General Good-byes And RIPs

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  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    @Piglet I've never read any of her books but I find her intensely irritating when she appears on chat programmes. It's the way she implies that she inhabits her characters minds, understands and feel herself into history and other peoples' lives in some superior way that the rest of humankind doesn't and can't, as though her ability to identify gives her a historical authority independently of the facts.

    It's put me off reading them, and now I suspect I never shall. What you and @questioning have said about her style strengthens this suspicion.

  • Piglet wrote: »
    I'm afraid I can't get on with Mantel; her meandering paragraphs and habit of not telling you who's speaking drive me up the wall. My attempt at reading Wolf Hall is several hours I won't get back.

    That's my experience, too. I tried - I really tried! - to read some Mantel. However, her use of non- or unclearly-antecedented pronouns made her incomprehensible to me.

    Blimey, in the best circumstances I find myself leafing back trying to identify the 'he' of 'he said' - too many characters and I'm sunk (goodbye, Russian classics). I think my memory is starting to get a bit shaky. So no Mantel for me!
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    That's exactly my problem, M-in-M!
  • Piglet wrote: »
    That makes me feel so much better; I thought I must be the only person on the planet who doesn't think Ms. Mantel is the greatest thing since sliced bread!
    I desperately wanted to like Wolf Hall but couldn’t do it. The TV programme is, however, fantastic.

    I like Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl but I’ve read other stuff and found I really didn’t get on with it.
    (At this point I admit that I don’t really like historical novels, possibly because I prefer history books).
  • DoublethinkDoublethink Admin, 8th Day Host
    edited January 2021
    I have just deleted my post about Hilary Mantel, because I’ve just realised it was The Other Boleyn Girl I read and hated !
  • Enoch wrote: »
    @Piglet I've never read any of her books but I find her intensely irritating when she appears on chat programmes. It's the way she implies that she inhabits her characters minds, understands and feel herself into history and other peoples' lives in some superior way that the rest of humankind doesn't and can't, as though her ability to identify gives her a historical authority independently of the facts.

    It's put me off reading them, and now I suspect I never shall. What you and @questioning have said about her style strengthens this suspicion.
    I'm with you on the irritation and the impression that she speaks for her characters.

    I've ploughed through Wolf Hall and Bring up the bodies but am dithering about The Mirror and the Light.
  • TurquoiseTasticTurquoiseTastic Kerygmania Host
    "Ploughed through" sums up my experience of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies as well. They weren't terrible - the characters were reasonably interesting, though I didn't feel there was any particular reason to believe that they'd actually been like that in real life. Every so often there would be an unpleasant piece of imagery that made me think "I'd really rather not have read that". They are not books I plan to re-read and I shall not be bothering with The Mirror and the Light.
  • CaissaCaissa Shipmate
    George Armstrong, 90. He captained the Toronto Maple Leafs to 4 Stanley Cups including the 1967 one. It is the first time stanley Cup impinged on my memories. I was 3.5 years old and living in Toronto.
    https://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/nhl/nhl-maple-leafs-george-armstrong-obit-1.5885742
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Great reading, but shouldn't some of this be split off into a Who Else Hates Hilary? thread?
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    I was beginning to wonder that, ML!
  • Cloris Leachman has died. For those of a certain generation she'll always be remembered as Frau Blücher.
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    The South African opera and jazz singer Sibongile Khumalo has died at 63 of a stroke-rlated illness. Thula Mama.
  • Cicely Tyson has left the building by the stage door and now sits in the audience. Iconic roles belonged to her but her life was probably the biggest one.
  • Crœsos wrote: »
    Cloris Leachman has died. For those of a certain generation she'll always be remembered as Frau Blücher.

    Nurse Diesel?
  • Frau Blücher, Nurse Diesel and Madame Defarge. But, as much as I loved her in those roles, she’ll always primarily be Phyllis Lindstrom to me.

  • Ah, but it was for best supporting actress in the extraordinary The Last Picture Show that she won her Oscar - too often forgotten.
  • This is probably a terrible thing to admit to, but Cloris's demise, and a couple of months where I've been snowed under in vouchers for the big river (which I don't usually ever use) -in fact, another £15 plopped into my inbox yesterday, spurred me to hit Amazon and splurge on Mel Brooks movies. So Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, Spaceballs and Young Frankenstein are heading my way. Annoyingly, the original Producers seems very hard to find. I blame the remake which, I think, is now the movie of the musical of the movie about the musical...

    Anyone for more beans?
  • That's Hedley!!!!!
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    :mrgreen:

    What crime have you committed?

    Rustled cattle!

    That's nothing - we've all done that!

    Through the Vatican?

  • :-) (where's the old :killing me: when you need it)

    Correction to the above - The Producers is hard to find, High Anxiety is near-impossible. Substitute the first for the second and I'm not telling whoppers above.
  • Wesley JWesley J Circus Host
    From the BBC: Captain Sir Tom Moore dies with coronavirus.

    RIP.
  • HuiaHuia Shipmate
    An valiant man. The world is made poorer by his death.
  • Huia wrote: »
    An valiant man. The world is made poorer by his death.

    Amen to that.
  • Indeed. Quite a character.

    <votives> for his family, that the Meeja give them some time and space in which to grieve.
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    RIP Sir Tom. :cry:
  • RIP Hilton Valentine, who played/devised possibly the most instantly recognisable guitar riff in all music.
  • Fare thee well Sir Captain Tom. Many hugs to his nearest and dearest.

    AFF
  • Hal Holbrook has died. Although best known in his later years for his one man show about Mark Twain, I'll always remember him as Deep Throat from All the President's Men. Seems timely again.
  • The oldest actor to win an oscar, Christopher Plummer has died, aged 91.

    Although I suspect most obituaries will focus on his Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, IMHO his best parts were Commodus in The Fall of the Roman Empire and Atahualpa in Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun.
  • The oldest actor to win an oscar, Christopher Plummer has died, aged 91.

    Although I suspect most obituaries will focus on his Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, IMHO his best parts were Commodus in The Fall of the Roman Empire and Atahualpa in Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun.

    I'll always remember him as General Chang, the Shakespeare-quoting Klingon from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Plummer went completely over the top in that role, which is what sold the character.
    Oh, now be honest, Captain, warrior to warrior. You do prefer it this way, don't you, as it was meant to be? No peace in our time. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends."
  • Like so many people, I first encountered Christopher Plummer in "The Sound of Music." But he was a major part of the wonderful Stratford Festival in Ontario. By the time I started my annual pilgrimage there (2014?), he was no longer active, so I never got to see him perform live. (I do have a DVD of him in "The Tempest" at Stratford, Ontario.)
  • Crœsos wrote: »
    Hal Holbrook has died. Although best known in his later years for his one man show about Mark Twain, I'll always remember him as Deep Throat from All the President's Men. Seems timely again.

    Hate to say it, but I can't think about him without thinking about Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Probably because he was by far the most notable name in that otherwise forgetable film, so it just sorta stuck.
  • I had the great good fortune of seeing him at Stratford as Prospero. That will live with me .
  • I had the great good fortune of seeing him at Stratford as Prospero. That will live with me .

    You mean Plummer, right? Yeah, he did tend to keep up his Canadian content somewhat. He even played Sir John A. in that 1970s Riel biopic on CBC, which I mentioned here a while back when there was a bit of talk about the first PM's racism.

    He did an interesting take on Mike Wallace in The Insider, and of course his portrayal of Jean-Paul Getty a few years back is now legendary, not least because of the circumstances under which it was filmed, ie. the movie was already finished when Kevin Spacey's MeToo scandal broke, so Ridley Scott had to re-shoot all of Spacey's scenes in a few weeks.
  • I'm not sure if we missed this, but the UK's largest publisher of hymn books, Kevin Mayhew, died last month.
  • Larry Flynt

    The last of the first-wave "porno chic" publishers. His magazine was often described as "explicit" or "tasteless", but that really didn't do it justice. Suffice to say, his infamous send-up of Falwell commiting incest in an outhouse was relatively tame. And set a tone for the magazine's political commentary that continues to this day...

    https://tinyurl.com/nhew71is

    (ABC News article, probably safe for work, but caution may be advised.)

    As you can probably glean, the magazine has been consistently liberal in its orientation(they justified that particular satire by pointing out that Cupp opposed reproductive rights). I think Flynt had his high-point in politics in the late 90s, when he allied with Clinton during the impeachment. (Not sure what Clinton himself thought of that, though I can't imagine he was overly bothered by having his Republican nemeses exposed for hypocrisy.)

    I always thought the Milos Forman biopic worked as a straight-ahead comedy(mostly due to Harrelson's performance, and how he played off Norton), and as a case-study of someone with a highly narccisstic sense of humour, but failed as a serious exploration of the issues involved. (And a 9 to 10 SCOTUS ruling could not have been a particularly controversial case.)
  • Pigwidgeon wrote: »
    Like so many people, I first encountered Christopher Plummer in "The Sound of Music." But he was a major part of the wonderful Stratford Festival in Ontario. By the time I started my annual pilgrimage there (2014?), he was no longer active, so I never got to see him perform live. (I do have a DVD of him in "The Tempest" at Stratford, Ontario.)

    I've been to Stratford once, for a few days. By chance it was during the Festival and we saw two plays. One was a wonderful performance of the war of 1812. The other was Henry V - which was OK but could have been better.

    Would love to return sometime and experience the full Festival. Perhaps when I retire...
  • I should have posted this a couple of weeks ago but better late ...

    The wonderful harpist Osian Ellis died last month, just short of his 93rd birthday.

    Unofficial leader of the Taffia at the RAM and a delight to the children involved in various works at Snape when he was around.
  • Wesley JWesley J Circus Host
    Famous and fabulous jazz pianist and keyboarder, Chick Corea, has died.

    He has Return(ed) to Forever. RIP.
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    The brilliant jazz musician Chick Corea has died at 79 of cancer.
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    The wonderful harpist Osian Ellis died last month, just short of his 93rd birthday.
    He gave a recital in Orkney in the 1970s - I think I got his autograph afterwards (I was into that sort of thing in those days).

    RIP.
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    I heard via Facebook that Lucian Nethsingha, former organist of Exeter Cathedral (and father of Andrew, who's the choirmaster at St. John's College, Cambridge) has died.

    He was a lovely gentleman; may he rest in peace.
  • Gosh! Lucian was at Exeter for 26 years and was much loved in the city.
  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    Quite rightly too. I've just looked him up; he was 85.

    When we first met him at COA conferences about 30 years ago, I understand he'd been very ill (possibly cancer?), from which he seemed to recover, so reaching that age is quite good going.
  • Doug Mountjoy, snooker player, died today. He was a local boy, from just down the valley.
  • TurquoiseTasticTurquoiseTastic Kerygmania Host
    Priscilla wrote: »
    Doug Mountjoy, snooker player, died today. He was a local boy, from just down the valley.
    Oh I'm sorry to hear that - a stalwart of the World Championships in the early 80s...

  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    He was indeed - RIP.
  • Reported by another member of the Time Team crew that their artist, Victor Ambrus has died. Very sad to hear - Victor had an impish sense of humour, and could really bring the past to life.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Ambrus
  • EigonEigon Shipmate
    He illustrated a lot of children's books, too.
  • Rush Limbaugh has signed off the air for all and for good.
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