#LONG BEARD ARTHUR ANTI

[daisydood]

do you guys ever see an arthur thats just. not how the arthur in your mind is supposed to be at all and its not like the arthur owner did anything bad its just wrong

[lettersofmoi]

In the sky

Glasgow-Dubai-Jakarta 25th - 26th September 2022 Warning: this letter may be overly dramatic and sentimental :")

Dear Alberto, When I wrote this letter, all that I could see from the plane window were the blue sky and white cotton candy clouds. I'm such a crybaby it made the nice guy sitting next to me look worried. He's from Czech, cannot speak English but was very kind. He offered me tissue and chocolate cookies.

Being on the plane has made me remember the boredom I experienced on my flight to Glasgow, a year ago. It was my first long-haul flight and the farthest I went away from home. I felt relieved when finally stepped on the ground, but that was before being greeted by the rude strong Glaschu's wind. Thus, being the clueless girl I am, I had no idea what my life will be like in Glasgow for a year. I guess I have done quite well, and one of the highlights of the year is my encounter with a certain curly guy.

It will be anti-climax and twisted if then I say that the man's name is Alejandro or Gaston Castano. But noo, the man's name is Alberto.

I still remember the first time I saw you, in the hallway to the kitchen. You showed up from your door, I bet were in the middle of studying of course, and said hi to me! A bearded face, long curly hair and that warm big smile! After that first encounter, I met you in the kitchen. I thought (and still thinking) that you are a very interesting person. You told me that you are "crazy about waves" when we talked about Bali. Then you showed me the pictures of you and your brothers. Wow, what a warm sibling relationship, that's what I thought. And then you shared the delicious chicken tomato pasta! As time went by, we would not only share food but stories too. I am happy somehow that we have passed the common nice and proper courtesy of a new neighbour, into more silly but fun daily interactions! Being silly feel so easy with you. I guess sharing movie nights, cool playlists, fighting over dishes and bad cookies, lost in the mountain during heatwaves, and hiking Arthur's seat in the middle of water-ice rains did that to us? And I know sometimes it's not always rainbow-and-butterflies stories, but I guess that's just how life goes on. Still, it's so good to have the finest person ever to pick up all of the lemons that life throws at us. Then cut them in half to taste, or just carelessly throw away all of the lemon back.

Thus I am not sure when it started, but the dinner time, movie nights, the door-knock game and just everything had become my daily routine. I would come to the flat after a long day and be thinking of so many prank ideas when saw your old blue bike parked in front of the building. But then you sold your bike before I could do my plans.

Well, I can say that I admire how you always showed that you feel content and enough with yourself. And very passionate about something you like. I really love to hear you telling me stories about surfing, math, physics, books, and just anything. Those were some of the many things I learnt from you. Somehow it made me realize what things that missing from my life, a simple joy in doing something I really love. So I am lucky to meet someone who reminds me of how to properly live my life again. Maybe I should stop now before this letter turns out to be too corny.

The more I write, the more I realize how far away this plane taking me from Glasgow, where you are right now.

So, allow me to say, it is such a pleasure to know you on this journey! I definitely won't have it any other way. And I am sure our paths will cross again! And we will eat sour peaches together again! And spicy foods until your face turns all red! Take care of yourself! Lusi

[qqueenofhades]

The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

[mydearhosea]

My RDR2 Themed Userboxes

This user loves __

This user loves Arthur and John's relationship

This user loves Arthur Morgan

This user loves Arthur Morgan's long hair and beard

This user loves Charles Smith

This user loves Dutch Van Der Linde

This user loves Hamish Sinclair

This user loves Hosea Matthews

This user loves Javier Escuella

This user loves Jack Marston

This user loves John Marston

This user loves Lenny Summers

This user loves the Marstons

This user loves Mary-Beth Gaskill

This user loves Molly O'Shea

This user loves Sadie Adler

This user loves Sean Maguire

This user loves Susan Grimshaw

This user loves Tilly Jackson

This user loves Uncle

This user ships __

This user ships Charthur

This user ships Vandermatthews

This user __ (chapter related)

This user doesn't play past chapter 3

This user's least favourite chapter was chapter 5

This user's favourite chapter is chapter 2

This user's favourite __ is __ (missions)

This user's favourite mission is A Quiet Time

This user's favourite mission is Advertising, The New American Art

This user's favourite mission is Exit, Persued By A Bruised Ego

This user's favourite mission is The Aftermath of Genesis

This user's favourite __ is __ (horses)

This user's favourite horse is the black raven shire

This user's favourite horse is Buell

This user's favourite horse is the warped brindle arabian

This user’s favourite horse is is the dapple dark grey hungarian half bred

This user's favourite horse is the mahogany bay tennessee walker

This user's favourite __ is __ (towns)

This user's favourite town is Blackwater

This user's favourite town is Valentine

This user __ (miscellaneous)

This user would sell Micah Bell to Satan for a single corn chip

This user wants nothing more than to see Dutch choke on a fat fucking mango

This user believes Kieran Duffy deserved better

This user can't get enough of Arthur and Hosea's relationship

This user wants to write RDR2 fanfics but doesn't know where to start

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This user's feelings about Dutch Van Der Linde fluctuate a LOT

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This user's comfort game is Red Dead Redemption 2

Feel free to send in some more requests. This will (hopefully) be updated every time I make some new ones :)

[greatworldwar2]

• Battle of Bardia

The Battle of Bardia was fought between January 3rd and 5th 1941, as part of Operation Compass, the first British military operation of the Western Desert Campaign of the Second World War.

Italy declared war on the United Kingdom on June 10th, 1940. Bordering on the Italian colony of Libya was the Kingdom of Egypt. Although a neutral country, Egypt was occupied by the British under the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which allowed British military forces to occupy Egypt if the Suez Canal was threatened. A series of cross-border raids and skirmishes began on the frontier between Libya and Egypt. On September 13th, 1940, an Italian force advanced across the frontier into Egypt, reaching Sidi Barrani on September 16th, where the advance was halted until logistical difficulties could be overcome. Italy's position in the centre of the Mediterranean made it unacceptably hazardous to send ships from Britain to Egypt via that route, so British reinforcements and supplies for the area had to travel around the Cape of Good Hope. For this reason, it was more convenient to reinforce General Sir Archibald Wavell's Middle East Command with troops from Australia, New Zealand and India. Nonetheless, even when Britain was threatened with invasion after the Battle of France. On December 9th, 1940 the Western Desert Force under the command of Major General Richard O'Connor attacked the Italian position at Sidi Barrani. The position was captured, 38,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner, and the remainder of the Italian force was driven back. The Western Desert Force pursued the Italians into Libya, and the 7th Armoured Division established itself to the west of Bardia, cutting off land communications between the strong Italian garrison there and Tobruk. On December 11th, Wavell decided to withdraw the 4th Indian Division and send it to the Sudan to participate in the East African Campaign. The 6th Australian Division (Major General Iven Mackay) was brought forward from Egypt to replace it and Mackay assumed command of the area on December 21st,1940.

After the disaster at Sidi Barrani and the withdrawal from Egypt, XXIII Corps (Generale di Corpo d'Armata (Lieutenant General) Annibale Bergonzoli) faced the British from within the strong defences of Bardia. Mussolini wrote to Bergonzoli, "I have given you a difficult task but one suited to your courage and experience as an old and intrepid soldier—the task of defending the fortress of Bardia to the last. I am certain that 'Electric Beard' and his brave soldiers will stand at whatever cost, faithful to the last." Bergonzoli replied: "I am aware of the honour and I have today repeated to my troops your message — simple and unequivocal. In Bardia we are and here we stay." Bergonzoli had approximately 45,000 defenders under his command. The Italian divisions defending the perimeter of Bardia included remnants of four divisions. Bergonzoli also had the remnants of the disbanded 64th "Catanzaro" Infantry Division, some 6,000 Frontier Guard (GaF) troops, three companies of Bersaglieri, part of the dismounted Vittorio Emanuele cavalry regiment and a machine gun company. These divisions guarded an 18-mile (29 km) perimeter which had an almost continuous antitank ditch, extensive barbed wire fence and a double row of strong points. The strong points were situated approximately 800-yard (730 m) apart. Each had its own antitank ditch, concealed by thin boards. They were each armed with one or two Cannone da 47/32 M35 (47 mm antitank guns) and two to four machine guns. The weapons were fired from concrete sided pits connected by trenches to a deep underground concrete bunker which offered protection from artillery fire.

Each post was occupied by a platoon or company. The inner row of posts were similar, except that they lacked the antitank ditches. The posts were numbered sequentially from south to north, with the outer posts bearing odd numbers and the inner ones even numbers. The actual numbers were known to the Australians from the markings on maps captured at Sidi Barrani and were also displayed on the posts themselves. The major tactical defect of this defensive system was that if the enemy broke through, the posts could be picked off individually from the front or rear. The defence was supported by a strong artillery component, yet the large number of gun models, many of them quite old, created difficulties with the supply of spare parts. The older guns often had worn barrels, which caused problems with accuracy. Ammunition stocks were similarly old and perhaps as many as two-thirds of the fuses were out of date, resulting in excessive numbers of dud rounds. Shortages of raw materials, coupled with the increased technological sophistication of modern weapons, led to production problems that frustrated efforts to supply the Italian Army with the best available equipment. As a "mobile reserve" there were thirteen M13/40 medium tanks and a hundred and fifteen L3/35 tankettes. The L3s were generally worthless, the M13/40s were effective medium tanks with four machine guns and a turret-mounted 47 mm antitank gun for its main armament that were "in many ways the equal of British armoured fighting vehicles". Bergonzoli knew that if Bardia and Tobruk held out, a British advance further into Libya eventually must falter under the logistical difficulties of maintaining a desert force using an extended overland supply line. Not knowing how long he had to hold out, Bergonzoli was forced to ration his stocks of food and water so that O'Connor could not simply starve him out. Hunger and thirst adversely affected the morale of the Italian defenders that had already been shaken by the defeat at Sidi Barrani.

On the Allied side, the 6th Australian Division had been formed in September 1939 as part of the Second Australian Imperial Force. Prime Minister Robert Menzies ordered that all commands in the division were to go to reservists rather than to regular officers, who had been publicly critical of the defence policies of right wing politicians. The result was that when war came, the Army's equipment was of World War I vintage and its factories were only capable of producing small arms. Fortunately, these World War I-era small arms, the Lee–Enfield rifle and the Vickers machine gun, were solid and reliable weapons that would remain in service throughout the war; they were augmented by the more recent Bren light machine gun. Most other equipment was obsolescent and would have to be replaced but new factories were required to produce the latest items, such as 3-inch mortars, 25-pounder field guns and motor vehicles; War Cabinet approval for their construction was slow in coming. The training of the 6th Australian Division in Palestine, while "vigorous and realistic", was therefore hampered by shortages of equipment. These shortages were gradually remedied by deliveries from British sources. Similarly, No. 3 Squadron RAAF had to be sent to the Middle East without aircraft or equipment and supplied by the Royal Air Force, at the expense of its own squadrons. Despite the rivalry between regular and reserve officers, the 6th Australian Division staff was an effective organisation. Brigadier John Harding, the chief of staff of XIII Corps, as the Western Desert Force was renamed on January 1st, 1941. Harding later considered the 6th Australian Division staff "as good as any that I came across in that war, and highly efficient." As it moved into position around Bardia in December 1940, the 6th Australian Division was still experiencing shortages. It had only two of its three artillery regiments and only the 2/1st Field Regiment was equipped with the new 25-pounders, which it had received only that month. Only A Squadron of the 2/6th Cavalry Regiment was on hand, as the rest of the regiment was deployed in the defence of the frontier posts at Al-Jaghbub and Siwa Oasis. The 2/1st Antitank Regiment had likewise been diverted, so each infantry brigade had formed an antitank company but only eleven 2-pounders were available instead of the 27 required. The infantry battalions were particularly short of mortars and ammunition for the Boys anti-tank rifle was in short supply.

To make up for this, O'Connor augmented Brigadier Edmund Herring's 6th Australian Division Artillery with part of the XIII Corps artillery: the 104th (Essex Yeomanry) Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, equipped with sixteen 25 pounders. Italian gun positions were located using sound ranging by the 6th Survey Regiment, Royal Artillery. At a meeting with Mackay on Christmas Eve, 1940, O'Connor visited Mackay at divisional headquarters and directed him to prepare an attack on Bardia. O'Connor recommended that this be built around the 23 Matilda tanks of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment (Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Jerrram) that remained in working order. The attack was to be made with only two brigades, leaving the third for a subsequent advance on Tobruk. Mackay did not share O'Connor's optimism about the prospect of an easy victory and proceeded on the assumption that Bardia would be resolutely held, requiring a well-planned attack. The plan developed by Mackay and his chief of staff, Colonel Frank Berryman, involved an attack on the western side of the Bardia defences by 16th Australian Infantry Brigade (Brigadier Arthur "Tubby" Allen) at the junction of the Gerfah and Ponticelli sectors. Attacking at the junction of two sectors would confuse the defence. The defences here were weaker than in the Mereiga sector, the ground was favourable for employment of the Matilda tanks and good observation for the artillery was possible. Most of the artillery, grouped as the "Frew Group" under British Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Frowen, would support the 16th Australian Infantry Brigade; the 17th would be supported by the 2/2nd Field Regiment. Much depended on the Western Desert Force moving fuel, water and supplies forward. The 6th Australian Division Assistant Adjutant General and Quartermaster General (AA&QMG), Colonel George Alan Vasey said "This is a Q war".

A series of air raids were mounted against Bardia in December, in the hope of persuading the garrison to withdraw. Once it became clear that the Italians intended to stand and fight, bombing priorities shifted to the Italian airbases around Tobruk, Derna and Benina. Air raids on Bardia resumed in the lead-up to the ground assault, with 100 bombing sorties flown against Bardia between December 31st, 1940 and January 2nd, 1941, climaxing with a particularly heavy raid by Vickers Wellington bombers of No. 70 Squadron RAF and Bristol Bombay bombers of No. 216 Squadron RAF on the night of January 3rd, 1941. A naval bombardment was carried out on the morning of the 3rd by the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships HMS Warspite, Valiant and Barham and their destroyer escorts. The aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious provided aircraft for spotting and fighter cover. They withdrew after firing 244 15-inch (380 mm), 270 6-inch (150 mm) and 240 4.5-inch (110 mm) shells. The assault troops rose early on January 3rd, 1941. The leading companies began moving to the start line at 0416. The artillery opened fire at 0530. On crossing the start line the 2/1st Infantry Battalion, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Eather, came under Italian mortar and artillery fire. The lead platoons advanced accompanied by sappers of the 2/1st Field Company carrying Bangalore torpedoes—12-foot (3.7 m) pipes packed with ammonal—as Italian artillery fire began to land, mainly behind them. An Italian shell exploded among a leading platoon and detonated a Bangalore torpedo, resulting in four killed and nine wounded. The torpedoes were slid under the barbed wire at 60-yard (55 m) intervals. A whistle was blown as a signal to detonate the torpedoes but could not be heard over the din of the barrage. Eather became anxious and ordered the engineering party nearest him to detonate their torpedo. This the other teams heard, and they followed suit. The infantry scrambled to their feet and rushed forward, they advanced on a series of posts held by the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Italian 115th Infantry Regiment. Posts 49 and 47 were rapidly overrun, as was Post 46 in the second line beyond. Within half an hour Post 48 had also fallen and another company had taken Posts 45 and 44. The two remaining companies now advanced beyond these positions towards a low stone wall as artillery fire began to fall along the broken wire.

The Italians fought from behind the wall until the Australians were inside it, attacking with hand grenades and bayonets. The two companies succeeded in taking 400 prisoners. The 2/2nd Infantry Battalion (Lieutenant Colonel F. O. Chilton) found that it was best to keep skirmishing forward throughout this advance, because going to ground for any length of time meant sitting in the middle of the enemy artillery concentrations that inflicted further casualties. The Australian troops made good progress, six tank crossings were readied and mines between them and the wire had been detected. Five minutes later, the 23 Matildas of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment advanced, accompanied by the 2/2nd Infantry Battalion. Passing through the gaps, they swung right along the double line of posts. The Italian defenders were cleared with grenades. By 0920 all companies were on their objectives and they had linked with 2/1st Infantry Battalion. However, several Bren gun carriers encountered problems as they moved forward during the initial attack. One was hit and destroyed in the advance and another along the Wadi Ghereidia. The 2/3rd Infantry Battalion was now assailed by half a dozen Italian M13/40 tanks who freed a group of 500 Italian prisoners. The tanks continued to rumble to the south while the British crews of the Matildas "enjoying a brew, dismissed reports of them as an Antipodean exaggeration". Finally, they were engaged by an antitank platoon of three 2 pounders mounted on portees. By midday, 6,000 Italian prisoners had already reached the provosts at the collection point near Post 45, escorted by increasingly fewer guards whom the rifle companies could afford to detach. The Italian perimeter had been breached and the attempt to halt the Australian assault at the outer defences had failed. Major H. Wrigley's 2/5th Infantry Battalion of Brigadier Stanley Savige's 17th Infantry Brigade, reinforced by two companies of Lieutenant Colonel T. G. Walker's 2/7th Infantry Battalion, now took over the advance. The battalion's task was to clear "The Triangle", a map feature created by the intersection of three tracks north of Post 16. Wrigley's force had a long and exhausting approach, and much of its movement forward to its jump off point had been under Italian shellfire intended for the 16th Infantry Brigade. Awaiting its turn to move, the force sought shelter in Wadi Scemmas and its tributaries. Wrigley called a final coordinating conference for 1030, but at 1020 he was wounded by a bullet and his second in command, Major G. E. Sell took over.

The artillery barrage came down at 1125, and five minutes later the advance began. The sun had now risen, and Captain C. H. Smith's D Company came under effective fire from machine guns and field artillery 700 yards (640 m) to the north east. Within minutes, all but one of the company's officers and all its senior non-commissioned officers had been killed or wounded. Meanwhile, Captain D. I. A. Green's B Company of the 2/7th Infantry Battalion had captured Posts 26, 27 and 24. After Post 24 had been taken, two Matildas arrived and helped to take Post 22. As the prisoners were rounded up, one shot Green dead, then threw down his rifle and climbed out of the pit smiling broadly. He was immediately thrown back and a Bren gun emptied into him. Upon hearing of the losses to the 2/5th Infantry Battalion, Brigade Major G. H. Brock sent Captain J. R. Savige's A Company of the 2/7th Infantry Battalion to take "The Triangle". Savige gathered his platoons and, with fire support from machine guns, attacked the objective, 3,000 yards (2,700 m) away. The company captured eight field guns, many machine-guns and nearly 200 prisoners on the way, but casualties and the need to detach soldiers as prisoner escorts left him with only 45 men at the end of the day. That evening, Brigadier Savige came forward to the 2/5th Infantry Battalion's position to determine the situation, which he accurately evaluated as "extremely confused; the attack was stagnant." Meanwhile, Captain G. H. Halliday's D Company moved southwards against Post 19. He drew the defenders' attention with a demonstration by one platoon in front of the post while the rest of the company moved around the post and attacked silently from the rear. This maneuver took the defenders by surprise and D Company captured the post—and 73 prisoners—at 0230. Although the Australian progress had been slower than that achieved during the break-in phase, the 17th Infantry Brigade had achieved remarkable results. Another ten posts, representing 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) of perimeter had been captured, the Switch Line had been breached, and thousands of Italian defenders had been captured. For the Italians, halting the Australian advance would be an immensely difficult task.

On the afternoon of January 3rd, Berryman met with Allen, Jerram and Frowen at Allen's headquarters at Post 40 to discuss plans for the next day. It was agreed that Allen would advance on Bardia and cut the fortress in two, supported by Frowen's guns, every available tank, MacArthur-Onslow's Bren gun carriers and the 2/8th Infantry Battalion, which Mackay had recently allocated from reserve. That evening, Berryman came to the conclusion that unless the Italian defence collapsed soon, the 16th and 17th Infantry Brigades would become incapable of further effort and Brigadier Horace Robertson's 19th Infantry Brigade would be required. The 2/1st Infantry Battalion began its advance on schedule at 0900, but the lead platoon came under heavy machine gun fire from Post 54, and Italian artillery knocked out the supporting mortars. The 3rd Regiment Royal Horse Artillery engaged the Italian guns and the platoon withdrew. The Italian guns were silenced when an Australian shell detonated a nearby ammunition dump. The Australians then captured the post. About a third of its defenders had been killed in the fighting. The remaining 66 surrendered. This prompted a general collapse of the Italian position in the north. Posts 56 and 61 surrendered without a fight and white flags were raised over Posts 58, 60, 63 and 65, and the gun positions near Post 58. By nightfall, Eather's men had advanced as far as Post 69 and only the fourteen northernmost posts still held out in the Gerfan sector. The advance resumed, only to come under machine gun and artillery fire from Wadi el Gerfan. The brigade major, Major I. R. Campbell, ordered MacArthur-Onslow, whose carriers were screening England's advance, to seize Hebs el Harram, the high ground overlooking the road to the township of Bardia. By the end of the second day, tens of thousands of defenders had been killed or captured. The remaining garrisons in the Gerfan and Ponticelli sectors were completely isolated. The logistical and administrative units were being overrun. Recognising that the situation was hopeless, General Bergonzoli and his staff had departed on foot for Tobruk during the afternoon, in a party of about 120 men.

On the morning of January 5th, the 19th Infantry Brigade launched its attack on the Meriega sector, starting from the Bardia road and following a creeping barrage southward with the support of six Matilda tanks, all that remained in working order. The others had been hit by shells, immobilised by mines, or had simply broken down. The company commanders of the lead battalion, the 2/11th Infantry Battalion, did not receive their final orders until 45 minutes before start time, at which point the start line was 3 miles (4.8 km) away. As they advanced, they came under fire from the left, the right, and in front of them, but casualties were light. Most positions surrendered when the infantry and tanks came close, but this did not reduce the fire from posts further away. Meanwhile, the Italian garrisons in the north were surrendering to the 16th Infantry Brigade and the Support Group of the 7th Armoured Division outside the fortress; the 2/8th Infantry Battalion had taken the area above Wadi Meriega; and the 2/7th Infantry Battalion had captured Posts 10, 12 and 15. The only post still holding out was now Post 11. The 2/6th Infantry Battalion renewed its attack, with the infantry attacking from the front and its carriers attacking from the rear. They were joined by Matildas from the vicinity of Post 6. At this point the Italian post commander, who had been wounded in the battle, lowered his flag and raised a white one. Some 350 Italian soldiers surrendered at Post 11. Godfrey sought out the Italian post commander—who wore a British Military Cross earned in the First World War—and shook his hand. "On a battlefield where Italian troops won little honour", Gavin Long later wrote, "the last to give in belonged to a garrison whose resolute fight would have done credit to any army."

The victory at Bardia enabled the Allied forces to continue their advance into Libya and capture almost all of Cyrenaica. As the first battle of the war to be commanded by an Australian general, planned by an Australian staff and fought by Australian troops, Bardia was of great interest to the Australian public; congratulatory messages poured in and AIF recruitment surged. In the United States, newspapers praised the 6th Division. An estimated 36,000 Italian soldiers were captured at Bardia, 1,703 (including 44 officers) were killed and 3,740 (including 138 officers) were wounded A few thousand (including General Bergonzoli and three of his division commanders) escaped to Tobruk on foot or in boats. The Allies captured 26 coastal defence guns, 7 medium guns, 216 field guns, 146 anti-tank guns, 12 medium tanks, 115 L3s, and 708 vehicles. Australian losses totalled 130 dead and 326 wounded. Bardia did not become an important port as supply by sea continued to run through Sollum but became an important source of water, after the repair of the large pumping station that the Italians had installed to serve the township and Fort Capuzzo. Axis forces reoccupied the town in April 1941, during Operation Sonnenblume, Rommel's first offensive in Cyrenaica. Bardia changed hands again in June 1942, being occupied by Axis forces for a third time and was re-taken for the last time in November unopposed, following the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein.

[dc-earth53]

#0006 - Aquaman (Arthur Curry/Orin)

Age: 43

Occupation: King of Atlantis

Marital status: Married

Known relatives: Atlanna (mother), Tom Curry (stepfather), Atlan (father), Orm Marius (half-brother), Mera (wife), Arthur Curry Jr. (son, deceased), Koryak (son, deceased), Mareena Curry (daughter).

Group affiliation: Atlantis, formerly Justice League of America, Others

Base of operations: Poseidonis, Atlantis

Height: 6’1”

Weight: 325 lbs.

History:

43 years ago: Orin is born to Atlanna, queen of Atlantis. An ancient Atlantean superstition stated that children born with blond hair are cursed, and Atlanna and baby Orin are cast out from the kingdom. Atlanna travels to Amnesty Bay, Maine, where she meets lighthouse keeper Tom Curry. The two fall in love, and together they raise the child, newly rechristened Arthur.

33 years ago: Atlanna dies of pneumonia, due to a weakened immune system not accustomed to surface illnesses. On her deathbed, she tells Arthur of his true nature.

27 years ago: Tom Curry dies of a heart attack. After his funeral, Arthur leaves home to seek out his heritage.

26 years ago: Arthur briefly spends time in Alaska, falling in love with an Inuit woman named Kako and, unbeknownst to him, getting her pregnant. He’s driven away by the demonic god Nuliajuk before he can learn of the pregnancy.

24 years ago: Arthur is led to Atlantis by a pod of dolphins, and there he meets royal advisor Vulko and claims his birthright, learning of his heritage and usurping the crown from the corrupt king Orvax.

22 years ago: Orin first comes into conflict with Orm Marius, his half-brother, the Ocean Master, who tries to usurp the throne of Atlantis for himself.

20 years ago: Orin teams up with Barry Allen to fight the Trickster, and Barry dubs him “Aquaman.”

19 years ago: 

Aquaman becomes a charter member of the Justice League after helping Earth’s heroes repel an alien invasion.

Orin meets Mera, queen of the exiled Atlantean city of Xebel, and the two marry soon thereafter.

Orin first encounters the undersea terrorist Black Manta.

18 years ago: Orin takes the young Atlantean mage Garth on as a protege.

17 years ago: Orin and Mera have their first child, Arthur Jr.

15 years ago: Arthur Jr. is murdered by the Black Manta as part of an elaborate scheme to take revenge on Aquaman and Atlantis for past defeats.

12 years ago: In the wake of the Justice League’s disbanding, Orin joins the Martian Manhunter’s new League, headquartered out of the Secret Sanctuary in Happy Harbor. Mera leaves him soon thereafter, wrecked with concerns over his commitment to her.

11 years ago: Aquaman is one of the many heroes involved in the fight against the Anti-Monitor.

10 years ago: 

Aquaman again fights Ocean Master when the latter attacks Amnesty Bay.

Orin returns to Atlantis to find it conquered by a race of giant jellyfish. He succeeds in driving them out, and reclaims his throne.

9 years ago: Atlantis becomes embroiled in civil war, as Poseidonis is besieged and overrun by forces from Tritonis, allied with Black Manta

8 years ago:

Orin receives the Atlantis Chronicles, learning of his relation to Ocean Master and beginning to sink into a deep depression.

Orin and his ally Dolphin are kidnapped by the terrorist Charybdis, who plunges his arm into a pool of piranhas, cutting his left hand off at the wrist. He replaces it with a harpoon.

Arthur returns to the Arctic, meeting again with Kako and his fully grown son, Koryak. Koryak chooses to travel with him and Dolphin on their travels.

Orin joins the newly reformed Justice League of America in response to a White Martian threat on Earth.

Orin and Garth reunite after time apart, and Garth takes the new title of Tempest.

7 years ago:

Orin reunites the scattered city-states of Atlantis to stand together against the threat of Tiamat.

Orin’s harpoon hand is broken, and he is given a robotic hand to replace it, indistinguishable from flesh and blood.

Arthur and Mera reconcile as Atlantis goes to war with the island nation of Cerdia.

6 years ago:

Atlantis vanishes in the wake of the war against Imperiex, hurled into the Obsidian Age by Atlantean magic and enslaved by the sorceress Gamemnae. The Justice League and Orin succeed in returning Atlantis to its proper time.

A large portion of San Diego, California is sunken into the Pacific due to the machinations of Dr. Anton Geist. Orin annexes the city into Atlantis, taking San Diego native Lorena Marquez on as the new Aquagirl. 

5 years ago: Atlantis is besieged by Lex Luthor’s Secret Society, and Aquaman leads the charge to defend it. Koryak dies during the battle.

4 years ago: 

Arthur re-joins the Justice League.

Atlantis joins the United Nations, appointing Garth as their ambassador to the world.

3 years ago: 

Orin comes into conflict with the Trench, a lost tribe of Atlanteans evolved to live in the deepest parts of the ocean.

Orin recruits a group of individuals into a team called the Others to search for lost Atlantean artifacts across the globe.

Half-Atlantean mage Kaldur’ahm comes to stand alongside Orin as the new Aqualad.

2 years ago: While Orin is on a mission with the Justice League, Orm seizes the throne of Atlantis for himself. Orin takes it back, and then decides to retire from superhero work to better rule his kingdom. Lorena Marquez becomes Aquawoman in his stead.

1 year ago: Arthur and Mera have their second child, a daughter named Mareena.

Present day: Orin and Mera begin to investigate the disappearance of the sea god Poseidon.

Commentary:

Aquaman is an interesting one, as for a long time he was a bit of a wildcard character, having many portrayals across various runs that differed wildly from one another, many of them a direct reaction to his depiction in Super Friends, which earned him a fair bit of public ridicule. What resulted was a regular cycle of Arthur being king of Atlantis and then being exiled, and he and Mera being together and then separated. This depiction aims to streamline that, with only one major period of exile from the throne, leading into the events of Peter David’s run, which are largely preserved here.

The lack of major Aquaman storylines in the twilight years of the post-Crisis DCU also allowed me to bring in several New 52 stories here, as well as introducing the idea from Young Justice of Arthur retiring from superhero work and passing his mantle on, again tying into the major theme of legacy that I’ve chosen to embrace. (Although, as Kaldur’ahm isn’t yet old enough in this timeline, that responsibility instead goes to Lorena Marquez.)

Arthur as a character is defined here by his responsibility, to his kingdom and to his family. He will defend them to the death and prioritize them before anything else, even if it causes him personal tragedy. Despite their past difficulties, he and Mera have reconciled and have a stable, loving relationship, and Arthur works hard to ensure that the disparate city-states that make up the loose nation of Atlantis remain at peace, even forsaking his duties with the Justice League to focus on his kingdom.

As far as physical appearance is concerned, the recent, Jason Momoa-inspired look DC’s been using as of late is absolutely perfect. It preserves the classic orange and green while giving him a little bit of an edge with the long hair and beard - a nice middle ground between the classic clean-cut Aquaman and the hook-handed Orin from David’s run. He’s a warrior king, he should look the part, and it’s almost a rule that every male superhero looks better with a beard.

Coming up next: Aquawoman (Lorena Marquez) and one that will sure to piss people off: Nightwing!

Got any questions? Asks are open! 

[hermankopusortizorsumshite]

You knew Arthur was different. You knew he was smart. You knew more about him than even he knew. Vulko had sent his own daughter to befriend Arthur when he turned 16. As you and Arthur grew up together you began to sound more time being out doing something physical. Whether working out or swimming oceans you and Arthur were always together. As the two of you grew older he became bigger, stronger, his hair grew longer and hung over his shoulders now. His boyish roundness had dissolved to reveal the chiseled features that now stood before you. You weren't particularly sure when his boyish round face had disappeared, but now it was strong and held a nice soft beard. His soft skin now was covered in ink to show his roots, his arms once blank canvases now covered in artwork. His teeth shirts became a leather vest from your father and a tee shirt with the sleeves cut off.

You were both turning 26 years young today, and Arthur had taken you to the bar to drink to it. You two were best friends, after almost ten years you two were as close as you could get. He was there for you and you for him. He was strong and chiseled, you were strong but held a petite cuteness about you.

"I got a question Hun." He whispers, sliding his beer away from him and grabbing your hands. "We've been best friends and almost the same abilities, I don't know what I'd do without you. I know you get scared, but honey, I wanna be more than that. Closer than that. I want you to marry me."

"Arthur Curry! It took you long enough! But Art, we've never dated." You inquire.

"We've been dating longer than we knew. That's why we live together. That's why we've built this life together. We've been dating since we were young. Now I just get to kiss you. When you're awake." He mutters the last part and catches your attention.

"ARTHUR CURRY!" You shriek, busting into laughter and hugging his neck.

"It was a joke my dear. Now answer my question." He rumbles softly in your ear.

"Yes! Arthur I love you. You're my very own anti-hero! Arthur Curry, I love you so much. You are my king both on Earth and in the sea." You whisper, hugging him tighter. He hands you box with a tiny little starfish puffy sticker on top.

When you pop open the box, there's a little wave and quarter sized oval shaped aquamarine gem in the middle, held in by a couple waves. And on the top of the box where the little light it was an angler fish. You laugh hysterically at the fish before Arthur pulls the ring from it's safe harbor and slides it onto your finger, kissing your knuckles.

"Wait til Vulko hears about this." He chuckles, pressing a hard kiss to your forehead.

[mihrsuri]

Okay tumblr won’t let me format the ask properly so I’m reposting it. So a prompt from @allegoriesinmediasres :  Ot3verse multimedia: bad “hot takes” about this timeline’s Tudor era, the OT3/Queen Mihrimah/Other nobles/etc. and people taking them apart.

CN: Biphobia, Homophobia, Anti-Semitism, Racism. Also the awesome responses are inspired by my friends @star-anise​ and @findingfeather​

If I see one more person say that my TEXTUALLY BISEXUAL aren’t bisexual I am actually going to explode into a gay super villain who drops themed glitter on my enemies.

#they are BISEXUAL even if they didn’t have the word bisexual #ffs #like h8 being like ‘i love my wife and i love my husbands’ and the duke being like ‘i love the king and the queen’ and the queen being like ‘i love my husbands and also here is some evidence of romantic feelings for ladies as well’ #they are all like I LOVE BOTH OF THEM

(tudortrio)

Just because you want to make everything about you doesn’t mean it is. They were gay, like shut up karen just because you want to make everything comp het and bullshit it doesn’t mean it was. They were each others beards like, get over yourself and stop thinking you are entitled to representation from real people.

#i fucking hate the way people want to be special

(onlyoneandonly)

Okay firstly I’ve tagged this because there are so many biphobic slurs in this comment that I do not want people to have to deal with and secondly I’m a lesbian. Get In The Sea. Thirdly can I just say that the fact that the poster above is a pretty serious anti-semite on top of everything else is Super Fucking Great. I haven’t got the spoons right now to deal with this so I’m passing this on - @ani-sadia and @snowyswansofcastallen if you are up to it?

#disk course #one day since our last bullshit #tw: biphobic #tudortriadthings

(tudortrio)

I want to ask the people who are So Invested In Making These Three Into Something They Explicitly Did Not Want To Be Cast As how you’d feel if future historians did that to you - if they insisted that the people you explicitly said you love, you cherish, you desire and you have built a life with didn’t exist, that you Were Clearly Something Else despite the evidence. Because that’s what you are doing here.

None of these three were straight (read Queen Anne’s poetry and letters to Princess Renee and you can’t not see a baby wlw with A Giant Crush) but they were bisexual and yes, that is true even if they did not have the word bisexual.

The love letters. The extremely explicit about all three of them and their love love letters (like Henry talking about ‘how I have missed the three of us in our bed in my absence for I long to kiss your pretty dukkeys and to see our Duke pleasuring you as I am inside him’ is Pretty Damn Clear.

The Rings. The clear description of the marriage ceremony they undertook and Henry & Anne’s ‘We would crown you before the world, my love’ to Cromwell.

The ‘Shared A Bed Every Night’

The fact that Henry said ‘I have loved both men and women but truly, my heart and soul belongs only to you both my dark haired loves’

I would just like to hear why it’s so so terrible that these three were actually bisexual. They are not straight still.

(ani-sadia)

I hate the fact that we have to listen to this “duchess” talk about her supposedly special heritage like can’t you let us traditionalists have something when the royal family is diminished enough and then this bitch comes along and now we’ve got another one.

#i hate her #anti-catherine #yeah whatever we get it ur a jew and u are brown #fuck off #why can’t we just have something for once #i wish arthur tudor hadn’t died and then england could have been an empire #why can’t i be proud of being white anymore

(ladyofangland)

Oh. Oh. Royal fandom it’s been zero days since our last Fucked Up Nonsense. Usually I don’t respond to things like this because I Am Tired but I have so many anons in my inbox talking in this tone and I just…I AM DONE. It was the best thing that Thomas I and Mihrimah happened because it has made our world which is kind and fucks like the one above are genuinely a minority. They are still there and it’s still painful (as a non white person I just…it’s painful. I hate how they talk about how England Should Have Been An Empire And Also Why Did We Have To Not Do Imperialism It’s The Jews Fault is still a discourse) but yes, Catherine is allowed to talk about being biracial, about being jewish about being not straight.

I’m so glad she’s thriving and you are here, being A Fucking Sad Nonsense. Also Arthur Tudor is going to haunt your ass for the way you are speaking about his relatives just fyi.

(fixeachotherscrowns)

I don’t see what she said that was wrong - Catherine is really pushy about everything, like okay be whatever  but you don’t have to go on about it all the time and make people feel bad about who they are. I’ve noticed Meghan does that too - they are both just really annoying and loud.

(delicatedarling)

Fuck Off. And Then Fuck Off Some More.

(duchessesofawesome)

[burnouts3s3]

Red Dead Redemption 2, a review

(Disclaimer: The following is a non-profit unprofessional blog post written by an unprofessional blog poster. All purported facts and statement are little more than the subjective, biased opinion of said blog poster. In other words, don’t take anything I say too seriously. Just the facts 'Cause you're in a Hurry! Publisher: Rockstar Studios Developer: Rockstar Games Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP): 59.99 USD How much I paid: 59.99 USD Rated: M for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language and Use of Drugs and Alcohol. How long I played: 50 Hours in an attempt to complete the story mode before Christmas rolls around Microtransactions: Preorder bonuses to those who ordered the game before release.   What I played on: A Regular PS4, not a PS4 Pro Performance Issues: Say what you will about the Infamous Rockstar Studios, the looks gorgeous with its various weather effects, depictions of gore and its various animations. Certain shadow details and hair particle effects look a bit blurry. One instance of the game pausing momentarily before starting again. My Personal Biases:  The only Rockstar Games I’ve completed are GTA IV and Bully on the PS2. I almost completed the Original Red Dead Redemption but got stuck and watched the rest of the cutscenes on Youtube. My Verdict: Red Dead Redemption 2 not only feels like a Love Letter to Rockstar games but also a Farewell. Admist the shooting, bank robbing, horse riding, cow milking, train heisting fun, there’s a sense of melancholy. Just like the Protagonist Arthur Morgan, players will begin to realize that not only have things changed but maybe looking back, the nostalgia of the hayday years are starting to fade and just like Civilization starts to roll in, change is coming to not only the world but to Rockstar as well… Buy it! WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD! Red Dead Redemption 2, a review

Rockstar Games wants to ask a question: At what price does Freedom come with? Set in 1899 and before the events of the first Red Dead Redemption, players control Arthur Morgan, an outlaw on the run after the Blackwater job went bad. Along with his charming bullshitter of a leader, Dutch van der Linde and the crazed Micah, Arthur attempts to lead a community of outcasts to safety. But with the Federal Government, the Pinkerton Detective Agency and rival gangsters after him, Arthur soon realizes that things aren’t what they seem. And in an attempt to be free from the every growing march of progress and civilization, he’s starting to have doubts if the things he thought were good were even great to begin with. Throughout the game, Players perform heists in an attempt to gain enough money to buy the community out for freedom. But, with one crazy heist after another, Arthur soon suspects that his all-knowing leader, Dutch, might be in over his head. Using the familiar cover mechanic, players can fire off guns and fend off or shoot civilians just so he pleases. But, now Arthur has to take care of the community. Using funds he’s acquired, he can upgrade his camp to supply food, medicine or ammunition. Arthur can now eat and cook items from materials found out in the wilderness. By hunting animals, Arthur can skin them for meat and pelts, which he can either sell or use for crafting. With no cars available, Arthur will ride his trusty steed through the desert, bayou and other locations, rendered in gorgeous detail. I could ride for hours and hours with time passing slowly in-game while various weather effects show off the RAGE engine to its finest. Customization is also a feature where in Arthur can grow a beard, get a haircut, own various guns or buy himself a three piece suit that will make him the most well dressed gentleman on the riverboat. In addition, the various mini-games appear where-in Arthur can do 5 finger fillet, play some Texas Hold’em Poker, or just collect debts from dead beats. In terms of content, for 60 USD, I felt like the thief here! And yet, it’s going to be the story that will either make or break the various players here. The game makes one thing clear: there’s going to be an increased emphasis on not only ethnic minorities but female characters as well. From Charles Smith, a half black, half Native-American, hunter to Sadie Adler, a widow who’s lost her home only to become a hardened gunslinger, gamers are sure to press the “SJW” alarm here. In one story mission, Arthur must drive a Women’s Suffrage Caravan into a southern town while being booed by hecklers. The change in cast also bleeds into the story: Arthur is having continuous doubts about Dutch’s mad schemes and wonders if Dutch has changed or if Arthur himself has changed. Their community is constantly on the run, attempting to find the ‘freedom’ America has promised only to be met by cities, civilization and some pissed off gangsters. The beauty of the wilderness is heavily contrasted with the polluted city of Saint Denis, where-in smokestacks blacken the sky. In some ways, the game is a commentary on Rockstar itself. Before, Rockstar games was the bad boy of the industry, upsetting parent groups and politicians with its risqué behavior. But now, Arthur reflects on whether or not those heydays of freedom and doing whatever you want were, in fact, as wonderful as they make it out to be. Arthur keeps second-guessing himself; he’s not sure if his loyalty to Dutch was warranted or if things were as good as Dutch made them out to be. Things have changed and Arthur isn’t sure if he’s the one that changed or if it’s the world around him. In some ways, Red Dead Redemption 2 is as deconstructionist and self-critical as Grand Theft Auto IV and its protagonist Nico Bellic, but where as Nico attempted to play the immigrant unable to let go (which contrasted heavily to the gameplay of gamers doing whatever they want with him), Arthur feels more consistent as a character.  Whereas John Marston, the protagonist form the previous game had a sardonic wit and one-liner for everything, Arthur feels like a cowboy seeing his last days of freedom and is coming to terms with his fate. It feels like the game is trying to appease everybody but the ideas put in place are sure to upset their political opponents. Men’s Rights Activists are going to complain about the mandatory mission wherein Arthur must drive a Women’s Suffrage Movement caravan through town but Feminists don’t like that players have the ability to beat up a Feminist. Minority players aren’t going to like the rampant racism displayed by Micah and Bill but White gamers aren’t probably going to like the depiction of Southern Plantation owners depicted as stupid and racist. Pro-gamergate players won’t like Sadie Adler, a widow turned gunslinger who might be crazier than Arthur but anti-Gamergate players will hate how Sadie would be a National Rifle Association spokesperson if Dana Loesch decides to retire. CAVEAT: Red Dead Redemption 2 might be the inevitable turning point for Rockstar Games. While the mechanics, the animation and the attention to detail can’t be less than soul bearing, it will inevitably alienate people. In some ways, RDR2 is all things to all people: a misogynistic game beating up women for Feminists, an SJW Pandering game to Gamergate Supporters, a Hunter’s wet dream to Animal’s rights advocates, Feminist Propaganda to Men’s Rights Advocates, and a thinly-veiled NRA ad to the #MarchforOurLives supporters. It’s offensive to everyone, Republicans, Democrats, independents, Libertarians, Feminists, MRAs, Journalists, Gamers, Consumers, pro-Gamergate, anti-Gamergate, pro-gun control advocates, anti-gun control advocates and anyone with good taste, even more so than the “all sides are bad, everyone shut the fuck up” viewpoint mainly held by South Park creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. And yet, I had a lot of fun with it. Verdict: Full Price!

[afrolesbikita]

Stories & useful updates on POS & POS System Hardware.

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In March 2019, a massive chemical fire broke out after a leak at a chemical tank farm in Deer Park spread to almost a dozen other tanks.

A plume of smoke soon loomed over the Houston skyline and lingered there for three days. Residents of Deer Park were forced to shelter in place due to air pollution hazards, the Houston Ship Channel closed for three days, and millions of gallons of hazardous waste spilled on the ground and leaked into the water.

That chemical fire at Intercontinental Terminals Company’s facility also rekindled a debate at the Legislature about the state’s rapidly growing petrochemical industry, much of it in communities along the Texas Gulf Coast. Thousands of such tanks, typically made of steel plates, are in the Houston area alone, and state lawmakers had already become concerned after at least 15 tanks holding crude oil, gasoline and other hydrocarbons ruptured or malfunctioned during Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Yet the 2019 legislative session ended without new regulations.

Two years later, the Legislature is nearing approval of Senate Bill 900 authored by state Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, which will create new standards on the type of tanks that put so many people in her district at risk two years ago. It passed the Senate late last month and late Sunday night it received preliminary approval by the House.

“I’m very proud of this bill,” Alvarado said. She said it took a long time to negotiate the bill with industry groups, but high-profile incidents like the ITC fire in her district forced the conversation.

“They knew I was going to be calling,” she said. “There were too many of these things that had occurred.”

Several bills were filed by Democrats this session to create new rules on the petrochemical industry. Few state rules apply to the tanks, and none require construction standards that ensure tanks can withstand powerful hurricanes or major flooding.

Alvarado spent years negotiating with industry groups to draft safety standards that would address the most pressing concerns while also not going too far to be unpalatable to the powerful oil and gas industry, whose opposition would be deadly in the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature. Before it heads to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, the House still needs to grant final approval, usually a formality. The Senate would then need to accept a minor changes made by the House or ask for a conference committee to settle the slight differences between the versions of the bill that passed each chamber.

Texas has a long list of rules on the books for chemical storage tanks, including requiring specific construction standards and plans to prevent spills, but they only apply to below-ground tanks and are aimed at preventing contamination of underground aquifers. Above-ground storage tanks are exempt.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality can fine companies for discharges or spills that harm the environment, but the agency previously told the Tribune that its rules do not require any spill preparation or prevention measures. The tanks containing toxic and flammable chemicals are often, but not required to be, constructed to standards determined by the American Petroleum Institute, a powerful oil and gas industry group.

During a September work session, TCEQ Executive Director Toby Baker told TCEQ commissioners that he was frustrated with the agency’s limited authority to regulate chemical plants before disasters occur.

Senate Bill 900, if signed by the governor, would require the TCEQ to establish new performance standards for large above ground storage tanks (called “vessels” in the bill) aimed at protecting ground and surface water in the event of an accident or natural disaster. For example, the tanks will be required to have remote shut off valves, overflow protection and anti-fire technology. “Had these things been in place, that could have prevented the ITC fire,” Alvarado said.

The agency must establish the rules by September 2023.

The Sierra Club wanted the regulations to go further. In an April legislative committee hearing, Cyrus Reed, representing the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the rules should also include tanks that are smaller in size, require more frequent inspections and take effect earlier than 2023.

“If I thought we could go farther, I would have,” Alvarado said in response to the criticisms during the April hearing. The legislation also allows companies to seek exceptions from the rules if they can prove to regulators that their tanks are at a low risk of flooding, hurricanes, fires and explosions.

Jennifer Coffee, general counsel for the Texas Pipeline Association, said during the hearing that the group, which represents intrastate pipelines, spent “countless hours” working with the Texas Chemical Council and the Texas Oil and Gas Association, two other powerful oil and gas interest groups, to help Alvarado craft a bill that would include the safety features that she considered essential.

The negotiations between all the groups didn’t come easy, Coffee said

“What might be good for the chemical industry might not be good for petroleum,” she said.

Regulating the tanks gained traction among lawmakers after high-profile chemical accidents provoked outrage from residents and regulators. John Beard, who leads the Port Arthur Community Action Network and worked in the chemical industry for years, told lawmakers in April that the rules “are about protecting lives.”

After a string of chemical fires in Texas in 2019, Alvarado said she found much broader support from Republicans — in particular from the now Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, whose constituents were evacuated the day before Thanksgiving in 2019 when several explosions rocked a TPC Group plant in Port Neches. That explosion and incidents also forced industry groups to come to the table to negotiate, Alvarado said.

“When you have incidents like this happening, we have a duty to respond and to change that, and that’s what we did,” Alvarado said.

This article was published on this site.

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[papermoonloveslucy]

LUCY ON “THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW” ~ PART 3

November 24, 1969 ~ S3;E9

Directed by Dave Powers

Written by Bill Angelos, Stan Burns, Mike Marmer, Hal Goodman, Larry Klein, Don Hinkley, Kenny Solms, Gail Parent, Buz Kohan

Cast

Carol Burnett got her first big break on “The Paul Winchell Show” in 1955. A years later she was a regular on “The Garry Moore Show.” In 1959 she made her Broadway debut in Once Upon a Mattress, which she also appeared in on television three times. From 1960 to 1965 she did a number of TV specials, and often appeared with Julie Andrews. Her second Broadway musical was Fade Out – Fade In which ran for more than 270 performances. From 1967 to 1978 she hosted her own highly successful variety show, “The Carol Burnett Show.” Lucille Ball made several appearances on “The Carol Burnett Show.” Burnett guest starred in four episodes of “The Lucy Show” and three episodes of “Here’s Lucy,” subsequently playing a character named Carol Krausmeyer. After Lucille Ball’s passing, Burnett was hailed as the natural heir to Lucy’s title of ‘The Queen of TV Comedy.’

Lucille Ball was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. With Richard Denning, she starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” which eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon, which was not a success and was canceled after just 13 episodes.

Supporting Cast

Vicki Lawrence was born Vicki Ann Axelrad in Inglewood, California. She sent Carol Burnett a newspaper clipping showing their uncanny resemblance to her.  Burnett called Vicki hoping to find an entertainer who could play her kid sister on her variety show. Lawrence was chosen as the kid sister and in the fall of 1967, she made her debut on the first episode of “The Carol Burnett Show.” She spent 11 years with the show and earned one Emmy Award and five more nominations. She created the role of Mama in the Family Sketches, which was spun off to “Mama's Family.”  An accomplished singer, her recording of "The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia" was number one and earned a Gold Record. Lawrence attended the tribute shows “All Star Party for Carol Burnett” in 1982 and “All Star Party for Lucille Ball” in 1984.  

Harvey Korman got his first big break as a featured performer on “The Danny Kaye Show” in 1963. After ten successful seasons he left “The Carol Burnett Show” in 1977 to appear in his own series which only lasted six episodes. From 1964 to 1965 Korman appeared in three episodes of “The Lucy Show” as various characters. He found screen success in many of the films of Mel Brooks. Harvey Korman died in 2008 at age 81.

Lyle Waggoner was a handsome leading man who had little success in films but found fame as the announcer and character actor on “The Carol Burnett Show.” He left the show in 1974 in a mutual agreement with the producers to appear in “Wonder Woman.”  

Guest Cast

George Carlin was a stand-up comic who specialized in skewering social topics. He is also noted for his masterful knowledge and use of the English language. Carlin's notorious "Seven Dirty Words" comedy routine was part of a radio censorship case that made its way to the Supreme Court in 1978. He made a second appearance on “The Carol Burnett Show” in 1978. Carlin died in 2008.

Sue Vogelsanger (Herself, in Audience and Archival Tape) was an audience member who wrote a song for Burnett.  Her husband sits next to her.

Gary Morton (Himself, in Audience, uncredited) is Lucille Ball's second husband. He was a producer on “The Lucy Show” and “Here's Lucy” as well as doing a few on-camera roles.  His laugh can be heard from the studio audience during the airline sketch.

Two uncredited extras play the parents in the Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice sketch and an uncredited actor plays the telegram delivery man in the vaudeville sketch.

Timeline of collaborations between Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett (not including award and talk shows)

September 27, 1960 - “The Garry Moore Show” (S3;E1) Lucille Ball, Guest

March 22, 1966 - “Carol + 2” Lucille Ball, Guest Star

October 31, 1966 - “Lucy Gets a Roommate” (TLS S5;E7) Carol Burnett as Carol Bradford

November 7, 1966 - “Lucy and Carol in Palm Springs” (TLS S5;E8) Carol Burnett as Carol Bradford

October 2, 1967 - “The Carol Burnett Show” (S1;E4) Lucille Ball, Guest Star

December 4, 1967 - “Lucy and Carol Burnett: Part 1” (TLS S6;E14) Carol Burnett as Carol Bradford

December 11, 1967 - “Lucy and Carol Burnett: Part 2” (TLS S6;E15) Carol Burnett as Carol Bradford

November 4, 1968 - “The Carol Burnett Show” (S2;E6) Lucille Ball, Guest

January 27, 1969 - “Lucy and Carol Burnett” (HL S1;E17) Carol Burnett as Herself

November 24, 1969 - “The Carol Burnett Show” (S3;E9) Lucille Ball, Guest

March 2, 1970 - “Lucy Competes With Carol Burnett” (HL S2;E24) Carol Burnett as Carol Krausmeyer

October 19, 1970 - “The Carol Burnett Show” (S4;E6) Lucille Ball, Guest

February 8, 1971 - “Lucy and Carol Burnett” (HL S3;E22) Carol Burnett as Carol Krausmeyer

A week after this episode first aired, the script for Carol's second appearance on “Here's Lucy” was finalized, although it would not air until March 2, 1970.  

Like Lucille Ball’s sitcoms, “The Carol Burnett Show” also aired on Monday nights, generally at 10pm. Earlier that evening, “Here's Lucy” aired “Lucy, the Cement Worker” (HL S2;E10) guest-starring Paul Winchell.

In Carol's opening remarks she tells the audience about a recent Halloween at her home. She also tells the audience she was born in San Antonio, but raised in Hollywood since the age of seven.

Carol introduces George Carlin, who does a stand-up routine criticizing the Emmy Awards' bias in favor of big-budget shows. He compares late night 'shows' like “Sermonette” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the likes of  “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He imagines a big-budge version of “The FBI List of Most Wanted Men,” including a commercial for The Justice Department.

Carlin: “Remember for anti-trust or Commie bust, the Department that's just, is really a must!  Don't leave your family defenseless.  And now, heeeeeeeeere's  J. Edgar!” ('Tonight Show' theme plays).

Carol sings a song written by audience member Sue Vogelsanger. It is titled “Just Talkin'.” Vogelsanger and her husband are in the audience.

In Lucille Ball's first appearance on the show, two flight attendants Finster (Carol) and Agnes Hooper (Lucille Ball) compete for a best employee award from their employer, BWA. They encounter a mysterious passenger (Harvey Korman) with a Fidel Castro-like beard, cigars tucked in his breast pocket, and a Spanish accent.

Hooper: “Where are you from, sir?  Havana?” Passenger: (alarmed) “Havana? What makes you think I'm from Havana?” Hooper: “Well, if it's one thing I know, it's a Cuban accent.”

This meta moment relies on the audience knowing that Lucille Ball was married to Desi Arnaz, a Cuban immigrant, as was his sitcom counterpart, Ricky Ricardo.

When the passenger pulls out a gun, Hooper and Finster fight over who will clean it for him. In the struggle, they inadvertently push him out the plane door, foiling his hijacking.

Lucy Carmichael and Carol Bradford trained as flight attendants in a two-part “The Lucy Show” in 1967.  

Lyle and Vicki perform "Try a Little Kindness" by Curt Sapaugh and Bobby Austin, first recorded by Glen Campbell less than a month earlier.

The second half of the show opens with Carol in the shower singing “I Say A Little Prayer” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Dionne Warwick in 1967. The song opens, however, with a verse of “Singin' in the Rain” by Arthur Freed and music by Nacio Herb Brown (1931). At the end of the song, Carol leaves the shower, and the camera reveals four soaking wet musicians in tuxedos inside.

Next is a spoof of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a controversial 1969 film about two couples who end up in bed together. It was made into a short-lived TV series in 1973. Bob (originally Robert Culp) is played by Lyle Waggoner, Carol (originally Natalie Wood) is played by Carol Burnett, Ted (originally Elliott Gould) is played by Harvey Korman, and Alice (originally Dyan Cannon) is played by Lucille Ball.  

Ted: “I'm afraid the neighbors will talk.” Alice: “No, they won't.” Carol: “Why not?” Alice: “We're the neighbors.”

In the final sketch, Harvey Korman plays Tommy Two Step, the emcee at an old vaudeville theatre in 1919. Onstage, he introduces Polly (Carol) and Dolly (Lucy), the Rock Sisters. 

They sing “Happiness Cocktail” while strumming ukuleles. Dolly then breaks out a saxophone, and Polly a coronet. Although Lucille Ball had a basic knowledge of both saxophone and ukulele (and demonstrated it on her sitcoms), she is pantomiming to the offstage orchestra, as is Carol. Lyle Waggoner plays the theatre manager who fires the act.

Fast forward to 1969, where fast-talking disc jockey Big Daddy (George Carlin) desperately needs one more act for a big 100-group rock concert. His dim-witted girlfriend / groupie Tondalayo (Vicki Lawrence) hires the Rock Sisters by telegram, based on their name alone.

Polly: “Our gowns!  Where are our gowns?” Dolly: “I took them to the cleaners.” Polly: “Do you think they're ready?” Dolly: “They should be. I took them in 1931.”

Oops! During the airline sketch, during a more serious moment with Carol and Harvey, Lucy starts to smile, about to break character, but quickly regains her composure.  

When Lucy catches Harvey's spat-out cigar in mid-air, Korman gives her a long, admiring glance as if to say “Well done!” Gary Morton's laugh from the audience can be heard during this moment.  

When Korman's character loudly announces he's got a gun and is hijacking the plane to Cuba, the other passengers (background actors) don't react at all!  

This Date in Lucy History - November 24th

"Redecorating" (ILL S2;E8) – November 24, 1952

[swordknown]

A VERY DESCRIPTIVE PROFILE OF YOUR MUSE.   repost with the information of your muse,  including headcanons,  etc.  if you fail to achieve some of the facts,  add some other of your own !

NAME.      Arthur Dayne. NICKNAME(S).      The Sword of the Morning. ALIAS(ES).      Harlo Brenos (as a sellsword in Essos) AGE.     23-45, verse/timeline dependent. SPECIES.     Human. GENDER.     Male. ORIENTATION.     Bisexual. INTERESTS.      Swordplay, swimming, horses, reading.  PROFESSION.      Kingsguard/Sellsword (verse dependent). BODY TYPE.     Lean, yet muscular.    EYES.       Purple. HAIR.       Dark Brown/Black. Long in some verses, short in others.  SKIN.     Dornish. FACE.      Rounded face, strong jaw, light beard. HEIGHT.    6′3′’ (look he’s gotta be uber tall to hold a sword like Dawn’s described, in reality, even this is probably too short lol). COMPANIONS.      Fellow Kingsguard, Rhaegar, Elia, Ashara. ANTAGONISTS.      Robert Baratheon, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister, Ned Stark, anyone anti-Targaryen.  COLORS.     Purple, White, Black, Silver. FRUITS.     Blood Oranges, Dates, Olives, Plums. DRINKS.      Water.  ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES?     Dornish Sweetwine, Dornish Red.  SMOKES?      No. DRUGS?      No. DRIVERS LICENSE?      No.

tagged by. @needlcd <3 <3 <3

tagging @sandwulf, @obuljagon, @swxrdofthemxrning, @isylaofwyl, @zaldrizerme, @droppedrubies, @lastxdragon, @wineinthewidow anyone else who wants to do it!!

[charlesjening]

Grant Thornton Elects Three Dynamic Individuals to Partnership Board

Purple roses were bestowed to three dynamos who were elected to the partnership board at Chez Preber.

The newest board members are:

Robert Fox

Robert Fox: Bert is national managing partner of professional standards, based in Chicago. He leads the Purple Rose of Chicago’s national office teams over accounting principles, audit methodology, SEC and regulatory matters, and independence and ethics. Fox also consults with businesses on complex accounting matters, including business combinations, revenue recognition, share- and nonshare-based payments, and long-lived assets, according to his bio.

Fox joined GT in 2002, left for two years to become a Professional Accounting Fellow in the Office of the Chief Accountant at the SEC, then came back to GT in July 2009, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before joining Grant Thornton, Fox spent time at Arthur Andersen and McGladrey.

Chris Smith

Chris Smith: Smith is advisory services practice leader for growth and transformation, based in Bellevue, WA. This bearded dynamo focuses on “designing and deploying future-ready strategies for clients wanting high, yet sustainable growth and then operationalizing the strategy across the organization,” according to his bio. His expertise mainly centers on corporate strategy, sales, marketing and customer strategy, enterprise transformation, operational excellence, post-merger integration, and culture design.

Smith joined Grant Thornton in 2007 after GT gobbled up the boutique strategy firm he founded, Arryve.

Mark Sullivan

Mark Sullivan: MS is advisory services practice leader for the Midwest region, based in Chicago. He’s got mad skillz in corporate investigations, fraud prevention and detection, and litigation support.

According to his bio:

Mark has worked with companies and their counsel worldwide to investigate frauds, develop and implement anti-fraud programs, and identify vulnerabilities within their organizations. His advanced interviewing skills and his team of forensic accountants, eDiscovery and computer forensic professionals provide an unparalleled response to complex investigations, compliance and litigation matters.

He joined GT in 2009, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also spent parts of his career at Deloitte and Arthur Andersen.

Jim Wittmer

In addition, GT’s partners and principals re-elected Jim Wittmer to the partnership board, then re-elected him as the board’s chairman.

Wittmer is Grant Thornton’s national tax leader for market growth, based in Philadelphia. He’s been with the firm for more than 27 years.

Wittmer took over as partnership board chairman in June once Brad Preber stepped out of that role to become interim CEO of Grant Thornton. Preber was elected CEO of the Purple Rose of Chicago in November.

The post Grant Thornton Elects Three Dynamic Individuals to Partnership Board appeared first on Going Concern.

republished from Going Concern

[anagamitofotografia]

Stories & useful updates on POS & POS System Hardware.

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

In March 2019, a massive chemical fire broke out after a leak at a chemical tank farm in Deer Park spread to almost a dozen other tanks.

A plume of smoke soon loomed over the Houston skyline and lingered there for three days. Residents of Deer Park were forced to shelter in place due to air pollution hazards, the Houston Ship Channel closed for three days, and millions of gallons of hazardous waste spilled on the ground and leaked into the water.

That chemical fire at Intercontinental Terminals Company’s facility also rekindled a debate at the Legislature about the state’s rapidly growing petrochemical industry, much of it in communities along the Texas Gulf Coast. Thousands of such tanks, typically made of steel plates, are in the Houston area alone, and state lawmakers had already become concerned after at least 15 tanks holding crude oil, gasoline and other hydrocarbons ruptured or malfunctioned during Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Yet the 2019 legislative session ended without new regulations.

Two years later, the Legislature is nearing approval of Senate Bill 900 authored by state Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, which will create new standards on the type of tanks that put so many people in her district at risk two years ago. It passed the Senate late last month and late Sunday night it received preliminary approval by the House.

“I’m very proud of this bill,” Alvarado said. She said it took a long time to negotiate the bill with industry groups, but high-profile incidents like the ITC fire in her district forced the conversation.

“They knew I was going to be calling,” she said. “There were too many of these things that had occurred.”

Several bills were filed by Democrats this session to create new rules on the petrochemical industry. Few state rules apply to the tanks, and none require construction standards that ensure tanks can withstand powerful hurricanes or major flooding.

Alvarado spent years negotiating with industry groups to draft safety standards that would address the most pressing concerns while also not going too far to be unpalatable to the powerful oil and gas industry, whose opposition would be deadly in the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature. Before it heads to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, the House still needs to grant final approval, usually a formality. The Senate would then need to accept a minor changes made by the House or ask for a conference committee to settle the slight differences between the versions of the bill that passed each chamber.

Texas has a long list of rules on the books for chemical storage tanks, including requiring specific construction standards and plans to prevent spills, but they only apply to below-ground tanks and are aimed at preventing contamination of underground aquifers. Above-ground storage tanks are exempt.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality can fine companies for discharges or spills that harm the environment, but the agency previously told the Tribune that its rules do not require any spill preparation or prevention measures. The tanks containing toxic and flammable chemicals are often, but not required to be, constructed to standards determined by the American Petroleum Institute, a powerful oil and gas industry group.

During a September work session, TCEQ Executive Director Toby Baker told TCEQ commissioners that he was frustrated with the agency’s limited authority to regulate chemical plants before disasters occur.

Senate Bill 900, if signed by the governor, would require the TCEQ to establish new performance standards for large above ground storage tanks (called “vessels” in the bill) aimed at protecting ground and surface water in the event of an accident or natural disaster. For example, the tanks will be required to have remote shut off valves, overflow protection and anti-fire technology. “Had these things been in place, that could have prevented the ITC fire,” Alvarado said.

The agency must establish the rules by September 2023.

The Sierra Club wanted the regulations to go further. In an April legislative committee hearing, Cyrus Reed, representing the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the rules should also include tanks that are smaller in size, require more frequent inspections and take effect earlier than 2023.

“If I thought we could go farther, I would have,” Alvarado said in response to the criticisms during the April hearing. The legislation also allows companies to seek exceptions from the rules if they can prove to regulators that their tanks are at a low risk of flooding, hurricanes, fires and explosions.

Jennifer Coffee, general counsel for the Texas Pipeline Association, said during the hearing that the group, which represents intrastate pipelines, spent “countless hours” working with the Texas Chemical Council and the Texas Oil and Gas Association, two other powerful oil and gas interest groups, to help Alvarado craft a bill that would include the safety features that she considered essential.

The negotiations between all the groups didn’t come easy, Coffee said

“What might be good for the chemical industry might not be good for petroleum,” she said.

Regulating the tanks gained traction among lawmakers after high-profile chemical accidents provoked outrage from residents and regulators. John Beard, who leads the Port Arthur Community Action Network and worked in the chemical industry for years, told lawmakers in April that the rules “are about protecting lives.”

After a string of chemical fires in Texas in 2019, Alvarado said she found much broader support from Republicans — in particular from the now Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, whose constituents were evacuated the day before Thanksgiving in 2019 when several explosions rocked a TPC Group plant in Port Neches. That explosion and incidents also forced industry groups to come to the table to negotiate, Alvarado said.

“When you have incidents like this happening, we have a duty to respond and to change that, and that’s what we did,” Alvarado said.

This article was published on this site.

I trust you found the above useful or interesting. You can find similar content on our blog here: northtxpointofsale.com Let me have your feedback below in the comments section. Let us know what subjects we should write about for you in future.

[spryfilm]

“Decline and Fall” (2017)

TV Series/Comedy

Episodes: Three

Created by: James Wood

Featuring: Matthew Beard, Stephen Graham, Douglas Hodge, Jack Whitehall, Eva Longoria

Jack Whitehall has come a long way since his British sitcom origins, he has worked to become a regular celebrity on English television, so it is not without any surprise that he may want to try something a little different. HE has struck gold with his new television series, “Decline and Fall” (2017), not quite a comedy but more fun than a drama – it has mixed results but the inclusion of a high caliber of supporting players means that there is always something interesting to look at, as well as a rich analysis of the upper class in the UK.

I was fascinated to see how this series would function as it was adapting an classic novel by Evelyn Waugh (Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh) into something that would not only be entertaining but fun to watch, with some acerbic wit thrown in. My mind was put at ease when I saw the name John Wood, the creator of the excellent “Rev” (2010 – 2014) which like “Decline and Fall” (2017) balanced drama, comedy, plot and narrative in such an expert way that it left you only wanting more. Wood seems to have a knack for comedies about people who are trying to find their way in an unjust world where no matter their own principles they are faced it situations outside of their control.

The series sees Paul Pennyfeather (Jack Whitehall) as an inoffensive divinity student at Oxford University in the 1920s, who is wrongly dismissed for indecent exposure having been made the victim of a prank by The Bollinger Club. This is just the set up, any more plot would spoil his on going adventures into a calamity of a life.

This is a wonderful mini-series that cracks along at a pace that may surprise many, it follows Paul as he stumbles from one situation to another – there are many elements within the narrative that are taken from other genres which make this great for a modern audience. There is no doubt this is a comedy that makes the central character the brunt of others whims to the point that he becomes a truly powerless figure without any agency of his own – but because of extremely poor decisions made by Paul you can never feel pity for him. Pennyfeather is taken advantage of by almost everyone from the opening scene where he is stripped naked, forced to run home naked while saviors are all around. Of course Pennyfeather is a representation of the lower classes of the time (although that could be easily said to be now, an anti Forrest Gump if you will) who is pushed around by the rich and powerful but never really getting ahead in the game of life. Of course the high and mighty that exist in this plot are all devious disguised crooks who are all guilty, one way or another, while Pennyfeather actually plays their victim, doing their bidding but clueless in every respect.

“Decline and Fall” has a real eclectic cast that on the surface may seem disparate but come together to bring the story to life in a way that my surprise many viewers. The cast led by Jack Whitehall who plays Pennyfeather without a hint of irony comes alive in a role like he has never before, which bodes well for his coming career – having escaped any comedy dungeon he may have been facing. There are far too many fantastic character actors to delve in too deeply but I have to talk about a couple.

Firstly not all characters make appearances or at least long appearances in every episode. The always-great Stephen Graham as Philbrick who turns up as a kind of butler in the first episode plays such a different part to anything else he has ever portrayed, is at once menacing, terrifying, funny as well as empathic all at very different moments throughout the series. Probably the surprise of the series is the American import Eva Longoria who plays Margot Beste-Chetwynde, the mother of one of Paul’s students, but by the end of the series is something of a femme fatale of sorts, who as a somewhat antagonist plays a most important part in Paul’s life, as well as his ultimate fate. The other main supporting character is David Suchet who plays one of the oddest characters in this series, he is initially a head master at the school Paul initially winds up at, playing it straight but with a bent that will strike many as eccentric, but like everyone else is not what he first appears. Finally Douglas Hodge as Grimes who comes and goes and must play three distinct versions of the same person, you will die laughing especially with his exaggerated limp.

The writer as well as main producer James Wood has crafted something utterly magnificent in his version of a fine novel that plays out like a bad dream, especially for the main character, Paul Pennyfeather. Wood who was the creative behind the excellent underrated “Rev” that featured another anti-hero in the form of Todd Holland’s Rev. Adam Smallbone (another great name), here has Pennyfeather the person not so much stuck in the middle, but pushed out in front of everyone else. Whereas Smallbone had some modicum of control, here Pennyfeather seems to have none at all – he is at the whim of others, even when he thinks he is being independent and in control. In fact much of the action takes place around him much like the student being shot in the foot on sports day, like us Pennyfeather is just a witness – great stuff.

Another aspect of the show is just how perfect the tone is, as well as how evenly the performances are with each actor within every scene. “Decline and Fall” is also a great break from other genre shows that are floating around, such as the endless supply of police procedural shows as well as the thrillers that seem to proliferate at the moment. The show is also a nice refrain from many comedies that have been produced, it is not highbrow but can come off like that, it is an interesting juxtaposition with many shows, even with its source material. When Waugh wrote this there is no way he could have known that it would be adapted into a television show, so we are witnessing a hero that is semi-autobiographical as well as an ideal hero of Waugh’s – but of course this is a deeply flawed character, which makes it even more human.

If you get a chance to view this mini series you should grab the chance, it runs for a little under three hours so it takes a small amount of time but the rewards are immense as is the entertainment, just great television, with excellent performance from a classic novel.

  DVD review: “Decline and Fall” (2017) “Decline and Fall” (2017) TV Series/Comedy Episodes: Three Created by: James Wood Featuring: Matthew Beard, Stephen Graham, Douglas Hodge, Jack Whitehall, Eva Longoria…

[amitavab]

Solzhenitsyn, Literary Giant Who Defied Soviets, Dies at 89

By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN

Corrections Appended

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow.

His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov.

Over the next five decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" and historical works like "The Gulag Archipelago."

"Gulag" was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn's calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as "the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was heir to a morally focused and often prophetic Russian literary tradition, and he looked the part. With his stern visage, lofty brow and full, Old Testament beard, he recalled Tolstoy while suggesting a modern-day Jeremiah, denouncing the evils of the Kremlin and later the mores of the West. He returned to Russia and deplored what he considered its spiritual decline, but in the last years of his life he embraced President Vladimir V. Putin as a restorer of Russia's greatness.

In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn owed his initial success to Khrushchev's decision to allow "Ivan Denisovich" to be published in a popular journal. Khrushchev believed its publication would advance the liberal line he had promoted since his secret speech in 1956 on the crimes of Stalin.

But soon after the story appeared, Khrushchev was replaced by hard-liners, and they campaigned to silence its author. They stopped publication of his new works, denounced him as a traitor and confiscated his manuscripts.

A Giant and a Victim

Their iron grip could not contain Mr. Solzhenitsyn's reach. By then his works were appearing outside the Soviet Union, in many languages, and he was being compared not only to Russia's literary giants but also to Stalin's literary victims, writers like Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak.

At home, the Kremlin stepped up its campaign by expelling Mr. Solzhenitsyn from the Writer's Union. He fought back. He succeeded in having microfilms of his banned manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He addressed petitions to government organs, wrote open letters, rallied support among friends and artists, and corresponded with people abroad. They turned his struggles into one of the most celebrated cases of the cold war period.

Hundreds of well-known intellectuals signed petitions against his silencing; the names of left-leaning figures like Jean-Paul Sartre carried particular weight with Moscow. Other supporters included Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, W. H. Auden, Gunther Grass, Heinrich Boll, Yukio Mishima, Carlos Fuentes and, from the United States, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Truman Capote and Kurt Vonnegut. All joined a call for an international cultural boycott of the Soviet Union.

That position was confirmed when he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in the face of Moscow's protests. The Nobel jurists cited him for "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn dared not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize for fear that the Soviet authorities would prevent him from returning. But his acceptance address was circulated widely. He recalled a time when "in the midst of exhausting prison camp relocations, marching in a column of prisoners in the gloom of bitterly cold evenings, with strings of camp lights glimmering through the darkness, we would often feel rising in our breast what we would have wanted to shout out to the whole world — if only the whole world could have heard us."

He wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged "not to participate in lies," artists had greater responsibilities. "It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!"

By this time, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had completed his own massive attempt at truthfulness, "The Gulag Archipelago." In more than 300,000 words, he told the history of the Gulag prison camps, whose operations and rationale and even existence were subjects long considered taboo.

Publishers in Paris and New York had secretly received the manuscript on microfilm. But wanting the book to appear first in the Soviet Union, Mr. Solzhenitsyn asked them to put off publishing it. Then, in September 1973, he changed his mind. He had learned that the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, had unearthed a buried copy of the book after interrogating his typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and that she had hung herself soon afterward.

He went on the offensive. With his approval, the book was speedily published in Paris, in Russian, just after Christmas. The Soviet government counterattacked with a spate of articles, including one in Pravda, the state-run newspaper, headlined "The Path of a Traitor." He and his family were followed, and he received death threats.

On Feb. 12, 1974, he was arrested. The next day, he was told that he was being deprived of his citizenship and deported. On his arrest, he had been careful to take with him a threadbare cap and a shabby sheepskin coat that he had saved from his years in exile. He wore them both as he was marched onto an Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was welcomed by the German novelist Heinrich Böll. Six weeks after his expulsion, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was joined by his wife, Natalia Svetlova, and their three sons. She had played a critical role in organizing his notes and transmitting his manuscripts. After a short stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States, settling in the hamlet of Cavendish, Vt.

There he kept mostly to himself for some 18 years, protected from sightseers by neighbors, who posted a sign saying, "No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns." He kept writing and thinking a great deal about Russia and hardly at all about his new environment, so certain was he that he would return to his homeland one day.

His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its "hasty" capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country's music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

Many in the West did not know what to make of the man. He was perceived as a great writer and hero who had defied the Russian authorities. Yet he seemed willing to lash out at everyone else as well — democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: "In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been."

In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned President Gerald R. Ford to avoid seeing Mr. Solzhenitsyn. "Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents," Mr. Kissinger wrote in a memo. "Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn's views of the United States and its allies." Mr. Ford followed the advice.

The writer Susan Sontag recalled a conversation about Mr. Solzhenitsyn between her and Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet who had followed Mr. Solzhenitsyn into forced exile and who would also become a Nobel laureate. "We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn's views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on," she said. "And then Joseph said: 'But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers — 60 million victims — it's all true.' "

Ivan Denisovich

In the autumn of 1961, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 43-year-old high school teacher of physics and astronomy in Ryazan, a city some 70 miles south of Moscow. He had been there since 1956, when his sentence of perpetual exile in a dusty region of Kazakhstan was suspended. Aside from his teaching duties, he was writing and rewriting stories he had conceived while confined in prisons and labor camps since 1944.

One story, a short novel, was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer. With little sentimentality, he recounts the trials and sufferings of "zeks," as the prisoners were known, peasants who were willing to risk punishment and pain as they seek seemingly small advantages like a few more minutes before a fire. He also reveals their survival skills, their loyalty to their work brigade and their pride.

The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk. "Shukov felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep," Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote. Shukov was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, and his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, and he had swiped some extra gruel, and had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.

"The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one," Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding: "Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper. He sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had shared a cell 16 years earlier. Mr. Kopelev, who later became a well known dissident, realized that under Khrushchev's policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, or The New World, the most prestigious of the Soviet Union's so-called thick literary and cultural journals. Mr. Kopelev and his colleagues steered the manuscript around lower editors who might have blocked its publication and took it to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor and a Politburo member who backed Khrushchev.

On reading the manuscript, Mr. Tvardovsky summoned Mr. Solzhenitsyn from Ryazan. "You have written a marvelous thing," he told him. "You have described only one day, and yet everything there is to say about prison has been said." He likened the story to Tolstoy's moral tales. Other editors compared it to Dostoyevski's "House of the Dead," which the author had based on his own experience of incarceration in czarist times. Mr. Tvardovsky offered Mr. Solzhenitsyn a contract worth more than twice his teacher's annual salary, but he cautioned that he was not certain he could publish the story.

Mr. Tvardovsky was eventually able to get Khrushchev himself to read "One Day in the Life." Khrushchev was impressed, and by mid-October 1962, the presidium of the Politburo took up the question of whether to allow it to be published. The presidium ultimately agreed, and in his biography "Solzhenitsyn" (Norton, 1985), Michael Scammell wrote that Khrushchev defended the decision and was reported to have declared: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."

The novel appeared in Novy Mir in early 1962. The critic Kornei Chukovsky pronounced the work "a literary miracle." Grigori Baklanov, a respected novelist and writer about World War II, declared that the story was one of those rare creations after which "it is impossible to go on writing as one did before."

Novy Mir ordered extra printings, and every copy was sold. A book edition and an inexpensive newspaper version also vanished from the shelves.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not the first to write about the camps. As early as 1951, Gustav Herling, a Pole, had published "A World Apart," about the three years he spent in a labor camp on the White Sea. Some Soviet writers had typed accounts of their own experiences, and these pages and their carbon copies were passed from reader to reader in a clandestine, self-publishing effort called zamizdat. Given the millions who had been forced into the gulag, few families could have been unaware of the camp experiences of relatives or friends. But few had had access to these accounts. "One Day in the Life" changed that.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, said on Monday that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was "a man with a unique life story whose name will endure throughout the history of Russia."

"Severe trials befell Solzhenitsyn, as they did millions of other people in this country," Mr. Gorbachev said in an interview with the Interfax news agency. "He was among the first to speak out about the brutality of Stalin's regime and about the people who experienced it, but were not crushed."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's books "changed the minds of millions of people, making them rethink their past and present," Mr. Gorbachev said.

Born With the Russian Revolution

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in the Caucasus spa town of Kislovodsk on Dec. 11, 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution began. His father, Isaaki, had been a Russian artillery officer on the German front and married to Taissa Shcherback by the brigade priest. Shortly after he was demobilized and six months before his son's birth, he was killed in a hunting accident. The young widow took the child to Rostov-on-Don, where she reared him while working as a typist and stenographer. By Mr. Solzhenitsyn's account, he and his mother lived in a dilapidated hut. Still, her class origins — she was the daughter of a Ukrainian land owner — were considered suspect, as was her knowledge of English and French. Mr. Solzhenitsyn remembered her burying his father's three war medals because they could indicate reactionary beliefs.

He was religious. When he was a child, older boys once ripped a cross from his neck. Nonetheless, at 12, though the Communists repudiated religion, he joined the Young Pioneers and later became a member of Komsomol, the Communist youth organization.

He was a good student with an aptitude for mathematics, though from adolescence he imagined becoming a writer. In 1941, a few days before Germany attacked Russia to expand World War II into Soviet territory, he graduated from Rostov University with a degree in physics and math. A year earlier, he had married Natalia Reshetovskaya, a chemist. When hostilities began, he joined the army and was assigned to look after horses and wagons before being transferred to artillery school. He spent three years in combat as a commander of a reconnaissance battery.

In February 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, he was arrested on the East Prussian front by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency. The evidence against him was found in a letter to a school friend in which he referred to Stalin — disrespectfully, the authorities said — as "the man with the mustache." Though he was a loyal Communist, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. It was his entry into the vast network of punitive institutions that he would later name the Gulag Archipelago, after the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Camps.

His penal journey began with stays in two prisons in Moscow. Then he was transferred to a camp nearby, where he moved timbers, and then to another, called New Jerusalem, where he dug clay. From there he was taken to a camp called Kaluga Gate, where he suffered a moral and spiritual breakdown after equivocating in his response to a warden's demand that he report on fellow inmates. Though he never provided information, he referred to his nine months there as the low point in his life.

After brief stays in several other institutions, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was moved to Special Prison No. 16 on the outskirts of Moscow on July 9, 1947. This was a so-called sharashka, an institution for inmates who were highly trained scientists and whose forced labor involved advanced scientific research. He was put there because of his gift for mathematics, which he credited with saving his life. "Probably I would not have survived eight years of the camps if as a mathematician I had not been assigned for three years to a sharashka." His experiences at No. 16 provided the basis for his novel "The First Circle," which was not published outside the Soviet Union until 1968. While incarcerated at the research institute, he formed close friendships with Mr. Kopelev and another inmate, Dmitry Panin, and later modeled the leading characters of "The First Circle" on them.

Granted relative freedom within the institute, the three would meet each night to carry on intellectual discussions and debate. During the day, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was assigned to work on an electronic voice-recognition project with applications toward coding messages. In his spare time, he began to write for himself: poems, sketches and outlines of books.

He also tended toward outspokenness, and it soon undid him. After scorning the scientific work of the colonel who headed the institute, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was banished to a desolate penal camp in Kazakhstan called Ekibastuz. It would become the inspiration for "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

At Ekibastuz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could say it without hesitation. Only then would he move on to the next bead. He later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had committed to memory 12,000 lines in this way.

'Perpetual Exile'

On Feb. 9, 1953, his term in the camps officially ended. On March 6, he was sent farther east, arriving in Kok-Terek, a desert settlement, in time to hear the announcement of Stalin's death broadcast over loudspeakers in the village square. It was here that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was ordered to spend his term of "perpetual exile."

He taught in a local school and secretly wrote poems, plays and sketches with no hope of having them published. He also began corresponding with his former wife, who during his incarceration had divorced him. He was bothered by stomach pains, and when he was able to visit a regional clinic, doctors found a large cancerous tumor.

His life as a restricted pariah struggling with the disease would lead to his novel "The Cancer Ward," which also first appeared outside the Soviet Union, in 1969. He finally managed to get to a cancer clinic in the city of Tashkent and later described his desperation there in a short story, "The Right Hand."

"I was like the sick people all around me, and yet I was different," he wrote. "I had fewer rights than they had and was forced to be more silent. People came to visit them, and their one concern, their one aim in life, was to get well again. But if I recovered, it would be almost pointless: I was 35 years of age, and yet in that spring I had no one I could call my own in the whole world. I did not even own a passport, and if I were to recover, I should have to leave this green, abundant land and go back to my desert, where I had been exiled 'in perpetuity. ' There I was under open surveillance, reported on every fortnight, and for a long time the local police had not even allowed me, a dying man, to go away for treatment."

After acquiring medical treatment and resorting to folk remedies, Mr. Solzhenitsyn did recover. In April 1956, a letter arrived informing him that his period of internal exile had been lifted and that he was free to move. In December, he spent the holidays with his former wife, and in February 1957, the two remarried. He then joined her in Ryazan, where Natalia Reshetovskaya headed the chemistry department of an agricultural college. Meanwhile, a rehabilitation tribunal invalidated his original sentence and found that he had remained "a Soviet patriot." He resumed teaching and writing, both new material as well as old, reworking some of the lines he had once stored away as he fingered his beads.

Twenty-two months elapsed between the publication of "Ivan Denisovich" and the fall of Khrushchev. Early in that period, the journal Novy Mir was able to follow up its initial success with Mr. Solzhenitsyn by publishing three more short novels by him in 1963. These would be the last of his works to be legally distributed in his homeland until the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1989.

When Leonid I. Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as party leader in October 1964, it was apparent that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was being silenced. In May 1967, in an open letter to the Congress of the Soviet Writers Union, he urged that delegates "demand and ensure the abolition of all censorship, open or hidden."

He told them that manuscripts of "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" had been confiscated, that for three years he and his work had been libeled through an orchestrated media campaign, and that he had been prevented from even giving public readings. "Thus," he wrote, "my work has been finally smothered, gagged, and slandered."

He added, "No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death."

The letter touched off a battle within the writers union and in broader intellectual and political circles, pitting Mr. Solzhenitsyn's defenders against those allied with the party's hard-line leadership. Two years later, on Nov. 4, 1969, the tiny Ryazan branch of the U.S.S.R. Writers Union voted five to one to expel Mr. Solzhenitsyn. The decision ignited further furor at home. In the West, it intensified a wave of anti-Soviet sentiment that had been generated in 1968 when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberal reforms of the Prague spring.

The conflict grew 11 months later with the announcement that Mr. Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Soviet press responded with accusations that the award had been engineered by "reactionary circles for anti-Soviet purposes." One newspaper belittled the author as "a run of the mill writer"; another said it was "a sacrilege" to mention his name with the "creators of Russian and Soviet classics."

But there were also Russians willing to defend Mr. Solzhenitsyn. The eminent cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich wrote to the editors of Pravda, Izvestia, and other leading newspapers praising the writer. Mr. Rostropovich, who had taken some risk in inviting Mr. Solzhenitsyn to live at his dacha near Moscow for several years, suffered official disfavor after his letter was published abroad.

Even greater risks were taken by the inmates of the Potma Labor camp. They smuggled out congratulations to Mr. Solzhenitsyn, expressing admiration for his "courageous creative work, upholding the sense of human dignity and exposing the trampling of the human soul and the destruction of human values."

Private Turmoil

At the time, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's private life was in turmoil. As news of the prize was announced, his marriage was dissolving. Two years earlier he had met Natalia Svetlova, a mathematician who was involved in typing and circulating samizdat literature, and they became drawn to each other. As Mr. Solzhenitsyn explained, "She simply joined me in my struggle and we went side by side." He asked his wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, for a divorce. But she refused, and continued to do so for several years. At one point, shortly after he had won the prize, she attempted suicide, and he had to rush her to a hospital, where she was revived.

In the meantime, Natalia Svetlova gave birth to Yermolai and Ignat, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's two oldest sons. Finally, in March 1973, Natalia Reshetovskaya consented to a divorce. Soon afterward, Mr. Solzhenitsyn and Natalia Svetlova were married in an Orthodox church near Moscow.

His skirmishes with the state only intensified. While the authorities kept him from publishing, he kept writing and speaking out, eliciting threats by mail and phone. He slept with a pitchfork beside his bed. Finally, government agents who had tried to isolate and intimidate him arrested him, took him to the airport and deported him. Mr. Solzhenitsyn believed his stay in the United States would be temporary. "In a strange way, I not only hope, I am inwardly convinced that I shall go back," he told the BBC. "I live with that conviction. I mean my physical return, not just my books. And that contradicts all rationality."

With that goal, he lived like a recluse in rural Vermont, paying little attention to his surroundings as he kept writing about Russia, in Russian, with Russian readers in mind.

"He wrote, ate, and slept and that was about all," Mr. Remnick wrote in 1994 after visiting the Solzhenitsyn family in Cavendish. "For him to accept a telephone call was an event; he rarely left his 50 acres." In contrast to the rest of his family, he never became an American citizen.

His children — a third son, Stepan, had been born six months before Mr. Solzhenitsyn was deported — went to local schools, but they began their day with prayers in Russian for Russia's liberation, and their mother gave them Russian lessons. She also designed the pages and set the type for the 20 volumes of her husband's work that were being produced in Russian by the YMCA Press in Paris. And she administered a fund to help political prisoners and their families. Mr. Solzhenitsyn had donated to the fund all royalties from "The Gulag Archipelago," by far his best-selling book.

As for the author, he would head each morning for the writing house, a wing the Solzhenitsyns had added to the property. There he devoted himself to a gigantic work of historical fiction that eventually ran to more than 5,000 pages in four volumes. The work, called "The Red Wheel," focused on the revolutionary chaos that had spawned Bolshevism and set the stage for modern Russian history. It has been compared, at least in its sweep and intentions, with Tolstoy's "War and Peace."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn started work on the first volume, "August 1914," in 1969, though he said he had begun thinking about the project before World War II, when he was a student in Rostov. "August 1914" was spirited out of the Soviet Union and published in Paris before Mr. Solzhenitsyn's expulsion.

He believed that his account, which challenged Soviet dogma about the founding period, was as iconoclastic as his earlier writings about the gulag.

In the United States, "August 1914" reached No. 2 on best-seller lists, but the subsequent volumes, "November 1916," "March 1917," and "April 1917," all completed in Cavendish, have not been widely bought or read.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was displeased by the Russian reaction to "The Red Wheel," which he spoke of as the centerpiece of his creative life. He expressed the hope that it would gain importance with time.

Aloof in America

In Mr. Solzhenitsyn's 18 years in Vermont, he never warmed to Americans beyond his Cavendish neighbors. On the eve of his return to Russia in 1994, he acknowledged he had been aloof. "Instead of secluding myself here and writing 'The Red Wheel,' I suppose I could have spent time making myself likable to the West," he told Mr. Remnick. "The only problem is that I would have had to drop my way of life and my work."

But even when he stepped outside Cavendish, as he did when he addressed the Harvard graduates in 1978, his condemnations of American politics, press freedoms and social mores struck many as insensitive, haughty and snobbish.

There were those who described him as reactionary, as an unreconstructed Slavophile, a Russian nationalist, undemocratic and authoritarian. Olga Carlisle, a writer who had helped spirit the manuscript of "The Gulag Archipelago" out of Moscow but who was no longer speaking to Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in Newsweek that the Harvard speech had been intended for a Russian audience, not an American one.

"His own convictions are deeply rooted in the Russian spirit, which is untempered by the civilizing influences of a democratic tradition," Ms. Carlisle said. And Czeslaw Milosz, generally admiring of his fellow Nobel laureate, wrote, "Like the Russian masses, he, we may assume, has strong authoritarian tendencies."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia on May 27, 1994, first landing in the Siberian northeast, in Magadan, the former heart of the Gulag. On arrival, he bent down to touch the soil in memory of the victims.

He flew on to Vladivostok, where he and his family began a two-month journey by private railroad car across Russia, to see what his post-Communist country now looked like. The BBC was on hand to film the entire passage and pay for it.

On the first of 17 stops, his judgment was already clear. His homeland, he said, was "tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition." As he traveled on, encountering hearty crowds, signing books and meeting dignitaries as well as ordinary people, his gloom deepened. And after settling into a new home on the edge of Moscow, he began to voice his pessimism, deploring the crime, corruption, collapsing services, faltering democracy and what he felt to be the spiritual decline of Russia.

In Vermont, he had never warmed to Mr. Gorbachev and his reform policies of perestroika. He thought they were the last-ditch tactics of a leader defending a system that Mr. Solzhenitsyn had long known to be doomed.

For a while he was impressed by Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia's first freely elected leader, but then turned against him. Mr. Yeltsin, he said, had failed to defend the interests of ethnic Russians, who had become vulnerable foreign minorities in the newly independent countries that had so suddenly been sheared off from the Soviet Union. Later, he criticized the advent of Vladimir V. Putin as antidemocratic.

Russians initially greeted Mr. Solzhenitsyn with high hopes. On the eve of his return, a poll in St. Petersburg showed him to be the favorite choice for president. But he soon made it clear that he had no wish to take on a political role in influencing Russian society, and his reception soon turned tepid.

Few Russians were reading "The Red Wheel." The books were said to be too long for young readers.

Michael Specter, then The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, observed, "Leading intellectuals here consider his oratory hollow, his time past and his mission unclear."

Nationalists, who had once hoped for his blessing, were alienated by his rejection. Democratic reformers, who wanted his backing, were offended by his aloofness and criticism of them. Old Communists reviled him as they always had.

In October 1994, Mr. Solzhenitsyn addressed Russia's Parliament. His complaints and condemnations had not abated. "This is not a democracy, but an oligarchy," he declared. "Rule by the few." He spoke for an hour, and when he finished, there was only a smattering of applause.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn started appearing on television twice a week as the host of a 15-minute show called "A Meeting With Solzhenitsyn." Most times he veered into condemnatory monologues that left his less outspoken guests with little to do but look on. Alessandra Stanley, writing about the program for The Times, said Mr. Solzhenitsyn came across "as a combination of Charlie Rose and Moses." After receiving poor ratings, the program was canceled a year after it was started.

As the century turned, Mr. Solzhenitsyn continued to write. In a 2001 book, he confronted the relationship of Russians and Jews, a subject that some critics had long contended he had ignored or belittled in his fiction. A few accused him of anti-Semitism. Irving Howe, the literary critic, did not go that far but maintained that in "August 1914," Mr. Solzhenitsyn was dismissive of Jewish concerns and gave insufficient weight to pogroms and other persecution of the Jews. Others noted that none of the prisoners in "Ivan Denisovich" were definitively identified as a Jew, and the one whose Jewish identity was subtly hinted at was the one who had the most privileges and was protected from the greatest rigors.

Mr. Remnick defended Mr. Solzhenitsyn, saying he "in fact, is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti-Semitic, and he is not, in his personal relations, anti-Jewish; Natalia's mother is Jewish, and not a few of his friends are, too."

In the final years of his life, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had spoken approvingly of a "restoration" of Russia under Mr. Putin, and was criticized in some quarters as increasingly nationalist.

In an interview last year with Der Spiegel, Mr. Solzhenitsyn said that Russians' view of the West as a "knight of democracy" had been shattered by the NATO bombing of Serbia, an event he called "a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals." He dismissed Western democracy-building efforts, telling the Times of London in 2005 that democracy "is not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet."

In 2007, he accepted a State Prize from then-President Putin — after refusing, on principle, similar prizes from Gorbachev and from Yeltsin. Mr. Putin, he said in the Der Spiegel interview, "inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible — a slow and gradual restoration."

Anne Barnard contributed reporting from Moscow, and Ellen Barry from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 7, 2008 An obituary on Monday about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer, misstated the title of his first novel and the year it appeared in Novy Mir, a Russian literary journal. The novel is "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," not "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," and Novy Mir published it in 1962, not 1963.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 7, 2008 The obituary also misspelled the given name and surname of a Russian writer who, like Mr. Solzhenitsyn, had been persecuted under the Soviet system. He was Osip Mandelstam, not Iosip Mandleshtam.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 7, 2008 And a subheading and a passage in the obituary also referred incorrectly to 1918, the year of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's birth. That was one year after the Russian Revolution, a series of events that led to the official formation of the Soviet Union in December 1922. Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not "Born With the Soviet Union" or born "a year after the Soviet Union arose from revolution."