#henry fielding

[wildwren]

PERIOD DRAMA APPRECIATION WEEK 2023

DAY 6: FAVORITE CHARACTERS // Sophia Western and Tom Jones

What difference does it make anyway, to the sum of human happiness, if I marry or not? If I am contented or miserable? Why did I ever think I was special? Why did I ever think you were?

Tom Jones (2023), adapted by Gwyneth Hughes and Georgia Parris

[anghraine]

I should be working on my dissertation, and have been, but I thought it'd be fun (for me :P) to loop you all in somehow. Therefore I bring you a very silly poll!

*best means whatever it means to you; feel free to propagandize

**yes, I deliberately excluded Shakespeare (from the poll, not the dissertation, lol)

[cryinginmelodrama]

To see a woman you love in distress; to be unable to relieve her, and at the same time to reflect that you have brought her into this situation, is perhaps a curse of which no imagination can represent the horrors to those who have not felt it.”

[realhankmccoy]

What's being missed despite this being 3 hours long:

the books are inartful trash, hastily written by an inexperienced writer for commercial purposes, not literary and tacky... this is marginally better than seriously analysing romance in an M&M's commercial

the books were sucking the magic out of prior vampires and whitening and suburbanising them... to witness Twilight hitting the Barnes and Nobles is to witness the world dying and going bland and turning into Wonderbread before your eyes

the books massively fail the bell hooks test -- books would have only stood a chance of not predictably repeating white capitalist supremacist patriarchy if Team Jacob would have won.

i don't think it's fair -- in the very brief examination of class issues -- to lump Twilight in with Titanic because it's not like somebody ln Titanic deliberately chooses a rich lover over a poor even if they have to die to join the immortal Mormon church. the whole point of Titanic is to fight back against -- fight back hard -- what the sort of people who write things like Twilight are doing to romance. I don't think she liked Avatar either? She's seriously got to get over her aversion to working hard on class issues. If you're screwed up enough by your fondness for wealth culture that you're making obvious errors like this, that says some work is needed. i understand my criticism probably just will exacerbate the problem though... I think it's fair to see Contrapoints as sitting closer to the castle that the Sheriff of Nottingham lives in than to being comfortable rollicking around in Sherwood Forest thinking of how to rob the rich because enough's enough... but i'd rather speak my mind even at the risk of exacerbating the problem in America just because really, that Gini Coefficient is getting obscene cuz influencers just don't seriously want to go there and risk losing that coin themselves. people feel like they worked for it, so so can you... even if their 'work' was basically like -- not working a real job and instead the donations of all the peasantry placing their hopes in them (Taylor Swift also makes her wealth this way and yes i get that there's plenty of sweat involved in getting onstage and saying OOOH LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME OOOH BARE LONG LEGGY LEGGY SHAKING OOOH but it's still not really as hard as showing up to a depressing real job)

i don't think she knows what she's talking at all on class -- about that romances can't have a poor person marrying a rich person, you'd almost swear she's never read any books by anybody and is just quickly in her head rationalising and extrapolating a Big Throught (a wrong one) in making up a bunch of b.s. that lets Twilight off the hook. like, maybe when your head is stuck in Twilight for too much of your life, you neglect all the books you should be reading about before you theorise. i mean especially if she's mentioning at least one Bronte sister to back her case... what about Agnes Grey which obviously backs the opposite point of view?

6. why, as usual does she not want to talk about what's probably the most disgusting and interesting thing about what's wrong with Twilight, this would have been the perfect time for her to dip a toe in (I get that reading all these academics has not prepared her for it, but come on, use some common sense here on what's really going on):

7. there's a gratuitous swipe at socialist in this video that i don't appreciate. either come out as a capitalist or come out as a socialist instead of equivocating and portraying yourself as a force of balanced reason. if you're truly a force of reason, you can explain in unequivocal terms what sort of economic system we're supposed to be aiming for here.

guess that's all that comes to mind... i don't think i learned anything about sexuality from these 3 hours.

my reaction actually is mostly that i'm really sick of white people and white people with money -- which isn't the intended effect of the video at all, but that's what i'm honestly feeling.

kudos for mentioning Pamela, though. I still haven't read it and it's supposed to be just magnificent. all of Europe used to cry over that stuff. Every male literary critic I'm aware of seems to love Pamela.

I haven't read Shamela, but I did not care for Henry Fielding who Bloom loves. There's another writer similar to Fielding that i didn't like at all either... forgetting who, but I remember really packing on the pounds as i read that one on the bathroom flloor in Milwauker.

also haven't heard Anne Carson mentioned in quite a while, everybdoy who likes recently literary things likes her, right. Autobiography of Red is a good reason to move to Canada and forget America exists, in my opinion. I prob should have done that 10 years ago already.

honestly i passed out during a good chunk of this video around the 70 minute mark so maybe indigenous people did get 2 seconds of a mention in that bit but i doubt it. i felt like it was a predictable video and she should take some time off, exit the ivory tower for 6 months and date a poor person. i think she could benefit from hopping on the first Greyhound to Mexico and spending some serious time down there. i'm not a hard taskmasker tho, walking around all over Mexico would be a stretch for her. i mean just start hanging out in some lower middle class neighorhood in america and going to parties or shows and loving everyone you encounter and talking to them and listening. i'm not asking for anything truly difficult for her here like hanging out with lower class people or going to a poor country. that sounds really bitchy of me but I'm just at the point 150 minutes in where i'm hearing WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WHA Charlie Brown's teacher moments, and it's not because she's too adult or over my head... it's just like, a bunch of bullshit here

BECAUSE FANS OF TWILIGHT DIDNT VIEW HER OR BELLA HER AS A

ok imagine a 70 year old woman caring i'm a 70 year old woman at heart it would be hard for a 50 year old woman to care, too these are teenagers Twilight is a young adult book I am not a young adult reader Quite frankly -- and I'm not into playing hardball, tho i could -- I'm not enough of a pedophile to be into Twilight. they are underage. they are high school meat. I would have to be what my small town called 'a chickenhawk' to technically find anything romantic about it. They are what is called Jailbait and i'm expected to care? this isn't like Agnes Grey or Wuthering Heights which were written before The Teenager was invented (kids, teenagers weren't invented til like 1944 they were invented when Hitler was killed mmkay look it up) anyhow there's quite a different jailbat OOOH BELLA IS 17 17 BABY... FLAIR to Meyer's writings about baseball-playing teenagers than there would be before the teenager was invented, mmmkay, no wonder i passed out.

I mean remember, the first two lines of this song were considered a risque way to light up a lame song with an edgier lyric in its time, and even THAT was over a half century ago now, and so what we get is both jailbait and a snooze, in the way you know, every small town male-enabling heteromind gets its thrills and that's Twilight:

All this gets mixed in with talk about holes -- k, we're talking about high schoolers here and we're how old? That said i'm not playing hardball -- I think it's suburban, bourgeois and opportunistic to just scream PEDOPHILIA over everything every opportunity you can. My point is I just don't think she's standing on the legs of serious commentary here and might want to think about her self-indulgence on the matter distracts from the more real, grittier, more difficult and more urgent-to-the-working class social issues at hand.

If I had infinite time, and if everything about Twilight weren't currently putting me to sleep even faster than the tomato soup in the cafeteria in the Salt Lake Temple started to do, I'd write a more literary, imaginative version of Twilight in 2 months and in my version, Edward or whatever would be utterly destroyed. I think that's what Twilight fans and Contrapoint fans should be working on.

the bar is low, it's Stephanie Meyer.

if you can't outwrite Stephanie Meyer, who can you outwrite?

The only bit of this video that perked me up at all -- and it's probably sort of equivocation that is par for the course with capitalism, since Twilight obviously captivates her -- is when she calls Twilight fucking conservative and heterosexual.

i mean this was probably set off by me falling asleep but one of my friends just mentioned this. it's not really a diss, we like funny lullabys.

when this is what's showing up on your screen how can you not get drowsy. i can't belive i'ts only 6:21pm on a Saturday cuz watching this Contrapoints video makes me feel like it's gotta be 2:20am and i'm up way too late and should be in bed.

i guess she prob realises how mentally ill her twilight fixation prob is and this is prob part of her self-indulgent life story she's painting so she can look back on that time she did a 3 hr video on twilight

which is sort of like a somewhat higher notches on the socioeconomic scale pyramid version of the sort of thing i'd do

i mean at least it's original right that's not sarcasm

twilight as a subject matter was not original tho. we need some life in this pasturized nonculture

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.

- Henry Fielding

[bonobochick]

Tom Jones on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre 

(dropping in 2023)

trailer...

[yorgunherakles]

başkalarında bulunan duygulardan yoksunum. gürültüden, gösterişten haz almıyorum. insanlar, bazı şeyleri elde etmek için didinip duruyorlar; bunları elde edince de sevinçten uçuyor, gurur duyuyorlar. oysa bunlar bana tamamen anlamsız geliyor.

henry fielding - tom jones

[macrolit]

from ml.books

[justwatchmyeyes]

Während die Freundschaft nach einem Nutzen sucht, verzichtet die Liebe freiwillig darauf.

Henry Fielding

[stelly38]

Watched the new adaptation of Tom Jones this past week.  It was cute.  Seems reviewers mostly liked it.  I thought it was enjoyable, goofy claptrap.  I saw the 1963 Albert Finney version years ago, and I don’t remember much about it, except that my father had loved it back in the day, so I probably watched it without much interest.  

I thought the two primaries were charming together, and wished for more scenes for the two of them.  But alas, then we wouldn’t have the hero’s journey, and all the ensuing goofiness.  I’ve never read Fielding’s book, but understand much of the “goofiness” that comes across onscreen springs from the author’s scathing commentary on social conventions of the day.  

Costumes and sets were gorgeous--visually, it was a treat to watch.  Not a bad way to kill 4 hours.  Wine would have made it better.   

[wildwren]

Sophia + Tom + falling in love // part 1

Tom Jones (2023) // The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749) *some quotes edited slightly for clarity

[elegantzombielite]

"Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason."

Henry Fielding, author (21 April 1707-1754)

[cryinginmelodrama]

Indeed, no one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.

[graffiticanada]

Poem

[insidecroydon]

Croydon lad who did a Runner for the Blind Beak of Bow Street

SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Policing the streets in the early 19th Century was an almost privatised service, funded by the parish. DAVID MORGAN delves into the Minster archive and finds how this borough helped frame the formation of the Metropolitan Police ‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello…: Bow Street Runners were the precursor to an organised police force In 1894, when Peter Shonfield died, aged 85, in the Elis David…