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rebeccalouisaferguson · 2 years ago

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Rebecca Ferguson: The first to ask questions in the intview

Ferguson calls via videocall from London and takes the interview in her own hands.

Rebecca Ferguson: Before we start I'd like to ask whats there behind you on the table. Sorry, I like to see through zoom-interviews the rooms of my intviewers.

ICONIST: What particular are you interested in?

Ferguson: The first book in the pile, for example.

ICONIST: I have to take a look for myself now. Here, "Bill Gates. How the prevent the next pandemic."

Ferguson: Oh. Does Bill have some good advice in it?

ICONIST: It's complicated. Gates had already warned of the dangers of such pandemics before the Covid outbreak. He later received death threats because one of his quotes, taken out of context, was used to create the grotesque fake news that he wanted to use the corona virus to microchip all of humanity. With that, we could now seamlessly move on to the conspiracies in your new series, Silo, in which no one knows which stories about human threats are true and which are fabricated.

Ferguson: *laughs* You are right.

ICONIST: The world has been destroyed, 10,000 people have survived in an underground silo, locked up there, isolated from the outside world. Nobody knows what really happened outside. You're not entirely wrong to take this as a depressing parable of the pandemic, are you?

Ferguson: There are certainly many parallels to events that happened not so long ago - the horror of the Covid lockdowns, governments wanting to control their environment, scarcity of resources and the need to recycle in order to survive. Only the novels on which the series is based have been published since 2011. And as an actress, what interests me most is the quality of the storytelling and the characters. When I was working on this role, I didn't think too much about whether the future society in the film had anything to do with today's society. To be honest, I don't want to think about the future of the world because sometimes it gets me pretty depressed. I am aware that I lead a very privileged life and that I am very fortunate. Don't get me wrong: it's important to me to speak my mind, for example I'm fighting for equality at every level. I accept those battles that I am convinced I must fight. Other than that, I just try to be friendly to others.

ICONIST: Your series about the silo society offers less action-packed science fiction escapism, instead it relies more on dialogue. It is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's end-time visions in his play "Happy Days" - with two actors who are stuck in a mound of earth after an apocalypse, sink into it and console themselves with purposeful optimism about their hopeless situation.

Ferguson: I love your reference to Samuel Beckett *laughs* Makes perfect sense. I've done a lot of research on depression and trauma to better understand the loneliness, grief, and loss that weighs on my character. And I like philosophy. The theses of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, for example, both of which assume the natural equality of human beings, i.e. that humans are good by nature and only become evil through society. It was interesting to transfer such thoughts to the film, to ask oneself: What happens when you condense this thesis and show what happens when many people are isolated in a room closed off from the outside world? And when down there one lie about the alleged causes of the catastrophe is followed by another. Do people rebel against lies? Regardless of the penalties they face? Those were the basic questions that fascinated me about this series.

ICONIST: The series is based on Hugh Howey's internationally successful best-selling trilogy "Wool", which is adored by fans. Did you feel pressure to live up to expectations? There are enough examples of film adaptations of fantasy and science fiction novels that have been torn apart by fans.

Ferguson: No, I didn't feel any pressure. It's great that this book series was so successful and has so many fans. I can only do my best. If people don't like it, that's unfortunate, but then there's nothing you can do about it. However, before I engage more intensely with such a role, I always do a lot of research on fan sites. I spend hours reading all sorts of things there.

ICONIST: Why are you doing that?

Ferguson: Because I often discover interesting details on these sites. For example, if a fan writes, "I love how the author describes how Juliette keeps her hand in a pocket the whole time." That's a small but significant detail. I said to myself, "Great, I'm going to do this the whole time through the shoot."

ICONIST: You say you don't like to think about the future too often. In a podcast "Spark Hunter" published in 2022, you dealt with the currently much discussed topic of the future of artificial intelligence. Actress Trudie Styler, wife of Sting, directed. What appealed to you about recording a podcast – actually more of a radio play – in addition to all your film commitments?

Ferguson: I like Trudie very much. When she called me one day and asked, "Do you want to do a radio play with actor Mark Rylance?" I immediately said, "If Mark Rylance is in, I'll be in, no matter what it is." Then sent me the scripts and I got scared at first.

ICONIST: Why?

Ferguson: Because it was pretty complicated stuff, with a lot of details about AI. It was just hard to understand at first. Mark Rylance voicing the inventor of a female artificial intelligence robot whom I speak. And then suddenly this robot starts to develop feelings, it takes pleasure in provocation and in questioning society. And reveals morbid feelings about human life - it's brilliant.

ICONIST: Sting also has a small speaking role in the podcast. In 1984 he had an unforgettable scene as an actor in David Lynch's film adaptation of "Dune - the desert planet" as the villain Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. There he stands with an oiled naked body, only wearing a futuristic loincloth, which he himself once described as the "first example of flying underpants".

(Rebecca Ferguson is laughing)

You can be seen as Lady Jessica in Dennis Villeneuve's remake of Dune. While working on the podcast, did you and Sting talk a bit about how sci-fi staging has changed over the past 40 years?

Ferguson: We actually did. I remember sitting with him and his wife at a table in their beautiful home at their winery in Tuscany. At one of our long dinners, I asked him, "Do you know what I'm filming?" "No," he said, "what?" Then I revealed to him that we were remaking Dune. And then his eyes suddenly lit up and we went on a long journey in our conversation, talking about what it was like shooting the first film back then, compared to the new one.

ICONIST: And the flying underpants?

Ferguson: (laughs) I won't give you any details, that's between Sting and me.

ICONIST: In winter comes the second part of the Dune film adaptation, in which you again play Lady Jessica, the mother of the young hero Paul Atreides. In the summer you can also be seen again as MI6 agent Ilsa Faust alongside Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" - and already in the ten parts of the Apple TV series "Silo". it doesn't get any better. Aren't you afraid of overexposure?

Ferguson: No. This is going to be a big year for me, with three very different film productions that I'm very proud of. Things like that don't happen all the time. I don't worry too much about it. I'm damn happy it turned out that way. You never know if something like this will happen again. Actors often come into the limelight very quickly, but then just as quickly go out of fashion. Age is often not helpful either. In that sense, I feel like I'm in a good place right now. I've been very lucky.

ICONIST: It is your third appearance in the Mission: Impossible series and your second in Dune. Is it also important for you to have something like consistency in big blockbusters, in times of intensifying competition between film studios and streaming providers with an unprecedented oversupply of films, in which there are also rows and rows of flops?

Ferguson: It's actually nice that I now know my role in "Mission: Impossible" well, because working on the set is complicated because we often don't have finished scripts. Working on the Mission: Impossible movies is so different from other movies. But that's what makes it so exciting. I know my role, but I'm always getting to know new actors who are in for the first time. In their eyes, I can immediately see what they're thinking when they're on set for the first time: "What the hell…?" Then I just think to myself: "I know that, I felt the same way at first." Then it's nice, when you are already familiar with your role. Lady Jessica in "Dune" is also a cool woman. In the second part, however, she is changed. I won't reveal any details now. Just this much: Your performances in the second part are so different from those in the first that it felt like I was playing a new person.

ICONIST: What does it do to you when you switch from one large-scale production to the next?

Ferguson: Well, while I was shooting Silo, I got a message that I had to do some reshoots on the Mission: Impossible movie. I love that kind of thing yeah You always think you need breaks. Until it suddenly: "We need you for four days in June to reshoot scenes for 'Mission: Impossible'." Then you're suddenly sucked in again. I love that because I love the roles too. It sure would be bad if I had to work on set in a terrible environment. That's not the case. It is great.

translated from German by @edwardslovelyelizabeth exclusively for @rebeccalouisaferguson

#rebecca ferguson #interview #silo interview #dune interview #mi7 interview #spark hunter #dune part two interview

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timptoe · 2 years ago

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When Genocide Is the Best Option

I played the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time during the summer of 2022, and it broke my brain. So I played it again over the last six months, trying to figure out why it did what it did to me, and after finishing it again last week, I’ve had the same reaction of intense grief I did the first time. I know I’m a newbie and a decade late to this game, but I’ve tried to piece together what it is about the ending that’s so brilliant and so terrible. And in true English major form, I’ve written 3000 words to try and exorcise it from my head.

It starts with the ending of Stranger Than Fiction.

In Stranger Than Fiction, a boring accountant named Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell in the best performance of his career) one day starts hearing a voice in his head (Emma Thompson, my love), narrating his life. It’s annoying, but bearable, up until the day he adjusts the time on his wristwatch and the Author says, “Little did he know this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.”

Understandably perturbed, Harold seeks to prevent this, ultimately by seeking the Author out and trying to convince her not to finish typing out the book and, presumably, his death. (The unexplained magical realism in this movie is absurdity on par with Samuel Beckett, I can’t tell you how much I love it.) She handwrites the ending for him to see, and Harold shows it to a Professor friend (Dustin Hoffman!) who tells him, “Even if you avoid this death, another will find you and I guarantee that it won't be nearly as poetic or meaningful as what she's written.” And Harold agrees once he reads it too, because in it, he saves a little boy. Isn’t that what we all want, for the end of our stories to have meaning?

But the Author ends up changing the ending. When the Professor reads the finished story with the new, happier ending where both the boy and Harold live, he’s clearly disappointed. They have this exchange:

Professor: It's okay. It's not bad. It's not the most amazing piece of English literature in several years. But it's okay. Author: I think I’m fine with okay. Professor: Why did you change the book? Author: Lots of reasons. I realized I just couldn't do it. Professor: Because he's real? Author: Because it's a book about a man who doesn't know he's about to die and then dies. But if the man does know he's going to die and dies anyway, dies willingly, knowing he could stop it, then...I mean, isn't that the type of man you want to keep alive?

Shepard is the type of person you want to keep alive.

The series does a good job of getting us attached to Shepard, so it’s natural that we want a happy ending for them. We want The Good Ending. And we’ve been trained by the last century-or-so of western fiction heroes’ journies to expect The Good Ending, too. We expect Frodo and Sam to be rescued from Mount Doom by the eagles. We expect Cloud to beat Sephiroth and come out the other side, whole. And even when the protagonist does die—think the Hero of Fereldan choosing not to sleep with Morrigan, or the wipeout of the team in Rogue One, or the dad dying in Life Is Beautiful—it’s usually a sacrifice ultimately in service of The Good Ending. The world is left better because of the hero’s death—a choice that isn’t really a choice, because we expect The Good Ending.

But instead, at the very last moment, Mass Effect throws us into the cruelest version of the Trolley Problem imaginable.

On track one, if you choose to keep the trolley on its original path, you Destroy all AI. Which means you kill a valued member of your crew and an entire race of sentient synthetics in cold blood. Sure, Shepard (probably) lives at the very end, but this is definitionally Not The Good Ending. The hero can’t commit genocide and still be the hero. And the idea that Shepard could live with themselves after making that choice isn’t consistent with Paragon morality. Maybe if your Shepard is a Renegade, they become an antihero in this moment, but it’s still not The Good Ending as we understand it.

So jump to track two, and choose to Control the trolley and drive it away from death toward new purpose. Which is fine, except that a) the whole arc of the third game shows that Control isn’t possible and is actually evil, embodied in the mission of Cerberus and the person of the Illusive Man; and b) Shepard is then no longer Shepard at the end of the story—they’ve lost the humanity they’ve been fighting so desperately to preserve, stripped away to become the closest thing the galaxy has to a god. Maybe they’re a good god for a hundred years, or even a thousand, but maybe the Leviathans’ Intelligence was, too. Can we expect Shepard-without-humanity not to eventually turn into the Catalyst? To say that the only way to save humanity is to “preserve” it? Renegade Shepard even says in the epilogue, “I will destroy those who threaten the future of the many”; Paragon Shepard’s version, “I will act as guardian for the many,” isn’t much better. Who decides who’s the many? Autocracy can’t be The Good Ending.

Track three’s gotta be The Good Ending then, right? The game certainly presents it as such: Synthesis, the ultimate bridge of understanding between organics and synthetics. The only way to truly achieve peace, argues the Catalyst. It’s the central option in that final chamber, it’s the shortest path to walk to, it’s literally colored lifestream!green. And it’s a completely violation of the bodily autonomy of every living creature in the entire galaxy. The body horror’s real on this one, y’all. I actually picked Synthesis on my first playthrough because of how clearly it was presented as The Good Ending, but watching the epilogue…I mean, it’s great for EDI. Probably great for Joker too. But then I saw the little green circuitry flash across James’s face during Shepard’s memorial and I thought, This guy? The body-as-a-temple guy? No way he’s okay with any of this. Imposing your will on an entire galaxy full of sentient beings feels inconsistent with The Good Ending.

Those are our choices in the final moments of the game. And honestly, the most nearly moral choice is probably track one. Control, at best, pauses the cycle until AI Shepard decides to start the cycle of reaping again. Synthesis takes away the freedom of all sentient creatures—even those who aren’t spacefaring yet, which: imagine if we today suddenly got Synthesized, the chaos that that would bring—to be themselves. So we’re left with Destroy. Think about that. From a certain point of view, genocide is the most nearly moral decision. Which means there is no moral decision.

There is no Good Ending.

In trying to come to terms with the ending, I’ve read a lot of takes about how the writing is bad. I just don’t think that’s the case. I rather think it’s some of the most brilliant writing in Bioware’s canon, precisely because it’s so uncomfortable. Maybe the Choice comes a little bit out of nowhere, though it’s vaguely hinted at in certain descriptions of the Crucible War Assets, like how the Crucible “tunes into the mass relays' command switches” for “the safe discharge of tremendous amounts of energy”, producing “some kind of energetic pulse that might pass through the magnetosphere of a planet unimpeded.” But even if the Choice is a swerve, the choices aren’t. Destroy has been Shepard’s mission from day one. Control is set up as an alternate option starting at Mars. And Synthesis is hinted at as The Good Ending by EDI, the Leviathan, and Legion.

And let’s talk about Legion for a minute, and why the Geth/Quarian peace doesn’t affect the conversation with the Catalyst. My first playthrough, I was aghast that silver-tongued Shepard wasn’t able to argue with the Catalyst that none of the options were necessary, that the Geth/Quarian peace proves all three choices are unnecessary, that everything’ll be alright with a little grit and empathy. Shepard’s able to argue (and convince) damn near everyone else in the series of almost anything; it feels like bad writing not to let them do that with the Catalyst, too.

Except for two things. First, Shepard is actively bleeding out. They’re barely conscious when the platform takes them up into the Crucible, not exactly up for a rigorous Lincoln-Douglass debate. But second, and more importantly, the Catalyst is an unreliable actor. The Leviathians’ Intelligence that becomes the Catalyst has one—and only one—purpose: to stop the chaos of organic/synthetic antagonism. The cycle of reaping works for millenia until, finally, a creature actually makes it through the Citadel and onto the precipice of firing the Crucible. That’s never happened before. And more to the point, the Catalyst can’t stop the creature; it has no corporeal form. So the Catalyst has to come up with a new plan: rather than allow the creature to Destroy its solution or, worse, supplant it as the new source of Control, the Catalyst needs to convince the creature to go through with Synthesis. I’m willing to bet the Catalyst would rather just kill Shepard and continue the cycle of reaping, but it knows that that’s no longer possible, so Synthesis is its best remaining option. It has every reason to lie to Shepard, to cajole Shepard into making that choice. It is utterly consistent in its motivations.

In other words, it’s good writing, even if it’s terribly inconsistent with The Good Ending we’ve come to expect.

(As an aside, I know from bad writing: I’m a refugee from Final Fantasy. FFVI was my first—and still my favorite—RPG; FFVII and its followups are brilliant, FFVIII has some of my favorite characters, FFX is a theological treatise better than anything I read in seminary. But FFXIII and especially FFXV are complete and utter garbage. Hollow characters. Unearned conflicts. Absurd twists with no basis in the narrative. A storytelling mode that’s so rigid as to be unbearable. And FFXV’s ending! No pathos, no resolution, the barest connection to anything else in the story, just a huge timejump and then “kill the bad guy.” Uuuuuugh.)

In teasing out the deep grief I felt after beating Mass Effect the first time, I was surprised at the type of grief it is. It’s not the sharp grief of the loss of love, like I felt when my mother-in-law died or when my wife miscarried twice. It’s not the dull grief of the loss of innocence, like when I left home for the last time or when I watched the towers fall on TV. It took a while to process, but I think it’s the grief of the loss of purpose, the same lingering malaise I felt when I finally realized my career of twenty years was actively bad and I had to leave it behind. Mass Effect’s ending is so hard because we want Shepard either to live, or at least to have a “poetic and meaningful” death, and they don’t. They live, they become a mass murderer; they die, they become everything they’ve fought against. That single choice has the effect of making everything before the Crucible feel purposeless.

And yet.

There’s a quote I like from Beckett that goes:

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on.

Art is not always meant to comfort us. Sometimes, it’s meant to break us and then, a la Hemingway, help us become “stronger in the broken places.” Beckett and the absurdists and the existentialists get that on a deep level: there’s always An Ending, rarely is it a Good Ending, and sometimes what you do before and after the ending matters more than the ending itself. And I think that’s where I finally get to with Mass Effect: yeah, the ending is absurd and purposeless. And that’s the point.

I want desperately for Shepard to get The Good Ending because Shepard is the type of person you want to keep alive. I want Mass Effect 3 to end like Mass Effect 1, with Shepard’s companions wondering where they are, and then they run up a piece of debris like a conquering hero for all to see. I want to see my Shepard reunite with Kaidan, to run across the scorched battlefield of London into a fierce embrace and say, “I would never leave you behind, not really, not forever. Not again. Never again.” And he doesn’t. And that sucks.

And there is a deep beauty in fighting until you can’t anymore, in making the only choice you can because it’s still your choice, in finding new purpose after The Good Ending, or The Not-So-Good Ending, because if Mass Effect is about anything it’s about endurance. We will endure this war because we have to. I will endure this pain because I have no choice. Life keeps going because life keeps going with no reason or rhyme so it’s our job to make a reason, to invent purpose where none exists, because that’s what we do.

Existence is absurd. Doubly so in a universe like Mass Effect’s, filled with aliens who wield feckless power and technology that is indecipherable and an enemy who is fundamentally Other. For Beckett, the response to that absurdity is a happy, mighty “fuck you.” Maybe you can get The Good Ending if you try hard enough. Maybe there’s never any such thing as The Good Ending. None of that’s the point anyway because, again, existence is absurd—so fuck you, my life has meaning because I say it does. My choices have meaning because I say they do. We have purpose because we say we do.

As Shepard says, “However insignificant we may be, we will fight. We will sacrifice. And we will find a way. That’s what humans do.”

I’m left conflicted about the next game. A huge part of me—the part that loves the twist in Stranger Than Fiction, the part that’s all about redemption and grace and simplicity—wants the game to be “The Search for Shep.” And I think if it is, it’ll negate the purposelessness and terrible beauty of the ending to Mass Effect 3, which would be an absolute shame. The ending of the Mass Effect trilogy is so powerful because it forces you to find meaning in the journey, not in the ending itself. It turned the whole series on its head for me at least because, honestly, I didn’t really like it during my first playthrough. I mean, it was…fine? Some good characters, some good lines, but kind of a mundane military FPS. Halo with space wizards. But it’s that ending, that existentially absurd ending, that lifts the rest of the series into high literature. (Not that I’m down on fix-it fics, mind you. There’s no work of literature that isn’t elevated by fanfiction. Hell, I’m writing my own fix-it fic from Joker’s POV! I’m just…conflicted about what to do with canon, which is another thing that makes me think it’s good writing after all.)

So that’s where I am. Never thought Mass Effect would jump into my top five favorite games ever, but here we are. It helped me come to terms with some pretty deep feelings I didn’t know were still in me, in the way good literature does. I’ll be chewing on this one for a long, long time. And lucky for me, the state of the fandom ten years after the trilogy ended is so robust that I’m in good company. Got a lot more thoughts, but I’ll stop there. Thanks, friends.

Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren't any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true. - Kay Eiffel, The Author, Stranger Than Fiction

#mass effect #mass effect 3 #my writing #are you really an English major if you don't substitute writing an essay for therapy #i have so many more thoughts but they'll keep #also reading so much of the fic and essays the ME fandom's done on here helped me piece my brain together #so thanks for that #stranger than fiction

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tradingmaps · 2 years ago

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100 Novel Opening Lines

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation. —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. —George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)

97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

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quotation--marks · 2 years ago

Text

The island. A last effort. The islet. The shore facing the open sea is jagged with creeks. One could live there, perhaps happy, if life was a possible thing, but nobody lives there. The deep water comes washing into its heart, between high walls of rock. One day nothing will remain of it but two islands, separated by a gulf, narrow at first then wider and wider as the centuries slip by, two islands, two reefs. It is difficult to speak of man, under such conditions.

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (trans. Samuel Beckett)

#malone dies #samuel beckett #1951 #1950s #20th century #irish literature #queue pierce my soul

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ireneworth · 2 years ago

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'My Dear, Put Back the Words'

Let Albee explain Albee. In 'Lady from Dubuque,' Irene Worth listens for the poetry.

By Harry Haun

Daily News, January 27, 1980.

Irene Worth, the "international actress" from Omaha, sits in a back corner of Gallagher's, dealing with the specialty of the day (corned beef and cabbage), looking resplendently inconspicuous in her Anyone face.

Save for the fact that she's surrounded by press and publicists, she could pass for anyone and, indeed, has during her 38-year life in the theater. Most recently she has been, by stage turns: a sensuous Hollywood siren on the skids (Tennessee Williams "Sweet Bird of Youth"); a destitute Russian; dowager (Anton Chekov's "The Cherry Orchard"); an indefatigable survivor sinking slowly into a mound of earth (Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days").

Now, she is "The Lady From Dubuque" in the so-named Edward Albee play opening Thursday at the Morosco. The character carries cryptic overtones like a flag, which is inevitable with Albee and par for his pre-premiere course. Everyone con nected with the production seems to have taken the blood oath of secrecy, and all the author will allow is that the title comes from a remark Harold Ross once made about the market for The New Yorker: "It won't be written for the little old lady from Dubuque." The same, of course, could be said for any Albee play.

For the present, his secret is safe with Irene Worth. True to the show's team-spirit, she will only admit to the title role. Period. "I'm not going to talk about what Edward's plays are about because it's too difficult," she declares out front. "Edward is the authority on his plays. He's got to tell what his plays are about. I'm just going to be in them." She makes no secret, however, of the fact that she is reveling in returning to Broadway in an original work—for her, the first time this has happened since "Tiny Alice" 15 years ago; now, as then, the author is Albee, the director is Alan Schneider and the producer is Richard Barr. "We have sort of an old scene going together," she allows.

"I love working on this play and working with Alan. Edward comes occasionally, and we all work together and change if we have to. I find it the deepest, best kind of work, very stimulating and energizing. It rivets one's concentration. It's like realizing the dream of being an actor because you're immersed in the text and exploring how you reveal it.

"Recently, Edward took out two words, and I'm going to ask him today to put them back—or two other words—because I need them to complete the poetry in that line. He's a very great musician, you know, so he's not unaware at all of rhythm and balance and dynamics. The mastery of his writing is that this is not imposed. The audience is not aware of it. It's only that the lines fall comfortably to the ear. There's an unselfconscious musicality in his writing."

When Irene Worth talks shop—and she never talks anything else to interviewers—the passion shows. It gives her a beauty and energy that belie her 63 years, for acting is something she knows, and loves, and this feeling has been returned to her in italics. To date, she has collected two Tonys (for "Tiny Alice" and "Sweet Bird of Youth"), one British Oscar (for 1958's "Orders To Kill") and the most extravagant praise imaginable. Walter Kerr, reviewing her "Hedda Gabler" In Canada 10 years ago, suggested that she "is, quite possibly, the best actress in the world." The road that has brought her to this point in time back to Broadway has been anything but a straight line. Indeed, if charted, her career could make, the course of pinball seem planned. Yet, miraculously, the moves have been right ones. She left Omaha as a child when her school-superintendent father accepted a comparable post in Los Angeles. She received a degree in education at the University of California and taught kindergarten for two years before heeding her muses. When 15 years of training to sing at the Met came to naught, she settled for the stage, surfacing first in 1942 in a road company of "Escape Me Never" and the following year on Broadway in "The Two Mrs. Carrolls," in both instances supporting Elisabeth Bergner. It was Bergner who pointed her toward the British theater where she toiled productively for the next 30 years, save for occasional New York forays in plays like T. S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party," Friedrich Schiller's "Mary Stuart" and Lillian Hellman's "Toys in the Attic." From the English, the actress acquired classic training, an awesome "international" reputation and an extra syllable on her first name (it's pronounced "I-ren-ee"). Since her engagement in "Sweet Bird of Youth" a few years ago, Manhattan has been her home.

"It's my choice, I think," she says, pondering the path above. "I like to grow as an actor. Also, I don't want to work on bad material. It's a waste of energy. If you're in a good play, the writing sustains you and ieeds you ana nourishes you, and you can get through the evening and have self-respect It's so thrilling if you've really done the play that night and it was good and you got somewhere."

Considering where she has gotten, it's slightly superfluous to wish her good luck as "The Lady From Dubuque," but she smiles anyway. "My dear, the only good luck you can have is enough rehearsal time so you get it right."

#irene worth #clippings #the lady from dubuque #1980 #edward albee #broadway

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