#last thing: it's the feeling of being oddly present and introspective as a young child

[dissociache]

Another year flew by and I'm turning 28 in five days.

So uh yeah Time makes u bolder children get older I'm getting older too and all that other shit Stevie Nicks said that's literally haunted me since childhood, even when I was too young to fully grasp just how fast the years would pass me by while simultaneously always knowing those lyrics would one day resonate heavily with me.

[tessa-quayle]

full text: 2019 Telegraph piece

check out the pictures here from @ralph-n-fiennes

the article by Hermione Eyre (official link - registration required for a free trial)

Ralph Fiennes does Ralph Fiennes so well. During our interview he delivers everything one might hope for: sensitive introspection, charm, pathos, a touch of mystery and even a (partial) defence of late Soviet Russia. ‘A lot of people didn’t experience it as repressive…’

This in the context of the stunning new film he has directed, called The White Crow, about the defection of Rudolf Nureyev from the Soviet Union in 1961. Oh, and he also impersonates a horse for me. Beautiful whinny. Sensitive nostrils.

‘It’s how I feel as the house lights go down and I can feel the expectation from the audience. You can see it in horses before a race.’ 

As we begin, in a Shoreditch loft studio not far from his home, he seems professorial, in a woolly cardigan, neatly arranging his spectacles, notebook and copy of the latest London Review of Books. When he is ready he gives me that trademark encouraging smile – half little boy, half crocodile.

Career-wise, he has it all. Family life, not so much. His greatest luxury? ‘My independence. I lead quite a solitary life.’ When I ask him if he’s a good uncle to his siblings’ progeny – Mercy, Titan and Hero, to name a few – he says flatly, ‘I could be better.’

His sister, the film-maker Sophie Fiennes, says her son Horace, now eight, really enjoyed the sword fighting in his Richard III, which is, if you think about it, a good outcome for a small boy going to see his uncle play Richard III.

His presence is a mark of quality in a film. Both the Bond and Harry Potter franchises, where he plays M and Voldemort respectively, brought him in for gravitas. Since Rada, he has run the gamut of Shakespeare, from Romeo in 1986 to his award-winning Antony & Cleopatra last year at the National, opposite Sophie Okonedo.

‘She was spectacular. I miss Antony. I found him very moving in his brokenness; his masculinity falling away and him trying to cling on to it. He’s male and middle-aged, and he keeps saying, “I’ve still got it, haven’t I? Haven’t I?”’

Does he recognise that? ‘I am 56 and I try to stay fitter’ – he does cardio and morning yoga – ‘but I can feel myself getting… old. Little shifts of energy and ambition, little impulses. You get tired more, you want to take it easy more.’ Then summoning mercurial energy in that actorly way, he explodes, ‘But I can feel myself fighting that, like, “I’m not gonna let go! Come on, come on. Yeah!” There are plenty of virile 56-year-old men.’

When I ask if he’s got a motorbike yet, like Ralph Richardson, he isn’t impressed. ‘No, my brother Joseph rides a motorbike. He can do fast cars and handle boats.’ Joseph, now 48, will for ever be the young Bard wooing Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, just as Ralph single-handedly made Herodotus hot, that spring of 1997 when we all went to see The English Patient and wept.

Antony gives everything up for sex. ‘Yes, he does, that’s a very real erotic connection, and it’s very emasculating for him.’ Does sex make the world go round? ‘Erm, sex produces more human beings, mostly.’ Nice deflection.

Fiennes married Alex Kingston, his great love from Rada, in 1993. Their marriage ended when he left her in 1995 for the actor who was playing Gertrude to his Hamlet, Francesca Annis, 17 years older than him. Although the relationship broke down in early 2006 amid reports of his alleged infidelity, they still talk, have a deep, mutual professional respect and go to each other’s first nights.

Kingston has since gone on to have a daughter, Salome, with her second husband and Annis already had three children; Fiennes has never wanted his own family. ‘Never say never,’ he demurs. ‘But I don’t feel that’s imminent at all. I love the family and community of plays or the cast and crew of a film.’

He recollects his lines from Man and Superman, the Bernard Shaw play, ‘where Jack Tanner [whom he played] rather brilliantly pours scorn on the idea of happiness: “No family, no marriage, spread your seed, but no marriage!” I love the mischief in that.’

He says, ‘I am the eldest of six,’ as if it explains everything. The Fiennes children were born within seven years. Martha and Sophie make films; Magnus is a composer; Joseph is an actor and his twin Jacob is a gamekeeper in Norfolk. Their foster brother, Michael, now an archaeologist, came to live with them when he was 11, Ralph was two and their mother Jini was only 24.

‘My wonderful parents [Mark Fiennes, a farmer, and Jini Lash, a writer] were pressured by tough financial situations and a very erratic income,’ says Fiennes quietly. ‘They were extraordinarily courageous in giving us love and a sense of home, but also a feeling, early on, of what it is to be a burden on your parents – somewhere I think that’s affected my choices.’

‘We experienced family life with bells on,’ says sister Sophie, who’s currently working on a new series of the brilliant Pervert’s Guide to… documentaries with philosopher Slavoj Zižek. ‘You have lived that and you don’t need to replicate it.’ She remembers that as a child Ralph ‘really liked getting away from us all and being alone’.

He adored his Pollock’s toy theatre and insisted his siblings formed an audience, ‘furious’ if they didn’t comply. He set up footlights in matchboxes. ‘It was magical, very Fanny and Alexander,’ says Sophie, referencing the Bergman paean to childhood.

Ralph always had ‘a love of practical jokes’, she remembers. When they lived by the sea, on the Sheep’s Head peninsula in Ireland, he stood on a rock at high tide and pretended to be drowning.

‘Gave our mother a fit.’ He also called their neighbour to say his wife had been changing a light bulb and was now hanging from the ceiling, twitching. ‘It was April Fool’s. Our neighbour was furious.’

As a young man Fiennes became, after Schindler’s List, the intellectual’s pin-up. Is ageing harder when you’ve been a heart-throb? ‘Look, there’s lots of heart-throbs out there. You see it in younger actors who are having their moment, there’s a new one and they’re written up, how beautiful they are… You see the waves and the breaks, that person had that moment, or that opportunity. There are a handful of actors and directors who stay [the course], but mostly it’s ups and downs.’ In other words, the challenge is to convert being a heart-throb into something more meaningful and lasting.

Such as directing. He directed himself in 2011’s Bafta-nominated Coriolanus with Vanessa Redgrave as his mother Volumnia; in 2013 he directed and appeared as a passion-struck Dickens opposite Felicity Jones in The Invisible Woman.

His latest is The White Crow, based on Julie Kavanagh’s biography of Nureyev. He spent months touring Russian ballet schools before finding Oleg Ivenko, a young unknown from the Tatar State Ballet company, who is devastatingly good as the dancer. Fiennes plays his mentor Pushkin.

I didn’t really want to be in it,’ he says. ‘But I felt this creeping pressure and although I had a cast of wonderful Russian actors and dancers, the Russian producer said to me, “If you want Russian investment then we need Western names, why aren’t you in it?”’

He will dig deep to make the films he wants to make: has he put his own money in? ‘I have done, yes.’ Would you again? ‘No! I’ve had to put money into all the films I’ve made. They don’t sparkle with commercial appeal.’ Did the money come back? ‘No.’ Harry Potter helps? ‘Definitely. I don’t regret doing it. I have the resources and I believe in the project. You get one life, so f— it.’

The script of The White Crow is by David Hare, who questions the view of Nureyev’s defection as a ‘leap to freedom’, showing instead a certain nostalgia for the Nikita Khrushchev era.

Hare and Fiennes spoke to friends of Nureyev from 1950s Leningrad, twin dancers Leonid and Liuba Romankov, now in their 80s, who appear in a lunch party scene alongside actors playing their younger selves. ‘Liuba said, “I felt free, I felt happy inside myself at that time.” Nureyev was so nurtured and nourished by the dance school.’

The film doesn’t have anything to say about the propaganda and food shortages. ‘If you say I should have laid out a history lesson of the regime, I say no, I think that would have been heavy-handed. I think an audience is smart. You see the ideological pressure of the regime and the constant surveillance Nureyev was under.’

Do you feel the Soviet approach to the arts got something right? ‘I do, because that was, as I understand it, the philosophy of “we’re all a group”, though of course the individual is stifled. I’ve always been moved by what I feel to be the dedication of the Russian arts ethos, the discipline, the intense seriousness with which people take it.’

His love of Russia began in his early 20s, with him performing Chekhov and reading Dostoyevsky; he is now fluent in Russian, has ‘a lingering fantasy of buying a flat in St Petersburg’ and has been presented to Putin. ‘At the St Petersburg International Cultural Forum, which they hold every year. He was very quiet and listening.’

This was before the Salisbury poisoning. Does Fiennes believe Russia was responsible? Briskly, ‘Yes, yes. It seems to me like it was. Clearly there are problematic things with the current regime to our eyes and I do feel it’s been a tricky time since Salisbury, and that’s a shame and sad.’ Oddly enough he knows the town well, having been to Bishop Wordsworth’s grammar school.

‘I had a mostly happy time there. It was an extraordinarily shocking, cack-handed event, unacceptable and wrong in every way. And in reaction the Brits have made things harder with visas and it becomes tit for tat, and the Russians have closed down the British Council, which was a wonderful enabler of cultural interaction. I don’t know if the British Council is a cover for espionage, maybe it is…’ Bond bells are ringing. But you’re M, you must know! He replies, curtly, ‘But I’m not M, am I?’

We return to the topic of growing older. ‘There are pluses to ageing, you know? You can let go of some shit. The competition falls away. You can see the cycles of your own mistakes, hopefully you’re learning… All the things that have caused you upset:  I hurt that person, I got a bad review. You start to feel: did that really matter? The things you were so concerned about just drift away on the current of life. And your idealism is tempered and your vanity gets knocked…’

He brings up, as an example, the 2002 film he made with Jennifer Lopez called Maid in Manhattan, a comedy fairy tale in which he plays a US senatorial candidate who falls for his chambermaid. ‘I saw in the newspaper they had J Lo’s most successful films and’ – big smile – ‘Maid in Manhattan was there, and it came quite near the top’ – bigger smile – ‘and then I read: “Let down by the fact that Ralph Fiennes seems like a serial killer.” Ha ha ha! I had to laugh.

’Cos my vanity scrolled it and then… bam!’ He gives a proper belly laugh. Didn’t he get together with J Lo while they were filming? ‘No. No. I was set up by her manager and the producer. So a picture was taken of us saying goodnight after dinner and sold to the New York Post. It was a decoy, to take the focus away from the fact that she was going out with Ben Affleck.’ You didn’t mind? ‘I did, actually. I thought it was really crap.’ He shrugs, smiles. The things fame brings.

‘I give my agent all these neurotic phone calls, asking about reviews, who said this, who said that, but then, glass of wine, laugh it off.’

I feel I’ve had a flash of the blazing, naughty, fun side of Fiennes; we have known it’s there ever since we saw his suavely clownish Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and his irrepressible Harry in A Bigger Splash (complete with gyrating dance routine). There is a fun side to him, then? He smiles enigmatically as we say goodbye. ‘You won’t ever see that in an interview situation.’ 

[redscullyrevival]

Fool’s Assassin: Fitz and the Fool Rundown

OH MY GOD @sonnetscrewdriver

Plot/Narrative/Setting:

Uhhhh, holy SHIT???

Now, I know I’ve consumed these Elderling books in a rapid fashion but this one I friggin’ devoured. 

I loved it so much, so many aspects of this first book I completly adored and got very emotional over.

Plot aspects and writing aspects.

Bee’s first chapter from her perspective?! 

Oh my god you guys I had to put the book down and wander about my house in a glow for a bit, but I’ll come back to that in a little while.

For now I just wanna say that I feel a little vindicated! Heh.

I said it felt like Blood of Dragons was leaning into another book and that feels true here, especially thematically - at least with how I viewed the end of Rain Wilds anyways.

The fresh baby Elderlings are going to have time to grow and look back on their past and their experiences and see them anew; time is it’s own change but in The Rain Wilds Chronicles the young keepers couldn’t see past their own immediate trials and tribulations, and had no need or desire to do so. They’re young. 

Fitz and the Fool seems it will focus on change and we all know every Elderling series is about change, duhdoy - but this time around the variation on theme seems to be “reflection as change”.

And this is being done in really interesting ways I’m gobbling up!

Looking back and reflecting on the past can’t change the past but it can change the observer, it can shift our perspective and self understanding.

Experience and time changes how we feel about our personal stories, changes how we feel about ourselves and our actions and choices and is a willing practice most people indulge in as they age.

And then there are children.

Children are a near constant form of self reflection; parenting is a daily grind through one’s own childhood memories and habits and looking at yourself and experience through your parent’s eyes as well as your newly acquired parent lenses - it is very intense. 

Raising children is achingly sweet, oddly nostalgic, uniquely frustrating, guilt draining, and terrifying. Trust me. 

And I don’t imagine there are many experiences that forces someone to be as introspective and unwillingly mining and measuring their own life as much as raising children does. It’s a type of change where your sense of control is lacking to nonexistent. 

Parenting is basically adolescence 2.0 okay? 

Nobody knows what they’re doing the first time around and all the experience in the world won’t prepare you for the amazing differences each child possesses. Parenting is just an adaptive process of change on the go.

So far the Fitz and the Fool series seems to be focusing on these two particular types of change by merging parenting’s hyper focused self-evaluation with the natural backward glance of ageing into a snowball of dread (and I assume later acceptance).  

It’s fantastic stuff!  

Fitz

I feel as if my personal prayers have been answered.

I’m so over the moon that Fitz is a professional wayward child collector, it’s so beautiful I can’t stand it! 

When reading Tawny Man I thought “You know what would be great? Fitz adopting more children” - a thought I had AFTER he married Molly and thus had like nine kids already. 

HehehehhaaahahAHAHAHABAAAAHAHAH!

This is my favorite Fitz.

Still making poor choices driven by self isolation of course, you can’t teach an old wolf new tricks evidently, but still my favorite Fitz so far. 

So much calmer. 

Quick to listen and slow to speak.

Empathetic, less paranoid.

A sturdy man. 

Retirement suited Fitz, and I’m so glad his edges softened and his eyes adjusted to the light. 

I want him to keep his found peace and take it with him through this new gauntlet of horrible happenings, I believe in him. 

It’s a little upsetting Fitz still doesn’t believe in himself, or rather he doesn’t believe in others.

Fitz is still afraid of what he can’t immediately control; doesn’t see his friendships clearly; and takes up more responsibility then he can handle without asking for help.

Frankly, after Molly’s death Fitz isn’t a very adaptive parent. 

He tries! He does, and if time was on his side I think Fitz and Bee would have built something wonderful and symbiotic.

PS Molly was so real in this book. So warm and defined in my mind, I grew to really see her. Devastated! 

Bee

Oh my sweet summer child!

We’ve broken into a new perspective! For the first time we see Fitz from the outside! I LOVE IT.

I also love Bee.

I really love Bee.

On the Fitz side of things I’m pleased with how he is now; on the Bee side of things I think there was a lot Fitz could have done and didn’t when it comes to his younger daughter.

Much of what Bee knows and understands of her Father (and other adults around her) is from her own observations and intelligence, not from him sharing information with her directly. 

Most informative communication between father and daughter is instigated by Bee.

And that’s frustrating. I’m frustrated on Bee’s behalf. 

I’m frightened for her now as well! 

Oh Bee, stay save. 

Be smart. 

The Fool

*anguished war cry*

Shun

Shun obviously has problems and I’m doing my best to not hold anything against her.

If she can she needs to get her shit together and sooner would be better than later.

She’s going to need herself and Bee isn’t going to admit it but she’ll need her too. 

God I hope Shun rises to the occasion of total survival - I’m on your team Shun! You can do it!

Lant

What the fuck lol?

Who is this clown? 

Shun is a mess but Lant is a disaster. What’s his deal?

Thankful for small miracles that Shun went with Bee - cause these two were getting chummy and I’m pretty sure they’re brother and sister or something.

Bee’s observation during dinner one night about how Shun and Lant were like mirrors of each other is going to ring true I’d wager.

AND I BLAME CHADE. 

I hope this kid turns around and becomes helpful, otherwise I’m cool if he stays home.  

Highlighted Passages

Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful.

A tiny motion caught my eye. It wasn’t much. Steady had opened his mouth and then shut it again. It was not much of a trail but I’d pursue it. I looked at him suddenly, pointed my finger, and demanded, “What did Chade tell you not to tell anyone?”

At intervals throughout my life, I had tried to record all I had seen and done. And often enough I’d had to hastily destroy those accounts when I feared they would fall into the wrong hands. I winced as I thought of it. I only regret the time I spent writing them when I had to burn them. I think of all the time I spent carefully writing, only to have it burn to ash in a matter of minutes. But you always began again. Writing it down. I almost laughed aloud. I did. And each time I’ve done so, I’ve found that the story changed as my perspective on life changed.

I had been young, I excused myself, and who does not put himself in the best possible light when he presents his tale to someone he loves? Or his excuses to someone he has wronged.

It was a very good life I had. When melancholy overtook me, I knew it was not for anything in my present, but only darkness from the past. And those bleak regrets were only memories, powerless to hurt me. I thought of that, and yawned suddenly. I could sleep now, I decided.

A part of me did not wish to leave her when her mind was so unsettled, and another part of me longed for a respite from indulging her delusion. I called Revel aside and asked that he pay special attention to her requests while I was gone. He looked almost offended that I thought such a command necessary. “As ever, sir,” he said, and added his stiff little bow that meant, You idiot.

I was almost annoyed at her for spoiling my perfectly good sulk. And that was when I realized that was what I had been doing. I’d been sulking because the Fool had sent letters to Jofron and not to me. And like a child, I’d been testing the people who loved me, pulling away from them almost for the sole reason of seeing if anyone would come after me.

I did not begrudge Molly her years of marriage to Burrich. He had been a good man for her. But this was like a slow knife turning in me, to watch them recollect an experience I would never have. I stared at them, the outsider again. And then, as if a curtain had lifted or a door opened, I realized that I excluded myself.

“Fitz! Must you always leap from one imagined disaster to another? Listen to what I’m actually saying, which is that I don’t know what path Nettle chose for herself. But if she is alone now, it is because she chose to be alone, not because someone decreed it for her. Her life is hers to live, not yours to repair.”

Ah, I do not know what comfort anyone could offer me, save to let me say these things aloud and not recoil in horror from my heartlessness.

There would never again be anyone like her. Never anyone who would love us so completely, with so little reason.

I reined my heart away from exploring those losses. It was one of my faults, one that Molly had sometimes rebuked me for indulging. If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard. I needed to focus on what I had, not what I had lost. I needed to remember there was a tomorrow, and I had just committed myself to someone else’s tomorrow as well.

There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal.

Like him, I bore some scars from the things we had exploded together. Just as we had this girl’s life.

I think I decided that night that the discomfort of being close to him was preferable to standing away from the only person in the world who I knew loved me. I suspect that at some point he had made the same decision.

In many places Patience had written scathingly skeptical notes about the veracity of what she was reading. Often they made me giggle uncontrollably: It was a glimpse into her that no one else had shared with me. Her notes were fading, so I renewed them in black ink as I found them.

I felt a flash of anger toward Chade at the bubbling kettle he had sent to my home. Who would be scalded when she finally boiled over?

“It’s too short to braid. I cut it because my mother died.” I looked at her directly for one instant. Shun met my gaze coldly. Then she said, “I can only wish my mother were dead. I think it would make my life easier.” I stared at her knees. Her words cut me and I tried to understand why. After a moment it came to me. She considered her pain more significant than mine.

I suspected that in her thoughtless wretchedness she could employ cruelty such as I had never experienced from an adult.

The best an assassin can do is create a setting in which he does not have to witness the pain he causes.

We live in our bodies. An assault on that outside fortress of the mind leaves scars that may not show, but never heal.

I hugged my knees tightly to my chest, pulling them in hard, wishing I could break my own legs. Wishing I could destroy myself so I could escape these terrible feelings.

“I will always take your part, Bee. Right or wrong. That is why you must always take care to be right, lest you make your father a fool.”

I could be my father’s daughter. Impervious to what he had done. Sure of my own worthiness. I lifted my chin.

FitzVigilant had failed as an assassin, so Chade had assumed he would do better as a scribe and teacher. And I had gone along with such a crooked piece of logic. Why? Did either of us believe that teaching children might be easier than killing them?

“Torture strips one of all dignity. Pain can make you shriek, or beg, or soil yourself. There is no privacy when your enemies own you and have no compunction, no human compunction at all about what they will do to you. So, among my friends, yes. Privacy is still an obsession. And a gift from them. A restoration in small part of what dignity I once had.”

I bowed my head to that. After a moment, she added, “People love you far more than you deserve, Tom Badgerlock. But you don’t even believe that they love you at all.” I was still pondering that when she added, “And I am one of those people.” “Nettle, I’m so—” “Say it again and I’ll hit you. I don’t care who is watching. If I could ask one thing of you, it would be that you never say those stupid words again.”