#Frank Forster

[fmajorenthusiast]

Frank: *walks by*

Brad: I'd hit that

Janet: I know you don't like him Brad, but violence is never the answer

Brad: Right yeah violence... that's what I meant... I'd hit that with my fists

[marryat92]

Marryat Sighting in the Wild

Fort Malden National Historic Site, located in Amherstburg, Ontario, shared this historic log of library books borrowed by soldiers on their Facebook page. The garrison established a library to encourage literacy amongst the troops.

While the year of this record of library transactions isn't given, it appears to be from 1837 or later, and it's full of Captain Marryat's books! The titles include Newton Forster, The Pacha of Many Tales, [The] Naval Officer (the alternate title for Frank Mildmay), Japhet in Search of a Father, [The] King's Own, and Snarleyyow or the Dog Fiend.

Marryat's fiction predominates in this snapshot of literature enjoyed by soldiers in southwestern Ontario, with several titles written down more than once. Interestingly, this is around the same period of Marryat's North American tour that resulted in his travelogue called Diary in America, and I know that he was present in the Great Lakes region near Fort Malden (which is across from Detroit).

Did the Captain pay a visit to his local fans? Either way, it appears that his works were very popular at Fort Malden.

[yosoybaxter]

[oldshowbiz]

Perhaps the most underrated network program of 1967.

[cuttysarkmag]

It's officially PRIDE! We here at Cutty Sark have a lot to celebrate this month. Like a normal 19th century sailing vessel, there's lots of gay people at our helm.

Anyways, we wanted to take a moment to honor the queer writers who not only made it possible for us to be here in the writing world, but continue to reinstate a fact which should seem antiquated by this point: queer people belong in this world, today, tomorrow, and yesterday. Although there's still lots to be done in ways of gaining rights for the LGBTQIA+ community in the United States and internationally, we are able to be stronger when we can remember how far we've come. If you are a queer writer, we encourage you to submit to Cutty Sark (cuttysarkmag.com). It doesn't matter whether or not your pieces directly relate to queer activism. Your existence is power.

Now, on with the list of our favorite books by queer writers:

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (fiction) Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara (poetry) Crush by Richard Siken (poetry) On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (fiction) Howl by Allen Ginsberg (poetry) Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (poetry) Dog Songs by Mary Oliver (poetry) Hunger by Roxane Gay (nonfiction) Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (nonfiction) Exit Pastoral by Aidan Forster (poetry) Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (poetry) Indigo by Ellen Bass (poetry)

[fandom-athenaeum]

The Office - S4 Ep10 Branch Wars

--

Books:

A Room With A View by E.M. Forster

Memoirs Of A Geisha by Arthur Golden

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt.

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Lit Hub: The Question of Homoeroticism in Whitman’s Poetry

Walt Whitman’s best poems demonstrate an almost unimaginable prescience; he and Dickinson, among 19th-century American poets, possess a nearly chilling self-consciousness, an acute self-analysis. Edward Carpenter, the British anarchist, writer, and champion of the Arts and Crafts movement whose life and romance were the model for E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, wrote this elegant description of a visit with Whitman in 1877; the emphases are Carpenter’s own: “If I had thought before (and I do not know that I had) that Whitman was eccentric, unbalanced, violent, my first interview certainly produced quite a contrary effect. No one could be more considerate, I may almost say courteous; no one could have more simplicity of manner and freedom from egotistic wrigglings; and I never met any one who gave me more the impression of knowing what he was doing more than he did.” That there were words for homosexual behavior in Whitman’s day there can be no doubt. Social structures for enabling same-sex congress seem to have been a feature of life in the modern city at least since the later 18th century, when the “Molly houses” in London offered a zone of permission for transvestism. Herman Melville, in Redburn, carefully evokes the nattily dressed fellows who hang out in front of a downtown restaurant where opera singers perform; he means us to understand what these stylish outfits convey. Historian and theorist Luc Sante describes a 19th-century pamphlet that takes as its project the publication of the locations of various quite particular spots of diverse sexual practice in New York City—so that those informed of, say, the address of a bordello featuring willing boys can take special care to avoid this hazard. Trenchant evidence comes from Rufus Griswold’s review of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: “We have found it impossible to convey any, even the most faint idea of style and contents, and of our disgust and detestation of them, without employing language that cannot be pleasing to ears polite; but it does seem that someone should, under circumstances like these, undertake a most disagreeable, yet stern duty. The records of crime show that many monsters have gone on in impunity, because the exposure of their vileness was attended with too great indelicacy. Peccatum illud horrible, inter Christianos non nominandum.” Which is all a way of saying that Whitman inscribes his sexuality on the frontier of modernity; he is writing into being—particularly in the “Calamus” poems of 1860, with their frank male-to-male loving, their assumption of equality on the part of the lovers—a new situation. He does not know how to proceed—he has no path —but he does it anyway. My guess is that he couldn’t have written “Calamus,” or the boldly homoerotic portions of the 1855 Leaves, even ten years later, as the advent of psychology increasingly led to a public perception of the normative, and imagery of the sacred family becomes the object of Victorian romance. As a category of identity—sodomite, invert, debauchee, pervert, Uranian—begins to emerge, so the poems with their claims of a loving, healthy, freely embraced same-sex desire become unwriteable, paradoxically, just as new language of homosexual identity begins to appear. Unwriteable, and, it would seem from Whitman’s later remarks, and some of his revisions, barely defensible. Carpenter and his readers were reaching for signposts of a gay identity when such a thing barely existed, but Whitman is ultimately a queer poet in the deepest sense of the word: he destabilizes, he unsettles, he removes the doors from their jambs. There is an uncanniness in “Song of Myself” and the other great poems of the 1850s that, for all his vaunted certainty, Whitman wishes to underscore. Again and again, he points us toward what, it seems, must remain folded in the buds beneath speech, since it cannot be brought to the surface. (Full article)

[farewellstarstuff]

Days before Christmas | flochjean (friends, just friends)

kinda modern au

wc: 1,3k

summary: Jean and Floch, as two people who can't stand each other, search of a Christmas tree (a bit of humor, fluff, frank conversations and jeanmarco as a mention)

"This one is too small"

"And this one is too huge"

"Mangy"

"Scary"

"Looks like you"

"Why is it?"

"The same red and small," Jean bursts into laughter, to which Floch rolls his eyes, pointedly turning away.

For the last few hours, they had been choosing a Christmas tree together. But Mikasa, who sent them together, did not think what a scandal this little request could turn into. Floch looked at everything from a completely different side than Jean. They couldn't agree on the taste of yogurt, let alone something as important as a Christmas tree.

The situation was also worsened by the fact that there were only a few days left before the holiday and all the good trees had long been dismantled. There were only the little ones, the giants, and this one, because of which Jean could not stop laughing for several minutes.

Floch was not enthusiastic about the idea of shopping together; he and Jean did not quite get along. At first, Floch himself was to blame for this and his desire to join Eren's company. He had been the center of his small on before, but he wanted more. He wanted to be in the co of a cool guy from the course, hang out with him, and not look enviously at his social media profile.

Who knew that Jean had been in the company all time, who treated new faces with either jealousy or contempt. They quarreled over everything: over projects, over the desire to be in the center, over the compliments that Jean paid to Mikasa, and Floch turned each of them into a joke. The last, biggest argument, because of which Mikasa sent them together, was an argument about who would be liable for the purchase of the Christmas tree.

The argument almost came to a fight, but Ackerman intervened just in time. She shoved the jacket into everyone's hands and sent them to look for the tree together.

So, she said, it would definitely be useful. Floch chuckled inwardly. This girl's naive hope that they would reconcile was really hilarious.

"Let's try another store, I found it," Floch handed Jean a phone with an open card, and he finally became serious.

"Come on," he drawled lazily, buttoning his coat.

The winter in Paradise has been extremely snowy this year. The snowdrifts reached human height in some places, which Jean continued to tease about. Unlike Forster, he towered over the snow, while Floch saw only white walls around.

It wasn't long to get to the next store, but even in those miserable five minutes, Jean managed to piss off Floch before an unexpected snow battle. Floch did not win it, of course. On the contrary, he spat snow the rest of the way and shook it out of his jacket.

"If we don't find a normal one, then we'll go back and choose from those," Floch muttered, sniffing his way through the crowd.

"For the first and I hope the last time, I agree with you," Jean grinned, clinging to the sleeve of Floch's bright uniform jacket so as not to get lost.

A sigh of joy escaped the lips of both when they finally reached the department with Christmas trees. There were a lot more of them here. One single, medium, fluffy and the brightest of all caught the attention of both.

"Here it is," Jean whispered, holding out his hands to where Floch was staring.

The three of them went out into the street: Floch, Jean and the tree on Jean's shoulder. The return trip was surprisingly not spent in silence, as it had been all the time before. Whether it was relief or they were just getting used to each other, the dialogue was surprisingly calm. There were not even any jokes.

Jean was telling how they celebrated Christmas last year at Marco's house. Numerous Bott’s siblings were doing stupid things, and he and Marco constantly had to keep an eye on them. But with all this, Jean missed those moments, especially Christmas itself. They spent it just the two of them, watching movies all day, playing snowballs in the evening, and after that they had a delicious dinner. And lights, gifts, bright packaging, happy smiles, amount of presents. Jean was dreaming and only on the way to the building noticed how sad Floch was.

"Why are you celebrating here this year?" Forster suddenly asked, looking up from his shoes. Jean felt his breath catch in his throat. There was nothing but sadness in his eyes.

"Marco has some problems in his family, they only asked him to come," Jean shrugged, lowering the tree to the ground. When he successfully leaned it against the wall, he finally felt how much it had been pressing on his shoulders.

Floch twitched the corners of his mouth, but instead of a supportive smile, it turned out to be some foolishness. Jean sighed.

"Are you all right?" Jean suddenly asked, which made Floch look down again and blush noticeably.

"This is my second year celebrating here. That year, everyone left, and those who stayed did not communicate with me. Not Christmas, but a holiday of loneliness. And this year I kind of got into the company I dreamed of, and here you are. I'm not blind, and I'm certainly not stupid – I can see that you're uncomfortable in my company. I thought at least this Christmas would be good. But, apparently, I'm interfering with the holiday."

Floch kicked the snow that had not yet been removed and hurried to hide his face in a wide scarf. He did not want Jean and his occasionally kind heart to begin their stormy activity now.

No consolations, no promises. Floch didn't want any of this. He didn't even want to say that, his tongue loosened by itself.

Jean was silent. He had never thought that Floch was actually so lonely. Honestly, there wasn't a moment to think about it. There was always a lot of life around Jean: there was Marco, there were quarrels with Eren, there was a secret crush on Mikasa, there were long conversations with Armin and many, many more things. But he never wondered what the others had. That was the same pain in the ass, the annoying Floch, who clung to their company a couple of months ago. Even Eren was not happy with Floch, but allowed him to stay.

Perhaps he was also hooked by someone else's unspoken pain.

"Look, I shouldn't have said that," Floch nervously pinched the bridge of his nose and continued without turning around. "I shouldn't have said all that, I'm sorry. These are just my problems, you don't need to think about them."

"You’re so dumb," Jean sighed heavily, coming closer. Floch wanted to jerk to the side, but with one movement, Jean trapped him in his huge hands.

The hug turned out surprisingly strong. Jean did not expect this from himself, but there was nowhere else to go. He felt Floch freeze, his hands still in his jacket pockets. He doesn't even seem to have changed in his face. A moment passed and Floch finally gave up. He raised his hands and patted Jean weakly on his back.

To hide the sudden tears he squeezed his eyes shut. Crying on the shoulder of yesterday's not a friend, but an enemy was impossible. It was a weakness. But Jean still felt the strangled sobs.

And he just squeezed his hands tighter.

Mikasa, who was watching them from the second-floor window, smiled faintly. Next to her, Armin patted her shoulder approvingly. The plan, which had seemed dubious to him from the very beginning, surprisingly worked. And it was good.

(author: I congratulate myself on the first plus or minus full-fledged, slightly silly and open in the final text, I think about a series of Christmas little stories about the aot guys, soooo will see)

[cosmogyros]

Normally I don't plan my reading in advance, because I simply follow whenever my fancy leads me, but this challenge seems fun! 25 books I want to read in 2025 - let's go.

(I've been missing the classics recently, so this list is a bit classic-heavy. Also I ended up being unable to keep it to 25. Oops.)

Color coding:

pink = fiction

green = nonfiction

An asterisk means it's a book I already own in physical form.

As I read books on this list, I will italicize them.

1. Willa Cather - My Ántonia

2. Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

3. Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

4. Han Kang - Human Acts

5. Geraldine Brooks - Horse

6. Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone - This Is How You Lose the Time War

7. Ruth Kinna - The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism

8. John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath

9. Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

10. Leslie Feinberg - Stone Butch Blues

11. Mary Doria Russell - The Sparrow

12. Banana Yoshimoto - Kitchen

13. Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States

14. Betty Smith - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

15. Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from the Underground

16. Upton Sinclair - The Jungle

17. Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths*

18. Olga Tokarczuk - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

19. Akwaeke Emezi - Little Rot

20. Naomi Klein - No Logo

21. Hengameh Yaghoobifarah - Ministerium der Träume

22. Kim de l'Horizon - Blutbuch

23. Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing*

24. Susanna Clarke - Piranesi

25. E. M. Forster - Maurice

26. Richard Adams - Watership Down

27. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

28. Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady

29. Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

30. Frank Herbert - Dune

Additionally, I'm going to tag on a second goal list. My "currently reading" pile has become way too huge, because I have a fickle heart and tend to hop around from book to book (or, as Bertie Wooster would say, I "flit and sip" like a butterfly). So I'm aiming to finish at least five books that I already started in 2024:

1. Albert Einstein - Essays in Humanism

2. Daniela Dröscher - Lügen über meine Mutter

3. Priscilla Murolo & A. B. Chitty - From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

4. Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks*

5. Simon Blackburn - Think: A Compelling Intro to Philosophy*

[measureformeasure]

december reads

what even happened this month. i sure don't know or remember. bold for faves as usual

books

Facing Down the Furies, Edith Hall

Conclave, Robert Harris

Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, Nicole Loraux trans. Anthony Forster

Skim, Mariko and Gillian Tamaki (reread)

Notes on Directing, Frank Hauser

Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison

Greek Lessons, Han Kang

The Complete Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

So Sad Today, Melissa Broder (which might take my least favourite read of the year. great way to end it)

plays

Icke's Oresteia for like the 800th time

cockroach (曱甴), Ho Ka Kei

short nonfiction

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, teeny little collection of Audre Lorde essays that lived in my bag as my waiting room book for ages

We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know, Kyla Wazana Tompkins

poetry

Siren Song, Margaret Atwood

I Guess By Now I Thought I’d Be Done With Shame, Franny Choi

movies

The Return (twice)

Conclave (five..times...)

[fmajorenthusiast]

Frank: Well aren't you sugar and spice and everything nice!

Brad: Well aren't you rudeness and sarcasm and everything.... uh....

Frank: No go on, if you find something that rhymes with sarcasm and makes sense, I'll take the fall this time

[ronanlynchian]

break rhythm here: your kiss is my justice masterpost

break rhythm here is my modern au enjoltaire fic where enjolras is a brit lit professor with weird roots, him and grantaire hook up, they accidentally ghost each other, and everything works out! it's still currently a work in progress, but you can read it here !!!

if you're here *from the fic*, welcome divas! this is a masterpost of everything that's been referenced so far-- including LINKS! hit the see more; i'll also be updating this post as i update the fic :)

here is the playlist where you can listen to every song i've referenced :)

title: a poem of love in eleven lines - gerrit lansing

chapter one:

ulysses - alfred, lord tennyson (title and ref'd in-text)

chapter two:

grace - jeff buckley

transatlanticism - death cab for cutie

lover, you should've come over - jeff buckley (title and ref'd)

mojo pin - jeff buckley

chapter three:

lover, you should've come over - jeff buckley (title and ref'd)

chapter four:

grace - jeff buckley (title)

maurice - e.m. forster

chapter five:

you & i - jeff buckley (title)

mojo pin - jeff buckley (again)

farewell, my queen - chantal thomas (no link, sorry friends)

everybody here wants you - jeff buckley

the burning heart - louise gluck

marriage morning - alfred, lord tennyson

the princess bride (no link again)

chapter six:

nightmares by the sea - jeff buckley (title)

letters between henry miller & anais nin

THE alex turner/alexa chung love letter

chapter seven:

the ghosts of beverly drive - death cab for cutie (title)

mortal kombat 9 (no link sorry)

wuthering heights - emily bronte

villette - charlotte bronte

the tenant of wildfell hall - anne bronte

jane eyre - charlotte bronte

frankenstein - mary shelley

an ideal husband - oscar wilde

emma - jane austen

playing it cool (no link sorry)

so we'll go no more a roving - lord byron guiding star - benjamin gibbard (even tho i don't specify, this is the song that r plays him)

panthea - oscar wilde

since feeling is first - e.e. cummings

to you - frank o'hara

chapter eight:

thousand fold - jeff buckley (title)

the birthday of the world - marge piercy

a birthday - christina rossetti

salvation - bell hooks

the new remorse - oscar wilde

the unbearable lightness of being - milan kundera

greek love-talk - rainer maria rilke

for hans carossa - rainer maria rilke

chapter nine:

you and me and the moon - the magnetic fields

speech & debate (no link bc it's a movie; you'll notice this is a trend)

nothing matters when we're dancing - the magnetic fields

chapter ten:

fake out - fall out boy (title)

lincoln in the bardo - george saunders

lover, you should've come over - jeff buckley (when will you guys get tired of this)

romeo & juliet - william shakespeare

my heart is the worst kind of weapon - fall out boy (in end notes)

degausser - brand new (in end notes)

you're so last summer - taking back sunday (in end notes)

chapter eleven:

if you can't leave it be, you might as well make it bleed - dashboard confessional (title)

chapter twelve:

the mixed tape - jack’s mannequin

[again and again, even though we know love’s landscape] - rilke

jane eyre - charlotte bronte

other lives and dimensions and finally a love poem - bob hicok

bulletproof… i wish i was - radiohead

colosseum - jericho brown

jesus christ - brand new

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond - ee cummings

perhaps not to be is to be without your being - pablo neruda

always - panic! at the disco

i will follow you into the dark - death cab for cutie

after the last midtown show - the academy is…

don’t go far off - pablo neruda

king lear - shakespeare

maud - alfred, lord tennyson

[13eyond13]

How many of these "Top 100 Books to Read" have you read?

(633) 1984 - George Orwell

(616) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

(613) The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger

(573) Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(550) Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

(549) The Adventures Of Tom And Huck - Series - Mark Twain

(538) Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

(534) One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(527) To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

(521) The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck

(521) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

(492) Pride And Prejudice - Jane Austen

(489) The Lord Of The Rings - Series - J.R.R. Tolkien

(488) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

(480) Ulysses - James Joyce

(471) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

(459) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

(398) The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(396) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

(395) To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

(382) War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy

(382) The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

(380) The Sound And The Fury - William Faulkner

(378) Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Series - Lewis Carroll

(359) Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

(353) Heart Of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

(352) Middlemarch - George Eliot

(348) Animal Farm - George Orwell

(346) Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

(334) Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

(325) Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

(320) Harry Potter - Series - J.K. Rowling

(320) The Chronicles Of Narnia - Series - C.S. Lewis

(317) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

(308) Lord Of The Flies - William Golding

(306) Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

(289) The Golden Bowl - Henry James

(276) Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

(266) Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

(260) The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

(255) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Series - Douglas Adams

(252) The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne

(244) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

(237) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery

(235) The Trial - Franz Kafka

(233) Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

(232) The Call Of The Wild - Jack London

(232) Emma - Jane Austen

(229) Beloved - Toni Morrison

(228) Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

(224) A Passage To India - E.M. Forster

(215) Dune - Frank Herbert

(215) A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - James Joyce

(212) The Stranger - Albert Camus

(209) One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

(209) The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(206) Dracula - Bram Stoker

(205) The Picture Of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

(197) A Confederacy Of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

(193) Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

(193) The Age Of Innocence - Edith Wharton

(193) The History Of Tom Jones, A Foundling - Henry Fielding

(192) Under The Volcano - Malcolm Lowry

(190) The Odyssey - Homer

(189) Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift

(188) In Search Of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

(186) Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

(185) An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser

(182) The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

(180) Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

(179) The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann

(178) Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

(178) Tropic Of Cancer - Henry Miller

(176) The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton

(176) On The Road - Jack Kerouac

(175) The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

(173) The Giver - Lois Lowry

(172) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

(172) A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

(171) Charlotte's Web - E.B. White

(171) The Ambassadors - Henry James

(170) Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

(167) The Complete Stories And Poems - Edgar Allen Poe

(166) Ender's Saga - Series - Orson Scott Card

(165) In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

(164) The Wings Of The Dove - Henry James

(163) The Adventures Of Augie March - Saul Bellow

(162) As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

(161) The Hunger Games - Series - Suzanne Collins

(158) Anne Of Greene Gables - L.M. Montgomery

(157) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

(157) Neuromancer - William Gibson

(156) The Help - Kathryn Stockett

(156) A Song Of Ice And Fire - George R.R. Martin

(155) The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

(154) The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

(153) I, Claudius - Robert Graves

(152) Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

(151) The Portrait Of A Lady - Henry James

(150) The Death Of The Heart - Elizabeth Bowen

[cinemaocd]

Good god, I'm watching David Lean films on my laptop and using my good headphones and they are so very much about sound, especially after Lawrence, but before on BOTRK, where the noise of the jungle was allowed to breath around the edges of the proceedings. As a designer he would never let atmosphere hamper dialog. Fond of echo effects, which he uses playfully in Lawrence of Arabia, Lean uses them to amplify the sound of a crying infant in a cave, and the rushing echo of a heart attack as heard in a dying woman's ear, to a far more mystical, almost supernatural effect.

I can't help but think David Lynch was paying close attention to David Lean.

For a man whose name is also an adjective for absence of fat, Lean's movies are ironically larded with rich sequences of landscapes, filmed in wide screen with the best technicolor. While the text of Lawrence of Arabia uses "fat" derisively to describe an imagined decadent England. (I always picture Bertie Wooster when Lawrence gets going on England being a fat country full of fat people. Not necessarily physically, but perhaps a mental blubber. ) It is a byword for decadence. The joy of course, is realizing the decadence of the experience of watching a three hour film, that takes time out to show you a troop of monkeys, a bicycle ride through tall grass, a woman passing an umbrella down a cliff as the wind absolutely booms in your ears. Lean transports you to impossible places. It is always spectacular.

I've often lamented the decade of bloated, over-long, over-budget films that followed in the wake of Lawrence of Arabia, which changed the landscape for a decade or more for better and worse. It seemed after Lawrence films got bigger but not necessarily better. Watching a master like J. Lee Thompson go from the glorious The Guns of Navarone to the excreble McKenna's Gold could inspire a strong case study against the Lawrence Effect.

Yet, it's Lean himself who makes best use of the space he made in the industry for a bigger, longer, artier film to be made in Hollywood. A Passage to India is a gorgeous film with a haunting theme. It's beautifully acted for the most part (Alec Guinness cringe aside) and manages both drawing room period drama pacing balanced against the coiled tension of Indian history. The film suffered from timing as it was released the year after Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. Two big name British filmmakers, doing period dramas set in India within a twelvemonth is a news story onto itself. Gandhi came out first: big, loud, simple-minded, ham-fisted, utterly gorgeous prestige drama that swept all the awards. The next year Lean puts out what amounts to an art house period dramedy with some interesting overtones of Forster's sexuality. That the film seems dated with its brown face and with its pussy footing around with the gay theme, when the year before Maurice was far more frank.

[filmbroandy]

got tagged by @grahhams to post 9 books i want to read in 2025 yayyyyy

you're lucky i've just recently committed to getting back into reading for real again, if i had been asked even a month ago i don't think i could've named 5. some of these are more want-to-finish than want-to-read but nevermind that.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

Maurice by E. M. Forster

The Odyssey of Homer translated by T. E. Lawrence

The Essential Dykes to Watch out For by Alison Bechdel

The Great Movies by Roger Ebert (or really anything by him tbh)

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (i neeeed to know what made obama put rpf on his summer reading list)

Teague Wars: Phase 1: The Brotherhood by Brandon Hoy (iykyk)

errrrmmmm i never do these so ill just tag the moots you can do this too if you'd like @cohendyke @misting-moors @pendularium @maliceandarrogance and all of my other beautiful followers <3

[jamesmmorgan]

GRANTATHON DAY 1: Privileged (1982) - Cloisters and Cucking

Genre: ‘Psychological Drama’

Starring: Robert Woolley, Diana Katis, HUGHIE Grant, Victoria Studd, James Wilby, Imogen Stubbs, Mark Williams

‘I demand satisfaction.’ - Lord Adrian

As films funded by the same university they are set in go, you could do a lot worse than Privileged. Our boy Mungo is credited here as little ‘Hughie Grant’, appearing in the supporting role of ‘Lord Adrian’, a legacy student who wants to get sent down from Oxford. The cast features a few noteworthy names besides Hughie: James Wilby, who we’ll be seeing again in our next film as a romantic lead alongside Grant in Merchant Ivory’s adaptation of Maurice by E.M Forster; and Imogen Stubbs, who I first saw in Frantic Assembly’s Things We Know to Be True (though I can forgive her for that).

Grant’s screen time here is limited and his character matters very little to the central plot up until the second act climax, when Adrian discovers Edward (Woolley) and Lucy’s (Studd) affair. Adrian confronts Edward at a party and hilariously challenges him to a duel, in which we get this breathtaking screengrab of Mungo:

Whoever said his earlier films didn’t showcase Hugh Grant’s range as an actor? (He did, actually)

The cinematography is very standard for low-budget films of the time, perhaps even above-average; we are treated to borderline pornographic shots of limestone structures drowned in that characteristically bleak English sunlight and the composition of much of these shots is perfectly adequate, although the quality of the picture on the copy I had when there are humans displaying a lot of emotion onscreen does sometimes result in slightly terrifying frames as above. Whenever the camera manually crash-zooms in on someone’s face in a mirror after they overhear something disconcerting, I am reminded a little of the Tales of the Unexpected series, which does befit the ‘psychological drama’ genre the film is seemingly going for. However, I would classify this more as a romantic drama, as the psychological aspects are somewhat obscured by the narrative’s indulgence in the love triangle between Edward, Anne, Lucy and Clive Durham’s special friend (portrayed by Wilby, whose character is also called 'James' -- great name).

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

With its many wide-shots of old academic buildings, play-within-a-play storyline and climactic scene of a reluctant scion turning a pistol on himself, it is very tempting to point to this work as a major influence for Peter Weir’s 1989 film Dead Poets Society, presumed zeitgeist of the ‘dark academia’ genre. But the similarities end there, to be quite frank, and I point them out only to irritate anyone reading this who thought they were clever for identifying them themselves.

I was disappointed by the lack of Mungo content overall, and especially puzzled as to Lord Adrian’s motivations in taking his own life. It’s not a student film without random suicide, I suppose, but it’s also never properly established that he is prone to self-destruction nor that he has been really backed into a corner emotionally by this point. Moreover, his death is framed with almost callous indifference by both the characters and the narrative itself. Understandable, given the cast and crew is made up of Oxford students, but dramaturgically uninteresting nonetheless as there is insufficient build-up and seemingly no fall-out. We get a few somber-ish shots of buildings (limestone is to this film as feet are to a Tarantino flick) and a line from one of the other students asking how Adrian’s cheating girlfriend is holding up, but that’s about it. The characters don’t seem to care that much that Adrian’s gone and neither does the spectator, brief as Mungo’s cameo was — that is, unless they are like yours truly, watching exclusively for Hughie and thus saddened that he was both heterosexual AND dead by the end of the film.

Even more puzzling is the loose thread of the masked attacker. At the beginning of the movie, Edward is accosted by a man in a mask; this sets up the supposed overarching mystery of the film, as a series of attacks primarily targeting women at the university continue to occur without much consequence. By the end, there is no resolution and also no reason to ponder one. A member of the main cast — Imogen (Stubbs) — is eventually attacked during a performance of The Duchess of Malfi, and there is a crumb of symbolism in how, at the very moment she is being attacked by the masked man, Edward is creeping onstage also clad in a mask to perform a scene in which the character happens to be attacking a woman. But if this is meant to say something about the covert (or, you might say, ‘masked’) violence of the upper classes, it falls dismally flat.

The hermetically sealed bacterial culture that is Oxford University is perhaps this film’s biggest hindrance. In a better script, whose title is The Riot Club, the focus would have been on the decadence and lack of empathy in the eponymously ‘Privileged’ main cast, rather than on the sexual exploits of the deeply unlikeable protagonist. Katis’ character is seemingly meant to provide an outsider perspective to the elite social circle that the ensemble occupies, but to a middle-class ruffian such as myself she seemed no less posh than the rest of them. Perhaps the scene where she is slightly disapproving of Edward when he is rude to a waitress was supposed to be this film’s equivalent to the bit in Riot Club where working-class Northerner Lauren gets to see Alistair and his mates’ true colours when she arrives at the Club’s annual dinner. But if that is the case, Anne doesn’t seem terribly deterred, and this is also quite literally the only scene in the film where we get to see actual members of the working class in the form of the waitstaff, who have a momentary exchange of commiseration about the students’ behaviour. I quite enjoyed this scene, to tell you the truth, and I wish there had been more like it.

I have visited Oxford only once in my life, but I remember enough of it to have recognised many of the locations in Privileged. As I said before, there are lots of sexy shots of limestone cloisters and grassy quads, all blanketed in the hazy glow of VHS generation loss, and I’m sure anyone who has studied or lived there will feel a great sense of nostalgia watching this film. I think perhaps my potential enjoyment of what is otherwise a fun campy time was marred both by the actual lack in Hugh Grant and my general dislike for the place. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate all the things this project has achieved: Mungo’s cinematic debut, Hoffman’s directorial debut, sweet Wilby sporting some serious Diana-grade golden curls, Imogen Stubbs in something where the writing doesn’t make me want to go the way of Lord Adrian, the list goes on.

Oxford students and alum will enjoy this film for the history and nostalgia. Cambridge students will enjoy this for the terrible acting. Mungo fans will enjoy this for the hair (I see now why the French kept calling him Mademoiselle). Would I recommend seeing it? If you can appreciate low-budget charm and a plot that meanders at the pace of a Teddy boy through the gates of one of the women’s colleges, you’ll find it entertaining enough. If, like Lord Adrian and I, you demand satisfaction, I’d say maybe watch it once for the novelty of seeing Hugh Grant in his first theatrical release.

OVERALL FILM RATING (/5): ⭐️⭐️; Entertaining, if a little muddled

HAIR RATING (/5): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

MUNGO FACTOR (1-10): 3 (Points given for hair and general foppishness; points deducted for the cucking and the killing him off)

See you tomorrow for my review of Merchant Ivory Productions' romantic drama Maurice.