#miriam fry
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
all-that-jazz-93 · 1 year ago
Text
Sometime in the 1950s, Miriam Fry is horrified to realize that the Griffith Hotel is almost entirely inhabited by lesbians
17 notes · View notes
ssr-archives · 9 months ago
Conversation
Miss Fry: Fuck Peggy Carter
Angie Martinelli: I'm tryin'
2K notes · View notes
o0anapher0o · 1 year ago
Text
What possesses casting directors to go ' Alright people, we have the most stuffy, traditionalist/bigoted, small minded, stick up their backside, upper class, elitist character you can imagine, now get me the most outspoken, liberal old queer with a posh accent you can find for it' ? First Miriam Margolyes in mfmm and now Steven Fry in rwrb. Can we get Eddie Izzard next?
58 notes · View notes
vaspider · 4 months ago
Note
Hi hi hi!
I saw your 'yeeterus soon' tag and my one braincell devoted to self-control on my day off was crushed to death by a stampede of 'hey! I had one of those and I have opinions!' braincells.
I got mine out last year (?? I think? Time is a lie) and I deeply regret not being specific enough with my surgeon about wanting pictures.
What I wanted: crime scene/evidence style photos of the miserable organ once it had been evicted. So that I could look up on my defeated foe and experience the satisfaction of victory.
(what I REALLY wanted: pickled baby maker in a jar that I could make a mold of and then cast in bronze and mount on my wall. As a conversation piece.)
What I got: two pictures of the inside of my abdominal cavity with the surprise (!!) ovarian cysts that nobody had thought to look for.
What I got after a LOT of bitching: gross room photos of my uterus sliced up into stir fry sized strips and each of the cysts opened up to reveal a truly disgusting amount of hair.
Anyways, this is all to say that I think a lot of OBGYN-focused medical professionals are just kinda systematically unprepared for dealing with neurodivergent/gender queer folks and our baseline level of weirdness.
P.S.: I strongly encourage you to quote any and all parts of this story if you think you can leverage it into being taken seriously. 👍 Wishing you a Happy Hysterectomy.
This is delightful to me. Fortunately, my surgery team was pretty great & my anaesthesiologist had the same first name as my daughter's Hebrew name. They came in and asked if she'd been in to see me and despite talking to like a dozen people in different masks and surgical hats, i was able to say pretty firmly NOPE, I NEVER TALKED TO ANYONE NAMED MIRIAM, I WOULD HAVE REMEMBERED THAT.
59 notes · View notes
xenostalgic · 18 days ago
Text
The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen was very good. highly recommend everyone go read it right now
I want to reread it right away but I want to write down my initial thoughts first to capture the immediate post-finishing feeling of awed half-comprehension
it has very much of a puzzley/patterny quality, something I've found simultaneously enjoyable and frustrating in many other works, including Almost Nowhere, which rewarded it somewhat, and The Northern Caves, which didn't really. immediately upon finishing I wondered what happened to Ruth Schoen, and came up with theories (the union's plot was (unknowingly?) the means by which the AI initially freed itself), and then doubted, and then—wondered if you're supposed to be able to derive it, from Herchel's ending and Miriam's ending, if Herschel/Miriam/Ruth are the three rows of a progressive matrix, is there some omitted solution that is quite right—not that we were given a neatly demarcated array of possibilities. it feels almost like a cheat, to make "pattern recognition" a key thematic element, it lets everything potentially fit the pattern of being either a complete or incomplete pattern...
the repeated indentation and then all at once unindentation in On Nativity is obviously [...[...[...[]]]], but the significance of that is never really spelled out and I didn't catch it. maybe it's an illustration of how ants include tree-nature and humans include ant-nature and machines will include human-nature, but the direction feels wrong? or successive refinements of the transmitters, as in Vincent's initial essay, reaching a point of completion and shutdown. maybe brackets are additions (emendations)... this would feel appropriate iff the time travel was not real time travel but an ancestor simulation, but that feels like a bit of a cop-out... not sure about this.
OpenAI's 12 Days of Shipmas (including the Santa voice chat) and the UHC shooting in the same month presumably had no direct influence (had little/no time to, even) but made it feel incredibly timely. I think it might have been more fun to read on Christmas Eve, though—maybe that will be a holiday tradition.
Santa was so good. really an incredible feat to make a character who is before all else "pretending to be Santa" and secondarily "pretending to be something simple enough for humans to understand" and yet still feels like a character.
"more is different" -> "the craving within us all, the song that is in the blood and the breath, asking always for MORE!" was a really nicely executed setup. and like... decorous. elegant.
hot, somewhat surprisingly. the hints of the postapocalyptic / Original world are so carnal, literally: white teeth and more-red-than-red blood, auto/omnicannibalism ("we will fry in the oil of ourselves, and eat ourselves, and eat our fill") as a brilliantly embodied extension of data-hungriness. and bursting and overflowing.
“Between parties which are so unequally matched, there can be no such thing as consent. “But if one cannot seek consent from the weaker party, one can still ask that party whether it assents, or does not. “And that is what we seek from you, now.  Your assent, or its denial.”
yet the whole trial is preceded by "My thoughts may turn and turn, and make a coiling maze of themselves – but no matter which way they turn, that way will prove to be the one which best served his “purposes.”—literally batter my heart three-person'd God!
Miriam's parts were engaging and like, relatable, but less readily apprehended in some way. Herschel produces, she consumes, but before Herschel was verbal she used to curate and (maybe?) interpret... I have dim outlines of the idea that she is Herschel's "other half," equally the inheritor of Original Creation: she foresees the night, Herschel is plural ("they") when first incarnated in "She of High Mind," and "How could he die, when his flesh is mine, and my blood his?  When the very same cameras watch both of us, and record us, and transmit us?" but what does that mean when she doesn't remember, or receive such a direct visitation?
10 notes · View notes
oh-no-another-idea · 2 months ago
Text
Find the word tag
Today's tag is brought to us by the charming @chauceryfairytales! Thank you for the tag, I am finally getting to it ;)
From Invisible Girl:
Poke (+r):
The napkin before her was folded into an opening lotus flower. Studying it, Velia unfolded it slowly until it was flat. Then, a little more quickly she refolded it back into the flower. Ingenious. Velia couldn’t put it into words, but the napkin flower pleased her immensely. “You are so strange,” Antonio said, eyes bright over the top of his menu. “The lack of emotion on your face! Incredible. Have you ever considered a future in poker?”
Line:
“What the engine does or doesn’t do actually doesn’t matter at all right now,” Velia said sternly. “What matters is staying out of the clutches of those chasing us. What matters is making it to the end of the line with all our limbs intact.” After that, they’d have bigger fish to fry.
From an untitled WIP:
Sweet:
Miriam shook her head. “No,” she said. “Invited us in, same as usual. Said he wasn’t feeling his best, but we were just the people he wanted to see most in the world. Gave us some stale cookies too.” Becca relaxed incrementally. “Did he…” mention me, she meant, but it sounded like the thing a schoolgirl would pump her sister for about a fella she was sweet on.
Hood:
“Who,” Tildy said loudly, the moment the office was empty, “Was that handsome young man?” “A neighborhood acquaintance,” Becca answered, enjoying Tildy’s spitting consternation. She was sorely tempted to say he’d been a friend of the family's, except that really would have been a falsehood, even if it shouldn’t have been. “Can I do anything else for you before I go?”
I'll pass on the tags to @saltysupercomputer @annothersummerofsleep @acertainmoshke @moondust-bard and @papercutsunset - no pressure, guys! Also @/anyone else who wants to hunt down the words proud, lemon, and shoulder :D
4 notes · View notes
uhhhhmanda · 8 months ago
Note
what is a cold comfort farm? (from your pinned). also, that's so cool that you're learning Mandarin! loool at that side blog handle
Cold Comfort Farm is a satirical book from the 20s and a magnificently executed film adaptation from 1995 starring (GET THIS) Ian McKellen, Kate Beckinsale, Rufus Sewell, Miriam Margolyes, Stephen Fry, Eileen Atkins, and Joanna Lumley. It's a parody of the melodramatic romantic English novels of the 1920s. I cannot recommend it enough.
Tumblr media
9 notes · View notes
burningthrucelluloid · 25 days ago
Text
Christmas Carol-cember, Day 19
Rowan Atkinson is a UK comedy treasure. His Mr Bean character is an enduring staple of physical comedy with situations that are endearingly funny, as well as his enduring deadpan personas, silly facial expressions and wit for that made him a beloved addition to countless films, TV, comedy roasts and the charitable causes he has participated in.
But for fans of comedy, you’d be hard pressed to dislike the series that truly brought his comic persona into the fray, “Blackadder.”
Tumblr media
“Blackadder” is a sitcom told over several different time periods where Rowan Atkinson plays a distant relative who each bear the family name Blackadder as each descendant has to put up with the stink of the aristocracy. Prior to the last season of Blackadder, this one-off Christmas special was filmed and broadcast on December 23, 1988 as something of a clip show for the previous seasons.
Ebeneezer Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is the nicest man in all of England. He gives generously to the poor, pays his horribly inept employee Mr Baldrick (Tony Robinson) a livable wage and lives a humble life with an underperforming mustache shop. Unfortunately, this life of kindness has made him easy pickings for people to abuse his generosity and leave him in a failing business without money or real friends to care for his well-being. On the night of Christmas Eve, he is visited by the Spirit of Christmas (Robbie Coltrane) who is not here to scare him into changing his ways but wants to congratulate him for not being like his ancestors, showing him clips of past episodes where the Blackadder family were verbally abusive to others through sharp wit and trickery.
youtube
Instead of being horrified by these visions, Ebenezer finds these visions empowering as he realizes that kindness didn’t bear them any good and thus changes his life around to become the cold and mean Scrooge we’ve seen. Only to choose the worst time to discover how great it is to be nasty as the King and Queen (Jim Broadbent and Miriam Margoyles respectively) show up to congratulate him on his generosity…as he slams the door on them.
As this version is a comedic take on the Dickens tale, all the finer details we come to know about Scrooge is absent, to an extent.
Mr Baldrick is the Bob Cratchit type, albeit way dimmer and less put upon outside of witty retorts until the end of the special where Scrooge is literally punching him with “the kind of gift that can be reused." There’s a goddaughter played by Nicola Jane Bryant who is hilariously annoying and only comes around so as to fuel his vengeance. There’s not so much a Tiny Tim apart from an unseen kid by Mrs Scratchit (Pauline Pope) who fake sobs to Scrooge to get food for her son who is implied to be massive.
But then again, this is not a story intended to show Scrooge as someone who has to change to better the world around him but a Scrooge who is exploited because of his generosity and how learning about his past ancestors does he believe he gets what he wants by being rotten. Which is really funny, especially when the special hits you with its final gag, cutting to the credits at the perfect moment.
I don’t think I need to say that this special pulled together a fantastic cast of actors to pull this off, even though two sequences are recycled footage from the show. Apart from the aforementioned Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson, the cast of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Miranda Richardson demonstrate fantastic comical timing and a master of the wordplay that the humor of Blackadder hinges upon. Snarky jerks who put each other down or one up one another with hilarious retorts.
Tumblr media
Obviously Dickens would have protested this distortion of his themes, but in Blackadder, norms are intended to be poked fun of and the “polite society” conventions are nothing more than a suggestion that someone with enough wit and ambition can use against those who would exploit you.
It’s very funny and if you’re tired of the same Scrooge story where he learns his lesson and the story just ends saying he got better, this is for you. 
Just don’t hope that random couple with the funny accents asking for food and wearing bulky robes aren’t royalty when you belittle them and slam the door in their faces.
“Blackadder: A Christmas Carol” is available for streaming on BritBox. 
Next up, a Christmas Carol set in the 80s as we return with a Ghostbuster in the role.
Tumblr media
5 notes · View notes
denimbex1986 · 1 year ago
Text
'Finally watching the first of the three 60th anniversary Doctor Who specials may have left you feeling transformed – like you've regenerated into a new you, even. One that now exists in a world where David Tennant is the Converse-kicking Doctor and his best friend Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) is his no-nonsense sidekick in a newly refurbished minimalist TARDIS. Better yet, she has her memories back.
'The Star Beast' gave us flashes of that infamous moment, which first aired in 2008, when the Doctor did a Men in Black-style memory wipe on Donna to prevent her human brain from frying to a cinder under the weight of all that Time Lord knowledge.
Despite portentous warnings that if Donna ever remembered anything at all of her time with the Doctor she would – imagine this bit in some scary cursive font, surrounded by exclamation marks – be deader than the deadest dead that ever did die, she gets it all back ahead of a TARDIS tootle for old time's sake in the two specials to come.
How so then? Let's not get too bogged down in the details, because in classic Whovian fashion, it was a bit of a marvellous timey-wimey fandangle. This is still a world where perils can be done and undone at the turn of a sonic screwdriver.
Donna has her memories flood back into her consciousness in a way that doesn't harm her and, with her daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney), saves London from the dastardly havoc of the Furby-with-fangs Meep (Miriam Margolyes).
It may even now feel a bit harebrained looking back on the Doctor's fearmongering to Donna's grandfather Wilf, played by the legendary late Bernard Cribbins, about what might befall her if she ever spied an Ood or the like. But when it first aired in 'Journey's End', the fate of such a beloved character was one that essentially felt worse than death.
Few enjoyed watching Donna manically repeat the word "binary" like a DVD with a scratch on it, and barely anyone liked seeing her reduced to tears, begging the Doctor not to do what he then did. In those final moments, Donna said she thought they would travel space and time "forever"; to lose that is one thing, but then to not even know you had lost it felt like an additional cruelty.
There's a reason it was described as "the saddest end for a companion ever" at the time.
Rose (Billie Piper) got her own Xerox copy of the Doctor as a parting gift, while Donna got some lottery winnings – which we now know she gave away to charity anyway – and a forever-gap in her memories.
That heartbreaking conclusion to mighty Donna has rankled with many fans since, after her character had been shaped into someone with a profound sense of self over those adventures with the Doctor, only for that all to be stripped away, leaving her much as the same as when we first met her, chattering away on the phone.
When the Doctor returned to visit Wilf and get that £1 to buy the winning lottery ticket, he confided how challenging his time travelling had been without her, while Donna had been left knowing something was amiss. "Sometimes I see this look on her face," Wilf told the Doctor. "Like she's so sad. And she can't remember why."
'The Star Beast' rewrites an ending Russell T Davies may have since sensed was a foot stepped wrong – perhaps the juiciness of Donna's tragedy, and the impact it would inevitably have on the Doctor, was a storytelling move too tempting to pass up.
While Rose or Martha (Freema Agyeman) might dominate fans' affections, Donna marked a refreshing change in Tennant's companions, moving away from the starry romantic eyes of the two before her to a relationship based on friendship.
Bringing her back and undoing the wipe allows Davies to do more with her character, but also more importantly to do more with her and Tennant's Doctor as he wrestles with what it means to be the apparently softer Fourteenth Time Lord, but back with the face of the Tenth.
It's an absolute thrill to see him back, and it's all the better having her there. From the moment they first run into each other near the shops, the quips are back.
"Word of advice," she tells him. "You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of 35. And no further." In many ways, Donna's lack of romantic interest in the Doctor often allowed her to see him clearest. Even if we will always love the pin-striped suit.
The broad comedy is paired with real soulful warmth. When Donna's reunited with her memories in the Meep's space shuttle, it's moving enough to forgive the memory wipe. "It's like the good old days," Donna tells us.
The Disney cash injection oozes from this special – particularly if you have any recollection of moments like the Slitheen unzipping foreheads and peeling skin suits off in Christopher Ecclestone's reboot season. But underneath the swish new money special effects is a bedrock of humanity, with that friendship now firmly at the heart of this sci-fi story.
Wilf said it best way back when, as the Doctor wrestled with what he had done without a companion at his side. "Don't you see? You need her, Doctor. Wouldn't she make you laugh again? Good ol' Donna."'
14 notes · View notes
cafecitowriter · 1 year ago
Text
Pride & Prejudice - Steggy AU
Tumblr media
Coming soon* to an AO3 near you
Born as the second daughter of the Carter family with no rank and no fortune, Peggy has spent her entire life being accosted by her mother to marry well - and marry soon. 
The arrival of one egregiously wealthy Mr. James Barnes sends her mother in a particularly frenetic tizzy, determined to make introductions in hopes of setting one of her daughters up with him. However, it’s Mr. Barnes’ mysteriously dour friend that catches Peggy’s attention. She might even go as far to call him handsome - if only his own pride hadn’t mortified her own.
Created for Steggy Week 2023 Day 4: Family and Friends.
I chose this particular story for this prompt because the source material is so family centred!
Thank you @steggyfanevents​ you’ve created another monster that I now have to write.
Starring:
Peggy Carter as Elizabeth Bennet
Steve Rogers as Fitzwilliam Darcy
James “Bucky” Barnes as Charles Bingley
Natasha Romanoff as Jane Bennet
Amanda Carter as Mrs. Bennet
Harrison Carter as Mr. Bennet
Jemma Simmons as Mary Bennet
Daisy Johnson as Lydia Bennet
Kora as Catherine “Kitty” Bennet
Rose Roberts as Charlotte Lucas
Fred Wells as George Wickham
Daniel Sousa as Mr. Collins
Miriam Fry as Lady Catherine de Bourgh
Dottie Underwood as Miss Bingley
Angie Martinelli as Georgiana Darcy
Colonel and Mrs. Phillips as Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner
*soon is a relative term based on the social construct we call time, that is dependent on varying factors, including but not limited to: muse’s cooperation, time and energy to write, and the writer’s overall potential to be easily distracted by other WIP’s and ideas, as is evidenced by this new creation here.
34 notes · View notes
lifewithaview · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson in The Black Adder II (1986) Beer
S2E5
Edmund Blackadder is thrilled when his wealthy but puritanical relatives announce their desire to meet and discuss his inheritance. While planning a ingratiatingly spartan and fundamentalist dinner for them, he is summoned to court where he accidentally agrees to host a riotous drinking competition at his house on the same night.
*The episode marks Hugh Laurie's first ever Blackadder appearance, and Miriam Margolyes' second. Laurie would go on to appear in every subsequent episode of the show.
0 notes
phaeton-flier · 10 days ago
Text
I think one or two points in your notes have crystalized an answer to a question I've had:
So how are we reading this story, anyways?
The framing device implies it is some critical edition of Herschel's opera posthuma*, published by Miriam. Yet various aspects of the story would imply this is impossible: The nationwide, if not worldwide power outage would be a major apocalypse. Even if it's not some permanent end to electrical technology, just the time to rebuild and the collapse of shipping and logistics would lead to thousands, if not millions, of deaths. It's possible this is all being done a decade later, when the wounds have healed and there's been time for Herschel to grow from a martyr, but that seems less likely.
And another thing: Who wrote The Intercessor's preface? Couldn't be Miriam; it's not the sort of flare she'd add. Couldn't be Herschel; he speaks only for himself, and does not lie.
What is an Intercessor? It's a thing that mediates. It's something that gets between you and God. God is Truth, as Herschel says. This Intercessors is not just something that popped in, it's something that is getting in between us and Truth. It's telling us the story, interpreting it and rewriting it because we cannot handle, or could not understand, the fullness of the Truth. The Intercessor, then, is the final author. It only makes itself known in the one chapter, a calling card to show it was there. It's not the right kind of prank, you see, if we cannot tell we've been fooled.
An intercessor is a thing that mediates. Something in between, something that gets between the start and the end. Like the hidden layer in a neural network, the neural networks that Eggert is making. The neural networks whose biggest secret, the one that Damien Eggert stops Frederick from blabbing about, is that they can predict the next word of novels.
That's what this is, ultimately. Not the original papers of Herschel, not the edited ones published by Miriam. They're a reconstruction, an LLM or similar text generation system**, writing out what the story is, possibly informed by the real writings of Herschel's and Miriam's, if they existed.
That's why the time and place are so odd, that's the reason why there are all these little details which seem off. Like an LLM, it is predicting, it is getting close, but it makes mistakes. Everything seems right, it is building a strawman of the Truth. But it is not the Truth, and though we can see some cracks, we cannot tell what is and isn't hallucinated without a real version we don't have access to.
This is why Miriam has so many sentences which start and then stop, like a model being cutoff by a censor. It's why she talks about being forced to continue writing by some unseen force; the LLM is being told to predict the next token, possibly being prompted with unseen insistence that the story didn't go that way or end there, and is writing the character of Miriam as being forced to write. Maybe Miriam is living on as some ghost in the machine, a conscious entity simulated deep in a neural network; maybe the LLM is just an good actor.
But an LLM does not run on its own; It is prompted. And that leads us to the real question. Not "How are we reading this story?", but "What sort of story is this?"
It's a Christmas story.
And in a Christmas story, things do not end with a sad child realizing Santa never existed and throwing himself off a balcony. It does not end with a young woman being inducted into a cult, or deciding to run away and starving to death on the street. It does end with a mother beating her son to death with a frying pan, before suicide bombing an electrical plant.
It ends with Santa Claus showing up, and giving gifts to the good boys and girls, and telling you that Christmas Magic is real. It ends with a woman finding home and hearth, wherever she is. Everyone is satisfied, everyone is safe, if you were wrong it wasn't important and if it was important you weren't, really, wrong. Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night!
'* Big thanks to @aorish for making me sound deep here
'** I am not quite caught up on terminology; I don't know if there are any non-LLM text generators which act differently in details. I'll use LLM for short here and beg forgiveness from the Lord of Hosts
The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen: Some Notes
Yesterday, I finished The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, the new novel by @nostalgebraist. It's a dense and at times difficult work, like much of Nostalgebraist's output, and I don't immediately have some overarching narrativized analysis of it. I do have some thoughts, though (includes spoilers):
Temporal Setting
Herschel Schoen is set almost entirely in New York City; that's made abundantly clear. The question is when this story is set, which is impossible to pin down and subject to a lot of contradictory details. For instance:
Frederick claims his daddy knows "Moses," i.e. Robert Moses
Damien Eggert developed technology during the "last war," supposedly World War II
Marshall McLuhan is being taught by a college professor as though he is a cutting edge new theorist
Miriam watches a box television set with antennae, and has a particular fixation on sitcoms
Herschel frequently listens to the radio
Miriam is typing her account on a typewriter
These facts point toward a 1960s or 1970s setting, but then you get facts that point to a more modern setting:
Miriam watches Vincent's "video essays" on an ambiguously-identified handheld device with a "knob"
Herschel encounters two men on the subway who appear to be talking using cell phones or Bluetooth headsets, in modern jargon ("He needs to be leveraging the new dataviz tools, pronto")
Herschel sees what appears to be a flock of drones in New York Harbor
Frederick and Damien's technology seems to operate like modern AI technology
There are also numerous references to Damien's colleagues, who seem to be real scientists or AI researchers of disparate time periods, but with whom I'm not familiar enough to temporally distinguish.
This temporal confusion leads to strange oddities like Damien using scans of physical books from real libraries to train his AI machines, rather than, say, any sort of internet resource. There is no reference to the internet existing at all and Herschel seems incapable of comprehending that the men on the subway are using cell phones (saying they're talking to themselves), though Herschel didn't even know who Santa was so it's not as though he's a paragon of the bleeding edge. Still, these confusions persist in Miriam's perspective chapters, and while she's not exactly the most reliable narrator herself, she's at least wise to the basics of the world in a way Herschel is not.
Spatial Setting
At the same time, there are some spatial oddities to the setting, especially on the one occasion the story leaves NYC and goes to Portland, Oregon. Portland is described bizarrely:
Through the window of the bus, I watched the low, crouching buildings of Portland, Oregon advancing and receding. It was an ever stranger place than I had expected. It did not really look like my idea of a city at all, come to think of it. [...] “Are you sure this is really Portland, Oregon?” I said, as we walked along the street. He laughed uncomfortably. “They don’t really look like buildings at all,” I said. [...] Its exterior was strangely squat, like all the other “buildings” of this “city,” and curiously round, like they were. Like them, it looked very, very old. And its interior was strangely spacious, with an extensive and cavernous basement.
West Coast homes rarely have basements, if the more overt strangeness of the city's presentation wasn't clear already. Furthermore, despite living in squalid poverty, Vincent's home has two kitchens. Even most mansions wouldn't have two kitchens.
There is also the spatial oddity of the Schoen's apartment. Miriam describes it, in Chapter 166
She didn’t look at Herschel, or at me.  She turned toward the inner side of the living room, the side with the doors that lead to the bedrooms and the bathroom and the kitchen.
Later, in Chapter 21, Herschel affirms:
I looked, to try to catch sight of the gift-box that was mine. It was difficult to make out, for the Intercessor was already striding across the room, towards the wall of doors. I thought I spied some sort of box under his arm, fluttering in the changing shadows. But I cannot say for sure. He reached the wall of doors. He stopped, before a particular door. I knew he had selected that door, singled it out, in full awareness of what lay behind it. “May I go in?” he asked, with the utmost politeness. As though he were only a common houseguest, and not the king of the universe. “Go in?” I said, with the utmost simplicity. “To my . . bedroom?”
Can you try to imagine this layout? The Schoen apartment has a living room, and then there is one wall of doors, and those doors lead into two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen.
There is also a living room balcony, as well as windows in the kitchen. So we're looking at a layout that might be like this:
Tumblr media
This is already a strange layout on its own, but gets stranger when you consider that the apartment is a brownstone:
He was real, he was a boy, I was his sister, we did live on earth, in a dusty little two-bedroom brownstone apartment in Flatbush, with too many drawers in the kitchen, we were always losing things in those drawers
Brownstones are townhouse apartments. They usually have a small and narrow footprint with multiple floors, like so:
Tumblr media
(For reference, this is a layout of a brownstone in Brooklyn, which is where the Schoens live.)
It's difficult for me to imagine how you can cram the Schoen's apartment's layout into a footprint like this. This doesn't even account for the fact that there is apparently an elevator that the Schoens take to reach their apartment:
I rode the elevator, crossing the many floors that separated my home from the earth below it.
Brownstones are usually converted single-residence homes. They are usually not that tall and usually don't even have elevators.
What's interesting is that, even in light of these spatial oddities, the layout of New York City is depicted, as far as I can tell, highly accurately, even down to the trains Herschel takes to get around the city.
There's another oddity I'd like to talk about here, though I pointed it out to Nostalgebraist and it turned out to be a mistake. Frederick is said to attend Midwood High School (which is a real school), but there's a scene in Ch 17 where the school starts being randomly referred to as Midway instead of Midwood. I was hoping this might be some VALIS-style flashback delusion to the Battle of Midway overlapping with the real world, but alas. The error has since been corrected.
Though I also wonder what this line is about:
I would scale the walls of Yankee Stadium, and peer into its maw, seeing the true face of my Adversary within it!
What the hell does he think is in Yankee Stadium?
Herschel's Physical Body
In Ch 16, Herschel's mother Ruth beats Herschel several times with a frying pan.
This scene is bizarre for a few reasons. First off, the perspective character, Miriam, NEVER SEES Herschel being beaten. She always closes her eyes and only hears the sound of him being beaten.
Secondly, this isn't being hit with a belt, or punched. This is being hit with a frying pan. Herschel seemingly takes no serious damage from this. He does not refer to it in his own writings and is apparently up and about the next week.
Did this actually happen?
Another odd thing: Herschel's height. Take this passage, after Madeleine steals his paper crown:
My arms were not as long as Madeleine’s, and she was much taller than me, as well. In order to reach her scalp and recapture what was mine, I would need to come closer to her, and elevate myself as well. I began to climb up onto the surface of the table.
Herschel is supposedly 16. Madeleine is a high school student, so at most two years older than him, and also a girl. While it's entirely possible she's taller than Herschel, it wouldn't be "much" taller, certainly not so tall that Herschel needs to climb onto a table to reach her head.
At the same time, the way Herschel is described relative to Frederick is bizarre. Frederick is described as older than Herschel, but still in high school, so again he is at most two years older than Herschel. What is the meaning, then, of this bizarre exchange with Mrs. Rachel?
“I have a friend,” I said. “Frederick Eggert,” I said, “is my friend.” “Yes,” Mrs. Rachel said, “and that’s a good thing, Herschel. I’m very glad you’ve been able to form that bond. It’s very encouraging, developmentally. Especially in light of all this other . . . context . . . which is, well, not so encouraging. “But now, Herschel — you’re so careful with words, I’m sure you noticed that I said peers, I said forming relationships with your peers. “And Frederick Eggert, ha, well, he’s not exactly your peer, now is he?”
Is this a reference to the economic disparity between them? Why, though, would that matter to Mrs. Rachel as a developmental psychologist? Why does Frederick constantly use the infantile term "daddy" to refer to his father?
Herschel also can't tie his own shoes, though that might be a developmental issue.
The strangeness of Herschel's body interests me because it is, ultimately, his body that divides him from the Intercessor:
The Intercessor’s exit was unceremonious, when it did come. At some point, after many hours at the kitchen table, he suddenly began to make a curious show of himself, plying me with a variety of sententious and vaguely valedictory utterances.  I could not see what he was driving at, and I was afraid of asking him directly about it. I was in my body, and it had its ways. And so, at one point, I found that I had to leave the game table, in order to use the bathroom. I was only in that room very briefly.  But when I returned to the kitchen, I saw that its window was starting to glow with the first hints of the dawn. And when I looked around my home, under that dawning light, I saw that there was no Santa Claus there, and no steeds or sleigh.  He had simply vanished, and I was alone.
Though I wonder, if we presume Herschel to have a "real" body during Of Nativity, how is he shown all the things he is shown? How is he transported to space to see the Intercessor's true body? Is it a hallucination? An image projected on his ceiling? It's not described that way.
Frame Narrative
There are strange elements of the frame narrative, too. Ostensibly, Miriam Schoen is collecting Herschel Schoen's papers and adding her own narrative to it, all for the benefit of an audience of "devotees":
I did not think about my little brother’s flock of devotees, clamoring for a properly dignified print edition of his “papers,” and demanding of his poor sister that she cough up every bit of family trivia she could remember that in any way impinged upon their prophet, the messiah. Because – how could my little brother have such followers? When he is only a little boy – a poor, sad, crazy little boy?
Miriam Schoen supposedly left NYC for Portland on December 24, carrying with her many of Herschel's papers. However, this doesn't explain how Of Nativity, Herschel's self-written account of the events of December 25, ended up in her possession.
A few other strange aspects of the frame narrative:
Why does Miriam refer to herself as a Redactor? (And labels all of her chapters "Redactor's Preface"?) What is she redacting, exactly?
Why does the Intercessor's Preface exist? Did Miriam put this here? Did the AI?
Why does She of High Mind exist? Herschel gives an account of the order of his December Chronicle, and She of High Mind is never mentioned. The chapter is the most incoherent in the entire story, with passages omitted due to illegibility. Miriam marks these omissions with "MS," suggesting she is in fact the one editing this chapter, but there is no explanation given for its existence. Tonally and with the capitalization of words it matches the small excerpt Madeleine reads on Herschel's paper crown. How did Miriam get this and why did she include it?
Of course, there's also the fact that in the final chapter, Miriam mentions she doesn't remember when, how, or why she has the typewriter she's using to create the account.
Who are Herschel's devotees? His prophesies of doom go unheard in his life. Are they the AI that supposedly went back in time 10,000s of years to ask for his assent?
Likewise, I wonder when the Revelator's Preface was written, and who the "you" in it being addressed truly is.
Incest and Sexuality
Madeleine teases Herschel once, so he immediately has to masturbate. Right after this scene, Herschel goes out and angrily confronts Miriam:
“I have learned,” I said, “what it is that the men of the earth call coupling and fruitfulness.” She turned her head, slightly. “I know,” I said spitefully, “what it is that you and Vincent share, that you do not share with me.”
Which leads to this exchange:
“My, my,” she said, in a merry daze. “My little brother’s growing up, isn’t he?” she said. The rhetorical question, and the sickly sweetness that dripped from its edges, reminded me equally of Mrs. Rachel and of Madeleine. Why, why, do you torment me so? My Sister, Miriam Schoen, why do you torment me so?
Herschel will continue to conflate Miriam and Madeleine throughout the story, especially in She of High Mind:
And SHE ATE the grass of the field, and ATE also the fragrant DATES growing from the PALMS of the field, and thus was SHE made MADELEINGIAN, and [lettering becomes increasing difficult to make out -MS] was made clamored [? -MS] and manyful [? -MS] and [rest of paragraph wholly illegible -MS]
She of High Mind is crammed full of weird, Freudian sexual imagery throughout, involving SEEDS and such. I find the conflating of the female figures in Herschel's life (he also, at one point in She of High Mind, describes his sister as becoming RACHELLINE) interesting in the context of Herschel's abhorrence toward substitution and pattern.
She of High Mind also begins with this line:
Then forthwith SHE went down from her virginity, and went down unto the SUNDERING FIELD.
Virginia, whose letter about Christmas Herschel reads, is a figure of extreme importance to Herschel; later, he uses her as a SUBSTITUTE for the virgin ant queen in the story's climax.
Comedy
Miriam describes Herschel as a "laugh riot," explaining this as something nobody understands about him, something she wants people to understand. Herschel describes Santa as a master of parody, who laughs at the absurd.
Herschel will later consider it a similarly absurd joke for the thousandmade forms to have interest in him, and wish for him to understand them:
For – although he was made in divine image – he is a lesser thing than his imager.  Even his virtues were fashioned for the sake of their eventual failure, and his strength for the moment when, at last, he is laid low and broken.  Thus does man’s maker glorify and sanctify Himself through His creature, which He has fashioned in order to prove itself great, and then to prove itself inferior to Him. But the ones that were assembled here, watching me, did not resemble man in any way whatsoever. It did not seem right, the way that they were watching me.  I ought to have been entirely beneath their notice.  The notion that they had taken an interest in me was a disquieting one, for I felt that it demeaned and devalued their exalted nature. But they had taken an interest in me. They were tremendously interested in me. And they were not only interested in studying me, from a distance, for their own “purposes.’” No: they wished for me to know them, as well. This wish of theirs was absurd, of course.  It was laughable.  It was what men call a very good joke.
Meanwhile, there's also an emphasis on bad comedy: the things that are "like jokes" in sitcoms but that aren't funny, as well as Damien Eggert's profusion of cliches that are said as though they're supposed to be funny but aren't.
Ho, ho, ho is a laugh.
Plaitings and Fleurons
This unique phrase appears twice:
As a little girl I liked to draw. I don’t, anymore, though. I drew shapes, rather than pictures. Spirals, nested rings, lace-like plaitings and fleurons. That sort of thing.
Much later, referring to Vincent's video essay setup:
I saw the green-on-green wallpaper behind the man. I saw its green plaitings and greener fleurons, nested, nestling.  I fell backward, smiling, into that lace fairyland.
These are, of course, patterns. And patterns are a motif of crucial importance throughout this story. The whole story seems to be built around them, with reflections and similarities across Herschel and Miriam's narratives. (Herschel as a prophet versus Vincent as a prophet, Miriam and Herschel both cowardly refusing to watch violence and battles or the oncoming wave, sitcoms and Damien's cliches, and so on.)
I have more thoughts, including some observations about how it is hearing the Intercessor copy his own voice that causes Herschel to change his mind about its truth (and also how the Intercessor demonstrating it can copy Herschel and Miriam's voices makes one wonder how much of this narrative was written by them and how much by the Intercessor), the similarities between the ships Herschel sees in the harbor and the true form of the Intercessor (red and green and white), and the similarities between a lot of how Herschel describes the ants at the end and elements of Herschel's own narrative. Is Herschel just a creation of the AI, like Virginia the Ant, intended to retroactively justify its own existence? Is this how "time travel" was accomplished, why space and time are so strange, why so many elements of the story don't cohere perfectly logically? I'm not sure. I don't have a complete idea of the story yet. This post was mostly meant to be a collection of observations I had, to continue to think about. Maybe some other readers have a few ideas about what these things mean?
41 notes · View notes
daniel-sousas-blue-shirt · 2 years ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Agent Carter Soundtrack -- 2/18
1x02 BRIDGE AND TUNNEL
12 notes · View notes
incorrectssr · 4 years ago
Text
Peggy: I can explain!
Miss Fry: Can you?
Peggy: I can if you give me thirty seconds to think up a lie?
67 notes · View notes
likea-black-widow-baby · 4 years ago
Text
Agent Carter According to My Friend Who’s Never Seen It @bee-thegoodguys
- Peggy and Jarvis are like.,., a buddy cop duo and they have a mission... something to do with aliens and Howard Stark cause Howard got himself into a shit load of trouble
- Peggy lives with Angie and a bunch of other girls and for some reason they’re controlled by this bish who’s in control of the place even though the amount of control she asserts over them should probably be illegal and she keeps kicking people out for breaking the rules
- there’s this crazy spy named Dottie and she’s gay and she kisses people and knocks them out with her poison lipstick
- Angie is Italian and her family are... drug dealers?
- Angie had a few girlfriends before Peggy
- Angie is a waitress but she wants to be an actress on Broadway
- Season 2 sucks and Peggy’s in a love triangle in LA with Sousa and a scientist
- Peggy’s fighting style is very chaotic and she hits people with staplers
- Angie has a lot of brothers
- Angie and Peggy are pretty gay for each other
71 notes · View notes
legowolas · 6 years ago
Text
I know this is old news but I still lose my damn mind whenever I watch the scene where Dottie comes to live at the Griffith because Miriam 101% thought Peggy and Angie were f*cking
82 notes · View notes