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flawlessflesh · 1 month

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cecil is the thistle expy i made for a roleplay group i joined! he's started taking on a life of his own though...

in this rp, the mundane world and the supernatural secretly co-exist. cecil lives with his family in an underground bunker deep within washington state's hoh rainforest. the family is locked away and cecil believes he's protecting them from harm. he spends his days digging a frighteningly complex system of tunnels throughout the forest, convinced that if he can reach the black river deep inside the earth that's haunting his dreams, he'll be able to find his brother del's missing soul.

^ cecil being hounded by a good samaritan (samson's dorothy <3)

i'll share the public bio i wrote for cecil under the cut hehe

Cecil of the Talayi family began appearing in New Portsmouth grocery stores and libraries a few months ago. He isn't occupied by any work or schooling and he disappears for long stretches of time into the Hoh Rainforest.

A receipt Cecil discarded shows the following purchases: a wheelbarrow, five 50-pound bags of concrete mix, gloves, a large pack of 2x4 lumber, steel pipes, an industrial saw, and a bag of sour gummy worms (berry blast flavor).

When he was a young child, Cecil was given a home by the Talayi family. There is no official adoption on record and it is unknown exactly when Cecil was brought in. The family's head at the time, Farhang (فرهنگ), was an Iranian immigrant who made his fortune in Silicon Valley - Cecil believes he owes everything to him. Cecil was homeschooled alongside his younger brother, Del (عادل), who he helped raise. These days he is his brother's primary caretaker.

Farhang Talayi was assassinated by poisoning in 1991 by suspected corporate rivals. The murder trial was long, arduous, and inconclusive. Contemporary newspaper articles and tv footage of the investigation are archived online.

Ten years after the trial, the Talayi family moved from the bustle of Silicon Valley to New Portsmouth. Del bought property deep in the forest and built a private compound ringed by high walls. The Talayis made a few half-hearted excursions into the town's social scene, but they kept to themselves for the most part, homeschooled their children, and now have not been seen in public for many months.

Those initiated in the Secret World will look at Cecil and know he is a Protoplast - a name given to an insular race of humans whose proximity to Flesh diverged them from Homo sapiens thousands of years ago. Not much is known about Protoplasts beyond their natural skill with the Flesh font and their unusual physical characteristics: androgyny, elongated goat-like ears, hair and eyes lacking melanin, and rumors of extended lifespans. They are viewed with awe and wariness - anyone so close to Flesh should be handled carefully, of course. Most Protoplasts seen outside their clans are in the employ of the rich and powerful, a living status symbol. Cecil is no different.

#cecil #i thought it'd be fun to share what i've been up to. still thistle related obviously. but i'm going down the oc-ification rabbithole #this isn't quite infinity au but there are some small elements i'm borrowing from it such as cecil's rship to the melini/talayi family #and other ideas i had for how thistle would exist in a modern world #cecil = lives in our world with our countries societies etc. infinity au thistle = lives in an fantasy modern world #my art

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fatchance · 1 year

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Another posting lapse is underway. I'm headed to my hometown in Virginia for family, food, and my fiftieth high school reunion. I have a great backlog of photos, which will likely only grow while I'm away. Fresh posts resume when I return.

Here's a postcard for you of the old Norfolk County Courthouse in Portsmouth, Virginia. Norfolk County no longer exists – subsumed by surrounding cities – and the courthouse is now repurposed as the city's art and cultural center. It was built in 1846. The circuit court still operated in the building during my high school years; I was a witness at a trial held there in a cramped, airless courtroom. It was a miserable experience that convinced me unequivocally that law school was not an option for me.

The postcard was printed by the Detroit Publishing Co. in 1905. The image is from the digital collections of the New York Public Library.

#away message #vintage postcard #Americana #Norfolk County Courthouse #Portsmouth #Virginia #New York Public Library Digital Collections

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 5 months

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Gail Godwin is one of our finest writers. Godwin's latest book "Getting to Know Death," will be published this month by Bloomsbury U.S..

This excerpt appears in Harper's Magazine.

>>>>>

DARK KNIGHTS OF THE SOUL

I have been close to people who one day found themselves in the desperate place and didn’t make it out.

I remember struggling to write a letter to a young man whose father had just hanged himself. The father had been the builder of our house. He was charming and talented and proud of his son. I wrote these things to the son and then came the point in the letter where I was supposed to write something hopeful for the future. All I could think of to convey was No, you’ll never get over it, but the time will come when you will be glad you can’t get over it because the loved one remains alive in your heart as you continue to engage with the who and the why of him.

Two people in my family didn’t make it out of their desperate place: my father and my brother.

Though I had seen my father only twice when I was a child, I sent him an invitation to my high school graduation. Mother said not to expect him to show up, but he did. He, his new wife, and his brother drove from Smithfield, North Carolina, to Portsmouth, Virginia, for the ceremony. In the early-summer weeks that followed, we wrote letters to each other. He had elegant handwriting and prose to match. He wrote that he would like more than anything to get to know me better. Could I—would it be possible for me to spend a few weeks with them at the beach this summer? I was in my first desperate place at that time and decided to tell him about it—though not all of it. I ended up going to the beach and returning with them to Smithfield and entering Peace College in the fall, paid for by my father.

My father had been doing some personal bookkeeping of his own. At the age of fifty, he had at last achieved a measure of stability. Finally, after thirty years of intemperate living, he had managed to stop drinking, had married a new widow in town with a prosperous brother-in-law, and was manager of sales at the brother-in-law’s car dealership. My father confided to me during the weeks we spent at his brother-in-law’s beach cottage that he regretted not having made more of himself. “You mustn’t let it happen to you,” he said. “Nobody is prepared for how quickly time passes, and you don’t want to be one of those people who wakes up in the late afternoon with nothing to show for it.” But later, in a radiant moment while we were lying on the beach working on our tans, he told me that I had come along at just the right time, and if he continued to win his battle against depression and alcohol, and if automobile sales continued like this, well, the future didn’t look so hopeless after all.

As we lay side by side, congratulating ourselves for finding each other, I had no idea that old disappointments were biding their time, stealthily building like waves, which in less than three years would drown him.

One winter afternoon when I was a junior at Chapel Hill, he phoned his brother at his office. “Just felt like saying hello, old son,” he said. “Son” was what the brothers called each other. After he hung up, he lay down on the floor of his bedroom in Smithfield and shot himself in the head.

Losing ground. Was that the thing that ultimately killed him? In his twenties, he began losing jobs, losing status, but always got back on his feet. A charming, handsome man, he did not need to keep a steady job as long as his mother was alive. And after her death, there would be other admirers waiting in line for whom his looks and charm were enough. By the time he met my mother, he was an alcoholic. After that came the mental disorders, given different psychiatric names as the years went by.

When they were driving back to Smithfield after my high school graduation, he came with a raging toothache. They found a dentist along the road who pulled the tooth. But the pain continued, and when they got home, the dentist told him it had been the wrong tooth. “I should have known,” he would finish this story, laughing. “I should have known when we drove into the parking lot and his shingle read: doctor payne.” He still had the charm but the looks were going.

This is from a June 16, 2018, New York Times op-ed, “What Kept Me from Killing Myself,” by the Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers. “Throughout that summer and into the fall . . . just below the surface of my semiconsciousness, was the constant thought: Maybe I won’t wake up this time.” Powers continues:

I doubt much needs to be said about the kind of despair that would make such an idea a source of comfort, despair that came not from accepting that things were as bad as they were going to get but, worse, that they might go on like that forever. The next step felt both logical and inevitable.

This sounds along the lines of what my twenty-eight-year-old brother might have been thinking in the hours that led up to his death.

In the last week of his life, Tommy was working on a long poem. He left behind two drafts. He titled one “Why Not Just Leave It Alone?” and the other “Why Change the World?” One line is the same in both drafts: “My pride is broken since my lover’s gone.” Both drafts end with the same image of the poet being laid to rest in his wooden home, “With my trooper hat on my chest bone.”

It was October 2, 1983. What happened, what we know happened, as opposed to all that we can never know, was that on the Sunday afternoon after Mother’s birthday, Tommy ironed a shirt at his parents’ house, where he had been living with his three-year-old son. He told Mother he was going over to see J., the woman he loved, a nurse who also had a three-year-old son. They had planned to marry; they had even made out a budget. Then J. suddenly broke it off. Tommy told Mother he was going over to ask J. to reconsider. “I’m going to settle it one way or another before the afternoon is out,” he said, and drove off alone.

COUPLE FOUND SHOT was the headline in the newspaper the next morning.

The day before, on Mother’s birthday, I knew Tommy was unhappy. But Tommy was always unhappy. He “felt things more than most” was the family euphemism for his troubled nature. He most took to heart the family’s fractures as well as the world’s. Drawing you in with his shy, closemouthed smile, he would offer his latest tale of woe. But always, always in his stories, there had been a quality of suspense, of entertainment. He starred in them as the knight-errant, complete with pratfalls and setbacks, but a knight-errant who picked himself up, dusted himself off, and set out on his next mission. Tommy was a modern Samaritan who carried a first-aid kit and a blue emergency beacon in his car in case he came across an accident.

We were in the kitchen and he told me the story of J. suddenly breaking up with him. But this time something was different. I was not, as usual, deriving the usual listener’s satisfaction from his story. Many years later, when remembering that kitchen scene, I realized what had spooked me about it: Not only was there not a trace of the shy, closemouthed smile, there was no knight-errant starring in my brother’s story. The tone was new: one of bafflement and resignation. There was no sense of any future missions. There was no tug of suspense. It was like a story that had already ended.

Tommy would be sixty-three now. He was born the same summer that my father drove from Smithfield to Glen Burnie, Maryland, and rescued me from my desperate place. If on that October afternoon twenty-eight years later there had not been a pistol handy in the glove compartment of J.’s car, would Tommy have remarried somebody else and raised his son and reconciled himself to a fallen world, as long as he had a firstaid kit and a job that gave him the satisfaction that he was rescuing people from injustice?

But now I do hear his voice, the old Tommy voice, just as it was in life, chiding me as he defends the position of his beloved National Rifle Association with its singsong refrain: “Gail, guns don’t kill people. People do.” I continue to engage with the who and why of my father and my brother.

During my life, I have found myself in the desperate place four times. But that first time, at age eighteen, was by far the worst.

Summer 1955 in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Everybody seemed to have a future but me. I had received a letter from Mother Winters, my mentor from ninth grade. She congratulated me on being salutatorian, asked about my plans for college, and brought me news of some of my classmates. “Pat has won the four-year Angier Duke scholarship to Duke, Carolyn will be going to Radcliffe, Stuart and Lee to St. Mary’s in Raleigh . . . ” Here I stopped reading and felt . . . what? A dry mouth, a pang in the chest, a sense of going down, of losing myself. All I knew to do was mark my position.

My position. At the time, I couldn’t hold all of it in my mind. If I had tried, I might have despaired, or lashed out and hurt myself or somebody else. I had so little experience to draw from and there was no escape.

Since my early teens, I had been building my life on false premises. I was creating a persona that was more extroverted than I really was. She pretended to more confidence and security than I felt. I became a pro at embellishing and editing my history. When I entered a new school, I “went out” for things I was good at that would bring me attention. The school paper, the drama club, painting posters and scenery, entering competitions—and, of course, getting high grades. I dated lots of boys, made it a point to be cagey and hard to get until each got fed up and moved on, usually just as I had begun to appreciate him.

That was the outside of things. At home, other dramas were playing out. We were not free people. Our embattled breadwinner, who was angry much of the time, sometimes knocked one of us to the floor for challenging him. There was no money for us except what he doled out and no going anywhere he didn’t drive us. As I entered my teens, the bread winner, who was only twelve years older than me, often spoke of how he “loved” me. His voice trembled. At night I would wake to find him kneeling in the dark beside my bed, his hand taking liberties.

My mother had shed her former confident self. As a child, I knew a mother who arrived home on the 10:00 pm bus after her wartime job on the newspaper, a woman who taught college and on weekends typed up love stories that earned one hundred dollars apiece. This powerless woman seemed more like someone I was visiting in prison. Only I was in prison with her. She suffered because there was no money to send me to college. She made phone calls to a private college in Baltimore to see if I could go as a day student. The registrar said a partial scholarship might be arranged, given my academic record, but where was the rest of the money to come from? There was no “rest of the money,” my stepfather reminded us, as though we were dim-witted. He suggested I take a year off and find a job, “maybe in sales work,” and save up for college next year. He added magnanimously that I could continue to live under his roof for the time being without paying rent.

That’s the way the ground lay that June 1955 morning in Glen Burnie, when the girl sat cross-legged on her bed, the letter from her old teacher clutched in her fist. “Pat to Duke, Carolyn to Radcliffe, Stuart and Lee to St. Mary’s.”

This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.

I can’t see a way out of this.

Things will not necessarily get better.

In my novel Unfinished Desires, about life at a girls’ school, two old nuns are being driven back to their retirement home from a doctor’s visit, and one says to the other, “There was a sentence this morning in that Prayer for Holy Women: ‘In our weakness Your power reaches perfection.’ What do you think it means, Sister Paula?” Sister Paula thinks for a minute and then replies, “I think it means you have to admit you can’t save yourself before you’re fully available to God.”

That morning in Glen Burnie, God was undergoing some very slippery changes in my psyche. He had ceased being the attentive Heavenly Father who was always aware of me. All I could be certain of that long-ago summer morning was that I could not save myself.

But something else did, something already embedded in the tissue of my particular circumstances: the earthly father who had been the absent father. In a mood of defiant resignation, I decided to send him an invitation to my graduation. Of course he wouldn’t come.

But he did come. And when we were lying beside each other on the beach, he said, “When I opened your invitation, after I got over being pleasantly surprised, I thought to myself, Well, this is one thing I did that came to fruition. And then, after we began to write letters to each other, it struck me that I might be the rescuer you needed.”

Art Work: "When Day Touches Night," a painting by Michael Ho, whose work was on view last month with Gallery Vacancy at the art fair Independent New York.

(Follies of God)

#Michael Ho #Harpers Magazine #articles #words and writing #reading and writing #Gail Godwin

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aimeedaisies · 11 months

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Court Circular | 23rd November 2023

St James's Palace

The Princess Royal, Commodore-in-Chief, Portsmouth, this morning opened Alford Schools of Military Music, HM Naval Base, Portsmouth, and was received by His Majesty's Lord-Lieutenant of Hampshire (Mr Nigel Atkinson).

Her Royal Highness this afternoon attended a Luncheon at Spithead House, HM Naval Base, Portsmouth, for The Princess Royal's Patronages based in Hampshire.

Her Royal Highness, President, the City and Guilds of London Institute, this afternoon presented The Princess Royal Training Awards at St James's Palace.

Her Royal Highness, President, British Olympic Association, accompanied by Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, this evening attended the Team GB Ball at the Savoy Hotel, Strand, London WC2, and was received by Mr Stuart Shilson (Deputy Lieutenant of Greater London).

#nothing about anne attending the installation of the new dean of windsor 👀#princess anne #princess royal #tim laurence #timothy laurence #court circular

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lboogie1906 · 25 days

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Master Chief Petty Officer William Goines (September 10, 1936 – June 10, 2024) became the first African American Navy SEAL. SEAL is an acronym for Sea, Air, and Land, which indicates all the environments in which SEALs are trained to operate.

He was born in Dayton. His family moved to Lockland, Ohio. His mother, Lauretta Goines, was a homemaker. His father, Luther Goines, worked in a pool hall and the automotive industry and was co-owner of a gas station.

He never knew Dayton had a public swimming pool since Blacks were not allowed. When state and federal officials required integration, the pool was filled with rocks and gravel. He taught himself to swim in a nearby creek.

He graduated from Lockland Wayne High School and joined the Navy. He was assigned to Malta for 11 months and selected for UDT Training. His class started with five Army Rangers, two foreign Naval Officers, four US Navy Officers, and 85 other enlisted men. After three weeks of training, only 13 men graduated.

He volunteered to join the new Navy SEALs unit. He attended 43 military training schools, which included unarmed combat, SERE school, jungle warfare, demolitions, Airborne school, reconnaissance, and Ranger school. He became “Plankowner” of SEAL Team 2. Fluent in French and Spanish, he served in Cuba, three tours in Vietnam, and other classified missions worldwide.

He joined the Navy Parachute Demonstration Team, the Chuting Stars, and performed 640 free falls and 194 static line jumps over five years. He was the Honor Student in his HALO class.

In 1987, he retired from the military as a Master Chief Petty Officer. His awards include the Bronze Star, the Navy Commendation Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal, a Combat Action Ribbon, and the Presidential Unit Citation.

He became Police Chief for the school system of Portsmouth, Virginia. He was honored at the opening of the Smithsonian’s African American Museum. He received the Lone Sailor Award. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

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dtolemy · 1 year

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{ KEDAR WILLIAMS-STIRLING, 19, CIS MALE, HE/HIM } Is that DARIUS PTOLEMY? A SOPHOMORE originally from PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, they decided to come to Ogden College to study BUSINESS on a ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIP. They’re THE HOMEGROWN HERO on campus, but even they could get blamed for Greer’s disappearance.

pinterest | spotify | spotify+ (warning: bubblegum pop and the gummy bear song)

WHO?

full name: darius ezekiel ptolemy

birthday: october 25, 2003

pronouns: he/him

personality: exuberant. galvanizing. insatiable, imprudent, impetuous. insert other sat words he uses incorrectly to sound intelligent, which he is capable of being strictly in the contexts of sports and the pizza prices of every take-out place in a statewide vicinity. where he remains oblivious to his faults, darius thrives, and where he is forced to confront them, darius falters, snaps back with something stolen from the climax of an academy award loser, and goes back to thriving. he’s a personality, a figurehead, a trophy that needs to win itself more trophies. he thinks of getting people to like him, love him, hate him, focus on him, in any way, to be just as important as getting good grades. despite this, he’s anything but a hard partier, and claims designated driver like it’s his eternal duty. no better way to make people fall for you than by being a goody-two-shoes, right?

appearance: darius’s wardrobe is a miscellany of colors, thrown over a toned body with a meticulous dishevelment that takes more time in the morning than his three showers. his stature is asserted to be 6’0 but more accurately 5’10 with the help of high top sneakers, while its presence is mostly felt in him darting about campus with an agility only achievable through years of training and an abject inability to read maps properly.

WHAT?

sports & extracurriculars: tennis, diving & swimming, table tennis

tropes: homegrown hero. if anything’s to thank for his rise to the top and unaccountable social claustrophobia, it’s the prestigious town of portsmouth, new hampshire. | small name, big ego. but also, his success is sort of totally, entirely his doing. even if said success isn't quite that recognized outside of the country. | mr. vice guy. pride, lust, relating to holden caulfield, etc. he didn’t pay much attention in sunday school, honestly. | | attention whore. no point in doing anything if nobody’s around to post a fancam of it. | the nicknamer. because having a coherent contacts list is for losers.

relationship to greer: greer’s recruit.

Maybe it was because he was playing with some of the finest New Hampshire had to offer, or maybe it was because his attention was thoroughly divided between warming up and making the varsity team warm up to him, but Darius put more effort than ever into preparing himself for the life of an Ogden student. Specifically, the life of an Ogden student in Greer’s inner circle. He sought her time with a dogged determination that could only be dampened by explicit refusal, analyzing every letter of her posts (which were probably drafted by a PR team with more experience than a lifetime in the industry could merit, but a man could dream, and dream he did) as well as reading Cosmopolitan magazines behind his textbooks. Thus, freshman year was filled with professional, totally subtle butt-kissing and a whole lot of scampering around campus to spend his old rackets’ insurance on… whatever it was that Greer liked, anyways. He knew he wanted, needed, to become like her other friends, a shiny thing out of reach from anyone below their level, but how?

hobbies: cycling, yoga, taking selfies at inappropriate times

inspirations: randall “pink” floyd (dazed and confused), jeff sadecki (yellowjackets), mike jackson (the psmith novels), emily cooper (emily in paris, i promise i can explain)

WHY?

tl;dr: ambitious, discontent, and brilliant at acting like he’s neither of those, darius was born to the most mind-bogglingly middling family ever to throw their name in the genetic lottery in the most average neighborhood to have ever been built. his father an electrician and amateur pastor, his mother an insurance agent, and his grandmother a dispenser of morally dubious advice from her rocking chair, he took the burden of being an interesting person onto himself at a young age, idolizing the grand slam GOATs of television and desperate to become one of them. he and his coaches molded him into the underdog of his hometown’s dreams, but now that he’s been thrust into a world where people actually go places for vacation and expect better than the best of him, he doubts he can keep up without some elbow grease.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION…

connections: tba! aside from the suggested connections for the skeleton, however:

platonic. sports buddies, role models, study groups, fitness friends, ride or dies with a probable emphasis on dies

antagonistic. rivals on the court, mutual jealousy, academic opposition, bad influences, competitors in popularity

romantic. fleeting flirtationships, unrequited crushes, awkward dating app matches, friends with benefits, enemies with benefits

plot summaries: tba!

thread tracker: tba!

headcanons:

hates table tennis and sucks at it big time but continues playing under the incorrect pretense that he will improve. either misses the ball entirely or hits it with so much force that whichever surface the poor thing lands on will be permanently scarred.

most active social media is linkedin. he is aware that this is humiliating but mentally maintains that he will be nothing without an internship to one of the many, many insurance companies whose employees he texts night and day.

favorites:

books. adventures of huckleberry finn by mark twain, losers take all by david klass, a separate peace by john knowles, winning ugly by brad gilbert, looking for alaska by john green

movies. fast times at ridgemont high, napoleon dynamite, sunday school musical, big time adolescence, teenage mutant ninja turtles (1990)

music. lecrae, nirvana, daft punk, weathers, sue sylvester’s super bass cover

#ogdenintro

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acapacityforenduring · 10 months

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if my brave franks (high school girls fight club) had been there (pub in portsmouth in 1628) wed have stopped that (duke of buckingham getting offed) from happening

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novadodson · 1 year

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"so come home" said ground control.

Is that NOVA DODSON? A SOPHOMORE originally from PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, they decided to come to Ogden College to study ENGINEERING & MATHEMATICS on an ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP. They’re THE SUPERNOVA on campus, but even they could get blamed for Greer’s disappearance.

‘‘ｓｏｃｏｍｅｈｏｍｅ’’ said the voice from the stars.

STATISTICS;

BASIC INFORMATION;

full name: noelle nova valerie dodson. nickname(s): n/a. age: twenty-two. date of birth: febuary 8th, 2001. zodiac: aquarius. hometown: portsmouth, new hampshire. current location: ogden, new hampshire. ethnicity: african-american & caucasian. nationality: american. gender: non-binary. pronouns: they/he. orientation: panromantic & pansexual. religion: agnostic. occupation: student & employee at rainbow road. language(s) spoken: english, chinese, spanish, tagalog, vietnamese.

FAMILY;

father: andrew ellis. september 14, 1973. mother: rose dodson. february 14th, 1978. sibling(s): n/a. children: n/a. pet(s): n/a.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE;

face claim: quintessa 'q' swindell. hair color: dark brown. eye color: dark brown. height: 5'6''. weight: 121 lbs. tattoos: multiple, scattered. ● behind left ear. (1, position) (2, artwork) ● left shoulder. (1, position) (2, artwork) ● right shoulder. (1, artwork) ● left arm. (1) ● hands. (1, artwork) (2, artwork) ● left ribs. (1) (2) (3) ● right thigh. (1, artwork) ● left thigh. (1, artwork) ● undecided position. (1, artwork) piercings: left nostril, lobes on either side (multiple), septum.

PERSONALITY;

character trope: the supernova. additional tropes: the astrophile, the cataclysmic, the connard, the dirtbag, the insurgent, the interstellar, the lothario, the lovable rogue, the miscreant, the phoenix, the rebellious spirit, the sabaist, the trickster, the vainglorious. character inspirations: bex mack (andi mack), brianna hanson (grace and frankie), captain james west (wild wild west), colin shea (what's your number?), lila pitts (the umbrella academy), lorelai gilmore (gilmore girls), martin whitly (prodigal son), max black (2 broke girls), nadia vulvokov (russian doll), robyn brooks (high fidelity), rue bennett (euphoria), shane madej (yes, just shane madej). positive traits: creative, optimistic, egalitarian. negative traits: rebellious, restless, unyielding. skills: adaptability, perseverance, speed reading. smokes: yes. drinks: yes. drugs: yes.

SCHOOLING;

attending; ogden college. major: engineering & mathematics. sports: n/a. extracurriculars: robotics club, math club.

BACKGROUND;

TW: death, parental loss, homelessness, murder, juvenile detention, prison. ● Nova was raised by a single mother, Rose Dodson, their father never in the picture as he had abandoned her the moment he found out she was pregnant. ● It became clear at a very young age that Nova was advanced and at only four, he took a Mensa test and was admitted as one of the groups youngest members with a score of 142. ● By age eight, Nova seemed entirely sure of who they were; they spoke to their mother about their identity and their future and Rose was nothing short of supportive, embracing her child and supporting them the way they always had. ● Unexpectedly, Nova's mother fell sick and passed away by the time he was twelve and they were placed with relatives. However, due to not knowing how to handle him, Nova was bounced around and eventually, ended up drifting between relatives homes, couch-surfing with friends or simply sleeping on the streets. ● At fifteen, after getting involved with the wrong people, a robbery Nova was a part of went wrong and he was charged with felony murder. They had never had a weapon or touched anyone, but due to their involvement with the original crime, they were charged as an adult and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. ● Nova graduated high school on their own while in juvenile detention and even helped tutor and push other kids to do the same but once he reached eighteen and was transferred to an actual prison, something shifted within them and they gave up on themselves. ● A mentor from Mensa who had known Nova since he was a child refused to give up on him, visiting monthly and attempting to encourage him to continue fighting for the future he'd planned and when Nova was finally released, they used their connection as an alumni of Ogden to get Nova a spot despite their background. ● A sparks seems to have lightened back within Nova; he's brighter than he has been in the past four years, attending classes and excelling as they had been as a child but even they're not entirely sure what they want for their future or if their dream is any longer worth pursuing.

BIOGRAPHY;

TW: death, parental loss, homelessness, murder, juvenile detention, prison. Under Construction.....

EXPAND ON HOW THEY EMBODY THEIR SKELETON TROPE;

While most of the life of a star is stable, as it burns through its fuel and begins to cool, the outward forces of pressure drop until it's low enough for gravity to take over and cause it's collapse — a supernova. It's chaotic, bright, powerful, beautiful. It's also essential to life, a source of elements including the very iron in your blood and in their wake, can leave either a black hole or a new star. Balance was taken from Nova a decade ago, forcing them to drop further and further downwards, a decline they had long since lost control of until gravity or fate intervened. What was becoming a shell of the luminary Nova had once been was thrown into chaos; a new world, a new environment and perhaps, a new start. Chaotic, bright, powerful, beautiful. It was essential to his survival, his life. The only question that remains, what will be left in their wake?

RELATIONSHIP TO GREER;

Nova's relationships to Greer seems to exist more on a hypothetical than any reality. Their arrival was meant to be a new and exciting change, a return to the life they were meant to have, one that ended up all but cloaked by the darkness of Greer's missing status. It seemed to be everyone's focus and to some degree, Nova was thankful for it, his arrival able to slip mostly under the radar. After all, who held interest in your story when the school's golden girl had up and vanished?

LINKS;

#ogdenintro #death tw #parental loss tw #homelessness tw #murder tw #juvenile detention tw #prison tw

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trench · 1 year

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School gun report for the week of 9/10/23-9/16/23

Still catching up… 9/11/2023: The shooter from the Proctor High School football game in Utica, New York, mentioned in the previous report, has been arrested. The suspect is a 16-year-old male. More guns for children, I guess. The victim of that shooting was a security guard who was shot in the head. At last report, he was in critical but stable condition. *** A female student of DuVal High…

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justforbooks · 2 years

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Leslie Phillips, who has died aged 98, was a light comedian of the old school, closely associated with a roster of smooth-talking cads and lady-killers in the series of Carry On and Doctor films he graced from the late 1950s onwards.

He first coined his trademark phrase “I say, ding dong!” as the lubricious Jack Bell in Carry On Nurse (1958) and made the simple greeting “hello” sound like a frolicsome, impure invitation, earning him the nickname “King Leer” and lending itself to the one-word title of his immensely entertaining autobiography (2006).

He became a national Sunday lunchtime institution on BBC Radio’s The Navy Lark, in which he appeared as a hopeless lieutenant on HMS Troutbridge – alongside Stephen Murray, Jon Pertwee, Tenniel Evans, Heather Chasen and Ronnie Barker – between 1959 and 1977. It was never clear – deliberately so – whether he was a simpleton or a crook in this company of Royal Navy undesirables on the recommissioned frigate stationed off Portsmouth.

Despite his louche and carefree acting persona, Phillips was an ambitious and hard-working artist who in the late 60s toured the world in his own West End hit, The Man Most Likely To... – he rewrote Joyce Rayburn’s play, took the lead, produced and directed it.

He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in his mid-70s and featured in several major films, including George Cukor’s Les Girls (1957), with Gene Kelly and Kay Kendall, Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985), Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) and Roger Michell’s Venus (2007), playing an old thespian alongside Peter O’Toole and Richard Griffiths.

His prodigious work-rate derived from his impoverished background in Tottenham, north London, where from an early age he was the family breadwinner. His suave and polished persona was as much a creation as that of Terry-Thomas or Rex Harrison, and it gave his acting an edge of seditious malice, an air of unofficial naughtiness.

With the confidence that came from being told frequently he was a good-looking lad he developed a taste for fast cars, high living and beautiful women when the money rolled in. For a time he was the highest earning actor on the West End stage, and joined the Ibiza crowd in the 70s, keeping a house there in a colony of artists and writers that included his great friend Denholm Elliott.

He was married three times and had a long relationship (between the first and second marriages) with Caroline Mortimer, the daughter of Penelope Mortimer and step-daughter of John Mortimer, both writers.

This was all a far cry from his humble beginnings as the third child of Cecelia (nee Newlove) and Frederick Phillips, a maker of cookers at Glover & Main in Edmonton. The family moved from Tottenham to Chingford, by the river Lea and on the fringes of Epping Forest, in an attempt to improve Frederick’s health, but he died of a chest illness in 1935, and Cecelia, spotting an advert in a newspaper, packed her son off to the Italia Conti school to train as an actor.

Phillips had shown talent in plays at Chingford school and soon supplemented his income from delivering papers and singing at weddings and funerals in All Saints Church, Chingford, by playing a wolf – his stage debut, in 1937, aged 13 – in Peter Pan, starring Anna Neagle, at the London Palladium.

After a spell as a cherub in a stained glass window in Dorothy L Sayers’s The Zeal of Thy House at the Garrick, he returned to the Palladium for the 1938 production of Peter Pan, now playing John Darling in a cast led by Seymour Hicks (“vile”, according to Phillips) as Captain Hook and Jean Forbes-Robertson (“lovely”) as Peter.

By the time he was called up in 1942, he had sung in the children’s chorus at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and acted with John Gielgud and Marie Tempest in Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus at the Queen’s – the start of a long association with the producers Binkie Beaumont and HM Tennent – and Vivien Leigh and Cyril Cusack in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma at the Haymarket.

Everyone in the business liked him, and this would stand him in good stead after the second world war. He sounded posh enough to gain a commission as second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, transferring to the Durham Light Infantry, where he was put in charge of the Suffolk transit camp at Chadacre Hall, before being invalided out in 1944.

His first post-demob job was in the box office at the Lyric, Hammersmith. He played Guildenstern in Hamlet at Dundee rep, and discovered his talent for light comedy in a stint at the York rep. His first major West End role was in a sentimental comedy, Daddy Long Legs (1946), at the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter).

The first of more than 100 film appearances came in Lassie for Lancashire (1938). The Hollywood adventure of Les Girls could have led to a latter-day C Aubrey Smith-style career in California, but he preferred London and Pinewood Studios – he was the last living actor to have worked there when they opened. He was also in the cast of the first live BBC broadcast from Alexandra Palace in 1948 – Morning Departure, set on a wartime submarine with Michael Hordern – and played his first BBC television lead in 1952 in My Wife Jacqueline (opposite Joy Shelton), a pioneering but mediocre (he said) sitcom about married life, broadcast live from Lime Grove in six 30-minute episodes.

Over the next 10 years he established himself in the Doctor films as the philandering consultant, Dr Tony Burke, and in the Carry Ons, usually stuck on Joan Sims. He followed the huge stage success of the superb farce Boeing-Boeing (taking over from David Tomlinson in 1963) with the first series of Our Man at St Mark’s on television, in which he played an eccentric new village vicar. When his affair, while still married, with Caroline Mortimer became public, he was no longer deemed suitable as a clergyman, and was succeeded in later series by Donald Sinden.

Opening at the Vaudeville in 1968, he played 655 performances as the upper-class lounge lizard Victor Cadwallader in The Man Most Likely To… and later toured to Australia (where one audience member in Adelaide was reported to have literally died laughing), New Zealand and South Africa, defying the cultural boycott and working in the townships as well as the commercial theatres.

He played in another “saucy” comedy, Sextet, at the Criterion in 1977 (Julian Fellowes was also in the cast), and then led a hugely successful revival of Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s Not Now, Darling at the Savoy in 1979, followed by another world tour.

Phillips said that he at last broke his own mould when cast by Lindsay Anderson as a dithering, weak-willed Gayev in The Cherry Orchard at the Haymarket in 1983 (Joan Plowright played his sister), and he went even further in a brilliant revival by Mike Ockrent of Peter Nichols’s lacerating comedy Passion Play at the Leicester Haymarket, and then Wyndham’s in the West End, in 1984. In 1990, he popped up unexpectedly in The Comic Strip and, also on television, in Chancer, which launched Clive Owen, playing Owen’s scheming boss.

There was now no pattern or predictability as he entered the last phase of an astonishing career. He played the professor in another Chekhov, Julian Mitchell’s rewrite of Uncle Vanya, August, with Anthony Hopkins at Theatr Clwyd, Mold (1994), and then joined the RSC to play a fruity saloon bar roué of a Falstaff in Ian Judge’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1996) on the main Stratford-upon-Avon stage and, in the Swan, a cynical hotelier in Steven Pimlott’s discovery of Tennessee Williams’s “lost” fantasia, Camino Real. Also in 1996, he played a frisky old Sir Sampson Legend in Love for Love by William Congreve at the Chichester Festival theatre.

On the Whole, It’s Been Jolly Good was the appropriate title of a Peter Tinniswood one-man play he took to the Edinburgh Fringe in 1999, reverting to more raffish type as Sir Plympton Makepeace, a bitterly “dumped” Tory MP from the Shires with no good to say of anyone: “That woman with the loud voice … I think she was the PM but to me she looked like a power-mad swimming baths attendant.” His last stage appearance came as an ageing judge with a back problem in John Mortimer’s Naked Justice at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2001.

In the new millennium he had good TV roles in Monarch of the Glen and Miss Marple. An excellent television version of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, adapted by William Boyd (2002), had him in the role of Gervase Crouchback, father of Daniel Craig’s anti-heroic Guy, and he regained his dog collar in Nigel Cole’s charming movie Saving Grace (2000), starring Blenda Blethyn. For the Harry Potter films he voiced the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts.

In 1997 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Evening Standard, and 10 years later another from the Critics’ Circle. In 1998 he was appointed OBE, and in 2008 CBE.

Phillips married the actor Penelope Bartley in 1948, and they had two sons and two daughters. They divorced in 1965, and in 1982 he married the actor Angela Scoular; she took her own life in 2011. Two years later he married Zara Carr, and she survives him, along with his children.

🔔 Leslie Samuel Phillips, actor, born 20 April 1924; died 7 November 2022

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#JUST FOR BOOKS #Leslie Phillips #in memoriam

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