#moncrieff

[icallhimjoey]

Hi! First of all, your stories are giving me so much comfort, you have no idea! And I don't know if you are accepting requests or anything, but I was on a bus home today, daydreaming as I always do, and a story idea popped up, and I don't know, maybe you are willing to give it a try to write it. Anyway...

I was listening to Moncrieff's song Warm while commuting and it made me think of a reader (won't lie, I imagined myself ehehehe) and Joe - maybe they are friends but she feels more, and maybe she finds a silver lining in everything that bothers him, encourages him and Joe is not really if his feelings are there yet, but he is definitely thinking more about her in a certain way. So, the idea is that he is so stressed out, so many things are going on, and he is being pulled apart by the industry, colleagues, people around him, journalists, and he finds himself spiralling and then one day he calls her, despite the time difference and she answers, sleepy and whatnot, and that's when he realises that she is the one.

I found that Moncrieff song so nice and I don't know, listen to it if you'd like, and if you won't write it or anything, it's okay. I just had to get it off my chest..

x

omg more people need to do this, this song is BEAUTIFUL hope you like what I've done with your request <3 Wordcount: 1.3K

---

Homesick

“Joe?” you answered, the thick of sleep in your voice clearly detectable over the phone.

“Hey,” Joe instantly regretted not checking what time it was in London before he called.

“My God, you better have a good excuse to call me at a quarter past six on a Friday morning.”

Earlier that evening, Joe had shut the door behind him and had let out a deep sigh. Homesick. He had really felt it then and recognized that the annoying negativity he’d been dragging around on his shoulders was a longing for home. He felt so far removed, now across the Atlantic in a city deeply impersonal to him and he wished he could will himself back into his flat in London.

London. Where he knew to find the exact spot of the bathroom light switch when he would reach for it in the dark of night. Where there were cups of strong builder’s tea just the way he liked it. Where there were after work drinks at pubs that would be filled to the brim with others who had the same idea when they walked out of their office buildings at 5. Where people responded to your “sorry” with their “sorry”. Where you were, right now.

Joe’s days in LA were complex, and his job involved many aspects he didn’t have any control over which started taking its toll on him. Especially now that he hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in a few days. On long days like this one, people would almost seem to handle him like he wasn’t a human being at all. They were all smiles and kind words, but the hours he’d have to work felt inhumane. They asked a lot from him. And that’s not to forget that when Joe would eventually find himself in the comfort and silence of the rented apartment, he’d be up late reading scripts, rehearsing lines, doing self-tapes and deep diving Wikipedia pages in research of characters he would audition for later in the week.

It left him frustrated, moody and snappy, which wasn’t Joe’s default setting, and he actively disliked this version of himself. It didn’t help that the days had started piling together and he’d let it build without mentioning it to anyone. He knew he had to when he’d taken a shower and het let the emotion hurt him in his throat rather than getting it out of his system by having a cry.

There only seemed one solution to his problem, besides actually cutting his trip short which he knew he couldn’t do, but he felt a little apprehensive. Should he bother you with this? You had bigger fish to fry at home – you didn’t need to listen to Joe complain about opportunities he’d been working towards for so many years. But he just wanted to hear your voice. He knew you’d at least be kind enough to make him feel better. Joe remembered how you’d celebrated his upcoming trip with him. The one he was on now. It felt entirely effusive, he’d been on many trips before for his career, but you knew this one would be different. “I know I’ve said it before, but I can feel it, Joe. I can feel it right here.” You pointed to where Joe thought your spleen was located. “I think this is where my conscience sits.” You laughed. “Trust me, you’re going to come back and not recognize this face, so let me pay for your beers tonight so you’ll at least owe me when you get back.” You’d dragged him along to a pub, pride shining out of your eyes at what Joe’s future held. Prouder of me than my own mother, Joe thought.

You and Joe had been friends for too long. You always joked that you crowbarred your way into his life and squeezed yourself in between Joe’s intrusive thoughts and insecurities. A heavy bench to perch yourself on, but your light could easily overtake that darkness within Joe’s mind. And he loved you for it, but it made meeting potential girlfriends so much more difficult, because none of them seemed to live up to what you brought him. They’d be so pretty, but then not as funny as you were. Or they’d be so funny, but they’d lack your soft care for him. Or they’d care so much, but would only listen to Joe and then not do anything to cheer him up. It was always something that didn’t feel right. You were hogging the seat on that bench in his mind that was reserved for a lover. And Joe knew it wasn’t smart, but he let you.

“Sorry,” Joe heard movement of duvet covers as you turned over in your bed. “It’s still Thursday here.” He chuckled through a wince.

A couple of seconds of silence followed, and Joe imagined you in the dark of your bedroom, tucked up in your bed with your phone pressed to your ear and your eyes still closed.

“How’s LA?” you asked, threateningly close to drifting off to sleep again.

“It’s great.” But then you heard it in Joe’s voice, he stitch of melancholy, and you forced your eyes open. Joe wasn’t doing okay.

“That bad?”

“No, really. It’s great! It’s just… it’s a lot.” Joe let his head fall back against the sofa he was sat on.

“Were you expecting it not to be?” Joe could hear the smile that played on your face. He was fine with you poking a little fun, knowing it would give way for bickering that held every potential to lighten his mood.

“You don’t really know what it’s like until you’re here. Until you’re in it.” He defended.

“You sound tired,” you observed. “Get some sleep, it’ll all feel better in the morning.” Your advice filled Joe’s chest with warmth. He knew you were right. “I’m so jealous I’m not there,” you noticed the rain hitting your bedroom windows hard. “It’s really pissing it down here at the moment.”

Joe closed his eyes. He’d love some rain right now, even if it was just to reflect his mood.

“You wouldn’t like it here. This place is heartless.” Joe didn’t exactly have the highest of expectations of LA before having visited, but the way homelessness and decay laid around the corner of the glamour and shine of Hollywood had left a bad taste in his mouth.

“You just say that because your heart’s in London.” You reasoned.

With you, Joe thought.

“How many days until you’re back?” you stifled a yawn, prompting Joe to do the same.

“Too many… like, eleven?” Joe wasn’t sure. “Maybe ten.”

And as you started getting ready to slowly ease yourself into your last day of work before the weekend, Joe started getting ready to finish his day and prepared himself for bed. It was almost as if you were there with him in LA, and simultaneously he was there with you in London.

You chatted about an issue at work as you both brushed your teeth – Joe could barely make out the words. Joe talked about an amazing restaurant he’d been to as you got dressed. The company he’d been in had ruined the experience, so next time, he said, he’d go there with you. You did your make-up as you offered Joe advice on how to find the silver linings, reminding him he was doing good things, great things for himself out there. Joe washed his face as he absorbed every bit of positivity from you that leaked through the speaker of his phone.

And when you opened the curtains in your living room, you could hear Joe close the curtains in his bedroom.

“Goodnight Joey, turn that big brain off, all right? Count to infinity if you must.”

“Have a good day at work,”

“Love you, sleep tight.” You tried your best to say it as a friend, but the butterflies in your stomach seeped through, just... slightly.

“Love you.” Joe tried his best to say it as more than a friend, hearing your butterflies and feeling his own in response.

—

The Taglisted: @kiwisa @jasminearondottir @josephquinned @cancankiki @sidthedollface2 @dylanmunson @munsonsgirl71 @alana4610 @emmamooney @xomunson @sadbitchfangirl @jssmth5 @bagelofthelord67 @nobody-000 @lluviamg06 @thatonefan-girl @kylakins88 - add yourself

[artistcaretaker]

its this time of the year: @reeperbahn_festival #RBF22 #Moncrieff #warm the #EP out now…. #reeperbahnfestival in 3 words: proud, fashion, entertainment! https://www.instagram.com/p/Cix6d7Zsi_B/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[kwistowee]

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (2002)

[dame-de-pique]

A.R. Hope Moncrieff - Classic myth and legend, London: Gresham Publishing Company, 1912

[felixcloud6288]

Does Tumblr have a post tag limit?

[a-living-cartoon]

So I’m playing Algernon Moncrieff in a production of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ and I gotta say…

They give off similar energy

[uwmspeccoll]

Milestone Monday

On this day, July 10 in 1871, French novelist Marcel Proust (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, to be exact) was born to an upper-class family in the Paris Borough of Auteuil. Born at a time of great change for French society, with the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle class, Proust's most well-known publication, the monumental, 7-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (currently translated as In Search of Lost Time, but previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) explores the effects of these changes in personal and intimate ways.

Proust began work on this novel in 1909 and continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to stop. It was published in France between 1913 and 1927, and has become one of the hallmarks of world literature from the 20th century. The novel unfolds as a series of memories initiated by the sensation of a sip of tea in which he had dipped a madeleine cake. The sensation sparks dormant recollections of experiences from childhood to adulthood in fin de siècle France society.

The first six volumes of the novel were first translated into English by the Scottish author and translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff from 1922 to 1930, with the final volume translated by British novelist and translator Stephen Hudson in 1931. Terence Kilmartin revised the Scott Moncrieff translation in 1981 (with the final volume translated by Andreas Mayor) using the new French edition of 1954. The copy shown here is a revision of that revision by British academic D. J. Enright, based on the French Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of 1987-1989, published in six volumes by the Modern Library in New York (and by Chatto and Windus in London) in 1992. It is the first edition to use the more current translation of the title, In Search of Lost Time.

View other Milestone Monday posts.

[vintagestagehotties]

Hot Vintage Stage Actress Round 1

Gladys Moncrieff: Teresa in The Maid of the Mountains (1921 Melbourne); Juanita in A Southern Maid (1923 National Tour AUS); Rita Ferguson in Rio Rita (1928 Sydney)

Mae West: Margie LaMont in Sex (1926 Broadway); Diamond Lili in Diamond Lili (1928 Broadway); Marlo Manners/Lady Barrington in Sextette (1961 Broadway)

Propaganda under the cut

Gladys Moncrieff:

Mae West:

Jailed for 8 days for Sex (1926), starred in the Sextette film adaptation, a playwright as well as an actress

[potato-lord-but-not]

bet you weren’t expecting fanart of these two stories huh

[quietparanoiac]

— But you just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins. — I said it was perfectly heartless of you under the circumstances. That is a very different thing. — Maybe, but the muffins are the same.

The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)  

[triviareads]

[cobblestonevoid]

I’ll preface this by saying that I hope and pray that this post reaches its extremely niche target audience (people that like Oscar Wilde, Good Omens, and paranormal/dark history Quite A Bit), as it’ll not be nearly as fun to people that don’t enjoy all three. That said,

I was going through the Wikipedia page for Eccles Cakes, because my brain had gotten stuck on the line and I’d been repeating “Eccles Cake?” to myself all day. Anyways, the point is, I’d gotten to the part about similar cakes they periodically get mixed up with when I spotted THIS:

This, in and of itself, is unremarkable. However, me being an Oscar Wilde fan first and reasonable second, I noticed a striking resemblance to the name for the ailing fictional character invented by Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest (who conveniently suffers bouts of exceptionally bad health whenever Algy’s relations invite him to something dull.)

While this may seem like a stretch to the untrained eye, it is a well documented historical fact that Jack Worthing, the play’s protagonist, is named for the seaside town in the south of England where Oscar Wilde wrote the play. As such, it is not an unnatural conclusion that he would do something similar with Bunbury’s name.

So, naturally, I went to the Wikipedia page for the Importance of Being Earnest. While I did not find anything in the page’s primary text, I did find this in the notes:

According to a Wikipedia note, I’d been corroborated by noted spiritualist and occult researcher Aleister Crowley (who, as an aside, Neil Gaiman has confirmed on tumblr that Our Crowley is named after, along with the town of Crawley). It is well documented that Aleister (as this is tumblr, and referring to him by his surname would inevitably lead to confusion) knew Wilde, which would hypothetically give him authority on the matter. Now, as much as I’d love to say that I’m the type of person to see that their theory has been corroborated and be happy and done with it, the American school system has done nothing if not engender an inherent distrust of Wikipedia in me. As such, I did some digging around the internet, and what I wound up finding was that every single site making this claim traced its evidence back to this book:

The book is $50. The author, Timothy D’Arch Smith, has a bio describing him as a “bibliographer, antiquarian bookseller (author’s note: oh my god he’s an antiquarian bookseller), and author, whose wit and scholarly predilections – Montague Summers (see Bibliographies), Aleister Crowley, rock 'n' roll, and cricket (see Games and Sports) – inform his contribution to the genre.” My question is,

Regardless, I think it’s really fun how all of my silly little interests intersected here and I needed to yell about it

[jinxinabox]

POV: Jack

[hungwy]

best works of translation into english?

[dansnotavampire]

Airplane, trident emblem for Connor, Laurence, and Ella! (Also a bit of backstory about them would be nice, as I don't think I've read any posts about your OCs before!)

First - some backstory!

Connor Owen, Laurence Moncrieff, and Ella Brittain worked for some vague approximation of the SIS (Military intelligence) they met in service, and worked very closely for a number of years. This story is about them (By story I mean three-man play)

Connor Owen is a translator; he speaks four languages fluently, and a handful of others passably, and all of his years of service for queen and country have given him three things: PTSD, an alcohol problem, and a dead best friend. Oops. Currently he is a teacher in a secondary school, and we meet him nearly ten years after his honorable discharge, at an AA meeting, along with....

Laurence Moncrieff. Their stalwart IO, he was a tactical genius, able to keep calm in any situation. Now he's *also* battling a drinking problem, and repressed homosexual feelings. He cooks, he cleans, he only goes to AA because he was court ordered to after he drunkenly wrapped his car around a lamppost, injuring zero people in the process only by a stroke of luck. (Are you getting why my tag for this is untitled alcoholism project now). In youth he was a rich wanker with a first in PPE from Oxford, and the only thing that's really changed since then is that he's less of a wanker now. He's just re-learnt how to wake up before midday.

Ella Brittain? She's dead. It's not Laurence's fault. Maybe one day he'll even believe that.

In life, she was 5'2 of lean muscle, with a resting HR of 54, and the steadiest aim you've ever seen. She could kick anyone's arse six ways from Sunday, and never used this skill unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, that was often the case in her line of work.

Now she haunts the stage, doling out imagined advice and insults to the two men still trying to learn how to live without her.

Plane - do they like travelling, or are they more of a homebody?

Laurence has travelled so much it bores him now; unfortunately, being at home bores him just as much. One day he'll go on a non-covert vacation again. Maybe he'll even take someone with him.

Connor *liked* travelling. But the last time he stepped foot on a train was two days after the worst experience of his life, and he's not sure he can stomach it anymore. Maybe with good enough company he could bear it.

Ella never held down an address for more than six months, even when she wasn't an internationally jetsetting superspy. Or government murderer for hire. Depends who you ask.

Trident - Can they swim?

All three of them can swim; they have to, for the job. Connor can't touch water that's too warm, though. He showers ice cold.

[thewrathfulwitch]

Ion of Delphi

Cerusa of Athens was the only remaining daughter of King Erechtheus that had not been married, the King looking for a suitable husband for her to marry despite her being childless. She secretly had an affair with Apollon, which bore her a son. Afraid of what her father would do, she abandoned the child in a cave where she hoped Apollon would protect him.

Without Apollon to lean on, she was wedded to the neighboring Prince Xuthus, a Prince who had aided Athens in the war. Years went on with them being childless, assuming Ion was dead.

In truthful reality, Apollon had Hermes carry Ion to the Temple of Delphi, where he was found by a priestess. The Priestess named him the name he is known by and raised him. He was a boy dedicated to the Temple of his father, taking great care of the holy place.

Years later, King Xuthus and Queen Cerusa came to Delphi looking for answers about how to help their childless marriage. King Xuthus was told to take a son of the first boy he came across. As he exited the Shrine, he saw Ion speaking to his wife and took him as the heir. Cerusa was skeptical, worried this was a bastard son of her husband's.

Cerusa asked an old servant to poison him at the feast of Ion's adoption, using the Gorgon's blood that was given by Athena herself to do so. He was given a special drinking bowl with the poisoned wine yet he poured it out as a libation to the God he revered all these years. Birds came to drinking the wine on the ground and as their beaks got wet, they shrieked in pain and convulsed violently.

It was from there that Ion asked the old servant why he was poisoned, since the servant gave the wine to him, and the Delphi elders ordered that the Queen be executed for such an act. She ran and hid amongst the crowd at the Temple, where the Pythia revealed herself from the Shrine.

She spoke openly before all, where she revealed the origins of Ion before the crowds. The dots were put together and the mother and son were reunited, with knowledge that Apollon was the father. Athena came to them, speaking for Apollon, telling Ion to go to Athens and take his claim to the throne. She spoke how he would be the father to the people known as the Ionians. To King Xuthus and Cerusa, she promised another son named Dorus, who would father the Dorian people.

Myths of the World: Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece by A.R. Hope Moncrieff