Pro-war and anti-war tendencies in literature and movies

[neufer]

Thanks for yet another anecdote I'm too lazy to figure out the connection of, neufer.

• You are most welcome.

On a side note, I recently read Alice in Wonderland and started on Through the Looking-Glass and just couldn't get into either one of them. I did think Alice would have been a much longer novel and that Disney watered it down a lot but was surprised it was fairly similar to the early animated movie.

I would strongly recommend that you read Martin Gardner's _The Annotated Alice_ as well as his _The Annotated Snark_.

(The late Mr. Gardner also wrote definitively on the Shakespeare authorship issue.)

[owlice]

Oh, yes! It's a pity we are not allowed to discuss it here.

So start a blog, Ann, where you can discuss whatever you like.

On a side note, I recently read Alice in Wonderland and started on Through the Looking-Glass and just couldn't get into either one of them.

I would strongly recommend that you read Martin Gardner's _The Annotated Alice_ as well as his _The Annotated Snark_.

geckzilla, I second neufer's suggestion of The Annotated Alice.

[geckzilla]

I'll have to check that out. I was wondering what I was missing.

[Ann]

I'd say you are right about Aragorn being a god, Chris. When I look at this picture of Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn that I have posted several times before, it's hard for me not to be strongly reminded of an extremely well-known religious character that tends to be portrayed just like this.

Yes... and I considered calling him a Christ figure (a well known literary device), but decided against it. Generally, a Christ figure ends up some sort of martyr, sacrificing himself (figuratively or literally) for some greater good. Aragorn does not do this- I do not think his mental anguish over the course of the story qualifies. So I'll just stick with seeing him as a generic god figure. Of course, that's just a literary concept. In the story, he wasn't quite a god, but more like a traditional European king- anointed by the real gods and granted some magical powers. But the idea is there.

In my opinon, Frodo represents the "suffering servant" aspect of the Christ figure. Gandalf is the one who gave his life for his friends and was brought back to life again, so he represents the resurrection aspect.

Aragorn is the glorious king.
It is to Viggo Mortenson's credit that he looks a little bit embarrassed wearing the crown, so he looks more regal from behind.




Ann

[neufer]

The direct decendent of _Anonymous_'s villainous Cecils]
Lord David CECIL (9 April 1902 – 1 January 1986) railed in 1932:

• "Of course there are people who say that the caterpillar is a satire
  on Oxford logic and the Duchess a skit on Cambridge paradox.
  
  But they belong to the same tribe of pedantic lunatics
  who think that Macbeth is a topical hit at Essex
  and Cleopatra a satirical picture of Mary Queen of Scots."
  
  - Lord David CECIL (from Robert Phillips' _Aspects of Alice_)

<<Lord David Cecil (9 April 1902 – 1 January 1986), was a British biographer, historian and academic. Cecil was a delicate child, suffering from a tubercular gland in his neck at the age of 8 years, and after an operation he spent a great deal of time in bed, where he developed his love of reading. Because of his delicate health his parents sent him to Eton College later than other boys, and he survived the experience by spending one day a week in bed. After school he went on to Christ Church, Oxford, as an undergraduate.

From 1924 to 1930 Cecil was a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He made an impact as a literary historian with his first publication, The Stricken Deer (1929), a sympathetic study of the poet Cowper. He followed this with studies of Walter Scott, early Victorian novelists and Jane Austen. For a time he was an associate of the literary group known as the "Inklings."

During his academic career Cecil published studies of Hardy, Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Dorothy Osborne and Walter Pater. As well as his literary studies he also published a two-volume historical biography of Lord Melbourne (to whom he was distantly related) and appreciations of visual artists - Augustus John, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne Jones. In retirement he published further literary and biographic studies of Walter de la Mare, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb and Desmond MacCarthy, as well as a history of his own family, The Cecils of Hatfield House and an account of Some Dorset Country Houses.

In 1932 Cecil married Rachel MacCarthy, daughter of the literary journalist Desmond MacCarthy. They had three children - Jonathan Hugh (1939–2011) (the actor and journalist), Hugh Peniston (b. 1941) (the historian) and Alice Laura (b. 1947) (the literary agent, who in 1975 married A. Hornak). Joyce Grenfell mentions that David Cecil was bisexual.>>

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_20]For certain folk[/url] [b][color=#0000FF] who forget [u]TO ALWAYS[/u] produce plays under a alias[/color][/b]

---

<<David Cecil is an Ugandan-British theatre producer. He was arrested in Uganda over a play which references homosexuality on September 17 2012. Cecil produced The River and the Mountain, written by Beau Hopkins, a British writer in Kampala and directed by Angela Emurwon. The cast is all-Ugandan. The dramatic comedy was programmed at the National Theatre but had to relocate after the Ugandan Media Council on 16 August 2012 provisorily banned a performance in public.

The Ugandan minister of ethics said the play “justified the promotion of homosexuality in Uganda," and added, "We will put pressure on anyone who says this abomination is acceptable.” Cecil was placed in a prison near Kampala on 15 and 16 September. A Ugandan court released him on bail on September 17 after charging him in connection with the staging of the play. His court date was set for 18 October and he faces a possible two year jail sentence.>>

<<Jonathan Cecil (22 February 1939 – 22 September 2011), was an English theatre, film and television actor. Cecil was born in London, England, the son of Lord David Cecil and the grandson of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury.

At Oxford, his friends included Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. In a production of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, he played a lunatic called Troubadour and a woman who sells pigs. Of his early acting at Oxford, Cecil said: I was still stiff and awkward, but this was rather effective for comedy parts, playing sort of comic servants in plays, and in the cabaret nights we had.

After Oxford, he spent two years training for an acting career at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where his contemporaries included Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi. In film and television, Cecil almost always played upper class English characters. He has been called "one of the finest upper-class-twits of his era". He also worked in radio, where his credits included The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Cecil wrote occasionally for The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. In one piece he noted Handsome young male actors of the older school have tended, in my experience, to be somewhat vapid and vain. I write this in no spirit of envy — comic and character actors, like proverbial blondes, usually have more fun. He also admitted that "... most of my experience has been in comedy, that’s the way life has taken me ... if I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t do parts with more depth".

Art (middle-class-twit) Neuendorffer