#phillip roth

[reallucyvanpelt]

[laspadasara]

[menwritingwomen]

What the absolute FUCK does this mean?? (The Dying Animal, Phillip Roth)

[ophelia-network]

“In fact, those who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believing they ought to be, or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards. So in earnest are they that being in earnest is the act. For certain self-aware people, however, this is not possible: to imagine themselves being themselves, living their own real, authentic, or genuine life, has for them all the aspects of a hallucination.” ―Phillip Roth

A Web We Weave by Bael art

[thishadoscarbuzz]

164 - American Pastoral

We’ve talked before about adaptations of Pulitzer Prize winners and films that had disastrous premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, but perhaps none as disappointing as this week’s film. From one of the most lauded novels of the modern era, American Pastoral had the heaviest burden of expectations and stop-and-start production history. With a pedigreed cast of Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, and Dakota Fanning, the film was originally intended to be brought to the screen by Phillip Noyce, only to be replaced shortly before filming by none other than McGregor himself. Critics weren’t kind to McGregor’s directorial debut, and it died as soon as it world premiered at TIFF.

The film underwent a fast re-edit, but that didn’t help it from bombing when it opened in the same weekend as eventual Best Picture winner Moonlight, the film underwent a fast re-edit. This episode, we redicover the film’s poor attempt at adapting Phillip Roth, Jennifer Connelly’s post-Oscar career, and how using Buffalo Springfield in movies about the 1960s should no longer be allowed.

Topics also include a return to David Strathairn being hot, McGregor’s screen persona, and Fanning’s rise as a go-to child actor.

Links:

The 2016 Oscar nominations

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[artemisdreaming]

You know how European literature begins?“ he’d ask, after having taken the roll at the first class meeting. "With a quarrel. All of European literature springs from a fight.” And then he picked up his copy of The Iliad and read to the class the opening lines.

“‘Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles... Begin where they first quarreled, Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles.’

And what are they quarreling about, these two violent, mighty souls? It’s as basic as a barroom brawl. They are quarreling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war. Mia kouri that is how she is described in the poem. Mia, as in modern Greek, is the indefinite article 'a’; kouri, or girl, evolves in modern Greek into kori, meaning daughter. Now, Agamemnon much prefers this girl to his wife, Clytemnestra. 'Clytemnestra is not as good as she is,’ he says, 'neither in face nor in figure.’ That puts directly enough, does it not, why he doesn’t want to give her up? When Achilles demands that Agamemnon return the girl to her father in order to assuage Apollo, the god who is murderously angry about the circumstances surrounding her abduction, Agamemnon refuses: he’ll agree only if Achilles gives him his girl in exchange. Thus reigniting Achilles. Adrenal Achilles: the most highly flammable of explosive wildmen any writer has ever enjoyed portraying; especially where his prestige and his appetite are concerned, the most hypersensitive killing machine in the history of warfare.

Phillip Roth, The Human Stain

Image: Dying Achilles at Achilleion, Corfu. Sculptor: Ernst Herter, 1884

[oldshowbiz]

1969 comedy record by the woman who did the original voices for Betty Boop and Olive Oyl

[englishproblems]

I’m heading out to a hair appointment, so I’m bringing Plot Against America by Phillip Roth with me but in case I’m in the mood for something lighter, I’m also bringing Death of a Salesman.