Middlemarch character most likely to succeed at Moby Dick, though presumably success here is being least likely to engage in whaling or enable others to engage in it
Tertius Lydgate, who wants to distinguish himself in a career other people find gross but who ALSO has miserable relationships to authority, is failing this test so hard and fast it's vertigo-inducing. Mary simply refuses to promise Fred she'll wait for him if he goes to sea and so he doesn't, and about 1% of the credit for that outcome belongs to Fred. Mr Farebrother gives a perfectly nice sermon about the book of Jonah that doesn't merit getting a whole chapter of a novel to itself. Casaubon drowns in the harbor.
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Wow Marjorie I guess you missed the part of the novel where George Eliot explains the simple, straightforward way to be a good person that works in every possible situation and also consistently meets with social approbation, financial success, political sympathy and romantic fulfilment, as well as 100% lacking any regrets or inner conflict about your decisions, which have disappointed no one! There's definitely an appendix in my edition #cottagemaxxing
The Nantucketers seem to have the most experience living in a small community and everything that entails, at least if they actually live there. Stationary Nantucketers are Father Mapple, Aunt Charity, Peleg and Bildad, all of whom seem to be financially and socially stable. Peleg and Bildad are living in a state of religious/ethical dissonance that would make them right at home in an Eliot setting up to the point someone called their bluff, at which point they might set off a chain of dominos that ends in someone getting killed, or they might laugh and walk away. Hard to tell. Father Mapple seems too good at his job to have many friends. Aunt Charity is industrious, seems sociable, and I would be surprised if she isn't a pillar of the community. Charity wins that bracket.
The whalers are all burdened with the necessity of leaving their hometowns and sailing all over the world most of the time, shoreless, indefinite as God! But some parallels can be drawn to Middlemarchers. Amongst the officers: Ahab is the closest thing we have to a Casaubon figure, engaged in a pursuit of something eternally elusive and fucking up a pious younger person's life in the process. Can you imagine how much they would hate each other? Casaubon does not win at Middlemarch and neither does Ahab. Stubb and Flask get along fine most of the time; people would talk about Stubb in the yards and public houses of Middlemarch, but he wouldn't care too much. Flask would get a little bit trod upon until he could get a better job. The heavy favorite here is Starbuck. He strikes me as unlikely to start conducting social campaigns à la Will Ladislaw (which I do take to be a success mode of Middlemarching) mostly because he's too aware of the necessity of making a living; but he's principled, aware of social status and financial responsibility, and married to a presumably appropriate person with a child. He would make a solid employee for a Caleb Garth in ordinary times and would have exquisite religious torments to juxtapose with Dorothea's when things got bad. I hate to play favorites, but amongst the officers' mess Starbuck is clearly ahead.
That leaves the harpooners and also Ishmael, who historically makes no objection when bundled with harpooners by happenstance. [edit: I said that wrong. He makes strenuous and prolonged objection, he just gets over it.] Middlemarch is, as I understand it, landlocked, which poses some difficulty to all of these four but is an absolute kiss of death for Ishmael. He simply would not. That boy would walk into town and then prefer-not-to his way straight out the other side of it. Meanwhile, it seems to me the closest to a positive relationship anyone in Middlemarch would attempt to form with any of the harpooners, none of whom are white, would be as objects of charity. I guess Tashtego would have the easiest time of it as a native English speaker from the US, although we don't really know that much about him.
Charity vs. Starbuck vs. Tashtego is not a match-up I have ever had occasion to consider before. I'm going to get some dinner and consider what I've done before casting my precious only vote in this poll.
The new adaptation of The Stranger slaps. Some of the most gorgeous black-and-white filmmaking I've ever seen, a searing presence of the sun at all times, complex simmering homoerotic undertones, a heartbreaking performance from the neighbor with the dog and precise, needling ones from the attorneys, and an engagement with the French presence in Algeria that feels thoughtful and purposeful throughout the film without ever taking the viewer out of the story. Absolutely un-shy about being the kind of black-and-white movie in French that will include a gratuitous nude scene.
I caught Calle Malaga at a film festival screening; it's about an elderly lady of Spanish descent living in Tangier, who has to make a decision about her future when her daughter comes to visit and says, come live with me in Madrid, the deed to your apartment is in my name and I'm putting it up for sale. The mother loves her life and her apartment and doesn't want to move. Movie shenanigans ensue. I enjoyed the performances in this movie 100% but the script only about 70%; it kept careening between tones, from madcap comedy to romantic heartwarmer to family drama, and it would have stuck with me more decidedly if it had had a real ending. A dedication does not a conclusion make.
Joybubbles, also at the film fest, was a unique cinematic experience because the screening I saw was both open-captioned and audio-described; the subject of the film was blind, and the filmmaker wanted blind audience members to have access to it. I've never watched an audio-described film before, and it was rather fascinating. I'm also just glad that somebody undertook to tell the story of this guy, who was a groundbreaking phone hacker, lifelong whimsy-spreader and subcultural and local legend; a number of people spoke during the Q&A who had known him or talked to him on the phone hotline he maintained for years.
The History of Sound was released with minimal publicity; I loved the book (a collection of short stories, from which this movie adapts only the first one) but missed its theatrical run completely and ended up borrowing the DVD from the library. Considering how no one seemed to care about distributing this film, it's a little surprising how much was apparently invested in making it: there are locations and characters that never appeared in the original short story, and it's cast with some legit movie stars. I was surprised that Josh O'Connor didn't play the lead (the narrator of the story) but perhaps they considered it more important to put him in the role the audience needs to be fascinated and tantalized by. I kind of was and kind of wasn't. He's good in this but Paul Mescal, the lead, plays the character's repression a little too effectively, considering he needs to carry 75% of the film on his face. This is, among other things, a film about folk music, and it was a joy to hear a couple songs I know (I sat up straight when a bar full of men started singing "I like to rise when the sun she rises") and a bunch I don't. I wished someone would sing with their whole chest sometimes. Folk songs are not 100% for singing on a high wistful edge of your voice that evokes the melancholy of everything you've lost. And I thought it all went on for too long--twice as long as it took Chris Cooper to read the entire story for the audiobook, and he didn't rush; there's no reason for this to have gone over 90 minutes. There were ideas it conveyed beautifully in one minute and then, for some reason, drew out for five minutes of empty dialogue, or just an actor staring at the wall. I don't not recommend this...the pervasive moodiness of it takes too long, but it works, and I love the central metaphor of the story. I recommend the book more, though.
The animals in The Sheep Detectives are conspicuously computer-animated; their wool looks fantastic but their movements are never convincing. The movie is fine but it's no Babe.
much to my sorrow it’s vladimir horowitz who plays piano much better than i. and pianissimo also fortissimo i can’t believe how his fingers can fly! if i had just a mere portion of vladimir hor’witz’s talent i’d practice all day…i’ve a suspicion it’s more than ambition it’s how many d.c. al fines you play…
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Been doing that thing where I imagine fanvids I'm not going to make, but the odd thing about playing this game with PHM is I keep realizing they wouldn't be vids about Grace. For example, Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble" is about people living through turmoil, imagining/hoping for miracles, and looking up at dying stars; that would obviously have to be about the people on earth, whom you generally don't see in the movie at all. (Why does this music video look like this.)
Meanwhile, if you can get over the fact it's textually about a disappointing Hollywood career, Aimee Mann's "Patient Zero" is about Eva Stratt. Life is grand, and wouldn't you like to have it go as planned? You paid your respects like a ransom to a moment that was doomed from the start. One of the reasons I don't actually make vids is that the ideas I think of always depend on footage that doesn't exist, but you could just set this song to a bunch of shots of Sandra Hüller's face and have a pretty good time.
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Recent posting trends caused me to slowly remember a double dactyl that I wrote in 2007, which went from being, yesterday, a flicker of an impression of something I might once have thought--under the dark, under the park, tunnel that's under a park?--to complete phrases until at dinner tonight I remembered about Joyce and fluorescence and everything except the opening nonsense syllables, which I had to recover by finding where I originally wrote the thing down--which is funny, because I think reading those syllables on the wall was the only reason I thought of making a double dactyl in the first place. (I got them slightly wrong actually--it's "hitherandthithering" and it's from Finnegans Wake.)
so, a 19-year-old contribution to the moment:
Hithering-thithering:
Joyce on the walls of the
long subway tunnel be-
neath Bryant Park;
words about night nearly
unrecognizable
under fluorescence that
wards off the dark.
so when i was a kid a read this story where a boy gets turned into a mouse by evil witches. at the end (spoilers) him and his beloved grandmother manage to slaughter all the witches but they do NOT manage to turn him back to a human child. he stays a mouse. the grandmother rebuilds her home to be mouse accessible. and they discuss the fact that he's aging like a mouse, so he probably only has a few years to live; but it's ok, because the grandmother confesses that she ALSO only has a few years to live and they both agree that they wouldn't want to live without the other. So everything is alright then, and they're happy, and that's the end of the story. it's probably been over two decades since i read it and quite frankly i am still processing the intertwining concepts of love and mortality but anyway that's not my point. my point is that Rocky did not die of acute radiation sickness because he spent enough time shielded by astrophage that his body was able to handle the damage, but holy shit does he have every type of cancer. he didn't die entering grace's atmosphere but all of his organs caught fire. I repeat — his internal organs caught fire. he spent several decades in a low gravity environment. Do you know what human bodies do in low gravity? it's not good man. 20% muscle loss in two weeks. 1% bone density loss every month. Maybe carapaces and low organic matter would handle the change better, but idk, it might actually be worse.
anyway my point is, actually, i do think that Rocky and Grace would get to grow old together.
i know i'm op but op the idea of Grace arriving at Erid on the verge of death, recovering, and then living a long and full (maybe not especially healthy) life, vs Rocky arriving home a trimphant hero, a miraculous survivor of a thousand calamaties only to at long last have to pay the toll, dying tragically young, I'm.
Rocky and Grace jokingly comparing the pros and cons of bipedal vs pentapedal joint pain. Rocky wearing the xenonite exo-suit because it actually helps keep his carapace from collapsing to the ground. Grace affectionately bumping his cane against it in morse code because of course their stupid ernglish pidgin isn't enough; now that everyone know english they also need a secret language that's just for them.
Grace in his motorized bubble scooter touring the city. Naturally, Rocky's going to keep him company by riding in the stupid sidecar, how would he explain everything if he was walking beside him? And of course Rocky's telling people to repeat things and his voice is weirdly pitchy, Grace is there and human hearing is awful. It would be rude to talk normally.
Rocky pulling out the old hamster ball and curling up inside. And he knows, he knows its bad posture, but right now it hurts less. Grace curled up around him, the exterior of the ball a carefully calibrated 39 C. They are both hiding from well meaning physical therapists. Whispering doesn't actually do anything in that regard, but Rocky finds whispering hilarious for some reason (Eridian equiv of helium infused squeaky voice).
Gravity as Erid's love for them, a painful embrace they wouldn't trade for anything.
They get to grow old together. It's not enough time, but its so much more than they thought they would have; it's surprisingly easy to be okay with it. It's a tragedy from every angle except perhaps the inside.
#whatever you do don't think about adrien ok#adrien got him back. They got to see him again. There's 23 other mates who can't say the same#i think there's a world with pebbles and an affectionate blobby uncle#but in this one the infertility is the first warning that he's maybe not okay#(of course rocky avoided mentioning the chronic pain - he'd been living with most of it for decades at this point)#(and for the first year or 2 he's dead serious about getting Every doctor to work on Grace. Like at first you think hes being hyperbolic#But theres a solid period where rocky is genuinely indignant at the concept of any doctor anywhere working on someone who isn't grace#Yes he knows other people need doctors too.#but also did you consider that they can fucking wait question???)#Anyway#In the end#In the end rocky falls asleep with grace watching. a few hours go by. and then a few more.#and then grace figures rocky won't mind if he rests his eyes for just a minute.#and neither of them have to mourn.
I just recently read the entirety of Sarah Williams' "The Old Astronomer," and I was very surprised how long it is. The most famous lines jump out at you, and then the poem goes on for SIX stanzas more. The ending is nice but the envoy has clearly already happened by the time you get there.
Entire poem behind the cut.
Reach me down my Tycho Brahé,—I would know him when we meet,
When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;
He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then till now.
Pray, remember, that I leave you all my theory complete,
Lacking only certain data, for your adding, as is meet;
And remember, men will scorn it, 'tis original and true,
And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you.
But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learnt the worth of scorn;
You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn;
What, for us, are all distractions of men's fellowship and smiles?
What, for us, the goddess Pleasure, with her meretricious wiles?
You may tell that German college that their honour comes too late.
But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant's fate;
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.
What, my boy, you are not weeping? You should save your eyes for sight;
You will need them, mine observer, yet for many another night.
I leave none but you, my pupil, unto whom my plans are known.
You "have none but me," you murmur, and I "leave you quite alone"?
Well then, kiss me,—since my mother left her blessing on my brow,
There has been a something wanting in my nature until now;
I can dimly comprehend it,—that I might have been more kind,
Might have cherished you more wisely, as the one I leave behind.
I "have never failed in kindness"? No, we lived too high for strife,—
Calmest coldness was the error which has crept into our life;
But your spirit is untainted, I can dedicate you still
To the service of our science: you will further it? you will!
There are certain calculations I should like to make with you,
To be sure that your deductions will be logical and true;
And remember, "Patience, Patience," is the watchword of a sage,
Not to-day nor yet to-morrow can complete a perfect age.
I have sown, like Tycho Brahé, that a greater man may reap;
But if none should do my reaping, 'twill disturb me in my sleep.
So be careful and be faithful, though, like me, you leave no name;
See, my boy, that nothing turn you to the mere pursuit of fame.
I must say Good-bye, my pupil, for I cannot longer speak;
Draw the curtain back for Venus, ere my vision grows too weak:
It is strange the pearly planet should look red as fiery Mars,—
God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars.
The other surprising thing is that in a spot where the commonly quoted version (apparently from an anthology published after the poet's death) says "fondly," the original poem says "truly." "I have loved the stars too truly." I found it jarring when I noticed this, but I think Williams got that part right. "Fond" has, especially in a 19th century context or older, a slight connotation of irrationality; and what this poem is about most of the time is the pursuit of knowledge, which has to come to a natural end but has never been abandoned.
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it's very funny to me that the advice in the notes divides cleanly into two camps:
Actually actionable advice (break it down into smaller pieces, leave and come back later, find somebody to do it with you so you aren't doing it alone)
People who are Jared, 19 and just say something that's fundamentally a variation on "just do it scared"
Warning: advice that "you have to leave your comfort zone to grow" is meant for people who are IN their comfort zone the majority of the time. If you rarely/never feel comfortable and safe, you actually need to get more comfortable and safe before you can grow 👍
