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Is anyone still watching Homeland? If so, do you want to talk to me about

( question that is a big spoiler )

So, clearly not everything you see on tumblr is true, but these things seem to be:

Ben Whishaw, Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons in the new BBC versions of Richard II & Henry IV I & II

If the casting of BW as Richard II is anywhere near as perfect as it sounds, that one, at least should be amazing.

Ben Whishaw has also been cast as the new Q to Daniel Craig's Bond

Am shipping Bond/Q already.

And he's going to be in a film about Jack Kerouac (played by Chris Evans) and Allen Ginsburg (played by Daniel Radcliffe) and their friends

No. You read that right. DR is going to play this well-known Jewish poet from New Jersey:



Okay, he's going to play him when he looked like this:



So I suppose it's vaguely plausible (though not as plausible as Jesse Eisenberg would have been. Still, Chris Evans as Kerouac sounds awesome.

My week has eased up some, thank goodness--hope yours has too!

( why yes, I do want to discuss Homeland 1x07, how did you guess? (spoilers) )

In other news, my audiobook for running and driving at the moment is Neal Stephanson’s Cryptonomicon,

( blathering on about books )

Also, I was overcome with a wave of Anglophilia when I signed up for Yuletide, and only requested British books and shows (The Hour, Whitechapel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Regeneration). I offered some US stuff though!

I have been amusing myself by scrolling through the requests from time to time, and being tickled to death that multiple people are requesting fic for “Jane Austen’s Fight Club” and “Feminist Ryan Gosling.” Viral video rules, apparently.

Happy Friday, folks!

...of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 the First World War officially ended.

I couldn't find the kind of image of the 1918 Armistice that I wanted, so have some pictures of a new memorial to Wilfrid Owens instead.

( Read more... )

I think this amounts to my monthly movie post. Since it turns out that what I really like to do on my one free Saturday a month is go to the movies.

This month, I convinced my work friend K. to come with me. We were trying to decide between Moneyball and Drive . Then K. (my work friend!) sent me the link to the feministryangosling tumblr which is pretty much the greatest thing on the internet, and after viewing a bunch of macros like this:



We decided we needed to see Drive.

( no real spoilers )

Let’s see, in other news I played hooky from the shows I think I’m following and watched the first series of Whitechapel via download. Because sometimes you just need to watch a good British procedural, y’know? In which people catch gruesome killers and wash their whiskey down with a side of class resentment. I enjoyed the heck out of it. Though it took me forever to figure out where I knew Phil Davis from. And that he’d also been in Merlin 4.04.

And speaking of Merlin:

( Merlin 4.05 that is (spoilers) )

Did anything happen in H50 2x06 except Steve getting in the ring? 'Cause I saw him put that mouth guard in, and start hopping up and down like a bunny, and then I started thinking about this:



And wondering if Steve would get anybody in an unbreakable thigh lock and force them to tap out like Joel Edgerton does repeatedly in the movie. And then I started wondering what would happen if Steve had to fight either Tommy or Brendan. And. Yeah....I kinda lost track.

I guess other things happened? The boys were pleased to see Kono with a rifle.

( Homeland 1x04 spoilers )

( H50 2x05 )

Homeland 1x03

Someone else is watching this, right? right? If not, maybe you should try it; it is pretty fucking good. If someone is, can they please talk to me about the whole "Semper Fidelis" moment and how awesome Damian Lewis is? And about one of the most disturbing, not-sexy sex scenes I've ever seen on TV?

(these are not spoilers: Damian Lewis is consistently awesome and the psycho-sexual stuff is consistently disturbing, though not gratuitous or unrealistic, I don't think)

Title: Three-Continents Watson
Pairing: John/Lestrade (background John/others)
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Word count: ~3.1K
Disclaimer: not mine, no profit
a/n: for innie_darling’s request at oxoniensis’s fall fandom free-for-all . Hope you enjoy, bb –it’s more dirty talk and schmoop than porn, I’m afraid.

Summary: “You know.” Donovan grinned. “Three continents, two sexes, one extremely talented—“

( ”Three-Continents )

I have watched too much TV in the past week, y'all. This really can’t go on. But, since I did, I might as well give you a brief report:

I have already shared my rant thoughts about Downton Abbey 2x03. Kudos to Julian Fellowes for pinpointing the exact moment in history when it became impossible to sympathize with the British ruling class (Evelyn Waugh notwithstanding).

But I also watched Merlin 4x01, which I loved with an unembarrassed love.

( Merlin 4x01 )

( H50 2x03 )

And two new shows, b/c 2011 seems to be the year of creepy stalkers as heroes. Both shows are obsessed, in an classically Foucauldian way, with the way in which the sheer quantity of information we are able to gather about other people only makes us that much more anxious about the things we can’t know—the people who live, and the things that go on, off the grid and under the radar and behind locked doors.

I’ve now watched two episodes of Person of Interest, and the second (1x02) is much better than the first. Jim Cavaziel and Michael Emerson even managed some chilly, lizard-voiced banter with each other, and I approve of the show’s penchant for rendering Cavaziel bloody and battered in an early scene and leaving him that way through the rest of the episode. I actually found the plot pretty interesting and coherent, and I think with just a little more character development the show could spawn some fic. It would be great for xovers with other shows set in NYC. What if the machine spat out Elizabeth Burke’s social security number? Mike Ross’s? What would they make of Reese lumbering around in the shadows.

I watched the first episode of Showtime’s Homeland, and, really, this is the best of the lot. It has a kind of Old Spice cast (“take a look at your cast”—“now look at our cast”—“now look back at your cast”)--Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, Morena Baccarin, Mandy Patinkin)--and a creepy Manchurian Candidate style plot: Lewis is a POW who’s found in Iraq after eight years of captivity; Danes is the CIA analyst who thinks he’s been turned; Baccarin is his wife and Patinkin is her mentor.

( Homeland 1x01 spoilers and warnings )

Still listening to Regeneration, and it is just as unrelentingly poignant as I remember. It’s been twenty years since I first read it, and I am now much closer in age to Rivers, the psychiatrist, than I am to the young soldiers he treats, and that has made a re-listen really interesting. It’s also made me want to read other novels that take psychiatrists/psychologists as their protagonists—any suggestions?

Long post is long—sorry!

So, I listened to all 24 hours of Wolf Hall and I loved every minute of it. Mostly I listened in the car (I drive a lot—mostly 10-15 minute trips from pillar to post) but some while I was running.

(and so, strangely, the novel was good for my fitness level, between my new Vibram five fingers, which look like this:



And kind of make me resemble this:



But make running less painful for me than it ever has been before (though, sadly, no faster)—anyway, between the shoes and the narrative, I actually wanted to run!)

It’s a kind of strange experience to listen to narrative as you run, though. The novel has some very sad parts, and I happened to listen to those as I was running during the last heat of the summer. So there I was slogging along in my blue shoes, pouring sweat and crying. I’ve been listening to Regeneration for the past few days, and I’m sure my face is fixed in a permanent sympathetic grimace.

I’m an aural person at the best of times, and I think in some ways it’s easier for me to process and remember books I hear than books I read. Also, of course, listening is slower. So I found that I had a greater awareness of the novel’s technical achievements than I think I would have done if I’d read (all 600 pp. of) it.

Which of course my book group had not interest in talking about , so I’m just going to go on about it for a minute now, feel free to scroll by.

( rambling about Wolf Hall )

So then I wrote a little Downton Abbey snippet last week about WWI war wounds. And that made me want to re-read Pat Barker’s Regeneration. But, things being as they are, that means re-listening. Anyway, the novel completely holds up (it came out in 1991), though I expect it wouldn’t be everyone’s first choice for what to listen to in the car. It may, however, have spoiled my enjoyment of Downton Abbey. Because really, talk about two different perspectives about what was going on in the north of England in 1916! In Regeneration, women in service are telling off their employers right and left and going to work in the munitions factories—just for example.

( spoilers for Downton Abbey 2x03 )

So, kinda by the skin of my teeth, I finished a line for kink_bingo

( card and thoughts under cut )