Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I was flying through this in a happy carefree way, but I just had to stop to admire that.
what are you reading now?
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Finished as you like it now, brilliant. Lots of loveable characters but my favourite was probably melancholy Jacques for the description of him watching the dying stag and the 'all the world's a stage' speech, obviously. Quite odd that for a character who doesn't really do anything he gets a lot of the best lines. The way he ducks out of the dance at the wedding at the end is very nicely done.
The other thing that made this play stand out from the others I've read so far is how much prose there is, which is very well done and makes me think there'd have been a great novel in Shakespeare too if such a medium had existed back then.
The other thing that made this play stand out from the others I've read so far is how much prose there is, which is very well done and makes me think there'd have been a great novel in Shakespeare too if such a medium had existed back then.
jenks
thread death
There’s a school of thought that says that as he progresses Shakespeare becomes more interested in the outsider who doesn’t come back into the fold - Hamlet in some ways is one such character.
the other thing about All the world’s a stage is the theatrical effect runs counter to the words - he finishes ‘sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything.’ However what happens at that moment? An aged man is carried on to the stage - not sans everything, he has help, care and support. He has human compassion. That’s why they need to be seen and not just read.
the other thing about All the world’s a stage is the theatrical effect runs counter to the words - he finishes ‘sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything.’ However what happens at that moment? An aged man is carried on to the stage - not sans everything, he has help, care and support. He has human compassion. That’s why they need to be seen and not just read.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
And isn't there speculation that Shakespeare himself acted the part of old Adam?
But yeah, I'm sure you miss tons of stuff by only reading not watching them staged, but it's extremely unlikely I'll ever get to see any so I'm just putting that aside. I'm not that into acting anyway, and the thought of a bad production could put you off a good play for life (at least that's what I tell myself)
But yeah, I'm sure you miss tons of stuff by only reading not watching them staged, but it's extremely unlikely I'll ever get to see any so I'm just putting that aside. I'm not that into acting anyway, and the thought of a bad production could put you off a good play for life (at least that's what I tell myself)
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I saw an outdoor production of A Midsummers Night Dream outdoors in a beautiful outdoor location in the Lake District when I was at school but I was far too young to appreciate it. But that's all I've seen and all I'm ever likely to unfortunately
version
Well-known member
@catalog @william_kent
About 40 pages into Motor Spirit. Was finding it a bit dull, but it's just started to pick up. The best bits thus far are him talking about the faultiness of memory, the bit at the beginning about that Polish guy's grave being linked to Sutcliffe is cool too.
The short sentence thing's odd, sometimes feel the entire thing's written like a blurb.
About 40 pages into Motor Spirit. Was finding it a bit dull, but it's just started to pick up. The best bits thus far are him talking about the faultiness of memory, the bit at the beginning about that Polish guy's grave being linked to Sutcliffe is cool too.
The short sentence thing's odd, sometimes feel the entire thing's written like a blurb.
Yeah he has definitely got an odd style which he ramps up into this clipped sentences thing. Geeky hard Boiled.
I think I like him a lot cos he seems to skirt the fiction / non-fiction line a lot. He puts himself in there plenty. And whether you like him or not, you get a sense of his voice.
Perhaps more importantly, I just find him very readable. Like, I can devour his books, read them cover to cover in a day or two.
Probably spoilers for you so I wouldn't read until youve read both motor spirit and how to find zodiac, but maybe interesting for anyone else who's not got the books
www.theguardian.com
I think I like him a lot cos he seems to skirt the fiction / non-fiction line a lot. He puts himself in there plenty. And whether you like him or not, you get a sense of his voice.
Perhaps more importantly, I just find him very readable. Like, I can devour his books, read them cover to cover in a day or two.
Probably spoilers for you so I wouldn't read until youve read both motor spirit and how to find zodiac, but maybe interesting for anyone else who's not got the books
‘It’s not an unsolvable case’: has the Zodiac killer finally been found?
Author Jarett Kobek never intended to make the case the focus of his book but he may have solved the 50-year-old mystery
www.theguardian.com
IdleRich
IdleRich
I just want to say that I got interrupted in this and read a couple of other things, but picked it up again yesterday and I've almost finished it now, I have to say that it's way darker and nastier than I expected but I'm totally drawn into it now. Has anyone read it or any of her stuff?
The way it piles up sadness on top of sadness. To start with the main character is a 26 year old who lost both of her brothers in the war and her father soon after; she has had one lesbian affair, the scandal of which combined with her father wasting all their money means that she has retreated to a premature spinsterhood in which she lives with her mother, spends her whole life doing housework and really is trapped by social constraints into a life with no hope of any kind of happiness or excitement or anything other than slowly fading away to old age, loneliness and death....
And you really have the sense that this or close to it was the life of so many people. A sad, grim country where social constraints condemn almost everyone to a sad tedium in which even the thought of any kind of spontaneous happiness is frowned upon. Almost as bad as brexit britain in some ways.
But then she meets the wife of their lodger and they find brief happiness together - a happiness that is quickly - in fact almost immediately - tainted, and then crushed by the realisation that it can never progress beyond furtive stolen moments, always fearful of being discovered, always under the thumb of husband, mother and society as a whole.
SPOILER
And then it gets worse in an utterly nightmarish scene in which her lover decides to get rid of an unwanted baby by taking some dodgy abortion pills from a back street chemist. Picking a night when husband and mother are out she takes loads of the pills with the result that she is crushed by pain and leaking blood all over the place, clothes soaked in blood, towels soaked in blood, bucket after bucket of blood - and worse - laboriously carried to the outside toilet, blood scrubbed from the floor and and the carpet... and then the husband comes home early and catches them in the act, one thing leads to another and in a struggle the lodger brains her husband with the ashtray and the two girls carry the body with its lolling head and spittle and more blood. I said nightmarish and it really is a graphic and horrible scene, all the more violent due to the genteel boredom that has preceded it.
And then with our lovers now accidental conspirators and murderers they must face the police investigation, their constant fear of discovery, the lies and the sadness and the bloodstains on the carpet. The reader dreads every knock on the door as much as they do, a tortuous age of slowly dripping agony. Which is then compounded by the breakdown of their love, the one true and beautiful thing is corrupted by the event that ties them together and then inevitable, horrible suspicions that arise from that. And it's just so sad, the death of a truly lovely romance that was described so purely and is now so tarnished the reader doesn't know if it was ever really real.
SPOILER
And where it will go now I don't know but I fear the worst. So the book is highly recommended but far from a laugh a minute. I just wasn't prepared for how devastating it would be, even though the part of the plot in the spoiler almost feels cliched in terms of how many times I've read or seen something like that in books or film. It doesn't matter cos it's so real, the paranoia so brutal, that the book transcends cliche.
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Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
I just started reading Progress & Poverty today, because I'm very interested in some of these economic ideas. Its another monster book, around 600 pages of discourse.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Yeah he has definitely got an odd style which he ramps up into this clipped sentences thing. Geeky hard Boiled.
I think I like him a lot cos he seems to skirt the fiction / non-fiction line a lot. He puts himself in there plenty. And whether you like him or not, you get a sense of his voice.
Perhaps more importantly, I just find him very readable. Like, I can devour his books, read them cover to cover in a day or two.
Probably spoilers for you so I wouldn't read until youve read both motor spirit and how to find zodiac, but maybe interesting for anyone else who's not got the books
‘It’s not an unsolvable case’: has the Zodiac killer finally been found?
Author Jarett Kobek never intended to make the case the focus of his book but he may have solved the 50-year-old mystery
Know very little about Zodiac but that Fincher film about the killings was on the other day so it's the perfect time for this to pop up.
version
Well-known member
The Fincher film's based on Robert Graysmith's book, Zodiac. Kobek rubbishes it at the start of his book. It threw me off because the Fincher film was my introduction to the whole thing. Still like the film though.
IdleRich
IdleRich
That twitter thread is pretty underwhelming though don't you think? Loads of very circumstantial stuff to me.
I know very little about the Zodiac, but i get the impression that - unlike with, say, Jack the Ripper - the letters are taken seriously and there is a general consensus that a large proportion of them are from the guy who did the murders. Does anyone know why they are given such credence, and how they have been able to separate the real ones and the fakes (I'm assuming there would inevitably have been loads of the latter).
I know very little about the Zodiac, but i get the impression that - unlike with, say, Jack the Ripper - the letters are taken seriously and there is a general consensus that a large proportion of them are from the guy who did the murders. Does anyone know why they are given such credence, and how they have been able to separate the real ones and the fakes (I'm assuming there would inevitably have been loads of the latter).
IdleRich
IdleRich
The film was... ok. At first I found it too disjointed and hard to follow or engage with as a result, but as it went on I got more and more sucked into it and I suppose that that was a deliberate way of doing it, to build up into something. Even at the end it had a sort of schizophrenic feel to it in that on the one hand it really seemed to conclude that it was Leigh Anderson, but at the same time they had to admit that all of the actual evidence that existed seemed to exonerate him. I didn't really know what to think really.... or more like, I didn't know what they thought.
version
Well-known member
Yeah, agreed that it gets better as it goes along. Good use of 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' too.
Kobek dismisses Leigh right off the bat in Motor Spirit and says Graysmith's thing is a feat of acrobatics based on a single mention of one of the victims having a person named "Lee" named among their friends.
IdleRich
IdleRich
I was humming Hurdy Gurdy Man all evening afterwards....
As I recall, from the film, the following reasons were given for naming Lee Anderson. Like I say these are from my memory of the film and also, I can well believe that they have been exaggerated or perhaps exploded or refuted elsewhere and they chose to omit this to strengthen their case, so I'm not claiming that they are necessarily valid points, they are just the ones I've heard made.
Firstly the girl who along with her boyfriend were the first victims apparently knew the killer. Just before the killing she had had a party and a strange guy called Lee came and just sat there doing nothing and it freaked out a lot of people (I guess this is what Kobek is referring to). She in fact had a lot of admirers who met her from working in a pancake diner or something and Lee Anderson lived 50m from that diner.
The reason that he first became a suspect was cos some friends of his reported things he had said in advance about wanting to kill people. He was also in the vicinity of the lake where the second couple were attacked on that day and someone saw bloodstained knives in his car - he claimed he'd killed some chickens.
Lee Anderson wore a watch that was made by a company called Zodiac and it had the same logo on it as used in the letters.
The tv guy who tried to interview Zodiac had a phonecall while he was out claiming to be Zodiac - the person on the phone spoke to his maid and said that he had to kill today cos it was his birthday. The date was 18th Dec and although the police claimed they had checked the birthdays of the suspects and said that no-one fitted, when Graysmith checked himself it turned out that Lee Anderson was born on 18th Dec.
The timeline fitted really well. There were letters until Anderson was interviewed, then the letters stopped for a bit. Also Anderson moved right after that happened and cleared out all his stuff, which could explain why, when they searched his place later, they found nothing of interest. There was more to this but the main thing was the way that the letters started again for a bit, then there was a four year hiatus for the exact period that Anderson was in jail for child molesting - when he came out of jail the letters started again saying "I'm back".
Years later they finally managed to track down the guy who survived the first shooting and they showed him a load of pictures and he picked out a picture of Anderson and said "that is definitely the guy who shot me" - according to wikipedia, when that happened the police decided they were gonna charge him but he died before they could.
So... when you hear all that... the watch, the birthday, the being in the right place with blood covered knives in his car, the timeline, the vicinity to the first victim and, most convincingly, the confident identification you think hmmm. But then the fingerprint didn't match, the second guy who survived said that it wasn't him, the handwriting didn't match (I don't trust the handwriting experts at all either way to be honest, sounds like pseudoscience to me) - and really it's all circumstantial. So I can't say I'm convinced - but I do think that saying "It was just cos she had a friend called Lee" is a little unfair... if we credit the film with being even slightly accurate.
As I recall, from the film, the following reasons were given for naming Lee Anderson. Like I say these are from my memory of the film and also, I can well believe that they have been exaggerated or perhaps exploded or refuted elsewhere and they chose to omit this to strengthen their case, so I'm not claiming that they are necessarily valid points, they are just the ones I've heard made.
Firstly the girl who along with her boyfriend were the first victims apparently knew the killer. Just before the killing she had had a party and a strange guy called Lee came and just sat there doing nothing and it freaked out a lot of people (I guess this is what Kobek is referring to). She in fact had a lot of admirers who met her from working in a pancake diner or something and Lee Anderson lived 50m from that diner.
The reason that he first became a suspect was cos some friends of his reported things he had said in advance about wanting to kill people. He was also in the vicinity of the lake where the second couple were attacked on that day and someone saw bloodstained knives in his car - he claimed he'd killed some chickens.
Lee Anderson wore a watch that was made by a company called Zodiac and it had the same logo on it as used in the letters.
The tv guy who tried to interview Zodiac had a phonecall while he was out claiming to be Zodiac - the person on the phone spoke to his maid and said that he had to kill today cos it was his birthday. The date was 18th Dec and although the police claimed they had checked the birthdays of the suspects and said that no-one fitted, when Graysmith checked himself it turned out that Lee Anderson was born on 18th Dec.
The timeline fitted really well. There were letters until Anderson was interviewed, then the letters stopped for a bit. Also Anderson moved right after that happened and cleared out all his stuff, which could explain why, when they searched his place later, they found nothing of interest. There was more to this but the main thing was the way that the letters started again for a bit, then there was a four year hiatus for the exact period that Anderson was in jail for child molesting - when he came out of jail the letters started again saying "I'm back".
Years later they finally managed to track down the guy who survived the first shooting and they showed him a load of pictures and he picked out a picture of Anderson and said "that is definitely the guy who shot me" - according to wikipedia, when that happened the police decided they were gonna charge him but he died before they could.
So... when you hear all that... the watch, the birthday, the being in the right place with blood covered knives in his car, the timeline, the vicinity to the first victim and, most convincingly, the confident identification you think hmmm. But then the fingerprint didn't match, the second guy who survived said that it wasn't him, the handwriting didn't match (I don't trust the handwriting experts at all either way to be honest, sounds like pseudoscience to me) - and really it's all circumstantial. So I can't say I'm convinced - but I do think that saying "It was just cos she had a friend called Lee" is a little unfair... if we credit the film with being even slightly accurate.
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william_kent
Well-known member
re: zodiac
an interesting double bill is "Dirty Harry" & "Zodiac"
both based on the Zodiac killings, both feature a maverick going it alone
I watched both after reading the Kobek books, "Dirty Harry" is probably truer to the time ( casual racism, homophobia, and the fashion didn't require historical research by the wardrobe department ) and better paced
"Zodiac" had bad pacing, I started losing my interest towards the end ( I just wanted it to end to be honest )
Kobek makes a case for "Dirty Harry" being one of the best San Francisco films - his description of the panning shot in opening scene certainly heightened my enjoyment when I got around to watching it
an interesting double bill is "Dirty Harry" & "Zodiac"
both based on the Zodiac killings, both feature a maverick going it alone
I watched both after reading the Kobek books, "Dirty Harry" is probably truer to the time ( casual racism, homophobia, and the fashion didn't require historical research by the wardrobe department ) and better paced
"Zodiac" had bad pacing, I started losing my interest towards the end ( I just wanted it to end to be honest )
Kobek makes a case for "Dirty Harry" being one of the best San Francisco films - his description of the panning shot in opening scene certainly heightened my enjoyment when I got around to watching it
it is all circumstantial evidence that's true, but then it always was/always will be. the kobek argument amounts to the difficulty of discounting doerr, whereas the other suspects can be.
the most interesting bit about the second book is to do with the cop and how he most likely fabricated letters in order to continue having a case.
the most interesting bit about the second book is to do with the cop and how he most likely fabricated letters in order to continue having a case.