IN CONCLUSION: if you’ve read Fanny Hill and are trying to wrap your head around how anyone could possibly make a non-porn screen adaptation… you should watch the 2007 BBC 2-part miniseries, it’s surprisingly good, if a somewhat inexplicable choice of material for the beeb to adapt
and if you haven’t read Fanny Hill, you should definitely go read it. It’s bizarre and purple-prose-y and occasionally actually a bit titillating and is one of the few pieces of pornography that managed to become classics of english literature
They are gentle and highly sensitive dogs with a natural respect for humans, and as adults they are decorative couch potatoes with remarkably gracious house manners.
why is every description of borzois ever written like a victorian comic novel’s protagonist’s description of their friend from london that they are in love with??
Don’t believe me still ??
He was still a pale young gentleman, and had a certain conquered languor about him in the midst of his spirits and briskness, that did not seem indicative of natural strength. He had not a handsome face, but it was better than handsome: being extremely amiable and cheerful
A lot tougher than he looks, the Borzoi is a tall, lean dog – elegant and graceful in bearing. In overall structure, he resembles a Greyhound with long hair. His head is long and narrow with a barely perceptible “stop” at his eyes and small ears that lay against his head like rosettes
Borzoi know they are aristocrats, but they also hide a bit of court jester. They are good-natured, gentle and calm, seemingly amused at whatever entertainment comes their way.
Here’s two quotes about Borzois and one quote about Herbert Pocket from Great Expectations.
But far from being cowed by the titans of literature who created them, Davies reckons he has an opportunity to improve upon their famous works.
“I’m trying to bring out the wonderfulness of what’s in the book,” he said at Cheltenham Literature Festival, “and I’m also, sometimes, trying to camouflage the faults and often write some scenes that I think Tolstoy or Jane Austen should have written which is very cheeky and arrogant but there you go.”
…
He added that when it came to War and Peace, “Tolstoy didn’t really manage a satisfactory ending so I had to give him one,” jokingly labelling himself a “boastful bugger”.
….
you know when Hugo’s narration comes over all Lemony and he’s like “hey here’s a thing that’s going to End Badly but no one knows it yet, I am telling you, the reader, so you can be prepared” ? Yeah.
NO NO NO NO NO!!!!
There’s a part in the article where he’s like ‘well we only see Mr. Darcy from Elizabeth’s pov and she’s so prejudiced against him that we don’t know he’s a good guy until the end’ and I’m like…that’s the point???? Like the actual point of the novel???? Using a character’s POV to obscure facts is a literary device, not a flaw!! Tons of authors do it!!! Giving it all away at the beginning is BORING!!
I’m so scared for his Les Mis adaptation O.O
I read that and cracked up because he doesn’t seem to even realize that he just namedropped half the title
And I mean I’d be down with him saying “and I thought that kind of approach wouldn’t work as well onscreen” but he’s just like THIS WAS AN ERROR, it makes Elizabeth look too…prejudiced …and maybe Darcy seems too…proud…for …some reason…”
I’m trying to have Hope, I did like his P&P, but every new article just makes me wince >_<
The characters just seem so FLAWED it’s CRAZY that they have to OVERCOME FLAWS in order to actually understand each other? I thinks dramatic tension should come solely from gritty, awful scenes of female misery, not from irony or information being revealed!!!
“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.”
“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
“She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.”
“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.”
“The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.”
“A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life’s gas-pipe with a lighted candle.”
“Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening.”
“As for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight.”
“This is a bit steep, Jeeves!” “Approaching the perpendicular, sir.”
“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
“I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”
“There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottke going about in sea boots.”
“A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached saturation point.”
“At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.”
“This was not Aunt Dahlia, my good and kindly aunt, but my Aunt Agatha, the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.”
“Like so many cows, it lacked sustained dramatic interest.”
“It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”
“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”
“Out on the course each morning you could see the representatives of every nightmare style that was ever invented. There was the man who seemed to be attempting to deceive his ball and lull it into a false security by looking away from it and then making a lightning slash in the apparent hope of catching it off its guard. There was the man who wielded his mid-iron like one killing snakes. There was the man who addressed his ball as if he were stroking a cat, the man who drove as if he were cracking a whip, the man who brooded over each shot like one whose heart is bowed down by bad news from home, and the man who scooped with his mashie as if he were ladling soup.”
“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”
“What ho!” I said. “What ho!” said Motty. “What ho! What ho!” “What ho! What ho! What ho!” After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’.”
“I always advise people never to give advice.”
“If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.”
“It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak and then decide not to say it after all.”
“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”
“If he had a mind, there was something on it.”
“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”
“Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.”
“The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.”
“He resembled a minor prophet who had been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin.”
“I don’t suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartare sauce.”
“Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock.”
“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself ‘Do trousers matter?’ ” “The mood will pass, sir.”
“I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.”
“It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.”
Rereading PG Wodehouse at the moment. There is a very direct line from him to Pratchett – these quotes illustrate that really well.
Although barely out of adolescence…[Shelley] was, in 1813, an ardent radical and anti-monarchist. Physically, he was rather odd, tall and slim to the point of limpness, with a high-pitched effete voice; but what he lacked in physical bulk he more than made up for in charismatic intensity. Among the earliest witnesses to this intensity were his school fellows at Eton, where he was sent by his landowning father when he was twelve. Initially he was bullied for his refusal to ‘fag’ for older boys, but the bullies soon discovered that in spite of his feeble frame, Shelley was not a boy to succumb quietly to taunts. On the contrary, he could be terrifying when roused, and was quite capable of reciprocal acts of violence. He stabbed one tormentor’s hand with a fork, and others remembered him as an almost unearthly creature, with flashing eyes, wild hair, and deathly white cheeks.
Literally one of my favourite facts ever is that J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, A. A. Milne, as well as the son of Alfred Tennyson and many others played on the same amateur cricket team AND THEY WERE TERRIBLE how great is that
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 