. Looking at Amazon now, it's a lot better than it was 7 years ago :P (Only $10.50 for the dvd)

Once you get a copy, I highly recommend watching it on an evening when you want to bundled up all cozy on the couch, with the lights off for a real cinematic experience. Watching it piecemeal on Youtube with low quality sound/images probably doesn't do justice to the choice of using black and white vs color film, or the musical motif. I say this because we of course watched it piecemeal in class, but I had a chance to watch it on tv (TCM or AMC or something) later, and even knowing the plot in advance, it was fun to indulge in the spookiness. Kind of like The Ghost and Mrs Muir or Rebecca, I suppose?

[cleolinda]

Well, I was still able to take those screencaps up there from the YouTube clips. There's some really beautiful use of light and shadow going on.

http://cleolinda.tumblr.com/post/10808951912/screencaps-from-the-innocents-the-1961-adaptation

[particle_person]

I haven't read Turn of the Screw, but I read the part you quoted as a miscarriage not a botched abortion? I dunno.

[cleolinda]

I'm just telling you what they said. I don't think I would have figured it out either way myself.

[particle_person]

Maybe James never decided either. Like "something nasty in the woodshed."

[readerofprey]

I think it definitely implies that she left because she was pregnant, so it could have been due to the pregnancy or a botched abortion; or he killed her; or she starved after leaving her job. I think the main point is that though her death was mysterious, it was definitely a result of the affair.