of matters light and dark

[selenak]

Quote of the day: "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a jolly, jocose gentleman walking about the earth with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch you would greatly oblige me." Kate Perugini, nee Kate Dickens, to George Bernard Shaw about her father Charles.

Moving on to comics: Wil Wheaton blogs about favourite comic

Comments

[shezan]

Armitage reads well, but it's not his natural voice; he's from the Midlands, not Yorkshire.

[selenak]

And here I thought that in the Richard III related interview I read last year he mentioned being a Yorkshire man?

[shezan]

His father's family has roots in Yorkshire but he grew up near Leicester & Birmingham.

[andraste_oz]

Oh, thank you so much for the links to the Hughes letters. I have a deep love for both Hughes and Richard Armitage, or "the Grim Northerner" as he's known in our house :)

(I did my Masters thesis on Plath, and I have such a deep sympathy for Hughes from that. And for Plath too. I can't imagine either of them were easy to live with, and I hate the way the relationship is so often distilled down to a very simplistic dynamic when there was so obviously so much going on internally and externally for both of them)

And now to read your review of the Letters!

[selenak]

Yes, I wouldn't have wanted to be involved with either of them, but I feel for and admire them both, and it doesn't do anyone a service to simplify the relationship into something black and white and take all their complexities from them. (And don't get me started on people who basically complain about Frieda Hughes loving her father, because clearly this means she hates her mother/doesn't respect her mother/is "hysterical" - that was actually the word I saw used in an essay - "her hysterical defense of a man who etc.")

[airie_fairy]

Man, I love how angry Charles Dickens is. Whether over justice or something incredibly petty or somehow managing to do both at the same time over the same thing, I just...*giggles*

I'm apparently incapable of taking even those I'm fond of seriously.

[selenak]

Have you read George Orwell's essay on Dickens? He's both impressed and non-reverential plus occasionally amused as well.

[airie_fairy]

I haven't, and I'm surprised I haven't!

[selenak]

Voilà:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Charles_Dickens/0.html

It's my favourite Dickens essay of them all.

[diotimah]

Beautiful and moving. Thanks for posting this. Although I agree, instead of footage from the Sylvia movies, evocative from places the had been to (or lived in) together, the letter itself etc., and preferable without human images, would have made it even more atmospheric. But what a voice!:)

[selenak]

And it's not like there is lack of material on places and manuscripts. Ah well.

Richard Armitage also did some Ted Hughes poetry reading, I think. He's been consistently good in everything I've seen him in. I'm very curious about his Thorin Oakenshield in the new Hobbit film!

[diotimah]

And it's not like there is lack of material on places and manuscripts. Ah well.

Absolutely.

I'm very curious about his Thorin Oakenshield in the new Hobbit film!

Sounds indeed promising. I'm curious as well.;)